By Lea Kahn, The Packet Group
It is undeniable that one of the few “constants” in society is change, but it is the rapidly increasing pace of change that is disruptive — especially when public policy is unable to keep up with those changes.
That was the message delivered by former Gov. James J. Florio, who spoke at Rider University last week at the invitation of the school’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics. About 60 people attended.
One of the benefits of longevity, said the 74-year-old former governor, is that one gains perspective. For one, there is the realization that everything is connected to everything else — and to be successful in one’s career, it is helpful to understand public policy, he said.
Physicians must understand health care policy and how it affects them, just as educators and teachers must understand educational policy and its impact on them, Gov. Florio said. It is equally important to develop peripheral vision and maintain an awareness of the changes that are going on in the world around them.
”We know change is constant,” he said.
There have been times in American history when society has experienced upheaval and it has undergone dramatic change, the governor said, pointing to the post-Civil War period and then the era of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
”All of these were periods of disruption, stress and alienation. We are in such a time now,” Gov. Florio said, adding that change is happening rapidly and dramatically. Pick a section — energy, health, telecommunications — and the change is not incremental but transformational, he said.
One of the best examples of transformational change is the job market, Gov. Florio said. Many years ago, high school dropouts could still make good lives for themselves. They could work in a shipyard or on an assembly line in a factory.
”There was the old social contract that a good employee could get more money and promotions, and health care benefits and a defined-benefits pension. But unless you have been living in a cave, those days are gone,” Gov. Florio said.
The Tea Party movement, in part, is an outgrowth of the alienation that people are feeling, he said. There are good people who are hard-working, but they are unable to understand what is going on. They do the right things, but they can’t understand the changes and why they can’t find jobs, he said.
The temptation by less sophisticated people is find a scapegoat, Gov. Florio said. In the past, it was the Jews or the Irish, but now it is gays, immigrants or Muslims. Maybe it is human nature to find a scapegoat, but there are answers that can be obtained if one is willing to explore, he said.
The most obvious answer is that rapidly changing events are “out-running our ability to change policy,” he said, noting that policy has to change to meet the “new reality.” He pointed to the financial meltdown in 2008, in which government was applying policies that dated to the 1930s.
Employment-based health insurance is another example of out-moded policies, the governor said. The decision to offer health care benefits grew out of the need for workers during World War II, he said. There was competition for workers, and offering paid health care was an inducement to work for a particular company.
The result, however, was that the cost of health care benefits was rolled into a product’s price, he said. Benefits added about 12 to 15 percent to the cost of a car, for example. That was fine during the 1940s or 1950s, but times have changed and there is more competition, he said.
”We have to start addressing policies (that have not caught up with reality),” Gov. Florio said. It is necessary to analyze the trends and forces that are at work — and “we need good, smart people to think of these things. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what the problem is,” he said.
One of those problems is jobs and employment, he said. There has been a loss of 8.5 million jobs in the past few years. The economy is coming back, corporate profits are “up,” productivity is good, companies have cash on hand — but the job market is not improving, he said.
Full employment was defined as an unemployment rate of 5 or 6 percent, Gov. Florio said. But companies have figured out how to be productive and profitable with fewer employees, and the United States may be entering a period of time when an unemployment rate of 8 or 10 percent is considered “full employment,” he said.
”Is this the new norm? We have to think about and acknowledge that things are not the way we would like them to be. My point is, somebody has to be out there and talk ‘reality.’ Deluding people may be satisfactory for a while, but it becomes frustrating,” Gov. Florio said.
Coming up with answers is not easy. Politicians are more concerned about winning elections today than with running government. It is important “in these tough times” to convince political leaders to take on the challenge of finding answers, he said.
One key leadership trait is intellectual courage — questioning traditional wisdom, finding out what is working and what is not working, he said. The reality is that there is rarely one answer to a problem. It’s a matter of laying out the options and then considering the pluses and minuses of those options, he said.
But politicians today are more concerned about winning re-election than solving problems, Gov. Florio said. They cannot afford to alienate donors. Deciding a policy issue entails that someone gets hurt, and if someone is unhappy, that person may not donate to the politician’s campaign, he said.
Nevertheless, Gov. Florio said, he is optimistic.
”As Winston Churchill said, ‘Americans always seems to get it right, after they have exhausted all of the alternatives,’” he said.

