Rebooting government and economics

What can save our crumbling institutions?

Our government and business institutions have not woken up to the challenges that are facing them, even after the great recession of 2008 and the verge of economic collapse.

These challenges include how to fix government transparency and how to ensure that economic systems provide for efficiency-based rewards while also encouraging and respecting environmental sustainability.

Perhaps it is time for us to seriously consider that our institutions and economic systems need serious repair, repairs demanded by the 21st century.

Of all the books that came out in 2010, one caught the eye of many for its fresh thinking and important lessons.

Macrowikinomics was written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. It cuts along the ideological red tape of left and right and provides ways of restructuring our current governmental and business systems, which by and large are stuck in the 1970s.

Considering that all Canadian political parties have pretty much failed in regards to these concerns, this book offers sound advice. Let’s take a look at some examples.

One idea the authors mention is collaborative learning, a more interactive way of learning than dry lectures. The book details a Portuguese elementary school, where students with laptops learned about astronomy primarily from the Internet. A main principle of such interactive learning is that students should be guided rather than lectured on a subject.

The whole point of this in regards to Manitoba education is that the K-12 system needs to be more open-sourced, interactive and focused on what students need to compete.

Perhaps it is time for us to seriously consider that our institutions and economic systems need serious repair.

The province could encourage more practical and interactive courses and encourage the use of collaborative open-source software like wikis to build a current virtual textbook for students.

At the same time, the province could look at more non-traditional methods of education for secondary school, including the encouragement of more on-the-job training or simple training programs for newer industries like solar panel installation or wind turbine building. This could extend to financial service industry jobs like banking institution tellers or tax preparers. This would provide high school students with real-world skills and make a high school diploma worth something again.

In terms of government, Tapscott and Williams mention the idea of participatory budgets, where citizens voice their concerns directly to their parliamentary representatives.

Manitoba members of legislative assembly could hold, for example, virtual town halls and engage their constituents over streaming video websites once every few months. That would get people talking.

My favourite part of the book is the focus on making the economic system more transparent.

Examples the authors use range from encouraging smaller venture capital investments to peer-to-peer banking.

At the same time, on the environmental economic side, the authors promote the notion of the “energy prosumer,” the idea that in the future mostly every household and institution will produce energy and sell it.

The ideas provided in Macrowikinomics may not be everyone’s cup of tea, as the book definitely has a centrist approach to problem solving.

It will take compromise from both sides to fix our crumbling institutional structures and to reboot them. But the point is that these reformations are needed. Our country and province depend on it.

Adam Johnston is an economics and rhetoric and communications student at the University of Winnipeg. He focuses on environmental, technology and economic policy at http://moderneconomicstechnologyenvironment.wordpress.com.

Published in Volume 65, Number 14 of The Uniter (December 2, 2010)

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