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Musings Report 2019-40 10-5-19 My New Book Is Available to You Today!
You are receiving this email because you are one of the 500+ subscribers/major contributors to www.oftwominds.com.
For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Thank You, Contributors!
Thank you and welcome, new subscriber-patron Louis B., and thank you, P. Murphy, Simons C., and Craig H. for your continuing generous support of my work.
My New Book Is Available to You Today!
We all sense a great deal of uncertainty in the world, financially, socially, politically and environmentally. We sense that Business As Usual (BAU) is no longer working.
In Musings Report #12, I asked: "Is the World Becoming Wealthier or Poorer?" as a way of assessing what's being lost or overlooked even as many of us feel we're getting poorer and pundits promise that artificial intelligence (AI) will make us all rich.
My friend Richard Metzger suggested I expand this into a book, and my new book is the result: Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World.
The book explains why our sense that we're getting poorer is accurate: we are getting poorer in ways that the system doesn't even measure.
The last section offers a framework for our personal response to the unraveling of Business As Usual.
I'm launching the book first to you, my Inner Circle of supporters, at a 40% discount on the digital Kindle edition ($3.95), and 30% on the print edition ($8.95). These discounts are only available through Monday, October 6.
The book is 38,800 words, roughly 90 pages in length.
Here are the first pages of the book, and a summary of the Table of Contents:
Section One: What Is Wealth?
Will you be richer or poorer in the future? Will the world be richer or poorer?
These questions are deceptively simple. Based on conventional financial measures, the answer seems straightforward: yes, you’ll be richer, and so will the world, as consumption, income and wealth all continue trending higher.
But there’s more to wealth than dollars, euros, yen or yuan, or ounces of gold.
The Problem with Measuring Wealth
Many types of wealth can’t be reduced to tidy dollar amounts, and others can’t be measured with conventional financial metrics. As author Daniel Yankelovich observed in 1972 (Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business):
“The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness.
The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.”
This describes the problem with measuring wealth only in monetary units: we disregard or assign arbitrary and misleading numbers to types of societal capital such as clean air and water, and we presume that what can’t be easily measured—intangible capital—isn’t important, when it may actually be more important than whatever can be measured in dollars. And lastly, since we don’t even recognize many forms of intangible capital, they simply don’t exist in our narratives of how the world works.
In other words, our conventional way of measuring wealth is blind - and potentially suicidal.
There’s another problem with conventional measures of wealth: they become powerful incentives to rig statistics in order to generate a politically appealing illusion of financial advancement, even as wealth measured in broader terms may be declining.
(While the markers of wealth vary by culture, the economic measures of gross domestic product (GDP), income, unemployment, etc. and social measures such as child mortality rates, social mobility, etc. are standards applied to all national economies. For the purposes of this discussion, wealth includes all types of capital and well-being, while prosperity considers the distribution of wealth: is a rising tide raising all boats, or is the elite gaining ground while everyone else is losing ground? Even if they’re statistically wealthier than people in other nations, the populace losing ground will feel less prosperous.)
But there’s an even deeper problem with conventional measures of wealth: the way we measure profit, the ultimate incentive to human endeavor, is profoundly flawed. As a result, even our bedrock financial measurements are, in Yankelovich’s term, artificial and misleading.
The goal of this book is to examine all forms of wealth and well-being, and look critically at the conventional financial measures, before answering the question, are we getting richer or poorer?
Factors Contributing to Diminishing Wealth
While conventional measures of wealth such as GDP, income and net worth are lofting ever higher in most nations, by other measures the world is traumatized by staggering losses and rising insecurity.
• Consider nations choking on industrial air pollution. How wealthy are the financially well-off in such nations if they breathe toxic air and can’t drink tap water? Isn’t toxic air and water a form of impoverishment? How much is their financial wealth worth if it can’t provide clean air and water? Social wealth—the results of social structures, values and investments—may well be a more important measure of wealth in terms of well-being than individual financial wealth.
• It’s well-known that pollinating insects are in decline due to human pollution and overuse of pesticides and other chemicals. As insect populations crash, this threatens humanity’s harvests from sources that require pollination by these insects. How is a reduction in food supply not a form of impoverishment? Does this diminishment of global wealth appear on any financial balance sheets? No, because the impact isn’t easily measured, and there are powerful political and financial incentives to ignore anything which might diminish the perceived expansion of prosperity. While food production may still be rising, the increasing fragility of that production is ignored because it calls the narrative of permanently higher yields into question.
• Human overuse of antibiotics in animal husbandry and healthcare is creating superbugs, bacteria that are resistant to all conventional antibiotics. Humanity is in effect breeding new and deadly diseases that may ultimately threaten much of humanity. How is the emergence of untreatable bacterial diseases not a diminishment of global wealth?
To truly measure wealth, we need to focus on all that is not measured by purely financial metrics--social, human, natural and intangible capital.
Measuring Intangible Wealth
On a corporate level, a conventional financial example of intangible capital includes corporate brands and customer loyalty to those brands. The capital is intangible but it has real-world results on sales and profits.
As well, a society’s intangible capital includes, among many other things, cultural heritage and trust in institutions. This capital is intangible but the loss of heritage and trust in institutions has real-world consequences. Greece offers a recent example of a systemic financial crisis leading to a loss of trust in institutions.
A household’s intangible capital includes, among many other things, financial security. If the household wealth is at the whim of volatile financial booms and busts, then how secure is the wealth? Clearly, there can be no sustainable financial security when wealth that balloons up in a bubble vanishes just as quickly in the inevitable bust.
This book will examine wealth in terms of sustainable well-being—health, safety, longevity, security, social mobility, trust, liberty, positive social roles, etc., as well as the conventional financial terms of income and ownership of capital. We will also examine access to wealth extracted from the Earth and its natural systems—energy, fresh water and nutrient-rich foods—because financial wealth that can’t be converted into well-being is of limited value, regardless of its magnitude in financial terms.
Table of Contents:
Section One: What Is Wealth?
Section Two: Will Technology Make Us All Richer?
Section Three: Capital, Labor and Debt
Section Four: Declining Capital in a Traumatized World
Section Five: The Structure of Power
Section Six: New Relationships between Capital, Labor and the Natural World
Section Seven: Where Will Your Capital Flourish?
I feel very fortunate to have such steadfast supporters of my work, and I am grateful beyond words to have this opportunity to explore topics that few others seem to be exploring--all as a result of your support. Thank you.
From Left Field
Could Climate Change Fuel the Rise of Right-wing Nationalism? -- interesting thesis....
NYC housing prices in near 'free fall,' conditions mirror recession era following tax hikes--ruh-roh....
This 57-year-old said ‘screw this’ to San Francisco — and retired to ‘delightful’ Albuquerque, where she slashed her expenses by 70%
Total sales of Florida homes to foreigners down 50% since 2017-- sign of the times...
Lift Weight, Not Too Much, Most of the Days--makes sense....
Brexit: Systematic Risk and a Warning-- worth a read....
WeWork illustrates everything that's wrong with the economy and with our capitalist system-- counterfeit capitalism....
The American Working Man Still Isn’t Working: Our Economic Recovery Has Left Many Behind -- stating the obvious....
Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice: Raw data from a 40-year-old study raises new questions about fats (from 2017, but worth re-reading)
Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites-- that which cannot be spoken....
Stunning Clip Shows Billions In Gold, Cash Hidden In Chinese City Mayor's Secret Basement--if only he'd converted all that gold and cash into bitcoin and kept the account in Singapore....
Corbett Report – The Weaponization of Social Media (video)
"If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency." Donella Meadows
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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