Albert Wenger is currently in the process of writing a book called World After Capital. The book isn’t finished yet. It still exists in a crude rough draft form. But already he has made it freely available online. You’re also welcome to comment and contribute to the book as he works on it.
Why has he done it this way?
Because this format of publishing is in line with where he believes the world is heading. He believes we are headed towards a world where new forms of surplus – brought about by technological innovation – will create greater levels of freedom: economic freedom, informational freedom, and psychological freedom.
His overall thesis is that the world has been moving through a series of scarcities. As hunter and gathers, the scarcity was food. In our agricultural period, we learned how to create food surpluses (which freed up more of our time), but it then produced land scarcity. Once the industrial revolution hit we once again freed up more of our time through surpluses, but then the scarcity became centered around capital. We also started to negatively impact the environment. Today, as we clearly move away from the industrial economy towards a knowledge and information economy, Albert believes the new scarcity is attention. (I wrote a related post about a month ago.)
If you’re interested in this topic and don’t feel like diving into his book, I suggest you watch this 23 minute presentation by Albert Wenger. I watched it this morning and he talks about everything I mention above.
Here’s one of his slides that I felt was important to share:
Why it’s interesting to think about this shift is because there will inevitably be positive and negative outcomes associated with it; there will inevitably be groups who, probably because of self-interest, would rather cling to the past; and because there are pressing global issues that we need to be focusing our attention on – issues such as climate change.
I can’t help but wonder about all the ways this shift could reverberate through the economy and our cities. Earlier this week I wrote a post about architecture as a tool for capital. But with our current fixation on “starchitecture”, one could argue that we have already transformed architecture into a new tool – a tool for grabbing attention. If you believe that attention is the new scarcity, then this makes perfect sense.
In a knowledge and innovation economy, new ideas matter a great deal. But it seems to be a lot easier for existing companies to come up with sustaining, incremental innovations, than it is for them to come up with new, disruptive innovations.
New can be hard.
That’s why I was interested in a recent New York Times article by Wharton professor Adam Grant called, How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off.
The article starts by arguing that many “child prodigies” rarely become adult creators who go on to the change the world:
The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to codified rules, rather than inventing their own. Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves. In the language of the critic William Deresiewicz, they become the excellent sheep.
To become creators Adam argues that children need to be given the freedom and independence to develop their own sense of self:
When psychologists compared America’s most creative architects with a group of highly skilled but unoriginal peers, there was something unique about the parents of the creative architects: “Emphasis was placed on the development of one’s own ethical code.”
Yes, parents encouraged their children to pursue excellence and success — but they also encouraged them to find “joy in work.” Their children had freedom to sort out their own values and discover their own interests. And that set them up to flourish as creative adults.
I firmly believe in this approach. But of course, this doesn’t just apply to children; though that is certainly an important takeaway. I also think that if you want the best work out of people in the workplace, you also need to: back off.
Creativity needs freedom.
Canada is a resource rich country. And one of the things that commonly happens to countries with a lot of resources is that they begin to myopically focus on the immediate gains from resources at the expense of long term innovation and economic development.
This is known as the “resource curse.”
The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published a report that looks at this exact topic: Canada’s urban competitiveness through the lenses of its resource economy and its knowledge economy. In the end, Richard Florida and Greg Spencer conclude that two can and should work together, but that we need to stop neglecting our cities:
“The oil and gas industry is not necessarily a constraint on the creative economy, but in the past decade or so it has come to dominate thinking around economic development policy-making. It is time to use the resources from the energy economy to build a more secure future as an urban knowledge economy. We can also use talent and technology to deepen and expand the resource economy.”
And one of their key recommendation is something I have argued for many times here on Architect This City:
“A New Federalism for Cities: It is time to give cities the taxing and spending powers they require. Cities must be given more control over their own destinies if they are to prosper in the 21st century.”
Now, here are a few interesting charts from the report.
This first one looks at the relationship between a city’s population and its creativity levels. The two are positively correlated, which means that, in this context, bigger is better.
This second one splits Canada in half – east and west – and then looks at how average income levels are affected by creativity levels (the knowledge economy). Here we see that in eastern cities, income levels are positively correlated with creativity levels. But in western cities, changing creativity levels have almost no impact on income levels.
Finally, this third chart compares the relationship between oil and gas employment (LQ = location quotient) and average income levels. What it finds is that income levels and oil and gas employment are positively correlated in the west, but there’s almost no relationship in eastern cities.
The way to read this chart is to think of the LQ as the employment multiple relative to the national average. So for example, a LQ = 10 means that the oil and gas employment levels are 10 times the national average. As you probably guessed, the pink dot way out on the right is Fort McMurray.
If you’d like to read the entire report, you can do that here. I hope that our new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, will read reports like this and spend more of his efforts investing in our knowledge economy – which means investing in our cities.