"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.
Pew just show that youth unemployment is 37% in the US. "37% of 18- to 29-year-olds are unemployed or out of the workforce, the highest share among this age group in more than three decades. Research shows that young people who graduate from college in a bad economy typically suffer long-term consequences — with effects on their careers and earnings that linger as long as 15 years.1(See chapter 5 in the full report)"
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.
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 you cannot get a job or you have lost one or you fear that you will lose one: what is your future?
I think it is this. The new economy that is emerging out of the ashes of the Job is a return to the Artisan with a difference. This time the Artisan is embedded in a network that leverages the value.
The new economy will not use the rules of the old but the rules of the network. It will not all be about programmers. But about "Makers" and a lot of what will be made will be food. For a new food system will replace the factory food system too. Here is why I think this to be true
In my book, You Don't Need a Job - I explore this is detail. Here is how I see this new world. It is already here - if you look carefully.
Online Global Connecting Trust Platforms
In 1910, Henry Ford opened a new factory at Highland Park. Here were found all the rules that were to make mass production possible in one place. If you had visited Highland Park in 1912, you would have seen the future in working form.
'Highland Parks' exist today. The new Highland Parks are the online connecting trust platforms. They enable global free scaling. If we look at them carefully, we can see the future.
You can easily see this kind of global online connecting trust platform in the craft sector. Community sites like Etsy and Ravelry are enabling millions of people in the craft and knitting worlds to make a living. Who would have thought that a young mother in a rural village in the UK could make a living selling knitting patterns and wool, but many do now.
Trust is built into these systems, they are not mere shopfronts. They enable the old village market, with all its social aspects, to exist globally. These systems enable the Artisan or Pioneer to link up with the Pragmatic and Nurturing archetypes in a systemic way.
Let’s see how they work in more detail.
The Human “Network Effect”: Mutual Benefit, More Trust and Freedom
Connecting trust platforms are emerging all over the place that give us all the benefit of the network effect. In a true network, all the members get more value as the network grows. While there are transactions, the big payoff is more trust. While each member has to fit into the protocols, the result is more personal freedom.
Lets’s start with growing mutual benefit for all. For instance, many people are putting their apartments up for rent on connecting trust platforms like Airbnb. This way you can get some additional income for your place and I can also find a good place to stay when I travel. I rent an Airbnb place 100 yards from where my son lives in Montreal when I visit him at a third of the cost of a cheap hotel room. The apartment is a real home. The owner has a name and cares what happens. She wins and I win. She reduces the costs of her home, I reduce the costs of my travel and I get to see my grandson more because it costs less and is more convenient. How can a budget hotel compete with this?
It’s all About Trust.
As each of us uses Airbnb, the trust grows. It grows locally between renters and owners who meet each other and get to know each other and it grows system wide. As behaving well becomes the new norm, it enters the social immune system of all parties. It is in everyone’s interest to deal with free riders. As trust grows in total, so does the scaling of the system. It is a positive cycle.
Airbnb makes its money by taxing the total system. The more the system grows, the better all do. So every member including the host is aligned.
The Human Network Effect: The Tighter the Protocols, the More Freedom
The high status in the ‘New World’ will be those who are free of ownership. This brings more personal freedom, for in reality, many of the chains we wear come from our attachment to things and to stuff.
Owning things is a legacy of the ancient age, when your clothes, your horse, and your castle proclaimed your status. What we missed is that the more debt we have and the more we are encumbered by our possessions, the more a slave we become. And by slave I mean a person who has little or no control in their lives. A person who has to fit into the old system.
What Could be More Symbolic of this Attachment than Our Cars?
What we have missed is that we don’t really need a car, we really need the service of a car. The car is perhaps the most important status symbol of the industrial world. In Toronto, it costs $9,000 a year, fully depreciated, to own a car. It costs, on average, another $4,000 to park it. You have to earn $22,000 gross for the privilege. There is, however, a network alternative that is growing in power. Car sharing in Toronto can be for an hour, a week or more.; it is priced by time. You can car share like this.
Even bike-sharing in Montreal and London have become the new normal. Platforms like these will grow up in every part of our lives where we gain a networked cost of the service.
The Human Network Effect: More Innovation
When you participate in a connecting trust platform you will also get progressively smarter. Remember that optimal learning comes from high trust environments that allow for many patterns or experiences to emerge.
While the old industrial model fights for more copyright, the human network offers most ideas for free using the open source model. What this means in practice is that new technology is available to the individual at a very low cost. We all share in the human network effect again.
The best open source systems are rooted in connecting trust platforms that facilitate sharing and that create the network effect for members. Such platforms also create better quality products and services. Open source is a Darwinian process where the good replaces the less good and where thousands work at this process of improvement.
Wordpress is a great example of such a connecting trust platform. The 3D printing world is coalescing around connecting trust platforms. Wikipedia is a connecting trust platform, as are MOOCs. (MOOC’s or Massive Online Open Courses are exploding as universities attempt to find an online alternative to the classroom).
The human network world will be a place where ideas grow more quickly, better and cheaper than in the old machine world. The old will hang onto their desire to control and, in doing so, become progressively more stupid and thus more vulnerable.
The Human Network Effect: It Will Cost Almost Nothing to Operate an Enterprise
You will have access to connecting trust platforms of tools that will enable you to compete directly with large corporations.
Back in 1880, we all owned our own tools. With the advent of industrialization and the mass market, however, tools got bigger and became too costly for the individual. Now technology is making most tools affordable for the individual again. In film, any person can afford an editing suite that only ten years ago would have been the preserve of a studio. Coming soon with 3D printing, it will be possible even to custom make manufactured goods as well. I see the day when even cars are made locally using open source designs and 3D printing.
These tools become even more empowering when they are connected to a platform. Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the costs of most organization are overhead. The most affected are companies with 20 to 50 employees. Most of the costs of running a business can simply go away if you choose to use these new work platforms.
Ideally, your organization should have no central office or offices. With the “Cloud” and the many tools that are supported in the cloud, all your core support processes can be virtual. We are moving quickly from a design where each of us keep our data and our applications locally. With the Cloud, all data and all applications can be shared beyond the node. Soon our local devices will pull down only what we need when we need it. The costs of having great tools and of massive amounts of storage are dropping to close to zero.
This trend for more network value is also true for staffing. Here is a link to the hiring page for Automattic, the organization that runs WordPress. See how they fit this new world and how different it is from an old organization.
In such a world, most of the meetings fade away, as the work is fully open and transparent. People can comment as things come up and much of the friction goes away.
Ideally your organization should only have a tiny core that is fully employed. In reality, all business has its ups and downs and a large, fixed overhead takes away your freedom and pushes you off mission.
Skilled workers can have more than one employer and are therefore safer too.
Employers can hire from the global pool and thus have access to the best people. Workers can choose to live where they want and have the best living choices. We are seeing the beginning of a move away from high cost large cities as a result.
We will no longer have to base a company in a big city, it can be anywhere. As a result the costs of a big city life can be reduced.
I will cover this in much more detail in You Don’t Need an Office.
The Human Network Effect: You Will Need the Banks Much Less
We are seeing a return to the classic rules of credit, where investors have a real connection and a stake in the deal. Connecting trust platforms extend the reach and make this kind of deal easy.
Much of the power of banks, and most of their costs to us, will go away in the network world.
For here the core of the idea of capital will not be financial capital, but social capital. The more trust you have, the bigger the network you have and thus the more you will be financed directly by your customers and other members who share your network.
We see the early evidence of this in the new financing connected trust platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. (My Dummies guide here)
The best deals here are where the borrower has a name and a cause and a product or a service that fits the needs of the members. The borrower, in effect, pre-sells to the market who are tied to her directly.
We see this in the new local food system, where farmers sell direct early in the season to buyers who will take delivery at harvest. This is called community supported agriculture.
We see this in community equity financings where the regulations confine the deal to parties who live in the same place.
Again, these systems are all based on finding trust again.
The Human Network Effect: Will Lower the Costs of Education and Health
Today, higher education and healthcare are the two most expensive services that we buy. Most of these costs will go away. You will also get better outcomes.
The cost of secondary education has grown faster than any other part of life. It has grown even faster, and by more, than healthcare. Student debt is now a bigger weight on the young than the mortgage bubble was on their parents.
Few things keep aspiring young people more in thrall than the burden of university. Few services have declined as much in quality than the learning experience provided by universities.
All this is changing.
In the next 10 years, educating yourself will become a new norm for many people. In education, we see the Khan Academy emerging as paradigm changing force. Many of the leading universities are putting their courses online.
Soon we will see even the ‘course’, with one teacher, shift to a tutorial model where the expert and the students engage in a conversation. This is a model where all learn from the emergent properties of conversation and where it will be our reputation that emerges as our credential.
The academic credential is like the job, an artifact of the industrial system. It is a convenient symbol of attainment.
Already, in the software world, employers hire on reputation. If you live in the Drupal world, you know the social hierarchy. You know who the players are. You know who is good or not. New entrants have to prove themselves in this ecology. As more of us live and work in networks, our reputation will become more important than any CV. It will be when others who are trusted say that you can do the work that you will get the work.
Learning will return to being a personal activity. The long death of machine education will open up a huge opportunity for those that really do want to teach and learn. Reputation and real knowledge will replace the credential. Connecting trust platforms for learning will emerge as they are for business.
It’s the same in health.
Many of us live in big cities because that is where the healthcare services are concentrated. Many of us pay enormous sums to access healthcare. This burden will go away.
A new, networked community health model is emerging where we help each other eat and live in a more healthy way. Much of this is connected to the new food system.
It will be the advent of the right kind of connecting trust platforms that will tip this idea into the new health reality.
I will cover these two areas in much more detail when I release You Don’t Need Medicine to Be Healthy in March and You Don't Need a School to Get an Education in the summer of 2013.
My best advice right now? Stop seeing the job as your future or the lack of a job as a bad thing. You can take charge of your life. Tomorrow, I will post about what you can do to take those first steps toward being free.
My nephew Tristan is just back from a trip to Spain. It's worse there on the ground than we hear on the media. No one can see a way back to the old days. Here are some perspectives. As I read read Tristan's words, I wondered what was coming here. Is this stage part of our own future? What chance do our young have here at home?
"I spoke to one Spaniard on my flight, who in his late 20s, and who said that of the four men in his family, his father, himself and his two brothers, only he had a job. He added that his job was actually in London and that he worked as a waiter in a restaurant in London for 3 weeks per month and then came home for a few days. He said that in his small village of 1,500 people he would be exaggerating if he claimed that 100 people had a job. Of those that had a job, many would work for the police or the army and a large number would work for the government....."
"The question that people in Spain ask themselves is where will the new jobs come from? With jobs there is income, with income there are taxes, with taxes the government can provide services and pay off its interest payments and debt. With no jobs there is nothing."
I think that Spain and Greece are the harbingers what is to come. The final stage of the old economy shuts us all out of the game. I don't see either a reform or a way back.
What future will you choose? Will you chose to stay in the machine world and so increase your investment in it? Have you given up? Or do you choose a different world and are you making this new reality your own?
I see that the signs are that we had better consider choice #3 soon. I see clear signs that more investment in the old world is a very bad idea.
Let's start with Bacon.
I have just got back from a visit to my local farmer's market where I chatted with my pork person about what is going on with pork. She had been in the machine model. She had 350 sows and sold the piglets on in the big system. But her 350 sow operation was too small. Even combined with her cousin with another 250 sows, they were too small. They could make a major expansion, fold or do somethng different.
She chose the radical different. She now has less than 30 sows. She sells direct and locally. Now she makes money rather than loses it all the time. But she too might have to be even more radical. If she is to survive at all and you and I will have any bacon.
Only huge scale works in the machine world. Machine meat depends on corn and soy. Which in turn depend on oil and water. This year's drought has driven up corn prices from $200 a ton to nearly $400. There is talk of corn at $800 a ton if we have drought next year. First of all this means that all the huge operators who have been at the scale demanded by the machine system, are now cooked. They have no moves in this scenario. They cannot find any alternatives at this scale. Their fixed costs are so high that their cash flow cannot survive another year like this. They will have to fold.
My local pork person has a chance though. She has her own market and buyers who are personally connected and she has rock bottom operating costs. She might also be able to hook into new food supplies such as the waste stream from local restaurants and households. This is how pigs always fed. She also has the room to change her breeds to pigs such as Berkshire, who can live outside all winter and also forage better.
She has still choices and room. The Big Pig Operator has none. She also will be still here to take advantage of higher prices. For when all the pigs in the system have been killed, there will be a shortage. Bacon will be scarce.
I see a pattern here with Jobs in large institutions.
Scale is the issue here too. To play at the high end in business you have to be a giant now. With being giant comes giant fixed costs. But the entire enterprise also depends on cheap oil and other cheap inputs. Any disruption to these inputs and the cash flow kills the operation. When you are at that scale, you only can shed labour and hope.
So the smart giants will continue to hire in cheaper markets and replace labour with technology. The well paying jobs in North America and Europe cannot come back. They are gone forever. And when the crisis in inputs takes place, as with corn for meat, then they will have to fail.
What will be left are the small operators like my pork person. There is no safety in a Job Job. There is no safety in the huge organization.
After the crash has settled, will the old system comes back? Will it be smart in an ever more uncertain world with risks attached to water and energy to rebuild a machine system based on the hope of secure key inputs? I doubt it.
Every year that passes, the key inputs to modern life become more fragile. Water, oil, topsoil are all at risk. And so is the underlying human capital. For a while, many seem just lost and incapable. But I also see signs that many are also taking their lives into their own hands and starting, like the pork person, to operate an economic model that works for them.
Smart people are dramatically reducing their own fixed costs and so attachment to the machine system. Just like the Pork Person. They too are making their own stuff and selling it directly. They too are investigating how to use their network to help them do better.
So this then is why the pork person is such an important story. She had to make the choice - scale up - fold - or change radically.
We all have a choice though like the Pork Person. We can stay in the old game and increase our investment in it. We can just give up. Or we can try the new model. We can rely on them or on ourselves.
The stakes are high. Time is short.
I expand on this in my new book - You Don't Need a Job - which I plan to launch next week on Amazon. Watch this space.
Last week, prompted by pressure from my son to be more clear about networks in my upcoming book - You Don't need a Job - You need a Need a Network - some new thoughts pushed their way to the front and I wanted to share them with you in sketch book form.
Please help me get them more clear.
The Network Effect and the Trust Network Effect - There is a difference that is important. In the standard network effect, the value of the network to each member is linked to the growth of the connections. It is transactional. So the more phones that are connected to the network, the more valuable the network is in utility to each member. This is the mechanical approach to networks.
For many people that I see using social media, this is their only goal. Many try and get as many "friends" as possible. If you are a real A lister - this works - you have influence. But for most people, having 7,000 friends on Facebook or Twitter doesn't mean a thing - IF YOU NEED SOMETHING.
I have been working a lot recently using Indiegogo and observing people who seek to raise money using crowd sourcing.
In every case that I have seen so far, the campaigns that worked had activated their core circle of trusted people who themselves had such a circle - who had such a circle and so on. It was this inner circle that did the work. The campaigns that just threw the ask out to the general network, tended to fail. There was no power to the general ask for help.
Why is this? If I have 3,000 friends on facebook - why don't they help me - they say they are committed but they don't act?
I think of my own behaviour. I will only act if a few people that I know well and trust ask me. For the rest, the answer is always no. How small is this group? Maybe 8 and no more that 30+ depending on the context.
This is my real network. I only act on strong ties not weak.
It may extend further on occasion to people who used to be in the inner circle but for whom time has passed and they have moved further out. So an ex close colleague or friend can call out of the blue and I will be ready to act. They remain people who have been trusted, Any of you who have served in the military will know this. When a ex shipmate or buddy calls, you go back immediately to where you used to be in trust.
I am seeing that this inner circle of trust is the "leverage". You have to pay attention to your reputation and to your inner network. To get you have to give. It's all barn building.
A high quality inner network is the goal.
This quality is all based on trust. So if I am right, then the drive for many friends is a waste of time and is based on the simple view of the network. We are not simple, we are complex humans! No Trust - No Commitment or Action.
The New Super Trust Leverage - Trust Platforms - What is new then and what I think is the Highland Park Game Changer - are platforms that create this level of trust among people who have never met!
Airbnb is a good example. Here is a platform that enables you to offer your place for rent to strangers. Etsy is another. Here is a platform that enables you to sell your crafts to strangers. Amazon is enabling a new publishing system for the "small" author. Visa is another. Visa is a platform that enables a retailer to take your money safely.
They key to all of these platforms is that they mediate and maintain high levels of trust. Thus enabling us to DO THINGS with small vendors and to be small vendors on a global scale.
They also do this at a very low cost. No Budget hotel chain can compete with Airbnb in price and value. No storefront with Etsy. No publisher can do what Amazon is doing for the small author. This trust mediation gives both sides of the transaction a deal that is impossible for the Factory model to replicate.
There is also a huge secondary impact. That is, as each of us buys from another in trust platforms, the trust that was at first mediated, becomes real. We tend to go back to the same places on Airbnb because we get to know and like each other. We get in touch with authors who use Kindle and start to have a real relationship with them.
So what I see is that the product of each successful transaction in trust platforms is the exponential increase in trust. This in turn increases the utility for all. The line between provider and consumer becomes blurred. This then is when an author can get crowd funding to help him write the new book! This is when the farmer can pre-sell his crop or meat in the spring for delivery in the fall.
The value is not confined to the connections alone but to the overall trust in the system.
This is the game changer. This is a much much better deal for all than the Highland Park system. It was Highland Park that overthrew the old local and artisan system because it was then a better deal for all. So I think Trust Platforms will overthrow the Highland Park world.
Highland Park was the new factory that Henry Ford opened in 1910 that had all the new features of the Production Line installed. It was the DNA of the process that would be at the heart of all modern institutions. Mass Production killed the small and the local because it could offer a car for much less money than one made by hand by artisans. It also gave a large unskilled work force much more money than a day labourer job could. Both sides of the mass market were created.
This better deal meant that The small and the local got pushed to the fringe. The family farm nearly died. The local paper died. The bakery, dairy, butcher, general store, iron foundry all died. The local banker who knew everyone was no longer needed. The local doctor who had a stake in the health of his community was no longer needed. The local diner that held the community together was no longer needed. All were replaced by Highland Park. And so we ended up Bowling Alone - for as community died, so did Trust.
All became simple transactions.
We all came to depend on a few vast organizations for all that is important for us. Vast organizations that not only do not care for us but work only for their own needs now. For the Highland Park Contract has been broken. Now most of us have the wages of day labourers, if we are lucky! Now most of the products and services are of low quality or worse, hurt us.
We are ready for something better and something better is here.
It's early days. It is maybe the equivalent of 1920. But I see Trust Platforms taking over the role of Highland Parks. They will do this because they are a better system. They offer more value to all. The evolutionary Tipping Point is 20%. Each time the trust platform takes 20% of the gross out of the sector, the Highland Park alternative will fall. 20 employees at Craigslist did this and look what happened to the mass production newspapers.
When 20% of kids choose the Platform rather than school, most of the universities will fold. When 20% of us stop going to the doctor for our chronic illness, how will they and big pharma cope? Coming will be a local food system that is based on trust and real food. When 20% of us buy all our food locally, how will Big Food cope?
Highland Park is trapped by their fixed process costs. With a 20% loss of gross and a trend of lower gross as the network grows, they cannot stand.
Evolution will work quite well and has a good chance of solving what seems to be the impossible world situation in front of us.
Why has modern medicine failed to stop the chronic illness epidemic? My quick answer is this. Modern Medicine has been captured by a simple linear idea of how the world works. It can only deal with local and simple problems. It cannot comprehend complex problems. It keeps trying to use simple tools, a pill based on one pathway that are based in the simple idea of cause and effect.
This all came from early success.
Joseph Lister created a breakthrough in medicine in the 1860's when he discovered that you could prevent infection in major operations by washing your hands and spraying the site with carbolic acid. Of course it took more than 10 years to be accepted but by the 1890's surgery did not mean a high chance of dying from infection.
Lister solved a problem that was simple and local. Keep the wound clean. Keep all that touch the wound clean. Keep the room where you treat the wound clean. Jenner did the same with small pox. Vaccinate with a close relative and you create immunity.
That is progress. But it is also the problem. Ever since then medicine wants the simple answer. It's early success in treating the simple has trained it to see only local cause and effect.
This is why it has failed and can only fail in treating chronic illness. For Chronic Illness is a complex problem brought on by interactions between your ancestry, the food you eat, what you do with your body, how much time you spend outdoors, your social status and how much sleep you have. There is no local cause. There is no one cause. There is only many variables interacting over long periods of time that result in emergence of disease that in turn result in the emergence of more disease.
You become obese, then you might develop Type 2 Diabetes, then heart disease, then eye problems and so on. Or you might get depressed and then get an auto immune disease such as IBS or worse.
Modern medicine treats each new disease as a stand alone. Much of the treatment drives further disease.
Our failure to see the difference between what can be seen as simple and local and what is complex is what is at the root of our failure. Now chronic illness is an epidemic. Every decade in the 20th century it has got worse. Since 1980, the epidemic has accelerated exponentially. Billions of dollars has been spent in "research". The entire medical world has been looking for answers. And they have failed. Why?
I had a flash this weekend as I was doing a final edit for the first book of my series You Don't need a ..." Modern Medicine, like all of our industrial institutions, has a machine design. All are based in a core process that ends in the sale of a product or a procedure.
Modern medicine is a linear world where the pay off is in the sale of a drug, a test, or a procedure such as an operation or a Botox shot. No one gets paid to work with complexity. So no one does.
All of Modern Medicine is focused on finding direct cause and effect pathways that end in a transaction that is based also on a mass market model. So in this world, depression can be "cured" by one pill.
If I am correct - what do you think pile in please - then we cannot expect any results from medicine. Medicine is captured by the fallacy that all linear institutions share of the world being linear and so reducing all interaction to a single payoff - a classroom with a teacher - a newspaper with a journalist - a pill with a doctor.
All the money you raise to go to this research is wasted. All the money we spend in this model is wasted. Investing more in the study of epicycles is not going to make the Ptolemaic system work any better.
So what to do?
Dave Snowden's Cynefin model says it all for me. Modern Medicine lives in the right hand quadrant but our chronic illness lives in the left hand side.
I don't think that the profession of medicine will welcome this insight. After all they all make their money and gain their status by their investment in the fallacy.
But we can help ourselves. For the systemic causes of chronic illness are all rooted in our lifestyle and in our ancestry. While complex they have only 4 quadrants.
Diet - Eat real food - give up all processed food - give up all grains and sugars - don't eat any food that has a chemical in it that you cannot read aloud
Be Active - Don't sit for more than 3 hours a day - Do physical work - be outside for at least an hour a day - get a dog - garden - get a standing desk
Get a Tribe - You will thrive when you have a real place and status in a social group - we are primates - we have to groom and be groomed
Sleep More - Sleep is not just a mechanical time out - it is a vital part of keeping us renewed and well - we need 8 hours a day - have a dark room - light is the enemy - don't watch TV in bed - don't read in bed - don't get stimulated before bed
There is then one variable about how all of this interacts and that is our ancestry. The closer you are to beig a Hunter Gatherer, the worse the outcomes of breaching the evolutionary norms for these quadrants. That is why First Nations People, Polynesians and Scots and Irish do do badly in the chronic illness spectrum.
There are no doctors in this picture are there? There will be a new research world though. A Big Data Crowd Sourced world. Where millions of us will share data about who we are - the ancestry variable and what we are doing and then we will start to see the emergent truth of what works best for you and for me.
Emergence is the new research frontier. But the powers that be will hate that because there is no transactional payoff. There will be no pill. There will be no procedure. There will be only the knowledge that what you and I are eating or doing is working or not for us as individuals.
We will have to find a new way of setting up this kind of research.
Trillions of dollars of cost will go away. There will be a true revolution in health and in human society.
Much more later this fall when I will release "You Don't Need a Doctor" I am still on track to release "You Don't Need a Job" and "You Don't need a Banker" at the end of June.
Here from BBC on how the Greeks are dealing with the collapse of their system:
But the social situation has only worsened, the demonstrators - still incensed - feel ignored and many Greeks are now unrolling a quiet revolution.
Tucked away in a side-street of Marousi, a hilly, green suburb of northern Athens, you come across the local garden initiative.
Marousi's mayor has transformed the land from a derelict dumping ground into small allotments for 40 families battered by the current economic climate.
The sound of raking and digging fills the air.
What, at first glance, may simply look like a healthy hobby is actually a lifeline for people in this community.
Sowing seeds
Argyro Papazoglou and her husband Niko are pensioners. They tell me they worked hard all their lives but have now seen their state pensions drastically reduced.
"We had to do something," Argyro said. The allotment, she explains, provides them with 50% of their food needs, allowing them to make much-needed savings on supermarket bills.
The Marousi allotment project is one of a growing number of examples in Greece where people have pretty much given up asking for help from outside - whether from their national government or the EU.
Instead, they are taking matters in to their own hands and finding ways to help themselves, their neighbours and their local community.
As well as feeding themselves, all the families working on the allotment hand over a chunk of their produce to others in need.
The fruits and vegetables are passed on to what Greeks have dubbed a "social supermarket". It is an idea catching on all over Greece.
Some of these supermarkets are supported by the state but a growing number of private initiatives stack the shelves with goods - from oranges to olive oil to nappies - donated by individuals or companies.
Ray of light
Social supermarkets allow low income families to shop at cut-down prices.
The money they pay is then used to provide the most destitute with goods for free, even helping them with gas and electricity bills.
Greece's Child and Family group supports more than 4,500 families and has a growing army of voluntary aid workers, doctors and dentists.
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