Little Victories, Elections and How to Navigate Our Time
How the world really works
Canadians went to the polls yesterday to elect a Parliament that will determine the next leader of the country. These are contentious times. We forget - maybe it’s that we lose track - that free, fair, and highly contested democratic elections are the envy of much of the world. Democracy, like everything else, works in cycles. This morning, 49 are disappointed and 51 are happy. It’s not that clear-cut but you understand my point.
It occurred to me that, even in a time of endless bickering, adult life is not always about getting what you want. It’s about feeling capable in your time and place. In whatever system you live in. If you can find your gifts, build the skills that give you the confidence to use those gifts, and build relationships (even with people you disagree with) then you are capable and most (let’s face it) elections don’t matter all that much. We all like to think we live in the greatest or worst of times, but it’s rarely true. Too much time has passed.
If you voted yesterday, you’ve done your duty. You’ve done what’s in your control, and now Tuesday is going to happen the way that almost all other Tuesday’s happen. You still have to wake up, take one step at a time, and go out into the world to do your work.
I myself happen to be in Ottawa, not a stone’s throw from Parliament - the room where it happened, so to speak. I’m sitting in Little Victories, I was here at the open, and I drank my espresso looking out the window at the citizens of the Capital scurrying about. The circuit opens here at 7:00am local time, which is a pleasant surprise.
My point is this - feeling capable is a wonderfully powerful feeling. Times come, and times go. Life goes on. If you’re going to feel capable in that world, you need a framework and a set of tools. Here’s one possible framework - a melange of ideas from a variety of places.
Please enjoy!
In 2023, I wrote about the idea of unseeableness. Things that once you learn, you can’t unlearn. Education has a way of doing this to us. Of infecting us like some kind of mind virus. If we don’t approach learning with a sense of balance, and flow, that virus can spread in ways that don’t always serve us.
For example, in some ways I wish I didn’t go down the light and technology rabbit hole because I can’t unlearn what I’ve learned, I can’t unsee what I’ve seen, and it’s not clear to me how to manage it without moving to some equatorial beach town.
That’s the power of education - a power we have to learn to manage. In a world where information comes at you as if by assault (Freya India is so good it’s heartbreaking)- this is more important than ever, but increasingly difficult.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who believed in the power of education like my paternal grandfather did. He made a career out of it - a local school principle on the East Coast of Newfoundland. George believed that we - each one of us - needs to be in the business of using our gifts. We discover our gifts via learning and putting what we’ve learned into practice. There is no former without the latter. Learning is a verb.
Although I love what I do and who I do it with, I’ve continued my education in pathways both informal and formal. In the latter category, continued education in economic development at the University of Waterloo - a rather productive place that I’ve long wanted to be a part of. I return every June to work through the material with a cohort of like-minded people (sort of). I can’t help but feel like I’m the bad egg (and that makes it all the more fun).
First, a note on relationships and how they influence learning.
Every Friday (or thereabouts, as life permits) I have lunch time espresso with Walter. Walter is wonderful. Walter is whimsical. Walter is without judgement or reservation. Walter is, indeed, wonderful.
He too happens to be in the economic development business, on the investment attraction side, and he likes to think about how the world works in the same way that I do. He has the benefit of youth and idealism - he’s 10 years my junior. Walter is something of a reverse mentor, and he helped me refine my ideas here. Obviously, there is nothing new or ground-breaking in this essay (or any of my essays), but I like to put the pieces together where possible - I’m rather good at that - and Walter helps me stay sharp.
Learning, although you won’t hear this in the public education system, is a team sport. Sitting alone, at a desk, spewing memorized information as the clock ticks down to final submission is an absurd way to learn. Especially for children. Learning is co-creation and if it isn’t with someone else (ideally a group of people) it isn’t actually learning.
I recommend you find a coffeehouse. I recommend you find a Walter. I recommend you make it a priority to leave your office and your silly screens, and to go learn together. The joys and opportunity there know no bounds.
Onward.
“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time. I hope that in this post you explore how the world really works - the foundation of all progress, the possible gains thereafter, and the terms by which it is all governed.
Here are 5 Tools used in this post.
The wonderful mensch - Kevin Kelly
The words and ideas of my grandfather - George Martin
Peter Thiel’s Zero to One
The Knowledge Project and The Prof G Pod - very different experiences
Are you interested in getting access to all of the tools used in every post on People & Place? Let me know in the comments and I’ll build something new and interesting for this community.
The Foundation, the Gains, and the Terms
Economic Development is a discipline that can be hard to describe. As it turns out, once the puzzle pieces fall into place, it’s also very hard to unsee. The revelation began for me when I realized that it’s a process - not a system or a product - and one that likely never ends. According to Larry Smith, “…a process that a place and its people go through to reach their full potential.” What a wonderful definition. What a wonderful idea.
If economic development is a process by which we achieve our full potential - then it seems logical to suggest that we can only achieve that potential in markets that are as free and open as possible - humans being in relationship with other humans - in a practical, mutually beneficial way, at scale, at any time, anywhere on earth (an interesting time to be writing this indeed because the current administration of the world’s economic powerhouse has seemingly forgotten this fact).
If economic development as a principle, is a process, then there are good decisions we can make to influence that process. If you’re a millennial in this space, you’ve likely been raised (for better or for worse) on familiar names like Sachs, Ferguson, Moyo, Friedman, Rifkin. The latter, although it’s easy to find fault, had a rather good idea in The Third Industrial Revolution that helps us define the fundamentals of economic development from a first principles perspective. A solid foundation upon which to build (he’s not as explicit about transportation as I feel he should have been, but I attribute the idea to him nonetheless because flowers are meant to be given where flowers are due).
The Foundation is defined by the energy that powers economic activity, the transportation that moves economic activity around, and the communication networks that coordinate economic activity. That’s how you go from 0 to 1 and that’s how you go from 1 to whatever’s next.
All Possible Gains above the foundation can be broadly defined as either people gains or productivity gains. We can have some underlying growth in a special domain of production, or we can increase the population so the work that needs doing gets done.
It’s Jeffrey Sachs, who gave us The Terms by which we can define that growth - geography (ex: mountains), technology (ex: mobile), and human institutions (ex: governments).
So there we have it - the foundation, the gains, and the terms. Here’s what it looks like in my brain.
What you’re seeing (in a sentence) is energy at the base, transportation moving it, networks organizing it, people and productivity producing gains, and the whole thing being define by geography, tech, and human groups.
Before we unpack each category in turn, I’m inclined to briefly talk about markets and why they’re so important.
If economic development really is about achieving our full potential, that implies free markets in which to do so! What are free markets? The definition most available in my brain comes from (again, for better or for worse) Javier ‘El Loco’ Milei - the current President of Argentina.
“…the market is a process of voluntary exchange where individuals cooperate through the transfer of property rights…this is the system that drives the allocation of resources.”
Free humans, using their unique abilities to make things, and to sell those things to other free humans who need that thing. In this way, we build a meritocracy based on free exchange of goods and services - with our modern developments in technology this could take place anywhere in the world, at any time.
In one of my favourite 20VC episodes, Ryan Petersen of Flexport says that his mission, and the mission of his juggernaut of a company, is to … ‘grow the GDP of the planet.’
The executive leadership of Shopify have similar takes - that what Shopify really does it allows everyone on earth to become an entrepreneur, if they’d like to be one. This seems to be a very good thing for humanity.
If we are going to use our gifts to make things and sell things in a free market, what is the foundation of making that possible?
(The Foundation)
Energy that powers
Transportation that moves
Communication that coordinates
“…the great economic transformations in history occur when new communication technology converges with new energy systems. The new forms of communication become the medium for organizing and managing the more complex civilizations made possible by the new sources of energy. The infrastructure that emerges annihilates time and shrinks space, connecting people and markets in more diverse economic relations.” - Rifkin
Energy is the critical ingredient - the ingredient without which the recipe fails. We need the energy necessary to power economic activity. This could be lighting lamps with kerosene to overcome darkness, moving trains with steam, moving automobiles and planes with the combustion of oil, or powering computers with electricity. We’re exploring new forms of technology like wind, solar, and nuclear, but the jury is still out on these categories - the plane is still being built, so to speak. Wind seems to be fickle, or worse. Solar seems viable if we can store and move the power. Nuclear seems to be a better alternative to coal, for example, but faces the odd challenge that it is very polarizing politically - just ask the Germans (again - the terms).
Sustainable energy is clearly the key to the whole game, and if you’ve personally punched your passport, and experienced places that don’t have it yet, it’s easy to see why.
Once we have the energy to power economic activity, we have to be able to move it around. We move things by road, by rail, on the ocean, in the air, and in seconds through cyberspace. If we can’t move the energy around, and find novel ways to store it up for later, then the energy itself isn’t useful.
There is an old Chinese proverb that roughly translates to - “Eventually you get where you’re going.” And so it is that the last ingredient in the fundamental progress pie is the coordination of the economic activity we’ve powered and moved. Things that are moving around need to get where they’re going!
We coordinate economic activity by sending carrier pigeons, via paper mail, through landlines, with cell phones, through text message, via email, or via software. In this way - from one individual to the other, or amongst big, decentralized teams and networks across the globe - we can coordinate activity through time and across space.
These are the roots of economic activity - you might say - so important as to be the catalyst to economic revolutions, or to be prioritized for disruption in war time. It’s why the Germans in WWII made sure to disrupt these systems as much as possible in centres of production, like Coventry, and centres of social and political life, like London.
“As long as there was tea, there was England.” - Erik Larson, from The Splendid and The Vile
(The Gains)
All gains above the foundation can be broadly attributed to either people gains or productivity gains. You either get really good at producing a certain thing, or certain things, or you grow the population so there are more people to do the work that needs doing. Economic development agencies are just as likely to support population growth and workforce development initiatives as they are research clusters, knowledge parks, or startup accelerators.
The risk, it seems, comes when underlying stagnation in productivity is paired with rapid people gains - with population growth. If there aren’t underlying, fundamental productivity gains - like in housing construction or healthcare - you eventually bottleneck and have to renegotiate the terms of the immigration strategy, like Canada did recently.
And so, again, it is the process of economic development that implies the toggling on and off dials so that productivity grows as population does. It’s a hard problem though - chicken-and-the-egg stuff - and we should all be patient with one another as we try to figure it out.
(The Terms)
I find the terms as interesting as anything in the human progress equation. Perhaps the most interesting, actually. This occurred to me recently when I was sitting on the porch with a local regenerative farmer. Farmers understand life-math as well as anyone, and tend to have a practicality that is - as far as I can tell - equal to 2 or 3 average PhDs. If you want to know if there’s base level inflation - ask a farmer. If you want to understand how to approach hard work with patience, consistency, and stamina - ask a farmer. If you want to understand how life works within Maslow’s hierarchy - ask a farmer. If you want common sense and reason - ask a farmer.
The terms are fascinating because most of us in the ‘developed’ world are so far from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that the stark realities of the world, at it’s fundamental level, are lost on us. Look no further than the COVID19 pandemic. We all thought that we could barricade ourselves in our homes and there would still magically be food and basic resources on the shelves, or delivered to our doors by an hourly wage worker. Where does the food come from? Who knows! How is my income still magically being added to my record of accounts? Well the money comes every two weeks! I’m being equally judgemental of myself here.
Mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, precious metals, chips, batteries, and statecraft are as fundamental to economic development as energy, transportation, and communication. There are realities we need to confront if we are going to live, make progress, and thrive in the real world. In essence, we need to be in the business of living in reality. As the world seemingly reorders itself - we’re learning that in earnest.
“...global change emerged from the interplay of physical geography, technology, and institutions. Physical geography…means the climate, flora and fauna, diseases, topography, soils, energy resources, mineral deposits, and Earth processes that affect the conditions of life. Technology refers to both the hardware and software of our production systems. Institutions include politics, laws, and cultural ideas and practices that guide society.” - Sachs
China is an interesting example of the former. If we think of China broadly as a big, fascinating, highly productive rectangle, we can see just how relevant the solid reality of geography is to the rise and fall of people and places.
In the south, the Xishuangbanna tropical rainforests, in Yunnan Province. In the West, the mighty Himalayas. In the far-East, the East China Sea, and in the North, the grasslands of the Asian Steppe. Let’s say you have eyes for China and you’d like to mount an invasion. The South? That would not be fun. The West? Impossible. The East? The most promising option yet, but it’s actually extremely hard to mount a successful maritime invasion. That leaves us with the North and that is precisely where historic China has faced its greatest threats of military incursion. The threat was so significant, that the Chinese were essentially forced to come off of the Oceans , having been an ocean-going society, to divert precious, finite resources to the issue of the Northern border. Geography is destiny.
“In 1843, the London public was invited to make its first crossing underneath the River Thames by a newly dug tunnel. In 1869 the Suez Canal saved Eurasian shipping traffic from rounding the Cape of Good Hope. In 1914 the Panama Canal cut short the route from Atlantic to Pacific.” - Thiel
Singapore is also an interesting example but the unicorn of all unicorns (for better or for worse) seems to be the United States of America. The proof is in the pudding, as they say - the Americans have economically and militarily worn the crown for the last century (almost).
Geographically, the US is an actual unicorn, being the only country on earth with all four official climate zones - from arctic in Alaska, to desert in the North-West, to the tropics of Hawaii and Florida, and to the boreal forests of the North-East. From a technology perspective, after and because of WWII, the US became a juggernaut, producing some of the world’s greatest technology hubs and technology companies. Institutionally, the US is uniquely recognized as the world’s first democracy, and still to this day is a model for productivity, even in the face of it’s own moment of struggle.
My basic premise is that it is possible to understand our time and our place. Not fully. Never fully. But with the common sense, patience, and curiosity of a farmer, we can understand - little by little - how the world works, and the processes by which we can find our place in it.
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.
See you on the road.
“…small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.” - Thiel
