SUPPOSIN': WHAT IF?

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

My research for the Cultural Economics writing project has forced me to do a lot of focused thinking. In the last thirty weekly postings I have tried to faithfully present the principles of traditional economics.

Together, we have thought about enterprise, production of goods and services, the concept of money, and who controls the money system. We have investigated banking and its fractional reserve system, and the Federal Reserve System with its control of the money supply. We have discovered the cause of inflation and how we monetize the Federal Debt. We have even looked at the cycles of business recessions and the phenomenon of serious economic depressions. Following our discussions about Keynesian economics, we continued by studying the trilogy of scarcity, choice, and cost and the tragedy of zero sum economic thinking.

I am very eager to get into discussing the idea of how every occurrence of major transformation in this old world takes place at the intersection of culture and economics. We will be taking a look at the ideas of land, labor, capital, and the entrepreneur in relationship to traditions, institutions, families, and individuals. That is at the very heart of cultural economics. But wait a minute. Before we go there, I feel compelled to take a bit of a bird walk to share some things I have been seriously considering lately. And I would like to discuss some of them before we move on.

You will notice at the bottom of all my recent postings it says Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics. I have been able to freely share concepts and traditions with my reader-friends, fully realizing that some of the issues will never make it into the new book. They may simply add to the collection of paragraphs that end up on the floor of the editing room. But being able to send up trial balloons of ideas into the atmosphere of reason and discussion is pretty stimulating.

C.S. Lewis used to walk about ten miles a day while he was teaching at Oxford University. He used that time to contemplate, dream, and imagine. Suppose there were a world like Narnia.

Suppose it had animals in it. Suppose God wanted to redeem that world as he has ours. Then suppose he had his Son take on an earthly form such as a lion and enter this other world as He did ours.

C.S. Lewis used to refer to his mental “what if” propositions as Supposals. For example, using animals like a lion that would talk, and a witch, and kids entering into another world through the doors of a wardrobe, would be a Supposal. 

Lately, I have been doing some Supposin’ of my own. As a worldwide observer, I can see how the traditional views of the cultures, economies, and behaviors of the present inhabitants of earth have set into motion some very sad consequences. In our previous discussion we talked about how the unquestioning acceptance of the scarcity, choice, and cost trilogy has promoted the expectation of absolute insufficiency, lack, and scarcity of everything. In my opinion, that acceptance has led to fallacious conclusions regarding reality.

Supposin’ . . . what if? What if that premise of insufficiency, lack, and scarcity was not factual or true? What if it was wrong- headed thinking? How would that affect our lives and the lives of our friends? How would that affect our communities and nations? How would that influence the phenomenon of poverty in the world? What if we changed our very paradigm and based our economic model on the concept of abundance and not shortage?

Supposin’ that instead of spending all our time choosing between alternatives that presume our resources to be either hopelessly limited or gone, we would use our intelligence, creativity, and energy inventing and discovering the world of abundance.

Europeans began using a black shiny rock called coal as energy to cook their food, warm their houses, and produce steam after Marco Polo brought a sample back with him from China. When I was a small boy, my mom used to read me the story about young John D. Rockefeller and how he went to his neighboring state of Pennsylvania in order to check out a new industrial discovery that was called oil. While inspecting a field where the oil had surfaced and had formed a sticky black pond, it was necessary for John and his partner to cross a rickety wooden plank bridge. Half way across, the plank broke and John plummeted into the oily slush below. Covered from head to foot, he scrambled to solid ground. “I see,” said John’s partner, “that you have plunged into this oil business head over heels.” John D. Rockefeller not only established an oil refinery near there, but went on to discover and invent uses for oil, and eventually became president of the Standard Oil Company and, at that time, the wealthiest man in the world.

Who said you could burn coal in the first place? Who said you could use oil as energy? Who knows what great discovery or invention is just around the corner that could change our world as we know it today? Only one thing is known for certain: if we so completely buy into the notion of shortage, depletion, and zero sum behavior, so that we fail to pursue the universe of possibility and opportunity, then we will by default become the ultimate losers.

I am looking forward to sharing in the next few weekly postings some ideas about shortage vs. abundance. I would welcome your ideas and insights, and you can help me by contacting me at press@winstoncrown.com. Who can tell, perhaps all of those paragraphs may not end up on the floor of the editing room after all.

Next week: Supposin’ a world of abundance

(Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics)

© Dr. James W. Jackson  

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

 

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

The Main Thing

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

Steven R. Covey gives us some of the best advice available when he reminds us that “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

As a cultural economist, I deal continuously with the economic trilogy of scarcity, choice, and cost. Everything that exists is a scarce commodity. That is not just to say that there is an immediate shortage of something—like we would refer to in the old simile that something is “as scarce as hen’s teeth”—because there aren’t any hen’s teeth. But something is deemed scarce because everything that exists has alternative uses. People have unlimited wants and needs and they can come up with more uses for the capital or commodities than those resources in existence. Scarcity is called the “basic economic problem,” meaning that the problem always exists.

Ultimately, a choice has to be made to determine how a resource will be used. People have to choose the alternative they most highly desire. Sometimes, it is thought that cost deals only with dollars and cents. But in a truer sense, the cost of the alternative you choose is the loss of the value of the next highest alternative that was foregone in selecting it. In other words, the real cost is the value of the alternative you could have had but decided to do without.

When we talk about the admonition “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” we are dealing with the subject of priorities, which is the arrangement of precedence and preference regarding certain resources, supplies, or services. We first have to decide what is the main thing? Secondly, we have to decide to keep that main thing at the top of our priority ranking.

Consistent priority ranking is a difficult assignment on a personal basis. It is even a tougher assignment on an international and cultural basis. Let me share a situation with you from my travel journals:

Shortly after the tragic genocide situation in Rwanda, I traveled in a Volkswagen van from Kampala, Uganda, to Kigali, Rwanda. There had been over one million people murdered in the short span of 100 days during the Hutu-Tutsi slaughter. It was one of the most heart-breaking incidents I had experienced in over thirty years of international travel. Limbs of dead bodies still protruded out of shallow graves. The economy was in shambles, and all was chaos. For the most part, the world totally ignored the tragedy and even the UN and the US refused to use the word “genocide” and chose not to send help. Project C.U.R.E. went there to help.

Upon my arrival in Kigali, I met with a lady named Christine. She was in her thirties, very knowledgeable and articulate and was in charge of administering the offices of the cabinet members. She was openly supportive and appreciative of Project C.U.R.E., and I presented to her the inventory list of the cargo container from Project C.U.R.E. that had just arrived. She took the time to brief me on the genocide situation and I asked her if she had stayed in the country or fled to another country. She said that she had stayed in Kigali, and had witnessed the bloody attacks on the innocent citizens.

Christine also acted as the Minister of Rehabilitation and Social In­tegration. She asked about crutches, wheelchairs, and prosthetic equipment for those who had been left disabled by the war. They were in desperate need, and no one else was coming to their aid. A million people had been murdered, and there were hundreds of thousands of other suffering human victims.

I expressed my surprise that others were not quickly coming to their aid: “While I have been in Kigali, I have seen scores of new, white Toyota Land Cruisers and new Land Rovers driving the streets of the city with the fanciest and newest of optional equipment added on. I have seen many NGO personnel sitting and conversing in the restaurants of Kigali. I just presumed that all those resources had arrived in Rwanda to aid in the horrible genocide crisis.” 

Christine hesitated, then turned and looked out the window. “I’m sorry you saw that. No, those new resources and personnel are not here to bring help to the victims of the genocide. They have come as a result of a new grant of over fifty million dollars to further the ongoing study of the eating, mating, and sleeping habits of the gorillas in our forests. I wish there were some way to get our priorities straight.”

Keeping the main thing the main thing sometimes becomes a knotty problem. As mentioned earlier, we are the ones that ultimately have to make the decisions regarding the arrangement of precedence and preference of all resources, supplies, or services. People have unlimited wants and needs and they can come up with more uses for the capital or commodities than those resources in existence. But the old economic trilogy of scarcity, choice, and cost can help us remember that we first have to decide what the main thing is and secondly, we have to decide to keep that main thing at the top of our priority ranking.

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com