Elites and Their Discontents
Monday, 20 August 2012, 7:00pm
Co-Merge, San Diego, CA
OVERVIEW
In 2000, the Department of Defense promised a new air defense fighter by 2008 at a cost of just over $50 million per plane. In 2012, this plane has shot up in cost to over $150 million, and will not be deployed until at least 2018. In 2007, the Experts predicted that housing prices would never fall. The next year, the world experienced the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Politicians have consistently failed to predict wars, end long lasting ones, or figure out effective long term fiscal challenges.
What is going on? Why are the elites in society consistently wrong? Should we be concerned, or is this merely an evolution to a more horizontal, democratic decision making apparatus that is a 21st century inevitability?
We will explore some of the more potent failures of the past two decades, and look at the assumed models that continue to fail our decision-makers. We will discuss ways our generation can adapt to an increasingly complex world. Finally, we will integrate the lessons of the last few sessions, including Design, Collaborative Consumption and Crowdsourcing, to come up with a resilient model for our culture that relies upon collaboration across professions, rather than highly specialized, but thinly spread, elites.
SYLLABUS
BOOKS:
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
The Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb
ARTICLES:
The Best and The Brightest Led America Off A Cliff Chris Hedges (TruthDig)
The Greening of Godzilla, Walter Russel Mead (The American Interest)
Why Our Elites Stink, David Brooks (The New York Times)
VIDEOS:
The Skulls, Universal Studios (2000)
How to Use Experts…And When Not To (Noreena Hertz)
Advice to Young Scientists (E.O. Wilson)
