We’re hearing all the time that we need to work more, yet unemployment is high – as are stress levels among those who are fortunate to have a job. The new economics foundation (nef) in London recently published a report examining the case for a 21-hour workweek. It’s a radical idea, but in many ways it makes a lot of sense – if you are willing to examine some of the fundamental assumptions in our economy closely.
The launching of the report was marked by a lecture at the London School of Economics from Juliet Schor, Lord Skidelsky and Tim Jackson, all three of them who have been challenging the usual growth model very convincingly.
I can recommend the podcast from the event, it’s very refreshing to hear basic concepts like equality, growth, and well being and productive turned on their heads.
Juliet Schor summarized the three benefits of working shorter hour as:
• shorter hours lead to lower unemployment and more job creation
• shorter hours reduce ecological and carbon footprints
• shorter hours give people more free time, reduce stress, enhance family life and community.
Tim Jackson has a nice comment on the ways that advertising and rampant lending worked, untill very recently:
”We can provide you with money that you don’t have to buy stuff that you don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last on people that you don’t care about. It’s pathological”.
As so often, it boils down to a very fundamental uncertainty and re-thinking of what we want to achieve – how do we define the good life.
Lord Skidelsky is working on it, he’s writing a book, and so far he has summarized it in 7 components:
Health, security, respect and dignity, personality, friendship, harmony with nature and leisure.
There are always some amazing panel sessions at Davos, and luckily we mere mortals can tune in via the World Economic Forum website. One of the heavy-duty sessions was about the economic outlook for 2012; with participation from a handful of the central players determining what will happen.
Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times chaired the panel, and started off with a few salient points to set the stage for the discussion.
He started out by observing that "The mood in Davos is that people are feeling relief in the way that somebody who has just been reprieved form hanging feels a relief. In stead of feeling the immanent prospects of catastrophe, there is a sense that things have been done which have eliminated very substantially the immediate risk of disaster, particularly in Europe, particularly because of the activities of European central bank, although not exclusively so. And that therefore we can start to think about the slightly longer term, which means the next few months, or perhaps even longer.
Martin Wolf then pointed out that the current economic crisis has been going on for nearly 4,5 years now, and by the time we reach September, according to IMF's forecasts, Chinas economy will have expanded by 60 percent over the past 5 years, the Asian developing and emerging countries, which are half the worlds population will have expanded by 50 %, the emerging world by about 35% and the developed world by essentially zero. So these 5 years will have seen the most extraordinary and unprecedented speed of transformation of the relative weight of countries.
A couple of thoughts on biomimetics and on using nature as inspiration for design.
Usually, it’s about things, finished objects whose beautiful shape or super-smart functionality and construction was copied or inspired by nature. Velcro, shark skin swimsuits, adhesives based on Gecko feet…
But we rarely see design that mimics the dynamics in nature. The ability to adjust, to grow and evolve, to move, to heal, to disintegrate and compost. These would be interesting properties in our objects and systems.
-Screening, every surface will be a window to information
-Interacting, we will be IN the web, not on it, with full body interface to ubiquitous data.
-Sharing. Anything that can be shared will be shared, and when information is shared it will increase in value.
-Flowing, data will be organized like streams, moving forward, weaving together the data emitted by every object and every person. The default mode is always on
-- Accessing. Without owning. You don’t buy individual items – books, music, films – you access it when you need it.
-Generating, raw data will have little value, but qualities that are generated for a particular context will be where the money is.
The whole thing lasts 20 minutes. You will feel wiser afterwards.
In 1980, Julian Simon was so frustrated with Paul Ehrlich's gloomy prediction of an exploding population and the depletion of resources, that he made a bet with Ehrlich. Ehrlich chose 5 major commodities - copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten - and they bet whether the prices would go up over the next ten years.
Prices fell, and Ehrlich lost, and for many, the wager was a demonstration of human capability to innovate and thus stay ahead or Malthus’ old prediction that the population and our needs would grow faster than we were able to increase production – leaving the masses to starve.
Well, Jeremy Grantham in his quarterly newsletter in July pointed out that if the bet had continued till today (Simon in fact proposed to extend it), Ehrlich would have won. Prices on all 5 commodities have risen above the 1980 level in recent years.
One of the lessons of the many studies of happiness is that the more you have already, the more it takes to make you happier. In that sense, we’re on a curve of diminishing returns, which drives us to exponentially higher levels of consumption in order to satisfy our desire for happiness.
Meanwhile, the planet’s natural resources are in overshoot. We’re extracting more and faster than the biosphere can re-generate. The fat, virgin sources of materials are getting depleted, and we’re moving to the margins, where it gets ever more costly – in terms of money and disruption – to extract resources.
We’re in a pinch; we need much more to feel happier, but it’s getting harder and harder to produce it.
I'm reminded of the old Paul Virillo quote: "When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress." (From: Politics of the Very Worst)
Disasters have their own spectacular fascination. Here's a satelite shot of the Costa Concordia from Digital Globe.
For years, Nick Veasey has made these amazing x-ray images of all kinds of everyday objects: animals, shoes, sea shells - and larger (really large, in fact) objects like entire air planes, busses and excavators. It's beautiful, and very informative, too. You really get to see a different aspect of reality. Check his site.
One of the crucial features of digital information is that the copy can be just as good as the original. This has opened the floodgates of copying and obviously made it a lot more complicated for anyone who has invested in creating digital content to charge money for access to it.
But what if the copy is even better than the original? If the one who copies does more than that – and actually adds to the original by adjusting, redesigning, tweaking, remixing…
At a system level, this is exactly what you want copying to lead to – enhancement, development, the emergence of new value.
This is the promise of a free exchange; to move beyond the original. Not always, but sometimes.
All copying is not alike. There are plain rip-offs, passive, even degrading copying. And there is copying as inspiration and re-combination.
It’s hard to draw the line exactly. The latter is a fundamental mechanism of evolution. We need it to stay fit for life. So you don’t want to stop the creative type of copying.
"Hovedårsagen til, at antallet af personer uden for den erhvervsaktive alder er steget, er, at der er blevet langt flere ældre, mens antallet af børn – med undtagelse af en kort periode fra 1940 – ikke er steget. Således er antallet af personer over 64 år steget fra knap 200.000 i 1900 til ca. 900.000 i 2010. Denne udvikling ventes at fortsætte i de kommende år, således at antallet af ældre topper omkring 2042 med 1,47 mio. personer. Det vil sige, at der om godt 30 år skønnes at være ca. 600.000 flere ældre end i dag."
"Der forventes en relativt større stigning i antallet af ældste ældre end i ældregruppen som helhed. Således skønnes antallet af personer på 80 år og derover, at blive fordoblet fra omkring 228.000 til 464.000 personer i løbet af de kommende 30 år"
"Fremover forventes der at blive færre i den erhvervsaktive alder og flere uden for den erhvervsaktive alder. Det betyder, at der omkring 2040 forventes at være 4 erhvervsaktive til at forsørge ca. 3 personer, der ikke er i den erhvervsaktive alder."
”Life on a low income is characterised by deep unpredictability. Just one unexpected bill – a new school uniform, or a bank charge – can disrupt the entire weekly budget. The families we met were operating from day to day, in a way that often felt very out of step with the patterns and rhythms of financial help such as tax credits and housing benefits”.
”Men were notable by their absence. Poverty is without question a gendered experience, and it is often women on whom most of the coping work falls”.
"In order to describe the money situation faced by the families, the research team came to use the term ‘Milkybar economy’ after noticing that several of the families seemed to have a predilection for that particular chocolate bar. There are two facts to observe here: first, the ‘Milkybar’ chocolate only costs 15p (about half the price of other chocolate bars) and, second, buying them was a deliberate, economic choice. The cheaper price allowed parents to buy children a sweet or treat with the small change left over from other shopping without impacting too much on budgets. Of course, not all of the families ‘bought Milkybars’, but these kinds of small margins were a consideration for all."
" Overall, 62 per cent of low‐income households had cut back on their heating costs in the previous winter by turning their heating off or down, heating only one room, or using their heating intermittently. However, their experience of cold at home also depended on the effectiveness of any strategies they used to compensate for their loss of heating. These included wearing more clothes, wrapping up in blankets, staying in one room, going to bed early and having hot drinks. The most income‐constrained households were adept at juggling these options as part of their wider strategies for coping on a low income.
The low‐income households who experienced cold homes reported adverse impacts on their mental health, physical health and social lives: nearly half (47 per cent) said the cold had made them feel anxious or depressed, 30 per cent said an existing health problem had got worse, and 17 per cent did not feel able to invite friends or family to the house."
Currently, I’m researching on a concept we call ”frugal solutions”.
Danish companies are usually inclined to compete by developing ever more sophisticated new features, moving up the value chain in order to stay out of commoditization and low margins. The problem with that strategy is that you loose sight of another, potentially much larger market. In the coming years it’s very likely that a lot of consumers will demand products that are a lot cheaper. They will focus on need to have, rather than nice to have – out of necessity. High unemployment, aging society, polarization of incomes and a welfare state with budgets under severe pressure will translate into a much larger lower end of the market. And Danish companies are not used to operating in that space, so there is imminent danger that foreign, lower priced companies will move in with their offerings.
This is where ”frugal solutions” come into the picture. The idea is to create solutions that can meet a demand at a radically lower price, but with little or no compromise in utility to the end user. The infamous Tata Nano car from India is an example; The M-PESA mobile phone banking system from Kenya is another. Generally, a lot of frugal solutions seem to emerge from emerging markets.
But there are Western examples, too. Discount supermarkets, low price airlines, the Swatch watches are some of them.
My favorite Western example, though, is IKEA. Visiting one of the blue and yellow warehouses is like an exhibit of brilliantly executed frugal solutions.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of details and system that are invisible to the casual visitor, but let me run through some of the elements that are obvious and easy to observe.
Let the users do some of the work: This was the original IKEA revolution: knocking down furniture into flat packages that could be transported by customers and assembled at home. IKEA has made it as painless as possible. Their manuals use no words, and they are impressive examples of clear communication. Just try any another manual for assembly, to appreciate how well they work. Obviously, this is not by co-incidence, but because the company has invested in developing the entire experience – not just the furniture.
One could say that IKEA has created a whole language or logic around their products. If you have tried assembling a few different models, you will be familiar with their special screws and fasteners.
In the warehouses, IKEA has moved a few steps further. Consumers go to the storage racks and fetch the packages, and they check out themselves, scanning the barcodes and paying with their credit cards. In the cafeteria, the logistics are similar: You are clearly instructed to follow the line, picking utensils, glasses etc.
Modularization: Many of IKEAs lines - kitchens, closets, book shelves… - are modularized, allowing end-users to configure a highly individualized result from standardized parts. This is not unique to IKEA, of course, but never the less part of why you can offer a satisfying experience at a relatively low price.
Democratic design: Clearly, IKEA has been able to create designs that a lot of people like, and make it available to just about anyone. Having IKEA objects in your home is nothing to be ashamed of. Fancy home decoration magazine will show homes with things from IKEA alongside other designer objects many times mores expensive.
Sometimes, IKEA in fact comes up with their own, new classic designs – and of course, at least as often, they create their own low price version of competitors models that they can see are popular in the more expensive shops.
Massive scale. Good design and massive scale of production translates into sometimes amazingly low prices. It's one of those great factoids of the times that the IKEA catalogue was printed in 197 million copies in 2010 - 3 times more than the bible.
Simplified design and cheaper materials: Some IKEA furniture – shelves, tabletops, cabinet doors… - are really almost just cardboard and a hard coating. Clearly, there is a constant strive to simplify models and use only the materials and the amount of materials that really contribute to the user’s experience.
At the moment, IKEA is replacing their many, many wooden pallets for transportation and storage with a new, lighter and disposable pallets made of cardboard.
Understanding the end-user’s context. For several years it’s been a main theme of the annual catalogue to show solutions for maintaining order and comfort in very small spaces. IKEA has developed lots of furniture that makes it possible to cram more stuff and functions into a tiny flat.
The interiors in the catalogue are not all vast, spacious rooms, but small, cluttered, real. An example is the STORÅ bed, on pillars, so you can place a sofa and a table underneath (see the video above).
Decency. Even though IKEA boast of their focus on low price, they also make extensive efforts to operate as a sustainable company. Sourcing wood from decent producers, cutting down on waste and toxic ingredients etc. Again, proof that a low cost solutions need not be morally corrupt.
Weird how we've set our self up. Millions of able and eager young people looking for a job - and at the same time there is so much work that needs to get done. So much decay, neglect, halfway finished projects, looming problems - yet we pay people for being passive. And not just a few - an amazing part of the working age population have no job. In Denmark, 2.050.000 people live on welfare, pensions and student grants. 2.769.000 people have a job - although the salary of 92.000 of those is partially paid by the government (løntilskud).
Here's a slightly unsettling video. Zombie man going back and forth between looking normal and looking absolute tattooed freak. At some point (1:25 or so) things start to blend - that's where it gets interesting.
I'm preparing for a stint as a moderator at a conference about the future of health care, arranged by the Danish Engineering society. It's amazing to read just how dramatic the aging of the Danish population will be, in our own life time. With some luck, I'll be 80 years old in 2041. By then, 8% of the Danish population will be 80 or above. Today the figure is only 4%. 19% of the population will be above 70 years in 2040.
Another stat: By 2020 - in less than 10 years - there will be 2 million Danes with chronic diseases - out of a total population of 5,5 mio.
Source: IDA og Det Nationale forskningscenter for Velfærd.
The Miticool fridge is a wonderful example of creating frugal solutions that are both cheap and which fit local conditions very well. The fridge is made of clay and it is kept cool by water which drips down the side from an upper chamber and evaporates. No electricity needed, no maintenance. No Noise. And very different from what a Western company would come up with.
Anyone interested in how to improve the efficiency of schools is likely to be fascinated by the School of one concept - an experimental program used in New York City. The program is based on targeting online exercises and instruction to students based on their moods and style of learning - using algorithms that are similar to those used to personalize music on internet services like Pandora. It's presented in this episode of Freakonomics radio. Maybe the presenters gloss things over a bit, but it does sound like School of one is on to something.
An excellent, thought provoking and very different podcast piece: Mike Daisey, an American stand up storyteller and Apple fan goes to Shenzhen in China to understand where those beautiful machines are made. It’s simply a guy telling a story of what the city looks like, what the workers told him, what the factory floors and cramped dormitories and endless hours are like, how workers are crippled by repetitive motions and toxic chemicals… Very bleak, very stirring to hear about – and remarkably, even entertaining to listen to.
I can certainly recognize his description of Shenzhen and the particular harsh and repressive side of Chinese culture that you see such places.
Mike Daisey may be a bit colorful, and certainly his mission is not to try to give a balanced view. It’s emotional, but the producers of the radio show, which aired his report – This American Life – have tried to fact check everything he told. In the second half of the program they talk to experts and rattle off regular journalistic data that largely supports the first story.
It takes an hour to listen - it's very well spent.
I stumbled upon a very interesting, classic essay: "I, Pencil: My Family Tree". The author, Leonard E- Read, traces the many steps that are necessary for manufacturing a pencil: Cutting wood, producing the saws to cut the wood, cooking the coffee to warm the loggers, mining the graphite, processing it, producing the lacquer, the label, the eraser and the metal holder of the rubber. It goes on and on - the point of course being to demonstrate how incredibly widely connected and interdependent an industrial process is. As Read puts it: Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make a pencil. It takes the cooperation and skills of thousands and thousands. The essay was first published in 1958, and since then the complexity has reached a whole different level. Think of an I-phone compared to a pencil. The phone is useless without being in ongoing connection to a network of communication, software, songs, news feeds - all of that. It's useless without regular charging from the electricity grid. Its value resides both in what producers have created, and in content created by the users that are connected through it. Read ends his essay arguing that the fact that so many people can come together without detailed instructions to make such a complex happen shows that we must leave men as free as possible to let the invisible hand work its magic. I would draw a different conclusion: The interconnection of everything and everybody is perhaps the most important trend shaping our future. it proves that we are increasingly interdependent. Our fate is common, we have shared interests. We should think less in terms of local, individual and short term gain - and more according to a planetary community. You could write a whole book about it - in fact, I did.
Jeg var en tur i Deadline på DR-TV igår for at præsentere Universefondens AsiaNBC projekt. Indslaget ligger her. (forneden i rammen kan du klikke dig direkte hen til interviewet: det er den fjerde hvide pind):
For thepastcoupleofyears I have coordinatedtheAsiaNew Business Creationproject at theUniverseFoundation.We have comparedcompanies in Denmark, China, Singapore and Korea and their approaches to innovation and business development.The differences shouldbe an inspiration and a challenge to any Western companyconcernedwiththeirplaceonthemarketsofthe future. Youcanreadallabouttheconclusions - and a lotaboutAsian business in general - at thenewwebsite. Youcanalsodownloadthebookletwhichsummarizesthefindings - righthere.
Bajaj, the Indian maker of the three-wheeler "tuk-tuk" that is ubiquitous in India and other developing countries has launched an upgraded version - a "four-wheeler". Top speed 70 km/hour, 35 km. pr. liter. We'll see if it fares better than the Tata Nano, which for all of its surrounding hype still lacks sales.
The Atlantic brought two photos of the Bund and Pudong in Shanghai - one shot in 1990, the second shot in 2010. A very clear illustration of large scale change.
An Abu Dhabi sheik has written his name in the sand of an island he owns - in letters that are two miles wide. This makes them plainly readable in Google Earth. As you can see on Google Earth, the letters were created by digging canals in the dessert and pumping them full of water. Very creative way of spending your money.
"Jobs will be created not so much through renewable technologies themselves as through the lifestyle changes that coping with climate change and energy security will bring about. Sensibilities will change and with them tastes. The new economy that will emerge will be even more radically post-industrial than the one we have now. It will be up to entrepreneurs to spot the economic opportunities that will come about with expansion -- much in the same way as ways were found to revitalize dockland areas where shipping industry has evaporated away.
Pondering what form recovery from recession should take should cause us to think seriously about the nature of economic growth itself, at least in the rich countries. It has been known for a long while that, above a certain level of prosperity, growth does not necessarily lead to greater personal and social welfare. Now is the time to introduce more rounded measures of welfare alongside GDP and give them real political resonance. Now is the time for a sustained and positive critique of consumerism that can be made to count politically. Now is the time to work out how to ensure that recovery does not mean a reversion to the loads-of-money society.
The period of Thatcherite deregulation is over. The state is back. We will need active industrial policy and planning, in respect to economic institutions but for climate change and energy policy as well".
Sorry, this is in Danish to announce that the drafts of the first 3 chapters of my book in progress are now online. Det er skitser, som det vil fremgå. De hænger sammen, men det er første vrid, så det er stadig lidt råt. De kan læses her
Among the sessions at this years Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum was a panel on "The new digital experience". Interesting stuff. In particular I think Craig Mundie of Microsoft has a very succinct description of the real issue regarding managing privacy: "The technology will result in us collecting and remembering a huge amount of data, and over time we will ultimately find beneficial ways of using this. People can certainly speculate that there are evil ways to use and exploit data, and the question I think will become: how can we find a manageable way for people to declare their intent about each class of data and each class of service that they subscribe to? And to the extent that we can get that agreed on and that becomes platformized, so you’re not facing a hundred different ways to express that intent, then I think these issues will come under control. There are definite business tensions, because it’s easy to build certain business models that presume that you have almost surreptitious collection of information – and of course government intelligence business, that’s what they do for a living. So at some level you have to realize the world is going to be a sea of data, and the real question related to privacy is going to be, how does the user get to specify what they think their ownership rights are in that data - no matter who collected it. And I think these are questions that are not clear in the law and in the policy and that’s really gotta be the focus of the discussion. "
Fast Company magazine has named the Cumulus exhibition building at Danfoss Universe one of ten "architectural wonders of the world" in 2008. I guess that proves that you can make a mark globally, even in Nordborg, Denmark.
My original intention was to write this coming book in English, but thinking closer through the practical issues I've decided to start out in Danish, and then hopefully it will be such a massive hit that the English will kinda happen automatically... So at moment the script is a weird mix of Danish and English. The "skeleton" of the book; my list of all the headlines for paragraphs, is still mostly in English - and I've posted it here. I've also written a 5-page abstract. The Danish version is here. The English version is here, or you can read on this blog a few postings back.
