How to Save the World

Towards a Steady-State Economy

Wed, 07 May 2008 19:19:08 GMT

Herman Daly is recognized as a pioneer in Environmental & Social Economics, and I've reviewed his work in these pages before. Recently he submitted a paper "Toward a Steady-State Economy" to the UK government's Sustainable Development Commission outlining and explaining the 10 public policy steps needed to achieve such an economy. The whole paper is essential reading for those wanting an understanding of the current economy, why it is not sustainable, and what is required to make it so. The 10 steps in a nutshell (I've altered and added to his words to explain technical terms):

Use cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources (energy, wood and other raw materials). Set caps according to source (scarcity of resources) or sink (waste produced in using the resources and loss of carbon absorption) constraint, whichever is more stringent. In other words, cap the maximum amount of usage of each natural resource at levels that are sustainable, and then allow the market, by auction, to determine how to allocate that maximum amount of usage by setting the price where the demand is greatest.
Institute ecological tax reform—shift the tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), through the economy, and back to nature (pollution). This internalizes external costs and raises revenue more equitably. It prices the scarce but previously unpriced contribution of nature. In other words, tax 'bads' (depletion, pollution and waste) not 'goods', by lowering social and income taxes and taxing extraction and pollution instead.
Limit the range of inequality in income—set a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to inequality. The minimum, he argues, should be sufficient for a comfortable life; the maximum probably not more than 100 times the minimum.
Free up the length of the working day, week, and year—allow greater option for leisure or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard to provide without growth. In today's automated world, there is no need for everyone to work all day every day to produce a comfortable living for everyone. I have argued before that one day a week, or one hour a day, should be all that is needed; most of our labour is wasted in bureaucracy, hierarchical politics and the production of junk.
Re-regulate international commerce—move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, and adopt compensating tariffs to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition from other countries. This is not an argument for reducing trade, but rather for eliminating the component of trade that exploits weak social and environmental standards and unsustainably low long-distance transportation costs.
Reduce and amend the authority of the IMF-WB-WTO, to something like Keynes’ plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances—seeking balance on current accounts, and avoiding large capital transfers and foreign debts. Instead of being an ideological force for globalization and deregulation at any costs, it would become an arbiter and a check on reckless and unsustainable national policies.
Move to 100% reserve requirements instead of fractional reserve banking. Return control of money supply and purchasing power to governments rather than private banks. This step is designed to curb irresponsible lending and borrowing practices, speculation and currency devaluation, and allow elected bodies to manage fiscal and monetary policy, not private sector parties with an inherent conflict of interest.
Move all remaining publicly-owned natural capital (the 'commonwealth' of land and resources) to public trusts 'priced' at their true value, while freeing from private ownership the 'commonwealth' of knowledge and information, making it free. Stop treating the scarce (natural capital) as if it were non scarce, and the non scarce (intellectual capital) as if it were scarce.
Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus immigrants equals deaths plus out-migrants.
Reform how we measure and manage national well-being—separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop 'growing' the economy when marginal costs start to exceed marginal benefits. Never add the two accounts. This reflects the fact that many economic activities (e.g. the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez disaster) actually add to GDP, and that hence GDP is not in any way a meaningful measure of economic prosperity or well-being.

It's an interesting list, but Daly has acknowledged that he's not optimistic that governments and those who would have to cede power to achieve these policy changes will ever voluntarily agree to such economic (and political) reforms, or that they could collaborate and do so even if they were so inclined. I share his pessimism. People with wealth and power simply don't give it up without a fight, and I know of few governments that would have the heart for such an 'unpopular' fight.

Nevertheless, even though it's probably impossible, it's interesting to know what we would have to do, top-down, to achieve a truly sustainable global economy.

Category: Alternative Economies

If Not Intentional Community, Then What?

Tue, 06 May 2008 02:33:57 GMT

Regular readers know that I'm infatuated with the idea of Intentional Community, and that I believe the only way we're going to make major positive changes to our unsustainable culture is by creating 'working models' of a better way to live and make a living.

An Intentional Community is a group of people with shared values and shared purpose who agree to live together to further those values and realize that purpose. Around the world there are hundreds of ICs, but the large majority of them are very small (smaller than the average struggling-nation family) or very short-lived. For awhile I doubted that ICs had enough urgency and commitment to compel most members to stick them out when times got tough or disagreements arose. Joe Bageant's son's argument that 'communities are born of necessity' is pretty compelling. And in Second Life the turnover in 'communities' is enormous -- many people change their 'home' as often as they change their clothes.

But while 'accidental communities' may outlast intentional ones, the evidence is that most of them are not happy places -- nor are they sustainable in a modern world quickly running out of room, resources, and the essentials of life. We've left community formation up to accident, and we got what we deserved -- greedy real estate developers telling us where we can and cannot live, turning the Earth into unnatural wasteland.

My study of indigenous, 'tribal' communities suggests that, while they are sustainable (at least they were until our civilization encroached irrevocably and dramatically into their habitat), they are not necessarily happy places, especially for non-conformists and especially when they abut other such communities (this seems to trigger an endless cycle of inter-tribal violence).

I have a perhaps idealistic view of the communities of wild creatures, which are not nearly as violent as the makers of sensationalist nature films would have us believe. From my studies of birds in particular, I've learned that life for other creatures in the wild is mostly joyful, peaceful and care-free. I've also learned that Gaia, the complex self-regulating system of all-life-on-Earth, is graceful, respectful, honourable, and astonishing.

If all-life-on-Earth can figure out how to live as responsible, sustainable, joyful and mostly peaceful life, what's wrong with us? Are we really a rogue species, unable to fit into the ecosystem that has evolved so effectively for millions of years? Or are we just going about the business of belonging to Earth all wrong, and, if so, what do we need to learn (or unlearn) and show to get us back on the right track?

My fall-back, if I cannot find a way to join with others to be a model in community, is Radical Simplicity, a model of a personal way of living devoted to:

leaving the Earth as we found it, unhampered in its ability to sustain itself indefinitely
consuming as little of the Earth's resources as we need to be fully ourselves
measuring our 'success' not by material wealth or GDP but by the quality of our lives ('our' meaning that of all creatures we share our ecosystems with) -- health, well-being, happiness, learning, love
relearning to listen to the Earth, to pay attention, and to live in harmony as a part of it

Perhaps because I've lived a prosperous, materially comfortable life, yet not found in it the happiness or health or well-being that I have always intuitively sought, it is easy for me to shrug off material measures of success. I can appreciate how those who have struggled for basic necessities all their lives would find my quest elitist, disconnected from the reality of the modern human condition. What good is a model of a better way to live if 90% of the people on this horrifically overpopulated planet will be completely unpersuaded of its value, even if they could afford to emulate it?

Yet I can't shake my fascination with the idea of Intentional Community. In theory it still makes sense. For the same reason, I'm also still fascinated with the idea of polyamorism, the idea that we're not meant to love or be loved by just one person, and that monogamy demands so much of us that we end up losing ourselves to compromise, or fracturing. I hear the two common objections to polyamorism: That it's a self-indulgent and absurdly unrealizable fantasy of middle-aged males. And that it's fearful, an attempt to insulate ourselves against the loss of love, against commitment, against responsibility, against being hurt. Maybe so.

(listening to House in the background -- a woman says to her new lover, one of the House doctors, after he indulges her: "I need you to do what you want. I can take care of me...I need you to take care of you.")

All of this internal debate inside my own head is, perhaps, the crux of the problem. I need to learn to let go, not to be afraid to be truly human, truly myself, to live in the real world. Not to be afraid of intimacy or responsibility. To be fearless. To try not to try too hard.

I need to think. I'm such a slow learner.

Or maybe I think too much. Maybe what I'm lacking is data. Maybe I spend too much time thinking and not enough time being. Before I can decide where I belong, perhaps I have to try belonging somewhere outside my own head.

Or maybe I should lock myself in a lab and learn biology and invent some dust that, spread from above the Earth, could halve the probability of women everywhere becoming pregnant. Or invent a meat, tasty as the finest on the planet, that could be grown in a test tube, in anyone's garden, and spare the world's creatures the outrage and misery of factory farms, and the horror of famine and hunger.

If not Intentional Community, then what?

I have no idea. I know it's not political or social reform, or 'free' markets, or new technology, or revolution, or spiritualism. We've tried all these things for ten thousand years, and they've only made matters worse. And I know that there is no going back, that there are no noble savages, that history has many lessons but no better models of how to live.

When I know myself a little better, when I know who I really am and start to have an inkling where I might belong, maybe I'll have some answers, some possibilities that make more sense. If so, you'll be the first to know.

Image: Erskine Falls, Australia, photo from my Picasaweb collection

Category: Let-Self-Change

Saturday Links of the Week - May 3, 2008

Sat, 03 May 2008 23:38:49 GMT

Flickr Photo Download: Nancy White graphs Peter Block’s Presentation

Haven't been browsing much during my three weeks away, so this week's list is the articles that have been sent to me or have showed up in my RSS feeds since April 5:

Love, Conversation, Community:

Hands-on Survey of Intentional Communities: Three activists made a 7-month journey through 11 European intentional communities, to explore the question of whether intentional communities can actually make a difference or are just people running away from the 'real' world.

Peter Block on Engaging People in Community: Nancy White graphs (see graphic above) Peter Block's process for finding and inspiring passion in partners in your communities. And more thoughts on convening from Block, from Holger Nauheimer's blog:

Leadership is about convening capacity.
Substitute curiosity for advice.
There are no answers. Everybody who offers you an answer wants to sell you something.
Transformation is based on a platform of relatedness.
Ask groups not to report their findings but what strikes them.

Aussie Intentional Community Profiled: Jindibah reveals how it has learned to achieve consensus and resolve conflicts quickly and amicably, largely by teaching members to know themselves better.

Dave Smith on YouTube: My favourite serial entrepreneur summarizes the key points in his book To Be Of Use.

Preconditions for Collective Change: Geoff Brown lists 9 factors that are needed to convert collective agreement into collective action. And he follows it up with a great round-up from some of the world's best blogs.

Ben Zander of the Boston Philharmonic on Leadership: Interesting speech on why people would rather be members of an effective team than its 'leader'; thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

May 10 is Pangea Day: Get together with the whole world and watch; thanks to Patti Digh for the link.

Narrative and Storytelling:

Nine Productivity Tools for Writers: Nine free apps for writers compiled by Dustin Wax; thanks to my colleague Greg Turko for the link.

Preparing for Civilization's End:

Carbon Con: Why carbon offset schemes don't work.

A Billion Hybrids On the Road: How we get lulled into believing we're making a difference in CO2 emissions when we're not.

When Governments Prevent Citizens from Suing Corporatists: The Bush regime is trying to protect its corporatist friends from liability for their atrocities against citizens and consumers by granting blanket legal indemnity for negligence and fraud, industry by industry.

A Compelling Argument for Canceling the Olympics Permanently: It's become a political, corporate-sponsored freakshow, with money, drug use, bribery and fraud determining the winners.

Female Victims of the Cycle of Violence: Central American girls willingly suffer horrific abuse just so they can belong -- to a gang of killers.

Michael Pollan Urges Us to Grow Our Own Food: The famous sustainable, responsible food champion says foods from personal 'victory gardens' not only taste better and save energy, money and the environment, but help us become more self-sufficient as well.

Making Everyone an Environmentalist: Alternet provides 8 reasons we will all soon be environmentalists, like it or not.

More Chinese Poisons: A blood thinner used for dialysis and other medical purposes all over the world is tainted with toxins from -- guess where -- China again.

Another Condemnation of the US Institutional Education System: Uncompetitive, obsolete, and sinking fast.

Climate Change: Just Do Something.

Nukes are No Answer: It's not if, it's when the next Chernobyl will hit. And in the meantime, taxpayers will foot the bill in subsidies and guarantees for hundreds of insanely expensive, dirty and dangerous nuclear plants.

As Arctic Melts, Land Poisons Become Water Poisons: Mercury and other toxins are entering the arctic food system through melting permafrost.

April was, Apparently, Animal Cruelty Month:

Canadian Seal Hunt 2008: Another year of carnage, carefully hidden from public view, courtesy of the Harper government.

Torturing Animals for Botox: Lots of better ways to test chemicals exist, but US regulators prefer antiquated, brutal methods.

The Cost of Factory Farms: Subsidized CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) not only inflict horrific cruelty on animals, they cost taxpayers a fortune, and the externalized cost we'll pay in the future is massive.

PETA Offers a Million for Humane Meat: PETA is offering a million dollar prize to anyone who can invent a way to clone meat commercially in test tubes.

Web 2.0:

Will Video Demand Collapse the Internet?: A British study suggests Web infrastructure is inadequate to support wide-spread use of video; thanks to David Jones for the link.

Thoughts for the Week: Richard Conniff suggests we stop calling what we pay for government services 'taxes' and start calling it 'dues'. And David Abram explains The Ecology of Magic.

Knowledge Management in 2020

Fri, 02 May 2008 04:52:49 GMT

It's 2020. Trying times for the global economy and society, but we're still hanging in there.

Madison S. is an information professional with Omni Consultants, a big global consultancy that is now focused (as are its competitors) on personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services for their clients. She has an MIS degree and is one of the highest paid of Omni's employees, even though she provides few services directly to Omni's clients.

She spends about 1/4 of her time producing business analyses based on environmental scans for Omni's consultants. These analyses sort through the firehose of information coming into the organization and distill out 'What It Means' summaries -- five-page point-form reports suggesting important trends, alarming developments, new opportunities, insights and implications for business, the economy and the society as a whole, rich in visualizations, with supporting data appended. These serve as powerful Talking Points Memos for Omni's consultants to use in conversations with and proposals to clients.

Another 1/4 of Madison's time is spent producing 'What Might Come Next' analyses. These are a combination of forecasts about the future of businesses and industries, based on her team's research, and provocative proposals for action to capitalize on or mitigate these forecast events. These analyses are framed as future state stories, scenarios, showing how the suggested actions would lead to optimal outcomes. Omni's consultants 'tell' these stories to their clients' executives and project teams to help them visualize their future and develop and refine strategies to exploit or adapt to the changes forecast. Omni's senior management, likewise, uses these scenario-based analyses in its own, internal strategy and risk management development.

This activity represents a dramatic change from the activities 'information professionals' had performed in the past. Omni's managers came to realize that research is best done by experts in research, not by everyone in the organization, and that good IPs are able to add enormous value to the information they locate and distil, if given the opportunity, provided they are knowledgeable about the business and how it uses information.

Another 1/4 of Madison's time is spent supporting collaboration and innovation teams in real time consulting assignments with Omni's clients, and in real time internal project work. Her role in such projects is two-fold: To provide insightful synopses of relevant information prior to the start of the collaboration and innovation sessions, and to retrieve relevant information immediately that has been identified as essential to moving forward by the collaboration and innovation teams.

The rest of her time is spent in face-to-face 'cultural anthropology' sessions with Omni's people, during which she observes them doing their jobs, identifies and suggests ways in which they could use information and technology to do these jobs better, and brings back to senior management reports on systemic 'information problems' that need organization-wide process changes or new technologies before they can be resolved.

Andrew R. is one of Omni's consultants. Like most of his peers, he maintains a weblog of what he has learned and discovered, which many people inside and outside the company subscribe to. He also participates in community weblogs for six self-established, self-managed 'communities of passion' he belongs to. His 'home page' consists of:

a directory of all the people in his networks (showing their current online status, and real-time multimedia virtual presence contact information for them),
a list of the RSS feeds to which he subscribes (mostly blogs of other community members, plus the publications of Madison's team), and
his calendar.

He can access this 'home page' from any computer or portable device.

He has no e-mail or voice-mail and does not use 'groupware' or other asynchronous technologies. He can almost always be reached by Instant Messaging, and his calendar of times when he is available for conversations and meetings is open for anyone to book. As such, most of his day is spent in physical or virtual real-time conversations and other collaborative activities focused on some specific objective.

The hard drive of Andrew's computer is virtually empty -- when he needs information, he gets it 'just in time' from the people in his networks via IM, by searching his RSS feeds, or by request from someone in Madison's group. Mostly, his networks feed him just the information he needs each day, so he rarely needs to ask.

Andrew earns his money substantially by observing and listening to clients and telling stories that are relevant to their needs, drawing on his experience with other clients, his imagination, and the information from Madison's group. He also earns money by facilitating his clients and networks to co-design and co-innovate solutions to their own problems collaboratively by sharing ideas, knowledge and insights, peer-to-peer, using Open Space and similar complex-problem methodologies .

Omni has no formal 'website' -- just its collection of blogs and its interactive directory of people with their contact information. Since they started these and abandoned the traditional website, readership of their pages, and follow-up work, have soared.

Their big KM project for this year is Reinventing the Water Cooler, designed to find a way to replicate the opportunity for serendipitous, unscheduled conversation that the old water coolers once enabled.

This is all well and good for businesses like Omni that have the resources to distill and analyze information. For smaller organizations and individual citizens it's a tougher challenge.

Kim L. is a partner in a small entrepreneurial venture called MacClothes, that produces portable sewing and embroidering machines that can be operated by the (now-ubiquitous) Macintosh 20/20 computers to allow users to create their own custom made-to-measure clothing. Until recently they did their own business research, or did without. But recently they've struck a deal to 'subscribe' by RSS to some of Omni's research for a very low price, after a 90-day embargo period.

Individuals in 2020 generally use RSS subscription to craft their own personalized real-time 'newspaper' consisting of feeds from any of thousands of specialized and community-based e-newsletters and millions of blogs, plus filtered 'Best Of Blogs' feeds ("BOBLs") on any of 7000 subjects maintained by information professionals as hobbies. The most successful of these BOBLs have millions of subscribers, including corporate subscribers who underwrite some of the maintenance costs. These 'premier' BOBLs maintain linkable archives of related stories to each story they feature, plus a 'What It Means' analysis and a 'Possible Actions' list that tells readers what they could/should do to act on the information in the story. Some BOBLs have become so popular that they have full-time paid specialist researchers and reporters on staff producing their own articles.

The main complaint from businesspeople and the public about information in 2020? This hasn't changed since 2008 -- it's still information overload. But at least in 2020 the value of information intermediaries has been rediscovered -- people who are skilled at (and have time to) 'make sense' of the raw information coming at us in unmanageable amounts. And as a result a little more attention is paid to the meaning, implications and possible actions that stem from all this information.

And, since all this information is viewable on highly legible, portable display devices, no more trees need to be killed to disseminate and use it.

(Thanks to my KM colleagues Down Under for inspiring this post, especially Shawn Callahan, one of the brightest and most insightful people I've ever had the pleasure to meet.)

Category: Knowledge Management

What Are You Afraid Of?

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:14:28 GMT

Joe Bageant makes the point in Deer Hunting With Jesus that the working class of the US (and perhaps of the world) are largely driven by fear. In explaining how and what they think he makes clear what it is they are afraid of:

Fears of the Working/Poor/Uneducated Class:

Unemployment: Not having, or losing, a job; not having enough; losing their home -- When you live close to the edge, destitution is never far away.
Authority: When the authorities (the boss, the government, the police) treat you like you're nothing, you learn not to trust them.
Illness: When you can't afford to be sick, and can't afford to look after loved ones if they're sick, and you know what it's like to be uninsured or trapped in a crappy long-term care or nursing home, the thought of illness is chilling.
'Evil' People: Evangelical preachers teach you that people are either good or evil, and that foreigners and liberals (who never give you the time of day) and people without 'family values' and people who aren't 'like' you are satan's pawns, and must be vanquished.
Being Ripped Off: The uneducated are prey for scam artists, and know how people can use money, coercion and influence to take advantage of them.
Crime: Most of the victims of crime are in poor areas, because that's where the people desperate enough to be criminals are, and where law enforcement is most lax.
Losing Hope: When you're constantly struggling, you can't lose hope; when your country is mired in a hopeless war and the news is all about layoffs and crime, it's easy to do so.

In Lakoff's terms, these fears explain the conservative worldview pretty well. If you're driven by fear, and these are things you fear, the 'strict father' approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes makes a lot of sense:

Promoting strict-father morality in general (good vs evil, rules to be obeyed, strict rules on right vs wrong)
Promoting the virtues of self-discipline, responsibility for one's own actions and success, and self-reliance
Upholding the morality of reward and punishment (including preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by self-disciplined, self-reliant people, promoting punishment to uphold authority, and ensuring punishment for lack of self-discipline)
Protecting moral people from external evils and upholding the moral order (legitimate authority)

That got me thinking about the rest of us. If we're not part of the working/poor/uneducated class, what class do we belong to?

Joe defines "working class" as those people who have no power/control over their jobs: what they do, when they do it, at what price, and how vulnerable they are to layoffs not connected to their work performance. The rest of us, other than the tiny elite of super-rich and super-powerful, he calls the "catering" class -- because they cater/pander to the elite in return for a higher level of wealth and control than the "working" class receives.

So I guess that means that I (and I suspect the majority of readers of this blog) are members of the catering/affluent/educated class, most of whom, in Lakoff terms, are liberal-progressives with the 'nurturing parent' approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes:

Empathetic behaviour and promoting fairness

Helping those who cannot help themselves
Protecting those who cannot protect themselves
Promoting the virtue of fulfillment in life
Nurturing and strengthening oneself

Are we, too, driven to this worldview and these approaches to living by our fears? I'd like to believe we are less driven by fear than those in the working/poor/uneducated class, but I'm not so sure. In one sense, we have more control over our lives and more assets to protect ourselves with, and more marketable talents. But perhaps because we have more, we have more to lose, so we are equally driven by fears. What are those fears?

Having not done the kind of research that Joe has, I can only speak for myself, but I have a sense that my fears are pretty common among those I know. My recent period of self-reflection has made me a bit more aware of what my fears are, and they are:

Fears of the Catering/Affluent/Educated Class:

Recession: Because we own more, we are more vulnerable to declines in value of our assets, and because our work is so tied up in the modern global interrelated economy, a recession that makes our skills less valuable and basic survival skills more valuable threatens us more.
Responsibility: By virtue of having more control and say in our world, more authority, we also have more responsibility. But, although this is a controversial thing to say, I think we're afraid of this responsibility, afraid of not being able to discharge it well, of letting people down. We long, many of us, for a simple, responsibility-free life. The idea that this is civilization's final century is horrific not only because of the loss and suffering, but because of the guilt of what we might have done to prevent it.
Living in the Real World: Affluence allows us to cut ourselves off from the real world, to live in communities (and cars) where we are cut off from the rest of the world, to live inside our own heads, where it's safe and secure. A brutal 'real' world where the majority love to hunt, accept cruelty and violence as normal, hate others, and are enthralled by movies and YouTube videos that show torture, rape and murder is terrifying to us.
Intimacy: This is probably a consequence of the fear above. Intimacy involves emotional vulnerability, and those of us who have been cocooned emotionally most of our lives and who have experienced, at least once, the anguish of being emotionally hurt when we have opened ourselves up, quickly become afraid to repeat the experience.
War: We know war never solves anything, never has a winner, and always makes things worse. Yet we see it everywhere, becoming bloodier all the time. Machetes used to kill neighbours in Rwanda, torture, rape, burning of villages, massive theft by gangs and enslavement of children in Darfur -- we find these things unfathomable and unbearable, contrary to our notion of humanity.
Letting Go: I think educated people find it harder to just accept, to abandon themselves and their ideas, to let go of what control they have. We are inherently more anal than those who live close to the edge, by their wits. Contrary to all logic, Colombians are more happy than Americans, perhaps because they don't worry about things they have no control over.

Those are the things I am afraid of, anyway. I suspect my fellow educated liberal-progressives will protest that they don't fear most of these things, but my observations suggest most of us do. Or maybe I'm just judging my peers by myself. What do you think?

Joe talks about the "class war" that's brewing in the US and, perhaps, everywhere. I think these different fears explain much of the basis for this "war". It's not so much we hate each other, as much as that we don't know each other, we fear (and are driven by) completely different things (and each class to some extent epitomizes the things the other fears), and hence we can't communicate with each other. And we don't socialize between these classes enough to begin to understand the divide and start to bridge the gap.

The chart above, that I explained in my Fire & Ice article, shows (in bold) the qualities that are increasingly prevalent among Americans, especially the young (who are, mostly, children of the growing working class). My sense is that working class fears drive the propensities in the right quadrants, while the catering class fears drive the propensities in the left quadrants. What's more, I think the disappearance of the US middle class (and consequent growth of the working class) explains why the 'median' profile of Americans is now in the lower right quadrant, and moving lower and further right, while the 'median' profile of Europeans, where the middle 'catering' class is faring somewhat better, is still in the centre-left.

And, for those who, in wondering why with all my new-found self-knowledge and opportunity to do anything I want to do, what's holding me back, what I'm afraid of -- now you know.

Category: Our Culture