The policies and politics of Development - Starting at Human Scale

If we assume that the social contract is broken, and we further take upon ourselves the responsibility for fixing it, what then can we say about 'How now shall we live?', that question-on-a-book from 1999, which echoes back to earlier inflection-point philosophy heading into what we now know as post-modernism.

Everyone feels like they are on the cutting edge, I mean, we have smart phones now and everything, but if we stop to think about what it all means and think about it long enough, we might eventually ask ourselves, 'On the cutting-edge of what?'. The simple answer of 'progress' is no longer enough to satisfy the urge to know because 'progress' in many senses has been very 'unprogressive', and this is for many reasons.

One of the reasons most commonly named here in Colombia - Corruption.

Corruption is the reason that we have not developed further! It is the reason, and many regions in the world may have had this experience with globalism, that the 'politics of globalization' have hollowed out our industrial capacity and returned us to the bean-picking, textile sweat-shopping ways where the competitive advantage of our low minimum wage resultant from a low cost of living really lies.

If the state as a government has any role at all, its roll should be to form a strategy about how to work with the forces of the markets and geopolitics and the forces of the individual people's and communities drive to create a better life.

For too long, what is referred to as Cronyism has dominated politics worldwide to the point where its purpose has been twisted into merely benefiting those who are in power. But twisting that twisted system into benefiting some different group 'for a change' would not be fixing the problem, it would be avoiding it!

But there are solutions to this problem, really easy stuff that will improve the outcomes for everyone, even and especially the politicians. I cannot help but think that at least some politicians are victim to the very twisted system, there is a saying in Colombia that 'Corruption IS the system', which is to say, the system doesn't even need to corrupt each individual, the system is corrupt and the politicians just enter into 'the way things are done'. But we can do things a different way - and its obvious to pretty much everyone that we must.

Transparency

This is actually one interesting front of the movement to improve our systems that HIVE can play a big part in. What sort of information are we publishing? HIVE could choose to incentivize transparency in governance initiatives to motivate municipalities to publish their records in Blockchain.

Currently, our municipality uses Facebook LIVE to record and 'make transparent' their 'close of records' ceremony each year. I will continue to try to encourage our community here, as well as people around the world, to include a post to a blockchain like HIVE (uncensored, available, open) that contains all relevant information like data, tables, links to material and other such references.

Governments should be transparent, this is a necessary, but not sufficient condition, to improve the system.

We also need a Development Policy

And I am not talking about Development Policy in some loose bureaucratic way. In fact, its probably best at this point forward to assume that the best way would be to iterate locally, and limit the influence and stupidity, throttle the power of higher level central authorities. But even without actively fighting, we must look locally at how we are going to DEVELOP ourselves, and what it means to do so.

In a certain sense, in the United States, people of a certain age can understand that the US was a great industrial nation and at one time there was made a lot of things like tanks and bombs and airplanes and often times in the legends the industrial superiority is also tied into US moral authority, which seems ridiculous in a post-modern sense of course.

But now living in a time when the US has limited moral authority it also finds itself with a quite limited industrial capacity, so perhaps these issues are more linked than we would like to think. Is it possible that 'making things' is more moral than 'managing things'?

I will deflect my own question by admitting that the managing of things is quite important, especially the managing of 'making things'. This physical reality cannot be ignored, when we 'add value' we are talking about things. Even the making of experiences requires a great many 'things' to get right, like building supplies, electrical wires and switches and indoor plumbing.

Back to development, since the end of the Cold War in 1989 especially, the forces of 'globalization' have been allowed to test, all the world over and in different ways, the benefits and limits of 'scale'. Corporations have grown so big, and so large they are in many instances more comparable to nation states, even though they do not share nearly any of the same constraints such as 'national elections'. But the limits of scale are becoming obvious, and the next wave of innovation will come from an opposite trend, so-called 'human scale technology'.

This is why I think that social contract iteration has to happen at the local level, by the way. But the implication of HUMAN SCALE has not even begun to be understood. Transportation will be affected, education will need to be affected, agriculture will need to change a lot. I think we are already seeing some impacts on medicine as well, how about a ZOOM meeting with your doctor - what country is she in? Does it matter?

This ties in with Millennials living with their parents, and trying to get work that they can do on ZOOM. This is right in line with a minimalist philosophy, which brings me to the next point:

Its not just about making things. In many cases its about making things in a better way. Take the sorry state of US Agriculture with regards to Corn, Cows and High Fructose Corn Syrup. I won't go over all the ways this is poisonous here, but in some version of the accounting we are managing to produce 'a lot' of calories 'really cheap'. But it is now clear that grass fed beef is a lot healthier for cows and people, and high fructose is giving us all diabetes.

So its not about making more food, but better food. Its also not about making a billion batteries. Its clear that all these rare earth metals are not the solution to our long term problems, but smaller, more human-scale iterations of technologies will lead us to improved implementations.

In other words, covering an entire state with solar panels might sound like a good idea, but you can be sure it will come with its own problems!

We have been awakened to the dangers of scale! Which is why the next wave of solutions is local. We need to think critically about our communities - What value are we adding?

What do people make in your community?

What products do they make, what foods to they grow, what engineering are they masters at?

With a bit of discipline, we can rekindle our spirit of community and understand our place within our society - and our place requires something from us, it requires our courage to 'ADD VALUE' instead of spreading fear, to start new business ventures based on ever changing opportunities and opportunities from change.

Just about everything comes from the earth - what are you growing? Can you grow fruit? Herbs? Fuel, medicine, spice or any number of other options, along with your skills, what are you growing? Especially wood, is one of the most useful materials that can be generated by the power of the SUN and RAIN and some tree genetics.

Do some value accounting in your community. Besides productive capacity, what social structures in your communities have value? This is the sort of analysis we are doing locally and want to encourage people to do around the world. No one is coming to save us, we must build our own future.

Freedom and Friendship