I’m an avid reader of The Economist, and in this week’s edition the article that jumped out at me was “A needier era“, which details how some–including me–think the new global economic realities are going to re-shape our politics:

THE 1990s was “the age of abundance”, argued Brink Lindsey in a book of that title. Round the world, incomes were rising; capital markets were processing endless flows of money and investment; technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. And politics in the age of abundance, Mr Lindsey claimed, was all about values. In America this was the period of the “culture wars” over abortion and gun ownership; internationally, there was a huge expansion in concern over human rights.

One of the biggest problems America faces is that many of its citizens, both liberal and conservative, are stuck on culture wars that feed their anger, instead of focusing on the reality that our current economic system is unsustainable.  Our focus on voting for people for their views about abortion, gun rights and gay marriage has given us a crop of leaders who are ill-prepared to take on the real challenges that we face.

The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure.

One of the challenges America faces as a country is how we choose to inform ourselves, which is mostly by the cable news channels.  Fox News and MSNBC (as well as the rest of them) are corrosive influences on all of us.  For those like myself, who don’t watch them, we still have to deal with the foolish liberals and conservatives who do and form their opinions based upon cable news demagoguery.

[Authors of a report at the Center on International Cooperation] claim that the current global system is ill-designed for such a world. It is not just that the foreign policies of big countries are in flux. Rather, the way states deal with new threats is, in the jargon, “stove-piped”.  As a UN panel said in 2004, “finance ministers tend to work only with the international financial institutions, development ministers only with development programmes.”

The authors say that what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign power. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.

What’s the first thing that you, as an individual, can do to start preparing for this new world?  Stop watching the cable news channels.  Stop listening to the Olbermanns and Hannitys, who do little else but incite your rage (and I have it too, but it has to be tempered).  Right now, we don’t need an angry populace.  We need a calm citizenry that takes time to learn about the economic issues that we face, rolls up its sleeves and gets to work fixing them.  You might not like abortion, and you may think gay marriage is all about equal rights, but if there is widespread economic collapse, these issues are going to be irrelevant to the world we face.

Do yourself and the rest of us a favor:  Stop watching cable news.

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