Leo Guinan
@leoguinan
Leo Guinan
I like the term economism . It describes how economic thinking and practice have become ingrained into all sorts of aspects of our lives, even non-economic ones. In today’s world governed by economism , everything seems to need to be measured by economic logic: am I using my time efficiently?
Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #78
Haven’t heard this term before, but I think it follows from the collapse of things into measurements. We started with measuring money as a collapse of information, and that led to collapses of other aspects of the world as a proxy for money where money isn’t available to measure value.
"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."
Ben Thompson • Platforms, Ecosystems, and Aggregators
We’ve created abundant scarce systems that result in winner take all behavior.
Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report
When you think about the future, you spend a little energy now to optimize what will come later
In the past jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.
Nicholas Goodey • Resistance and Embracing Your Nature
The heart is where the energy lies.
Our design expectations get higher every single day. And for better or worse, we associate trust with design.When we see something beautifully-designed, we are automatically more inclined to trust it. When we see something poorly-designed, we are inclined to NOT trust it.
Jay Clouse • How to look more legitimate
Kindness isn’t always easy or obvious, because the urgent race to the bottom, to easily measured metrics and to scarcity, can distract us. But bending the arc toward justice, toward dignity and toward connection is our best way forward.
Seth Godin • Three types of kindness
Engineering Generosity and Abundant Systems
Seth has a lot of good ideas on this. Should tie in to his ideas more.
Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity.
Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
It requires different thinking to take advantage of abundance. Abundant systems teach people to think abundantly.
If hazards stop being rare, stop being predictable, and/or produce damages that aren’t easily reparable (or suggest that a building should not be rebuilt in that location), the existing market structures for both property insurance and property more broadly won’t work.
Home Insurance is a Really Big Problem
This is a broken assumption of the insurance market. It’s based on money, not security. The problem is that we don’t organize the problem correctly. We don’t need to protect against specific kinds of events. We need to protect specific people. Everyone is worth protecting. What if insurance was designed to help us figure out exactly how valuable everyone was to protect and to who?
The model flips and the math is way easier.