About this pod theme...

Hi Patrick.

I'm intrigued. Tell me more about what you mean by creating global abundance from the bottom up.

Looking forward to the dialogue.

Sincerely,
Jamie

Re: About this pod theme...

Jamie,

Many thanks for the question.  Here's what I mean:

If you go back about five hundred years, you find a world where existence is pretty fragile for everybody.  Even a very wealthy family from 1500 enjoyed only a handful of the material comforts that are available to billions today as a matter of routine.

In particular, death from disease, complications of childbirth, malnutrition, war or famine was only a heartbeat away.

During those five hundred years, parts of the world have seen extraordinary development, starting with the Industrial Revolution in the UK and Europe and continuing with the blossoming of global trade and then the rise of the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Other parts of the world have seen very little of this development.  In fact, for some of them things have got worse, because population densities have increased, making previously sustainable ways of life unsustainable.

Right now, in October 2007, the daily death toll from extreme poverty is somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 people.  This is not famine, war or natural disaster; it is simply grinding poverty - entire communities routinely having too little food and water to survive, for months or years on end.

The good news, however, is that this number has dropped significantly during the last 20 years.  When I first began supporting The Hunger Project in 1988, the daily death toll from what they call chronic persistent hunger was approximately 35,000.  And that was against a backdrop of a significantly lower global population.

On the other hand, 20,000 people per day is still a shockingly large number.  To put a little more clarity on that, what we're mostly talking about is women and children, especially baby girls, who come a very clear second to baby boys in many African and Asian societies.  Given scarce resources in a family in, say, Tamil Nadu, a baby boy will continue to be fed and given water; a baby girl simply won't.

The big answer to all of this is that there are still a number of countries that need, in effect, to go through the industrial revolution.  This means the creation of sustainable commerce, formation of capital, development of infrastructure, etc.  That, in turn, requires the engagement, empowerment and education of the people in those communities/countries, as well as some changes to rebalance the playing field of global trade.

That, in a nutshell, is what I mean by Global Abundance.

I'll be expanding on many of these topics as the pod develops.  If you have any questions in the mean time, please let me know.

All the best,
Patrick

Re: About this pod theme...

For 24 years now my dad and I  http://macrae.tv/_wsn/page3.html
have debated globalisation as an overarching system which will spiral one of 2 ends:
abundance at ever locality
extinction

we agree that abundance depends on integrating a community-up globalisation

however compared with our timelines, we'd confirm sir nick stern's analysis (invest 1% of national GDP now on non-carbon energy to save 20%)  but not just on energy. Globalisation is spinning the wrong way with global-down big brothers extracting from the sustainablity of more and more communities which in turn in a network connected world will spread disease (see larry Brilliant videos) or wars or an end to what could have been nature's abundant clean water, foods and fuels.

The good and bad news is the primary cause is a huge mathematical error. The world's largest organisationss do not include local sustainability in their audits. What is excluded from a system's measures is exponentially destructed over time.

All the solutions for community up integration are already out their but global professions, media and education are blinding our view of them in a world whose measures are designed on the big get bigger at any cost.. Unseen wealth was reported as a missing audit back in 2000; the antidote audit is mathematically easy to specify but contextual. If there's a global sector you feel is compounding particularly urgent harm let's see if we can parameterise what missing audit needs applying to it.

Re: About this pod theme...

Chris,

Many thanks for your post.

At the risk of taking the wind out of your sails, I think we're coming from a VERY fundamentally different place here.

I'm not about finger-pointing.  I'm not saying that anything's wrong with the current system.  I'm not saying it's anybody's fault that things are in the mess they're in.

What I AM saying is that there are some things missing that, if they were present, could make a big difference to the fostering of global abundance.  Those things are:

1) A widespread belief that it's possible for a world without extreme poverty to exist.

2) Building on 1), an upsurge of activity on the part of ordinary people, when they realise:
    a) it's not hopeless;
    b) they have something to say about how things turn out;
    c) there are organisations that, given some money, actually produce big results.

3) A global shift in mindset, from scarcity (competing for “resources”) to abundance (collaborating to create wealth)

Now, I'm not saying that there are no scarce resources in the world.  Clearly there are finite resources on the planet, particularly including fossil fuels, fresh water and fertile land.  However, if we can harness the creativity of not thousands but millions/billions, I firmly believe we can address the energy crisis, which in turn allows us to address all three of these issues.

The biggest tragedy of our current world is that so many talented lives are going to waste.  HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and chronic persistent hunger are claiming 20,000 to 25,000 a day; who knows what talents are perishing among that number?  The next Einstein?  The next Mother Teresa?  The next Ghandi?  We really have no idea.

My mission for this pod is to unleash the solutions that are known, and have them spread like wildfire across the globe:  The Hunger Project's Epicenter strategy; Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank; Practical Action's low-tech, high-impact farming techniques; the permaculture techniques that are greening the Western Sahara; Rick Nelson's Solaroof technology.

All these tools/techniques can make a huge impact, and we can spread them quickly and quietly, through our networks, because fundamentally they're about spreading knowledge (i.e. bits of information) rather than spreading stuff (i.e. atoms).

And the best news of all is this: none of them really threatens the status quo particularly.  Perhaps a few of the more extreme despots will be discommoded by the new-found empowerment of some of the people they've been oppressing, but in general the “powers that be” will be fairly indifferent to this stuff, because it will happen very gradually.

I think one of the big challenges for the conscious capitalism community is choosing to spend more energy on creating solutions, and less energy on pointing the finger at the big, bad establishment, on to which it projects the ills of the world.

Maybe Shell, Monsanto, Esso, the US Government, Cargill, Wal-Mart, the Chinese Government, the World Bank et al have done nothing fundamentally wrong.  Maybe it's all our doing that the world is in the state it's in, because we were too busy pointing the finger, rather than rolling up our sleeves and getting to work….

All the best,
Patrick

Re: About this pod theme...

What I heard in what Chris was saying is:

1.  you get what you measure

2.  there are some measures missing. 

What gets measured gets done..... or not!

Jennifer,

Thanks for a beautiful summary - I couldn't have put it better myself  :-)

Patrick

Re: About this pod theme...

This pod should not die!

Well said, Jennifer: some measures are missing, and it is not finger pointing to say that these measures are missing from the dominant economic theories.

Other vital concepts are also missing from the economic orthodoxy that drives practice in economics. These are some fundamental distinctions that were observed in classical economics:

Difference between

• needs and wants;
• prices largely determined by demand (like price of land, or money) and those largely to do with costs in production;
• a fair price and a price the market is willing to pay
• real demand and effective demand (backed by money);
• earned and unearned (windfall) gains like rise in food prices after a bad harvest*.

        *when demand outstrips supply, people and groups of people increase prices not a law of nature.

Lack of these distinctions and the existence of other misconceptions in the thoretical engine driving economic practice will stifle any effective reform in practice as unfeasible.

So I would distinguish “finger pointing” from an analysis of what is missing and from where it is missing.