Friday, July 12, 2024

#194 / Think About It!




Michael Luca, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University, has reviewed the book pictured above, Third Millennium Thinking. Click this link to read Luca's "Bookshelf" column in The Wall Street Journal on May 6, 2024. Of course, nonsubscribers may well face a paywall that will deny them access. If that happens to you, you'll have to take my word for what Luca has to say!

Luca tells us that the authors of Third Millennium Thinking aim "to empower readers with strategies to better assess and incorporate information as they make decisions, from the individual to the societal level." He also tells us that the authors are a rather impressive bunch: "Mr. Perlmutter is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of California, Berkeley; Mr. Campbell is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley; and Mr. MacCoun is a social psychologist and a professor of law at Stanford."

Frankly (as is so often the case), my blog posting today is premised upon my delight in one specific phrase that Luca has mobilized in his discussion of Third Millennium Thinking. In the end, Luca tells us, Third Millennium Thinking contends that "decision-making is a team sport."

This pronouncement, which I think is true, makes clear how important it is to realize that "we're in this together." Frequent readers of my blog postings know that this is a phrase of which I am, perhaps, excessively fond. I repeat it often, as does Joyce Vance. She is someone whom I think speaks with authority, and she appends that phrase to the end of every one of her (mostly daily) blog postings, which are collectively titled, "Civil Discourse." 

The fact that we are "in this together" is definitely a correct statement of our inevitable situation in the world. "Individualism" is worth some attention, but the "collective" side of who we are, and how we operate in the world, needs to be given more credit. I have not titled this blog, "We Live In A Political World" for nothing! 

It's pretty easy to focus on our individual selves first, or even exclusively, and that would be a mistake. If Vance and I aren't persuasive, take it from Perlmutter, Campbell, and MacCoun

Let me, perhaps, add one more thing. Our entire system of democratic self-government, in the United States of America, as defined in the Constitution, says that we should make decisions about what our nation should do, and how it should be run, by way of debate and discussion among elected representatives, all of whom come from different locations, and backgrounds, and all of whom have different ideas and perspectives. In other words, decision-making as a "team sport" is how the United States of America has set up its system of governance. 

To the degree that our politics, today, operates mainly in the spirit of partisanship, we should understand that the "parties," the aggregations into which we have divided ourselves, are quite often attempting to eliminate those on the "other side," those with different views. This not only violates the basic rules upon which the nation's decision-making process is premised, but it also means (according to the esteemed authors of Third Millenium Thinking) that we are losing our best chance to make good decisions.

To put it another way. If we would all like to reach that "Third Millennium," we had better start using "Third Millennium Thinking" right now. If we don't start recognizing that decision-making has to be structured as a "team sport," we are unlikely ever to make through the next 976 years.

Or, even the next 97.6 years. Or, maybe, even the next 9.7 years. 

Think about it!

I'm serious!

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