We are not going to save each other, ourselves, America, or the world. But we certainly can leave it a little bit better. As my grandmother used to say, “If the Kingdom of God is within you, then everywhere you go, you ought to leave a little Heaven behind.”

hat has been the perennial state and condition of not simply black people in America, but all self-conscious human beings who are sensitive to the forms of evil around them. We can be prisoners of hope even as we call optimism into question.

Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.

One movement had forty-seven local branches across the nation, the other sells millions of albums and CDs. The comparison is not a matter of patronizing this generation. Frankly, it is a critique of each us who has to deal with this market culture and through market mechanisms try to preserve some nonmarket values.

Unfortunately, neighborhoods often took shape in my boyhood under patriarchal and homophobic conditions, and that history must be called into question. Still, we must recover its flow of nonmarket values and nonmarket activity.

he ultimate logic of a market culture is the gangsterization of culture: I want power now. I want pleasure now. I want property now. Your property. Give it to me.

Spirituality requires an experience of something bigger than our individual selves that binds us to a community. It could be in an authoritarian bind, of course, which is why the kind of spiritual and moral awakening that is necessary for a democracy to function is based on a sense of the public—a sense of what it is to be a citizen among citizens.

ny civilization that is unable to sustain its networks of caring and nurturing will generate enough anger and aggression to make communication near impossible. The result is a society in which we do not even respect each other enough to listen to each other.

The conversation matters because the preservation of democracy is threatened by real economic decline. While it is not identical to moral and cultural decay, it is inseparable from it. Even though the pocketbook is important, many Americans are concerned more about the low quality of their lives, the constant fear of violent assault and cruel insult, the mean-spiritedness and coldheartedness of social life, and the inability to experience deep levels of intimacy. These are the signs of a culturally decadent civilization.

Corporations speak glibly about downsizing—bureaucratic language that simply means you do not have a job even though we have the highest profits we have had since 1948. And yet 25 percent of all of America’s children live in poverty, and 42 percent of young brown brothers and sisters live in poverty, and 51 percent of young black brothers and sisters live in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world. These sets of conditions are immoral.

Even the Greeks, despite their glorious yet truncated democratic experiment, would only apply the tragic to the elite. Ordinary people were limited to the idyllic and the comic, the assumption being that their lives were less complex and one-dimensional.

Problem people become indistinguishable and interchangeable, which means that only one of them has to be asked to find out what all the rest of them think.

e understood what it meant to be cast as part of a problem people rather than people with problems. Once the humanity of a people is problematized, they are called into question perennially. Their beauty is attacked: wrong hips, lips, noses, skin texture, skin pigmentation, and hair texture. Black intelligence is always guilty before proven innocent in the court of the life of the mind: The Bell Curve2 is just a manifestation of the cycle.

It is very difficult to engage in a candid and frank critical discussion about race by assuming it is going to be a rational exchange. Race must be addressed in a form that can deal with its complexity and irrationality.

When we think of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Buelle Wells-Barnett, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, James Baldwin,1 and so many nameless and anonymous ones, we cannot but be moved by their standards of vision and courage. They are wind at one’s back.

In Tradition and Individual Talent (1919), T. S. Eliot claims that tradition is not something you inherit—if you want it, you must sacrifice for it. In other words, tradition must be fought for. . . .

n this essay, West is concerned about the viability of democratic society in America, which he believes is threatened by “a lethal and unprecedented linkage of relative economic decline, cultural decay, and political lethargy.”

Technology platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest play a significant role in encouragingthis human behavior because they are designed to be performative in nature. Slowing down to check whethercontent is true before sharing it is far less compelling than reinforcing to your "audience" on these platformsthat you love or hate a certain policy

Just as putting on sunscreen was a habit that society developedover time and then adjusted as additional scientific research became available, building resiliency against adisordered information environment needs to be thought about in the same vein

Another popular tactic of disinformation agents is dubbed "astroturfing." The term was initially connected topeople who wrote fake reviews for products online or tried to make it appear that a fan community was largerthan it really was. Now automated campaigns use bots or the sophisticated coordination of passionatesupporters and paid trolls, or a combination of both, to make it appear that a person or policy has considerablegrassroots support. By making certain hashtags trend on Twitter, they hope that particular messaging will getpicked up by the professional media and direct the amplification to bully specific people or organizations intosilen

One of the most alarming examples of foreigninterference in a U.S. election was a protest that took place in Houston, Tex., yet was entirely orchestrated bytrolls based in Russia. They had set up two Facebook pages that looked authentically American. One wasnamed "Heart of Texas" and supported secession; it created an "event" for May 21, 2016, labeled "StopIslamification of Texas." The other page, "United Muslims of America," advertised its own protest, entitled "SaveIslamic Knowledge," for the exact same time and location. The result was that two groups of people came outto protest each other, while the real creators of the protest celebrated the success at amplifying existingtensions in Houston

Anyone who uses Web sites that facilitate social interaction would do well to learn how they work—andespecially how algorithms determine what users see by "prioritiz[ing] posts that spark conversations andmeaningful interactions between people," in the case of a January 2018 Facebook update about its rankings

IN A HEALTHY INFORMATION commons, people would still be free to express what they want—butinformation that is designed to mislead, incite hatred, reinforce tribalism or cause physical harm would not beamplified by algorithms. That means it would not be allowed to trend on Twitter or in the YouTube contentrecommender. Nor would it be chosen to appear in Facebook feeds, Reddit searches or top Google results

The seemingly playful nature of these visual formats means that memes have not been acknowledged by muchof the research and policy community as influential vehicles for disinformation, conspiracy or hate. Yet the mosteffective misinformation is that which will be shared, and memes tend to be much more shareable than text.

The word "meme" was first used by theorist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to describe"a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation," an idea, behavior or style that spreads quickly throughouta culture. During the past several decades the word has been appropriated to describe a type of online contentthat is usually visual and takes on a particular aesthetic design, combining colorful, striking images with blocktext. It often refers to other cultural and media events, sometimes explicitly but mostly implicitly

Instead of whollyfabricated stories, influence agents are reframing genuine content and using hyperbolic headlines. The strategyinvolves connecting genuine content with polarizing topics or people. Because bad actors are always one step(or many steps) ahead of platform moderation, they are relabeling emotive disinformation as satire so that it willnot get picked up by fact-checking processes. In these efforts, context, rather than content, is beingweaponized. The result is intentional chaos.

Those who spread mis information—false content shared by a person who does not realize it is false ormisleading—are driven by sociopsychological factors. People are performing their identities on social platformsto feel connected to others, whether the "others" are a political party, parents who do not vaccinate theirchildren, activists who are concerned about climate change, or those who belong to a certain religion, race orethnic group. Crucially, disinformation can turn into misinformation when people share disinformation withoutrealizing it is false.

They included, among others, satire, which is notintended to cause harm but still has the potential to fool; fabricated content, which is 100 percent false anddesigned to deceive and do harm; and false context, which is when genuine content is shared with falsecontextual information.

Effective researchand interventions require clear definitions, yet many people use the problematic phrase "fake news." Used bypoliticians around the world to attack a free press, the term is dangerous. Recent research shows thataudiences increasingly connect it with the mainstream media.

Trust in institutions is falling because of political and economic upheaval, most notably through everwidening income inequality. The effects of climate change are becoming more pronounced. Global migrationtrends spark concern that communities will change irrevocably. The rise of automation makes people fear fortheir jobs and their privacy.

Purveyors of dis information—content that is intentionally false and designed to cause harm—are motivated bythree distinct goals: to make money; to have political influence, either foreign or domestic; and to cause troublefor the sake of it.

it appears asmemes, videos and social posts on Facebook and Instagram.

Most of this content is designed not to persuade people in any particular direction but to cause confusion, tooverwhelm and to undermine trust in democratic institutions from the electoral system to journalism. Andalthough much is being made about preparing the U.S. electorate for the 2020 election, misleading andconspiratorial content did not begin with the 2016 presidential race, and it will not end after this one. As toolsdesigned to manipulate and amplify content become cheaper and more accessible, it will be even easier toweaponize users as unwitting agents of disinformation.

"fake news."

One of the most iconic images from that day shows a large clustering of New Yorkers staring upward. Thepower of the photograph is that we know the horror they're witnessing. It is easy to imagine that, today, almosteveryone in that scene would be holding a smartphone. Some would be filming their observations and postingthem to Twitter and Facebook. Powered by social media, rumors and misinformation would be rampant. Hate-filled posts aimed at the Muslim community would proliferate, the speculation and outrage boosted byalgorithms responding to unprecedented levels of shares, comments and likes. Foreign agents ofdisinformation would amplify the division, driving wedges between communities and sowing chaos. Meanwhilethose stranded on the tops of the towers would be livestreaming their final moments.

The Māori concept of whakapapa – their word for ‘genealogy’ – could provide the inspiration we need. It is the idea that we are all connected in a great chain of life that links the present back to the generations of the past and forwards to all the generations going on into the future. It so happens that the light is shining on this moment, here and now, and the idea of whakapapa helps us shine the light more widely so we can see everyone throughout the landscape of time. It enables us to recognise that the living, the dead and the unborn are all here in the room with us. And we need to respect their interests and the world they inhabit as much as our own.

The future might be full of uncertainties, but we can rest assured that there is one thing that our descendants will want to inherit from us: a living world in which they can survive and thrive. We must bequeath them the conditions conducive to life itself.

he naturalist Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac (1949) called the ‘land ethic’, which is the idea that ‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and the beauty of the biotic community’.

And it is something that humans have signally failed to do by using resources faster than they can be naturally replenished, and creating more material waste and greenhouse gases than the planet can absorb.

he way that living organisms have evolved to survive over the long term is to take care of the place that will take care of their offspring.

In 1928, the mathematical economist Frank Ramsey – the inventor of discounting – declared that discounting the welfare of future generations was ‘ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination’.

Economists have devised a method for making such temporal judgments, known as discounting. Just as a person appears smaller and smaller the further from us that they stand, so discounting gives smaller and smaller weight to their interests the further in the future that they are. Governments use discount rates to decide whether they will make long-term investments, for instance in a new public hospital or tidal power energy project. The result is that they rarely back projects with long time-horizons as the benefits accruing beyond around 50 years are discounted away and become negligible.

striving to secure the legal right of future generations to a clean and healthy atmosphere – as is currently taking place in the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit in the United States – will benefit both present and future generations through curtailing the impacts of the fossil fuel industry.

instance, 150 million children currently at risk of malnutrition-related mortality, primarily in developing countries. Shouldn’t they have a greater claim to our attention – and resources?

The Scales, the Arrow and the Baton open our minds to respecting the interests of future generations and ensuring their fair treatment in a world where existing political and economic institutions largely ignore them.

In a more positive sense, we can make sure that we pass on the public health institutions or great works of art and literature that previous generations have bequeathed us

If we think back to our own forebears, there are many things we might wish they had never passed on to us, from the inheritance of colonial-era racism and patriarchal attitudes that still have a hold in so many countries, to the environmental impacts of an industrial system based on burning hydrocarbons.

A final argument, which I call the Baton, is based on the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ This ancient empathic principle can be extended to future generations, so we have a duty not to impose harm or dangerous risks on future people that we wouldn’t be willing to accept ourselves.

The first is an argument I call the Scales, which has its origins in utilitarian philosophy. Imagine a set of scales where everyone who is alive today is on one side, and on the other are all the generations of people who are yet to be born. Assuming there won’t be a mass extinction or dramatic fall in the birth rate, at least in terms of sheer numbers, the current generation is easily outweighed by all those who are likely to succeed us.

here is a significant chance that, at some point, the arrow is going to land with devastating effects, just as is the case with the burning of fossil fuels or the poisoning of the oceans. The fewer arrows we fire, the better.

A second argument, the Arrow, comes courtesy of the philosopher Derek Parfitt. In his book Reasons and Persons (1987), he asks us to imagine shooting an arrow into a distant wood, where it wounds someone: If I should have known that there might be someone in this wood, I am guilty of gross negligence. Because this person is far away, I cannot identify the person whom I harm. But this is no excuse. Nor is it any excuse that this person is far away. We should make the same claims about effects on people who are temporally remote. To put it another way, if we have an obligation not to plant a bomb on a train that would harm a child now, we have the same obligation not to do so if it was timed to go off in 10 minutes, or 10 days, or even 10 years from now. Or consider the case of high-level radioactive waste. We know that it could be dangerous to people hundreds or even thousands of years from today, but just because they are distant in time doesn’t mean that we should be freely permitted to dump the risk on them.

By one calculation, around 100 billion people have lived and died in the past 50,000 years. But they, together with the 7.8 billion people currently alive, are far outweighed by the estimated 6.75 trillion people who will be born over the next 50,000 years, if this century’s birth rate is maintained (see graphic below). Even in just the next millennium, more than 135 billion people will be born. How could we possibly ignore their wellbeing, and think that our own is of such greater value?

Future generations are granted no political rights or representation. Their interests have no influence at the ballot box or in the marketplace. This leaves them vulnerable to multiple long-term threats, from rising sea levels and AI-controlled lethal autonomous weapons to the next pandemic that lies on the horizon, whether naturally occurring or genetically engineered.

This is a struggle that I feel acutely aware of, and not just because I have children. I spent nearly a decade as a political scientist studying democracy, and it never once occurred to me that our political systems disenfranchise future generations in the same way that slaves and women were disenfranchised in the past

Our societal attitude today is one of tempus nullius, particularly in high-income countries. The future is seen as ‘nobody’s time’, an unclaimed territory that is equally devoid of inhabitants.

We treat it like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk and nuclear waste – as if nobody will be there.

There will always be a need for governments to focus on immediate issues like the COVID-19 crisis. But these pioneering initiatives show how it is possible to give voice to future generations through present-day design.

he US public interest law firm Our Children’s Trust has filed a landmark case against the federal government on behalf of 21 young people campaigning for the legal right to a stable climate and healthy atmosphere for both present and future generations.

Future Design is just one example of a growing global movement to overcome the short-termism that pervades politics. In Wales, there is a Future Generations Commissioner whose job is to scrutinize the impact of public policy on the well-being of citizens 30 years from today, and there is now an active campaign for the whole UK to have its own commissioner.

or Saijo, Future Design is urgently needed to tackle the growing ecological crisis. His ultimate ambition is to see it practiced at the heart of a new Japanese Ministry for the Future and used in international meetings like the G20, as well as its being adopted by towns and cities worldwide. “We must design social structures that activate the futurability within us,” he says. “If we don’t do this, our continued existence itself is at stake.”

“We are inspired by the Native American Iroquois practice of seventh generation decision-making,” explains the movement’s founder, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, an economics professor at the Research Institute for Future Design at Kochi University of Technology. He points out that although humans are obviously lured by short-term rewards and instant gratification, our brains are better at long-term planning and envisaging possible futures than we had previously recognized. “Imagining yourself in the future isn’t easy for our brains to digest,” he says, “but there is now a growing body of neuroscience research revealing the human capacity to make this kind of mental leap.”

Future Design is now spreading rapidly across Japan and is being used in major cities including Kyoto, Matsumoto, and Suita. Earlier this year, residents from the city of Uji, just south of Kyoto, created a Future Design citizens' assembly to lobby local officials. It has even been taken up by Japan’s Ministry of Finance as a tool for challenging the short-termism that dominates economic policymaking.

It turns out that when they’re acting as people from the future, they advocate far more transformative policies, from health care provision to climate change action. Using Future Design, Yahaba residents agreed to a 6 percent increase in their water rates to finance long-term investment in the town’s degraded water infrastructure, having realized how much this would benefit their children and grandchildren. The experiment has been so successful that in April 2019, Yahaba’s mayor set up a Future Strategy Office to ensure that Future Design is used in all major decision-making.

Since 2015, the residents of Yahaba have taken part in Future Design, a unique model of political decision-making where they are invited to public meetings to discuss plans for their town’s future. They start as themselves, with the perspective of a current resident. But then — and this is where it gets interesting — they are given colorful ceremonial robes to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents of the town in 2060.

Washington had identified a fundamental flaw in democracy: that the billions upon billions of people who will inhabit the future and will be impacted by our choices have no political voice. They are granted no rights or representation. Their interests can’t compete with the cut and thrust of a presidential election or the short-term cycles of 24/7 media.

n his farewell address in 1796, George Washington warned against “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.” He was talking about public debt,

The pandemic just lifted the odds of European-style taxes to a virtual certainty. The middle class will start paying for those IOUs soon, and it’s the virus that has brought the reckoning from a dot in the distance to a daunting fiscal future that’s approaching fast.

But piling on $4 trillion overnight, and heightening the interest burden, could scare foreign investors who keep our rates low and the dollar strong. Until COVID-19 hit, it appeared that the baby boomers were simply offloading the burden onto generations that might not start working for 20 years. Now, today’s middle-class workers in their forties and even fifties will likely get stuck with the huge tax increases.

The rub is that the U.S. middle class is where the big money is, and middle-class families pay extremely low income taxes. Trump lowered their rates in 2017, and no major politician advocates increasing them. In fact, the rate paid by the median family making $59,300 a year is just 3.3%.

The outbreak makes this future burden so much more crushing that America probably won’t get to those 2029 numbers. Piling on that unforeseen $4 trillion makes it much more likely that a credit crisis will strike sometime in the next several years, forcing radical action. The idea that taxing the wealthy will come close to solving the problem is an illusion.

If that scenario plays out, the U.S. would shoulder a staggering 123% of debt to GDP in a decade, 18 points higher than under the CBO’s already scary alternative budget projections. That’s approaching Italy’s current 135%, and exceeds France’s ratio of 98% by one-fourth.

he CBO predicts that cheap money won’t last, especially since huge borrowings could erode America’s vaunted creditworthiness. The CBO forecasts average rates in the 2.6% to 2.7% range over the next decade.

Total debt jumps to $32.4 trillion, rising from 79.2% to 105% of GDP. Thereafter, unbridled growth in Medicare and Medicaid in future decades keeps deficits and debt on a rapidly climbing escalator.

In reality, Congress and the administration almost always renew middle-class tax breaks, and agree to bust the restraints to satisfy Republican demands for higher defense spending and Democrats’ push to strengthen social programs.

So it’s reasonable to assume the national debt will grow by $4 trillion more through early fiscal 2022 than was planned for in early March. That would mean America’s debt will jump from a previously forecast $17.7 trillion at the end of 2021 to $21.7 trillion, a 23% rise unmatched since 1942 as America mobilized to fight Germany and Japan.

CARES and other legislation cost $2.4 billion, the recession another $1.76 trillion in lower taxes and higher outlays on programs such as Medicaid. The new funds to replenish the PPP and aid health care providers add $470 billion. Those numbers bring the total of new borrowings through the close of fiscal 2021 to over $4.6 trillion.

The shutdown is hammering tax revenues, and ballooning spending on existing aid programs such as Medicaid and standard unemployment benefits, excluding the extra assistance included under CARES.

The CARES Act also encompasses a second category, loans that companies are obligated to repay. That comprises $454 billion for midsize businesses with up to 10,000 employees under the Main Street Lending facility, a number that the Fed will leverage to deliver hundreds of billions in credit, and $56 billion for passenger and cargo airlines, the U.S. Postal Service, and “firms vital to national security,” notably defense contractors.

Most of the new spending is incorporated in the CARES or Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, signed on March 27 by President Trump. The CARES measure, along with two previous, much smaller bills, appropriates $2.4 trillion, chiefly to assist businesses and families. But all of the CARES spending won’t, over time, translate into bigger borrowings. The program allocates around $1.6 trillion in direct payments, including $290 billion to families, $180 billion to support health care, and $119 billion for education. Passenger airlines are getting capital injections of $25 billion. It also earmarks $366 billion in “loans” for small businesses, mostly provided by the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). But most of that cash is likely to turn into grants. If the restaurants, landscapers, physician practices and the like maintain their pre-crisis payrolls for eight weeks after they receive the aid, the loans can be forgiven.

Says Brian Riedl, a budget specialist at the conservative Manhattan Institute: “Even though the spending to battle the coronavirus has made our fiscal outlook far worse, the administration is calling for another round of tax cuts, and both Congress and the administration are talking about spending trillions more on infrastructure and other programs. If the U.S. government keeps spending like the Europeans, the American middle-class will be taxed like Europeans.”

America’s cable TV anchors and policy experts are paying scant attention to what's arguably the most damaging and enduring aftershock from the COVID-19 pandemic: the outbreak in deficits and debt to levels not witnessed since World War II.

It is likely that within the next decade, the U.S. will need to impose monumental tax increases. What America’s leaders aren’t saying is that it’s the middle-class Americans working today, the autoworkers, nurses, and deli owners, and not just their future generations, who'’ll foot most of the bill.

The U.S. was facing a dire fiscal future before the crisis struck, but the economic lockdown, and the gigantic new spending enacted to combat it, brings the day of reckoning far closer.

When the participants in the study were tested immediately after playing the game or watching the video and then a couple of months later, everybody improved, but the game players improved more than the video watchers.

Sunk-cost thinking tells us to stick with a bad investment because of the money we have already lost on it; to finish an unappetizing restaurant meal because, after all, we’re paying for it; to prosecute an unwinnable war because of the investment of blood and treasure. In all cases, this way of thinking is rubbish.

Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.

As coronavirus has led to abrupt disruptions in democratic and electoral life, some governments seized the opportunity to disproportionately extend state power.

From the very beginning, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an “infodemic.” Overwhelmed by uncertainty and confined in their homes, people obsessively searched for information. At the same time, malign actors multiplied the production of fake news, conspiracy theories, and manipulated information on an ad hoc basis

Governments are developing bold recovery packages that transcend the old Washington consensus through massive government spending and reliance on debt.