"Mr. Gill owes about $45,000 in federal student loans, plus another $40,000 to his parents. That investment in his future has led to a secure job with decent pay and good benefits. But it has left him with tremendous financial constraints, as he faces chipping away at the debt for years on end.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a new study, found that 30-year-olds with student loans were now less likely to have debts like home mortgages than 30-year-olds without student loans — even though most of those with student loans are better educated and can expect to earn more money over their lifetimes. The same pattern holds true for 25-year-olds and car loans.
This is surely a different start than any modern generation has had before? Can you buy a car? Can you own a home? Can you afford to have children? What does it mean for how you live your life?
Is this why so many young don't and have to find another way?
Is this why car sharing has to be a new reality? Is this why renting will become so important? Is this why owning stuff will have to be less important? Is this why in the UK so many 30 plus year olds still live with their parents?
Isn't our economy and our culture is centred on owning stuff. It has been since the dawn of agriculture. But the Millennials cannot own stuff. A whole generation will grow into middle age with few assets that they "Own".
A marker of this is car sales. Cars sales have dropped in Europe for 18 months in a row. Car sales are down 10% in Europe and 17% in Germany! Demand also sank in other major continental markets, falling 14.5% in France, 13.9% in Spain and 4.9% in Italy. The UK was the only major bright spot for car makers, with sales up 5.9%.
What does this mean to an economy that is based on selling more and more stuff?
What will this mean to marriage and family? At the moment single people and single parents are at an all time high. Can a person survive as a single in this kind of world where sharing may be the only way to have what we need?
We cannot know how this will be in any detail. But this is will be very different from any generation for 10,000 years.
It could mean the re-emergence of a society that is based on sharing and on the tribe. We used to live like this. Huans lived like this for all time - Except the last 10,000 years after the dawn of agriculture.
This is William Tyndale. He is being burned at the stake. His crime? Heresy. What he did was to translate the bible into English so that people outside the church could read it. Worse he printed it so that it was more accessible still.
The church needed to control access to scripture, because their authority depended on the church being the expert in control of how the bible was interpreted.
We are now at a similar point in medicine. No one is being burned at the stake or even persecuted but what is a secret is the data in our patient file.
We are entering a new phase of health and life, where control will shift from the institution to the person. We can see this pressure build up now in education. The institution is disconnected from the realty and the budget of the people.
The same is true for medicine. There is an epidemic of chronic illness that medicine has not been able to halt or reduce. 70% of illness today is caused by how we live. Our health is literally in our own hands. No doctor can force us to eat differently, be more active, stop smoking or drinking. No doctor can help us leave toxic relationships or jobs. Only we can do this. Only if we also have help from others like us. The expert has no role in this area of health. The result is a system that has a huge cost burden and does not have the outcomes that we need. It is a mirror of what we face in education.
What is emerging is "Citizen Medicine". It will be like "Unschooling" where the citizen plays the central role. In Citizen Medicine, we create our own health profile. We find out where our risks lie. We seek advice for how best to reduce these risks. We own our own health data. We work to improve how we live.
And our family doctor? She becomes a health facilitator - an advisor and a gateway to other areas of health that are acute. Just as a teacher might play the same role in learning. Some doctors are moving to this role. See the link below to Wellx.
I was visiting my beautiful grand daughter Sophia the other day and was so impressed by her love of stories and of princesses. So we started to imagine what a Zombie Princess story might be like.
I thought that I might work out some of the ideas in public though and so today here are a few of them.
My influences are Sleeping Beauty - the innocent condemned by a curse - who lives in an undead way for hundreds of years. The Prince who brings her back to life with love. The Secret Garden - a lonely child who is taken from all she knows and put into a strange house that has a secret. The Canterville Ghost - where there is a one aware person and a tragic ghost in a castle that no one else can see and who is redeemed by love. And, above all by the late great Roald Dahl who wrote what children really want to read about - definitely not politically correct!
In this context, here is the idea for the story.
Banished Rusian billionaire Sergei has renovated a castle in England for his wife, Oxanna. The couple travel all the time and their 10 year old son, Sasha is left in the castle for the summer holidays with only the house keeper Irene and the driver, her husband Bryan. There is something warm and wonderful about Bryan and Irene but also something strange.
All the castle is completely modernized except for the old tower. That is next year's project. Bryan makes it clear to Sasha that he must not go up there. It is not safe. But of course, what 10 year old lonely boy would not rise to the challeng?
The book opens hundreds of years earlier. We are at the scene of a massacre. We find a strange looking couple looking though a castle for the bodies. He, a warlock, has killed the Zombies that have done this.
All the household are dead, even the Earl and his Countess. They find the daughter, Elizabeth. She is still alive but has been bitten. How can they save her? The old woman is a witch and has a plan for Beth. They burn the castle and the bodies of the undead and leave with Beth.
Meanwhile back in Moscow, there is a meeting. The orders for the men are clear. Sergei has to be taught a lesson. The lesson has to be public and be a warning for all who disobey. The decision is to kidnap and kill the oligarch's son and make it look like a simple crime gone wrong.
All these threads expand and then converge. In the end love, courage and sacrifice triumph. You will cry!
Do you have a child of any age who might want to read such a book?
I worry about money today? I never used to but I do now. I am not alone. More and more people look into the future and worry that money might not buy anything or that they might now have any or both. There are all sorts of signs.
A stockmarket that is not based on the real economy. The 1% who have most of the wealth? Workers who are not rewarded for their work? Cyprus and "austerity"? Bank Bailouts that supersede everyone and everything? The rape of our environment in the search for "growth"? Bitcoin? There is lots of evidence that something wrong with money today.
Money seems to have become an end in itself and it has become too distanced from the needs of people and the planet. What is wrong and what will come? I have a few ideas that I would like to test with you.
I think that institutions have captured humanity. We think they serve us but they don't and money is central to this capture.
We go to school to learn. But in reality 60% leave school knowing almost nothing and the rest know a lot of abstract things that give them a credential. Schools teach to the test and the credential. In reality most of us leave school knowing little about what is really important. We have few practical skills. Our education system is an end in itself.
In theory our health system should keep us well. If we have a car accident it does a very good job of fixing us. But for our general health, look at the outcomes. We are all getting more and more sick and this is all costing us more and more money. Health care has become an end in itself.
What has banking become? It used to help people and business finance real things, like build a factory, a canal, a house. It used to help people trade with each other. But now most of the money in banking is made by financial manipulation. Banking has become divorced from the real economy. It is an end in itself.
And the job? If we are honest, most jobs today are also abstractions from the core of making and serving in a real way. You are a part of a machine. You are not the personification of the thing or the service. Your pay in a job is not based on the value that you create, look at how wages have lagged productivity, they are based on leverage. How low can you be paid and still turn up for work is the equation. The job is an end in itself.
But there was another way that did root everything in the real.
This picture is of a ledger that was used by merchants in the Hanseatic League from the 14 - 17 century to conduct their business.
They also had a problem with money at the time. Then money was made from gold or silver and was made only by kings. There was not enough money around to conduct trade. So the merchants of the Hanse came up with a system that solved their problem and that kept their trade OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT.
Groups of merchants would do business with each other and use a ledger instead. I buy fish from you, we record the sale in the ledger. You buy iron from me, we enter the sale in the ledger. We supply wood and building materials to another partner, it goes into the ledger. Periodically we net the whole thing out. Very little real cash was needed. But the transactions were real. This was not barter. There was a cash value attached. So we all knew where we stood. And best of all, when we sell to outsiders, like the English, they pay cash which flushes the whole system.
This is the scale of the Hanse:
Each city had its own ledger. And then the cities had larger ledgers that made up the Baltic region.
This system can and did scale. It made the Hanse the wealthiest region in the world for several hundred years.
The ledger was a public document shared within the group. It was the partnership platform. Big deals could be done like this too such as building a fleet or improving the harbor. Bigger deals could be done when Lubeck and Danzig and other cities funded anti pirate patrols.
The entire Hanseatic League used this approach of public business to give them the edge over all who had to finance themselves using cash alone or who had to borrow conventionally. The ledger was in effect their credit system: for it enabled them to escape the bonds of a monetary system that, then, was based on physical gold and silver.
Are you starting to see how we might do this today?
The General Store and Barn Building
This is a tested idea. This is how credit also worked in rural Canada and America for hundreds of years. In rural communities there was no cash for most of the year. So how did business get done? With a ledger!
In that case the ledger was held by the General Store. Again in rural America, cash was rare and only was abundant after harvest. You bought from the store using the ledger and the store ledger was used to record you buying and selling other things with your neighbours. Harvest would flush the system when we sold to outsiders.
Without the social trust platform of the General Store, economic life in rural areas would not be possible. But here, the the power of Trust and Community built on the ledger added another layer of value. This I call Barn Building.
In rural America and Canada, social trust extended beyond good to include services.
In these kinds of communities there was also a social labour exchange. If you needed a new barn for your son, the community would give its labour in return for an expectation that you would do the same to others. Here the ledger was kept in the minds of the community. The more you were seen as being generous, you lent me your cart, you gave me a cow when my milker died, the more the entire community would be ready to aid you. In this kind of system, the more you give, the more social credit you have.
Today, this is how Open Source software works. The core deal being that I can use the elements in the system but I have to give back my improvements. The reality being that the more you give to the system, the more you can expect to get back. At first in status, or trust, and then in material help. The Open Source community lives their lives in public. Inside their world, all the key players are well known. Newbies have to prove their worth. This is normal and human.
The real world
In a value system based on real good and services, money and credit can be attached to reality. There will be enough money al the time because it is based on real trade in real things. So such a system avoids two big problems of all other money systems.
If money is rooted in a scarce commodity, like Gold or Cowrie shells, there is never enough. Kings debase the currency or others do. If the money is based on paper and the trust in a government, in the end governments debase the trust. This is what we see today. Money is worth a fraction of what it was 100 years ago. It has been no store of value.
The future of money
In parts of Europe, such as on Greek Islands, where no on has any cash, markets are emerging where all involved trade with each other based on selling real goods and real services for a money amount, like the Hanse, but based on the ledger.
My bet is that online markets will arise that are much bigger than a town on a Greek Island. Those of us who have little access to cash will be able to use the online ledger to buy and sell real goods and services.
I already consult locally for food. It's a good deal for both sides. We work out my hourly rate. This gives me a credit in the store and I buy food at her market rates. We both win.
We are learning how to insert trust into this. Look at eBay, at Airbnb. Look at sharing sites. We are so close.
For personal trust and reputation are central. This is less about contract than shame and reputation. The letter of the law will not save you if you behave badly in such a system.
At the same time, new clearing systems are emerging outside the banking system I am looking at Ripple.com.
I see a system emerging that will be outside the control of the current system. That like MOOCS and Universities will make the current offer look like a bad deal. Like Craigslist, make the classified in newspapers look like a bad deal. Like downloads and sharing make albums look like a bad deal.
THEY will fight this. But will lose. They will lose because this kind of money works for 99% of us.
If we go down this route we will humanize money. Money will represent real value that each of us create. Money will be limited to the real value that the planet offers too. Money will be balanced with reality. Money will be a store of real value. Each of us will be able to get what we earn.
More later on this but you can see more right away in my book You Don't Need a Banker to get Credit. You can get this here
What is the economy that will give us all hope - real hope that we can have a good life? I think that it is what I call the Networked Artisan. This is a person who makes things by their own hands but uses often the new tools to do this and the network to connect and sell to a community that can be next door or across the way.
It can be a micro farmer like Amy and Verena at Heart Beet Organics on PEI who operate a 2 acre farm using large greenhouses to produce veggies 10 months of the year.
As part of the pattern for all Networked Artisans, they sell direct to customers and create close personal relationships with them. Farmers markets grew by 17% last year. Food will be at the core of this new personal movement. Trust is at the heart of it.
In the UK there are web hubs springing up that make it easier and easier for customers to become part of this.
Are you a knitter? There are 3 million knitters in an online community called Ravelry. Here they compare projects, help each other and sell things to each other. It is a vast tribe of knitters.
Underneath all of this is a new market. This is the market of the people who no longer trust the corporate offering. They know that they lose control and that they are often lied to. This is why food is a wedge. For as people learn how the processed diet is so bad for them AND how they have been misled as to its safety, they seek food that they can trust.
How big is this market?
2.5% of a population are the Innovators who jump in early. In America that is about 8 million people.
13.5% are the Early Adopters - that is about another 40 million.
So nearly 50 million people are ready for this kind of offering. That is a huge market for a small artisan. A market that the Big Corporates cannot reach and compete in any more. They will be excluded over time.
Meanwhile, all the technology that is taking away the jobs in that sector, is helping the New Artisan. You have rock bottom communication costs. You have top flight tools. Want an ecommerce tool - Woo Commerce. Want CRM - Paupress. Want to publish a book - pressbooks. Want make a prototype - 3D printers. Each year, the tools get better and cheaper.
And most importantly as we see in Ravelry and Big Barn, we see the online aggregators getting better. You have an appartment - Airbnb. You make fountain pens - Etsy.
Soon every commnity will have such a site. It will get easier and easier to become part of this.
The future is here now. The empowered person in the empowering network of people who want trust and meaning back in their lives.
So what do you do?
My first book - You Don't Need a Job - explores this shift in detail. If you want to know more abouyt what is going on and how to become part of this, then please give it a whirl.
The online and self publishing world today is such a great space on the web. It reminds me of the joy I had as a newbie blogger back in 2002.
There were about 60,000 bloggers in the world then. This was about the population of the Athens of Socrates. There were the giants, like Doc Searls and Hugh Mcleod, but, as in Athens, we all knew each other. The Agora was small enough. You could "know" everyone. It was such fun because we all struggled to make sense of this new form of communication. The tools were clunky and many would reach out, like Critt Jarvis, and help newbies like myself find out how to put an image into the post.
This is how I am experiencing the self publishing space now.
It too is an Athens with an Agora. The Agora is on Twitter and Facebook and Good Reads. Here we cluster around genres. The one I like the most, that has nothing to do with my own writing, is the Roman fiction genre. The Goddess is Manda Scott. The King is Steven Pressfield. In this genre, the princes are people like Ben Kane, Anthony Riches and Simon Turney. Just as back in 2002, the A list are very generous to the new. They give time and attention and they are very open about their own process and their own work habts and issues. This is a real community.
This is of course just one genre. There are many others. Patti Larsen is a Princess in the teen Witch Genre and is able to publish a book every six weeks. When does she sleep?
Back in 2002 the tools were emerging to make blogging work. There was Blogger itself and there was Dave Winer's Radio Userland. Quickly these tools made it ever easier to post AND to connect. Especially Userland that had RSS at the core and helped us get connected to each other's writing.
Today the connecting tools look like Good Reads and there are new publishing tools like Press Books, dveloped by Hugh McGuire, the Dave Winer of self publishing. Press Books enables the author to organize and lay out an ebook so it looks totally professional. It is like the advent of later Userland that meant that you no longer had to know code to blog. Press Book is based on the Wordpress platform and so is a familiar child of the blogging world.
I think that Self Publishing of books is the next step in "Personal Publishing" that began with blogging. I think that it is the true new long form. For ideal ebooks are not long. For non fiction, less than 150 pages. Better less than 100. There is also a market for the monograph of 30 ages. No more having to pad the book to get to 250 pages in non fiction. For few non fiction books have more than 3 big ideas in them and were only padded to give the sense of value in a old book form.
"30% of the top-selling e-books on Amazon are self-published, beating out the biggest authors from the largest publishing houses in the world – as well as titles from Amazon’s own imprints (which aren’t included in the Indie Top 100).
This roughly tallies with the limited data we do have from Amazon, who recently announced the top-selling Kindle Books of 2013 (January to March). Seven of the Top 20 were self-published (and that’s not counting formerly self-published work, or Amazon imprint books).
Without more detailed numbers from Amazon, it’s hard to know whether these percentages hold true further down the rankings, but looking at the huge number of categories and granular sub-categories in the Kindle Store – which all have their own bestseller lists, filled with self-publishers – I think it’s safe to assume that is the case. If anything, looking at those genre bestseller lists, I would guess that proportion grows.
Now we can start putting the pieces together. When we factor in the respective market share of Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and Kobo), that leads to the following estimate (which might be conservative): self-publishers have captured 25% of the US e-book market."
I read 90% of books on my Kindle now. I have all but given up paper. I am always early but I see no end to this trend. Most books will be read electronically.
As traditional publishers consolidate, it is also even harder to get published conventionally.
What is changing is not books but publishing. As with everything today, we are leaving an institutional world and arriving in a personal world. The author is on her own as is the musician.
But I do see the need for a new kind of micro publisher. She will have the low overhead of her authors. She will link editors, designers and artists to writer. She will teach how to market. She will herself have a large network in the genres that she works in and, having her support, will introduce the new author to the audience. She will be an aggregator of genres. She may even be the new bookshop?
So what to do? Like the well paying job, being published by a nice cozy publisher who markets your book and gives you an advance and takes you to lunch is dying and is only open to best selllers who have proved themselves by self publishing! This is the Shades of Grey Story.
Stop looking for a publisher and get publishing!
It has never been easier to have your book published. Selling books has always been hard. But I suspect that as each of us gets more connected within the genre of our choice, that even this gets easier. I eagerly await the next volume of my favourite authors. I buy on publishing date often. I review and my own network gets added to the authors.
It was the same in the early days of blogging. Mutual respect, mutual help, being kind and having something to say won an audience. With royalties of up to 70% and rock bottom direct costs, you may not get rich but you might make a good living. A living that gets more secure as your network expands.
But it does demand a lot more work than writing!!!!!!
What will life be like in the UK and the US and Canada for our young and old as more and more of us are shut out of the job and the official institutional world?
In Greece, where there is nothing left of the old but a shadow and NO confidence in government, there is a new hope. This excellent video shows how many city slickers are returning to food making in the country and on the Islands. All are asked if they would return to the city if things got better. All say firmly no.
Micro agriculture is surging.
They know now that this life can sustain them and offer them a freedom that they never had before.
I see small early signs of this movement too here in Canada. On PEI there are quite a few new tiny farms that are already viable. I see so much land here in the Eastern Townships with housing that is much cheaper than in town.
I offer more context as to why this is taking place and how you can get ready in my book, You Don't Need a Job
So if the standard view of nutrition - eat less animal fat, eat healthy oils, drink low fat milk and eat more healthy grains - is right - why is this chart the way it is? Surely if we took the nutritionists' advice, we should all be thinner and more healthy now?
Is this because most of us disobeyed and ate more animal fat and red meat and less healthy grains?
Well we did almost stop eating lard. So what fats did take animal fat's place?
Now we see this - we have an answer. It is vegetable oils that have taken over. THIS is the fat that we eat today. We eat hardly any of the "bad" fat that they all go on about. But they still talk abut eating too much fat. So what fat are we eating? Its the fat they recommend!
And grains? What have we replaced all the calories we ate in animal fat with? With grains.
Note that sugar itself has been in decline. What has been on the rise is HFCS. This is in nearly all processed food. And what about soda?
All sodas are up. HFCS replaced sugar in about 1980. Also look at how "diet" soda has taken off. We thought that diet soda would help. And the result was? We got fatter.
And what about milk? Low fat is less fattening right?
So 65% of all milk drunk by kids is 2% or low fat. Is this helping?
So what is wrong with this picture?
We have done all that the nutritionists have asked us to do and we are fatter and more sick than ever.
Time for Nutritionists to think a bit harder. More here
It's hard for us all to give up these ideas. 35 years of the message being pounded into us has made the conventional wisdom the truth. If you are puzzled by why this has not worked, please give my book a shot. You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy offers you a broad manual for how to take charge of your health - I cover diet, your body and your social world. I wrote it for people who now question the whole message of health. Do you wonder about diet? Do you wonder about exercise? Do you even wonder why medicine has not made us well.
If you have these questions, I may offer some new answers.
How are we boomers going to live out our long lives? I worry about this myself a lot. My concern is why I have sold our big house on PEI and moved to a small one here in Quebec near my kids. It is why we have set this house up to run on very low energy costs. It is why we bought in town so that we can walk everywhere if we have to.
I have a tiny pension and the government one too. I do have some savings but I wonder about their safety and again how long they will last.
75% of American nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in savings. Most have no pensions.
One of the biggest exposures that all older people have as they age in becoming chronically ill. What price illness? What price disability?
More than any factor - even energy costs - being chronically ill is the greatest threat that any boomer will have to how we live out these last decades.
This is why I took charge of my health. It is why I urge you to think about taking charge of yours too. For at our age, the forces of Natural Selection - that protect the young so that they can have kids - have abandoned us. We have no protection except what we do for ourselves. Here is more on this vital topic by the expert in aging, Professor Michael Rose.
You can do a lot to reduce your risks of becoming disabled by chronic illness. It is all about living your life as close as possible to our evolutionary fit. Eating what we are evolved to digest. Using our body as it needs to be used - that is being active, sleeping well and getting enough sun. And having a purpose and so a proper social place and connections.
These are all easier to find as we get older and have more time.
At my age, this is my kind of porn and it is also where I am weak and can and do cheat sometimes on my paleo diet.
Last weekend I was away for a party. I fell off the wagon completely. Had half a loaf of French Bread at dinner. A Burger King Burger on the road WITH bun. Ate what was put in front of me all weekend - all totally non paleo and had more Burger King on the way back.
I put on 5 lbs immediately. But worse, I felt like shit. Cramps and generally crummy.
A week later I am nearly back to normal having been very strict. My point is this - apart from acknowleding how hard it is to give up bread etc, it is to wonder at how sensitive my system has become since I have not made wheat and sugar part of my diet.
It takes only a few hours to start to feel "off". When we eat like this all the time, does our feedback mechanism stop? I know that in theory when we feel or see something new, after much repitition the novelty fades. Is this what happened to us when bread etc was the staple of life?
I think that the good news here is that once we have made eating the old way a new thing, then when we fail, we get reminded so hard and fast that this is not good that it is easy to get back on the better path.
If you are thinking about taking charge of your health, consider being a strict paleo dieter for the first 3 months. This will first of all show you a new looking and feeling you. Then it will set you up to react when inevitably, you cheat later.
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