Prosperity, what is it and what are the obstacles?

This is a rework of a presentation I did for high school students when they visited Faculty of electrical engineering and computer science where I work. My talk was mostly about why should open source software exist. I was trying to follow Apple's very successful strategy of marketing WHY instead of the easier way of marketing WHAT. 

I will share some of those slides with the reader and explain the contents too. The talk starts with topics like what is Linux and the philosophical differences of open versus closed development model. Right after that it is time to speak WHY do we need freedom (personal, software or economical freedom).

To start the debate of why we need freedom, I wanted to motivate the participants. Teenagers are a though crowd to motivate, especially since they were not volunteer attendants. But I think I managed to get their attention by asking some challenging questions:

• What are your needs, what are your wishes and how are you achieving happiness?
• How do you define prosperity? Is it having food each day or is it having luxurious items or is it the ability to visit exotic places?

After a short Q&A session I asked them what do they think is prosperity of a collective:

• Is it low unemployment rate? Is it high life expectancy? Is it low crime rate?

During that short brainstorming introduction we concluded that people have different needs, wishes and hopes. But we all agreed that perceived prosperity (happiness) comes from having the knowledge how to satisfy personal demands and the ability to actually do so.

I disagree with freemarketeers who over complicate the preconditions for prosperity and twist them to fit their agenda. I strongly disagree with this talk and the path to prosperity mechanics listed at 8:40.

• Competition
  Is very useful concept for weeding out the unneeded and less efficient processes in society. Sometimes competition is desired, sports do help us release the tensions of evolutionary pressure of being the fittest to survive. I do think this is one of the primitive urges that human personality embeds. However forcing or encouraging unnecessary competition is a waste of resources and effort. The ones who lose in a competition wasted a lot of effort and the resources that they had allocated to be able to participate.
• Private property
  Private property is a form of a guarantee that the owned resources will be available when the owner wants to use them and in a state the owner has left them. I agree that high availability is a good thing, but most of the time it causes resources to be underused and thus it is wasteful. Two examples of public services being more practical than private property are the yellow cabs in New York or health care - to employ a driver or a doctor for yourself is a huge waste of resources.
• The consumer society
  Yes we do want goods and services and yes we do want them upgrading over time, but I (and many others) do not want to be forced to waste a fortune on consumables if there is a more sustainable alternative available.

It is quite simple to voice what we need to reach prosperity: we need to know how to reach prosperity and then execute the steps needed to get it done. Sadly, figuring out a plan to reach higher level of prosperity and executing those steps can be darn hard.


On the topic how to reach prosperity I quoted a sentence from Isac Newton about standing on giants shoulders. We went on to discuss that all progress happens in incremental steps - some steps are huge, most are small and barely noticeable. And another point was how wasteful the competition based models are. Worse even - obstruction of competitors not only delays a step of scientific or technological progress, it can even prevent it completely.

Next is listing the limitations we face in reaching prosperity.

• Physical limitations are 
• lack of time, or inability to coordinate time between multiple actors
• distance or detachment
• lack of resources (tools and materials)

• Sociological limitations are
• laws - some of those limitations are needed, but there is many rotten apples in that basket. We formally did abolish slavery, but many more unjust laws exist.
• patents and licenses - in my humble opinion, currently those are the biggest unnecessary causes of inequality in the world. Any free market advocate will tell you that we need to bring down barriers to production and trade, but sadly that logic somehow does not apply when they are talking about their own monopolies.
• lack of money - most obvious obstacle and most overrated one at the time.

• Personal limitations
• inability to understand - there are a few cases of people who have mental disorders and I do believe they are not capable to acquire certain advanced knowledge. However I do believe that any healthy individual can understand anything if they invest enough time and effort in obtaining said knowledge. Some people are faster and others are slower learners but standardized teaching systems we have at the moment do irreparable harm by eliminating learners who just need more time.
• lack of motivation - this is probably the most common obstacle in personal or collective development today. We are literally throwing our future trough the window, but the worst thing is that the bankers and the politicians are gladly taking that burden from us and use our future for their own agenda.
• conflict of believes - often our believes prevent us from accepting new knowledge. We have to question everything and re-question it regularly to be able to make the best possible decisions.

The first technology that started to bring down the barriers of space and time was invention of writing. Writing allows us to transfer knowledge without a teacher and a student to ever meet at the same place and at the same time! That is an incredible and exciting advantage. Moreover written messages can also be transported with far less effort then persons which makes it an even more beneficial invention.

The next big thing was the printing press. Invention of the printing press allows us to reproduce knowledge faster and thus allows greater number of learners to learn in parallel. 

Digitalization era and the internet have brought us even more efficient ways of replicating knowledge and distributing it. Invention of video playback on demand is another step into providing more comfortable and more efficient learning. Knowledge spreading and learning is easier and more efficient then ever before!

As an example of efficient knowledge transfer the slide above contains a screen capture of a 4 minute video on youtube on open source blueprints for mechanical tools we need to start a civilization. Check it out here.

We should always obey the law. If we do not like it, it is less harmful to try to change the law then break it. That said - the easier way is not always viable, so I am not condemning civil disobedience. For example Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle for independent India is one of my greatest heroes.

Mahatma Gandhi
Picture from wikipedia.org

To combat the lack of money there is always a bunch of options. Those are listed up on the slide and I also talked about that topic in my previous post on economics of open source projects.

About the patents and licenses, let me shortly repeat myself: those are outright dumb limitations that provide short term monopoly on knowledge to the owner of the intellectual property, cause inequality and slow down adoption of technologies while also waste enormous amounts of effort in legal procedures. Another big problem is also incompetence of patent offices to distinguish between valid and invalid patent claims.

I already talked about personal limitations. On this slide I just pointed out, that we can overcome most obstacles if we just commit ourselves to it.

Huh, this was a long post, I hope you liked it though. In previous posts I already wrote about WHY, WHAT. Now I wrote about What are the CONDITIONS FOR PROSPERITY and what are our OBSTACLES on the path to reaching it. Now the remaining part that is still missing is HOW to get it done!