Category Archives: Links to mainstream media articles

Our illusory view of wealth

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Heres an interesting article I just read which talks about an aspect of the depth of the economic problems the world is facing at the moment.  It points to there being serious problems with our current way of thinking about wealth and exchange.  I think in recent times most of us have bought into an illusory view of wealth.  The cracks are showing now and we really need to start thinking differently if we want to bring things into balance.

So many of us have been running, just to stay in place and now we are finding out that we may have actually been going backwards.  Time for a new system? new goals? new ways of thinking about wealth, work and how we interact with others in our community?

http://business.time.com/2012/06/20/our-net-worth-is-down-39-how-worried-should-we-be/?iid=biz-article-mostpop1

Follow on from last post

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When too much of our focus is on money, we can become like a machine 0011011110010111101001010101010011010101  :S  with the obvious problems this entails.  Everything becomes a system to be optimized – running the risk of missing the point.

This article in Time looks at an example of the kind of problems of using ‘machine’ thinking (literally).  Do we really want to live our lives this way?

http://moneyland.time.com/2012/06/11/how-to-get-a-job-beat-the-machines/?iid=pf-article-mostpop1

 

 

 

Really interesting interview on The Daily Show about innovation and risk

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Heres the link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/thu-june-7-2012-edward-conard

The piece is kind of long, it is an interview with Edward Conard about his book “Unintended Consequences”.  It is the second, third and fourth segments of the episode and probably counts for about 40 minutes of the show all up.

It touches on motivation with Edward Conard pushing the idea of financial reward driving innovation and John Stewart pointing to the main motivator being something else.  At one point in the interview Edward Conard says how for years all these MBA students worked really hard to get the best grades for a 1 in 100 shot at a job with a company like Bain Capital, but then after the tech boom how they struggled to recruit these same type of students because they were all going to have a go at the tech industry because of the potential for reward.

I found it interesting because I was thinking my next post would be about motivation and it plays into that topic nicely. (I think I’ll still write about that soon).

If I think about the big tech successes… what drove them? I can’t think of one that was founded and driven by an MBA who thought they’d make a lot of money out of it.  I can only think of successes founded by people who were passionate about what they were doing and had ideas about how things could be done differently.  The MBAs and money men may have jumped on later, be they didn’t start or drive it.  You can look at the finance industry as driving innovation or parasitizing it depending on your perspective.  I would argue that money has not been the driving motivation of a single major beneficial innovation in our society.

The interview also looks at other aspects of the financial system and overall there are some great contrasting view points expressed strongly but amicably.

Where did the inspiration come from?

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As I have started my experiment with giving freely and receiving freely, people have of course asked the obvious question of where the idea came from.  As with many ideas, I didn’t really know at first, it had been buzzing around inside my head for quite awhile before I finally figured out how to express it and how I would go about it in practice.  As I’ve thought about it more though I have identified a number of sources of inspiration over the last several years that have sat in my subconscious and worked away until I have come to where I am now in my thinking.

International Financial Crisis and Recession

One of the biggest factors I think has been the international financial crisis and the prolonged recession that has followed it.  As a result, a lot of people have been having a really hard time financially and some of the inequities and problems with our financial system that normally would go unnoticed or at least not thought about in any detail have become more prominent.  I guess the saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it’ is actually pretty good advice a lot of the time, but the recent problems have made it clear that something is broken with our system and the way our society functions.

Occupy Wallstreet

A lot of people have been thinking about this and protesting, advocating different kinds of changes that might address the issues.  Probably most prominent amongst these is the Occupy movement.  Starting with Occupy Wallstreet, this movement spread all over the world including to New Zealand where protesters occupied various public spaces for long periods of time.  One of the things I found interesting about this protest movement was that no-one really seemed to have any specific demands, other than a fairer financial system which didn’t make the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  How exactly they wanted this to be achieved was not made clear and in many ways I don’t think was an aim of the organizers, but the did want people to think about it and I think in that they have succeeded.  I didn’t personally pay a great deal of attention to the protest movement, but I think it did trigger some things of in my own mind to get me thinking.

I think maybe the reason that the Occupy movement didn’t have specific demands to address the situation was that the situation is complex and a solution may not be simple, or maybe the solution is simple but we are so ingrained into thinking about things in a certain way that it is hard for us to see it at this point.  Maybe when our perspective changes the solution will in fact be clear and simple, we just have a lot of ‘deprogramming’ to do to bring us to a new way of thinking about our world and in particular our financial systems.  I’ll write more about this in a future post.

Unease and Action

Anyway, the combination of these factors and probably a host of others has left me with a general feeling of unease about our financial system which has been hard to exactly put my finger on.  I think in a way this has been a good thing, because it often takes discomfort to motivate change and action, but what action should I take, especially when I hadn’t really identified the problem fully yet.

Inspiration

Well a few other ideas of things I had heard about in recent times were percolating around in my head as well.  One of the high profile ones was when Radiohead released their album ‘In Rainbows’ in 2007 on a ‘pay what you want’ basis.  It was a very unusual concept at the time (and still is really) and provoked a lot of media attention.  There was a lot of speculation at the time that it had been unprofitable for them, but when figures were eventually released it turned out that the opposite was true and it had been very successful for them.  Theres an article about that here: http://www.techdigest.tv/2008/10/radiohead_pay_w.html

Something else I heard about awhile ago was a cafe here in Auckland that was operating on a ‘gift economy’ basis.  I recall thinking it was very strange and wondered if it would work (and here I find myself doing basically the same thing).  The cafe is called the Wise Cicada cafe and as I was writing this I found an article about them here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/blogs/nick-smith/3795026/Gift-economy-cafe-confounds-some

I don’t know if they are still operating that way now, but I have contacted them to ask so hopefully I will get some feedback from them and be able to write about that in a later post.

Finally, there was one other article that I read, although this was after I had already begun my experiment.  It was about a coffee shop in the central city operating in this was for just one day to mark an anniversary.  The article is here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/consumer-information/news/article.cfm?c_id=164&objectid=10805546

Zeitgeist

Even though this article was after I had begun my experiment, it shows that there is a general zeitgeist around this idea.  There are many other factors of course, the prevalence of downloadable content on the internet, open source software and so on.  People are looking for different ways to exchange value. The idea is out there floating around and some people are beginning to latch on to it, including at this stage me. While the idea is still very much on the fringes, as I have written this and thought about some of the things that have inspired me, instead of feeling like I’m breaking new ground I’m actually starting to feel a little like maybe I’m actually a bit of a latecomer to the party.

Bob Jones NZ Herald article.

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Heres a link to a column that appeared in the New Zealand Herald (local paper) today.  Comes off as a bit of a rant, but there were some parts I really liked about it.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10810705

One quote I liked was this: “Theft is the taking of someone’s property by stealth or by coercion which is an accurate description of indirect (sales) and direct (income) taxes.”  I think this is quite accurate in many respects, but can be expanded much further to include many common practices in business and commerce.