The value of institutional knowledge

(3/2023) Weaving has been used by humans for thousands of years. Through the Middle Ages weaving was all done by hand. Then came the Industrial Age with inventions such as the Jacquard loom, patented in 1804. Joseph Marie Jacquard, building on earlier inventions, created a system of punchcards to control mechanical weaving. A hole in the punchcard would hold a warp thread in place. No hole and the thread would lift, allowing the weft thread to be alternately visible and invisible, thus creating a pattern. Ordered placing of one vertical thread over/under a horizontal thread makes any pattern possible. This mechanical function made organization of any sort of information possible. On/off, zeros and ones, the construct of computer data.

The path to our modern computer wizardry started over one hundred years before anyone reading this was born.

The impact of computers on human thinking is endless. Computation tools for medicine, farming, data management, distribution of food and other necessities, organizational systems for our lives—automobile manufacture, bus, train and plane schedules. Society’s elders have seen such transitions over the course of decades—institutional knowledge of work and life.

Youth in any era are raised with existing inventions, and always push their elders to make way for the new. That’s how it should be, progress is healthy. Anyone who makes it to their 30’s, 40’s and beyond starts to see the links in the chain of progress, and learns that new ways of doing things come from experience, trial and error. Often, more is learned from error than success.

Late 20th and early 21st century kids are increasingly raised in a society where necessities come to you by knowing what buttons to push and which store has food. It’s a hard lesson when grandma takes you out to the garden to grow something—a bridge to understanding where we find food. Career employees with institutional knowledge of a company are bridges of understanding for young adults entering the work force.

All people want something, and at the same time they share the need for life sustaining food, water, and shelter. The elder politicians in our democratic system know the value of change over time. Change that comes from learning how things are done, listening to what people want, and understanding the difference between wants and needs.

We have Social Security because a hundred years ago more people were dying in poverty than society would tolerate. Society tolerates a lot of misery if it’s not happening to me and mine. With industrialization, new means of employment and the beginnings of a middle class in our economy, citizens increasingly demanded compensation after serving their country or employer. After history changing events, especially the Civil War and WWI, veterans protested a lack of support from the federal government they just fought to protect. Our fellow Americans are smart enough to understand that the Federal government’s role is to organize aide for citizens who are without means of support. Pleas from constituents, debate in Congress, and subsequent laws added up to a solution with long term effects.

Using Democracy we built a social safety net which has a financial structure that works in tandem with our economic structure, and it is held in trust for each of us because of the confidence we have in each other. Our elders have learned, through institutional knowledge of life, that you can’t have it both ways—use a system for one’s own benefit, and say it is corrupt.

Institutional knowledge of our American system means understanding how we have worked together over decades to figure out how to use our assets to best advantage, while maintaining our individual freedoms. Our elders have lived it. Debates over what is fair, arguments to protect one person’s property rights over another person’s safety and civil rights is time spent on grievances rather than solutions.

Jacquard filled a need for cloth and satisfied the want for beautiful clothing. Silks, cotton, linen fabrics of every sort are ready to buy or ready to wear. The invention of weaving machines has impact beyond the production of cloth.

Serious people who spend their careers in elected office know that a law voted on and passed will have decades, maybe centuries of effects on society. A law that solves an immediate problem will can have myriad unknown results. The fact that our tax and spend system is stunningly complicated, does not make it wrong. It means that solutions can be found in simplifying the system.

Some in the GOP hold grievance rallies against Social Security. No solution is offered except a new rule to talk about Social Security every five years in Congress, for the purpose of deciding whether or not to take it away from Americans who spent a lifetime paying into it.

Experience teaches that pointing out a problem, while offering no solution, helps no one.

Democratic leadership rallies for our Social Security system and the support it gives to the backbone of our American society—stability for families. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid support the American family through all stages of life, from at-risk pregnancies and births, developmental needs, death benefits for orphaned children, disability benefits, to a dependable fixed income late in life.

Politicians, with the Institutional Knowledge of why we have targeted support for social safety, offer a bridge of understanding for our youth. All social security money is earned. If you are employed and paying taxes to the Federal government, then you are paying into the social security system now. Our elders paid into it for decades. Our elders need our support, and we need their institutional knowledge of life.

Our children need a better education on how to see the problem in front of us and understand the long term consequences of a hasty solution.

Like Jacquard, focus on the problem in front of you makes you better able to find a solution. A real solution can take us anywhere.