Reclaiming Freedom

Hearing our opponents hijack the language of justice, equity and environmental safety frustrates the hell out of me. They lay claim to words like ‘progressive’ and ‘sustainable’, to the point where it’s use necessitates a brief investigation of what type of ‘sustainability’ the speaker actually means. (Option A – a recognition of the fallacy of infinite growth with finite resources, or option B – the continuing of that infinite growth completely ignoring those finite resources.)

So let’s not let that happen here.

The public struggles for freedom, for democracy, that have brought to life a stale Western image of the Middle East must remind us that we believe in freedom. Human rights are essentially freedoms. Equality is about freedom from oppression and discrimination. The great social movements we regard with awe – Suffragettes, Abolitionists, Diggers – all of these were centrally concerned with freedom.

I was shocked to see various conservative commentators ask questions such as ‘are we sure democracy is always right?‘ yesterday. Seems to me that when we scratch beneath the surface of these ‘free-marketeers’, what we find are conflicted, prejudiced and ill-informed views. (Read John Cassidy’s recent book How Markets Fail for a good insight on this.)

So what does this mean for us?

Too soon are climate advocates accused of undemocratic, dictatorial tendencies. For me – to suggest that a temporary suspension of democracy is necessary in order to deal with the unprecedented global problems we face reveals two failures on our behalf.

1. A failure of belief in the wisdom of the crowd. Vox populi, vox dei and all that. (See here for an interesting anecdote on that phrase.)
2. A failure to imagine new democratic, global governance systems through which we can take these decisions equitably.

I certainly know that that isn’t easy – seeing the UNFCCC negotiations at close hand is enough for anyone to want to run away from global dialogue. But to abandon the principal that so many of our ancestors fought for, and that many around the world still struggle for, would be to abandon any hope of a solution.

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” MLK

And, to bring in an expert on language…

Viva La Moutholucion!

This remains one of my favourite campaign videos ever.

“If it isn’t real – spit out your meal!”

“Power to the pie-hole!”

“Viva la moutholucion!”

Link Loving 11.02.11

• The British are the new Canadians says David Mitchell. And that can’t be a good thing, eh?
• How to beat procrastination, according to St Paul and the good people at The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
• Philip Auerswald asks why the enemy’s enemy, always seems to be the next…enemy?
• Inc. has the best and worst interview questions to give, and what it tells you about the interviewee.
• The Yes Men have their own little mini-me operation, The Yes Lab. I wonder what comes out of it…
• Rio Tinto is expecting a $US14 billion profit, but they want  compensation as Australia moves towards cap and trade.
• Why revolutions are unpredictable, from the Becker-Posner blog.
• Our brains are shrinking – and it’s making us smarter, so says Alisdair Wilkins.

Proof

Today is proof that change is possible, that big dreams matter, and that people power lives strong.

Long live freedom!

Now – the hard work starts.

Caroline Lucas – Smart Strategy

A brief note on Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion.

The baggage she brings with her into Parliament;

• 1 out of 650 MPs, sole Parliamentarian for the Greens – easiest thing to disappear into nothingness
• Seen as a single-issue politician by the media, fellow MPs, and most of the public

What she’s now doing;

• Chosen issues to focus on, not trying to obstruct every injustice and ending up being wholly ineffective
• Driving the debate on Parliamentary reform – building allies across the political spectrum and focusing on winnable changes
• Spotting populist issues, such as the Government plans to sell off our national forests, and becoming a champion in the media

Smart lady.

Just Imagine: Ricardo Semler And Semco

This taken from Gordon Roddick’s edition of the Observer this week –

“When Ricardo Semler was 21, he was put in charge of the family firm that made pumps and propellers. One of the young Brazilian’s first moves was to fire two-thirds of his managers. “I’d come from having fun in rock bands,” he says, “and I’d seen that there were ways to make people enthusiastic if they were involved entirely.”

The result was Semco, one of the most revolutionary and counterintuitive companies in the world, where employees choose everything from their dress code to their salaries. Critics said it would never work – yet it became one of South America’s most successful conglomerates and, 25 years later, Semler is applying his principles to the classroom.

Semler realised that “the young adults who joined our company were awaiting direction. Tracing this back made it evident that schools, from an early age, were torturing kids with useless formats.” He and his wife Fernanda, above, gathered a group of education experts to imagine a new school, removed from structures that were “created to make life easier for adults”. The concept is Synapses, a “self-driven” system now being offered to children in São Paulo.

At his “Lumiar” schools, the masters are rarely trained teachers, but have a passion about a particular subject; pupils choose their own courses, from basketball to planets, Star Wars to fashion and meet weekly to make decisions on all aspects of the running of the school, from discipline to class outings. The schools’ results have been astonishing, scoring 96.15% in government tests, “even in rural areas,” says Semler, “where one third have no electricity at home, and the average income of the parents is £170 per month”.”

Synapses projects are already in development in the UK and India, although this is defiantly not a programme to be rolled out: for Semler, the whole point is in taking control away from “authority” and giving greater freedom to pupils just as he did to his employees.”

• Imagine learning to build a bicycle from scratch and learning the value of pi along the way, imagine learning chemistry in the kitchen.
• What’s the difference between a military and a corporate culture?
• The pointlessness of five year plans.

Link Loving 10.02.11

• A year at war – the story of three soldiers in Afghanistan, by Catrin Einhorn.
• Peter Grier asks whether Reagan was a good President.
• Jereme Roos warns us that Europe is in crisis. How can we break through?
• The first half of this piece on the Today Programme is wonderful. ‘It was the young people that created the revolution. We didn’t help them at first – we were too scared, but now we are all part of it’.
• Paul Mason has twenty reasons why protests are kicking off all around the world. Spot on.
• Proof that the human body is capable of just about anything.
• Dorian Lynskey ponders on the poshification of pop music, and looks at the relationship between privilege and protest music.
• Thomas Friedman finds three things changing the Middle East; China, 20-year olds, and Twitter.
• The Today Programme reveals some of the logistical things to think about in a changing climate. Like the idea of phone networks going down…
• Andy Summer on why inequality matters for poverty reducation, and how it’s come back on to the global agenda.

Dear Big Cheeses Who Run the World

This is so fantastically brilliant. Read it. Umair Haque smacks it down in the Harvard Business Review. I swear that the put-downs in this piece are some of the best I’ve ever read.

WARNING: You may want to read this in a place where you can whoop and cheer.

Dear Big Cheeses Who Run the World,

We regret to inform that you’re fired. We’re really, truly sorry about this, but we’re going to have to let you go. It’s time for you to pursue other opportunities.

In case you haven’t noticed (and who can blame you? It’s pretty hard to see it from private jets, mega-yachts, 158th floor boardrooms, and members-only backrooms) times are pretty tough lately, and we’ve got to cut back somewhere. In fact, that we’re beginning to suspect that maybe, just maybe the entire contract between us, you, and tomorrow — the Washington Consensus, yesterday’s blueprint for building economies, communities, and societies — is fatally broken.

Yes, though it did fuel a dismal sort of prosperity, we’d like to aim slightly higher than McGrowth. Because what that seems to have led to, at the end of the day, is a level-five epidemic of austerity. Your solution? Well, it’s all a little too Dr Frankenstein for us, frankly — undead companies, banks, funds, and boards, patched and stitched piecemeal back together, shocked back into life via the electric jolt of yet another bailout, stimulus, or special exemption so they can stagger on into a desolate tomorrow.

Thanks — really — but no thanks. We’d like to pass on your very kind, rather creepy plan for a Frankenfuture. It’s time, instead, for us to take a quantum leap into the 21st century; to, once again, with steadfast determination, unyielding courage, and just a little bit of trembling trepidation, leave the past behind — and furiously pioneer a better tomorrow.

Please don’t worry about us, though — because we’re not worried about you. Gambling away other peoples’ money, glad-handing each other, double-crossing Planet Earth, and driving companies and entire economies into the red — these are highly employable skills, and we’re sure you’ll land on your feet. We’ll be happy to provide a reference spelling out your expertise at being zombie overlords, should you ever need one.

Just in case, though, you’re in need of some totally utopian, rather idealistic, hopelessly naive, laughably unrealistic, stupidly hopeful, colossally constructive, thoroughly impertinent reading material, here’s a little crib sheet we’re leaving behind for you. It’s a brief, crude stab at a new set of design principles that might, just might, be able to spark 21st century economies, communities, and societies, and ignite a more authentic, enduring prosperity.

Call it, if you like, the Generation M* Consensus — the growing consensus of a global movement dedicated to toppling the old order, by doing meaningful stuff that matters the most.

• The Empty Vessel Rule.

Government, Arthur Okun famously argued, is a leaky bucket — one which leaks money at every turn. Yet, though the government may be often a leaky bucket, the corporation is just as often an empty vessel: bereft of any purpose higher than profit. What the private sector offers in terms of efficiency, it subtracts in terms of virtue. So what we really need to do today isn’t merely to privatize what used to be public, or the reverse, nationalization. We need to meld the efficiency of the private sector with the virtues of the public sector — to pioneer the legal, financial, and contractual basis for new corporate forms, like forporations, that balance obligations to shareholders and the many kinds of stakeholders; that exist “for” a higher purpose than mere near-term profit.

• Shadow Tax Cuts.

Low taxes are the next item on the Washington Consensus’s agenda: nice, but not nearly good enough. Sure, sky-high taxes will kill prosperity dead. So what about the hidden taxes we all pay every second of every day? Consider. The fumes smogging up our skies are a tax. The junkfood lining the bleak exurban shelves is a tax. Most big-box stores are taxes sucking the life, heart, and soul out of town. Wall Street’s “innovations” turned out to be a tax. The hidden charges and unfair fees that constitute most “business models” are the epitome of a tax. Where the Washington Consensus ignores all these very real taxes just a little too conveniently, the M Consensus suggests it’s time to see them, face them, and eliminate them: steep enough shadow taxes will render all growth meaningless and illusory, because value has simply been extracted — not actually created.

• The Lessig Principle.

How? Here’s one way to counterbalance shadow taxes. Property rights, the next bullet point in the Washington Consensus’s agenda, are essential to growth — and so they’ve got to be enshrined, embraced, and extended. And have they ever been. The original term of copyright was, for example 14 years; today, it’s nearly ten times that: up to 120 years. Given that growth rate, by 2100, the copyright on this blog post will last for approximately 47 billion years. Yet, as Mike Masnick tirelessly points out , building on the work of scholars like Larry Lessig, draconian intellectual property rights regimes stifle innovation, entrepreneurship, and disruption, at the expense of protecting tired, lazy incumbents (here’s an eloquent explanation on why from Lewis Hyde). So where the Washington Consensus argues for a heavy, rigid approach to property rights, the M Consensus pushes for feather-light rights, knowing that the scarcer special privilege is, the more real value everyone’s likely to enjoy.

• The Porter Rule.

While IP rights, are of course, a form of regulation, the next item on the Washington Consensus’s agenda is deregulation in almost all other respects. A giant oil spill, an even more gigantic financial crisis, and an even more gigantic lost decade all evoke the dangers of a dogmatic devotion to deregulation. The M Consensus, instead, subscribes to Michael Porter’s path-breaking Porter Hypothesis: crudely put, that stricter regulation isn’t what stifles competitiveness — it can be exactly what induces it, by encouraging disruptive innovations to spark and catch fire.

• The People Principle.

Perhaps the biggest incentive we can give corporations to start getting serious about real innovation again, then, is what might be called humanization. The next item of the Washington Consensus’s moldy agenda is legally protecting the corporation. It’s been taken to an absurd extreme, with the doctrine that corporations must enjoy legal personhood. But (Earth to beancounters) corporations aren’t people — only people are people. The former face few of the obligations citizens do, can’t face the same kinds of punishments, are legally bound to maximize profit in ways that citizens aren’t, and tend to have thousands of times more cash, time, and power, which means they can afford to de facto buy rights almost no person on earth has (like hiring batteries of lawyers to fight cases for decades). Corporations, like hammers, are just tools. And for the same reason we don’t anthropomorphize hammers, nor should we empower corporations with the same rights and powers as people. Where the Washington Consensus humanizes corporations, and dehumanizes people, the M consensus suggests unhumanizing corporations, and rehumanizing people.

• The Uninterest Rate.

So where the last item in the Washington Consensus’s agenda is interest rates, set by markets, to knock governments, people, and communities into shape, the final item in the M Consensus’s agenda is what I call an uninterest rate: the rate at which income isn’t transformed into outcomes. It’s outcomes that count. Though we got a little bit richer, did we actually realize tangible, enduring benefits that mattered? Or did we just get more insecure, obese, unhappy, and disconnected? If the uninterest rate is high, it means income isn’t translating into outcomes; because our economy’s engines and engineers — corporations, CEOs, investors — are uninterested in making stuff that actually makes us better off; they’re just interested in making a quick buck. The higher the uninterest rate, the more corporations are likely to be knocked into shape — by fed-up people, communities, society, and investors alike. If it’s low, incomes equal better outcomes, and the mere paper wealth we may have earned actually matters in human terms.

The plight of the global economy looks a lot less like a headsplitting hangover and a lot more like what tends to happen to a two-pack-a-day smoker after twenty years. So what I’ve just described is really this: the agenda for the kind of innovation that’s scarce, rare, and valuable today: institutional innovation. That’s the kind of innovation we need to restore economic health. And every day, I see more and more organizations signing off on it, in ways big and small — from Starbucks, to Pepsi, to Timberland, to Wal-Mart, to Nike, to Google, to Tata.

There endeth (for now, anyways) the M Consensus. Truth be told, of course, it’s not really a consensus, at least not yet. It’s just a highly flawed, surely imperfect, quickly written blog post with just a few ideas — no, not a comprehensive set of answers — for what tomorrow’s great consensus could be. So fire away in the comments with your own suggestions, questions, examples, and additions.

*Yes, I’m fully aware I don’t speak for everyone under the age of 25, 35, 45, or 95. Nor am I trying to. There are plenty of exceptions that prove the rule that Millennials put meaning, fulfillment, and purpose first. That said, the “M” in Gen M doesn’t stand for Millennials. It stands for “a movement to do meaningful stuff that matters the most”. It’s not about your age — it’s about your values, your vision, and your calling.

Nina Simone – Revolution And Strange Fruit

Interspersing the performances are clips of an interview in which Nina discusses the role of the artist in society from 1968. Terrifying to think this was less than 50 years ago.

Link Loving 09.02.11

• Generate your own Malcolm Gladwell book title. Genius.
• David Bosco has a warning tale of what happens when you post major political donors as Ambassadors. Guess it was only Luxembourg though.
• Thrilled to see Ann Pettifor is part of the network of economists behind the new think-tank PRIME, launched on the 75th anniversary of the publication of Keynes’ General Theory. Bloomberg coverage here.
• It’s not the amounts that make this vile – it’s how they earn it. Meet the world’s best-paid men.
• Professor Roger A Pielke Jr finds a ‘third way’ for green growth.
• What does it feel like to be part of a revolution? Dan Gardner reveals all.
• If the Superbowl were a film – what would it look like with these different directors?
• Gerry Hassan says it’s time England has it’s own democratic forum.
• I love it when he does this – Jonathon Porritt tells it like it is.
• Apparently there’s a British version of the American Dream. Smaller, of course. And less brash.