You have to love the NCAA playoffs. Start with 3 million high school players. Take only 35,000 into college programs. Let only 24,000 play more than a minute or two. Then put 64 teams into a tournament to determine who is the national champion. Eliminate 50% of the contenders in each round. Let one team remain. [Okay. I totally made up the numbers up to the point of 64 teams. This is a blog, not a newspaper. I don't have a research staff.]
My favorite bit is what happens to each team as they exit, the lesson in the primacy of losing. It does not matter how many games a team has won up to this point, the one game that they remember, the one game that defines their season, is the loss.
I wonder if it is true that as societies become more affluent and less subject to actual scarcity (all of these student athletes have enough to eat, to learn, to wear, are healthy, etc.), if manufactured scarcity does not become more important. Because if you think about it, that is what a tournament does - manufacture scarcity.
In order to build character, we need goals that teach us how to handle losing. I say it only tongue in cheek that I love how 63 teams entering the tournament are guaranteed to be "losers." If this makes all but the final team feel a little more apathy, a little more understanding of people who really have lost, then the fact that the tournament produces so many more losers than winners actually serves a purpose.
At least losers have played. That's something.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
Showing posts with label scarcity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scarcity. Show all posts
06 April 2009
23 March 2008
Why Abundance is So Scarce
“If survival of the fittest were truly the basic theme of evolution, then today we should all be microbes.”
- Ludwig von Bertalanffy
There seem to be three big obstacles to abundance: “only” thinking, inability to see the larger whole, and inability to design one’s way out of current scarcity.
Zero sum games are games like the NCAA tournament – one team’s victory comes at the expense of another team’s playoff hopes: for me to win, you must lose. By contrast, in nonzero sum games (more often called variable sum games), the outcome is not fixed. For instance, in a relationship, it is quite possible for a couple to play games that make them both worse, or both better.
This applies to communities as well. Imagine three farmers living in low-lying water. They build paths connecting the three houses. The paths linked together actually block out the water. They now have an enclosed area, a triangle of land, that is shared between them. In such a reality, the sense of ownership is different. Each farmer depends on the other to continue to maintain the path so that all have farm land. [Thanks to my buddy Rick for this example of a sensibility he wishes he could have brought back from his time in Germany to the US.]
In his brilliant book Nonzero, Robert Wright points to nonzero games as the mechanism for progress. If one Northwestern tribe has an abundance of salmon and another has an abundance of furs, cooperation by trade makes both tribes better off, allowing them to be warm and well fed. Trade may well be the simplest example of a nonzero sum game.
As economies become more advanced, they become more characterized as nonzero sum games. People working in an economy more dependent on land, for instance, are more inclined to think zero sum. Such societies are more violent and more given to absolutes. By contrast, people working in an economy more dependent on information and knowledge are more inclined to think nonzero sum. These societies are prone to negotiation and willingness to see things from multiple perspectives.
Inability to see beyond zero sum rules is probably the biggest obstacle to peace and progress. Such a world view is probably best characterized by the phrase, “There is only so much.” As soon as people believe that, the only reasonable thing to do is get yours – at any cost. What is more rarely seen is the possibility of dropping the “only” in this phrase, transforming it from “There is only so much,” to “There is so much.” The first defines a scarcity mentality. The second, an abundance mentality.
There are two things that could destroy a community. A scarcity mentality that leads to in-fighting (this can happen even within companies). An abundance mentality in a community that has not designed its way out a dependence on scarce resources.
“Only” thinking, as in, there is only one way to do things or only one truth that defines things or only one perspective that matters, breeds scarcity. As long as people and communities cling to “only” thinking they will have an abundance of evidence of scarcity.
There does seem to be an impulse towards the progress that depends on greater cooperation – the movement from tribes to city-state and city-states to nation-states for instance. And all this progress seems dependent on seeing a greater whole than exists now, seeing beyond the limits of current boundaries. Abundance, then, seems to rely on a few things: getting beyond “only” thinking, seeing larger wholes, and, as seen with the farmers able to create land out of a swamp or tribes negotiating trade deals, a design competence.
- Ludwig von Bertalanffy
There seem to be three big obstacles to abundance: “only” thinking, inability to see the larger whole, and inability to design one’s way out of current scarcity.
Zero sum games are games like the NCAA tournament – one team’s victory comes at the expense of another team’s playoff hopes: for me to win, you must lose. By contrast, in nonzero sum games (more often called variable sum games), the outcome is not fixed. For instance, in a relationship, it is quite possible for a couple to play games that make them both worse, or both better.
This applies to communities as well. Imagine three farmers living in low-lying water. They build paths connecting the three houses. The paths linked together actually block out the water. They now have an enclosed area, a triangle of land, that is shared between them. In such a reality, the sense of ownership is different. Each farmer depends on the other to continue to maintain the path so that all have farm land. [Thanks to my buddy Rick for this example of a sensibility he wishes he could have brought back from his time in Germany to the US.]
In his brilliant book Nonzero, Robert Wright points to nonzero games as the mechanism for progress. If one Northwestern tribe has an abundance of salmon and another has an abundance of furs, cooperation by trade makes both tribes better off, allowing them to be warm and well fed. Trade may well be the simplest example of a nonzero sum game.
As economies become more advanced, they become more characterized as nonzero sum games. People working in an economy more dependent on land, for instance, are more inclined to think zero sum. Such societies are more violent and more given to absolutes. By contrast, people working in an economy more dependent on information and knowledge are more inclined to think nonzero sum. These societies are prone to negotiation and willingness to see things from multiple perspectives.
Inability to see beyond zero sum rules is probably the biggest obstacle to peace and progress. Such a world view is probably best characterized by the phrase, “There is only so much.” As soon as people believe that, the only reasonable thing to do is get yours – at any cost. What is more rarely seen is the possibility of dropping the “only” in this phrase, transforming it from “There is only so much,” to “There is so much.” The first defines a scarcity mentality. The second, an abundance mentality.
There are two things that could destroy a community. A scarcity mentality that leads to in-fighting (this can happen even within companies). An abundance mentality in a community that has not designed its way out a dependence on scarce resources.
“Only” thinking, as in, there is only one way to do things or only one truth that defines things or only one perspective that matters, breeds scarcity. As long as people and communities cling to “only” thinking they will have an abundance of evidence of scarcity.
There does seem to be an impulse towards the progress that depends on greater cooperation – the movement from tribes to city-state and city-states to nation-states for instance. And all this progress seems dependent on seeing a greater whole than exists now, seeing beyond the limits of current boundaries. Abundance, then, seems to rely on a few things: getting beyond “only” thinking, seeing larger wholes, and, as seen with the farmers able to create land out of a swamp or tribes negotiating trade deals, a design competence.
09 June 2007
The End of Economics
Economics is the study of scarcity. By 2050, in many parts of the world, scarcity may well be transcended. At that point, economics will be history.
In an agricultural economy, there is a very real question of starvation. Subsistence living was reality for the vast majority of the world's population only 1,000 years ago. In Europe, it was not unusual for groups driven mad by starvation in the months leading into harvest to form suicide pacts.
In an industrial economy, food production is less precarious and scarcity typically shifts from food that might feed one to the products that do things like clothe, house, entertain, transport, or inform one. In agricultural economies, the rich are fat and the poor are thin; in developed nations, the poor are fat and the rich are thin. Eating the right amount is a product of will power rather than crop failure.
In an information economy, even a scarcity of goods becomes history as landfills, garages, and closets become increasingly packed and cluttered. What is scarce is the economic freedom that allows one to pursue avenues of engagement, contribution, and meaning that seem pushed to the periphery of life for many focused on making mortgage payments, college loan payments, 401(k) contributions and insurance payments.
Already, G-8 countries are building something new atop the information economy, just as they did with the industrial economy around 1900. An entrepreneurial economy is emerging, an economy in which the roles that are typically ascribed to entrepreneurs are made more popular, more common. The wealth that will be generated in this economy, wealth driven by and driving further advances in resource availability and use (problems of the agricultural economy), manufacturing and distribution (problems of the industrial economy), and problem-solving and design (problems of the information economy), will create abundance inconceivable by most of the current generation.
Humanity will still face problems. The problem of being human, the problems of finding happiness, meaning, engagement, and healthy relationships will all still be with us. But these dramas will be played out free from the fear, or overhang of scarcity. Measures like GDP growth will become as nonessential to the measure of progress as caloric intake has become to the developed nations. We will have moved beyond that.
Before about 1000 - 1300 AD, tradition rather than economics defined society and its changes. Since that time, the West has been transformed by economic forces. By the middle of this century, those of you who are still alive will get to witness the end of economics. Historians will look back to the period before 2050 as a time when humanity was so consumed by fear, scarcity, and competition for goods that our humanity was largely subsumed to Freudian impulses. Once economics has ended, we'll live in a true renaissance, a time when a majority of humanity can properly focus on what it means to be human.
The end of economics. It's just decades away.
In an agricultural economy, there is a very real question of starvation. Subsistence living was reality for the vast majority of the world's population only 1,000 years ago. In Europe, it was not unusual for groups driven mad by starvation in the months leading into harvest to form suicide pacts.
In an industrial economy, food production is less precarious and scarcity typically shifts from food that might feed one to the products that do things like clothe, house, entertain, transport, or inform one. In agricultural economies, the rich are fat and the poor are thin; in developed nations, the poor are fat and the rich are thin. Eating the right amount is a product of will power rather than crop failure.
In an information economy, even a scarcity of goods becomes history as landfills, garages, and closets become increasingly packed and cluttered. What is scarce is the economic freedom that allows one to pursue avenues of engagement, contribution, and meaning that seem pushed to the periphery of life for many focused on making mortgage payments, college loan payments, 401(k) contributions and insurance payments.
Already, G-8 countries are building something new atop the information economy, just as they did with the industrial economy around 1900. An entrepreneurial economy is emerging, an economy in which the roles that are typically ascribed to entrepreneurs are made more popular, more common. The wealth that will be generated in this economy, wealth driven by and driving further advances in resource availability and use (problems of the agricultural economy), manufacturing and distribution (problems of the industrial economy), and problem-solving and design (problems of the information economy), will create abundance inconceivable by most of the current generation.
Humanity will still face problems. The problem of being human, the problems of finding happiness, meaning, engagement, and healthy relationships will all still be with us. But these dramas will be played out free from the fear, or overhang of scarcity. Measures like GDP growth will become as nonessential to the measure of progress as caloric intake has become to the developed nations. We will have moved beyond that.
Before about 1000 - 1300 AD, tradition rather than economics defined society and its changes. Since that time, the West has been transformed by economic forces. By the middle of this century, those of you who are still alive will get to witness the end of economics. Historians will look back to the period before 2050 as a time when humanity was so consumed by fear, scarcity, and competition for goods that our humanity was largely subsumed to Freudian impulses. Once economics has ended, we'll live in a true renaissance, a time when a majority of humanity can properly focus on what it means to be human.
The end of economics. It's just decades away.
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