150 years ago my great grandfather left the family farm and walked to Montreal - where the jobs and the opportunity were. He was early in the powerful trend from rural to urban. Many think that this trend still continues. In the developing world it does. BUT there is a trickle back now that might become as flood as the Job world dies.
Are you going to be one of these new rurals? In this post you will find the profile. You may find yourself!
This is 30 seconds from the heart of downtown.
We look at trend in the context of where I live - in Knowlton in the Eastern Townships in Quebec - we are an hour's drive from Montreal.
The new rurals are not really a retirement group. Nor are they rural folk. They work and they come from the city.
60% of the new rurals used to live in Suburban Montreal
92% lived in an urban setting for a significant part of their lives (19+ years)
They are very well educated - 74% have a university degree
83% of the new rurals are 40 years old or older. 17% are young adults between 25 - 39 years of age
56% are retired or semi retired - 41% still work
Among those who still work 68.3% are self employed
83% of the new rurals migrated to the country because of the attraction of rural life.
Access to the web is another key issue
My great grandfather had to put up with a very poor quality of life when he first arrived in Montreal. His main goal was to find work and opportunity and that only existed in the city.
But today, IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT SKILLS, you can work anywhere and the opportunity depends on your network - that may mot be in your city but all over the world. For instance, my son who lives in Montreal is in Minneapolis this weekend at a conference of his peers. His peers congregate online or at conferences. They do not live next door to him in Montreal. 90% of his peers do not live in Montreal. His work does not anchor him in the city. I think being 33 does - for now!
I live 30 seconds walk from the Marina on a street where the dog and the grandchildren can run around with no fear of being run over.
Now you can make the quality of life the main issue.
For instance, I met a couple on the trail this week. They had just moved from Old Montreal. They told me that they had not had a proper night's sleep in the 5 years in their old place - it was so noisy. They had made the choice to have a better quality of life. Their dog, mine and another all met on the trail that day. For us it is often the dog and not the child that provides the entree to a new relationship. They are musicians.
Most new rural migrants work for themselves. They don't commute to Montreal for work. Though they might go to town for fun.
Check us out. What have you to lose? Your life?
(This data comes from a research paper - Nouvel population dans La Quebec rural - Le cas de la municipalitie regionale de comte (MRC) de Brome- Missisquoi 20018 by Guamond, Lauri, Simard and Myriam)
"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.
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
90 Million Americans are no longer looking for a job
This chart shows labour participation. There is no sign of any change. The job is not coming back.
We are starting to understand why this is not just a "normal" recession. It is structural. A global workforce pushes labour costs down. The shoe maker in Maine competes with the labour pool in China. The lawyer in New York competes with the lawyer in Mumbai. It is also about technology. The lawyer in Mumbai competes with software that offers you and I the simple contract. IBM are developing software that will give you a better diagnosis than your doctor. No one in the job world is safe.
So what to do? My advice is to stop making getting a job or keeping yours the only focus. Don't over invest in getting the credential for the job.
There is another mindset and another world of work out there that is not at risk the way that the job is. It is a world that offers you great freedom and health too.
It is the world of the network and skilled person doing something personal in this network.
It is the first of a series that explores the real new economy that is based on the network. You Don't Need a Banker to Get Credit explores crowd sourcing and the new credit system that relies on your social world too. My latest book, You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy - shows how to take charge of your health. One of the most powerful forces of illness is the loss of control that we get from having a job!
I am just starting on You Don't Need a School to get and Education - I hope you can see the pattern. The network will replace the institution. The job is at the centre of the institution.
School is far less important to our kids future than we think. It is the work we do - or not - before our kids go to school that sets them up for life.
What we do BEFORE they go to school will make all the difference.
This chart - from the research of Hart and Risley - Shows how the learning gap widens over time from the first day of Kindergarten. The children go to the same schools. But by 13, the once tiny gap is very large.
This is because the "Trajectory" has been set before they go to school. The real work of preparing our children to lear and for life happens NOT at school, but at home and is largely done by 6. In fact, as we will see, it is largely done by 3.
We will explore this in later posts. But the main points of the task for all of us as parents are these:
It's all about environment. The space that we set in the family for our children. The more aligned to the child's development and health, the better.
The family culture - Respect
The diet
Medication
Birth and Breast feeding
Touch
Words and Tone
Rules Structure and Autonomy
Allo parenting - how much support from others who are close
The modern workplace compromises the environment like no other negative force. The modern work place is a massive barrier to doing this task well as it drains our energy and separates us as couples and as parents. The issue that the job creates is time and energy. We have neither if we both have a job.
The irony is that more and more young people of parenting age do not have traditional jobs. In my first book You Don't Need a Job - I explore the why's and the hows of this. Not having a job does not mean that you have to be poor, it means that you have control over your time and it means that you are not separated from your partner, home or child.
Over the next few weeks I will explore all of this as I use these posts to create the notes for Book 4 - You Don't Need a Scool to get and Education
There is little doubt that the world of education is changing before our eyes. For most kids, K - 12 is failing to keep their attention. For those that graduate, College is too expensive. For those that graduate from college, there are too few jobs.
The experts are in ferment. Is the answer to double down, test more, focus on the 3 R's and make school more like a business? Or is it to use new social technology and to open it up? Or is it to change the pedagogy? Who will win? What is right? The answers are not clear yet. But parents of young kids today cannot wait for the experts to settle this. They have young who need answers now.
So what can we do? I hope to show you in my next book, You Don't Need a School to get an Education, that there is lot we can do without "School". You don't have to wait until the experts are setted - if they ever will be. You can do some things that you can be sure will help your kids, now!
As parents we can set our kids up for a great life. It's all in our own choice and power. We need no school or instutution to do this for us.
Once, all parents knew how to do this but, since we have let institutions take over our lives, we have forgotten how. Once we put the job up as the centre of our lives, we also lost the time and energy to do this.
But now at least 50% of European young adults don't have a job and will not get one. At least 35% of North American young adults either cannot get a job or are underemployed. Many potential new parents are in a great place to take back their power. Many grand parents are in a great place to help.
Many of us are learning that they can make a good living and NOT have a job. Many are finding that they can get back time in their lives. Time that is essential to raising young children. My first book - You Dont need a Job - shows you what is going on.
All we have to do is to remember what all parents used to know. What we do and how we are in the first 3 years of life sets up children for their lifetime.
Here is why.
If you want a satellite to get into orbit, you have to get the "Initial Conditions" right. Too fast and it escapes into space for ever. Too slow and it falls back to Earth.
All systems are like this. They are determined by Initial Conditions.
Humans have such a trajectory. We too are very sensitive to the kind of start we get in life. This start powers all the rest of our life. It drives our ability to learn, to cope, to be socially able and even our health. Here is what it looks like. It's a trajectory:
This is what this means. At 2 years old, we see two children. One can understand 300 words. The other can understand 150. Not much of a difference. But now look out over the next 15 years.
The 150 word child gets stuck and does not develop. This has nothing to do with school. The child is challenged before they arrive in school. Every grade 1 teacher knows what I am talking about. They can spot these kids in a few days. These children find learning very hard. They find concentrating very hard. They find behaving socially very hard.
It is exceptionally difficult to change this trajectory. A hard pressed teacher with 30 kids in her class has not much of a chance. Most of these kids get stuck at a grade 5 level. You don't believe me?
This chart shows the growth in investment in school. The flat black line shows literacy. School is not working for most kids.
This is what it means for society. Most Americans struggle with comprehending the meaning of the written word. I only have data for the US but I doubt that if there were stats for British or Canadian kids that they would be any diferent. School as it is does not help most children.
But!
The 300 word kid cannot be stopped. All this is easy for them. No matter how good or bad the school, they are going to develop well and fast. By grade 10, they are at a developmental stage of a 2nd year university student.
School has nothing to do with these two diverging outcomes. What sets these different tracks is all set at home. Set at home by parents. It is what we do as parents that sets the initial conditions. The critical period is from the moment we decide to have a child until they are 3.
Here is another look at the trajectory for development that I hope will show you more clearly what happens.
Here is the master chart for human development. It is very much like finding the right "speed" to find orbit. The key curve to get right is the curve at point 3. The period from 0 to 1 to 1 and to 3 is the critical phase.
No matter what school is like. No matter what the world is like. If you get this phase right, the your child will be able to cope with anything that the world puts in front of him or her.
This is why your child's future is in your hands. For you are the key influence in this period.
Over the next few weeks, we will look at all the factors in the early years that will help any parent have a great chance of giving the child the best possible start in life. It's all going to be about the environment that you create.
We will look at what you can do before you get pregnant. What is the ideal frame of mind and body. We will look at when you are carrying the baby. We will look at the first three years after the baby is born. We will take a holistic view. We will look at your relationships, state of mind, what you eat and do. We will look at the culture that you set at home. We will look at how you interact with the baby in every way.
I offer this up, not as the best dad ever. I was far from that. But as someone who has made a study of the best science on the Early Years and on Human Development. There is a growing field here that is like the field of Human Health that I discuss in book 3 - You Don't need Medicine to Get Healthy. This field of human development also looks back at evolution and at how we are designed to give our children the best start in life. As we explore this on the blog, I will introduce you to the many people who know far more than me and who can help you more than I can.
In 1830 if you lived in America on the frontier you lived a very different life to the one that you had left back in Europe. But to get to this new life, you had to get on a ship, get to St Louis and then take a wagon train out west.
There were two worlds The Culture of the Old world and the Culture of the Frontier
Today this split in culture is back. The difference is that there is no ocean or continent to cross. Today the ocean is in our minds.
The frontier is here now. Enough people now live the new or aspire to it to make it a future that most of us might take in time. Remember, after the railway was built in the 1860's 50 million people left the old world for the new in the next 50 years. Once the tipping point is reached a better offer for life will beat the lesser.
Here are 2 short descriptions of the Old World and the New. Just to make it honest, I used to live in the old and thought it was the only way - so I am not being judgemental here.
The Old World
In the old country, you have a job or see the job as central. So you accept that you work away from the home for an organization. You have a lot of debt. You have student debt, car debt. You don't have a mortgage because your student debt prevents this. You rent. You live in a big and expensive city because this is where the jobs are. You have to put your kids into school because you work outside the home. You both commute for 2 hours each a day.
Your kids are 10 and 12. They have no idea what they want to do later in life. They do nothing around the house. The boy doesn't read very well and has had behaviour problems at school where is is profoundly bored. You have been advised to put him on Ritalin but have refused. When they are 18, it is anticipated that a 4 year residential BA will end up with $100,000 of debt. Unemployment for 18 - 35 year olds is now 23% and is expected to climb to 50% in 10 years as technology and globalization continues to kill jobs.You expect that the education system will be there but you don't know how you will pay for it.
You expect the system to be there but you don't do anything to take care of yours self. You rely on processed food because you don't know how to cook well and you don't have the time or energy to prepare meals from scratch. You are both over weight and pre-diabetic. Your kids are both over weight. You don't sit down together to share any meals. There is not a single member of your family that lives closer than 1,000 miles away. You expect the system to look after you when you are old.
In the last 2 winter's there have been terrible storms and you have lost power for weeks. You are pissed off with the the mayor and the utility. There have been layoffs in both your workplaces and you worry about your jobs. You have have no savings. Your debt makes that impossible.
The New World
In new you don't have a job and nor do you seek one. You work at home and you make things. You are a coder. Your spouse works in a co working space near your home. She is a personal coach. You are both artisans with deep skills. You are deeply connected to your customers on a personal basis. You have no debt. You have a small home. You own in a small community where housing is affordable. You educate your kids at home and with several other families close by. You don't have a home classroom.
They learn by getting engaged by what is going on. You read to them all the time as small kids and they both learned to read well by 6. By 10 it is clear what they are really interested in. Your son is mad for drones and you have built several together and he has been using the CAD side of you Mac to drive the 3D printer to make many of the parts. Your skill as a programmer has been invaluable. He watched you work ever since he was an infant. You had him on your knee coding as he learned to read. He is selling them now to a few adults and has a small business of his own. Your daughter is fascinated by carpentry. This is something that you know nothing about but your neighbour is a carpenter and she got the bug by hanging out with him. She is his apprentice and works full time as such. She can do that at 12 because she does not have to attend school. All the math that she needs comes via her work. Your 10 year old has to read at a college level to learn more about design and has the math skills of a math grad. They have never had a lesson.
You eat real food and take care of your health. All at home cook. Your wife's mother lives with you and she does a huge amount of work in the garden where you grow most of your veggies and raise chickens. All the kids have jobs to do in the family household economy. Your extended family have been moving ever closer to you in the last few years and you can now see them all the time. Your dad and mum live very close to you and host a large family meal every 2 weeks. You have a very small car and the kids bike around town.The family own a van and a truck and many of the larger tools that you all need jointly.
All the family have good health. They eat well and have a complete social world. They all use their bodies. They all have a lot of time outside from work to just hang out. The surplus cash flow goes into making the family more resilient. Last year you all built a large green house on your brother's place. The larger family share this. This year the family will buy a large wood splitter so that all the wood you use for heating can be bought in 8 foot lengths and cut up and split by you all. The family supply the labour. In large items like this, the family share in the cash costs. As a result the family are not exposed to the global food system and only in a small way to oil costs. The family use almost nothing from the state and are largely self sufficient.
So which world will be best for you over the next 50 years?
I have been posting a lot recently about how networks work. My new book is all about why and how the Network model will take down all those that organize traditionally. So what to do?
You have a traditional organization. Can you change to become a network and so survive the revolution? I think in most cases the answer is no. But with the right leadership - FROM THE TOP - you can do it. This post is about the context of one organization that had had the right leadership and has made this transition.
TV as we know it is the typical traditional organization. You watch what we think is good when we choose and all you do is watch. Appointment media like that is dying. But The Nine Network of Public Media in St Louis is no longer that kind of station. Yes they still do TV but the choice is massive and you can watch it all on your terms and you can also participate. But this is still nothing.
The Nine Network is much more than a TV station that has taken advantage of the digital realm. It is doing more.
First of all it is becoming the local community convenor to deal with important local issues. It started by helping people tell their own stories such as what they did in the war. The breakthrough project was when Nine took on ther Mortgage Crisis at the outset. It called the meeting of all who could help and created the space to help the community help itself. This was so successful that CPB funded a national program where stations, radio and TV, in the worst hit parts of America became the local facilitator of the community. Now Nine is involved in Education and Healthcare. Many other stations see this role as Connector as their future too. Here is Ideastream in Cleveland - another leader.
Secondly it is putting the public into Public TV. It has a school that teaches the public how to tell stories on video.
Thirdly it is connected to the St Louis Public Radio station. St Louis Public Radio. The two stations are physically linked in adajacent buildings and are building a Commons between them to enhance their role as Connectors of the Community.
Fourthly, 9 hosts the local online newspaper - The Beacon - that is full of journalists who could no longer work for a paper!
These local relationships are not one organization but are a real network. They are separate but together. They share resources. They look after each other.
So what was the context for this change? First of all there was the leadership issue. Jack Galamiche at then KETC was a man who saw what had to be done. Tim Eby, who had been chair of NPR, was the new leader at St Louis Public radio. He had sponosored the project that had all the stations in the NPR system look into the digital future. It is my experience that without the right kind of leadership at the top, traditional organizations have no chance.
The second was having the right kind of context. What would success look like? What could be the goal and so what then was the work to get there.
This was the context that we worked from. I think that any traditional organization can look at these slides and find a goal and so a path for themselves - provided that the leader wanted to do this AND could bring their board along too.
You will see that at the heart of this work is a shift in culture. There is no harder work. You will also see how, if you can agree to make this shift, how you then schedule work to help you make the transition. For we cannot change our culture by an act of will. We can only acquire new habits. We have to work our way into the new.
So, if networks are the future, how do we set them up? We are so used to using engineering that we can default into using engineering rules.
Real networks ALL "Emerge".
This sounds weird but we actually have a lot of experience in how to do this. It's called Gardening! It's also called Parenting. When we apply machine principles to gardening we get monoculture agriculture. When we apply machine principles to parenting, we get badly adjusted children.
When we apply the Rule #4 we get life and the full potential of the network, the garden and our kids.
In this part of my book, You Don't Need a Job, we look at how the rules of Emergence work. They apply of course not only to your work network but also to how you parent. I will show you both.
This is a perennial garden. Once the gardener has set the conditions up correctly, the garden does all the work.
This process is called emergence. It is as different from engineering as dynamite is from the atom bomb. Engineering uses mechanics, emergence uses physics. It is in this process that the quantum improvement in performance between an engineering culture and a network culture will be seen.
The challenge for us today is to find out how to set the conditions for emergence to occur. The answer is to be found in the concept of initial conditions.
All natural things, living or not, develop when they find the ideal starting conditions. Hurricanes don’t happen in January. They happen between June and November when the initial conditions of temperature and water are right. Without these conditions, a hurricane will not develop to its full potential, but with the right conditions it will. It will do this all by itself.
Human social networks are the same they emerge when the optimal conditions for development take place.
We can start to explore this idea best by looking at how our children develop, or do not, to their full potential. If we can understand this, then we can understand how to set up the ideal initial conditions for a human social network. For we know that in nature all development is fractal. What happens at one scale happens at all scales.
This figure shows us what it looks like when a child acquires language. What we see is a pattern that becomes denser and denser as more and more connections are added. Then, at some point, the new system takes off and has a life all of its own. This is emergence. Emergence is how life itself begins. At some point of connection inside an ideal environment, life itself emerges. This insight makes me wonder what will happen after 100 years of humans being connected as we are today? Is this how language itself emerged after millions of years of people sitting around a campfire?
We know now what the optimal initial conditions are for human language and development so we can apply this knowledge to human networks. (A full explanation of this process is here if you wish to explore this.)
To initiate the process of human development, children need to be touched a lot. They need to hear a lot of words. Infants also need to hear these words in the right social and cultural context. The right context is in a firm, safe and loving family culture.
As you will see, initial conditions are also time sensitive. The window for development is largely closed for a child by 3.
This is what success or failure looks like.
We can see two separate trajectories that diverge over time to produce a significant difference. At 2 years of age one child can understand 300 words and the other 150. Not much of a difference. However, look at the trajectory. In the case of the 300 word child, by 15, she will be at 2nd year university level. The 150 word child will be stuck at grade 5.
The difference looks tiny, but that is the key to understanding initial conditions. Tiny differences at the outset extend over time to huge differences. Trajectories have a power of their own.
Willms’ and Hart and Risley’s work shows us that family culture is how initial conditions are set for every human being’s development. The optimal culture sets the maximum amount of trust.
Authoritative – Parents who establish a warm and nurturing relationship with their children, but set firm limits for their behaviour.
Authoritarian – Parents who are highly controlling, requiring their children to meet an absolute set of standards.
Permissive – Parents who are overly nurturing and who provide few standards for behaviour and are extremely tolerant of misbehaviour.
The Willms research informs us that the poorest learning and development outcomes are found in families that have authoritarian and permissive cultures. Most machine organizations have these kinds of cultures too.
I think it follows that human culture is the driver for human social networks, for trust is the critical element.
In summary, human development is tied to initial conditions that promote trust and then exposes the child to the maximum amount of the right patterns. If these conditions are applied in a time sensitive manner, then emergence will take place. If done very well, the trajectory will take the person to her full potential.
What works for you and me as individuals, will work for groups.
For this is how natural systems work. They are fractal, they are the same at all scales. The brain and the universe share the same organizational pattern.
However, that is not all we need to know. If we were planting a perennial garden we would also need to know what kind of mix of plants is best. For we know that, even with the best growing conditions, a garden that reaches its potential must have the kind of reinforcing diversity that will drive good health and resilience.
There must be a healthy iteration between the elements in the mix.
In a later post we will talk about the "protocols" that all networks have in order to connect and have great complexity and so life. The good news is that no real network has more than 4 of these. The complexity comes from their iteration. So they are in fact easier to set up than a traditional organization that depends on thousands of rules.
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