Musings Report #13 3-30-13 How can we get more out of our creativity?
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
How can we get more out of our creativity?
Longtime correspondent R.S.D. responded to last week's Musings with this insightful observation:
"Your item in the Musings noted that many problems can be resolved by resolutions reached on discrete portions of the larger issue - and I agree. I would add that as the discrete portions are addressed, normal creativity is much more likely to bring a successful resolution than the same creativity applied to the larger problem."
This insight has major implications, for it suggests not just that problems are best solved by breaking them into constituent parts, but that our creativity is more likely to solve the smaller problems than the sprawling, complex big ones.
In confirmation of this, correspondent C.D'A. sent an email (drawing upon his personal experience with aid in Africa) detailing the failure of billions of dollars in aid to reach the people the aid was intended to help.
The large problem--underdevelopment and poverty--goes through the less grandiose problem of bypassing endemically corrupt governments and the absence of rule of law. In other words, anything of value is soon stripped by men with guns.
The "grand solution" turns out to be micro-projects too small to arouse the greed of corrupt officials and men with guns (army, rebels, brigands, gangs, it doesn't matter). C.D'A's example was getting sewing machines into women's hands so they could generate small-scale, locally derived household income.
In effect, the more widely dispersed the aid money is in small quantities, the better the odds that it will reach the target audience and actually improve their lives.
Scientific American recently published a cover story, The Origin of Human Creativity Was Surprisingly Complex (sorry, it's behind the subscription paywall) that suggested the key to the sudden rise of human creativity was the acquisition of means of recording and communicating innovations so they could be shared with others and passed on to the next generation.
In other words, creativity can only be usefully shared/spread if the innovators are "networked" by spoken language, trade and symbolic representations such as written languages. Isolation is thus a critical barrier to creativity, as good ideas are not just passed on to others, they spark new innovations as new users apply them in different ways to other fields.
Peter Drucker made a similar point in his book Post-Capitalist Society: (page 58) "The changes that most profoundly affect a knowledge do not, as a rule, come out of its own area." It is cross-fertilization across disciplines that lead to innovation.
What does the Internet enable? Mass communication (and with auto-translation, however poor, language is no longer an isolating factor), mass sharing of knowledge, and mass collaboration in cross-fertilization projects. The best ideas are soon available to anyone who wants to put them into practice locally.
Clearly, we have only just begun to see the positive contributions to creativity the Internet has enabled.
Market Musings
As the divergences and extremes in bullish sentiment pile up, everyone is quite naturally looking for a downturn in U.S. stock markets. Ironically, this creates the "wall of worry" the market needs to keep climbing higher. It also calls to mind the hoary old maxim that what everybody knows has no value.
Many people point to the Federal Reserve as the villain holding up a market that "should" fall for a variety of reasons, but the structural problems in the Eurozone may be creating a tailwind few seem to discern: a "flight to safe haven" out of the euro, and all assets denominated in euros.
Given the Bank of Japan's public goal of deflating the yen to the point that inflation is aroused, holders of yen would be wise to trade yen for dollars or dollar-denominated assets such as US real estate, stocks and bonds.
This would help explain the strength in all three of these markets. If the euro sags 30% over the next few years and returns to parity (1 to 1) with the U.S. dollar, even if a euro-denominated asset rose by 10% in that time, it would still have lost 20% when the loss of purchasing power of the euro is factored in.
So perhaps non-US capital seeking safe haven helps explain the strength in US real estate, stocks and bonds. If so, any dip or downturn might be shallow until some major change triggers an exodus from US equities.
This idea informs my basic strategy:
What I am doing: buying junior domestic oil companies and beaten-up tech names
What I would do if I were managing $1 billion: Continue building positions in cocoa, sugar and coffee, and continue adding to tech stocks that have been hammered down 20+%.
The best thing that happened to me this week
Lest I appear to be fixated on our fruit trees and garden, I mention with some hesitation the satisfaction I gained from harvesting some beautiful kale and beet leaves from our winter garden (plants that don't mind the winter chill and rain). I steamed them with a dash of salt and then squeezed the water out, shaping a sort of sushi-like roll, which I then sliced into rounds much like sushi. Delicious, and absurdly healthy.
I realize non-gardeners might not fully grasp why some leafy vegetables would be the best thing that happened this week, surpassing monetary gain or praise from readers, but the magic of eating veggies that one has nurtured is still a thrill, even after four decades of gardening.
Although I'm breaking the rules here (already!), I have to mention "the best thing I heard about in the larger world" was the restoration of the vast Mesopotamian marshes in Iraq that Saddam had destroyed to eradicate the restive marsh Arab population: PBS Nature program, Braving Iraq.
Administrative Notes
To those who received the Q1 2013 renewal pitch, this will be your last Musings Report. Thank you for your support in 2012 and I hope you will continue visiting the blog. In other random news, I noticed the site (and the blogspot mirror site) have recorded over 11.6 million page views since 2006. I don't look at stats very often, but this surprised me. Garsh....
From Left Field
The 10 most walkable cities--one of my two hangouts, Berkeley, is Number One; downtown Hilo is walkable but Hilo is not yet bike-friendly like Berkeley....
Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? Best essay yet on issues raised by Sheryl Sandberg’s media-darling book on women in the upper reaches of the workforce, Lean In.
What would your city look like with Beijing's air? A smog simulator (via Maoxian) Growing up in Los Angeles before smog controls on vehicles, I thought I knew smog. I was wrong.... nobody talks about the cost in human health and life due to smog this thick, but it must run in the tens of billions each year. Beijing announces $17 billion plan to control pollution--what a joke, even $170 billion would just be a start. It's called external costs, folks, and the bill is in the trillions, not billions...
China's urban refugees: Leaving pollution, city life behind (via Maoxian) Urbanization outflow has already started for those who can afford to leave the big-bucks jobs in Shanghai and Beijing.
NEW LINGO ALERT: "TLDR" stands for "Too Long, Didn't Read." How long is too long now--2,000 words?
Thanks for reading--
charles
