Material poverty vs temporal poverty
Hernando de Soto is one of my intellectual heroes. He wrote the book The Mystery of Capital, one of those incredibly important books that caught the attention (and respect) of the heads of state of many developing nations.
In a nutshell, de Soto says that world poverty can be relieved if developing countries create and enforce property laws which allow poor people to legally OWN property. I can't really do justice to his work by trying to explain it here, but I highly recommend the book.
But while people in developing countries try to improve their economic well-being by joining the game of capitalism, what are we doing in the West? We live in developed countries, yes, but how can we improve our economic well-being?
It seems that people in poor countries may suffer from material poverty, and that we in developed countries suffer from temporal poverty: we have material abundance, yet we lack time!
A decade and a half after Stephen Covey published the acclaimed The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which stressed the principle of focusing on what is important and ignoring what is urgent, we still fall prey to doing what is urgent.
Why?
The shocking truth is that although we live in a capitalist system, we have little idea what capitalism is really about. This is why we suffer from temporal poverty.
We have as much to learn about capitalism, as explained by Hernando de Soto, as the people from poor countries.
Sure, most of us have an idea of how stock markets function. We put money in mutual funds, and some of us can even make investment decisions on our own, without requiring advice from financial analysts.
Yet, the fact that most people are trapped in the rat race and have to work for a living, is proof positive that we do not understand capitalism as much as we think we do.
If you read de Soto's book, you may begin to understand the very foundation of capitalism. But you won't be able to do anything useful with that knowledge.
Not until you read about value design, and that requires reading and understanding Edward de Bono's books (he published over 60 books).
More to come.
In a nutshell, de Soto says that world poverty can be relieved if developing countries create and enforce property laws which allow poor people to legally OWN property. I can't really do justice to his work by trying to explain it here, but I highly recommend the book.
But while people in developing countries try to improve their economic well-being by joining the game of capitalism, what are we doing in the West? We live in developed countries, yes, but how can we improve our economic well-being?
It seems that people in poor countries may suffer from material poverty, and that we in developed countries suffer from temporal poverty: we have material abundance, yet we lack time!
A decade and a half after Stephen Covey published the acclaimed The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which stressed the principle of focusing on what is important and ignoring what is urgent, we still fall prey to doing what is urgent.
Why?
The shocking truth is that although we live in a capitalist system, we have little idea what capitalism is really about. This is why we suffer from temporal poverty.
We have as much to learn about capitalism, as explained by Hernando de Soto, as the people from poor countries.
Sure, most of us have an idea of how stock markets function. We put money in mutual funds, and some of us can even make investment decisions on our own, without requiring advice from financial analysts.
Yet, the fact that most people are trapped in the rat race and have to work for a living, is proof positive that we do not understand capitalism as much as we think we do.
If you read de Soto's book, you may begin to understand the very foundation of capitalism. But you won't be able to do anything useful with that knowledge.
Not until you read about value design, and that requires reading and understanding Edward de Bono's books (he published over 60 books).
More to come.
posted by Super Peter at 10:53 PM
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