American Society is Too Immature for Capitalism

While I drank my coffee this morning, I stumbled upon the above post in my Facebook feed. As the various commentators, myself included, argued the benefits of sharing verse stealing from one another, of which evidently socialism and taxation are forms, it became very clear to me that the issue at hand isn’t socialism vs. capitalism, but the very fact that Americans are children wanting to play with a very grown up idea, and failing miserably.

I love money. I’ve always loved money. I studied economics as my undergraduate electives and fell in love with money even more while pursuing my MBA in International Business. While I stuck with technology as a career, and then eventually homemaking, I continued my love of money, or more importantly, the story of money. I regularly read books written by economists just for fun. To me, money is beautiful, not because supply-side economics looks nice as an equation, but because money is the truest historian of humanity. Money is our scribe.

            If you want to know who you really are as a person, then study your bank statements. Where do you spend your money? Whom do you spend it on? Why? How do you feel about your purchases? How did you earn your money? How do you feel about that?  Do you ever take the time to think about this? If you do, you will know more about yourself than any shrink will ever tell you. Money never lies. Money is pure. Money will tell you the story of your heart.

            Go deeper, look at each purchase and ask, what’s behind it. What did it take for that car to be in your garage? What resources were needed? What amount of labor? Where was it built? Why do you need it? What does it say about you? The story of money is rich, and deep, and never, ever false. What you see might make you uncomfortable, but it’s still the truth of who you are as person, both emotionally and intellectually, at the time the money is spent.

            Follow the money and you shall know the truth.

            Money tells the story of our society. A peek at the government budget for the United States of America tells us who we are as Americans—fearful, warmongering, self-interested juveniles set on the acquisition and hording of money and profits at the expense of human lives. Why would I say that? Because any country that spends more than half of its resources on war is afraid. And people who are afraid don’t make very good capitalists.

            Capitalism is the golden jewel when it comes to money. Free trade allows humans to invest, invent and imagine. A strong merchant class allows the flow of information in and out of a society. A strong labor class allows for the creation of high quality products to improve the lives of the community. This ideally happens within the structure of freedom. The freedom to choose your craft or trade, the freedom to acquire capital and investments and the freedom to spend your money according to your values. When viewed this way, what could go wrong?

            There are three components to the creation of goods—raw materials, labor and capital. Where do we get our raw materials? From the earth. Where do we get our labor? From humanity and technology, which has been invented by humanity. And where do we get our capital? From banks, family members, profits, venture capitalists, Kickstarter campaigns, crowdfunding, rich guys with nothing better to do and the sale of stocks. When a human is empowered and living from a place of ingenuity, these three things are in balance. The higher the person or society moves up Maslow’s hierarchy, the clearer their thinking and the ability to plan long term kicks in. This is what capitalism requires—healthy adults who are secure enough to see the bigger picture and operate from a place where the relationships between raw materials (nature), labor (humanity) and capital (money) are in harmony. One is not focused upon to the detriment of the other.

            A person who lives in fear, who’s afraid of losing something, whether it’s their yacht, their stock options, their job, their house, their hot girlfriend, or even their national identity or status among peers, will not be able to keep the three in balance. And since capital eventually produces profits, which is what remedies the person’s fear and insecurities, then that is where the short term, fearful human will focus. How do I get more capital? How do I pay my investors and still make a buck? How can I implement a system of trade laws that maximizes capital so I can have never ending growth? This person will not consider what happens to nature when its resources are over-mined for production, nor what happens to their workers when benefits are reduced in order to increase the bottom line. Capitalism becomes CAPITALism.

            Many Americans claim the government should stay out of the economy. But yet when business leaders pay the government to create labor and environmental laws that enable them to make more money, that’s progress. Why? Why is it progress to operate from the mindset of a child? A toddler can’t understand why he needs to share. His parents show him that. Sharing isn’t about taking from the 1% and giving back to the 99%. It’s about implementing capitalism in a way that keeps all three things, nature, labor and capital in balance.

            And it takes an adult mentality to do that. America, unfortunately, doesn’t have what it takes. We’re the selfie-stick culture. The mine, mine, mine culture. The individual reigns supreme culture. America has become the place where adults think its fine to throw a tantrum in public because they’re tired of being politically correct. America is a place where on one hand, Donald Trump is a contender, and on the other Hillary Clinton deserves to be the president because she’d be the first female president, and she's wanted it all her life. Seriously? Donald Trump is the trope of our time and who cares if Hillary is female and has wanted to be president all her life? Both of these candidates soothe the American insecurity and fear of not being good enough.

             Which is a problem, because unruly children often require authority to behave, and historically authoritarianism is the opposite of freedom. So we're at an impasse--on the one hand we're a democracy that requires a capitalistic economy and on the other hand we still can't manage to stop bullying one another on the playground, which requires someone of a higher authority to step in and tell us how to behave.

            Capitalism requires a certain emotional and intellectual advancement from its people. Money itself has always required this from us. To me, money isn’t the root of all evil, it’s the refusal to grow up and see the connections between all of us that causes all the evil in the world. Money is just the messenger.

            And everyone knows you shouldn’t kill the messenger.

Hey Humans--Robots Are NOT Better Than You!

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

~ e. e. cummings

At the Brighter Brains conference this past weekend in Oakland, CA, I had the pleasure of meeting an older man who had thought a lot about the future—and he was very afraid. Science, he said, was going to destroy us. And worse, when robots are better than us, what is the purpose of the human being? He was interested in my eHumanTrilogy and asked me, “In your future, do humans still work? Because honestly, I don’t see any point in us once robots take our jobs and economy.”

I get this question a lot. And it’s valid because it addresses one of our basic fears—that we have no worth beyond our capacity to make money. Without money, we can’t feed ourselves. Without food, we die. But I think the fear goes deeper than just the economic impacts of massive automation.  As I spoke with this fine gentleman, I realized that the issue we have is a personality disorder—we don’t believe in ourselves as anything more than a cog in the wheel. Most humans fear the future because they don’t see their place in it. They’ve been led to believe that their worth resides only in their economic contribution, and that since robots can easily replace them in their jobs, then robots can completely replace us as a species.

Essentially, we have an HUGE inferiority complex.  And we need to let it go. Now.

I told this gentleman that when he came to my table, I didn’t think, “Who is this man? What has he done in his life to earn money? How far did he rise before he retired? What worth does he have now?” No, what I thought was, “Look, someone wants to talk. Let’s talk.”

Humans need each other. When we come in contact with another human, they reflect back to us our own state of mind. By engaging in one another, we grow, learn and enhance our cognitive abilities. We also become more able to imagine and create when we’re around others to bounce ideas off of.

In her blog on HuffPost, Margaret Paul, PhD has this list of things humans need from one another:

Caring, tenderness, hugs, touch and emotional support, connection, sharing love, learning and growing emotionally and spiritually, companionship -- sharing fun and laughter, play, adventure and everyday life, love making, physical help when needed, having our back

This is what we really need from one another. If you think your worth is limited to how fast you can think, or how strong you are, then robots have already surpassed you. They are much better at taking the SAT or building a car on a manufacturing line than any human. So the thing you fear most has already happened, you’ve been or will be replaced.

But what if you’re needed to care, love, hug, touch and support someone? What if your true purpose was to coach and inspire others? How about sex? Yes, robot sex is a big fantasy for many techno-thinkers, and that would be expected in this extremely pornafide society. But let me tell you, no robot will ever smell like a man, taste like a man, or touch me like a man.

No robot will ever replace my friends, or my husband, or my family. No robot will motivate me to be more than I already am, even if the OS is Samantha from the movie, Her. No robot could raise my sons with the love and interest that I did. And no robot will ever truly replace the men and women I met at the conference this past weekend. I doubt an android would have engaged and inspired me the way the gentleman in Oakland did.

This fear and self-loathing needs to end. Instead, we must begin to see how much we need one another, and how beautiful we are as a species. Otherwise we will continue to live in fear—which is to live in a cage, whose door is wide open.

The Social Fabric of a Technically Advanced Society

There is so much human potential. I see it everywhere I turn. Yet something seems to hold us back, ever so slightly, from actually becoming a stable species. Yes, we have come a long way, yet at this moment in time it seems we have but two choices before us, begin to cooperate and live in harmony, or destroy everything, including our planet.

I’m not sure I’m an optimist, but I don’t think spending too much time on doomsday scenarios is a good use of my time. Deep down I believe we can use our minds, hearts and technology to completely transform the human experience across the globe—taking a world where 50% live on only $2 a day and turning it into a world where technology is shared with everyone—and all humans, animals and the planet benefit from this collaboration.

Rather than label such a place utopia, can we simply agree this is the final implementation of the Technological Revolution? Long ago, we began to organize in new ways with the Agricultural Revolution. More recently, the Industrial Revolution changed humanity.We’re now in the middle of shifting into the Information Age, but as long as half of us don’t have running water, live in war torn nations, and die of curable disease, we really aren’t there. We’re half way there.

It’s like starting college and taking one hundred years to graduate. And it’s driving us insane.

How do we complete the current Technological Revolution? We can’t merely rely on technological advancement to do it, because we can’t create a new paradigm from within the old paradigm. Rather we must step out of our scarcity mentality and create a society that truly supports a technically advanced world. This is a very different social fabric than the one we see right now. Currently our currency is greed, at any cost. Technology is only pursued if there’s profit and thus most people do not benefit from the revelations we’ve made.

Our innovation is being held captive by greedy, small, fearful minds and the systems to which they cling.

To move forward and truly become a technically advanced society, we must change the story of our lives from competition to collaboration. From fear to courage. From greed to need.

Rather than focus on the end of the world, I want to look at the next evolution of humanity. We ushered in the Technological Revolution, it’s now time to complete it and make it a reality across the globe.

I’m not sure how to get there, but here are a few key aspects I think one might see if they suddenly woke up in a technically advanced society:

1.       An economic system of abundance

      

      In his article titled, The End of Capitalism Has Begun, author Paul Mason writes, “…all mainstream economics proceed from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world, information, is abundant and wants to be free.” Of course, many classical economists mock Mason’s premise, but I think he’s on to something. If we landed on a planet with a technically advanced society, we’d see abundance everywhere, because information age would have been fully realized and it will upend everything as we know it. Our businesses since the Industrial Revolution have relied on materials and labor. Information knows nothing of such limitations. “Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely.” [Mason]

      We are only just beginning to see the effects of the information-based economy on our goods and labor force. What once took over 100K employees to deliver (photos developed by Kodak) now takes less than 20 people to implement and issue (Instagram.)

2.       Universal Access to Information

In a technologically advanced society, all information is retrievable in a straightforward manner. Some call it the “Great Mind” of humanity and I think it’ll be something close. Every thought, idea, invention, picture, item of legislation, etc. will be available online. Nothing can really be hidden in such a world, especially if everyone has network access. Thus the “Great Mind” grows, changes and morphs as more and more people access it, add to it, and use it. Think of Wikipedia on a grand scale. Most importantly, NO ONE is locked out. Network access is a given and every human being participates according to his/her need. In such a world our imaginations will be held as critical assets to productivity. As Mason writes, “The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted.”

3.       Decentralization of food, healthcare, education, currency, and manufacturing.

In other words, it’s an open sourced world. Gone are the days of limiting the distribution of life-saving technologies in order to increase the value of a company’s stock. Once the “Great Mind” is in place, anyone can begin to create their products, and then share them with everyone else. Eventually forcing all of our large, monolithic monopolies to come to terms with the fact that they no longer hold the patent, or the exclusive path, to any service. From health care to infrastructure to energy distribution, a technically advanced society is an Open Source society. I think there’s a reason Minecraft is so popular with the youth, they long for such freedom of creativity and sharing in our “real” world. Perhaps they’re on to something.

4.       Decoupling of work and personal definition

In a technically advanced society, people are imaginative and lithe. They move from task to task as their interior and exterior needs guide. No one choses a career at 18 and remains stuck in the wheel for life, for no job can really last that long. Ideas as well as society’s needs are always changing. Humans are educated to take part in shaping their world and assisting where their current skill set is needed. Yes, there will still be inventors, coders and health care workers, but other work, like cleaning up the environment, teaching the youth, raising our children, caring for our old, bringing countries online, installing renewable energy will also be important. Just as no idea is wasted in a technically advanced society, no work is beneath anyone (besides, we’ll have robots to do the nastiest, most dangerous work, right?) Nor is work the only thing that matters. The main goal of education now becomes enabling children to discover themselves and figure out how the world needs their skills, rather than being told what skills are needed. How could anyone truly know the most important skillset of the 21^st century, with technology changing the game at every turn? Better to be inspired and imaginative than intelligent, at least by today’s standards.

The arts would also flourish in a technically advanced society because artists and storytellers would be freed from forced labor to enlighten, engage and inspire the population.

Today many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary. As David Graber has written, we create “…bullshit jobs on little pay…” in order to prop up our current economic paradigm. We often describe ourselves as our work. A technically advanced society challenges us to describe ourselves as our skills and interests.

5.       Universal Basic Income

As I’ve written in previous blogs on the topic, I believe the disassociation of work from wages is necessary for us to free our technology and truly advance into the information age. The basic housing, food, transportation and health care costs MUST be granted to all citizens, in every nation. To see one another as worthy of life is a first step. I realize this is a hard thing, but technology demands it of us.  We won’t get there with the economics of scarcity, which is why I started this list with the Economics of Abundance. The information age is the great equalizer. The sooner we understand this and guarantee a basic income for all individuals, the sooner we can truly reap the benefits of the promise of the future.

6.       Servant Leadership

Decentralization still needs leaders, but not rulers. This is often called Servant Leadership—those who are willing to work to create space where other people’s needs are met. We currently have the mindset that to need something makes us weak, but in a technically advanced society, needs point the way towards innovation, improvement and ingenuity.

I recently worked at an education conference where George Hoffecker, co-founder of Hoffecker Burgess Consulting and advocate extraordinaire of Appreciative Inquiry, spoke of needs as “life expressing itself.” Our needs, he suggested, are life giving, but our strategies for getting our needs met can be a problem. A Servant Leader does not fix the person’s need, but instead makes space for others to express their needs and be heard. From there, solutions can be figured out together. He also suggested that a Servant Leader often hears the Yes behind the No by making the effort to understand the needs of the one who is showing resistance.

This is a very different paradigm than what we see in Washington DC right now, and I’d suggest that in a technically advanced society, the governmental structure we have would need to be dismantled. Servant Leaders need to be close to the people they work for. Local governments would become more important and Servant Leaders would spend their days with the people inspiring them to create a community that at the same time allows the freedom of the individual.

How then would we create laws that affects the whole? Who needs Congress, or the EU, when we have…

7.       Direct Democracy

With everyone connected to the network in some way, be it a telepathic neuro-implant or a Smartphone, legislation can be brought to our finger tips. Reddit-like boards will exist to allow dialogue. Servant Leaders will moderate and encourage us to be civil using tool sets like Appreciative Inquiry to enable the Internet Troll to become extinct. Laws can be recommended, shut down, or modified, and then voted upon by all subscribers. Voter registration is encouraged for all citizens, but not forced. Yes, we’ll need a great security system, and this form of democracy can only exist if the previous six items have been established. In addition, we need an EDUCATED population, but if we’ve decoupled work from identity and wages, the education of our children now has the goal of creating informed, inquisitive and imaginative members of society.

Imagine something like TPP or the Patriot Act happening under such a system. Anything can be corrupted, I know. But if our leaders are truly servants and our technology is truly open sourced, many of the issues we see now in politics are naturally removed from the picture, finally enabling us to fully embrace and implement the Information Age.

8.       A Planetary Identity

Nationality no longer has a place in a technically advanced society. We are all beings sharing the same network, information and data as well as natural resources. Information truly is the great equalizer. Take this example: 3D printing. Trade is completely different in a world of 3D printing from home. Danit Peleg, an Israeli fashion designer, just created an entire clothing line and 3D printed it from her house! Check out her video, it’s amazing and her work will change the entire fashion industry. Now, shopping becomes designing our own outfit, or purchasing designs online and printing out at home, thus creating an online fashion community, with an individual bias.  The concept of a multi-international company like The Gap selling slave made clothing falls away, leaving us with a global citizenry. We’re almost there and our social media is bringing us together faster than anything else. Her video went from 1000 views to over 1 Million in just seven days. Good ideas spread like wildfire on a global network.

Our planet's resources are shared. What happens to the people in the Congo in order to get minerals for our iPhones, matters. What happens to the Pacific Ocean garbage patch, matters. No longer can we drain the aquifers in one place without causing a drought somewhere else. We are connected, one people, one race. Rather than focus on national exceptionalism, in a technically advanced society, the people focus on human exceptionalism as stewards of one another and the land, and all cultures are shared and honored. We are the people of Earth. Once we understand that at our core, we will see the promise of technology finally shed its shackles, and we will truly become a technically advanced society.

Book Review: Abundance--A Must Read for Any Futurist

Authors Peter H. Diamandis and Steve Kotler have created just about the perfect handbook when it comes to envisioning a technically advanced, democratic and thriving society. Written in 2012, this book is still an important read for anyone who’s interested in a technical future where humanity finally rises above the mire it has been tethered to for millennia.

Much can be said about the book, but there are two aspects that put Abundance at the top of my recommended reading list. First, Diamandis starts out by addressing the most obvious elephant in the room when it comes to hindering progress: our Cognitive Biases. We tend to be negative creatures, programmed from birth to fear our world and each other. Scarcity is driven into our minds, from supply-side economics to original sin. The media focuses on bad news because that’s what the human mind responds to. While we claim to desire happiness and peace, most people simply don’t believe that they, or anyone else, deserve it.

Diamandis goes straight to the heart of the matter by addressing this flaw, and why it holds us back. The reason technology hasn’t lived up to its promise is because we’ve been thwarting progress with our negativity. In order to free technology and allow it to evolve, we too must free our own minds and evolve from our reptilian, amygdala driven patterns, to higher order thinking and use of the frontal lobes of our brains. This is not a simple task, but in the grand scheme of things, there’s nothing more important than for us to realize that life is actually much better than it’s ever been and that the future will serve us even more when we trust in the abundance of both the Earth and our capabilities.

Basically we need to rewire our brains. We’re still heavily relying on a hardware platform designed to keep us safe from wild animals, weather and other threats our ancient ancestors had to deal with. As Diamandis writes,

“…our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Things have changed. Many of today’s dangers are probabilistic—the economy might nose-dive, there could be a terrorist attack—and the amygdala can’t tell the difference. Worse, the system is also designed not to shut off until the potential danger has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely.”

Physically our brains have grown in size, particularly in the frontal lobe, since the days of the caveman. We have an entire neurology we can embrace, and with it, a totally different perspective of life. Essentially we’ve evolved the hardware to be capable of seeing the systems before us and know that scarcity is something we can overcome, if we chose to believe in it. There’s really no other way.

As long as we remain stuck in the endless negative threat loop, our technology will be held hostage by fearful minds.

Diamandis goes on to point out,

“For abundance, all this carries a triple penalty. First, it’s hard to be optimistic, because the brain’s filtering architecture is pessimistic by design. Second, good news is drowned out, because it’s in the media’s best interest to overemphasize the bad. Third, scientists have discovered an even bigger cost: it’s not just that these survival instincts make us believe that the hold we’re in is too big to climb out of, but they also limit our desire to climb out of that hole.”

What follows after this realization is an attempt by the authors to show your logical brain, that part of you that thinks beyond threat, why you can believe in a better future, using both science and personal stories to prove their point. It’s a brilliant exercise in cheerleading for their cause: an abundant future for all Earth’s citizens.

The second reason I recommend this book is because of its treatment of the BOP, or the over four billion people on our planet who live at the Bottom of The Pyramid, on less than $2 a day. Imagine it, four billion of us live in extreme poverty. Many of us spin our wheels trying to figure out how to get our resources to this group. This book actually gives us a blueprint that doesn’t merely suggest we share our resources with these folks, rather that we make the resources of the Earth and technology available to them in a variety of ways. From Technophilanthropists to the effects of putting cheap Smartphones in the pockets of villagers in West Africa, the possibilities to liberate half the world from poverty are literally in the palm of our hands.

For example, we in the west often look at our Smartphones as luxuries, but to someone in the BOP, it’s a way to share goods with others, discover information about clean water sources, and inform the world when violence erupts in the middle of the night. As they come online, they become a part of the global economy, which changes everything.

Not enough is written about the BOP as a group of consumers. Recipients of charity, yes. But as the old saying goes, “You can give a man a fish, but better to teach him how to fish,” the same holds true for the BOP and technology. This is the market place where solar paneled eco-friendly housing and inexpensive water filtration systems will come to be. Food distribution and agriculture as we know it will dramatically change when we invest in the BOP, which in turn will teach us how to manage the world when 9 billion of us roam the streets.

Abundance—The Future is Better Than You Think was a great read, and belongs on home bookshelves everywhere. Next on my reading list, BOLD, the authors how-to-guide follow up. If anyone can inspire us to make a difference, it’s Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. 

Universal Basic Income—The Foundation of a Technically Advanced Society, PART TWO

My post last week about UBI had over 1,000 hits in just a few days! In addition, it was shared across the internet, including the Basic Income Reddit thread. Several readers reached out to me, both for and (a few) against the concept. These interactions led me to write about the idea once more, this time focusing on some key items that came up: demographics, feasibility and housing.

On the demographics front, I found that most of the big supporters of UBI are millennials and younger. This isn’t surprising, as they have the most to lose if we do nothing about the rising costs of being alive in the US, and the least to lose if we do change our economic policies from scarcity to abundance.  Millennials have come of age in a terrible job market combined with huge student debt. Many of them live at home, because they lack the basic income needed to launch an adult life.  Their earnings-to-debt ratios define them as a group. They will also be the ones to watch the job market automate completely—more than 40% of them will be replaced by robots before the age of retirement. Our future depends on this group of individuals, yet they need more than a lucky break if they’re going to enter their mid-life as secure adults. It’s no wonder that they support UBI, regardless of political background. From conservatives to liberals, our twenty-somethings are searching for new ways to build the world they’ll inherit. Universal Basic Income, combined with technology, is not simply appealing, but necessary.

Yet how feasible is UBI? Readers on Reddit pointed out that my suggested $30K per US adult would be twice our current budget! Yes, you’re correct. I purposefully did NOT look at the current economic system when coming up with that number. Instead, I looked at how much a person would need to afford shelter, food and health care, in the majority of market spaces in the US. Why would I do this? Because we can never evolve out of our situation if we remain focused on CAN’T. We must use our imaginations and find a way to overcome it. So I started with what we need, and from there we shall create a world where our needs are met.

The US Government poverty guideline for a single household for 2015 is $11,770. This guideline is used for determining whether or not you qualify for SNAP, welfare, Head Start and a host of other programs. The point of UBI is to rid ourselves of having to qualify or prove that we lack our basic needs. Instead, our needs are covered and we can turn our efforts towards bettering our lives beyond that, if we so choose.

Some recommended a UBI of $12K, with an increase of $4K a year per child, but that means you still need government help to get that roof over your head and see the doctor, and eat, as well as leaving us in the strange situation where having a ton of kids in order to increase your income is desirable. Yes, $30K is twice that, but actually it turns out I wasn’t far off. Numbeo.com puts the minimum monthly income to survive in the US at $2,642.30, or $31704, after taxes. **note this actually includes clothing, utilities, transportation, etc.**

Thus, if this is what’s needed, then the next step is to see how to implement it. It’s obvious that currently we don’t collect enough money to redistribute it in this way.  In order for us to truly take care of one another, we need a new story about money. The entire economic system may need an overhaul, and this is what scares most people.

It’s not just the 1% who fear the overhaul. It’s anyone who owns a home, pension plan or 401K. If we’re going to make UBI possible, it will require rethinking housing, land ownership, and money.

Approximately 30% of our income each month goes towards paying for housing. Land ownership has made this the most volatile of costs, for as the housing market rises and falls, so do rents and the cost of living, making it very difficult for wages to keep up. While health care and food costs do vary from state to state, it’s housing that really drives the cost of living in any area. For example, the minimum hourly wage needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment in California is $26.02, but in Illinois the amount is $16.78. The reasons for the inflation are many, however most people find that they can’t make enough, even in Illinois, to afford shelter. UBI would help close this gap and make housing a given, rather than the most stressful part of paying the bills.

In lieu of UBI, there are movements to create affordable housing in the US. Tiny Home projects, like the Emerald Village, aim to help get low income folks into a home. This idea really isn’t new, the housing projects of the 70’s and 80’s attempted to do just this. Yet many low income housing projects turned into high-crime high-rises, rather than clean, safe housing. There are many reasons for this, but at its heart is the land ownership issue—how can the government create affordable housing for the struggling yet still guarantee that the housing market doesn’t tank? UBI helps in that the government stays out of the housing market and supply and demand take over. Tiny, affordable houses can be purchased by those who desire them, and McMansions can still spring up right next door.

The Venus Project also tries to overcome these issues by combining technology with the idea of inexpensive, affordable, sustainable communities in order to grant shelter, food and health care to all.  Once again, the story of money must change in order for these ideas to be liberated.

Liberation from the story of money is what we really seek. Since land ownership began, humanity has fallen into to classes--land lords and serfs. We’ve used our brilliant minds to create a system where some thrive while most barely get by. It surprises me that we haven’t moved on yet, that still so many suffer. What is the point of consciousness, if not to figure out the puzzle of abundance? Why chain ourselves to scarcity, when it just isn’t necessary?

In their book, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, authors Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler focus the bottom billion people—our brothers and sisters in the Third World who live on less than $2 a day. Ironically, with advances is technology, these bottom billion are now considered the rising billion. They aren’t mired in the world of Wall Street finance, minimum wage wars and debt, like the working poor of America. Instead, they barely get by at all. Yet in this huge poverty vacuum, there is space for 3D printed houses, solar powered electricity, waterless toilets, Lab-On-A-Chip medical technology and cheap smartphones. Combined with microfinance and technophilanthropy, the bottom billion might just have a fighting chance.

Thus it seems that the technical advancement of the Third World will eventually grant them a guaranteed basic income. The two really do go hand-in-hand.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if America becomes the nation left behind?