Category Archives: Links to mainstream media articles

Awkward conversations

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As I have continued with my give freely receive freely experiment, I have of course continued to have conversations with people about what I am doing and why I am doing  it.  For the most part these conversations have been really positive, often with people expressing what a great idea it is and that they hope I have lots of success etc etc.  But then some of the conversations have just been awkward…

Part of this is probably due to me not being all that great at expressing my ideas about GFRF yet, and then part of it is probably that the idea is so different from what people are used to and have experienced for their entire lives that they really struggle to understand what its about.  Some of our ideas about exchange are so deeply embedded that they become invisible to us, they become fundamental assumptions that we do not question or even necessarily realize exist.  So when a new idea is presented to us that operates outside those sets of assumptions we still try to interpret them in the context of our underlying assumptions even though they don’t apply, and this can lead to confusion and misunderstanding.

In a way its a bit like trying to tell someone that ‘there is no spoon’, those who’s minds are ready embrace the idea readily, while others just think you’re weird.  I guess what I need to do is demonstrate that there is no spoon to help them to understand.  I’m working on it but I think it’ll take some time.  (If you don’t get the reference, watch the video clip below, and if you do get the reference still watch the video – its a great scene).


So in this post I thought I’d mention some of the comments or misunderstandings I’ve encountered in my awkward conversations.

One of the biggest misconceptions I have encountered has been that by using ‘Give Freely Receive Freely’ I am not valuing what I do.  One quote “Yeah I get what you’re doing, but I don’t think I could do that myself because I value my time too much”.  Honestly this couldn’t be further from the truth.  The way I see it is that I value my time so highly that I don’t want to put a price on it.  The moment I put a price on my time, even a very high price, it becomes a commodity to be bought and sold.  My life, and my time is more valuable to me than that, I will however give it freely at my own discretion.

Another misconception related to this when I mention this system of exchange is that I am expecting people to pay less because of this.  Again not true.  Essentially I expect people give to me freely in return because they want to support what I am doing.  This is not tied to any particular price level.  People will give according to their means and the value they find in what I provide.  I want people to find and evaluate that value for themselves though.  Too often our ideas about value are determined by marketing efforts or by power relationships (monopolies, cartels, vulnerability of one of the parties to the exchange) rather than by the actual value of what is provided.  This leads to distortions in our economy and society and causes resources to be directed to things that aren’t actually useful to us and to be diverted from things that are.  If each of us is able to determine value for ourselves then our individual and collective resources would go to the things that are truly worthwhile and make us happy, rather than being wasted on things that actually contribute no value to our lives.  (Many of the things our money and therefore resources go to under our current way of operating, far from adding value to our lives actually take it away – more on this in another post).

(A classic example of price being determined by marketing rather than true value in this article.  A $3000 vacuum cleaner that doesn’t perform as well as a $100 one: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10829343 ).

I believe there is great value in what I do, that it really helps people in their lives, and that left to find the value themselves they will value this appropriately.  Of course there is the challenge of helping people see past the common externally imposed marketing and power relationship driven value system, but you’ve got to start somewhere and I believe that exchanging in this way may actually cause people to value what I do more highly than if I put a set price on it.  Most people are actually quite intelligent if you give them a chance to be.

A third misconception again related to the other two, is that somehow by doing this I have given up on having all the things our material society values.  Basic things like owning my own house, take holidays and so on.  Again not true at all, I still want those things and think I have a good, maybe even better chance of receiving them by giving freely and receiving freely than by charging set prices.

What I have given up on is the idea of struggling and competing against others in my society.  I guess you could say I have given up on the rat race, but I don’t think that the rat race is the only way to achieve those material aims.  I think there is a better way, and that is what I am pursuing.  This way involves more trust and more co-operation with others in our society.  It will bring out the best in me so that I end up contributing more that is of true value to individuals and society without wasting as much energy on the things that are not of value; and if it works properly I will receive more in return for the true value I create.

This way is the Give Freely Receive Freely way.  I hope you’ll continue to follow my journey as I explore these ideas and learn how to make this work in practice.

The retirement crisis

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I was reading this article the other day: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/personal-finance/news/article.cfm?c_id=12&objectid=10828728  Its fairly humourous and makes interesting reading, but I started thinking… theres a fundamental flaw in the discussion surrounding the coming retirement crisis.

The potential crisis

For those not in the know, there has been a lot of discussion in the media and in politics in recent years about a demographic crisis which we will reach soon where we have a much larger number of older retirees and a much smaller group of working age people to support them.  The level of taxation to fund these retirees would be extremely high, so a lot of thought and analysis (and hand wringing and headshaking and arguing, but very little action) has gone into what western economies can do to deal with this potential crisis.

The fundamental flaw

A lot of this discussion (including that in the linked article above) revolves around the need for these retirees to save more so that they will be able to self fund their retirement, meaning that the government won’t have to support them through untenable levels of taxes on the smaller working population.  And this is where I think there is a fundamental flaw in the thinking.  What is it that these retirees are going to consume/need when they retire?  It will be things like food, clothing, housing, travel, medical care and so on right? How are these things going to be provided, or rather who is going to provide them?  Well one way or another it is the working population who is going to provide these things.  So regardless of how much these retirees save we end up with the same problem of a smaller working population supporting a too large retired group.  This will have to balance itself out one way or another.  The most likely way is that prices will simply rise due to supply and demand imbalance and the retirees savings will be devalued, so in the end they are no better off than if they had not saved.

At the heart of this flawed thinking is a common mistake that many people make in our society today, and that is to think of money as ‘real’ or a ‘thing’.  The hard truth of the matter is that you can’t eat money, it won’t keep you warm at night or dry from the rain and it certainly will not carry out any medical procedures on you.  Most money today isn’t even physical in the sense of a piece of paper or metal or plastic, it is merely an electronic blip stored on a computer somewhere.  Money is an abstraction of value within our economy.

What actually makes sense?

So what does make sense to prepare for this potential crisis?  Well in a certain sense, saving is effective for individuals, because if you have saved more than those around you then you will have more purchasing power for an easier retirement.  But this doesn’t do anything for the group and our society as a whole.  To deal with the wider societal issue we need to look at what we are doing with our resources now and how we can adapt our societal structures to deal with the changing situation in the future.

There is a kind of saving we can make now that will make a difference in the future.  That is building infrastructure.  If well planned this will make everyone’s lives easier in the future as it will allow things to be done more efficiently.  A smaller number of workers will be able to provide more goods and services for everyone in society if they have better infrastructure to work with.  Building infrastructure is a type of ‘real’ savings vs the abstract hypothetical savings of accumulating money.  If we build the housing, medical facilities and other productive assets now that will be needed by our population in the future, that is taking a load off those future workers (it would also stimulate our stagnant economies in the current economic environment).

The other thing that makes sense is to get rid of the idea of an expected retirement age. This is one idea that has been discussed to some degree in the mainstream political commentary, and while it clearly makes sense, it has not been a very popular idea politically.  I think this is due to the fact that many people see work as a hardship, something they only do because they have to, so they look forward to retiring as soon as they can and see it as ‘unfair’ to have to work longer than they expected.  But when you look at it objectively, people are living longer and healthier lives, why should they stop being productive, providing for themselves and contributing to society?  In nature if an animal does not ‘work’ the animal dies, there is no ‘retirement age’.  Why should it be any different for us?  This is in fact similar to the situation when retirement ages were introduced.  The average life expectancy wasn’t much past the age of retirement, but things have changed and our ideas need to change as well.

Work doesn’t need to be a hardship.  People who truly find fulfillment in what they do, do not want to quit or ‘retire’.  They want to keep doing it for as long as they can.  We may need to create ways to make it easier for people to move from physical labour (a much smaller part of our modern economy now anyway) to other types of work as they get older, and to work less hours and so on to fit with their capacity, but ideally work should be something that people enjoy doing and look forward to rather than something they want to get out of and ‘retire’ from.

I believe that the Give Freely, Receive Freely concept holds answers to how we can address these issues or resource allocation and intrinsic work motivation.  These answers would not only address future economic concerns but make for a happier more productive society for all of us right now.  It starts first with change inside the individual, and can then spread to influence how communities and eventually whole societies function.  I hope to flesh more of these ideas out in future blog posts.

……………………

(I did think of one more idea of what makes sense to address the future retirement crisis – investment in developing artificial intelligent robots (I guess this is a subset of building infrastructure)…. if we have a smaller human working population we could supplement this with a robotic one.  Not something I think we should hold our breath about though, and then of course we would have to always be on the watch in case they try to take over the world :P)

 

Another interesting study

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This one was about changes in behaviour when people think about money.  They found that people reminded about money were less helpful, and preferred more solitary activities and less physical intimacy.  Hmm, I wonder if people are being reminded about money regularly in our society today…

On the flip side they were inclined to work harder and take on more challenging tasks.  I tend to think this has been shaped by our society though and that money now stands as a proxy for more basic motivations.  The average person is no longer in touch with those basic motivations because money has become such a pre-occupation.  I think those basic motivations could be rediscovered and provide all the stimulation we need to work hard and acheive great things for ourselves and our society.

You can read the article here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/personal-finance/news/article.cfm?c_id=12&objectid=10830294

Cool conspiracy theory movie

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I found this well made recent conspiracy theory movie on youtube.  It ranges from free energy to suppression of other technologies to the banking system… and so on, linking them all together.

They make a good case for some of their ideas, but what really made them stand out from other conspiracy theory movies was their call for action at the end. There are a lot of nice ideas on those lines in that section of the film.  I think though that some of their ideas for change are… well they’re nice, but in some ways don’t go far enough.  To me, regardless of whether there is or is not a conspiracy in the world, the root cause of so many of our problems is greed and power seeking.  To me, it seemed like some of the proposed solutions would end up in the creation of new power structures that might work well at first, but would most likely still end up becoming corrupted because of the nature of the structure centralizing power to a certain degree and allowing for corruption to occur.

I really liked the movie’s emphasis on individual’s rights and individual action.  I think this really is a big part of the way forwards to a better world.  I don’t think their solutions really addressed the core problem of rooting the tendency to greed and power seeking out of the individual.  While this tendency continues to exist then systems will inevitably become corrupt.  Any system is made up of its constituent parts, only when we have a group of people who have removed greed or power seeking from themselves on an individual basis will we be able to have a society with the same characteristics (my next post is going to be on greed by the way, its halfway written at the moment).

The video is below.  I think it makes a good watch.

More financial markets craziness

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I wonder how aware most people are of the financial manipulation that goes on behind the scenes.  This happens on every scale, from individuals, to corporations to sovereign nations – gaming the system to their own advantage with little regard for true underlying value.

Those who don’t participate are disadvantaged.  I think its time for a better system that doesn’t reward this kind of behaviour.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10827874

 

The danger of SPEs

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I just read an interesting article about a paper by a couple of law professors who argue that three of the biggest recent financial scandals (junk bond fraud in the 80’s, Enron in the early 2000’s and the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008) were all down to a special accounting technique of using ‘special purpose entities’.

You can read the full article here: http://business.time.com/2012/08/15/the-accounting-trick-behind-thirty-years-of-scandal/

I think there is a deeper issue though, not just about SPEs, but about how in general we create fictitious legal entities to conduct exchange and hold assets.  These entities take the humanity from our interactions with each other… because the are not human.  We quickly become trapped in the complex rules that we have created to support these entities and huge effort and resources are put into maintaining the environment which supports these fictitious structures.

I think there’s a better way.  It involves doing away with fiction and returning to what is real.  This will take some effort as many of the fictions we have created as a society have become so embedded that most of us perceive them as ‘real’. There are of course also many highly intelligent people who understand the fictions behind much of our current societal structure, but because of the societal inertia behind the system they are also compelled to interact with them as if they are real.

As a society we need to recognize when our fictitious creations no longer serve us effectively.  I think recent world events indicate that we are now at that point and we need to rethink how we interact with each other.  It can be hard to change how you think and move from one paradigm to another.  When the change is complete though, the old paradigm often seems ridiculous and the new paradigm obvious common sense.

These times of change can be challenging as they involve doing things in ways that are new to us and so involve uncertainty and maybe even fear until the new ways have been proven effective.  To do things in a new way first involves at least imagining what those new ways might be and then having the courage to try them – even with the inherent uncertainty.  I believe that the ‘Give Freely, Receive Freely’ concept could be part of a paradigm shift and new way of interacting with each other.  I don’t think I’m alone in this, I know there are other people out there doing similar things, I just haven’t been very successful in connecting with them yet.

Flirtatious vs Friendly

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I just had to post this here before I forget about it as I am going to want to refer to it later.  The article is about flirtatious women getting a better deal when negotiating purchases, but it also refers to something else that I find really interesting.  When the flirtation was perceived as friendliness the person got a worse deal… So under the current prevailing economic mindset, being friendly costs you money.  Isn’t that crazy?  So we are currently encouraging people to not be friendly if they want to get ahead and succeed.  Hmm… ever wondered why there seems to be so much conflict in the world today?  It is an inherent feature of the current prevailing pricing system and the mindset that surrounds it.  Does it have to be this way?  I don’t think so, I think there is a better way.

I’ll write more about this soon.  Here is the link:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10823556

My ‘Give Freely Receive Freely’ Experiment Update – June 2012

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Well its been almost two months since I began my ‘give freely receive freely’ experiment, so I thought it was about time I posted an update about how it has been going.

To re-cap, I am trying this experiment with my clinical work (Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qigong Therapy, Massage and Lifestyle Advice).  You can read the explanation that I first posted about this on my clinic website here: http://developyourqi.com/?p=468

Results

Since that time I would guess that maybe about 40% of my clients have paid a bit more than they would have in the past, about 40% have paid about the same and maybe 20% have paid a bit less.  So overall, I think I am a bit ahead in terms of the money I have received for my clinical work compared to what I would have under my previous set price approach.

I have not had a huge rush of people booking in for treatment as some people thought I would with this pricing approach, and I think there are two reasons for that.

1. I think that still not a lot of people know that I am using this ‘give freely, receive freely’ exchange idea.

2. People are unfamiliar with the idea, and maybe a little uncomfortable about it.

Research

This is not surprising at all as it is an unusual idea and one which is quite different to what we are used to in our normal day to day transactions.  Some people have actually done some research into this kind of exchange – referring to it as ‘pay what you want’.   You can read about some of this research here: http://www.economist.com/node/21554218

One of the key findings from the research was that less people would buy something paying whatever they want for it (even though they could pay nothing if they wanted to) than would buy something with a low set price.  I believe that this is because most people have an innate sense of what is a fair exchange, and only want to engage in exchanges that feel fair to them.

I believe this is a very good thing – even if it does not maximize income.  My aim in experimenting with this type of exchange is not to maximize the money I receive, although I certainly wish to have enough to pay for my needs my main aim is to engage in a more free type of exchange with people that encourages them to think about and recognize the true value of what they are doing.  This requires thought and can be quite difficult when people are not used to considering economic transactions in this way.  It is also to make my services affordable to everyone, not matter what their economic circumstances may be.

Therapeutic Value

From a therapeutic point of view I believe that this type of exchange can be beneficial because it causes the patient to consciously think about the value of the treatment they receive.  All to often we go through life not thinking about the reason or value of what we are doing.  By consciously thinking about this it helps to open the way for the patient to actually ‘receive’ the benefit of the treatment.  In the end while I as a practitioner will have an effect on the health of my patients, most of the work is going to be done by them.  It is their cells that will have to repair themselves, it is them who may have to do remedial exercises, it is them who may need to make changes to eating habits, lifestyle and thinking patterns.  Conscious engagement in assigning value to the sessions they have with me can help to create commitment on both a conscious and unconscious level to follow through on what they need to do to become well.

This type of conscious engagement can then spill over into other areas of their lives as they learn to recognize value in what they do.  They will hopefully continue and do more of the things that are truly valuable and find themselves doing less and less of those things that have little value or even take value away.

It has been interesting over the last few weeks as I have shared this ‘give freely receive freely’ idea with people.  I have found myself eager to see a new client or one I haven’t seen in awhile, as much to share this concept with them as for any other reason.  I have seen many smiles, nods of agreement and a few laughs as people have heard or read about the concept.  Some people have been excited and enthusiastic, others self conscious and maybe a little confused.  No-one has been outright negative.  One client who was not very happy with his work situation told me that what I am doing had inspired him to investigate a new joint venture opportunity that was coming up.

The Experiment Continues

It is early days for the experiment yet.  I plan to keep it going for now, and maybe permanently.  I am actually already thinking about how I might be able to viably use this concept for some of the other services I offer.

I do hope that as I continue people will become more and more comfortable with this concept.  ‘Give freely, receive freely’ does not mean that you suddenly have to pay more for something to show that you fully value it, it does mean that you have to engage with your role in an exchange and deal with concepts of value, integrity and fairness.  I hope that people will remember that what is ‘fair’ for them to give in an exchange has a lot to do with their resources.  Those who have little should not feel bad that they can only give little.  Those who have a lot should feel good that they are able to give a lot.  And those people somewhere in between (which is probably most of us) need to be realistic about what they can give in an exchange – so that they are satisfied and feel good about the exchange, both what they have received and what they have given.

(Those who are scripturally inclined might like to check out these links Mark 12: 41-44, Mosiah 4:27)

I know that this is challenging and maybe even confronting when you are used to having the price of something set for you.  But I think there is real value for both parties to exchanging in this way.

I have quite a lot more that I would like to write about ‘give freely, receive freely’ and the way it can change our perception of the world around us and our relationships with others. That is why I have set up this blog.  I think the idea has potential, and I am sure I will learn a lot more about it as I experiment with it in practice. I realize that to some of you this whole concept seems very strange, but I hope that you will continue to read this blog as I post more about my ideas and experiences with this concept, and maybe it will still seem strange to you, or maybe it will start to make sense.  At the very least I hope it will give you some food for thought and maybe even some entertainment.

An April Fools Joke About Pay What you want Pricing

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I came across this article about a pay what you want airline.  I must admit I thought that was very strange that they would even attempt to operate that way, and the I saw the date the article was published – Sunday 1st April 2012.

I expect a lot of people view the idea of paying what you want for something with suspicion an a little bit of unease even when its for real.

http://www.skyscanner.net/news/articles/2012/04/012265-worlds-first-pay-what-you-want-airline-launched-reveals-skyscanner.html

Medical billing

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The last sentence of this article really sums it up: “It’s a broken system”  The article is about medical billing in the United States and how the bills have little to do with the cost of providing the service.  A clear example of how bureaucratization and a greed based system has lead to ridiculous outcomes that hit the poorest in our society hardest (note where it talks about the uninsured being charged the highest prices).

I have big questions about how the level of medical expenses can be justified, even in New Zealand where I gather things are much cheaper than the USA.  I think the answer quite simply is that the expenses are what they are because they can charge what they like.  The customer/patient is generally in a vulnerable position and is unable to shop around effectively so market forces do not regulate this effectively, and there are a whole lot of people who want to ‘clip the ticket’ on the way through which inflates the prices to a ridiculous extent.

Anyway, heres the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/your-money/health-insurance/navigating-the-labyrinth-of-medical-costs-your-money.html?_r=1&hp