[Applause]
hello thank you for having me here
there’s been an amazing afternoon of
community and connection discussions and
I want to talk about connection in the
digital sense I want to talk about how
social capital is the thing that
connects us and that we can create
metrics to go beyond GDP and upgrade
economics so let me go back way back to
my childhood I’ve been obsessed with
computers and automation since I was a
child so much so that I built a family
of robots and a cardboard computer so
believe me that year I got a computer
for Christmas I’m still waiting on the
really cool robot stuff what I want to
talk about though is what is valuable to
us we’ve heard a lot about that on talk
on the talks today it’s parenting its
elder care its caring for the loved ones
in our lives
building community volunteering in the
community raising awareness through
walking these are the things that are
valuable to us as human beings but
unfortunately in the eyes of
contemporary economics none of those
things have value they have zero value
because they’re not measured we have to
look at economics as a cultural
operating system for society and that
means it gets upgraded over time for
most of human history or all of human
history it’s been face-to-face
connection and empathy that has allowed
us to build the social trust that’s
allowed us to build civilization allowed
us to build nations to come together and
invent and be innovators and about 250
years ago Adam Smith the philosopher
codified this idea with the invention of
the invisible hand as an idea and the
invisible hand was empathy not just of
marketplaces but of society itself it’s
the reason we could function and about
at the turn of the last century the
Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie he
decided that because of his access to
libraries as a young boy that it gave
him the advantage in life and so he as
the modern as the father of modern
philanthropy and helped finance and fund
nearly 3,000 libraries in the US and
Europe
and about a hundred years ago Henry Ford
nearby to here and close to the
manufacturing production center of
America he decided that if he paid his
workers double the usual pay they could
afford to buy the vehicles they were
producing it’s this idea that became the
consumption cycle and really built the
middle class in America but we had a
problem in the 1929 we had a crash and
in 1934 Congress asked economists what
happened and for the first time we
counted and we came up with what is now
known as GDP or gross domestic product
and we realized that between 1929 and
1930 for 33 we lost 40% of our value in
the economy it was a problem but now
with GDP and a consumption cycle
post-world War two America boomed and
grew fast and large but we knew there
was a problem and in 1968 Robert Kennedy
noted that GDP measures everything
except that which makes life worthwhile
and it’s those things that make life
worthwhile that are so important to us
but we trucked on anyway and we had a
cycle of growth and bubbles growth and
bubbles and at the turn of this century
we had seen the real estate bubble the
dot-com bubble in the financial crisis
they’ll tell you bubbles are not a
result of greed bubbles happen because
it’s the only way a GDP driven economy
can pay for the things that we really
really feel are important and you’ll see
when we’re in a bubble we’re able to do
all these things that are really really
important but aren’t very tangible and
but what this bubble cycle has led to is
a period of income disparity and social
and lack of social trust that is really
the biggest problem that we have
destructive face in society today but
fortunately in the last 10 years we’ve
had some great business innovations and
those business innovations are things
like conscious capitalism of which I’m a
huge proponent for and new corporate
structure like benefit corporations that
look at capitalism look at business as a
force for good that can elevate humanity
and raise people out of poverty the
other innovation that we have is this
new idea of Big Data the digital
footprint and all of the information
that
connected within our devices and the
Internet is allowing us to rebuild
social trust it’s allowed me to travel
the world using websites like
couchsurfing or Airbnb or to get into an
uber and lyft knowing the rating of the
different users that I’m interacting
with another example of big data in the
new economy is Wikipedia Wikipedia
completely evaporated the encyclopedia
industry it’s gone now but it has no
value in GDP and this is mostly this is
not a problem that wikipedia has by not
monetizing itself it’s a problem in the
field of economics to properly value
Wikipedia’s place within society so what
does the work of the future look like if
we have automation and we have metrics
that don’t count things I believe the
work of the future is all those things
that GDP doesn’t count
it’s caretaking it’s taking classes that
teach stability it’s walking for
awareness it’s doing all of the things
that make us human
but the problem right now is all that
data in the digital economy is a black
box economics looks at big data as a
black box to extract advertising revenue
from and we’re seeing that play out this
last month with Facebook having their
Cambridge analytics issues and the fact
that right now the technology sector has
only one metric GDP and advertising to
realize the value of the data they
possess what I’m proposing is that data
is actually the digital manifestation of
Adam Smith’s invisible hand and that by
providing metrics for that data natively
we can start to build a new model for
funding and cycling currency within the
economy the challenge we have is finding
a crossover point we have other metrics
like gross happiness index but the
problem with those indexes is they don’t
translate to the tangible economy when
we went for a barter system to coining
money you could still trade your cows
and grain or you could still trade your
gold for cows and grain so how do we
trade the industrial economy and have a
so a point to the digital economy and my
background in advertising brought me to
this figure it’s called average revenue
average revenue per user most technology
companies have this figure Facebook at
the end of last year the average revenue
per user in the US and Canada was about
$26 a person and what happens is the
higher socio-economic education level of
a user population the higher their
average revenue per user is so like for
200 years ago we can create a new
consumption cycle for the digital
economy instead of the industrial
economy and this cycle allows private
capital to be invested in education
human welfare and societal well-being
and therefore building social capital
which returns to higher revenues to the
company growing the entire market
similar the way the middle class was
built a hundred years ago and so what
we’re doing now is with the Institute
for economic evolution we’re asking
these questions how can we start
analyzing big data how can we start
looking at the metrics we have to invest
in medical research because investing in
medical research isn’t a liability on
society it’s an asset to society money
spent on research money spent on
families money spent on education is all
money that goes right back into the
digital economy I believe that this new
digital economy is much vaster and
larger than the industrial economy ever
could have dreamt abate but the problem
right now is we’re locked into one
metric and so I’m hoping that we can
build these new metrics and a very a
very number of those metrics so that we
can build a better economy built on
social trust that values people first thank you
hello thank you for having me here
there’s been an amazing afternoon of
community and connection discussions and
I want to talk about connection in the
digital sense I want to talk about how
social capital is the thing that
connects us and that we can create
metrics to go beyond GDP and upgrade
economics so let me go back way back to
my childhood I’ve been obsessed with
computers and automation since I was a
child so much so that I built a family
of robots and a cardboard computer so
believe me that year I got a computer
for Christmas I’m still waiting on the
really cool robot stuff what I want to
talk about though is what is valuable to
us we’ve heard a lot about that on talk
on the talks today it’s parenting its
elder care its caring for the loved ones
in our lives
building community volunteering in the
community raising awareness through
walking these are the things that are
valuable to us as human beings but
unfortunately in the eyes of
contemporary economics none of those
things have value they have zero value
because they’re not measured we have to
look at economics as a cultural
operating system for society and that
means it gets upgraded over time for
most of human history or all of human
history it’s been face-to-face
connection and empathy that has allowed
us to build the social trust that’s
allowed us to build civilization allowed
us to build nations to come together and
invent and be innovators and about 250
years ago Adam Smith the philosopher
codified this idea with the invention of
the invisible hand as an idea and the
invisible hand was empathy not just of
marketplaces but of society itself it’s
the reason we could function and about
at the turn of the last century the
Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie he
decided that because of his access to
libraries as a young boy that it gave
him the advantage in life and so he as
the modern as the father of modern
philanthropy and helped finance and fund
nearly 3,000 libraries in the US and
Europe
and about a hundred years ago Henry Ford
nearby to here and close to the
manufacturing production center of
America he decided that if he paid his
workers double the usual pay they could
afford to buy the vehicles they were
producing it’s this idea that became the
consumption cycle and really built the
middle class in America but we had a
problem in the 1929 we had a crash and
in 1934 Congress asked economists what
happened and for the first time we
counted and we came up with what is now
known as GDP or gross domestic product
and we realized that between 1929 and
1930 for 33 we lost 40% of our value in
the economy it was a problem but now
with GDP and a consumption cycle
post-world War two America boomed and
grew fast and large but we knew there
was a problem and in 1968 Robert Kennedy
noted that GDP measures everything
except that which makes life worthwhile
and it’s those things that make life
worthwhile that are so important to us
but we trucked on anyway and we had a
cycle of growth and bubbles growth and
bubbles and at the turn of this century
we had seen the real estate bubble the
dot-com bubble in the financial crisis
they’ll tell you bubbles are not a
result of greed bubbles happen because
it’s the only way a GDP driven economy
can pay for the things that we really
really feel are important and you’ll see
when we’re in a bubble we’re able to do
all these things that are really really
important but aren’t very tangible and
but what this bubble cycle has led to is
a period of income disparity and social
and lack of social trust that is really
the biggest problem that we have
destructive face in society today but
fortunately in the last 10 years we’ve
had some great business innovations and
those business innovations are things
like conscious capitalism of which I’m a
huge proponent for and new corporate
structure like benefit corporations that
look at capitalism look at business as a
force for good that can elevate humanity
and raise people out of poverty the
other innovation that we have is this
new idea of Big Data the digital
footprint and all of the information
that
connected within our devices and the
Internet is allowing us to rebuild
social trust it’s allowed me to travel
the world using websites like
couchsurfing or Airbnb or to get into an
uber and lyft knowing the rating of the
different users that I’m interacting
with another example of big data in the
new economy is Wikipedia Wikipedia
completely evaporated the encyclopedia
industry it’s gone now but it has no
value in GDP and this is mostly this is
not a problem that wikipedia has by not
monetizing itself it’s a problem in the
field of economics to properly value
Wikipedia’s place within society so what
does the work of the future look like if
we have automation and we have metrics
that don’t count things I believe the
work of the future is all those things
that GDP doesn’t count
it’s caretaking it’s taking classes that
teach stability it’s walking for
awareness it’s doing all of the things
that make us human
but the problem right now is all that
data in the digital economy is a black
box economics looks at big data as a
black box to extract advertising revenue
from and we’re seeing that play out this
last month with Facebook having their
Cambridge analytics issues and the fact
that right now the technology sector has
only one metric GDP and advertising to
realize the value of the data they
possess what I’m proposing is that data
is actually the digital manifestation of
Adam Smith’s invisible hand and that by
providing metrics for that data natively
we can start to build a new model for
funding and cycling currency within the
economy the challenge we have is finding
a crossover point we have other metrics
like gross happiness index but the
problem with those indexes is they don’t
translate to the tangible economy when
we went for a barter system to coining
money you could still trade your cows
and grain or you could still trade your
gold for cows and grain so how do we
trade the industrial economy and have a
so a point to the digital economy and my
background in advertising brought me to
this figure it’s called average revenue
average revenue per user most technology
companies have this figure Facebook at
the end of last year the average revenue
per user in the US and Canada was about
$26 a person and what happens is the
higher socio-economic education level of
a user population the higher their
average revenue per user is so like for
200 years ago we can create a new
consumption cycle for the digital
economy instead of the industrial
economy and this cycle allows private
capital to be invested in education
human welfare and societal well-being
and therefore building social capital
which returns to higher revenues to the
company growing the entire market
similar the way the middle class was
built a hundred years ago and so what
we’re doing now is with the Institute
for economic evolution we’re asking
these questions how can we start
analyzing big data how can we start
looking at the metrics we have to invest
in medical research because investing in
medical research isn’t a liability on
society it’s an asset to society money
spent on research money spent on
families money spent on education is all
money that goes right back into the
digital economy I believe that this new
digital economy is much vaster and
larger than the industrial economy ever
could have dreamt abate but the problem
right now is we’re locked into one
metric and so I’m hoping that we can
build these new metrics and a very a
very number of those metrics so that we
can build a better economy built on
social trust that values people first thank you
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