We begin this new year with a fresh look at where we want to go and the future we hope for our children and grandchildren.
The Conversation recently sat down with Patrick Sullivan, CEO of Oceanit, and Paul Brewbaker of TZ Economics. The duo wrote a paper challenging lawmakers and all of us to think about investing in our young minds — our talent, our human capital — or risk losing our future.
Hawaiʻi has just come out of a pandemic and economic upheaval, and most recently a natural disaster. Sullivan and Brewbaker suggest that it has left us with an opportunity to, as Sullivan framed it, reclaim a point of view offered by King Kalākaua.
It's the idea that Hawaiʻi is the center of our universe as we have this kuleana, responsibility for this special place we call home.
Sullivan says innovative policies will be key to sustainable job creation.
"We keep looking outside as though somebody is going to save us. And I think as a community, we have to decide to save ourselves, and that means to look in the mirror, to kind of look at the talent we have, and to try to understand how to build the right policies to create the ecosystem where these emergent enterprises could thrive," Sullivan said.
He said that if Hawaiʻi builds talent, and then creates the infrastructure to enable that talent to bring their ideas and innovation to the rest of the planet, then the state will build industries based on ideas.
"The kids that are coming up through the system, which tends to encourage up-and-coming kids not to contemplate a future in Hawaiʻi — if it's not explicit, it's at least implicit and sort of the modern culture — so we need to push against that quite a bit," Brewbaker said.
This story aired on The Conversation on Jan. 9, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
