People in West 4X more likely to make it to age 26, 68X more likely to make it to 76 than in 1600

For me, the most amazing rags to riches story isn't the story of any one individual but is our story in the West. The difference between who we were centuries ago and who we are now is stunning on every measure.

The simplest measure of our progress is probably measured in life span. One early bit of data from London in the early 1600s captured the probability that a person would make it to various ages. It's not just an infant who could so easily die in the first years of life. Anyone subject to an abscessed tooth or bout of diarrhea was vulnerable. The reliance on superstition rather than science was just one of many reasons it was so easy to die: it was a century after this data was collected that England executed its last witch.

The red shows the probability that a person would make it to 6, 26, etc., in London in the early 1600s. The blue shows the probability of making it to those ages in the US in 2008. You were 4X more likely to make it to 26 in this century, 68X more likely to make it to 76.

It's right to be amazed at spacecraft landing on the moon or computers in our pockets that can download more data than we could consume in a million lifetimes. But what's even more impressive are the odds that you can still enjoy such things well into the last half century of your life.

The Right to Mock and Inquisition 2.0

Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte recently resigned from the Edwards Campaign.

The story? Both had written things critical of the Catholic Church in their private blogs. Disparaging perhaps even disgusting. The backlash against them and the Edwards campaign was so vitriolic that they chose to resign. This seems to me a setback in the march of progress.

When JFK ran for president, his religion was an issue. The United States was previously an English colony. It was assumed that we simply would not subordinate beliefs, commerce, or politics to the men in Rome. For decades, centuries probably, the average American could shake his head in amazement at the thought of a pope claiming to be infallible. This country was founded on contentious argument and the silly notion that even the atheist, debt-ridden farmer had an opinion worth hearing. As George Carlin quipped, "I have as much authority as the pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it." Only when Kennedy made it clear that he wouldn't be taking any advice from the pope but would, instead, try to follow the lead of the American people did he win the vote.

Now, today, we have Catholics like Bill O'Reilly who claim to be cultural warriors. What they are really fighting for is the imposition of their religion onto the rest of the citizenry. One reason that these cultural conservatives so violently attacked the two irreverent bloggers is because the success of their campaign rests on getting people to show a reverence towards authorities that have no authority over the American people. What did Peter say to the beggar who fell before him bowing? "Get up. We are men like you." Obviously we engage in odd forms of worship in this country, but it is generally self imposed by giggly teenage girls watching music videos or awed middle-age men watching ESPN.

One of the biggest differences between the West and the Middle East is the ease with which we can mock religious leaders - indeed, the ease with which we can mock leaders of any stripe, whether they are priests, politicians, or Boy Scout troop leaders. We laugh at people like Jon Stewart without realizing that this power to mock is, in many ways, the foundation of the modern world. Yet the option of mocking is showing reverence for even absurd notions; it seems hard to imagine a better way to stifle free thought than to squelch the childish impulse to poke fun. (Think how different Italy's development would have been if Galileo could have mocked the Church instead of submitting to its house arrest. Italy was far ahead of England before this terrible event that effectively shut down science in the Mediterranean. But Galileo showed respect for the church about the time that Henry VIII thumbed his nose at the pope and formed his own church. The result? Italy hosted the Renaissance and Galileo and England hosted the Enlightenment and Isaac Newton - and the Industrial Revolution.)

I don't want to live in a country unable to mock men who dress in fashion that dates from the Roman Empire or the people who take seriously their pronouncements. And yet, it would seem, certain people do lack the freedom to exercise the right to mock without harassment that borders on the criminal. We are effectively saying that only people who have no serious influence on politics can mock and everyone else must show reverence to authorities with no authority. That, it seems, is a serious setback.

Coming Soon to a Cubicle Near You - Revolutionary Ideas About Your Corporation

It's quite delightful to point readers off to a kindred thinker. Jeff Jarvis, fresh from his meeting with the world's elites at Davos, has come to believe that

"Perhaps the most important ‘ding’ moment I had at Davos was that the powerful are, no surprise, one step behind in their understanding of the true significance of the internet: They think it is all about individual action when, in truth, it’s about collective action. And so they don’t yet see that the internet will shift power even more than they realize."
[read it all at http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2007/02/01/davos07-my-big-conclusion/]

You can read my take on this same shift in a few posts at this blog, three of them here:
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2006/12/social-evolution-and-next-corporation.html
and
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/be-rupert-murdoch-for-only-5000.html
and
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/employees-becoming-entrepreneurs.html

Vladimir Dzhuvinov has a blog through which he's working out a model that could effectively disperse power. You can find him at:
http://www.thetransactioncompany.com/

Russell Ackoff is perhaps one of the best known thinkers in management to espouse internal markets (just one of his many profound ideas), something that I'm beginning to believe will be an essential part of the dispersion of power from corporate elites to the common man. You can find information about his ideas at:
http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/

Not all of the corporate transformation talk is actually about transforming the corporation. Pamela Slim has a blog directed towards helping people to escape the cubicle farm - no longer keen to waste her energy helping corporations to transform, she's directly helping the people stuck within them. Even these actions will help to hasten a transformation of the corporation, forcing business to reconsider the role it has defined for its employees. You can find Pam's brilliant "open letter" here:
http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/get_a_life_blog/2006/05/open_letter_to_.html


Such ideas are infectious memes. The ideological immune system of the current social system will first miss these ideas, then mock them, and then point out their flaws. But these ideas will eventually transform society. When you change the dominant institution, you invariably change all of society.

Just think about it. What if this chorus (of often harmonizing, sometimes discordant voices) is right? Maybe it's time to ask yourself what exciting things are possible if power were to disperse outwards from the elites within the corporation as they have previously done within the church, the state, and the bank. And what if this pattern of revolutions, the rise of the individual, has been the pattern of progress throughout the history of Western Civilization? And if you think about that, the meme is already in, already past your defenses. What was it Supreme Court Justice and co-inventor of Pragmatism Oliver Wendell Holmes said? “Man’s mind stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension.”

Employees Becoming Entrepreneurs

If anything has defined the great institutions of Western Civilization, it is their eventual adoption of a model that allows individuals greater freedom and autonomy. We’ve seen this in the church, in the state, and even in financial markets. I suspect that we’re about to see it in the corporation. Popularizing entrepreneurship within corporations will inevitably spill into other sectors as well. As we do, the impact will be a century in which social innovation will become as common as technological innovation has become in the last century. The consequences of this can hardly be imagined.

Entrepreneurs typically start businesses. More broadly, entrepreneurship refers to creating some kind of social construct, institutionalizing a solution to some need that was previously not met or not met as well. There are, in my mind, layers to this. The first guy to start a drive-through hamburger stand was a pioneering entrepreneur; the guys who imitated him were also entrepreneurs, but of a lesser kind; the guys who franchised from those imitators were entrepreneurs as well, but, once again, of an even lesser kind. All accept variability in their income – variability that is ultimately a function of how well they’ve put together an operation that meets market demand. This is in contrast to the employee who accepts little variability in income. Additionally, entrepreneurs almost invariably risk not just their income but their capital. But the lesson of the pioneer with the concept, the imitators who follow, and the franchisees who follow the imitators, points out that there is not simply one level of entrepreneurship.

So let’s look at a traditional company, using an example from 50 years ago. An entrepreneur starts it. One of his acts is to hire employees. If the company does well, those employees have “job security,” but it is only the entrepreneur who sees increase in his wealth because of increases in company equity.

Now, let’s take an example from 7 years ago. An entrepreneur not only starts a business, but he makes his employees a part of it through stock or stock options. Now, if the business increases in value, the employees see their net worth rise as well. They have capital in the game as well as their efforts.

Finally, let’s take an example 5 years from now. A traditional entrepreneur starts a business and in the course of the business has to establish legal, accounting, IT, finance (etc.) infrastructure. He has employees. Once the business is underway, a subset of the employees sees an opportunity to create a new market or to patent a new product.

At this point the company can handle it one of two ways. The traditional way would be for these employees to undertake the project and enjoy whatever rewards the company has – promotions, stock sharing, a bonus.

If the company were more entrepreneurial, the original entrepreneur would see this as an opportunity to become a venture capitalists of sorts. He would potentially finance this new venture and the employees who came up with the inner-business plan might even put some of their own money into the venture. They would now make the same or less than before, they would have invested their own money, they would be using the existing infrastructure for its expertise (the patent attorney, the accountants, the IT guys, etc.). They would be able to focus on developing the product and market (or perhaps only the product, using the existing marketing group).

If the product takes off, the original entrepreneur does really well – better than those venture capitalists who do so well. Why does he do so well? Because he’s not just got a piece of the venture, as a venture capitalist would, but his piece is bigger because he has basically provided these employee-entrepreneurs with an incubator, providing them with the core elements of the business that they might not have the capital, inclination, or expertise to provide.

The employee-entrepreneurs make more money as well. Whether the venture is actually spun off or merely valued by an outside agency, it will have some equity value. As the “entrepreneurs,” the guys who started this venture will have a chunk of this. That chunk they have may actually generate more money for them than what is paid to the CEO.

What this suggests is that the corporation slowly changes over. It started as a bureaucracy that employees you in a function and is beginning to transition into a project-centric company that puts more emphasis on regularly creating new products or services than in maintaining the bureaucracy. Finally, I predict that the evolution will continue until you have a created a place where innovation within the corporation has echoes of innovation within a country. This is possible in part because of the transformation of financial markets – corporations have access to capital and the capital investment tools that previously only banks had.

I see this transformation as a means to stimulate an enormous amount of innovation and equity creation. And, of course, provide more autonomy to the individual. In my mind, the employee would not be required to become an entrepreneur, but would have the opportunity to become one without risking everything to do it.

The Future of Prosperity - When More is Less

A fascinating post at http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/ leads with this:

"Jeff Jarvis is blogging from the Davos world leaders conference, finding (amongst other things) that 53% of Western Europeans think that the next generation will be less prosperous than this one. That's compared to 37% in the US, and just 14% in China."

Why the optimism gap? It could be that the West has an intuitive sense that the model we've been using for more than a century may be appropriate for a place like China but is increasingly less so in the West. China's per capita income is about 5% what it is in Western Europe or the US and Canada, making their perspective very different.

A single scoop of ice cream is nice - two can be fine ... but at some point (3? 6?) the enjoyment turns to nausea. More is nice for those who have little but after a while more becomes less desirable. Many Chinese are only now beginning to enjoy the benefits of prosperity - getting bikes, cars, stereos, and fashionable clothes for the first time. But once they have that, what is the next stage of prosperity? What happens when more is no longer better?

For decades we have confused quantity of goods with quality of life. Given that the prosperity of the last couple of centuries was the equivalent of our first scoop or two of ice cream, this confusion has not been particularly important. But now that we're facing our third or fourth scoop, it is important to make the distinction.

Our economies are still largely geared towards more, towards quantity of goods. Walk through a Costco or a landfill to see how voluminous our appetite for "goods" is. Yet these goods to have are not the only kind of goods. In fact, philosophers distinguish between goods to have and goods to do - considering the goods to do a higher good than those we have. Quality of life is related to goods to have - it is hard to imagine aspiring to a quality of life that didn't include at least some modicum of shelter, clothing, and food - much less those delightful bits of technology like laptops, mp3 players, or cell phones. Yet the marginal utility - the additional joy we get - from more goods (to have) does gradually drop. Eventually, goods (to have) simply do less to increase our quality of life.

Those in the West may well see that we're geared for getting more even as getting more has less and less impact on our quality of life. This may be the reason for the optimism gap between the West and China. Until the West has shifted its economies to more directly go after improvements in quality of life, this sense of pessimism in the West may only get worse.