The fascinating story of plastic - for better or worse

Another great talk from the Long Now Foundation's series of seminars on longterm thinking:
Susan Freinkel, a journalist, presents the story of plastic. Fascinating, informative, and ultimately disturbing, Freinkel tells how quickly this material has conquered the earth. When Titanic sunk, no part of it was plastic. Today, most of us would be very seriously challenged to get by even a few minutes without using something made of plastic. It's everywhere, and unfortunately it ends up accumulating in nature, in oceans and landfills, where it breaks down only very slowly.
If you have an hour or so for listening, this podcast will fill you in on the state of plastic.

China: Getting old before they get rich

Getting old before they get rich, is a sentence that’s popping up a lot about China. If you want a quick overview of just how dramatic and fast the ageing of the Chinese population is, this article in the Economist, ”China’s Achilles heel” is a good place to start.

Among the facts are:

Shanghai is believed to have the lowest fertility rate in the world, just 0,6 in 2010 – way below the 2,1 rate which is necessary to keep the population number stable.

A fast rise in lifetime combined with rapid urbanization and the one-child policy means, that the number of old people is growing, and the number of young is dropping much faster than in the west. By 2020 it is expected that a third of Shanghais population will be over 60 years old.

The 4-2-1 families of four grandparents, a couple and their only child has become the norm, and obviously this will become a considerable burden on the lone child soon.

China is not prepared.  The systems of pensions and healthcare cover only a fraction of the population. Just adapting the physical infrastructure to accommodate elderly is a huge task. 

How this plays out at the personal level is well illustrated by this BBC program”Assignment: Too old to get rich” – which portrays how elderly in Shanghai get by. Some are faced with climbing the stairs to the 8th floor because there is no elevator; some are ashamed because their spouse is becoming demented in a culture that often sees dementia as a form of mental illness. Others join the crowds of elderly in IKEAs cafeteria, sipping coffee and hoping to meet a companion.

One obvious conclusion: there is vast potential for Danish companies to deliver expertise on how to support an ageing society. But the solutions need to be really cheap.

Socializing kids to see themselves as co-creators

Entrepreneurial spirit is not a Danish characteristic. Our culture tends toward the less risky, less offensive approach to life. Much has been said about the need to make our educational system instill a more entrepreneurial culture, and train kids to see starting a business as a real possibility. The discussion often includes the need for leadership.

In typical Danish fashion I would like to suggest another line of thinking: maybe we should go broader. Perhaps what we need is to educate kids to become participants and co-creators, to show initiative, to assume responsibility and contribute – as opposed to passively accepting what ever we are offered in a role as receivers, consumers, and clients.

Once we have that kind of culture among kids, I’m confident that entrepreneurs will emerge. Also, we would have the foundation of a democracy that is not just a matter of saying yes or no, but one in which we see eachothers as participants and co-creators.

Sommerhus for sumpere

Af og til er det svært at forstå hvad man ser. I Vollerup, nær Kalundborg, er 6 sommerhusgrunde til salg, men jeg kan ikke rigtig forestille mig, at nogen skulle få lyst til at købe dem. De ligger midt i en sump, som det fremgår af billedet. Der er vel en kilometer til vandet, og der er masser af fine, tørre sommerhuse til salg i området til finanskrise priser. Hvad tænker ejendomsmægleren på? I don't get it.

The business of organizing civil society

The German ride-sharing service ”Mitfahrzentrale” turns out to be a really good example of how a little bit of commercial organization can mobilize resources in civil society that would otherwise be wasted.

I used to hitchhike quite a bit. You would find a good place to stand, maybe hold a sign with your destination, stick out your thumb and hope for a ride. It’s a cheap way to get around, it makes better use of all those empty car seats on the highways – and it allows for all kinds of great meetings and conversations among strangers.

But it’s pretty unpredictable for both riders and drivers. You may end up with a jerk beside you. You never know how long the journey will take, and as a driver, it’s not likely that the rider will offer any payment. Should anything happen, you probably will have no idea what the identity of the other person is.

A ride-sharing service takes a lot of the uncertainty out of this. You go online, post where and when you are going (e.g. Hamburg to Kolding, Thursday afternoon) or you browse the list of rides that are offered by drivers who will take riders.

There’s a set price, so the driver can recover some of the costs (and the ride-sharing services gets a cut of that), and the users of the service are registered. In some cases there are reputation systems, so you can asses the person you will be riding with beforehand.

The point here is that by adding a minimal level of commercial activity, you can make the sharing of resources much more attractive and easy. There are great resources that can be mobilized in the non-commercial realm of civil society, but a lot of the potential is never realized, because of uncertainty, inconvenience, opaque circumstances etc.

This points to a very interesting area of new businesses: providing the framework to harness the potential and resources of civil society.

Generally, I believe we will see a lot more hybrid organizations in the future, where commercial and non-commercial players interact, resulting in the creation of a lot more value than if the game was only pure commercial or pure non-commercial. 

There is a lot of discussion about "gov 2.0" and what the appropriate role of government should be. One of the slogans is to move "from provider to enabler" - in other words, that the government should focus on creating the necessary conditions, infrastructure and framework for productive interaction among companies and citizens. 
That is exactly what the ride-sharing service does. It doesn't deliver the driving, but enables people to get around in a more efficient way. 

What should we tag this with? Collaborative consumption, mesh economy, social networks, enabler/provider, frugal solutions. There is a lot going on. 

A cheaper, stronger state

Interesting challenge:
In the future, governments will need to have more influence, but at a lower cost to tax payers. 

Insights from IDEO

Anyone interested in innovation can probably find inspiration in the brief online newsletter, Patterns, which IDEO publishes. It's a great place to stay updated on the latest buzzwords. Most recent issue is about Gamification, other recent topics were "Serve the people", "Social media bolstering big brands" and "Care and repair".

Lots of good stuff, easily accessible.

Great instrumentalists - a capella

Hardly news, I realize, but I hadn't seen it till now. Just amazing how these guys are great instrumentalists - except that they don't play any instruments.

E.O Wilson - Evolution selects on both group and individual level

E.O Wilson, the grand old biologist, has a new book out - The Social conquest of earth.
While I'm waiting for the mail man to bring me the book, I've listened to a few presentations online.
Wilson just did a Seminar of long term thinking - talk for the Long now foundation. If you are interested in evolution, you should listen to it.
One of his main points is that evolution in fact selects at both group and individual level - not just at the individual level, which has been the orthodoxy for many years.

In his recap of the talk, Steward Brand writes:
Wilson’s alternative he calls “multi-level selection,” where individual selection and group selection proceed together (with kin selection a continuing bit player). In our eusocial species, that mix of traits makes us “permanently unstable, permanently conflicted” between selfish impulses and cooperative impulses. We negotiate these conflicts endlessly within ourselves and with each other. Wilson sees inherent adaptive value in that constant negotiation."

Another good introduction to Wilsons book is this interview with Charlie Rose. At 19 minutes, it's amazingly comprehensive.

Economics as complex evolutionary systems

Eric Beinhocker by blindwatcher


A meeting of two great minds: Richard Dawkins interviews Eric Beinhocker, the author of “The Origin of Wealth”. The 15 minutes interview is a great introduction to the idea of seeing economics as complex systems.

A few quotes from Beinhocker's responses:

…Evolution is a recipe, an algorithm that’s at play in economic systems, just as it is in biological system. And that recipe values cooperation just as much as it favors competition

…We can think of businesses as designs, for instance a design for running a bank, and each of the banks along the high street will have a slightly different way of running a bank – a different design. And the evolutionary competition is a competition for you walking down the high street to determine which bank wil serve you best, which design will suit your needs better than the others.
Where cooperation plays a role, is that you can deliver on a better design if you have strong cooperation, so a bank where the employees work together as a team and cooperate can maek better service than a bank that doesn’t. And large companies with lots of employees cooperating, often have great advantages over much smaller organisations.

…Companies that engender large scale cooperation will tend to be – on average - more successful.

…We often talk of evolution as design without a designer, but in economic systems we have lots of designers - human beings who sit and think of things. And the key role, that plays is that it is a source of variety. When an entrepreneur comes up with a new idea in their garage, that’s adding variety to the system. We can’t predict whether that will work or not untill it’s actually tried, but it creates this teaming variety in the system.

The Conundrum by David Owen - review and podcast interview

I did a review of David Owen’s excellent little book ”The Conundrum” for this weekend’s literary section of Danish Newspaper Politiken. I also did a 13-minute audio interview with David Owen about his book.

”The Conundrum” describes how – despite all good intentions – all our efforts to reduce environmental impact by creating more efficient technology end up paving the way for MORE consumption. High speed train make us go further; LED lighting lets us use much lighting everywhere; more efficient refrigerators expands our use of cold drinks, makes fridges available for more consumers – and expands our use of Air-conditioning as well.

David Owen concludes that we need a more fundamental shift – but that shift is a lot more difficult.

From the book:

”We’re consumers at heart, and our response to difficulties of all kinds involves consumption in one form or another: Just tell me what to buy. The challenge arises when consumption itself is the issue. How do we truly begin to think about less – less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress – when our sense of economic, cultural and personal well-being is based on more?”

”In truth we already know what we need to do, and we have for a long time. We just don’t like the answers. That’s the conundrum.”

Only in India - funny, real, very Indian

I love sites like "Only in India": funny, very particular, and somehow a great love for the subject shines through.

The Only in India blog is filled with photos of the weird ways Indians cope with being in India. Jugaad innovation – bottom up. Like this tuk-tuk driver and his hand free mobile phone solution...

Climate change is like an asteroid on collision course with earth

Renowned climate scientist James Hansen has a TED talk out. Low key, but very scary:

”Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collission course with earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now. Yet we dither, taking no action to avoid the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes. If we had started in 2005 it would have required emission reductions of 3% pr. year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century. If we start next year, it is 6 % pr. year. If we wait ten years, it is 15% pr. year – extremely difficult and expensive, perhaps impossible. But we aren’t even starting. So now you know what I know, which causes me to sound this alarm”.

My interview with Lisa Gansky on the Mesh economy

I reviewed Lisa Gansky’s ”The Mesh” and Rachel Botsman’s ”What’s mine is yours” in the Danish newpaper Politiken this weekend. In addition to the review they published an audio recording of an interview I did with Lisa Gansky.

You can hear the interview here.

From the interview:

”A lot of the mesh economy is organized around this particular theme:

unused value equals waste. So, at a global community level we already have a lot of stuff. But we don’t need a lot of what we have much of the time. And so a lot of these services are about getting more yield or getting more utilization out of what we already have”.

Attention is the first resource that we will run out of

We create all this stuff, but we can barely find the time to use it – because we are so busy creating even more stuff.

And now the economy is crashing and unemployment is rising because we can’t consume fast enough to keep production growing.

It’s seems that the first resource, which we are running out of is attention. We can’t overcome to consume enough to keep up growth.

It’s a weird, backward logic – but it’s real, for now.

The more we have, the less we appreciate additional growth. It takes more to make us happier – while on the other hand, we need to run even faster and put even greater strains on the planet’s resources to increase consumption.

At some point it implodes, when gains are clearly losses.

Quality is subjective, what is quality can change

Quality is subjective, what is quality can change. A few examples come to mind:

- It used to be that music lovers were really concerned with hifi sound quality. These days we gladly accept bad mp3 quality through lousy earbuds for the convenience of having anything we want anywhere, anytime.

- ”Handmade” used to be an indication that something was made in a more exacting way, but these days lots of stuff can only be made by robots. Humans don’t have the consistent precision required to make our gadgets.

- Price and quality are not necessarily correlated. Google is free, like Facebook, YouTube et al.

Looking for a new capitalism

A good quote – by Gary Hamel, from his foreword to Umair Haque's book “the new capitalist manifesto”:
“We know the future cannot be an extrapolation of the past. As the great-grandchildren of the industrial revolution, we have learned at last that the heedless pursuit of more is unsustainable and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Our planet, our security, our sense of equanamity, and our very souls demand something better, something different.
So we long for a kinder, gentler sort of capitalism – one that views us as more than mere “consumers”, one that understands the difference between maximizing consumption and maximizing quality of life, one that doesn’t sacrifice the future for the present, one that regards our planet as sacred, and one that narrows rather than exploits the inequalities in the world”.

Visions with a small "v"

Tired of big breathless visions. I don’t know where to start. I’m looking for a few small visions, visions with a small “v”.
Small steps, small bets, but real.

Teaching for the future

You really need to see Salman Khan's TED presentation of his amazing Khan academy and the idea of flipping the classroom by making kids watch instruction videos on their own, and then doing what used to be "homework" in the classroom, assisted by the teacher.
The Khan academy has developed some great digital tools to track the progress of each student and to ensure that the student can learn a topic in a coherent fashion, rather than jumping on to new subjects before having the foundation of understanding that's needed.
Indeed, this seems to be a glimpse of the future.
And if you liked this; check out the "School of one" project in New York. Sort of similar, and apparently with great results too.

The solution will be shared

In my last posting I concluded that, on balance, sharing is becoming a more attractive strategy for growth than trying to conquer resources from others.

And so what?

Well, it has a number of consequences:

For one, defaulting towards sharing takes a different mindset than what most of us have been brought up with. The past three decades have been an era of individualism, classic liberalism, and a belief that greed is good because the invisible hand of the market will sort it all out.

Sharing is an act of individual surrender. You bet part of your resources and some of your sovereignty and control on others. You chose to trust that together you would achieve more, than you could have done on your own. You could be ripped off and cheated, the project may not work out, others can free ride and leave you with the bill… There are risks, and not necessarily any guarantees.

You lose some freedom by joining the community. You can be held accountable, you have to follow rules, others may not vote for your ideas.

If you are strong, it may not be obvious why you would want to depend on a community.

But, you may not really have a choice. In so many areas, our fate is shared, whether we like it or not. The global ups and downs are increasingly linked. As the global finances go, so will you. Likewise with social unrest, climate change, and a functional biosphere; you are affected by the actions of others, and you affect them – in ever larger and tighter connected systems.

Whether you are an individual, a company or even a nation state, you can’t go it alone anymore.

Sharing and co-creation is becoming ever cheaper and more powerful. Increasingly, those who chose to go alone, will not be able to compete and thrive compared to those who are capable of cooperating and creating community.

And ultimately, if each of us simply try to keep growing in a finite world with an increasing population, the system will crash for everyone. That possibility is uncomfortably real.

IMHO we cannot go on like we have done so far. At some point, soon, we need to find some solutions. I think they will be based on sharing, on community – despite the imperfections.