Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review says a lot which chimes with my own thinking on the fact that in almost any policy area you choose, the main problem is the over-heavy institutional legacy of industrial-age organisation:

What stands in the way of the future, most often, is the past. It’s yesterday’s sluggish institutions.

Yet, instead of reimagining and rebooting those institutions, we keep reviving and resurrecting them — zombielike — hoping that by bringing them back from the dead, we can keep the status quo humming along for just a little while longer, that we can eke out the last meager, shriveled morsels of returns from seeds laid down during the industrial age.

If the greatest barriers to prosperity aren’t government deficits, bailed-out bankers, ineffectual civil servants, a recession every seven years or so, corporations who shrug their shoulders and keep on practicing the dismal lessons of business as usual, investors who turn their back on authentic investment in lieu of mere speculation — if all those and more are merely incidental second-order effects of a deeper cause, and that deeper cause is the institutions that keep on producing all the above as predictably, consistently, and relentlessly as it rains in London… well, then, it’s time to dream bigger.

Read the whole thing, as it’s very readable and smart.

Some lively comments too, including one from me which points out that another way of expressing the same thought is the Kinetic Energy metaphor:

This shows why tank shells are small and very fast: you get exponential increases in kinetic energy (ie in this case explosive impact) by increasing velocity, but not if you increase mass.

The point being that we live in a world in which we have large heavy slow ‘massive’ institutions (government, corporations, unions and so on) which can’t cope with the energy of high-velocity changes coming from all sides.

The one sure thing in all this is that ‘government’ is now a huge part of the problem. It is based upon a pre-medieval idea that centralised power should give orders to people to maintain stability. That no longer works when people have the technological networking power to challenge those orders faster than they can be issued and enforced.

This in turn raises the deep and largely unanswered moral question of the consent of those being governed to what is being done in their name. For most of human history people have had no real chance to express their consent or dissent in a structured way. That chance is now emerging in a high velocity way.

All obvious enough. But it is likely to take staggering planetary disruption to bring down the ‘yesterday industrial age institutions’ and the jungles of bad assumptions and practices they create. Too many forces on all sides of the argument have an interest in defining the way forward in terms of the discredited past, as the Wisconsin example and almost everything which happens in the European Union both demonstrate.