A few weeks ago I gave a “Ted-like” talk at the 10th Anniversary of Tisch College up at Tufts University (am an alum, and on the board at Tisch).  I used the opportunity to try out a new big version of our old “New Politics” rap I’ve been giving for some years now. This new talk explores the notion that we are entering an era of unprecedented opportunity and possibility, and that if we get it right more is possible today for the people of the world than ever before.

If you have 10 minutes take a look and offer up your thoughts.  What works? What needs to be improved? Anything I left out? Is it good?  Offer your feedback below, and thanks for taking the time.

You can watch the video here.

Simon can be reached at srosenberg@ndn.org.

Following on the heels of their critically acclaimed 2008 book, Milllennial Makeover, Hais and Winograd have their next book coming out this September, Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America.   In this new book, Winograd and Hais investigate how the beliefs of the Millennials are transforming American society.

We are proud to be hosting them here in Washington at NDN, 729-15th st NW, for a launch event on Thursday, September 15th at 12Noon.  To RSVP, click here.

For more on the book, including info on how to buy it and to book them for a talk, visit their site.

It’s important to note that the news is not all bad: a robust set of solutions and investments have already been deployed by the Obama Administration.  In the short-run, the Recovery Act has done its job to keep the economy from entering a free-fall and the Administration’s unheralded set of long-term “new foundation” investments in education and workforce, broadband, clean energy and so forth are seeding new ideas and industries.

The next step is what this project focuses on – creating the right “middleware” to better connect the dots — linking short term and long term federal investment strategies, the public and private sectors, and innovative ideas from the top with the frontline realities of bottom-up and regional implementation.

At the core of these ideas is a simple paradigm shift – an emphasis on nurturing bottom-up change rather than top-down dictates. The reason: federal silo’ed programs and one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work as well anymore in meeting the complex challenges of the 21st century economic markets.  Growth, job creation and shared prosperity lies in creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and new businesses to find financing, lifting up new clean economy markets, and building new networks to connect innovators, suppliers and customers across traditional geographies.

Backgrounder: Next Economy Partnership Project One Pager July 2011

Recent Work

June Polling on Jobs and Energy Solutions

The Acceleration Agenda: Job Creation, Innovation and Economic Development in the 21st Century

Dan Carol and Morley Winograd: Reorganizing Beyond the Beltway. May 4, 2011.

Dan Carol: The Bottom Line on Bottom Up. February 14, 2011.

Dan Carol: Rediscovering the Obama Narrative. April 21, 2010

Young voters were a key component of the voter coalition that won Colorado and Florida for Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008. These new reports find that two years later, solid pluralities of Colorado and Florida Millennials (18-29 year olds) intend to vote for Democratic gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and Congressional candidates in this year’s midterm elections. The Democratic vote intentions of Colorado Millennials are based on the continued identification of a majority of them with the Democratic Party, and of the greatest number as liberal or progressive. Finally, most continue to hold favorable attitudes toward the Democratic Party and to approve of Barack Obama’s performance as president.

At the same time, the extent to which these young Coloradans and Floridians turn out at the polls this fall is a major concern. Political participation, and the extent to which the political parties and other organizations attempt to enhance it, is the overriding issue in Colorado and Florida youth politics in 2010.

Poll Reports:

NPI Political Attitudes & Behavior of Colorado Millennials Report

NPI Political Attitudes & Behavior of Florida Millennials Report

Background on Young Voters & Midterm Election Turnout:

CIRCLE Quick Facts: Voting in Presidential and Midterm Elections by Age

The Acceleration Agenda: Job Creation, Innovation and Economic Development in the 21st Century

Executive Summary

Few of us are happy about the level of progress we have made in either creating robust employment growth or deploying a new policy and financing architecture that can scale broadly to reach the high road economic vision we all share – be it about manufacturing and job creation, small business entrepreneurship, clean energy market transformation, 21st century infrastructure, local economic development, or export expansion. This slow progress comes at great cost, as stalled success here is undermining the case for more innovation and investment in US economic competitiveness.

While debates will rage among economists about whether this is a normal cyclical recession or something more, and in Congress about what we can afford to invest in given the deficit, this paper describes a series of low-cost but high-impact steps we can take now to accelerate job creation, growth and American competitiveness.

At the core of these ideas is a simple paradigm shift – an emphasis on nurturing bottom-up change rather than top-down dictates. The reason: federal siloed programs and one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work as well anymore in meeting the complex challenges of the 21st century economic markets. Growth, job creation and shared prosperity lies in creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and small companies to find financing, lifting up new clean economy markets, and building new networks to connect innovators, suppliers and customers across traditional geographies. That’s where studies show we netted 40 million new jobs from 1980-2005, from young companies less than 5 years old.2

To be clear: this paper does not simply call for more federal revenue-sharing with the states. The changes we need to accelerate private-led innovation in regions and communities do not begin, or end, there.

What we need instead is to create the incentives and architecture for a new Regional Race to the Top, for all America’s regions.

As President Obama understands, our recovery is tentative, and we need creative approaches for public-private collaboration. Change begins with the business sector and local community stakeholders at the center of the conversation – not as an afterthought.

So is the Acceleration Agenda a new “industrial policy”? Do such labels matter? We hope not – there is too much on the line for our economy to be bogged down in oversimplified debates from the past.

Connection Technologies in U.S. Foreign Policy: An Overview of 21st Century Statecraft & Internet Freedom

Executive Summary

Within the next decade, over 90 percent of all people on earth will own a mobile phone, tying the world together in a single information and communications network. The rapid growth of this network is changing every part of our lives and our societies, and is putting incredible power into the hands of individuals to understand and impact the world around them. For the U.S. Department of State, our increasingly interconnected world presents both new opportunities and challenges different than those faced in the 20th century.

“21st Century Statecraft” is a new mode of thinking at the State Department that understands the world as a networked place, and sees an opportunity to embrace the technologies that are tying together the world’s people. Over the past 18 months, the State Department has taken advantage of the global network to conduct public diplomacy, strengthen civil societies, improve security and promote economic development around the world.  More broadly, the objective of this new strategy is to give newfound voice to individual people in global affairs.

Based on this view of the global network as a powerful tool for connecting people across borders, the State Department came to see online rights as equal in importance to their offline analogues. Freedoms of expression, assembly and commerce can hardly be imagined in the 21st century without their extension to the online sphere. In January, 2010, Secretary Clinton laid out a vision for “Internet Freedom,” arguing that the defense of online liberties must be seen as integral to the defense of American values, strategic objectives, and economic goals.

This paper is an overview of the State Department’s use of new technology in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, with a focus on the “21st Century Statecraft” and “Internet Freedom” initiatives. Not intended to be comprehensive or critical, this paper attempts to define and clarify these initiatives and the arguments supporting them, and offer a platform for further debate. These are new, evolving but crucially important issues, and informed conversation about the role of technology in our world is critical if these technologies are to be a positive force in history.

One of these emerging uses lies in the field of remittances, championed by Bill Barhydt, founder and CEO of m-Via — the first international mobile remittances company based in the U.S. In a nutshell, his business allows users to send and receive micro-payments using their mobile phones, creating “mobile wallets” which allow recipients to decide where, when, and how much they withdraw.

M-Via has enjoyed remarkable success in its roll-out phases, with 15% week-on-week growth in participation and nearly four times as many remits compared to conventional snail-mail or branch-banking methods. And although m-Via currently operates with Mexico, Barhydt told us that the program will expand to sixteen more Latin American countries by the end of this year.

Three take-away words from yesterday’s conference easily explain m-Via’s uncommon success: convenience, security, and interoperability.

Convenience: Barhydt’s company saves users valuable time and money. The conventional process — primarily mailing cash or wiring via Western Union — consumes too many resources for both parties, who must have a credit-worthy bank account, time to fill out paperwork or visit the post office, and money to cover associated fees and travel costs. m-Via eliminates these issues. Once an SMS transaction is sent, all receivers need to do is reply, enter a personal code, and visit one of the tens of thousands of partners, retailers, and compatible ATMs stationed throughout the country to withdraw funds from their mobile wallet.

Security: In one rural town Barhydt visited during his recent trip to Mexico, wise families won’t make the trip to the bank to pick up remittances on Tuesdays. Thieves know, he told us, that most families withdraw remittances on Tuesdays, making the trip a dangerous outing. Considering that migrant workers send larger amounts on fewer occasions to save money, families feel at-risk picking up and carrying large sums of cash. m-Via allows recipients to take shorter trips to withdrawal facilities and to only take out as much as they need, leaving the rest in their “mobile wallet.”

Interoperability: Where m-Via shows the most promise is in its infrastructural capacity to function with major interbank networks (that Cirrus or Interlink logo on the back of your bank card). In other words, m-Via isn’t trying to get users to switch banks, change carriers, or use certain ATMs; on the contrary, the goal is to make the service as widely available and accessible as possible.

Contrast this to mobile money in the Philippines, where remittances comprise 11%, or $15.8 billion, of the country’s GDP. In this space, Globe GCASH and Smart Money compete heavily for mobile money consumers, making them use each company’s proprietary financial system rather than focusing on compatibility (although it must be mentioned that the latter recently reached an agreement with MasterCard). These “low-interoperability, highly competitive landscapes”, said Barhydt, make the mobile money ecosystem fragmented and inefficient.

m-Via’s success is magnified in light of the daunting obstacles facing the mobile micro-payment marketplace. The first, Barhydt explained, is the congested and obsolete financial regulatory process which stifles a small 35-strong company such as m-Via and absorbs too many resources. Another more serious issue, raised by Obopay CEO Carol Realini, is the fierce opposition mobile money start-ups encounter by powerful and established mobile operators in foreign markets. Indeed, Barhydt echoed that América Móvil, Mexico’s largest mobile provider led by mega-billionaire Carlos Slim, has given m-Via a hard time getting a foothold in the marketplace.

Despite these obstacles, m-Via’s business model seems to be working, primarily because he’s tapped into the relatively untapped market of mobile remittances — a $300-billion-a-year industry involving nearly 200 million migrants worldwide. And since users can send and receive money without a bank account, the program provides a great option for the marginalized unbanked population. All said and done, m-Via joins a fleet of new companies set to prove how mobile technology, when done right, can be leveraged to the benefit of millions.

Hiatt riffs on the work of Freedom House, observing that the forward march of freedom, after decades of remarkable progress, has ground to a halt. In recent years, we have seen the tide recede, with basic freedoms curtailed and many democratic governments slipping away from basic democratic values like rule of law, press freedom, and open markets. Hiatt blames this regression on repressive governments learning from past mistakes and evolving to be smarter and more effective:

Dictators have learned from each other to stamp out any buds of independent civil society by means of tax laws and supposedly neutral regulation. With China in the lead, they learned not only to neutralize the World Wide Web but to turn it into an effective weapon for propaganda, tracking and repression of their own citizens, and attacks against democratic rivals. Taking advantage of their control of television, they mobilized ideologies of nationalism and anti-terrorism to undermine the rhetoric of freedom…

Three assertive powers — China, Russia and Iran — not only resist democratization but actively seek to disseminate their model of authoritarian rule in their spheres of influence.

I think Hiatt is quite right that there is a new trend in authoritarianism, and one that is gaining momentum. But one of the funny things about this resurgence of authoritarianism is that, unlike the communist states of the 20th century, these autocrats aren’t trying to win on the power of their argument. Really, democracy can already boast rhetorical victory, and the fact that these autocrats hold power in part by perpetrating a charade of democracy is a testament to that. As Applebaum writes:

Countries as disparate as Russia, Venezuela and Iran have become adept at using the rhetoric of “democracy” — along with faked elections, phony political parties, even state-controlled “civil society” organizations — to deflect pressure for change.

These prosperous yet undemocratic states like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and China offer the trappings of democracy, with few of the freedoms. Their ideology is a daunting competitor, and developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia face a choice between developing as open, free-market democracies, or as closed, statist autocracies. Increasingly, countries are sliding in the wrong direction.

ChinaIn the quote above, Hiatt cites control of the internet as a powerful tool for manipulation and repression by these authoritarian governments. And in truly, madly, deeply authoritarian states like China, North Korea, Belarus, or Syria (or the other 16 countries that grace the pages of Foreign Policy’s review of the 20 least free places on earth), that’s true. But I think that internet and mobile networks actually make it harder for states to put on the “charade of democracy” that lets modern authoritarian governments legitimize themselves to their own people and to international observers.

Up until last June, Iran’s Islamic Republic was a prime example of a repressive, dictatorial government that managed to be seen as legitimate by many of its own people and many in the Islamic world thanks, in part, to a machinery of democracy that they operated. But when it didn’t produce the result they wanted– the wrong guy won the presidential election– the machine started working against them, with the relative free speech and free association they permitted on internet and mobile networks helping to organize an opposition movement.

Iran cracked down, hard. The government gave up its claim to democratic legitimacy, and the state has been pushed out of the middle ground into a position where everyone can see the regime’s true nature. Increasingly in the coming years, new connection technologies will force governments in this phony middle ground to make a choice. With powerful tools for organizing, advocacy and communication in the hands of every individual, you can’t fake democracy. Elections are easier to monitor, movements are easier to organize, and the truth has a lot more routes to the people.

Some countries will follow Iran’s path: give up their claim to democratic legitimacy and tightly control freedoms of speech and assembly on ICT networks. For other governments, that may not be worth it, or may not be possible, and we may see some developing countries, faced with a fork in the road, taking the path toward openness. As these technologies make phony democracy impossible, countries will have to choose their course, and if anything, we can surely expect the chasm that divides open and closed societies in the 21st century to grow still deeper and wider.

Below is a link to to the paper, after the executive summary there is an appendix which highlights some of the more pertinent information from the paper and Rob has blogged on the paper here.

Paper: The Impact of Immigration and Immigration Reform on the Wages of American Workers

Executive Summary

As the debate on comprehensive immigration reform has been rejoined, alarming amounts of misinformation are being presented as facts.  This report corrects some of this misinformation by reviewing the empirical evidence and evaluating the real economic effects of the recent waves of immigrants into the United States by analyzing the role of immigrants in our labor markets and economy.

This report presents an accurate portrait of our immigrant population, dispels misconceptions about undocumented immigrants, and reviews the evidence and analysis regarding the wage and other economic effects of both immigration and reforms to provide undocumented immigrants a path to legal status.

• Immigration Population Demographics: More than one-third of recent immigrants come from Asia and Europe, while less than 57 percent come from Mexico and Latin America. A substantially larger share of immigrants than native-born Americans lack a high school diploma; but roughly equal shares of both groups — between 28 percent and 30 percent – hold college or graduate degrees, and more than half of immigrants from Asia are college-educated or better.

• Misconceptions about Undocumented Immigrants: Two-thirds of immigrants are naturalized citizens or legal permanent resident aliens, 4 percent have legal status as temporary migrants, and 30 percent are undocumented. While undocumented male immigrants are generally low-skilled, they also have the highest labor participation rates in the nation: Among men age 18 to 64 years, 94 percent of undocumented immigrants work or actively seek work, compared to 83 percent of native-born Americans, and 85 percent of immigrants with legal status.

• Economic Analysis on the Impact of Immigration on Wages: A careful review shows that high levels of immigration have not slowed overall wage gains by average, native-born American workers. Most studies suggest that recent waves of new immigrants are associated with increases in the average wage of native-born Americans in the short-run and with even larger increases in the long term as capital investment rises to take account of the larger number of workers.

• The Wage Impact of Reforms to Provide a Path to Legal Status for Undocumented Immigrants: The largest effects of such reforms would be felt by immigrants themselves: After the 1986 immigration reforms, wages rose by 6 percent to 15 percent for previously-undocumented male immigrants and by 21 percent for previously-undocumented female immigrants. Those reforms also increased wages of previously legal immigrants. Research also suggests that those reforms led to modest wage gains by native-born Americans.

• Other Economic Effects of Immigration: Studies have found that immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start new businesses than native-born Americans; and even immigrants without high school diplomas, who account for 31 percent of all immigrants, comprise 27 percent of immigrant business owners. Various analyses of the fiscal effects of immigration have produced mixed results on the state and local levels; but studies show that immigrants have a net positive effect on the federal budget. Moreover, immigration reform would enhance these positive fiscal effects by indirectly raising the taxable incomes of immigrants and others.

Appendix: The Impact of Immigration and Immigration Reform on the Wages of American Workers

Twitter, however, has remained online, and many of Pakistan’s tech-savvy have been venting frustration there. Shoaib Taimur (@shobz) captured the basic sentiment of the Twitterati in one remark:

note to everyone: I oppose the ban on websites. I dont endorse Blasphemy but curtailing our freedom of speech is too much #fb

The Facebook group is broadly considered to be a tasteless and tactless effort, but the ham-handed response by the Pakistani courts and the PTA is worse. Huma Imtiaz (@HumaImtiaz), a Pakistani journalist, sees the work of Islamic hard-liners in the action of the government. In a blog post, she argues that the PTA has previously shown great ability to block individual pages showing content that would be damning to the Pakistani government, but is now responding with blanket censorship to appease a radical minority.

Sabeen Mahmud (@sabeen) and Dr. Awab Alvi (@DrAwab) organized a press conference this afternoon to speak out against censorship. As Mahmud tweeted later:

I have been insisting that the outrage needs to be about Internet censorship not FB. @kidvai

The press conference quickly devolved into an accusatory shouting match, with the media taking the side of the government. As Dr. Alvi tweeted afterward:

Safely home Sad experience, our point we condemn cartoon caricature but Not a blanket ban on websites, became issue of muslim non-muslim

And Mahmud followed, sarcastically:

>> Well done mainstream media. You outdid yourself today. To think we marched on the streets for your freedom.

Oh wait, I remember now! You thought I shouldn’t have expressed outrage and should have watered down my stance >>

It’s heartening to see individuals standing up against censorship for their freedom of speech and freedom to information. What’s happening in Pakistan right now is a prime example of the danger the internet faces of losing its open, global nature, and becoming a series of national networks, subject to censorship, borders, and the whims of policymakers. Some of Pakistan’s Twitterati predict the bans will be lifted in the coming days, and I hope they’re right.

It’s nearly midnight in Karachi now, but I expect these individuals and this situation will be active and exciting to follow tomorrow. On Twitter, I’d recommend following @sabeen, @DrAwab, @HaroonRiaz, and @HumaImtiaz for good, regular (English-language) updates.