Faith and hope are as much a part of political reality as they are in change programs within businesses. As I reflect on the daily political landscape that pretends to offer us information to make sense of the 'most important issue' in the upcoming election (the economy), I offer the following two articles for your consideration. I think these two articles are important to digest together. Both have the feel of the kind of unbiased analysis, reflective discourse, and unvarnished truth that must accompany any true reform in our national debate on such topics (a reform that is desparately needed).

• Storms on the horizon, revealing the mindset of Richard Fisher, a member of the Federal Reserve, regarding the tenuous nature of future economic projections regarding deficits, and the unfortunate logical consequences of forces already set in motion with entitlement programs and how they relate to those deficits
• An analysis of Obama's and McCain's economic plans, neither of which I believe offers much hope for true change to address these storms, despite PR offered by both candidates

Taken together, one might conclude from these readings that neither candidate has the courage to speak of the true state of things, or to offer significantly different alternatives to dogmatic menus that have been served up by both parties in the past. Yet such offerings may no longer continue to serve us well in our current situation. In important matters, hope and change, as sound bites, may be great for public relations purposes, but as a citizen and skeptic, I prefer transparency and collaborative efforts, and in this case, have little faith in anything else. The consequence for many voters may be electile dysfunction - the inability to become aroused over any of the choices for President put forth by either party in the upcoming election year.

While untrained as an economist, I have sought to better understand economic principles in my own recent readings, and have come to appreciate how flawed our models of economic behavior are; of course, if we consider the implications of this, it means we really have no reliable means to assess the future collective consequences of actions we consider in our present circumstances. Simply put, these models lack the ability to factor in the complexities relating to the interconnectedness of all that is at play at present - our linked international economies, mischief of various interests (foreign and domestic), the accumulated debt of inattention to education and our national infrastructure,  the evaporation of an independent and professional body of journalism, population dynamics and demographics, escalating trends and effects of technologies (especially health care and information sharing), the numbing impact of bombarding our population with a 24 hour news cycle of emotional imagery (typically without meaningful context), increased demands on critical natural resources (oil is perhaps the least worrisome, as soil and water will be far more important in the long run), and as always, base ingredients of ourselves - greed, gluttony, etc. 

I believe such factors may accumulate and interact to create far greater uncertainties in our future than our political friends or voting populations are capable of understanding, or even that any centrally planned 'strategy' can perhaps hope to control or guide. Yet if react we must, we are unprepared, and thus our reactions are likely to be overly simplistic, delayed, and may well create more problems than they solve (witness the post-9/11 decision-making and legislation, where examples abound). There are no substitutes for proactive, long-term investments towards a common vision, yet the idea that any executive system drivess meaningful changes based upon a vision alone is naive, and implies that we can plan, implement, and deploy changes within four years, and produce meaningful, effective change across hundreds of thousands of large organizations in that timeframe. Industry cannot do this across thousands of people in similar timeframes;  government is even less likely to be successful, with less leverage, and an even more diverse unity of purpose. And crafting such clear visions are hardly what political campaigns are all about, since a campaign's focus is usually more about abstract ideas attempting to leverage voters passion, and spin that is more likely to obfuscate than achieve clarity and unification. Out of such campaigns, people ultimately decide who they will put their faith in, and close elections can be an indication that the answer is 'neither' as much as 'either'.

In my field, I am always amazed at the undesirable consequences that emerge when attempting to implement radical changes, especially without careful collection of evidence and assessments of cultural readiness, thoughtful study, adequate experimentation and design, and realistic planning and deployment; one need look no further than the No Child Left Behind efforts of this administration to see how such efforts can disappoint, and be politically manipulated, even when all these steps are performed. Problems are real and indeed exist, but options for change must be generated and carefully analyzed, in the context of a shared vision. You can't just try to implement change for change's sake, especially if there isn't an alignment of common purpose - in the absence of this, underlying resistance will continue, and little will be accomplished.

Yet the solutions offered at present by both parties seem far too inadequate for today's realities. In any event, they will be diluted further by infighting and ineptitude, and the result will indeed be change, and consume enormous resources and time - but like Katrina levee repairs, will be unlikely to meet expectations. Meanwhile, Rome burns. For example, one need look no further than the recent housing crisis for evidence that markets are innovating and morphing faster than regulatory efforts can react to those changes... or the oil crisis, for idiotic 'solutions' like the windfall profit tax, to highlight how foolish and naive our proposals are.

As a student of history, none of these trends or forces is new... yet history has taught us again and again that the architecture of systems such as are at work here - economic, environmental, political, cultural, and social - may not always react predictably to successive incremental changes (whether in scale, context, or behavior) without significant and painful adjustments. Such adjustments can either be designed, or will just happen, but our political system as currently deployed does not do that - like companies unable to innovate new product lines from within, governments are often unable to reinvent themselves.

Whether designed or not, these adjustment points will occur and affect other related systems, and may lead to considerable chaos. Perhaps our political and economic systems will then prove again, sooner than any of us would like, that we must be careful what we wish for. Then we may again be wishing, as we just were at the end of the previous administration, for 'life as it was'.