Delighted to present an interview on digital diplomacy, wealth inequality, job creation and more with Alec Ross, formerly Senior Advisor for Innovation at the State Department, now finishing a book on globalization. Below, a link to the #OneWithFarai podcast plus some quotes from the interview. pri.org/programs/one-farai/digital-diplomacy-and-global-economy On One With Farai, we have each guest ask a question of the next guest -- whose identity they do not know. In this case, Alec Ross got a question posed by actor Delroy Lindo: “If you could do one thing to change or address the educational system in this country, what would it be?” Rosss response: “The one thing that would have the biggest and longest-term impact is to change the standing of a public school teacher. Public school teachers ought to have triple the salary that they have today.” Below are more quotes from our interview with Ross. ======================== On Digital Diplomacy The idea behind digital diplomacy essentially is that diplomacy ought not be conducted between elites — white guys in white shirts with red ties talking to other white guys with white shirts and red ties; flags flying in the background with mahogany tabling, a cup of coffee in front of them. Rather, our diplomats ought to be engaging with publics, since it increasingly the case the publics, more so than elites, are driving geopolitical outcomes around the world. It was June of 2009, and the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran had ordered every reporter to their hotel rooms. Simultaneous to this, hundreds of thousands of people were protesting on the streets of Tehran, and there was no way of getting information out to the wider world, except for the Tweeting…. A colleague of mine, Jared Cohenm, reached out to Twitter to make sure their networks in Iran were up when otherwise they were scheduled to be taken down. It’s sort of the first moment in foreign policy in which a revolution was being Tweeted, much in the same way in which CNN revolutionized newsmaking during the first Gulf War… the first 24-7 CNN war….. Because of social media, a government like the Putin government can’t control the media environment like it could previously. ============= On Hillary Clinton I ran technology and media policy for Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign in 2007-2008. When Hillary Clinton recruited me to join her, it was really interesting the approach that she took to my hire. It was relatively undefined. This was at a time where she was taking what she thought would be an entire federal government’s worth of people — she thought she was going to be President — and she had to squoosh them all into one Department, the State Department. And the one exception she made was for me, the quote-unquote Obama Guy. She said, to the same extent the internet disrupted the Presidential campaign…she believe the internet would disrupt foreign policy for both good and ill….. She said I need someone like you to develop an agenda for us. For good: we developed some spectacular programs that helped disrupt political assassinations in Syria, that helped take down narcotics cartels in Mexico. For ill, we saw how the internet worked against our interest on things like Wikileaks. For the four years that I worked at her elbow, it really proved true that 21st century networks really impacted the conduct of foreign policy. It just doesn’t seem to break through on tv — I actually think she’s very maternal. She treats her staff and treats her others very much like a loving mother. Just on a personal note that’s one of the things that I took away from her that I don’t think most of the world sees. On a professional note she is subject to more disgusting commentary than anybody else on planet earth, and for her to have to live through these things day in and day out is remarkable. But the thing I took away from her was, I was getting bad press for some crazy program of me. She looked at me and said, “Alec, if you aren’t taking incoming fire, you’re bombing the wrong targets.” ============== On Genomics I think about genomics like I think about the internet in 1994. There’s so much that’s going to come and there’s so much that’s going to come quickly, because I do see more and more of the research being done in university labs being made ready for commercialization. And it’s going to have an enormously disruptive impact on our lives for good and bad…. I think that genomics is going to contribute to inequality because the commercialization of genomics is going to benefit the wealthy and the exceedingly well-connected. And simultaneous to the wealth creation that’s going to come….the health of not just low income Americans but working class Americans is likely to get worse. If you actually look at the data regarding life expectancies for low income and working class Americans, it has actually gotten worse in the last decade or so. Since when do we live in a country when people die younger than they did previously, even as our science gets stronger? Over a period of decades, genomics is going to benefit a wide variety of people, but during the first decade it will benefit the wealthy and the well-connected. ============= On Wealth Inequality and the Global Job Market In a global economy made up of 7.2 billion people from 196 countries, being American does not advantage you in the way it did in decades past, because of the nature in which competition for labor, competition for human capital is global. People in Baltimore are not competing against people in Pittsburgh and Cleveland for jobs. People in Baltimore are competing against people in Bangalore. What this means is that education has to become lifelong, it’s not just something you do in high school and college. People also have to become comfortable with increasing mobility in their work lives. And the sum of it is that life is only going to get more difficult for working class and middle class Americans as our economy grows increasingly interconnected and increasingly global. For government, billions of dollars flow into vocational education programs today. Those dollar amounts should go up and the nature of the programs should be fundamentally redesigned. Vocational education is more important today than it ever was….We need to make sure that everybody has a chance to get a good job, and one way we can do that is to make a significant investment in vocational education and community colleges, but not do so using yesterday’s models, but with a Singapore-like focus on determining what tomorrow’s jobs are. When it comes to industry…big companies are not incentivized to bring their capital to the United States and to hire domestically. Foreign profits are simply not being booked domestically and therefore taxes are not being paid on them. Right now, more than a trillion dollars are abroad as America’s biggest companies are in tax avoidance schemes. If we can figure out a way to repatriate those dollars and to tie that repatriation to hiring, that will do more to structurally impact unemployment than anything else.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:27:07 +0000
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