Jan05

Soft Skills for Dummies? As If! LOL

So, as I explained in my earlier post, I took the exam this morning to certify for TS for MOSS (SharePoint) configuration. Aside from the test dragging a whole bunch of skeletons out of my closet, it also left me feeling just a bit spunky. So, I guess I can't resist the urge to stick my middle finger up at somebody right now. Here’s something that came pouring out after I got all the self-immolation out of the way.

--fold--

If you have skills - if you are truly brilliant - people will find a way to try and put you in your place. There is some truth to the expression that “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down”. A lifetime of punishment for doing well has changed my behavior over time; it has made me learn not to shine too brightly. The Dao says that you should never forget the value of worthlessness - the gnarly tree by the side of the road does not get cut down for firewood. There’s some truth to that as well.

When you leave college, or after high school if you don’t go to college, hopefully you will be lucky enough to get a job doing what you like. After all, you're going to do it for half your waking life, so you'd better like it. But, something I remember from school is that there’s no short supply of people in the world for whom what they truly enjoy is putting other people down - or rather, establishing themselves in a group that is superior to others.

These people need to find jobs they like too, and while I don't think that every manager is one of these people, I’ve done some off the cuff counting of the ones I consider to be good managers vs. the ones that are not so good. I think it is fair to say that the career of management is at the very least an attractive option to these sorts of people. Once established on that track, they have learned to emphasize the areas of their personality in which they are strong and call them "soft skills", while they also downplay the role of "hard skills", perhaps sometimes almost without realizing that this is what they are doing.

What are hard skills, anyway? I suppose they’re the skills that actually let you get something measurable accomplished, whereas soft skills are soft because - like the soft sciences - they are as much or more fluff than quantitative or empirical and verifiable fact. If I were feeling more generous I might admit that at least the actual results of employing soft skills are more difficult (or impossible) to measure, but their use can produce real results.

So, what do I want to say by this? Am I saying these skills don't exist? Hardly! In fact, I myself have been in management positions at different levels, so I know that there are skills you can learn and that some people are indeed more socially adroit than others. But is there a certification exam for working with people? Is there a bar exam that you need to pass to prove that you are not someone who will poison the work environment at your company? No, not that I know of - the PMP certification teaches hard management skills, not social skills - just as an MBA teaches you tools and rules for running a business. But, an MBA can’t make you fun at parties all by itself – quite the opposite I would think!

To the best of my knowledge, there’s no finishing school for businesspeople. Maybe there should be. If there were, then many people who are too quick to point to a skilled developer and loudly comment about his "lack of soft skills" would have washed out long ago and become something a little easier to handle like being a hand sanitizer, salad bar spray barrier, or tire patch-n-repair kit.

After thinking about it for some time, I have come to believe that much of the discourse about soft skills that we take for granted as part of our working life is actually a myth. In fact, the truth is that we all have soft skills. We go home and have to practice conflict resolution with our families. We all develop different techniques for time management that work for us – however badly that may be. Many sports nuts would have a hard time fitting in at an anime convention - and being outnumbered might not feel too comfortable about it. I’ve seen very powerful people who were universally disliked by literally everyone at their company, but who didn’t even know it (though I believe they may have suspected it strongly). I’ve also seen executive managers in high levels jobs slink around as if they had been labeled “most likely to wear a pocket protector” because they were ostracized by their peers. Anyone kicked in the teeth long enough will begin to behave in ways that show they expect it, and the opposite it also true. Give a lowly developer a private office and they will start to behave more like they are 'in charge' as a result.

It is true that this is nothing more than my opinion, but I believe the myth of soft skills is a construction generated by the people who were the “cool kids” in high school, created for the purpose of indefinitely perpetuating their position in the social hierarchy. It has theory X written all over it. It has its roots in the same insidious class based elitism that causes us to say things like, "ain't isn't a word." even though you probably can't find a native English speaker alive who can't tell you what it means (and it's even in the dictionary!). There are real coping skills that people learn for dealing with each other, but to put up an imaginary straw man called "soft skills" and attach to it all your preconceived notions that nerds are socially inept is worse than wrong; it's pure and simple bigotry, and people who do it ought to be ashamed of themselves.

To be truly effective, any evaluation of soft skills would have to be based on measurable facts, and even psychologists and sociologists will tell you that generating this kind of verifiable and repeatable data [ethically] in human beings is challenging. Despite this, they do find interesting way to shed light on human behavior, and management science does sometimes find ways to translate this into the business world.

But, business itself could do much more. If we honestly expected the same quality of performance from people who had working with people as one of their primary job responsibilities, as we do from people who perform technically, then I don’t think it would be unreasonable to require from them the same kind of objective certification of their "soft skills" as is required for IT, medicine, law, accounting, or the building trades.

Perhaps such a test would be too costly in terms of time and "actors" to be feasible for new employee screening. Without being emotionally realistic, it would be incredibly easy to just fake it. But, at the very least I think we could all (technical and non-technical alike) benefit from some simulation exercises and training. Just as an example, I would like to see a salesperson or recruiter placed in the position of having to work overtime for several weeks straight, and then measure their social skills as their project is slated to be cancelled prematurely and they’re forced into the position of defending their investment in time. Or maybe they could be periodically graded on the way they deliver constructive criticism to employees who require negative feedback. I had some other ideas too, but they were starting to take on the characteristics of the Stanford and Milgrim experiments, so I’ll just stop. Again, ethics, challenging stuff.

Truly thinking about it now, I guess it's very complex and would require a lot of thought, but one thing I do know is that there aren't nearly enough people devoting resources into this area of testing or training as there should be. To say it is an order of magnitude less than the scrutiny given to IT skills would be a gross understatement, and it is only fair that somebody's feet should be held to the fire to make it happen.

Since that will probably never happen, maybe instead I’ll just write a science fiction novel about what it would be like if we did.

Published: Jan-05-08 | 0  Comment | 0  Link to this post

Jan05

Well, It's About Friggin' Time

Today I finally managed to get my sorry rear end into a Prometric testing center to take the 70-630 exam for MOSS Technology Specialist.

 

My reasons for waiting so long are complex, and in some ways they are kind of pathetic.

 

At a basic level, I've just had too much on my plate over the past year. My 2 older kids were getting involved in extracurricular education that required a lot of my time and money. My two youngest are still in diapers, My house is half gutted with renovations. Then I broke my rib and caught some kind of weird bronchitis. On top of just generally being overextended at work, preparing for an exam seems like it would probably have been biting off more than I could chew.

 

Under the surface, my reasons for procrastinating were more complex, but I think they say volumes about the kind of person that I am. In school, I never needed to study. I was always ahead of everyone else, I always read ahead, and I always tested at the top end of the scale. I was always eager to prove how good I was. So, you might think that in my 30s I would approach test taking in a very similar way.

 

That's not the case, though. What I realized about myself this week was that I have, over the years, developed a lot of performance anxiety around the concept of taking tests - in spite of the fact that I've never taken any that I did not easily pass. So, I wondered, why might that be?

 

At some level I think that historically doing well on tests has actually been bad for me. Over my years in high school I was tested early and often for many things. Please don't take what I am about to say as bragging, because I only want to talk about it to highlight the contrast between my actual performance and my feelings.

 

I took the SATs in seventh grade and scored higher than the average for high school seniors. Years later, my score for the PSAT was the highest in my school - I tied with my friend who died later that year - and qualified for the NMSQT scholarship program. I retook the SAT when I was a senior myself, and with scores alone I could have gotten into many colleges regardless of my GPA. I took the ASVAB test and was literally hounded by military recruiters for months, even though I was considered legally blind. I was given psychological tests, and identified as a high formal thinker. I blew through several AP tests, and got the highest scores possible for both English and history exams.

 

However, none of these achievements got me much in the way of a tangible reward. Over time, I began to feel that no good deed goes unpunished.

 

As a seventh grader taking and passing the SAT, I qualified for the Hopkins CTY program, and I even got a nice certificate. But, I never got to participate in CTY, because my family didn't have the money to send me to their summer program. My mom, adding insult to perceived injury, was so ashamed of this fact that she wouldn’t talk to me about it, and later insisted that I'd never actually wanted to go to the program, even though I wanted it more than anything I had ever done or wanted to do up until that point.

 

As a parent blessed enough to have bright kid, I was overjoyed that my daughter qualified for the same program and that I will have a chance to do for her what my parents' couldn't do for me. But, even making a good living it is expensive. Sarah qualifies for many such expensive opportunities for the gifted, and I was starting to feel strained even before her brother was also recently invited to enter the talent search for CTY. I am starting to understand the dilemma my mother faced, and I think I would've handled it differently and communicated about the problem. I thought she understood me, but looking back I guess she never fully could. I guess I can forgive her for it - finally. But, she passed away about two and a half years ago, so I'll never get a chance to tell her any of this.

 

Maybe that was what started it all. I had worked hard to pass that exam. I studied all summer for it in my windowless bedroom, learning things about algebra, trig, and English that we had never covered in school. All that work, and what I got amounted to a small pat on the back. Today, CTY has an award cerimony for the kids who take part in the test. I don't know if it existed when I was a kid, but we were less than an hour from Baltimore back then and I think it would've prevented a lot of emotional damage if I'd been able to attend such a thing.

 

Anyway, that was never really the end of it. As I got older, my grades in school started to slip. My life at home was an emotional mess. I had a difficult relationship with my dad, and he was pretty rough with me. The bigger I got, the more we fought, and the more I did things deliberately to punish my family. Then later I would punish myself for not doing well in school and not doing my homework. To this day, the worst thing that negatively affects my work performance is having to deal with people who have confrontational or combative personalities. A negative encounter with such a person, even for a few short minutes, can turn my entire day into a disaster and leave me falling flat on my face.

 

I qualified for NMSQT, and I probably could've gotten a scholarship. I can't quite remember it well enough to state it as fact, but I believe that Rob might've actually gotten the Merit scholarship. If so, they sure didn't reallocate it when he was killed in a car accident, and I know that doesn't make any sense, so maybe it went to a person in a different school. I don't know - maybe I just don't want to think anything bad about my friend. He was really one of the few people alive that would understand the importance of what I am writing here today, so it really hurts to be writing this. We were equals in every way, but I wasn't even allowed to say a few kind words about him at his funeral.

 

My parents were actively discouraged by the school administration, because they said that my grade performance was too much of a factor against me. I guess I wasn't a model student, or the kind of person they thought would be worth investing a little time and energy in helping me prepare for college or get my grades together. Maybe they resented the fact that I could get an A one quarter and then fail the next, and then start working again and get an A, and then fail again - then ace the final and pass the class with a C.

 

Later I learned that my scores were high enough that there were colleges willing to completely ignore my GPA. Can you believe that? IGNORE my grades. By the time I found this out though it was too late and I would have to pay for my own schooling. The long story short with the SATs was that in the end another five years of school only raised my score about 300 points. I got no help finding a school. Hell, the majority of senior year I didn't even *have* parents and I had to pay for my own food, clothing, and shelter. All I learned is that a smart person can get the same score on the test as they would've if they'd studied by reading a book about quasi-cheating style test taking practices that defeat the way the test is designed, and that you can do this and even go without food and sleep.

 

All the military tests ever got me was recruiters willing to make false promises to me and tell me that there was some hope that they could use me - at least in the Navy. What a pile of bullshit that turned out to be!

 

All the psychological tests ever earned me, frankly, was more psychological tests. I started to feel like a pincushion, and I chafed at taking tests. My train was beginning to come off the rails.

 

AP exams were the only place where I still have an overall good feeling about the tests. They were easy. The essays felt especially easy, where other people seem to hate them. My mom used to say I have "the gift of gab". Just look at my blog; is it any wonder? But even with these, I have the dubious distinction of being the only kid in my school's history to have ever successfully gotten a perfect score on the AP English exam - and an A on the final - and yet still manage to fail senior English. I was in danger of failing history too, and I owe it to my teacher Mr. MacAvoy that I passed. He was the best teacher I ever knew and I owe him a lot that he was willing to spend the time with me to make sure that I could get exposure to the test material even though I read far to slowly from the textbook to ever keep up.

 

Fast forward past college, where I would routinely CLEP out of classes.

 

When I started my IT career, tests were also very important in moving ahead. Early Novell and Microsoft certification programs were not what they are today. There was a lot more ink and paper in the process during the nineties. And, they were experimenting with something called adaptive test administration software. In a nutshell the test was designed to sense your weak points and probe at them, almost as if it were trying to make you fail. To the best of my knowledge this testing technique has been either abandoned or very much watered down since then. If so, then I am not surprised, because I found the whole idea to be emotionally traumatic. For me it took my feelings that the world was full of people who would punish me for my talents and secretly wanted me to fail, and it transferred them from people to the test itself. I never forgot that.

 

After the divorce with Karen, I never updated my contact information with MS or with Novell. Novell certifications became worthless anyway. After she left, I let the rent go on the last two months of our lease, and even let them evict me, steal half my stuff, and throw the rest out on the side of the road. I let this happen even though I took the time to go back and rescue my pet cats. I think that I really did not want any non-living thing to be left that would remind me of that time in my life.

 

It has been eight years since then.

 

My attitude about tests is that I expect myself to do very well on them. In fact, I would consider anything less than a 95% to be a personal failure, though I can learn to live with myself for getting above 90%. The extent of my shame is such that I would retake such a test and pay the extra money to do so in order to hide such a score. I will delay taking any test if I do not believe that I can easily achieve a near perfect score. This is who I am - I am such a perfectionist that I consider this to be a great weakness and I am not proud of it.

 

People who believe that I have a big ego, just because I know my skills and demand fair compensation for them do not have a clue. I push myself harder and demand more from myself than most people alive. It is a blessing and a curse. I am stuck with it, so I might as well make the best of it.

 

When I started preparing a week ago, I found immediately that there were several gaps in my SharePoint knowledge. In the past week, I invested probably about 8-10 hours making sure I knew what those holes were. Most of my energy was spent in shoring up my biggest weakness - convincing myself that I was ready to take the test.

 

I guess if you've gotten this far, you are wondering how I did on the test this morning.

 

I completed the test in under half an hour. I missed two questions out of 51. I'm certain that I know which one at least one of them was, because I had it narrowed down to two possible choices and decided to take a 50/50 guess instead of sitting there for an extra minute or two to think about it. I believe that I probably missed the second one due to not reading the test questions carefully enough; this happens to me on about 1 in 50 questions historically because I have bad eyesight and I tear through the test like a ferret snorting sugar out of a Pixie Stick.

 

So, now if you are good at math and have taken this test before, you know that my score was 964 out of a thousand. And now the rest of the readers know it too. ;-)

I was disappointed to have not gotten a perfect score. I say this because I thought the test was very easy. I believe that other people - especially young people with no health problems, lots of time to prepare, and no outside responsibilities or commitments to their families - should be able to get a perfect score if they study hard. I also thought that in many, many cases the test would give five choices and three or four of them could be eliminated right off the bat as being patently ridiculous, which was not my experience with practice tests in which the distinctions between choices are much more vague. So, if you have good test taking skills and over prepare for the test, I think you almost can't avoid doing well on it.

And, if me saying this makes you either feel a little frightened to take the test, or more than a little angry at me because you didn't do as well, then I would like to apologize. The truth is that I often feel guilty about that too. I took this test basically because I was forced into it, not because I wanted to compare myself to anyone else. In fact, the last thing I want is to be measured against others, because no matter where I fit into the spectrum I will be miserable both for not being better than I am and for being so much better than so many other people.

 

And, if you were one of the very fortunate ones who got a perfect score, then I would like to congratulate you for escaping at least one side of that double edged sword.

 

If you missed one question on the test, I bet your are kicking yourself. I bet you either know exactly which question it was and are really beating yourself up, because you knew it was either C or D and you picked the wrong one. Or, you have no idea which one it was, in which case I am sorry that you'll probably have trouble sleeping tonight. There are few things worse than letting test anxiety creep into your dreams. Either way, let me know who you are, because I owe you a beer.

 

I know my ten year old daughter has similar feelings of perfectionism, so I think that in the near future I will have to learn how to deal with these. This is a start.

 

So all said and done and havign gotten all this out of my system, I did about as well as I thought I would. I didn't do as badly as I feared, and I didn't do as well as I hoped I would. I hit it right down the middle, line drive right of center field. Not a home run, but a two-base double. Not half bad!

Published: Jan-05-08 | 0  Comment | 0  Link to this post

Jan05

And Speaking of Shoehorns

Just wanted to take a few minutes to bang out the post I meant to write last night, but was too tired after my caucus watching expidition.
 
My wife and I have this ongoing discussion that has been taking shape over several months, about this concept we call Little Sister.
 
The term is an overt reference to the orwellian term Big Borther, meant to symbolize the all watching eye of the government. Actually, the best way to describe it is that it is BBs counterpoint - the all watching eye of, well, everybody.
 
Little Sister is enabled by the cell phone camera. It waits for us to have our Macaca moment, then tells the whole words about it. Thus, we are assured through repeated examples of the failures of others that our own transgressions will be met with the swift dispassionate justice of the collective.
 
As an example, the other day I received an e-mail from a friend at work. It contained a video of a man crossing the street, wearing headphones. Then an SUV runs the light, and the resulting crash causes it to tumble inexorably towards the man, who is still blithely unaware of his impending doom. I can be sure of only three things: I will never knowingly run a red light, I will never cross the street wearing headphones, and there are many other people for whom seeing this clip will have a similar effect.
 
So it this how we acheive societal elevation? Is it a devolution into a world where the world privacy has no real meaning? Or, will we all become so used to the ubiquity of cameras that we simply learn to forgive one another of all but the most aggregious transgressions?
 
What do you think will come of this?
 
Update: Kudos to Cory Doctorow, who is quickly becoming my favorite author, for putting a eerily-similar-and-yet-completely-different spin on this timeless idea with his novel Little Brother. Amazing work as always! My wife, 11 year old son, and I all absolutely loved it.
Published: Jan-05-08 | 0  Comment | 0  Link to this post

Jan04

Maybe the World Isn't Such a Bad Place After All

For the past several years, I feel like I had been living in a dream that I keep waiting to wake up from.
 
I guess it really started around September 2001. Before that, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and I knew where I was trying to take it even if I had mixed luck actually driving it there.
 
That day would have been the first time I found myself saying "can this really be happening?" I guess I never stopped asking that question.
 
Ever since, I've had this feeling that I am living in a forgettable time - an era that will someday pass. My kids' kids will read about this time on a lazy May afternoon in their history textbooks, assuming they ever get to modern history. My history classes frequently never made it much past WWII, but I read ahead anyway.
 
Anyway, if and when they do read about us and this time, perhaps they will call this the "post Sept. 11th era", or maybe "the Millenium turn", or just the 00's (spoken: "oh"s). In any case, it'll probably only get about half a page.
 
Personally, I would like it to be rembered as "the naughts".
 
naught also nought (nôt)
n.
1. Nonexistence; nothingness.
2. The figure 0; a cipher; a zero.
pron.
Nothing: All their work was for naught.
adj.
1. Nonexistent.
2. Insignificant.
I think it fits. It means both zero and meaningless.
 
One never really knows how something will turn out when you look back on it later, but I get the feeling that it will turn out to have been pretty pointless. Maybe I just wish that it will turn out to have been pointless.
 
A pointless decade, opened by a meangingless and cruel attack, followed by a succession of pointless and widespread worldwide violence, culminating in an unecessarily frustrating and futile war, and symbolized by the innefectual leadership of an irrelevant schmuck.
 
Is it any wonder that for eight years now, I haven't really truly wanted to get out of bed in the morning.
 
Four years ago, I nursed some hope that we would stop collectively drinking the Kool Aid and see things for what they really are. I threw myself into campaigning as hard as I could for what I believed in. I gave it my all - weeks of my time, my vacation, trips to other states, the maximum amount allowed by FEC rules. I exhausted myself for the sake of hope.
 
We all know how that battle eventually ended. Any chance I had at hope was crushed out of me.
 
As it turns out, my friend Nate was right when we proudly declared himself the founding member of Kerry Supporters for Bush. It turns out that demons do come home to roost, and four more years is probably the worst thing that W. could have ever done for himself and his party, both politically and historically. So I can laugh at that and not feel too bitter about putting it all on the line in 2004.
 
But, I did not get involved in the run up to the priamry this year. I did not pick a favorite. I didn't go out and canvass, or make calls, or travel to other parts of America. I didn't write letters, or letters to the editor. I didn't have the TV crews over my house to show them the power of ordinary people getting involved. I didn't dare have my heart broken a second time.
 
I watched. I've been watching for a while now, waiting for a sign that this feverish dream is coming to a close.
 
And then, something truly astounding happened.
 
Barack Obama is now the front runner for the democratic nomination for President of the United States. Say whatever you will about the candidates you favor, their values, policies, experience, whatever. A black man has had his ticket punched by a decidedly white and rural state. And to boot, they picked him over a woman, and an affable white guy.
 
I couldn't be happier, but have I fallen into another dimension?
 
Doesn't matter.
 
Today, when I feel a little anxious, when I feel like the world just isn't a safe place, like it's not what it's supposed to be, I can take a deep breath, lean back in my chair, and wrap myself in the warm-blanket-and-hot-cocoa feeling that comes from knowing that sometimes the world is not the dark, twisted, distopian place you believe that it is - at least not 100% of the time.
 
Whatever you think about Barack, or Democrats, or this guy's chances of taking this all the way, I think you have to admit that it'd be pretty cool if he does.
 
Because - if for no other reason - when he wins, he'll be making history. He made history last night, and he will do it again if he wins the nomination, and again if he wins the general election. His victory will mark the closing book end of an era that began with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.
 
He'll stand as a living testament to the fact that, imperfect as it is, this country belongs to all of us. He will remind millions that they should not give up hope for a better future, and they should never allow themselves to become disenfranchised - either by others' actions or their own inaction.
 
Little kids will grow up wanting to "Be Like Barack".
 
For the first time in a while, I see at least one possible future that ain't half bad.
 
And, I happen to think that - race issues aside - he'll also be a pretty damn good leader.
 
Someone could still take this feeling of hope away from me. They have done it before. For today, I want to bask in it. I really hope that they don't. I feel stronger about this than anything I have felt in years. Because, I feel like the future this man envisions - and makes me see too - is so much brighter than dreadful past that I remember.
 
Update: Why not hear what he has to say?
 
My blog won't let me embed the video, but here's the link to his victory speech from last night. It's inspiring.
 
 
And, just because I think it's funny.
 
 
"Hero Levels", hah, indeed! Flamin' troll! If I had a profile on YouTube I'd probably start a flame war with him. :-) At any rate, people shouldn't be rating videos on YouTube based on their political beliefs, in my *huge* opinion. This is a perfect example of the kind of divisive mentality that we stand against. It's a great contrast.
Published: Jan-04-08 | 0  Comment | 0  Link to this post

Nov07

The War on Scarcity: It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

So, in my previous post about [Great American Novelist] Cory Doctorow, I made an off-handed comment about the War on Scarcity. I turned to my cube mate, and asked him if he knew what the War on Scarcity was, which he did. (He's also a fan of Cory). So, I got to thinking. Where did I hear that term "War on Scarcity"? Why do some people seem to instinctively know what it means?

Well, Google says that the only references to the term "War on Scarcity" online are references to a 2004 speech by Tim Sanders (Steve's 2 Cents has a retelling of it here), and are self improvement related in nature. Basically, in this use it is a call for people to reject modern consumerist thinking. Appreciate what you have and not what you lack.

But, the War on Scarcity is really much larger than that, and it is only just beginning. It is not something that you can solve simply by becoming a Buddhist and rejecting your material desires. It is a drama that has been unfolding for thousands of years. It has been smoldering - not a full-fledged war - but there have been skirmishes. You see its echoes in history: the Magna Carta, Marxism, and DRM. It's part of what it means to be a human being. While just as there are pacifists in any war, individuals may turn away from materialism, the conflict will continue to unfold around them.

We are now at a critical nexus in this drama. There are signs that the opening salvos of the true war to come have already been fired, and the events that take place in the next 50 years will have a profound effect in that they will tell us the nature of the conflict that will likely continue for a thousand years into the future.

But, to understand a War on Scarcity, one needs to understand the nature of Scarcity itself. Scarcity has been with us since man first walked the earth. Historically, and perhaps ironically, we are accustomed to having an abundance of scarcity. We have always struggled to have enough resources to go around, whether it is food, land, raw materials, fuel, money, or energy. As man has progressed, we've continually found ways to produce resources in great abundance. So, we shift our attention to solving the problems of scarcity at a higher level. Instead of struggling for food, we start wars over oil. But, do we take the abundance that we create and truly eliminate the scarcity?

Think about it. As just an example, there is now enough food in the United States to feed a large part of the world - so much so that the government has an active interest in propping up the price of basic foodstuffs like corn. Corn itself is now so cheap that we find corn starch and corn syrup are added to practically every type of packaged food product we eat. Corn is now cheap, so the masses can now have it is quantities that are greater than are healthy. We slurp down corn laden Coca-cola with our Doritos, and get fat. Our bodies are not evolved to eat large amounts of empty corn calories every day. One might even say that the scarcity was better for us in some ways than the abundance.

Instead, we could feed the starving masses of the world (and, to our credit, sometimes we try), but by and large any attempt to do this is impeded by the systems we have in place around the world to prevent it. We call those systems governments. Ostensibly, we set them up to ensure justice and provide for the common good, but often they just act as a machine for perpetuating unnecessary scarcity. Whether the corn is rejected for being genetically engineered or is stolen by warlords really doesn't matter; either way the result is that someone goes without a meal.

Where the scarcity is resolved, new scarcities arise. Some people, who have more money than others, choose to buy steak (raised on corn) or whole and organic foods. Is there a scarcity of cows that not everyone can afford steak? Is there a scarcity of vegetables grown without pesticides? And what of the scarcity of paper money that causes some people have enough of it to overcome these scarcities while others can't? Some scarcities are real. There is only so much land after all. Some are manufactured. As long as someone is paying farmers to grow more corn than they really need (or can profitably sell), then there will be less for cattle and carrots.

Some are entirely imaginary.

And that is where things get very interesting. If you look at the course of human history, you can easily get the sense that at least some of us are very comfortable with scarcity. We now have systems put in place all around us that perpetuate and even celebrate scarcity. We have a money system based entirely on faith, investment markets composed entirely of rules and too complex to truly understand, and bank vaults full of notes that no human will redeem within our lifetime. We have erected a cadre of laws for intellectual property that makes it a crime to take something from another human being while at the same time also allowing them to keep it. Given that in the whole sphere of human knowledge each success rests upon the accomplishments of those who came before us, this idea is itself so tenuous that half the world considers it a fallacy. We endow corporations with the rights of living men, while consciously overlooking that they are immortal giants who nearly cannot help thinking of "ordinary" men as mere insects. We are categorized: employee, customer, consumer - competition.

Unlike the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, the War on Scarcity was not declared by any government. Actually, calling it the War on Scarcity is perhaps a bit perverse, because it was really started by those who favor scarcity. But, like those other "wars", it does have an enemy which is partly – if not entirely – make-believe. However, this does not mean that the stakes are not high or that the consequences of the conflict can't be felt by you and me.

I can't sit on my soap box and pretend that I know all there is to know about the War. Perhaps I will be able to articulate that at some later point in time. For now, it was my hope that I can convey a general sense of the idea that is represented by the term. As a way of doing this, I would like you to consider a few thought exercises.

Suppose that tomorrow a very smart man develops in his garage a means for creating virtually limitless energy. If this is too hard, imagine that he merely finds a way to get much more use out of the energy sources we already have – say triple our efficiency. Suppose that man has a choice: he can choose to publish his method to the entire world, or he can keep his method secret and instead sell the fruits of his labor - namely the energy it produces or saves. If he does the latter, does he benefit more from selling more energy more cheaply, or does he benefit more from selling less of it at a higher price? Suppose he wants to take the first option instead. Do we live in a society that would celebrate this man as a hero, or like John Galt would we make him learn to regret his generosity?

There are now 3D printers that can create products out of plastic from plastic powder using only a CAD drawing. It is not so difficult to imagine a future, not unlike the one in Printcrime, where we have such devices that are capable of making virtually anything out of common raw materials like metal, paper, plastic, or wood. Suppose you had such a device in your home. Is there anything that you should not be allowed to make in it? What if you wanted to make a pistol? What if you wanted to make a grenade? How about a box full of grenades or a basement of weapons? Suppose you had a much larger version of such a device in your garage? Would you make a car with it? If you had or could easily download the blueprint for a '66 Camero, what would car companies have to offer you to convince you to pay $30,000 for one of their blueprints instead? What about the time period where not everyone has a garage sized printer? Would you sell a car to your neighbor or give it away? If you didn't have one, how would you feel if you knew that GM or Toyota were actively trying to keep you from getting one?

What does it mean for a copyright to be infinitely renewable? If a corporation can live forever, and the intellectual works of its employees are the intellectual property of no single man, but only of the organization, then does that mean that they remain copyrighted indefinitely? Is it right that Walt Disney was able to transfer the copyright for Mickey Mouse to a corporation that under the DMCA will continually renew it for all time to come? Should the Public Domain encompass the works of William Shakespeare but not Steamboat Willie? Didn't both have a profound impact to human history, and was Walt cheating death this way or only cheating himself?

The next time you download a song for free over the Internet, or hear people debating that topic after a story on the evening news, you should think about this. We are getting smarter – collectively. We are solving problems of technology at a rate that is increasing exponentially. But, we are adapting to our new abilities much more slowly, because the concept of not having enough is very deeply engrained into the human consciousness. We are, after all, living and mortal beings with physical needs. But just as it is now not entirely impossible to give practically every human being alive a complete box set of the works of Paul McCartney on MP3, it will someday be possible to give every human being a TV, and X-Box 360, a car, a house, and a diamond ring.

Some people will ask what will compel people to work in a world where they can have anything they desire at virtually no cost. Others will say "Who cares, because we'll have practically anything we want." The answer will either be wonder or fear. The more we try to prop up scarcity today, the more we are delaying and magnifying the inevitable conflict to come. And, I am certain that we will be very lucky indeed if it does not eventually come to people killing each other. That is the essence of the War on Scarcity.

Published: Nov-07-07 | 0  Comment | 0  Link to this post

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