Ideas
Chris Macrae

Beyond Nations - The Economic viewpoint

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Beyond Nations - The Economic viewpoint

Those who have debated the coming of the net generation the longest, have found the forbidden question of Beyond Nations. the most inconvenient of truth dabates for reasons like these The dirty secret of the industrial age was those 'nations' that extracted most (energy , minerals etc) from foreign communities grew the most while impoverishing those they extracted from. Even more tragic systems then externalized risks back onto those places that had been put most in debt while being extracted from! This below zero-sum modeling was a consequence of an industrial age of consuming up things. Those who value a post-industrial revolution aim to mediate the human race's pioneering era of above zero-sum models liberated by the dynamics of knowhow multiplying value in use, mobilized through global village apps accessible everywhere at the same almost zero-cost - exactly the opposite system dynamics spun around the 20th century's consuming up things faster and faster

Ultimately nature's evolutionary rules are bottom up and openly collaborative. It's no wonder that the scaling of man made systems to be global for the first time is causing climate and other crisses wherever we exponentially devalue nature's rules. More absurdly we haven't yet legalized organsiational forms most suitable for such sectors as abundant clean energy which can be networked out of every community not ruled over by a few giant interests of eg controlling carbon's chaining of value

For youth of the 21st century, most of whose innovation of productivity will value multiply virtually across the world in services (and not just with workers next door) Note the intrapreneurial paradox - much of this open replication of microfranchises will distribute knowledge aimed at prioritise life-saving local community regeneration. The greatest risk to worldwide youth becomes governments who monoplise regulating trade instead of opening windows onto a 'borderless' world . Such anti-youth dinosaurs spin the most uneconomic distortions -witness what big banking has so far done to 21st century jobs (lost generations)

Diarising joyful stories of youth's cross-cultural adventores

While our friends of YouthCapitalism would like to be in contact (1 ,2, 3 , 4) with worldwide citizens with solutions to the left-hand crises such as those twinning capital cities in million job co-creation with youth, we'd also like to hear fom those with joyful cross-cultural histories. Take the case of Muhammad Yunus many youth's most joyful economist

Around 1955, the 15-year old Yunus seized the opportunity to go on a round the world trip of almost a year's duration with other Muslim teenagers. The celebration: the annual worldwide Boys Scout summit, that year being convened out of Canada. In those days, planes were prohibiteively expensive. So sixteen teenagers sailed out of Bangaldesh (then called East Pakistan) on their Westbound journey. Even more courageously their trip back east sailed to continental Europe, took trains to Wolfsburg, where they bought a few Volkswagen vans to drive back overland.

Arguably the mid 1950s was the only time in history sixteen youth could do this. Before that the world was at war (as industrial extraction literally ran out of space) and even Volkswagen technology wasn't reliable enough. After that the number of visas needed to plan such a trip and the costs of safety would have made such a trip 10 times less economical if doable at all

Let's discuss what can be learnt from this. One idea is that those editing moocs and khan academy could make one of their priorities the design of a pro-youth curriculum of cross-cultural joy. Keynes explained why economists who do not value deep cultural arts are not to be trusted to ruling over future system design. Even more dramatically to point, Adam Smith wrote never ever let one mindset monoplise your schooling system. Wherever governments are that protective mindset, schools are not being democratically designed around the knowhow borderless youth of the 21st century need most to be economically viable with their working lives and peacefully celebrating cross-cultural joy