An Inquiry into Human Nature and the Cost of the Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith would be far less popular today were it not for his indolent generalizations about the march of progress in America and his contempt for Asia.  Nearly 240 years later, as we watch as the economies built on his perfunctory musings crumble despite the most impassioned interventions, it is ironic that we still blindly follow our Hobbesian Narcissism to his Echo.  Wealth is Power, we hear in the romantic distance and gaze longingly into the pool of our reflection puzzling over the beauty of our own projection.  Like the woodland nymphs of antiquity, European leaders intervene in Spain this weekend while the U.S. Congress and the sparring presidential campaigns blissfully ignore the 'fiscal cliff' looming at year's end.

In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith writes:

Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase. The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.

It is ironic that this Spring and Summer of European discontent is emanating from economies that have long shunned the very labor celebrated by their economic demigod.  Far more insidious is the abject failure with which U.S. economists and their operators adequately price the cost of our economic dependency built on our militarized extreme of the "command" of labor.  Our "fiscal cliff" is looming larger than all estimates given the fruit borne of our unconsidered resolution to violent control of commodities which, having yet again lurched into military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan from which we will have no quantifiable gain, we will seek to repatriate our soldiers and repurpose our industrial complex only to find that we've built nothing of transferrable value.  While at the end of the Great Wars we were able to forge a civilian manufacturing base, exactly how do you repurpose unwitting mercenaries and nation-building consultants who failed to build what they were handsomely paid to build?  Bringing our soldiers home to unemployment and having austerity hit our defense budget in January leaves the U.S. in the unenviable position of adding violence to austerity.  And we thought that with our wealth came power.  Hobbes didn't see that with violent power comes moral poverty. 

The fallacy of historicism so richly imbued in Smith's view and so warmly embraced by his protégés is built upon a linear regression that suggests that:

Free Natural Resources + Commanded Labor = Colonial Wealth.

Now we clearly don't wish to think of ourselves as still living in the bigotry of colonialist models.  However, as I pointed out in last week's post, the shareholders of Rio Tinto's Bougainville Copper Limited celebrate surrogated cannibalism when they turn a blind eye towards the death of 20,000 people so their company can enforce a mining concession granted by the U.N.-sanctioned colonial administration of Bougainville by Australia!  When Smith's 'command of labor' is taken to the militarized extreme, we find ourselves building an entirely unsustainable order of affairs which is sure to collapse - most probably in the most inelegant of ways.

In my presentation tomorrow (the manuscript will be published in the Proceedings and is available upon request), I will be suggesting that wealth needs to be redefined and liberated from its dominion-based, colonial empowered moral bankruptcy.  In an argument suggesting that sustainability is a function of the ability to enjoy non-destructive utility of matter and energy while preserving as much essential optionality as possible, I propose that:

wealth = utility x retained optionality^∞

where ∞ = ∫ of all users across all value dimensions

When one considers this formula, one can readily see that the greatest wealth is experienced when the maximum benefit can be derived (in number of participants) from the least phase and state alteration (for more on this, take a look at my previous postings on Phase and State Coherence).  And the more value (in terms of integral accounting) dimensions can be simultaneously appreciated by the more participants, the greater the momentary and residual wealth.

In future posts, we will broaden the inquiry into this expansion of Buckminister Fuller's view of wealth which he described as the, "organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."  By liberating this definition from its linearity, one can see that a Common Wealth can emerge, be characterized, and, in application, be the basis for a More Perfect Union.

End of a Gun

You’ve read most of this story hundreds of times before.  In fact, it’s so old that the civilized world has anesthetized itself and sterilized a blight on our civilization with terms like the “Resources Curse” and “Dysfunctional States”.  Countries rich in minerals and energy where poverty – both in economic and social terms – run rampant; where officials are prone to bribery and corruption; and where, when faced with a world turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the people, desperate people turn to violence in a predictable last grasp for something to control.  Blood runs.  Families are destroyed.  And the perpetrators sponsor lavish seminars with their elite friends to discuss the hopelessness of a world filled with savages.  Paradoxically, Rio Tinto’s CEO reportedly has decided to participate in a campaign to “raise awareness” around human trafficking as part of the firm’s London Olympic sponsorship despite the labor abuses, impoverished living conditions, and sex trade affiliated with its mining operations.  Apparently “awareness raising” serves as his copper and gold Pontius basin in which he launders his conscience and that of his investors.  And best of all, in the name of Corporate Social Responsibility, even PAX Global and Praxis Core Stock Fund (funds that prey on the disembodied conscience of uninformed investors) invest in the perpetrators who, according to them are necessary components of investment portfolios despite being part of a “messy and imperfect” compromise.

But you haven’t read THIS story.  Because this story hasn’t been told before.  And if you listen to Australian media (ABC, to be specific), you may have been led to believe that this story could not be told.

In 1967, under the UN-authorized colonial custodianship of Papua New Guinea by the Australian government (jointly liable for the atrocities described herein) and eight years before independence, the Bougainville Copper Agreement was executed granting occupiers the control of one of the world’s largest copper (and other mineral) assets.  This agreement, forced into the “peaceful” independence agreement in 1975, granted a company (now Bougainville Copper Ltd – majority owned by Rio Tinto) rights to 42 years of mining with compulsory 21 year renewals irrespective of any law or Act of the government.  This provision, in a letter to then Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare, was invoked by BCL Chairman Peter Taylor demanding that the Company enjoy renewal of its mining license prior to its expiration at the end of 2011.  Peter was simply reminding Sir Michael Somare of the agreement he had signed with R.W. Ballmer of BCL in 1967.

Bougainville became synonymous with the worst of mining.  Politicians were pitted against their citizens’ interests; clans were variously favored or ignored by the Company leading to bitter enmity and violence; and, in the late 1980s, the situation became intolerable.  A landowner conflict erupted into a war in which the Company was forced to cease its operations and over 20,000 people were abducted, tortured and killed.  And, to add insult to injury, in the fig leaf promoted as a Peace Agreement, the Bougainville government was given the 19% equity ownership once provided the National Government – equity that gave no PNG party any meaningful corporate or economic controls when issued – and an interest that, without production, had negligible value to Bougainville. 

To listen to the international media regarding Bougainville since the conflict in 1989 is to see images of fierce armed fighters, destroyed infrastructure, and destitute living conditions.  To hear BCL speak of the mine and the project is to hear about the need to pacify people for which they’ve exhibited nothing but contempt for 45 years.  The vitriolic propaganda spewing from remote shareholders is only outdone by opportunistic bureaucrats seeking to use their public office to pander to would-be operators who would love to rip new holes in the fabric of the land and its people with just another destructive operation.  To watch the footage from ABC in Australia, you would be advised that this is a place of dysfunction, lawlessness and hopelessness.

But that was before this week.  Because this week, during the consummation of a six week global financial and corporate literacy program that we helped develop and deploy, I had a chance to spend time in Panguna and Arawa and meet the people that have been the object of Australian, UN, and global contempt for decades.  Teaching them about the unconscionable acts that formed the BCA prior to independence and the intolerable supra-national rights granted to a company by a custodial administrator acting under the authority of the UN, we saw hundreds of people realize that those who they were told were “development partners” had in fact been complicit in grave injustices.  Showing them a corporate structure – like so many in Papua New Guinea and around the world – where equity, financing, leasing, taxation, and self-dealing arrangements aid in the misappropriation of assets to the detriment of the people awakened a level of passion unseen since the beginning of this stain on humanity’s record.  And, much to the surprise of the common narrative promoted by remote privateers, the people did not resort to violence.  Rather, they sought more information.  Because, as is always the case, abusers maintain their power by the persistence of ignorance, not by transparency and full exchange of facts.  

And then what happened next was most poignant.  Sitting in the back of the room at a 3 hour session in Arawa was a muscular man with a fatigue hat on his head.  He sat motionless for 3 hours looking at me with piercing eyes.  And before I was finished, he left.  The next morning, my companions said, “Chris Uma wants to meet with you.”  Chris is one of the men who the outside world – the world terrifyingly romanticized by a company that wants another bite at its ill-gotten apple – has been told to fear.  This General of the Mekamui Defense Force – most often pictured with battle-hardened visage and armed with automatic weapons wanted to meet me.  Meeting with Chris was not part of my plan but that’s part of the story.

Chris may very well have the firmest handshake in Papua New Guinea.  He’s muscular, powerful and our first interaction involved the dissolution of every one of the propaganda-laced messages that have been littered around the world by those with something to hide.  “We know that we’ve been lied to for all these years,” he said, “but now finally someone – a white man – has come and told us the truth that we all knew must be out there.”  And after that statement, Chris, many of his men, and our delegation had a long conversation about what true resource development could look like.  Together we went to the “NO GO ZONE” on the road to Panguna.  And when there – a world away from the terror that has been promoted by so many who have so much to hide – we had fun.  We picked flowers and put them into the barrels of the weapons that, in a moment of honest exchange, served no hostile purpose.  We sat together and talked about a future built on mutual respect.  And best of all, we agreed that it was time for the world to see a new picture of Bougainville.  Rather than the story of brokenness, violence, death, and treachery, an image of what happens when people sit together with mutual respect was allowed to emerge.  And then, the man the world has been told to fear; the man who has been enraged by the injustice meted to him and the people living around him; the man who only saw violence as a means to have a voice; that man removed his hat and placed a flower in his hair while the gun barrels that once blocked a hostile world became vases for the flowers of a new day.  

We, the Citizens of the World are better than colonial privateering and plunder.  We are better than violence fueled by willfully perpetuated ignorance.  We are better than standing idly by while corporations – aided by their servant governments – act with complete impunity and derision knowing that half a world away, no one is watching.  Whether it’s in Bougainville or in the Rio Tinto sponsored Olympics in London, it is time for us all to realize that violence is the fruit borne of a Tree of Willful Ignorance and productive futures are harvest from those who plant the Seeds of Knowledge and Mutual Respect.  Do the world a favor.  Send this blog post to as many people as you can.  Repost it so that search engines across the world show another picture of Bougainville.  Not one defined by violence but one that holds the fragile blossom of hope!

Swindling Futurity on a Large Scale

Today, I am accompanying my dear friend and colleague, Mr. David J. Pratt in a lecture at the James Madison Museum (http://www.thejamesmadisonmuseum.org/events).  Our lecture is entitled: ‘Banking on the Future: Madison and the Closure of the First National Bank’.  We expanded on some of these themes.

In a letter to his esteemed philosopher and scholarly friend Mr. John Taylor in 1816, Thomas Jefferson famously stated:

"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

While this sound bite has captured the #OWS crowd with patriotic zealotry, the unquoted sections of the letter of May 28, 1816 are equally or more admonishing of our current state.  And in this week when Wall Street banks had to cover their own “irrational exuberance” in the Facebook IPO bubble, we find a world in which the funding of human enterprises is devoid of consideration as much today as it was 200 years ago.  With JP Morgan unveiling its reckless synthetic illusions which have both helped the bank manufacture illusory profits and distribute dividends at the expense of the publicly-back accountability deferrals and with breathless CNN, Fox, and CNBC commentators fawning over NASDAQ: FB complete with TD Ameritrade screen shots instructing an uneducated populace into the abattoir of opaque speculation, all of Jefferson’s concerns find themselves landing on a modern America and G-8 devoid of any creativity. 

Consider:

“The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth He made for their subsistence, unencumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.”

Jefferson went on to lament that, “Much I apprehend that the golden moment is past for reforming these heresies.” What was the proximate cause of his melancholy?  Setting aside Jefferson’s personal economic proclivities which had frequently pitted his profligate consumption at odds with moneylenders, Jefferson seemed to discern that, given the opportunity to be swindled, the populace, in the main, would be seduced.  Given his profound distrust of Alexander Hamilton’s ‘big government’ impulses – fearing that they would undermine the experiment of the Republic – he reflected that, “the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents.”  Resolute in his opposition to the First Bank of the United States and facing a diminishing pool of allies in his opposition to the expediency-laced formation of the Second Bank of the United States, established in large part to deal with debts from the War of 1812, Jefferson was certain that the adverse consequences of sovereign banks would lead to the undoing of his life’s aspirations.

From 1791 to 1836 – allowing for the nearly 4 year gap between the expiration of the First Bank charter and the promulgation of the Second Bank – furious debate raged over how a relatively new country, filled with industrious people and unquantified resources, would grow.  Two major wars, three financial panics, and untold scandals later, our banking system and associated laws took their first tentative step in to setting the economic stage for the Civil War.  

So, in this week of irrational exuberance ranging from Jamie Dimon’s callous façade regarding the reckless synthetic positions constructed under his leadership at JP Morgan to Mark Zuckerberg’s gravity-defying circus in which the final act will likely involve “audience participation” (think Water for Elephants), I find myself intrigued by the news on the opposite side of the Earth.  

In Mongolia, “anti-investor” legislation – if you read Western pundits – was passed seeking to insure that the nation would be able to participate in the development of its vast metals and energy resources.  Most media outlets have followed the passive-aggressive narrative suggesting that instilling fear of failing foreign investment should play a role in national sovereignty.  Tragically, these fear mongers fail to understand that there are more resource investors in the world than once controlled the market and, if asked to chose between cooperation with nationalists or no access to energy and metals – participating access will prevail.  In New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, facing the electoral consequences of delayed justice, Prime Minister Peter O’Neill finally released $9 million held by the Mineral Resource Development Corporation seeking to placate a rather vocal voice that could swing his political fortunes.  What was conspicuously absent from this transaction was any meaningful participation in Newcrest Mining’s nearly $3 billion gold revenue – close to 20% of which is derived from its Lihir operation.  

During the next few weeks, I will be working with my colleagues in the Pacific to educate a number of communities in an effort to limit the “swindling of futurity”.  It’s as relevant in the U.S. as it is in Papua New Guinea.  Ironically, what’s missing here is what’s missing there.  First, a public sector for the people and by the people.  Second, a population taking the time to be informed.  And finally, recognition that linking productivity to socioeconomic benefit is essential for any economy – regardless of political monikers.  While many of you visit this blog on a recurring basis each weekend, I trust that next week, as I’m in the midst of one of the most significant resource conflict and violence-torn parts of the globe, you take your InvertedAlchemy moment to reflect on this and other posts and share this dialogue with others.  In so doing, we may rekindle the taper Jefferson sought to light and reinvigorate a public accountability much needed in our time.

Fair winds and following seas until next time…

Less Than Zero – Beyond Infinity

please follow the link at the end of this post

Thomas Kuhn, the author of the 1962 controversial treatise, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions opened public discourse (and fierce, often polarized debate and acrimony) around the prevailing historicism-laced linear progressive world view.  Defiant in the face of a Cold War context of manifest destiny in which ‘progress’ was both dogmatic ideology and the battle cry for iconoclasts, his suggestion that revolutions were punctuations (‘paradigm shifts’) created by intellectual dissonance with incumbent systems was heretical and, well, come to think of it, revolutionary.  Most troubling for the purveyors of institutionally coalesced ‘knowledge’ – a.k.a. scientists – was his positing that endless pursuit of anomaly resolution (resolution of error from which expertise is derived and lauded) was unlikely to be the proximate cause for breakthroughs.  Revolution, he suggested, comes from those who challenge assumptions rather than from those who refine precision around consensus.

When we observe the entire incapacitation of the current masters of economy and industry – be they Central Bankers, Finance Ministers, Economists, or Corporate Titans – in their collective inability to assess the direction, duration, and scale of current economic dislocations, we could conclude that the “revolutionary” inflection is upon us.  This inflection, according to Kuhn, would suggest that what will emerge is an “incommensurable” set of methods and metrics heretofore unknown or unperceived.  Applying a modicum of discernment to our present socioeconomic paralysis, one can clearly see that our Pythagorean obsession with the ‘created order’ being essentially a numeric inevitability gives us no escape from our numerically constrained archetypes and memes.

Kuhn’s inquiry, taken together with his critics’ analysis of his work, collectively seem to conspicuously ignore one artifact – NUMBERS.  In all of my blog posts of late, I’ve toiled to admonish us to find the unquestioned assumption upon which the balance of our experience and understanding is poised and, once found, jiggle the fulcrum and see what happens.  Like an engineer balancing a spinning turbine; like a piano tuner seeking perfect pitch; one can apprehend coherence and frictionless function best by willfully introducing dissonance and then tuning it away.  To that end, I would like to propose the following:

The stronger the impulse to enumerate, the greater absence of trust.

Let us explore this for a moment.  Whether for Euclidean metrics to describe; King David’s egoic impulse to count and conscript; Pharaonic and Persian mandates to tax; or Newtonian requirements to codify finitude; the impulse to number bridges the sacred and profane with remarkable consistence throughout much of humanity’s collective expressions.  Through numbers we can limit and delimit; we can compare and contrast; and, under the euphemism called ‘the scientific method’, we can compute divination and regress our world into a series of statistically reproducible dogmatically held postulates.  Challenge the assumption that humanity and its ‘progress’ requires numbers and you’ve entered the Olympian Halls as a mere mortal.

I had the good fortune of sitting with one of the world’s most respected quant traders a few years ago and demonstrated what was possible when you understood market dynamics with intent-based linguistic analysis rather than using the nine degrees of freedom (the statistical principle of the number random vectors in an expression or model prior to the final deterministic completion of a model or set) by which numerical analysis is constrained.  The 25 degrees of freedom afforded by the alphabet and the nearly 1.013 million degrees of freedom afforded by words in global use today far surpasses any numerically constrained model and, when deployed, gives far superior understanding of market dynamics.  However, whether it’s 9, 25, or 1.013 million degrees of freedom by which we enumerate and denominate, we’re still limiting our understanding when we’re constrained by finite symbols (numbers, letters, or words). 

So back to Thomas Kuhn: why is it that neither he, nor Karl Popper (one of his great critics), nor any of his other critics were willing to challenge the concept that, through the applications of numbers, we may have actually extinguished human potential rather than seeing its progress?  After all, some of the greatest puzzles which plague modern self-proclaimed ‘scientists’ is how pre-linguistically recorded civilizations achieved great feats of navigation, architecture, and communication “without numbers” or “without knowing about zero”.  Could it be possible that they achieved these wonders because they didn’t have numbers?

Now all of this becomes quite relevant when we realize that numbers serve a very important role in our social systems and their possible irrelevance (or even the contemplation thereof) can be quite disconcerting.  We’re sure that we need numbers.  But, I would suggest that our “need” for numbers is inversely correlated to our access to and acceptance of TRUST.  Certainty, laws, science, wealth, identity, power, and faith all hinge on numbers and their control.  If one had absolute confidence in the perpetual source of animating energy in the universe – as propagator, transmitter, and consumer in simultaneity – than the need to constrain or describe anything would be rendered obsolete.  It’s when we lack confidence in the undeniable and absolute abundance of universal energy – when we need to harness, control, or lord over the same – that enumeration is perceived as necessary.  And when this shows up in the microcosm of economics and currency, the postulate seems to be reinforced.  My desire for a “stored unit of value” – the consensus definition of money – is a proxy for my inability to TRUST that future performance will be remembered, much less honored.  By introducing the surrogate of an artifact of value storage and exchange, I’m stating that the TRUST between transacting parties is untrustworthy when compared to the confidence in an inanimate consensus artifact.  The artifact, which can only express value when used in a community sharing a consensus illusion is, by definition, a paradox.  Since I don’t trust you, I’ll trust a system in which we share an illusion where a disembodied enumeration instrument has more “faith and confidence” than the individuated actors in the system. 

You want to try something fun?  Try a day without numbers.  See what happens when you show up without metrics or constraints.  See what happens when all you have to deploy in transaction with others is yourself and your TRUST.  Try it and then let me know if this may be the fulcrum of our society’s undoing and the infinite mass through which something essentially new and human might be born.

My dear friend and colleague Richard David Hames published a great companion discussion on his Five Literacies blog at http://fiveliteracies.typepad.com/richard_hames/2012/05/dichotomies.html

A More Perfect (Monetary) Union

I recently had a wonderful correspondence with a dear friend and colleague in which I had written the following two sentences in response to an impassioned inquiry into how to solve a funding need for a truly inspired project.  In response to my letter, these two sentences were described as “dense” and “in need of unpacking”.  As I wrote my response, I realized the applicability of this conversation to many others and so, courtesy of my friend’s valuable criticism, I’m inviting you all into a deeper discussion.

“…I have never encountered anyone who has an ‘abundance of scarcity’ when it comes to accessing money.”

“I have frequently encountered impulses who want to emerge without being defiled by the surrogacy that comes with money.”

Let’s start with the first absolute statement.  Money, in terms of Integral Accounting, is a surrogation-utility of value transfer.  Money, in its agnostic form is neither credit nor debt; neither sovereign nor communal.  Rather it is the manifestation of a consensus promise – explicitly in the form of an artifact – of temporally stored value.  When one states a “lack” or “abundance of scarcity” around accessing money, this can often be discerned as a symptom emblematic of either a detachment from communities of trusted consensus or an obsession with a particular form of artifact.  In a fiat or central bank-linked debt denominated currency system like the one in which we find ourselves, we may perceive scarcity of dollars in a world overflowing with artifacts of temporally stored value. 

The effort required to expand our understanding of Money in an inclusive sense is monumental if we’re looking for dollars, euros, rupees, or yuan.  While I can accept on one level that one may have an abundant scarcity of accessing these sub-class artifacts, I would suggest that the deeper issue is an incapacity to see other value storage units that are present for which no explicit account has been taken.  Too often our self-imposed exile from deeper interaction and engagement comes from our unquestioned assumption that we are compelled to suspend our inquiry when it comes to money because “the system” mandates our acquiescence to its ubiquity.  This is merely the Stockholm Syndrome in which we are confined within, and defenders of, the agency of our captivity.  Worst of all, we heartily defend our dependence on a utility inextricably linked to our enslavement sacrificing even our most deeply held aspirations on the altar of, “I would have, but for…”

My second observation – if you can imagine it – is even more controversial.  Much of the world has seen well-intended actors watch helplessly as great animating impulses whither for the “lack” of money.  What is abundantly ironic in this sociopathic state is our unwillingness to consider that the impulse may not want to be animated by an artifact that could one day destroy its purity.  Many people would classify me as an entrepreneur.  I find that classification repugnant not for its literal illusion to the ring master of an itinerant French circus but rather for the mistaken cavalier personality customarily associated with the moniker.  Among the endeavors of greatest consequence in my over two decades of commercial business, funding neither animated nor validated the efforts I’ve undertaken.  In fact, when I set out to create M•CAM in the mid to late 90s, I knew that the greatest market inefficiency was the unaccounted value for state-sanctioned artifacts of human innovation (the fact that banks took intangible asset liens but could not count them as explicitly valued collateral).  The scale of the commercial banking side of our business alone is conservatively measured in the trillions of dollars!  However, the explicit requirement that our business had was not reckless monetary financing – it was ratable balance sheets.  Inviting investors and financial institutions into a dialogue where they were asked to keep their money but merely lease access to their assets was the most perplexing value proposition they’d ever heard.  And, mind you, this is while dot com madness was frothing a bubble with valuation multiples exceeding 1000 times revenue or more on ludicrous delusions.  Their incredulity notwithstanding, our company persisted for over 14 years and it is only now that people are starting to get that to access the largest banking and conventional capital market in modern history, we don’t need funding!  We need collaborative asset counter-party agreements. 

You see, even at the white hot core of the monetary and banking system, the single largest monetary denominated transaction in history (yes, even bigger than Facebook’s IPO or Apple’s ephemeral valuation) can only occur in an ecosystem where counter-party asset interaction (in Integral Accounting parlance “Custom & Culture”) is the predominant value.  Here’s the rub.  When we take a step back from what we perceive to be indicted for “lack of monetary endorsement or funding”, we may very well be seeing an opportunity to be unconstrained from the limitations imposed by a debt-based currency.  Now many of you will see what I'm describing and contextualize it some paternalistic 60s or 70s communal nostalgia.  This is not the case.  Right now, the biggest economic (monetary) growth engine on the planet realizes that narrow views confusing "currency" with "money" is contrary to its growth.  When China recently entered into its transaction clearing agreements with Japan and India, the value did not accrue to their respective currencies.  Rather, it accrued to the Custom & Culture friction reduction between cross-border businesses.  While the explicit currency clearing agreement uses money, the value of the AGREEMENT is an explicit acknowledgement of Custom & Culture harmonization.  Neither the Japanese nor the Indian agreement explicitly expanded wealth transfer or trade but both did create a common market into which new types of relationships would be possible (saying nothing of their disintermediation of the U.S. dollar dependency). 

Much of what we collectively judge to be impaired by insufficiency in funding is, to the contrary, begging to thrive independent of money’s insidious constrictions.  In their recent Thrive: The Movie, Foster and Kimberly Gamble stated that on their path to documenting narratives of humanity thriving, they kept running into the horror of humanity held hostage by money and its nefarious lords.  My heart breaks when I see a film nominally about ‘thriving’ conclude with a call to abolish the Federal Reserve.  Money isn’t the problem.  The Federal Reserve isn’t the problem.  Heinous, sociopathic corporate titans aren’t the problem.  Large banks aren’t the problem.  The problem is a humanity that elects to actually empower these entities by continuing to participate in the system devoid of willful, more expansive, more imaginative engagement.  I’ve spent time with the people and the corporations of the Gamble’s inquiry.  And, as odd as it sounds, many of the people (yes, there are real people in the upper echelons of the rarified 1%) are enthusiastic when they hear about initiatives to diversify the calcified dependence on an anachronistic debt-laden dollar denominated system.  And while I would not suggest that there is unanimity in the stratosphere of the financial elite with respect to an appetite to abdicate the power they perceive to wield, I have had too many experiences of profound behavioral shifts from those that see an alternative form of engagement explicitly apart from their monetary narrative.

To conclude that every illumined path must eschew all currency artifacts is the stuff of myths and is a luxury of the elite.  But to ascribe to currency a supremacy at the expense of all other temporal value surrogates is to serve oneself Hemlock and begrudge the death.  We must realize that the persistent passion, when not attended with money or any other accounting artifact around which we perceive animating necessity, may still be an impulse worth following.  In one instance, our struggle to provision it may merely be a teacher to allow us to see the world in a new manner.  In another, it may give us the opportunity to discern the true emergent signal clarified from the metaphor we constructed when the impulse first arose.  And in yet another instance, we may be invited to manifest an impulse without defiling it with provisioning that is incompatible with the intended scale, duration, or intent. 

Now don’t you wish I had just stated all of this in two short sentences?  Oh, that’s right, I did.  But I’m thankful that you needed me to unpack the “denseness”.  I hope this helps.

Credentialed Debtors Prison – Again

Apparently I didn’t get a memo about why we’re suddenly supposed to care about student loans and the interest rates thereon.  In stunts that would be the envy of contortionists in Cirque du Soleil, Speaker Boehner and Representative Maloney exchanged ideological barbs over a conflict that is all smoke and no fire.  If you watched in slow motion, you realized that all of the theatrics around the student debt crises assiduously avoided any substantive issues on either side of the aisle and, when the lights come up, We The People will still be addicted to our debt-fueled ‘education’ system that continues to fail every aspiration upon which our expectations ride. 

Now before I get into the point of this post, it’s helpful to point out that H.R. 4628 – the successfully passed, soon to be vetoed bill – logically funds a freeze of Stafford loan interests rates at 3.4% for another few years by repealing funds appropriated for medical prevention and public health.  In short, the idea is that a less healthy version of you will be indebted less the argument goes, I guess.  Now the Senate counterproposal – S. 2343 – logically freezes the rate at 3.4% for the same period but pays for it by taxing individuals in S-corporations earning over $250,000 per year as employees with income or loss.  And in a nod to assuage the OWS contingent, it includes as taxable “professional service business” the fields of health, law, lobbying, engineering, architecture, accounting, actuarial science, performing arts, consulting, athletics, investment advice or management, or brokerage services.  Because, you know that our nation’s fiscal problems are created by all those overpaid accountants and artists.  What?

However, while both H.R. 4628 and S. 2343 are equally diaphanously veiled political wolves in sheep’s clothing in a desperate attempt to indulge respective ideologues on either side of the political spectrum, their existence is prima facie evidence of a failure of EDUCATION; not merely pathetic pandering.  Tragically, this bet to buy electoral allegiance in November will work on enough people that it’s worth the price of admission at the expense of substantive analysis of the education ecosystem.

I had the good fortune to lecture to a soon-to-graduate group of Executive MBA students in Chicago on this blustery weekend.  These individuals (or their corporate sponsors) had respectively deposited about $100,000 each for a degree that will, if the thesis holds, more than pay for itself in the value that they return to their productive lives and affiliated enterprises.  According to the most recent data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, the Masters of Business Administration is the most costly category of Masters level education.  Promoting a post degree income increase ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 one could conclude that business schools are a great investment.  However with an estimated 150,000 graduates emerging with this credential in each of the past several years (a number that inflates with economic downturns), it is evident that this quantitative educational field is suffering from some serious accounting discrepancies.  Recall the recent press surrounding the Graduate Management Admission Council’s reports which suggest that MBA graduates had a median starting salary of $78,820 (not including the 42% who received signing bonuses) while PayScale research reported median starting salaries including bonuses at $61,000.  With the public vilifying Wall Street banks, brokers and other ‘elites’, I find it ironic that at the educational christening of those who are going to strive for being the 1%, the factories from which they’re minted can’t even get their own economic ROI reported in a reliable and transparent fashion.  Their own data discrepancy has an error range in excess of 21%!  If the institutions that teach business and financial leadership cannot adopt standards for transparent accountability, is it any wonder that their alumni go on to fudge economic data and become Goldman Sachs’ eavesdroppers for Galleon?

And this doesn’t address what actually happens in class.  Today I had the privilege of addressing executives – adults who are pursuing their MBA.  The room was filled with passionate, inquiring and heavily invested minds.  I spoke to them about the amoral effectiveness of Integral Accounting appealing not to social responsibility, ‘goodness’, or humanity but rather to self-serving interests and greed.  Pointing out that unconsidered consequences of geopolitical and ethnographic insensitivity actually diminishes corporate returns; that ignorance of indigenous well-being directly harms business continuity; that duration of economic returns is inversely proportional to the degree of callousness in initiating corporate endeavors; I watched a room filled with responses ranging from dismissive apathy to passionate engagement.  And, as with countless similar lectures before, I had impassioned private conversations with another small group of students who struggled mightily in their self-imposed conflict of wanting to practice greater awareness and humanity in the face of corporate behavioral inertia.  You see, even those who want to change, even those who have pursued a top-tier graduate education to enable leadership, stand on the brink of commencement naked against the prevailing incumbency.  

EDUCATION is DEAD would be the Nietzsche-esque conclusion.  He famously concluded that “large states public education will always be mediocre for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is bland.”  He is also attributed with the statement that “to forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.”  Our society has for too long pretended that ‘education’ is a pathway to Labor in a Keynesian paradox.  For as we regress towards a unit-productive mean, we will necessarily move away from the punctuated equilibrium events that unleash inspired, context shifting advances.  If we educate with an eye towards greater labor transaction inefficiency (higher wages), we will ultimately extinguish the very enterprises for whom labor aspires to sell their collective life’s purpose.  It’s time that we gain experiential wisdom rather than conformist ventriloquism.  It is time that we have a Mastery program for Consequential Engagement - an MCE.  For when our knowledge is evident rather than credentialed, than we may once again rise to a More Perfect Union.

Economics of Chocolate Custard

OR: Why "Pay It Forward" is holding us back

Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.

Galileo Galilei


Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.

Professor William Cameron; Dr. Stephen Ross; attributed to Albert Einstein’s chalkboard


We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Werner Heisenberg Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958)

There’s a decent chance that I will miscommunicate to some of you in this posting. Those of you who really love the “feel-good” genre of movies should stop reading right now because this is not meant to be a “feel-good” post. Those of you who are all about incremental human conscious evolution should go on Netflix or Hulu and rent a movie about the triumph of the human spirit and get fired up about cheering on George Bush’s thousand points of light. And for those of you who have given up on humanity entirely, well, don’t read this either because there’s actually some hope and this post will just convince you that I’m naive. For the few of you left, let’s try this on.

Last week’s post discussed the Three Audacities, the third of which will be the bridge into this week’s observation. For those of you who missed it, I’m referring to the Audacity of Transaction. Now, we need a little Werner Heisenberg – yes the one that you all know and love for his Principle – to help us clarify a simple linguistic but complex epistemological distinction; namely, the difference between “Action”, “Transaction”, and “Exchange”. Heisenberg stated that, “the more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum.” This observation, when applied to economics, is rather profound as our current practices and metrics reward a predisposition towards artifact (how much / what kind) rather than the nature of counterparties (transaction) or the thermodynamics of flow (exchange). We’ll revisit this at the end of my story but, here’s what happened.

On Thursday evening four of us went to Rita’s in Knoxville Tennessee a few minutes before their 9pm closing time. A well-dressed couple in their late 50s came in a minute later engrossed in a smile-punctuated conversation. Behind the counter was a young woman who was the personification of enthusiasm. I don’t know whether it was the frozen custard, the ice, or the toppings but she was effervescent.

“What would you like this evening?” she asked with a passion you’d expect from your most sympathetic friend.

“I’ll have chocolate custard in a cup with Reese’s and sprinkles,” one of my companions replied.

“That’s a GREAT choice – well done! Chocolate with Reese’s and sprinkles is fantastic,” she responded.

All the way through the orders, each of us had apparently divined the elixir of karmic bliss based on her sheer admiration for the brilliance of our selections. You couldn’t have been more validated as a human being in that moment than realizing that, for some mysterious reason, your choice of frozen custard had somehow unleashed a confirmation of brilliance and genius heretofore unmanifest.

I reveled in the moment. The couple behind us ordered two chocolate custard dishes – no sprinkles or improvements of any kind – from the other server behind the counter. No praise. No enthusiasm. No brilliance. And when the young man went to ring their order in the register, I told him to put their order on our tab.

“Do you know them?” he inquired coolly.

“No,” I replied.

“Whatever,” was his thoughtful reply as he shuffled off to close the store.

A few seconds later, our server, having completed her service with precision, began ringing up our purchase. I told her to put the couple’s order on ours.

“Do you know them?” she echoed the question that had just been asked by her colleague.

“Nope,” I replied.

“Oh my gosh,” she gushed. “That’s soooo cool! Wow, that’s awesome.”

“Don’t tell them,” I instructed her. “Just let it be their lucky evening.”

“That’s awesome,” she half whispered.

We turned to leave the store and the couple went up to pay.

“It’s already covered,” she said, beaming.

The couple exchanged glances and then looked back at her. “Thank you very much,” they said with incredulity.

Now had the interaction ended precisely at that moment, there would be no blog post. Had it ended there, I would not be about to puzzle the aforementioned people who I advised against reading this blog. In that moment, the celebration of the server’s enthusiasm for life, the anonymous action of creating mysterious goodness, and the expression of gratitude from the recipients of an unknown surprise would have been magical, playful, and what life fully lived is about. But alas, there’s a blog post, in large part, because what followed was: a) the tragedy of Transaction, and b) why our endemic behaviors (even in goodness) are so pathologically incapable of unleashing system level change.

“Don’t thank me,” she shot back, “thank them. They paid for it.”

And then the cancer of our system.

The gentleman, who up until that moment had been engrossed in a delightful celebration of affection for his companion lit by smiling faces, looked at me changing his demeanor.

“Now I suppose I HAVE TO pay it forward or something, right?” he said totally devoid of the joy that had punctuated the small time we shared together.

In this Transaction, the magic of humanity was lost. In truth, our server’s joy may well have been my inspiration for an ACT of joyful human sharing. My decision to pay for the other couple’s custard was not BECAUSE of her – she merely was filled with positive energy that was flowing and, in that environment, more positivism flowed. I was already in a great mood and may have had the impulse to surprise the couple with our without her energy (as this impulse is frequent enough in my life as to suggest that it can emerge without external stimulus). My ACTION was not in response to anything and my admonition to keep the ACTION anonymous was specifically to avert the social corruption that follows the mistaken belief that reciprocity is a necessity. To ACT in the anonymous present is human. To TRANSACT with expectation or as a reflex to external stimulus is socialization.

When the gentleman said, “Thank you,” it was appropriate to express gratitude for the anonymous impulse and, as I was present, had I desired to be involved in a social TRANSACTION, I would have heard it and would have been rewarded. In that moment, an EXCHANGE in an identity-less context would have been another celebrated moment.

It was in the server’s ‘correction’ where the EXCHANGE went off the rails and became an unfortunate TRANSACTION. By implying that his gratitude needed to be directed away from her (remember, I was thrilled with her generous goodness for which I had thanked her too) and replaced to a person who had specifically said, “Don’t tell them,” she reinforced a deep social pathology that it was unfair or inappropriate to accept gratitude perceived to be undeserved. Ironically, her impulse to correct his errant “Thank You” overrode the explicit social agreement of keeping the identify of the ACT opaque. And then, by feeling that a social contract had been foisted upon him so that he would HAVE TO pay it forward, the complete erasure of magic was assured.

Much of what stands between us and what can emerge in our systems is our enslavement to reciprocity and equivalence. Our myths are filled with causality and transaction. Even our hero stories of transcendence are told in transaction-justifying language. ‘Unconditional love’ is celebrated above Love. Generosity is celebrated above acknowledging abundant stewardship. ‘Getting’ or ‘Receiving’ “Credit” is more important than putting positive energy into flow or perpetuating that which we want to see manifest.

Which leads me back to a simple observation. Light (be it a particle, wave or something else) is NOT the property of a photon. To be Light, photons (remember, it’s plural) have to be activated and be willing at any point in time to be both progenitors and propagators of excitation. Otherwise, it’s not Light. No credit. No ego. Just always ready to BE ON. Let there be Light.

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