Involve to Evolve
Explained with apples
My sister says “When stuck, don’t speed up!” which is a quaint and very Mexican way of saying: Stop and think. And if the mistake has been dragging the world for too many decades, thinking is not enough: we have to rethink! Rethink from the base, from the very concept: Understand that the consumerism that Baby Boomers lived as something almost patriotic to activate the economy, is turning out to be a crime against Millennials and future generations.
UNO’s 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals propose, among other things, the use of resources in such a way that current needs of the population can be met without compromising the needs of future generations.
We have to understand that consumerism means bread for today and hunger for tomorrow, and we need to change not just habits but attitude because our dear life, literally depends on it. ”What is not sustainable will stop being profitable” Quoting Jori Armbruster: “What is not sustainable will no longer be profitable”. Those cheap shoes, those shoddy trinkets and disposable objects, are way more expensive than they seem: Their manufacturing is poisoning our only planet and what we save in money we will pay at health cost. Well-being requires being associated with needing less, not having more. In this sense there is hope because new generations are more prone to be users instead of owners: Shared cars, house exchange or rent for holidays, digital services that dematerialize the accumulation of objects (books, music, photographs, games). New technologies (Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Biotechnology, Blockchain and in general a greater processes efficiency) are making products and services more accesible to the world population, so basic needs will be met with minimum resources.
In painful contrast, today almost a quarter of the world’s population is excluded from the global economic system, resulting in massive migrations: We need to create value in a more inclusive and distributed way to achieve a balance that allows everyone to have opportunities within their own environment.”When stuck, don’t speed up” Think. The current economic system is broken: If the industrial revolution made production easier, why things are more expensive than in our grandmothers’ time?
I’ll explain it with apples :) Agricultural technification makes it cheaper to produce, for example … apples. Why then does the kilo of apples cost more than 10 years ago ? Because every year money loses value. In Mexico and many other countries we have even eliminated zeros from our currency, in order to continue reducing its value.
Fiduciary money (paper money without gold backing) is an experiment that is only a century old: Is printing more and more bills really the best thing we can do in plain 21st century? Can a global economic system where 50% of the wealth is in the hands of 1% of the population be considered sustainable?
A century holds at least 3 generations. Can we think of better alternatives for the great-grandchildren of those who believed such system would work? Can we look those children in the eye and tell them if we don’t evolve, if we don’t try better, everything will be fine for them?
We are stuck. Do not speed up. Think
#EthicHub # FinancialInclusion #SocialImpact#Blockchain #ThereIsNoPlanetB #WeAreTheOthers #FutureIsToday #LookThemInTheEye
