TED – Mutual Responsibility

August 29, 2014July 30, 2014

How Collaboration Has Made the Human Brain Bigger

How Collaboration Has Made the Brain Bigger

In this article “Collaboration Makes Our Brains Bigger,” Gaurav Bhalla references a TED talk by Dan Gilbert to mention how the human brain has grown significantly in size over the last 200,000 years due to its power of imagination.

Moreover, the development of the kind of imagination was mentioned as well, i.e. that

We moved from imagining, “How big is the universe?” to imagining, “How do we work together to build a spaceship to get to the moon?”

So, collaboration seems to be one of the main reasons we developed imagination. In other words, we became Homo Sapiens because we had a better brain that could imagine how to collaborate, and because we could imagine how to collaborate we became better Homo Sapiens. And the more we learn to collaborate — and that includes the list of things like co-creation, value creation, open innovation, collaborative innovation, collective innovation, and continuous innovation — the more our brains will grow.

Image: "Education" by Sean MacEntee.

July 10, 2014July 8, 2014

What Is Flow Experience? Can We Help Each Other Experience Flow More Often Than What Is Described Here?

What Is a Flow Experience? How Can We Help Each Other Achieve a Flow Experience More Often?

When you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, you do not have enough attention left over to monitor how your body feels, or your problems at home.

You cannot feel even that you’re hungry or tired.

Your body disappears, your identity disappears from your consciousness, because you don’t have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that you exist.

So existence is temporarily suspended.

This automatic, spontaneous process that is being described can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you cannot be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field.

Whether it is mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it is better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out.

This is the flow experience, and it happens in different realms.

–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the TED Talk “Flow, The Secret to Happiness.” All quotes in this post are from this TED talk, which can be viewed also at the bottom of this post.

Flow Experience for a Poet

For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. This poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky — a very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity, when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked.

Flow Experience for an Athlete

But it happens in other activities. For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. You don’t think; it goes automatically, if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth.

Flow Experience for CEOs

It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called “Good Business,” where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can’t have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job. Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. She is the founder of Body Shop, the natural cosmetics king. It’s kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you’re working.

This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was at that time starting out Sony without any money, without a product — they didn’t have a product, they didn’t have anything, but they had an idea. And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart’s content. I couldn’t improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace.

Flow Experience during Work

Now, when we do studies — we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people — from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds — who enjoy their work. And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.

7 Conditions of Flow Experience

1. Completely involved in what you are doing – focused, concentrated.

2. A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.

3. Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well you are doing.

4. Knowing that the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task.

5. A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.

6. Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes.

7. Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes it own reward.

What Do You Think?

What could help people have a flow experience regardless of their profession or skill?

Is there a common flow experience we could all help each other achieve, and thus experience this exalted state much more often, and not in connection to our profession or skills? If there is, how could we achieve that?

Please write your answers in the comments below!

Watch Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Flow, The Secret to Happiness [TED Talk] »

Image: "The Flow of Water" by "John T. Howard."

January 16, 2013

Israel & Iran: A Love Story? [TED Talk]

They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So… now it’s communication. It’s a two-way story. It’s Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other.”

– Ronny Edry, Israeli graphic designer

Given the contentious nature of relations that exist between Israel and Iran, it is a wonder that one man, Ronny Edry, could start a whole new dialogue between the peoples, simply by creating one poster on Facebook. That poster [the image above] said:

Iranians, we will never bomb your country, We [heart] You.”

The following quotes are from Edry’s TED talk. In it he details how that poster led to many more posters, conversations, and the revelation of love between Israelis, Iranians, and many others:

On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted. A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we’re going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. And the client was saying, no, it’s 10,000 a day.

(“10,000 missiles”) This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. It’s like every year it’s the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. It’s like, if we don’t act now, it’s too late forever, for 10 years now.”

So I come to the computer and I start looking on (after posting his initial poster to Facebook), and suddenly I see many people talking to me, most of them I don’t know, and a few of them from Iran, which is — What? Because you have to understand, in Israel we don’t talk with people from Iran. We don’t know people from Iran. It’s like, on Facebook, you have friends only from — it’s like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook. And now people from Iran are talking to me.

So I start answering this girl, and she’s telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don’t have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they’re all sitting in the living room crying. So I’m like, whoa. I ask my wife to come, and I tell her, you have to see that. People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry. And everybody’s crying now.

So I don’t know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I’d just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that’s how it started.”

So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster. And that’s how it started. And that’s how, really, it’s unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it. It’s not just one dude making one poster, it’s — we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, ‘Make me a poster. Post it. Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too.’ It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense. I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn’t have the time. It was a huge amount of pictures. So for a few days, that’s how my living room was.”

The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters. They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter) Crazy, crazy. So you can see they are still shy, they don’t want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So. And now it’s communication. It’s a two-way story. It’s Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other.”

November 30, 2012November 30, 2012

Connected, But Alone [Ted Talk]

“I’m still excited by technology,“ says Sherry Turkle in her TED talk, “but I believe, and I’m here to make the case, that we’re letting it take us places that we don’t want to go.” Turkle is a psychologist and author most recently of the book, Alone Together.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile communication and I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I’ve found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they’ve quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.

So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you’re texting… Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents’ full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention.”

The Allure Of Connecting When You Want, How You Want, With Whom You Want

Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we’re setting ourselves up for trouble — trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We’re getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere — connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. So you want to go to that board meeting, but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you. And some people think that’s a good thing. But you can end up hiding from each other, even as we’re all constantly connected to each other.”

Across the generations, I see that people can’t get enough of each other, if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

Over and over I hear, “I would rather text than talk.” And what I’m seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they’ve become almost willing to dispense with people altogether.”

The 3 Fantasies Of Connections Based On Technology

These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies. One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, that we will always be heard; and three, that we will never have to be alone. And that third idea, that we will never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches. Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, they reach for a device. Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light. Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. And so people try to solve it by connecting. But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses, but it doesn’t solve, an underlying problem. But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It’s shaping a new way of being.

The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am. We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we’re having them. So before it was: I have a feeling, I want to make a call. Now it’s: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. The problem with this new regime of “I share therefore I am” is that, if we don’t have connection, we don’t feel like ourselves. We almost don’t feel ourselves. So what do we do? We connect more and more. But in the process, we set ourselves up to be isolated.

How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we’re not able to appreciate who they are. It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we’re at risk, because actually it’s the opposite that’s true. If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they’re only going to know how to be lonely.

So, How Can Better Relationships Be Formed?

I see some first steps. Start thinking of solitude as a good thing. Make room for it. Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children. Create sacred spaces at home — the kitchen, the dining room — and reclaim them for conversation. Do the same thing at work. At work, we’re so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to think, we don’t have time to talk, about the things that really matter. Change that. Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. Because it’s when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other.

Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection — how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves — but it’s also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction. I’m optimistic. We have everything we need to start. We have each other. And we have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability. That we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler.

So in my work, I hear that life is hard, relationships are filled with risk. And then there’s technology — simpler, hopeful, optimistic, ever-young. It’s like calling in the cavalry. An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars, you can “Finally, love your friends love your body, love your life, online and with avatars.” We’re drawn to virtual romance, to computer games that seem like worlds, to the idea that robots, robots, will someday be our true companions. We spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends.

But our fantasies of substitution have cost us. Now we all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet. They need us. Let’s talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love.”

October 21, 2012October 21, 2012

Time To Act: Continued Constant Economic Growth Will Lead To Collapse

The earth is full. It’s full of us, full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands; yes, we are a brilliant and creative species, but we’ve created a little too much stuff—so much that our economy is now bigger than it’s host, our planet…”

– Paul Gilding, independent writer and adviser on sustainability.

The above and following quotes are from Gilding’s TED talk on sustainability.

A Familiar Message With Little Regard Given To It

It is nothing new that advocates and scientists are warning that consumption is out of control on our planet. However, little is done to educate us, the various populaces of the planet, that our current levels of consumption are detrimental to the future survival of our species, other species, and the planet as a whole.

As Gilding says,

We’re burning through our capital, or, stealing from the future… what this means is our economy is unsustainable … when things aren’t sustainable they stop.”

In Love With A Crazy Idea

When we think about economic growth stopping we go, ‘that’s not possible,’ because economic growth is so essential to our society that it is really questioned… it is based on a crazy idea, the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet… I’m here to tell you the Emperor has no clothes, that the crazy idea is just that: It is crazy.”

Gilding states a counter argument:

But we need growth. We need it to solve poverty. We need it to develop technology. We need it to keep social stability.”

His reply:

I find this argument fascinating, as though, we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs… the earth doesn’t care what we need. Mother nature doesn’t negotiate. She just sets rules and describes consequences and these are not esoteric limits. This is about food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives.”

The Specifics Of The Growth Crisis

Many of you will be thinking: ‘But surely we can still stop this. If it’s that bad, we’ll react.’ Let’s just think through that idea.

We’ve had 50 years of warnings.

We’ve had science proving the urgency of change.

We’ve had economic analysis pointing out that not only can we afford it, it’s cheaper to act early.

And yet the reality is we’ve done pretty much nothing to change course. We’re not even slowing down.”

We’re not acting. We’re not close to acting. And we’re not going to act until this crisis hits the economy and that’s why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for.”

Here is Gilding’s full TED talk [17 min.]:

The Lack Of An Integral Perspective

So, when does this transition begin, when does this breakdown begin? In my view it is well underway. I know most people don’t see it that way. We tend to look at the world, not as the integral system that it is, but as a serious of individual issues.

We see mistakenly each of these issues as individual problems to be solved. In fact, it’s a system in the painful process of breaking down.”

Change Takes Everyone Working Together

We are more than capable of getting through everything that’s coming… when we feel fear and we feel loss; we are capable of quite extraordinary things… There’s certainly no economic or technical barrier in the way… the only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel and this is where you come in… we can be more. We can be much more.

… We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society’s evolution. Like, what do we want to be when we grow up when we move past this bumbling adolescence when we think there are no limits and suffer illusions of immortality?

… We can do what we need to do but it will take… every one of us. This could be our finest hour.”

Image: “Built for collapse” by Danny Birchall on Flickr.

October 13, 2012October 13, 2012

Every Man Is A Piece Of The Continent, A Part Of The Main

Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom. But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is? What should I do with my life? What’s missing? What’s missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves. It’s really comfortable down here on the lower level. Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center.

One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top. …

Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger. And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago. ‘No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.'”

–Jonathan Haidt

September 15, 2012

Now You Can Understand Why Connecting To Other People Is Great, Thanks To This Shouting Sociologist

The benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs!”

Nicholas Christakis, MD PhD, in his powerful TED Talk “The Hidden Influence of Social Networks,” lays down the omnipotent role of social networks and the benefits of connecting with other people…

Social Networks Naturally ‘Sustain & Nourish The Good’ & ‘Reject The Bad’

We form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate.

So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love, kindness, happiness, altruism and ideas.

If we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.”

An Example Showing How Certain Properties Reside Not In Individual Parts, But In The Interconnections Between Them

Think about these two common objects. They’re both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way – on the left – and you get graphite, which is soft and dark.

But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms.

So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And so it is not just what’s happening to these people – whether they’re losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy – that affects us; it’s also the actual architecture of the ties around us.”

Human Beings Are Not Reducible To The Study Of Individuals, But Must Be Understood In Reference To The Collective

Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we’re residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism.

Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. Like, for example, a hive of bees that’s finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that’s evading a predator, or a flock of birds that’s able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that’s able to bring down larger prey.

Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena – like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption.”

Watch Nicholas Christakis’ TED Talk ‘The Hidden Influence Of Social Networks’

September 15, 2012September 15, 2012

A Cultural Goal In The 21st Century: Building A Global Village [TED Talk]

We don’t want to be all the same, but we want to respect each other and understand each other.”

Sheikha Al Mayassa is chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority. In this TED talk she focuses on her small Middle Eastern state of Qatar—and the new emphasis the nation is placing on redesigning their culture to resemble a global village.

We are changing our culture from within but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions… It’s important for us to grow organically. And we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance.”

Global & Local

And this is what the leaders of this region are trying to do. We’re trying to be part of this global village, but at the same time we’re revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development.”

Towards A Global Village

Now over and over again, people have said, ‘Let’s build bridges,’ and frankly, I want to do more than that. I would like to break the walls of ignorance between East and West… Culture’s a very important tool to bring people together. We should not underestimate it.

This is a very interesting journey. I welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions. Familiarity destroys and trumps fear. Try it.”

September 15, 2012

Revising The Formula For Happiness And Success [TED Talk]

What we’re finding is it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.”

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, founder of Good Think Inc. and frequently on-demand speaker for a variety of audiences, discusses problems with the workplace’s current formula for happiness and success, proposes a new formula based on his research and some techniques for its implementation.

The Current Formula For Happiness & Success Is Broken

If I work harder, I’ll be more successful. And if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.”

What’s The Problem With This Formula?

First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we’re going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. And that’s because we think we have to be successful, then we’ll be happier…”

“But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order.”

If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise.

In fact, what we’ve found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.

What we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you’re positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.”

The Solution – Train Your Brain By Creating New Positivity-Inducing Habits

We’ve found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully.

We’ve done these things in research now in every single company that I’ve worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they’re grateful for, for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.”

By training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we’ve found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create a real revolution.”

Watch The Happy Secret To Better Work TEDx Talk With Shawn Achor

Quotes from this post were taken from this video:

What Is The Happiness Advantage? By Shawn Achor

Images from this post were taken from this video:

September 15, 2012September 16, 2012

How To Redefine Prosperity To Get Through The Crisis Unscathed

“The credit and debt system … is a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.”

Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the ESRC Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE), Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, in his TED talk Economic Reality Check explains the paradox of living in crisis times, the paradox between people’s needs to “save, save, save” and the continuation of an socio-economic influence to “spend, spend, spend,” and suggests a solution of redefining prosperity: for meaningful, altruistic values to spread throughout society in order to achieve a “we” vision of prosperity.

Graph: The dramatic rise in personal debt and the plummeting of personal savings in the U.K. the last 15 years before the 2008 financial crash [taken from the TED talk]

The Crisis’ Paradox – The Need To Save & The Social Influence To Spend

“In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? … They want to spend less and save more.
But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view … saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even further, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It’s an anomaly, it’s a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.”

The Crisis’ Solution – To Build Social Influence Of Meaningful, Altruistic Values That Allows People The Freedom To Become Fully Human

“It is about opening up. It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect [the] fragile altruist within.

[It’s about] … redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations, a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model.

This is not just a Western post-materialist fantasy. In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when Prosperity Without Growth was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu says, “I am because we are.” Prosperity is a shared endeavor. Its roots are long and deep – its foundations, I’ve tried to show, exist already, inside each of us.

This is not about standing in the way of development. It’s not about overthrowing capitalism. It’s not about trying to change human nature. What we’re doing here is we’re taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose. And at the heart of that economics, we’re placing a more credible, more robust, and more realistic vision of what it means to be human.”

Tag: TED