Regenerative Culture R&D

This week’s cover article of “The Economist” declares, “Toward the end of poverty.”  Such a phrase is just dumb; it completely misses the fundamentals of global finance and economics.

On a hypothetical basis, the idea that we could reduce the number of those making less than $1.25 per day to 100 millions by 2030 makes sense.  Models can do anything.  But is there even the faintest whisper that the definition of $1.25 per day contributes any meaning to the word poverty?  Absolutely not.  In other words, what is the relationship between financialization and happiness?  Complex, and often inverse.

Poverty is an artifact of our financial system.  Proposing the elimination of poverty through financialization is a little like saying you can cut down on sunburn by spending more time in the sun.

That the Economist is declaring such misguided paradigms completely undermines their credibility in understanding anything meaningful about economics as it relates to people and the planet.  But maybe they never had that much of such things to begin with.

I recently finish “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” by David Graeber.  At 666 pages in my iBooks edition, it has a lot of pages, but it’s a very short book.  And by short, I mean that it just barely skims the surface of this issue.  And what issue would that be?  The issues of money, culture, religion, government, war, slavery, politics, and debt.  Going back a few millennia, it’s clear that these subjects are fundamentally linked, and talking about one without the others means you’ve stepped out of context.

The books so dense and fresh I have no idea where to begin, so I’ll just get going rather than try to pull things into coherence.

Economics isn’t a science.  It’s a combination of anthropology and fiction.  Economics was a recently invented term.  We treat money like it operates under laws, like physics, when it’s actually a plastic social agreement.

Barter comes after money, not before.  Gift economies come before money economies.  Coinage appears only during wars.  Governments form to create and manage currencies.  Currencies are created to fund wars.

Social economies and material economies don’t mix well.  The triangle slave trade of the 1800s is a tribute to that.

Small amounts of debt are debt; large amounts of debt are power and control - think “too big to fail.”

In their inception, church and state, and money and politics, were unified.  This modern idea that each two pairs should be separate has thousands of years of cultural development in the way.

Interest, or usury, has been banned by many major religions [Islam, Christianity] for good reason.  In the Middle Ages, one could not be both a merchant and a Christian, as the values were at odds.

Historically, debt and slavery has been imposed on people that would have otherwise been killed in war.

There’s a lot to be learned in the history of words.  For example, to be free means to be grounded in community - contrary to modern usage.  This origin comes from it’s usage in Greek times, when a slave would be emancipated and granted citizenship.

Looking back over history, it’s rare to find genocide unlinked from debt.  For example, why did the Spanish decimate the Mayans?  Because they were in debt to the Chinese.

Poverty is a creation of money.  In it’s early days, money was used for special things and managing social relationships [such as marriages].  Things such as food an housing were supplied by the community, except during extreme cases when somebody would be kicked out of a community [and most likely die shortly after].

Debt used to be temporary.  For example - the Jewish “Jubilee,” or regular annulment of all debts.

Money has no essence.  But if we tried to give it one, it would be religion.

The idea of debt isn’t indigenous, as it implies separation.

Money replaces, or more precisely, liquidates social capital and trust.

Although 5,000 years seems like a long way back, I’m sure that the story of debt is very interesting before then.  We just don’t have access to the records.

Check out my tweets on the book here.  And here’s my Evernote.

One of my friends recently shared an article with me, “Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine.”

My partner and I started a conversation about some of the issues it covers.  Her startup’s part of a tech accelerator in Montreal and one of her business partners will probably be moving to the Bay in the Fall.

I feel very disconnected from the psychology, and definitely frustrated, as I’m exploring the question of what is money and what is it for right now.

According to this article, money is an abstract measure of self worth and doesn’t have an innate purpose.  I’ll illustrate this with a few quotes from the article.

They talk about the shift in mindset from purpose-driven to competitive that happens to entrepreneurs moving to the Bay Area:

A college classmate wrote of Chen’s [an entrepreneur’s] evolution since moving to the Bay Area: “He used to tell me, ‘I want to build a product that helps social entrepreneurs and changes the world.’ Now he tells me, ‘I want to be the next Airbnb or Dropbox.’”

Silicon Valley financial capital has no conscious connection with the real economy.  According to Paul Buchheit [Google, serial entrepreneur]:

They’re mystified how a company with no revenue can be worth a billion dollars. It’s because of this power law: If a company has a 1 percent chance of being a hundred-billion-dollar company, then it’s worth about a billion dollars.

Also, it’s not as if when people make money, they put it into anything of beauty or quality.  About Demo Day:

Most of the founders wore T-shirts and sneakers — Asics mostly, never Nike

Hollywood’s been outgunned on the narcissism index:

According to the research institute Wealth-X, there is now a higher per-capita concentration of “ultrahigh-net-worth individuals” (assets worth at least $30 million) in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere in the country — more than that of the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas.

Another reference to the lack of purpose and disconnection from values and ethics:

There is a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about the “game” and who is “winning.”

Not only that, but to be in the lottery, entrepreneurs need to submit themselves to a brutal hierarchy that includes third-world living conditions:

They rented a single bedroom in a cramped apartment in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood, sleeping on two futons, one of which prevented the door from opening more than a few inches. They spent $1,600 a month on rent, food and all additional expenses combined. - Asian founders of Strikingly

This hierarchy also has to do with age.  From Paul Graham, Y. Combinator:

The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32

In contrast, check out the attitudes of Slow Money - a group with which I’m more in alignment.

I’ve just finished reading Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua’s recent publication, “Regenerative Enterprise.”

The book is the crystallization of the ideas coming out of a series of participatory design events focused on regenerative investment hosted by the Financial Permaculture Institute, in some of which I’ve been a participant.

The book is especially brilliant for two reasons:

1. The way it outlines the necessity of ecosystems of enterprises founded on the values of permaculture design
2. It’s emphasis on personal maturation, a topic which I’ve yet to see in other resources produced by the greater New Economics community

To answer the question of what is regenerative, I’ll start with a series of sweeping stereotypes summarizing the three fundamental types of economic models:

*The Eight Forms of Capital Model could assist in reaching a deeper understanding of the following overview.

I - Extractive

The extractive economy transforms living and cultural capital into financial capital through financialization.  Profitability is tied to the effectiveness of an enterprises’ ability to externalize it’s impacts.

Poster child: ExxonMobil

II - Social

The evolution of the extractive enterprise over the years to it’s current form has horrified many to innovate.  The dominant solution?  Social enterprise.

Social enterprise has realized the shortcomings of extractive enterprise, and targets the limiting of it’s living and cultural impacts at one stage of its supply chain.

In some ways, social enterprise is less ethical than extractive enterprise. Nobody driving a Lamborghini claims to be helping the environment with that decisions.  But many have been lulled into thinking that driving a Prius could actually help the environment.  This fallacy is particularly dangerous because it soothes people into unconsciousness.

The issue here?  The driver of the super car has a rudimentary consciousness of their impacts, and on some level, has consciously chosen their path.  The driver of the hybrid has gone asleep, and well think they’re doing enough to “save the world” when they’re actually more locked into the paradigm than the driver of the super car.

Poster child: Toms Shoes

Highlighted Impact: Wealth disparity between first and third-world countries.

Unconscious Impact:

• Manufacturing
• Distribution
• Lifecycle

Not that Toms doesn’t care about these issues.  But if one were to create balance sheets for all three accounts - people, planet, and profit - the profit would come up in the black but the people and planet would still be left in the red.  Just because there’s revenue doesn’t mean there’s net profit.

Why the mismatch?  Even when a social enterprise has a strong mission, if it wants to grow it’s “impact” [a force embedded in our money and culture] it needs to tap into the extractive economy ecosystem.  And even if our entire economy was composed of social enterprises, it would never become sustainable, because social enterprises aren’t based on a systems perspective.

III - Regenerative

Regenerative enterprise takes in financial capital and yields living and cultural capital.

As I point out in the last section, this is only possibible with an ecosystem of enterprises that operate together.  And different enterprises are optimized for different yields.  Not every enterprise yields living and cultural capital.  But they are functionally interconnected such that the synergies of the system net living and cultural capital.

Poster child: currently nonexistent, but under development

-

Enterprise Ecosystems

All enterprises are embedded in a greater web.  One fundamental aspect of this universe is the interconnection of all components.  The functionality and consciousness of this interconnection is vital.

Extractive enterprise operates in an ecosystem.  If ExxonMobil needs IT solutions, it can turn to Alcatel Lucent and scale out instantly across operations in over a hundred countries.  And then if Alcatel Lucent need to distribute it’s physical units, it can turn to UPS, a global parcel service.  The effectiveness of this ecosystem at yielding financial profit in the short term can’t be underestimated.  It’s “success” is based on the principle of functional interconnection.

But, partially due to the anonymity synonymous with financial capital, feedback loops surrounding living and cultural stocks are predominantly unconscious.  Not with regenerative enterprise.

-

Personal Maturation

The shift from social to regenerative is a cultural shift, a paradigm shift.  It doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen easily.  People going through this shift need a lot of personal support, and need the courage to seek support and confront their deepest fears.  Understandably, the dominant paradigm of extraction trains us to suppress the most effective methods of dealing with these issues.

Supporting people in this deep personal work of holistic maturation is an aspect of my life’s work.  Bill Plotkin gives an excellent overview of of these ideas in his book, “Nature and the Human Soul.”

-

In summary, “Regenerative Enterprise” is a phenomenal read, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone in the new economics and permaculture movements.

I’m out in the Boulder area of Colorado for a few weeks right now.  The Fourth Slow Money [Inter] National Gathering catalyzed this trip.  A friend called me up a week or two before and suggested I attend [I’ve been a long-time Slow Money fellow], and that he’d sponsor me to do so.

A few days later I had my tickets.  After signing up for Slow Money, I got an email from them about Hazon - a Jewish Food Festival taking place the day before the opening of Slow Money.  I’d been hearing about Hazon from my Jewish foodie friends for years, but never made it out to their big event each summer in the Bay Area.  So I signed right up for their festival here.

The first session I attended at Hazon was on the transformation associated with the blessing of food.  One of the participants told me that just one Rabbi has two opinions.  And with four from different Jewish traditions, there would be a multiplicity of opinions in the room.

In the introduction, the facilitator pointed out that the average American eats one ton of food per year - a lot of food!

We quickly got into some interesting discussion.  The energetic hierarchy outlined in some Jewish traditions begins with inanimate objects [like mineral], moves up to rooted organisms [like trees], on to mobile beings [like birds], and then to speaking ones [us].  This is a food chain, and a process that moves inverse to the direction of entropy.  Gurdjieff’s models on energy hierarchies compliment this model.

Questions and observations:

• Are we elevating our food, or are we descending to its level?
• Eating food is a reengagement with the covenant with God.
• Why is the Buddha fat?
• What are you doing for the food?
• Food as a vessel for blessing.
• Timing: Adam and Eve wouldn’t have been cursed if they’d waited three hours to eat the apple.
• The word “mana” means “from,” inferring the interconnection embedded in food and eating.
• On vegetarianism: are we ready for meat yet?
• Why do we say grace before a meal but don’t say a blessing afterwards?
• To sin is to be blind to our interconnection.

I found all of these thoughts very interesting, and a good backdrop going into Slow Money.

A bit of background on Slow Money.  The term comes from Slow Food.  The Slow Food Movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in 1989 in Italy, as opposition to a McDonalds setting up in Rome.  Slow Food is the opposite of fast food.  And so that’s where Slow Money comes from; it’s the opposite of fast money.  Currently Slow Money’s primary practice involves local food system investment.  In 2009, Woody Tasch, a poet and financier, published a book called Slow Money.  He named and applauded a trend that was already starting to happen in communities around the country.  I met Woody in 2010, and promptly got involved in my local Western Massachusetts chapter of sorts, PVGrows.

This National Gathering began with a Fundraisers’ Reception limited to 150 people, raising money for Carlo Petrini of Slow Food and Mary Berry of the Berry Center.  After a brief introduction by Woody, we got right into things.

I was immediately struck by Carlo’s presence.  To me, he’s the father of one of the most profound and integrated movements in the human history of this planet.  To put things in perspective, Carlo’s a much more impressive person for me than Obama.

One of the especially impressive aspects of Carlo is his commitment to the Italian language.  He comes to America, where we forget that not everyone speaks english, and delivers phenomenally expressive communication [with the assistance of two interpreters that switch off] all in Italian.  He doesn’t even attempt to communicate in English.  I love it!

I’m a photographer, so I sat on the floor right in front of Carlo for his speech.  He caught my eye a few times.  Directly afterwards, he started complimenting me on my toe shoes, asking where he could get a pair.  I felt kind of special, as our conversation took place with the assistance of an interpreter.

My sponsor sent me here in part because he’s establishing Slow Food Caribbean.  I told Carlo about it, and he said he’d love to head down to help him out, and get his team at HQ supporting him.  So one of my main objectives for the conference - connecting with Carlo - occurred within the first hour.

The next morning opening in the Boulder Theatre.  With 40 staff, 20 press, and around 600 participants, it’s a pretty big event.

Woody opened the day with an amazing speech about how this is a movement, a paradigm shift.  He set up every conversation I’ve had thus far.  One of his terms was innate value.  What I take from this is that traditional investment yields financial capital - a substance with no innate value.  Regenerative investment on the other hand, the kind that yields profits in culture and ecology, is full of innate value.

He was followed by the opening panel:

• Mary Berry - Berry Center
• Wes Jackson - Land Institute
• Winona LoDuke - Honor the Earth/Native Harvest
• John Fullerton - Capital Institute
• Jerry Cunningham - Coyote Creek Mill
• Moderator: Katherine Collins - Honeybee Capital

I know Mary and Wes from the Prairie Festival, Winona from various previous conferences, and John from our professional overlap around regenerative investment.  The breadth of perspectives they covered was the perfect opening to the day.  The mood was of expansion.  A favorite quote from Jerry was his new farmer’s motto, “go small, and welcome back home.”  Winona pointed out how indigenous cultures have months named after seasonal food, when cultures of empire have a months named after Roman conquerers.

For the rest of the day, until Carlo’s closing session, I skipped all of the speakers and just had meetings with participants and presents.  If an event isn’t participator, I’ll make it participatory.  And the meetings couldn’t have been better.

Carlo’s speech at the end of the day couldn’t have been better.  One of his best similes on money was money as dung.  If money’s manure, why do we show it off in our living rooms?  We should plant flowers in it, not put it up on display, but cycles it’s nutrients back to the soil.  Another key point Carlo made was the tension between the dominant paradigm of for-profit/philanthropy of exchange versus the alternative and traditional paradigm of reciprocity - where energy flows move through a community in cycles.

One of the reasons I’m here is the establishment of my professional role.  At this venue, I describe myself as a nurturer of the Slow Money community.  A bridge-builder.  A support person.  As Alex Boguski said in a conversation we had walking down Broadway, a kind of money therapist.  I lay the cultural groundwork for authentic Slow Money and regenerative investment to take place.

I successfully communicated this message with most of those with whom I spoke.  Thanks to Carlo and Woody as a backdrop, they got the message and the concept, and understood why sponsorship is my means, rather than the exchange-based paradigm.  But I didn’t yet secure any more sponsors - what I’m looking for to turn my purpose into a livelihood right now.  But that will take continual development of relationships.  And deep exploration of the questions of what is money and what is it for.

For dinner, one night I went to the Kitchen, and the other I went to Oak.  At the Kitchen seventy-five of us Slow Money people rented out the entire restaurant with Credibles.  Four courses over four hours, family-style.  Perfection.

Boulder HUB is thinking of hosting a simultaneous event next Slow Money based on participatory design, as this was very old school broadcast-style.

All-in-all, it was a great experience.

Reviews from others:

NYTimes

Elephant Journal

Denver Post

I’ve had the compulsion and motivation to get back to really listening to music again.

I have a long relationship with listening.  Here’s the short summary.  I did a lot of singing and playing and creating as a kid.  In ninth grade I got an iBook, a free iPod Mini, Bose headphones, and an external harddrive with 10,000 songs on it.  On the half-hour-ride to and from school I’d listen.  Each week I’d fill up my iPod with a random selection from the harddrive, and listen to it on shuffle.  Later in high school I built a hi-fi tube amp home stereo system with one of my uncles, and started buying a few CDs now and again, but mainly getting music by swapping harddrives with friends.  I attended a performing arts high school, so there was never any shortage of good music and good speakers.  Around the time of the hi-fi system I also installed an upgraded system in my car, complete with a subwoofer to get the full frequency range represented.

For the past year or two, for a combination of reasons, mostly unconscious, I haven’t been listening to as much music [or going to as many shows, now that I think about it].  I haven’t had an ideal place to set up my hi-fi system, as I’ve been moving around some.  Because of the moving, I’d taken the subwoofer out of my car to make room.  My family had three pairs of high-end monitor headphones.  One I gave to a girlfriend and never got back [hopefully she’s still enjoying them].  The two others my sister broke the plugs on.  And then I just haven’t felt like I’ve had the money to spend on CDs, and I get frustrated when my iTunes library has a bunch of lo-fi mp3s on it rather than ALACs or WAVs. Speaking of iTunes libraries, even though I’m pretty good at having my stuff backed up on multiple drives, I’ve lost big chunks of my iTunes library at least five times in the past decade by now.

But it’s time for a return.  About a month ago I put the subwoofer back in my car.  I talked with my hi-fi uncle about the broken headphones, and he pointed out that I could just get plugs cheap on Amazon if I soldered them my self.  So I took his advice on that and they’re now as good as new.  And I recently was given a bit of money.  I decided to allocate approximately $100 of it for media [because if I don’t spend the margins on something nice it will go to necessities like gas].  So far I’ve gotten “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Naissance,” “Polyfonia,” “Youth,” “We the Common,” and “Total Folklore.”

And how did I come up with these five albums?  By exploring a combination of KEXP’s Live In-Studio Podcast, Vimeo Staff Picks, and asking a choice handful of friends about what they’ve been into lately.

When I was talking with friends, most of them said they’d switched over to Spotify Premium.  I have the free version, but haven’t gotten into it.

I’ve been frustrated by the bustle and constant changes in the tangled world of music technology: iOS, iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Groove Shark, Sound Cloud. I feel like I don’t understand any of them.  And none of them seem to just do the one thing well that I care about: play music.

Well, I’m pretty picky.  I like lossless.  I like hi-fi.  I like continuity and depth.  I tend to listen to albums straight through, and have never understood mix tapes enough to create on myself.  And I like not having to wade through millions of artists and getting right no the stuff I like, with one click or motion.  I just don’t have a good feel for places like Spotify’s library - it’s too large and unfamiliar and unstructured.

I’d like to even switch over to vinyl.  Fix up an old turn table with my uncle, and get a nice subwoofer.  Set up a listening room.

Lately I’ve just been going back to picking out a few CDs at a time to have in my car, and listening to them from start to finish.  I like the simplicity, and the commitment [it’s tough to switch artist, and I’m more likely to listen to tracks all the way through].  Maybe it’s a little like how cheap restaurants have hundreds of items on the menu when the nicest places have no menus at all.

Choice is slavery.

Last year I attended the Economics of Happiness Conference in Berkeley, CA.  The event was opened with two documentaries.  One of them was “Schooling the World,” produced by Carol Black.  The film pointed out that when development happens child mortality goes down and human trafficking goes up.  Black had a child who had died as a baby.  Even so, she said she would prefer her child to die as a baby than go into human trafficking.

The life/death cycle is integrated.  And yet it seems common in our culture to treat the two as though they are distinct.  We have doctors who supposedly support “life.”  And then we have our military, which supposedly supports “death.”  But these two things are one in the same.  One cannot divorce responsibility from one if they have involvement with the other.

One of my friends was teaching me some things about Qigong.  He said that in ancient Asia, energy masters could both utilize their skills in the healing arts and in the martial arts.  The understanding required was one in the same.  Application was a matter of choice.

In my view, the Green Revolution following World War II was fueled by our growth-based money system and rationalized by a feed-the-world mentality.  Due to centralization of power, a handful of people were able to heavily influence the lives of millions and maybe even billions of people.  Feeding more people’s good, right?

From the systems perspective, more food results in faster population growth.  And our bigger population is now locked in to food production levels that cannot be achieved using earlier methods as they’ve been displaced with high-yielding resource-intensive methods.  And yet our fossil-fuel driven methods of today can’t be sustained.  So the Green Revolution actually intensified food shortages and famine, amongst a broad range of other issues, rather than alleviating them, if we take into account the impacts of the system we’ve implemented.

There are a lot of projects to build wells in developing countries.  This is a life-giving opportunity, yes?  Well, if they don’t have the technologies for wells, these communities my be struggling now, but they’re also getting by on real-time resources.  In countries like the US we’re robbing future generations of their access to fresh water by exploiting our aquifers and a rate much higher than their real-time replenishment.  So every life you improve by building wells, you might be responsible for ten deaths a century down the road, when the community has greatly outgrown it’s natural limits, which catch up to them and result in much more severe drought when the population is much larger.

Who could argue with life-extending technologies that help our elderly live longer lives?  Well, in our market-based extractive economy, they’re taking resources that would be used in other way.  Indirectly, letting an old person live five years longer, might result in the death of five children in fifty years due to resource depletion.

I don’t mean to imply here that death is bad.  But I’d appreciate it if more people took responsibility for the deaths that are associated with their decisions.  As a rule of thumb, any life-sustaining action ties responsibility to a future death.  And the multiplying factor, greater or less than one, depends on the qualities of this intervention.

Life isn’t eternal [and we wouldn’t want it to be].  Therefore, assisting life today is pushing off death to tomorrow.  But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that these two states ever have much distance between them.

Another rule of thumb is distribution of power.  Is it ever a good idea to nest the fate of millions of lives under the sole responsibility of one individual?  Probably not.  Distributed decision-making means tighter feedback loops and overall better results.