Pop quiz: What is the meaning of the following set of
numbers?
63, 62, 58, 56, 76, 68, 56, 90, 57, 67, 55, 67, 68, 77
Those are the ages of the members of the Think Long
Committee,
the group convened by famously homeless billionaire Nicolas Berggruen to come
up with systemic fixes for California’s governmental dysfunction.
For those who haven’t been
following it, the Think Long Committee – let’s call it the TLC — is the most
promising entity in the reform movement. Berggruen is an expert in
constitutions with a global outlook and a strong sense that California’s system
is broken and needs to be redesigned.
But what’s strange about the TLC is
that, for a body committed to the long term, it seems to be in a terrible
hurry. Berggruen and the TLC have committed to putting together a plan for
California in a matter of months. Then they want to present their plan to the
governor and legislature. If there is no action, they think they can then
reform California by putting multiple initiatives on the ballot, presumably
next year.
There are a number of problems with
this approach (chief among them: using ballot initiatives to "fix" a system
that’s been paralyzed by ballot initiatives won’t work), but the haste and
make-up of the group seems to be the most basic error. Redesigning California’s
system of government should take years of policy development, outreach and then
enactment (through constitutional revision processes that are likely to fail a
couple times before they succeed).
So what explains the haste? I’m two
decades too young to be the youngest member of the TLC, but a friend in his 60s
assures me that there’s no one so impatient as a geezer. If that’s true,
perhaps one solution would be to boot a few of the oldest members off the
committee and select replacements who stand a chance of living long enough to
see the full effects of a system redesign in California.
It makes little sense, in an
enterprise devoted to building a better future, to exclude people in their 20s
and 30s (and heck, even their 40s). The state is full of qualified young
people. Arguably the most famous businessman in California today is in his 20s
– Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. And if TLC wants to be representative of its
state, it should be younger. California is an unusually young state, with a
median age of 34.6 (compared to a national average of 36.5, according to the
census bureau).
When should
this shake-up of the TLC take place? As soon as possible. The existing members,
after all, don’t have all that much time left.