Power Shift, Part 3: The Civil War
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could…
Power Shift, Part 2: Judicial Review
The constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. It is emphatically the province and duty of…
Powershift, Part 1: Overview of the Inflection Points
Abstract: During the course of US history, the balance of power between the states and the federal government shifted to the federal government through a series of inflection points tied to key events. “The American Republic will endure…
Part 3: Pathbreaking Conceptual Framework, Three examples
Path dependencies and punctuated equilibriums can come in a variety of settings, ranging from the policy issues that True, et al. (2007) discussed, to war and other catastrophic events, to deliberate strategy. Sometimes, two or more of these situations work…
Part 2: The Conceptual Framework
Equilibriums are interesting. They seem to fly in the face of the Second Law of thermodynamics, which states that systems move from a state of order to a state of chaos. This process is called entropy. But the word equilibrium…
Part 1: Is Your Culture Like a Railroad or a Multi-modal Transportation System?
Figure 1 Railroad Tracks, the New Replaces the Old There is a natural conflict between the new and the old. Sometimes, the new destroys the old and replaces it, as shown in Figure 1. At other times, the new embeds…
