Manifest Destiny: Marshall Plan 2.0
We’re marveling in this week of the Pandemic at the ziggurat of competence, collaboration, and hard work of the contributors rolling out the first vaccine while the deposed Whiner-In-Chief, who couldn’t manage a two-car funeral, wails about his mistreatment. Now’s our chance to declare which side of the competence/service divide our progeny will embrace.
“Manifest Destiny” was America’s 2-century conviction that it had the manifest right to interfere in any country in the western hemisphere. It was the overt successor of Europeans’ genocide against North America’s indigenous peoples. Leveraging the land and resources we appropriated, we undermined Latin America and, eventually, attacked Spain based on questionable evidence.
“The U.S. has been involved in nation-building and promoting democracy since the middle of the nineteenth century and Manifest Destiny”, State Department official Karin Von Hippel stated proudly in 2000, justifying the grand triumphs she forecast for the Middle East wars which some people in the State Department were sure would pay for themselves. As an ex-warfighter, I was dubious.
The People-Centered Internet
I’ve been volunteering lately with the People-Centered Internet, which was formed to assist non-corporate (i.e., carbon-based) persons worldwide to leverage the power of the Internet to improve their personal future and the planet’s. Much of PCI’s focus has been on Africa, but, since I live in México, I wonder if we can also serve Latin America and ourselves in the process. Hell, We could call ourselves The “Western Union”. We’ve already got the logo:
The Western hemisphere may have the largest and most consequential concentration of resources on earth due to its size, cultural and climate diversity, and the urgency its people feel to improve their lot. An “America Serves” Western Hemisphere Marshall Plan could proceed at actual warp speed thanks to the Internet, not as just another buzzword. Now that software is eating the world and the feasibility of person-centric peer-to-peer mutual support networks, a Western Hemispheric P2P user group might support a non-bureaucratic economic union, to deliver the benefits of the EU without its overburden of organizational complexity.
Naturally, I believe it should all be done with RFCs ;-)
Bad news sells ads: all we hear is imminent disaster.
The news doesn’t want to tell us about the seismic cultural cataclysms that China and Russia, and even Europe, are facing. All three lack the essential ingredients for a model commonwealth of nations. Their populations are aging and their younger generations are shrinking, while they suffer some of the worst pollution and climate challenges.
China
China’s impending depopulation will be accompanied by a momentous transformation of national demographic structure. Between 2015 and 2040, China’s population age 50 and older is on course to increase by roughly one-quarter of a billion people; the under-50 population is set to decline by a roughly comparable magnitude. This means China is set to experience an extraordinarily rapid surge of population aging, with especially explosive population growth for the 65-plus group, even as its working-age population (conventionally defined as the age 15–64 group) progressively shrinks. While the Chinese government has a number of policy options for mitigating the impact of pronounced population aging and a shrinking manpower pool, these trends can only make for serious economic headwinds, presaging the end of China’s era of “heroic economic growth.”
Meanwhile, a Western Hemisphere economic union has all the right ingredients to make China and Russia as irrelevant as your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
1️⃣ A growing, energetic population of young, ambitious people.
2️⃣ People eager to join America’s vibrant tech-centric economy.
As Rachel Maddow discovered, Russia is little more than a wildcatting oil play, assuming that the world will remain addicted to the only drug they have to sell. Her book is Blowout: Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy — Winner Take All. “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”
That’s the problem with autocrats. They lack the imagination and systems mentality of the best American VCs, tech leaders and the people learning how to deploy the AI-based digital assistants that are now reforming how regular people in complex organizations will routinely collaborate across time and distance and language barriers.
CanAmericorps?
My friend Diane Francis saw all this before the rest of us, so she published Merger of the Century in 2013:
If they merged, the countries (US & Canada) would become an energy and economic powerhouse, occupying more land than Russia or the continent of South America. They would control more oil, water, arable land and resources than any other and would enjoy the protection of America’s military.
An outright merger may be too much for Canadian and American politicians’ inner autocrats to even start talking about. However, their competitiveness might inspire us to out-EU the EU, out-Soviet the ex-soviets and out-administer the massive Chinese bureaucracy, each mired in bureaucracies set in stone by the dominant modalities of their origins.
And we could do it by getting serious about inventing a Western Union Progress Corps, modeled on Americorps and requiring service for every Canadian and American young adult for starters and then all countries of the new Western Union. Among other benefits, it would eliminate student debt, expand every family’s economic possibilities and require young people to be thrown together with people from places they’d never visit, learning what they’d not otherwise glimpse.
Below, take a look at how just one company has leveraged these forces to build a global community, including nonprofits Wizeline Academy and StartupGDL, promoting tech in Mexico’s Silicon Valley, Guadalajara.
The Lepe Brothers
I’m inspired by the example of the Lepe Brothers, Bis & Bel, born in Oxnard California to a Mexican couple who worked tirelessly to ensure their kid’s future. When Success Runs in the Family:
Bis passed up West Point for Stanford, where he majored in economics, minored in computer science, and worked for multiple startups. His junior and senior years, he worked 60 hours a week while in school full time.
Big brother passed on that ethos to little brother. On a break home, Bis remembers, he told Bel, ”This whole Internet thing is going to be big, so you should probably be taking programming classes.” And so, at about 12-years-old, Bel enrolled in a programming class at the local community college.
Bis also says he told Bel prep school would give him a leg up. “Everyone in my class that went to boarding school is just better prepared,” he said. “You should look into them.” Bel duly attended Andover and then Thatcher, and then worked almost full time while a freshman computer science major at Stanford.
Because his parents worked 3–4 jobs, Bis Lepe could pass up a free West Point education and cobble together savings and scholarships to afford Stanford at the dawn of the Internet. Then, when prep school was seen as a requirement for Bel, they sent him to Andover and Thatcher.
Bis Lepe now runs WizeLine.com, one of the finest contract web development firms. Nominally based in San Francisco, Wizeline’s second office opened in Guadalajara, and then added NYC, Mexico City, Quéretaro, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Singapore, Barcelona, and Sydney.
