Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Children Should Be Free to Learn about True Entrepreneurship

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I do not remember a great deal of the lessons I learned in elementary school. For one thing, I attended a public school, meaning I did not receive top of the line education. Made to sit restlessly in desks for eight hours a day, recess seemed to be most students’ favorite subject of the day.

But for the sixth graders who attended my elementary school, springtime meant that we got to begin a unit on entrepreneurship, one of the few subjects that made us excited about learning. To get each of us excited about the project, we spent an entire week learning about the founding of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. And while cold sugary desserts were quite appealing to us as the spring weather grew warmer, it was the prospect of earning money that excited most of my fellow classmates.

A Lesson in Entrepreneurship

At the end of the unit, our sixth-grade class would be broken up into groups where we would be responsible for creating some sort of business. Our target audience would be our fellow classmates and each group would have to create a marketing campaign as well as actually creating and selling whatever product we had selected.

Since our unit on entrepreneurship had been dessert-centered, most of the groups went for edible products. Some even paid for pizza to be delivered during lunch and then charged more per slice in order to turn a profit. My group decided to make custom ice cream shakes. Buying huge tubs of vanilla ice cream and a wide selection of candy bars, the “Sweet Shop,” as it was called specialized in blending your candy bar of choice with vanilla ice cream.

The idea was a success! In fact, we had the entire sixth-grade class lined up for our custom shakes. As a ten-year-old who never had to do much aside from taking out the trash every now and then, this was my first experience with manual labor. I wanted people to like the product my team was selling, so I worked diligently to make sure the ratios of ice cream to candy was perfect.

All this hard work paid off, as we sold out of our supply in less than an hour. After all was said and done, we had earned $160, not shabby for a bunch of twelve-year-olds in the 1990s.

After the week of student-run businesses had come to a close, each group was told that they were to turn over our funds to our teachers, who would then give us our earnings. Weeks went by, and none of my classmates had heard anything further from our teachers about the money we had earned. This was especially frustrating, as each of us was responsible for putting up the capital for our own projects, which meant lots of allowance being spent on a school project.

A Lesson in Regulation

Finally, almost a month later our principal gathered the sixth grade together in the auditorium for an announcement. “I know many of you are wondering what happened to the money you earned,” she began. “The administration has decided that it would be irresponsible of us to hand over so much to young students. So after much thought and deliberation, we have decided that we are going to keep the money and put it towards a field trip for the entire class.”

You could hear a pin drop in the room after that announcement. We had all worked so hard and now we were being told that we would not be receiving the money we earned. While this was a great primer for dealing with IRS in our adult lives, what our teachers and administrators were really teaching us was that there was something inherently “bad” about earning money.

It is this same attitude that follows students throughout their entire education. Instead of being told how wealth created by entrepreneurs has fueled innovation and created countless jobs, we are taught that seeking money is somehow something to be ashamed of. As children, we understood this to be false. We understood that raising capital and putting in the work needed to get a business idea off the ground was grueling. But the money we earned, as a result, was the light at the end of the tunnel. One that was now being extinguished by the educators that were supposed to be teaching us the value of entrepreneurship.

That experience has always stuck with me. During my own experience as a teacher, I made sure that I would never be this kind of educator. When I saw my students trying to earn an extra buck by selling drawings to fellow classmates or making bracelets and selling them to friends, I always gave them an approving smile.

If we want to teach our children to be self-sufficient adults, we must teach them the beauty of entrepreneurship. Wealth creation is what makes the world go round. We should be teaching our children the beauty of earning money, not demonizing it.

Choose Economics: It’s The Culture Of Smart Decisions

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Economics is for everyone. Ludwig von Mises wrote, “It concerns everyone, and belongs to all; it is the main and proper study of every citizen.”

Is that overblown? Not really. For individuals, economics is about making good decisions, and good-decision making leads to the good life. Bad decisions lead to bad journeys along bad roads, and it’s often hard to find the way back.

Think Economically, Like An Entrepreneur.

The decision-making practices of entrepreneurs, those innovators who drive economic growth and elevate the life-enjoyment of their fellow citizens, are worthy of emulation. We can all benefit from thinking like entrepreneurs. Let’s call it thinking economically.

First, entrepreneurs choose the economic way over the political way. The economic way creates value by identifying ways to serve others, especially in a new and better manner than their competitors. This creates new value for society, and entrepreneurs get rewarded in proportion to how much value they create. The political way is to let others do the work of value creation, and to appropriate the fruits of that value creation for other purposes.

In the economic way, the individual selects ends (which, in ordinary conversation, we might label as goals or objectives) that they can strive to achieve. These are not ends for society, or for the tribe or the group, but for the individual. Happiness results from the feeling that we get when we select appropriate ends and for which we are able to find the right means to achieve them. Carefully selected ends are important, as opposed to a vague search for “something better”. There are many different ends we could aim for, and so both selection and ranking of the most important are central to good decision-making. Milton Rokeach was an American sociologist who formalized the ranking of ends based on the value that people attach to them. He identified the highest-ranked ends in terms like “An exciting life” or “A sense of accomplishment” or “Freedom”, “Equality” and “Family Security”. These are ends that can occupy us for a lifetime, and should be well chosen.

The Right Ends Require The Right Means.

The second vital component of happiness is selecting the right means to achieve our ends. Means will vary with time, as opposed to ends, which can be maintained throughout life. For example, an individual might select the pursuit of a college degree as a means towards the end of a career and a sense of accomplishment. Some are now questioning whether this is still the best means to that end, indicating that we must all be conscious of changes in the applicability of different means to reach our ends, and that we should be adaptive in making adjustments. “Am I selecting the best means to attain my highest ranked ends?” is a question to ask constantly.

Time Preference: Choose Saving Over Consuming.

Within the ranking of ends and the matching of means to ends lies the variable of time preference. To entrepreneurs, the future is worth more than the present. They are willing to make sacrifices in the present (i.e. consume less) with the goal of reaping greater benefits (i.e. achieving more important ends) in the future. In economics, this behavior is called saving and investing. When we don’t think entrepreneurially we often succumb to short-term preferences that don’t contribute towards our highest ranked long term goals. For example, if we eat or drink too much that’s enjoyable in the moment but bad for us in the longer run, we are undermining our own goal of extended and sustained good health. It’s easy to do, unless we are thinking economically at all times.

Negative Feedback Is A Gift.

To help us to think economically, there is negative feedback. This invaluable input to better thinking comes to us free of charge, courtesy of the marketplace. If we try to make a contribution to the benefit of others, whether that is a business offering or proposing a transaction, or whether it is offering an opinion on something, we’ll quickly get feedback from the marketplace. If the feedback is positive, we are reinforced in our thinking, and we can continue in the same direction. If the feedback is negative, we are faced with a different choice – either to change our communication, to make our contribution more persuasive and acceptable, or to make a different, better and more acceptable offer. Economic thinking embraces negative feedback because it’s the most valuable resource for helping us to improve and do better. To continue our food-and-drink analogy, getting fat is negative feedback (assuming that this was not our chosen end), as is the commentary from others who notice it and are uncomplimentary.

Embrace Uncertainty.

Whatever action we take and whatever ends and means we select, the entrepreneur and the economic thinker recognize that the future is uncertain and there are no guarantees that our desired outcome will come to pass. Economists call this uncertainty. In uncertain conditions, there is always the possibility that our expectations will be disappointed. Entrepreneurs deal with uncertainty by attempting to reduce the number of variables in the uncertainty equation. Given all the choices of action, what evidence is there that one is more likely to generate the expected outcome than another? Entrepreneurs achieve this narrowing of choices of action through testing and experimentation, at the lowest level of commitment and consequently the lowest possible level of risk. In the world of start-up businesses, this is often captured in the idea of minimum viable product or MVP. Given what the entrepreneur needs to find out to reduce future uncertainty, what is the offering with the lowest but most salient number of features, developed with the least commitment of valuable time, in order to generate real feedback, positive or negative, from real customers?

This kind of reduction of uncertainty with minimum investment is applicable to every economic decision. Should you commit your valuable time to going to see a newly released movie? Invest in finding out the evaluation of people whose judgment you trust and who share your tastes. Are you trying to decide which suit or dress to invest in for office wear? Check out the reaction of peers to the fashion and style choices of others who appear to be successful in gaining the kind of social and business acceptance you seek, and then follow their example. In both cases, the marketplace is giving you valuable feedback at little cost.

Economics For Life.

Ranked ends, carefully selected means, continuous assessment of the fitness of means to ends, time preference adjusted towards savings and investment, embracing negative feedback, managing uncertainty by careful testing of steps. These are elements of economic thinking that are useful to us at every moment and in every aspect of our lives.

When Missed Student Loan Payments Prevent You from Working

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It is no longer a surprise that occupational licensing laws prevent otherwise entrepreneurial people from entering the workforce. But the government has taken these laws one step further. Instead of solely being a barrier to entry into the workforce, which is bad enough on its own, occupational licensing laws are now being used to penalize those who have fallen behind on their student loan payments. 

One Nurse’s Story 

Shannon Otto wanted to be a nurse since she was 16-years-old, when she had the opportunity to shadow her aunt who worked in an emergency room. After dedicating the time and money necessary for achieving her dream, Otto had finally become a nurse in Nashville, Tennessee, a state that had been experiencing a shortage of nurses.

But after becoming a nurse, Otto started having epileptic seizures that prevented her from being able to work. Without a steady stream of income, Otto was unable to make her monthly payments and defaulted on her student loans. After some time, Otto was able to manage her seizures to a point where she would be able to return to her job once more. But just before she was about to return to work she received some disappointing news from the Tennessee Board of Nursing.

Since Otto had been unable to make her student loan payments as she dealt with her epileptic seizures, the state had responded by suspending her nursing license. If she wanted that license back, and thus the ability to work, she would have to pay more than $1,500, money she clearly didn’t have after spending so much time out of work.

Otto commented on the board’s decision saying:

“I absolutely loved my job, and it seems unbelievable that I can’t do it anymore,”

The Student Loan Problem

Otto’s story is just one of many. The total amount of student loan debt in the United States now exceeds the total amount of credit card debt. And while this statistic on its own is extraordinary, there is even more to it than initially meets the eye. In order to get approved for a credit card, the company you are applying through will check your credit and ensure that your track record is worthy of being loaned money. This ensures that they are not lending money to someone who may even have the means necessary for repayment.

With a student loan, your past will not be used against you because for most 18-year-olds entering college, they have no credit history at all. In fact, many have never had a job. But this hasn’t prevented the government from loaning out large sums of money to very young adults with no financial history and no experience in the workforce. 

But more people being able to subsidize their education costs with government loans means more people able to attend college. And more college graduates means that those special degrees are no longer rare anymore and they no longer give you an edge over others in the workforce marketplace. If everyone has a degree, that degree will not hold as much value.

And when graduation day came, many students found that despite their pricey diplomas, they were unable to find work. No job meant that when those student loan payments came due, many were unable to pay them.

It is all too easy to fall behind on student loan payments, as Otto’s story has shown us. Whether you are out of work for a few months or simply can’t afford your payments, missing a payment happens to almost everyone. But when one missed payment turns into many, the government now has some very powerful leverage to use against you.

When students take out student loans, they usually take them out specifically to help solidify their future career plans. Few think that these loans may actually ruin their ability to work. But that is what is happening. For those who have fallen behind on their payments and have earned a “default” status, the government can, and often do, revoke occupational licenses needed to work.

Currently, 19 states reserve the right to strip you of your occupational license if you default on your student loans. One state, South Dakota, will also go as far as taking away your driver’s license. But while this is supposed to be viewed as a punishment for not paying the federal government, it doesn’t really make much sense. If you strip someone of their ability to work, you are not increasing the likelihood that they will pay the loan back. In fact, you are making it increasingly difficult to do so. 

While this may sound almost too outrageous to believe, at least 8,700 instances of professional licenses being taken away from those who have defaulted on their student loans have occurred. However, the actual numbers are much higher, as records of revoked licenses are not kept by most licensing boards.

As it stands, the government has too much power over our own individual careers. And by preventing us from earning a living, the state also interferes with our ability to pursue our own individual destinies, and this is absolutely terrifying.

How A Social Conversation Produces A Stream Of Innovation.

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Are you participating in the social conversation about food? Almost everyone is, and it’s a wonderful example of how innovation dynamically emerges from interconnectivity and the sharing of ideas.

There are many participants with a wide range of points of view and experience and knowledge. There are consumers, producers, chefs, doctors, dieticians and nutritionists, stylists, bloggers and influencers. They’re young and old and in between, and of all ethnicities, education, professions, geography and background.

Multiple Streams Of Thought, Multiple Ideas.

There are two main streams of thought, with many sub-streams. There’s the food-as-indulgence stream – meals, dishes, recipes, ingredients, spices, flavors, pairing, presentations, and styles. And there’s food-as-health – freshness, clean ingredients, protein versus carbs versus fat, paleo and vegan, body chemistry, nutrition, digestion, and performance.

Interconnectedness Is The New Innovation.

This is precisely what is meant by the idea that interconnectedness is the new innovation.This social conversation among millions upon millions of interested parties and knowledgeable economic actors all over the world results in the sharing of ideas and the generation of new ones. Every participant has a legitimate input into the conversation – they all eat, and many of them are food preparers. Some of them have specialized knowledge to share, whether as health experts or nutritionists or chefs. Everyone is seeking betterment – better tasting meals, more pleasure, or improved health. Everyone has skin in the game.

The emergent innovation is fast-moving and multi-faceted. In the supermarket and online, there are new recipes with short, “clean” ingredients lists based on an abhorrence for ingredients with chemical names no-one can recognize. A package from Hu Products (Hu as in Human) declares: no gluten, no dairy, no refined sugar, no GMO’s, no cane sugar, no emulsifiers, no sugar alcohols, no soy lecithin. Less is more. Frugal innovation.

The Great Debate.

There is a great debate about the right proportions of fat, carbohydrates and protein. There are low-carb diets, high fat diets, (including the keto diet), high protein diets (like the paleo diet), and balanced diets. Some of these are said to be useful for weight control. There are also diets designed for more far-reaching health benefits than weight control, such as an anti-inflammatory diet, anti-diabetes diet, anti-cancer diet, and anti-alzheimer’s diet.

Support for all of these initiatives can be found from bloggers, food websites and apps, doctors, nutritionists and academic white papers.

On the indulgence frontier, there are meat chefs, fish chefs, fruit chefs, vegan chefs, innovative bakers and cake chefs (as well as cake artists) and pastry chefs and sauce chefs. There are restaurants for every taste, food type, ethnic cuisine and specialty. There are progressive restaurants – such as The Perennial in San Francisco, that runs its own sustainable fish farm, where the fish are fed composted waste from the restaurant – a burger restaurant (Momofuku Nishi) that makes its burger out of meat substitutes, and a gentrification-neutral restaurant (Everytable) that prices its menu items according to the median income of the neighborhood. There’s Asian-Latin fusion, farm-to-table, and pickle pairing (at Husk, in Charleston, South Carolina).

Not Just Food Innovation, But Also The Questioning Of Institutions.

In a Netflix film titled What The Health, filmmaker Kip Andersen investigates the impact of highly processed foods on both individual health and on communities. The film is heavily vegan biased – which is OK, since all information that comes to us via social conversation is biased by its origins and originators and it is up to us to recognize and process and balance the bias on our own. From its perspective, the movie asks some interesting new questions. If we are becoming more knowledgeable about how certain foods directly impact health conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, why is it that we find big government, big business and big health non-profits like American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, and American Cancer Society promoting those very foods on their websites and other marketing materials.

The answer, of course, is crony capitalism and politics. The big health non-profits are sponsored by the big food corporations who manufacture the disease-associated foods. The government is lobbied by the same manufacturers, as well as by big agriculture. Big pharma would rather we were all chronically sick and in need of treatment, than all increasingly well.

The social conversation about food generates innovation not just in food choices, diet and restaurant styles. It also informs us sufficiently that we begin to question top down authority, and the motivations of those institutions that aim to control both our attitudes and our behaviors.

The Consumer Is The Leader Of The Innovation Process.

Where does all this innovation come from? It comes from the empowered consumer, in a new process of ideation and value co-creation through a network of co-innovators. The locus of innovation is not deeply embedded inside any firm, but rather exists outside the boundaries of the firm, in the marketplace. In this context, the internet and web-based technologies like social media are crucial tools in making innovation a socially interactive and open process that entails collaboration to share ideas, resources, and costs.

The Entrepreneur Co-ordinates.

The entrepreneurial role is not the origination of ideas and innovations, but the systemic integration of activities and resources through which market innovation emerges. Entrepreneurs foster interactions and relationships at the consumer-to-consumer level and at the “many-to-many” level. Entrepreneurs build bridges between people and ideas that might otherwise be disconnected. They also bring new resources, relationships and people together to foster market innovation. In this role, entrepreneurs use networks, especially the internet, that function as open platforms — spaces where market actors share ideas, integrate resources, learn, reach consensus regarding priorities, define roles, engage in joint action and sustain working relationships.

New services – such as new diets, new restaurants, new recipes, and new food pairings – emerge in full complexity through the connections in action among knowledge, data, people, processes, objects and devices. We call it a social conversation. Anyone can join in. No-one can control it. It rejects authority. It is open to new ideas. It makes our lives better.

The Entrepreneurial Genius Responsible for the Creation of Airbnb

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One of the key ingredients of a great entrepreneur is the ability to constantly ask yourself, “how can I make this better?” This is a question Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia has been asking himself his whole life. And it was this innate desire to innovate and improve on existing models that has taken Airbnb from a fringe Silicon Valley experiment to a household name.

Natural-Born Innovator

Like all young kids his age, Gebbia loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He also loved to draw. Taking his passion for the pizza-loving cartoon turtles to the next level, he dedicated many hours to drawing pictures of the show’s characters. It wasn’t long before his classmates started noticing his drawings and asked him to draw pictures for them as well. This gave Gebbia an idea.

Charging $1 for small drawings and $2 for larger drawings, he was able to run a successful side hustle as an amateur artist. In addition to the money, young Gebbia was also making his classmates happy. It was a win-win situation for all parties involved, or at least it was until the adults got involved.

As demand for these Ninja Turtles drawings increased, the schoolchildren had begun telling their parents that they needed more lunch money than usual. This created suspicion among the parents, who contacted the teacher wanting to know what was going on. As all signs pointed towards Gebbia, the teacher approached him and told him he had to stop selling his art.

As Gebbia tells Tim Ferriss in a podcast episode: “You could say it was my first brush with regulation.”

And as Gebbia got older, his desire to create value morphed into a desire to innovate and make things better. During his senior year of high school, the student body had unveiled the t-shirt for that year’s graduating class. Gebbia was not impressed. And while he had no background in design, he knew he could do a better job. So he set to work.

Teaching himself Photoshop, a program of which he had no prior knowledge, Gebbia was able to create his own version of the senior class shirt that was much better than its competitor. Providing his own funds for the production of the shirts, Gebbia turned his dream for a better shirt into a reality. But now he was left with an inventory of shirts with no buyers.

Many innovative people never succeed because they lack the ability to get an idea from prototype to shelf. Everyone wants to dream, but no one wants to work. This is precisely what sets Gebbia apart from all the rest.

He went around school selling his shirts to each of his classmates. Telling each the story of how he came up with the design for the new shirt, a feat he accomplished with great success. This lesson would come to be integral in his later successes.

Where Is the Music Coming From?

Gebbia’s desire to do things better can most certainly be credited for his success as an entrepreneur, but it also got him in a fair amount of trouble as a kid.

At the end of his freshman year of high school, Gebbia was immensely disappointed by the prank that year’s seniors had chosen. As always. Gebbia knew he could do better, and spent the next three years determined to come up with a better plan.

By pure happenstance, just a few weeks away from graduation, Gebbia learned that it was actually quite easy to gain access to his school’s intercom system. Creating a diversion, he was able to covertly steal the main office’s cordless phone. All he had to do was dial #00 and he would have access to every room in the school. The only thing was, he didn’t know what to do with all this power. Then it hit him: he decided to make a tape that would play Alice Cooper’s “School’s out for Summer” and Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” better known by its chorus, “We don’t need no education.”

While he had initially expected the administration to discover the phone and shut down the prank quickly, the opposite happened. As the music came blaring over the intercom, complete pandemonium ensued. The faculty could not figure out how to turn off the intercom and the students were relishing every moment of the chaos.

As Gebbia casually fled the scene and walked into class, he saw students in multiple classrooms dancing on their desks. The prank was a success. However, the administration would eventually catch on, and this prank would result in a summer of manual labor at the high school.

But in his small county in Georgia, he was a legend: so much so that MTV aired an episode of High School Stories that featured the prank only a few years later.

“CritBuns”

His t-shirt endeavor had given him a love for design, so after high school, Gebbia attended Rhode Island School of Design. During the course of his education, Gebbia had proven himself more than capable of not only completing difficult design projects but also finding a way to get them funded and into the hands of consumers, something every entrepreneur needs to be able to do.

In art school, there are long periods in which students critique each others’ work. During these sessions, students sit on dirty, hard stools that were known for leaving black marks on the behind of the sitter after they stood up from the chair.

This was a problem so common among art students, that everyone had their own horror stories to tell. During his senior year, Gebbia decided he was going to fix this problem. Customizing foam, he created a cushion that would fit comfortably on top of the art school stools. Named “CritBuns” because their use was intended for long periods of critique sessions, Gebbia had created a solution to a widespread problem. But merely solving the problem for himself was not enough for him. He knew the other students would love these cushions if only they knew about them. They would also be willing to pay for them.

But spreading the word was not as easy as he thought. A couple of months before graduation, the school announced a design contest for a product that could be given out to the entire graduating class of 2005. This was perfect. Gebbia would be able to get his idea funded in addition to spreading the word about his cushions.

As luck would have it, Gebbia won the contest but, unfortunately, he had no idea how to create hundreds of CritBuns. Even worse, he had no idea how he was going to do it in time for graduation, which was now just four weeks away.

After making several calls to various prospective vendors, Gebbia was routinely told he would need at least six weeks to obtain the raw materials needed to make this a reality. But that wasn’t going to work and Gebbia was going to complete this project no matter what it took. After many phone calls and a little creative problem solving, Gebbia was able to produce the CritBuns. And the day before graduation, hundreds of the seat cushions arrived on campus.

Prototype to Shelf: the Power of Storytelling

One of the wonders of CritBuns was how they were sold. It was purely by word of mouth. The cushions may have been meant solely for art school students, but other consumers were finding uses for them. And every consumer had a story about their CritBun experience. Someone would tell the story of how the cushion had helped them or where they had used it, and the stories would resonate with other consumers. It was this experience that taught Gebbia the importance of storytelling when attempting to get a product from prototype to the shelf.

When he was selling his CritBuns in Japan, he was unable to rely on storytelling, as he did not speak the language. It wasn’t until he began working with a translator who could do the storytelling for him that be began moving the product. This would aid him later on with Airbnb.

After school, Gebbia continued to sell CritBuns while taking up residence in San Francisco. It was there where he met the other co-founder of Airbnb, his roommate Brian Chesky.

When the two wanted to attend a design conference happening in the Bay Area, where they lived, both were bothered when they realized that many not living in the area would be prevented from attending simply because hotel accommodations were either in short supply or too expensive.

In true Gebbia style, he was anxious to provide better solutions that would alleviate these problems. It was then the two decided it would be fun to purchase three air mattress and charge low rates to conference attendees who wanted to stay in their apartment with them. This original concept was meant to be strictly for conferences, as this was the direct problem at hand. They didn’t see at the time how this concept could be expanded to accommodate more consumers.

As it turned out, people loved this idea and, before they knew it, they were hosting the first three Airbnb guests in history. And while the idea was received well at the conference, especially since the guests were on stage as part of the presentation, the idea did not catch on. Just like the initial CritBuns, nobody knew about Airbnb, so it was not likely to get off the ground.

But that was before the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Love him or hate him, Candidate Barack Obama was a sensation among politicos. As a talented speaker, Obama was able to pull in record-breaking audiences. And many of these attendees were young Americans, an age bracket historically apathetic about politics.

As a result, the Democratic National Convention had had to relocate to a larger venue in Denver than was originally planned. But the delegates coming into town were already grabbing up all the hotel rooms, making lodging scarce. And since it was in such high demand, hotels could charge astronomical prices for a room.

This gave Gebbia and Chesky an idea. They would relaunch Airbnb at the Democratic National Convention. Excited and sure of themselves, they contacted CNN and other news outlets to let them know but were routinely shut down. No one seemed to find their idea that interesting, especially during an election as historic as 2008.

Desperate for some media attention, they focused on bloggers. They may not have known how brilliant this plan was at the time, but they are both aware of it now. When it came to reporting on local news concerning the convention, the local news networks relied on local bloggers. Likewise, national news networks were relying on local news networks in Denver for their reporting on the upcoming National Democratic Convention.

Before they knew what was happening, they were being featured on prominent news networks and their website was being shared with millions of audience viewers. Within a few weeks, around 800 Airbnb reservations had been made for the DNC, and Airbnb was officially on the map. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Who knew that the young boy selling Ninja Turtles drawings would one day create a business that would completely redefine the way we travel? And while his high school administrators may not have thought much about his high school prank, Gebbia is truly an entrepreneurial genius.

Hayek Anticipated That Millennials Would Be Skeptical Of Free Markets.

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The Millennial generation has been described as hating competition, or at minimum misunderstanding it. According to this theory, they were raised on participation trophies which engendered a “no-one loses” culture.

In an alternative theory, they are so meritocratic that they become hyper-stressed at the sorting, sifting, and ranking by schools, universities, the workplace, and social media that they feel institutionally compelled to strive, perform, and achieve even though they are not comfortable with doing so.

It’s probably futile to attempt to capture the feelings and motivations of an entire generation, which perhaps accounts for the wide disparity in theories. But there is consistent data from surveys and behavioral analysis (such as in voting for Bernie Sanders) that the Millennial generation is warm to the idea of socialism and skeptical about capitalism.

Disparate Information Results In Disparate Outcomes.

F. A. Hayek, in Law, Legislation and Liberty, anticipated Millennials’ discomfort with free markets. The “no-one loses” culture is, he declares, contrary in principle to free markets. The moral energy of the market applies at the individual level. Each of us is free to use the information available to us in order to design our service to others in the pursuit of rewards. Often, this information is not known to others. The individual uses education, and knowledge of time and place and existing circumstances, as well as the history of his or her predecessors in their position, in the process of choosing how to contribute in the marketplace. There are billions of other individuals who have different knowledge, and they are making equally unique choices on the basis of their unique information. The outcome of these simultaneous and interacting choices based on disparate information can not be known.

The Economic Game.

Hayek compares market activity to a game. In fact, he employs the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a game: “a contest played according to rules and decided by superior skill, strength or good fortune.” Like any game, winners and losers are not pre-determined. And outcomes can change as circumstances change, often unpredictably.

In the case of “the economic game”, the players participate because doing so improves the chances of all, and leads to “an increase of the stream of goods and the prospects of all participants to satisfy their needs”. But the outcome for any individual is not guaranteed. And Hayek emphasizes the role of luck: rewards may have no connection with merit, and might therefore be thought – erroneously – to be unjust.

Within this economic game, there is a particularly important role for “negative feedback”. (Hayek points out that economists have recognized the role of negative feedback for a long time, and cites Adam Smith as one of the first to see it clearly.) Negative feedback means that some players in the game will find out that their efforts have been misdirected. Negative feedback tells players what not to do. They are forced to change their tactics and look elsewhere for new means to achieve their goals.

At the same time, some players will find out that things have turned out better than they expected. The disappointed players may resent those whose rewards are higher. But that does not mean there is “injustice”.

The economic game proceeds, as do all games, according to rules and information that guide the actions of all players. The aims, skills and knowledge of those players are different. The consequence is that the outcome will be unpredictable and there will regularly be winners and losers. Some will have to change their mode of play – but they could not have foreseen this in advance. They must adapt. This is not a matter of merit. In spite of the best efforts of which they were capable, and for reasons they could not have known, their efforts were less successful than they had reason to expect. Doing the “right” thing cannot always be a matter of merit – it’s determined independently by the market in a way that the individual can not know in advance.

And for those that win, there is no “unearned” benefit. Each individual’s share of the total product of the market that, in Hayek’s words, “accident or skill assigns to him” will be as large as we, as a population all playing the game, know how to make it. The determination of the magnitude of one individual’s reward “does not depend on anyone’s will and desire, but on circumstances which nobody knows in their totality”.

It is easy to imagine that a generation brought up on “participation trophies”, not understanding the role of competition, might be uncomfortable in these circumstances. Because they are hyper-sensitive to sorting, grading and ranking, they might want to be protected against what Hayek calls “an unmerited descent from the material position to which they have become accustomed”. On the contrary, the obligation is to “abide by the results of the market when it turns against us”.

In The Economic Game, There Is No Such Thing As Social Justice.

Many Millennials are often identified as Social Justice Warriors. Hayek’s conclusion is that we must resist all thinking about so-called “social justice”. In fact, he calls the chapters of Law, Legislation and Liberty from which the foregoing quotes have been drawn The Mirage Of Social Justice. The word justice is inapplicable to a game where the knowledge, skill and luck of the players are different. He sounds very modern when he says:

It seems that among the younger generation the welfare institutions into which they have been born have engendered a feeling that they have a claim in justice on “society” for provision of particular things which it is the duty of that society to provide.

Such a claim is meaningless. First, there is no such thing as society. This personification suggests that society has a will, and can act to direct outcomes in a specific way, which is not the case. The market creates equal chances for individuals to play the game, not certainty as to which of them will benefit from the outcome. If it were otherwise, if government is used as a method to determine outcomes, it will result in “the destruction of all values of a free civilization”. Why? Because only a totalitarian government can attempt to exercise this kind of control. Freedom means that, in some measure, we entrust our fate to forces we do not control.

Hayek feels so intensely about this that he uses very strong language to make his point. The idea of social justice, he says, is the product of “primitive thinking”. It is “vacuous” and “naïve”, and the concept is “empty” and “meaningless”, and even “fraudulent”. And the possibility of its translation to coercive acts of government is “the greatest threat” to civilization.

The Millennial generation’s desire for participation trophies, and fear of sorting, sifting and ranking, is the source of that threat.

Could Crypto Investors Help Rebuild Puerto Rico’s Economy?

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Decades of harmful policy choices by the United States Congress, combined with a devastating hurricane season have all but destroyed the economy of Puerto Rico. But where the Puerto Rican government and members of Congress have called on the United States to bail Puerto Rico out of their financial mess, some entrepreneurs are thinking bigger. And the entrepreneurial approach to the Puerto Rico problem won’t come at the expense of the taxpayer

While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are currently down, this winter saw a boom in the crypto market, making many modest investors incredibly rich, if they played their cards right. This means that many young and idealistic investors now have the capital to invest in projects they are passionate about. And these investment opportunities are even more appealing if they present the opportunity to accumulate wealth. It is for this reason that many crypto investors are setting their sights on Puerto Rico.

Just a few weeks ago, Coin Agenda, the leading conference for crypto and blockchain investors, held a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The setting for this conference was not random. In fact, in the coming months, many of these crypto investors will be leaving the convenience of the United States mainland and will try their luck in Puerto Rico.

A Crypto Utopia

Since early last summer, the crypto market has grown exponentially. While the holiday boom has calmed down over the last few months as natural market corrections have occurred, many people who invested wisely were able to maintain their new level of wealth. And with wealth creation comes the ability to spread that wealth and create value for others, which is why these new crypto investors have started a project called, “Sol.”

By investing this newfound wealth into the economy of Puerto Rico, these crypto investors have the opportunity to rebuild the U.S. territory while also creating wealth with new business endeavors. The idea is that with new wealth, comes limitless opportunities to create jobs and prosperity for the downtrodden in Puerto Rico.

These investors also hope to promote sustainable living by teaching locals how to grow their own food and produce renewable energy. But it does not end there, by introducing the people of Puerto Rico to the crypto economy, these investors hope to help the locals safeguard their financial futures. The hope is that “Sol” becomes one of the first cities to completely adopt the burgeoning crypto economy, setting the way for the rest of the world.

But there is another aspect of Puerto Rico that makes it especially appealing to these crypto investors: It’s a tax haven.

Puerto Rico’s Unique Tax Laws 

While these crypto entrepreneurs are hoping to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s economy, there is another benefit. Puerto Rico has unique tax laws. Some even refer to it as a tax haven. As a territory of the United States, residents of the island enjoy some of the same “privileges” as mainlanders, the right to vote being one of them. But its unique status exempts its residents from having to pay an income tax.

While this fact on its own would be a huge relief to the burden of forced taxation, there is more to it. Cryptoassets used to largely ignored by the IRS. But after so many people made so much money, the government decided it wanted its cut. This is why a recent legal battle with Coinbase ended with the government gaining access to the exchange’s users. This means that all these new crypto millionaires will pay greatly when the taxman comes collecting.

But by relocating to Puerto Rico, these entrepreneurs and investors can avoid having their earnings stolen by the Federal government. Or so, many hope. However, going up against the United States government is quite a feat, especially since there is so much money in the crypto space. It is likely that the IRS will find some way to take its cut, but in the meantime, many crypto investors are hopeful.

And less money spent on taxes means more money that can be spent on efforts to rebuild Puerto Rico. While the future of the crypto world is still unfolding, it is undeniable that blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are going to play a huge role in the economy. But if this Puerto Rican experiment turns out to be successful, we may see how powerful crypto can be in both alleviating poverty and making municipalities more self-reliant.

Expert Planning Takes On Bike Sharing And Blows A Tire.

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Around sunrise this July 22ndin Onawa Iowa, near the Missouri River, more than 10,000 individuals from all over the world will swing a leg over a bicycle, clip into their pedals, and venture eastward. One week later the grand tour will end in Davenport, on the Mississippi. The cyclists arrive in all ages, shapes, and sizes; and it’s been going on every year since 1973. No one planned that.

Spontaneous Order Meets The Field Of Dreams.

The idea was hatched by two avid riders, a reporter and editor at the Des Moines Register. Their goal was to finagle a week long bike vacation to be paid by their employer. The pitch was to write a column every day about the people, communities, and scenes of Iowa they would discover from the seat of a bicycle. The original trek began in Sioux City, and after 6 days would also end in Davenport. In between it would be rolling hills, water towers, grain elevators, corn, and soybeans.

A few weeks earlier writer Don Kaul announced the journey in his ‘Over the Coffee’ column and invited readers to join them, no amenities provided. It’s estimated that 300 cyclists showed up, as many as 500 rode on the more populated stretches, and over 100 finished. A few thousand more complained that the notice was too short, school had started, and there was the Iowa State Fair. One of those who showed up and completed the ride was an 83 year old farmer by the name of Clarence Pickard. His gear included an old Schwinn, long pants, long sleeved shirt, woolen long johns – “they keep me cool”, and a duct-taped pith helmet.

From Landscapes To Cityscapes.

Now known as the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, its immense popularity has inspired similar week long bicycle adventures across many other states. The healthful benefits of cycling have also inspired the construction of bike paths in many American communities. And as a pollution free mode of transportation, urban bike-sharing projects have sprung up around the world. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Paris is considered the urban bike-sharing paradise, their service is named Velib. And per the city’s transportation deputy, bike-sharing is an important part the city’s identity.

At its recent peak, there were 1,200 Velib stations, and it averaged 100,000 bike rides per day. In celebration of the system’s success, a new contract has now been awarded to upgrade the network at a cost of only $734 million. Assuming peak usage every day, this works out to a mere $20 per bike ride over a full year, not including the untold millions already spent. And to improve upon the healthful benefits of cycling, or promote green transportation, or increase profitability, take your pick, electric powered bikes were added to the system.

Expert Planning Blows A Tire.

The actual results of this socialism inspired program were predictable. The newly installed bike stations are not compatible with the old system, so they aren’t connected to the power grid. The batteries that allow users to unlock bikes become dead trying to connect to power. The workers assigned to replace the batteries have gone on strike. The City of Light now has holes in the pavement lining the streets where the old stations have been ripped out. The new ones can’t be installed because of problems with the soil under Paris’ streets.

French media now refer to their bike-sharing paradise as an “industrial catastrophe.” Sadly, this is undermining the popularity of their Socialist mayor and her reputation for competence. Really? As is typical, the accusations have started flying. The mayor’s office is blaming the new contractor. The contractor is blaming the electric utility company and the previous operator. Also blamed is the “impossible to predict” centuries of construction in Paris that left behind gravel filled earth. Next, Quasimodo will be summoned before a tribunal, Esmeralda defending, to fight off the Parisian power structure.

A bike-sharing blogger calls it “a shame.” An entrepreneur would call it hubris and waste. Socialists are never accountable, capitalists always are. Those in need of a real ride-sharing service while visiting Paris should try Lyft or Uber. It would be cheap, faster, and more reliable except for one fat nail in the road, the National Union of Taxis. The same hierarchy behind Velib is also behind its chauffeur licensing requirements.

Personal Ownership And Government Ownership.

Comparing recreational bike touring with its urban transportation cousin may be a link short of a chain, but their creation offers valid lessons. The urban bike-sharer is entitled to the first 30 minutes for free, on the same unit everyone gets, if it works. If not, they’re dependent on the government hierarchy. The cross-state cyclist is also entitled: to the wind, hills, heat, and rain atop their favorite chariot. They enjoy this self-reliance with a cast of thousands, all looking out for each other. And a network of entrepreneurs is everywhere. Bike mechanics, pork chop hustlers, and smoothie purveyors; all anticipating the needs of the riders, and serving them cheerfully, trading value for value.

Velib has earned a lot of detractors and will get more expert planning. Iowa has earned a lot of fans for its hospitality, rolling terrain, and network of two lane paved roads. They were never planned for cycling and no one complains. I’ll take the old farmer from Indianola over the mayor of Paris all day long.

A Netflix Series Shows How Markets Can Be Used To Enact Social Change

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As an avid Tina Fey fan, a large portion of my own personal admiration stems from her frequent skewering of “sacred cows.” While presented in a different style, her “no one is immune to criticism” attitude is comparable to the political commentary found in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s long-running South Park, which has left no politician unscathed when it comes to its content.

Politics has a keen ability to divide the country into factions, especially this most recent election season where individuals have doubled down on their preexisting views, leaving no room for compromise or civil discourse. It is precisely for this reason that writers like Stone, Parker, and Fey have become a breath of fresh air for viewers who have recognized the hypocrisy that exists within the entire political sphere, regardless of party affiliation.  

Fey’s performance as Sarah Palin may have become a symbol for the 2008 Presidential Election, but her mockery does not stop at right-wingers. While Fey most likely considers herself part of the Hollywood left, she sees humor in both sides which is why her current project, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is currently much needed in a country desperately in need of a laugh.

Left and Right

The Netflix original series and brainchild of Fey, in which she also occasionally guest stars, has been extremely popular since its first season debuted in 2015. Its third season is arguably its best yet and displays Fey’s continued comedic insight into all corners of society.

From questioning the overuse of the term “privilege,” to questioning shallow patriotic traditions, nothing is off limits when it comes to the show — including political correctness. But in one particular episode, meant to poke fun at the hardline right wing Trump supporters, Fey, perhaps unknowingly, makes the case for using capitalism to bring about a desired social change, something that is far from leftist in practice.  

Jacqueline Gets Her Groove

Kimmy Schmidt’s strongest creative component is the unique characters the show highlights. Reuniting with her 30 Rock costar Jane Krakowski, Fey has created a character who is the epitome of a blonde trophy wife, but as the seasons unfold, there is a surprising depth to Kimmy’s friend and former employer, “Jacqueline White.”

After breaking off a marriage that allowed her to live a luxurious, albeit lonely, life Jacqueline attempts to assert her independence and take on the world alone. While she may seem like your typical first world, upper-class female, viewers soon come to learn that this is just a facade. Through phone calls made to her family, we learn that Jacqueline is the black sheep of a very traditional Native American family. In one scene, we see Jacqueline pop out her blue contacts to reveal dark brown eyes that she has worked so hard to conceal.

Her family hardly takes her seriously, especially since she has fought so hard to leave behind her true roots. However, in season three Jacqueline proves herself to her family when she is successful in convincing the owners of the Washington Redskins to change their name to something less offensive to her heritage.

On the surface, this may seem like a typical display of leftist PC culture, but regardless of how you feel about the name of the team, using the market to bring about change, especially social change, is an admirable lesson to preach, even if it is masked in modern liberal undertones.  

Change the Name

After falling in love with the black sheep of a wealthy family, portrayed by David Cross, Jacqueline learns that her new beau’s family are the owners of the Washington Redskins. Wanting to take a stand and make her family proud, she and her new love interest decide to take on the family and demand a change to the team’s name. Unfortunately, Cross’ character is “smooshed” by a car and falls into a coma before their plan goes into effect.  

His family, who is more taken with Jacqueline than the son they view as an outcast, arranges for the two to get married mid-coma, which, due to the suspended reality of television, is able to occur without any ethical complaints.

As a legal member of the family, Jacqueline is now able to fight the team’s name change from the inside.  

“The Washington Gun-Takers”

While on her way up to an owner’s meeting, Jacqueline runs into her parents who have traveled a great distance and are protesting and chanting “change the name!” She is all too excited to tell them that she is taking the team down from the inside when she notices that the protesters are burning large amounts of Redskins merchandise.

Inquiring as to how much was paid for the jersey’s being thrown into the makeshift bonfire, her father tells her that each jersey is $250, but that he would have gladly paid more just to feed the offensive cloth to the flames.

Suddenly Jacqueline realizes that the only way to change the owners’ minds is to find a way to make the name change profitable and desirable for all parties involved. Unfortunately just as she has this epiphany, she discovers that the other owners have switched the time of the meeting intentionally to avoid dealing with her activism.

Having only five minutes to make it to the top floor of a New York City skyscraper and preying on their dedication to nationalism, Jacqueline calls upon another splendid character, Titus Adromenon, a hopeful, but mostly failed, musical theater performer.

Knowing that the other owners are bound by tradition and will not conduct any business during the National Anthem, Jacqueline calls Titus and tells him to “sing the Star Spangled Banner, and really milk it!” which is then broadcast over a loudspeaker. While Titus is performing this over dramatic and very long version of our national anthem, she is able to make it to the meeting in the nick of time.

Composed of stereotypical conservatives who are committed to red meat, God, and their guns, the owner’s board has only one female, who comments that “Americans don’t kneel,” in reference to Colin Kaepernick’s infamous decision to kneel in protest during the national anthem showing exactly where their principles lie.

Money Makes It Work

Catching her breath, Jacqueline addresses the owners, “what is the single most important thing to everyone in this room? Money!”

Garnering the room’s undivided attention, she explains how Colin Kaepernick had the number one selling jersey the previous year, specifically because he was the center of controversy.

Consumers either bought the jersey to show support for the professional athlete, or they bought the jersey to destroy it as a form of protest. Either way, consumers were purchasing Kaepernick merchandise in droves, while the team sat back and watched the profits pour in.

Jacqueline explains that “anger” is a hot selling point and that there is money to be made off of the atmosphere of rage seething throughout the country because after all, “Nothing motivates Americans like outrage.”

She then segues into her proposal to rename the team, “The Washington Gun-Takers.” Just the suggestion of this name evokes strong emotions as the patriarch of the family stands up and exclaims, “Nobody takes my guns! I’d buy a jersey just to shoot it full of holes!”

Suddenly the lightbulb goes off and the entire room understands exactly what Jacqueline is trying to say.

By using market incentives, every single party involved wins. Those offended by the former name will bask in their victorious pursuit of justice and those who had no issue with the name will be bonded by their love of anger. Meanwhile, everyone is buying merchandise, either in support or protest of the new name — proving just how powerful market incentives can be.

Each week the cast of Kimmy Schmidt learns a new basic life lesson. While usually this involves learning how to Google or secure a job, in the third season the entire cast gets a primer in free market economics 101.

Interconnectedness And Local Creativity Are Reviving America’s Hometowns.

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National politics are divisive, depressing and grim. To hear politicians tell it, failure is rampant, everything is in decline, someone’s always losing, and someone’s always complaining. The collusive national media play along, loving the theme of decline and division.

Meanwhile, back in America, things are pretty good and improving. That’s the finding of James Fallows, who traveled America’s small towns, many of them unknown to – yet disdained by – the politicians and journalists of the Washington-New York corridor.

In fact, Fallows sees enough positive developments to state, “I have seen the future, and it is in the United States.”

All the improvements in this vision are local. No brilliant central planners are involved. No federally elected politicians have their fingers in the pie. Here are a few of the examples Fallows cites:

Innovative local schools: Perhaps the greatest destruction perpetrated by centralized government is the federalization of education. Our children are being taught the wrong things by the wrong people. In his small-town travels, James Fallows found many locals who were proud of their innovations in education. Some were public boarding schools, some were joint ventures with local employers to train students for decent-paying jobs in culinary, architectural, mechanical, agricultural and other fields. Community colleges provide what Fallows calls “connective tissue” in local and regional economies, often in collaboration with the specific needs of employers (like Boeing and Airbus aviation research and aviation engineering projects in Wichita).

Libraries: People across the country are sharing ideas about how to make local libraries centers of learning, training, knowledge sharing, job searching, activities and community. They even provide desk space for young entrepreneurs.

Downtown reinvention: The bi-coastal media set may portray small town America as decrepit and decaying, but, in fact, Fallows on his travels found over 1000 downtown revitalization projects under way, combining residences, shopping, dining and entertainment. He contrasted them favorably to the homogenized and faceless big malls favored by suburbanites.

Small high-tech advanced manufacturing: The national media paint the pcture of abandoned factories, but Fallows found smaller advanced technology manufacturing workplaces in almost every town he went to, including over 1000 successful manufacturing start-ups, and several manufacturing incubators. This is coincident with a significant talent re-migration back to smaller towns, with rising communities. Venture capital for start-ups is following, countering the current over-concentration of venture capital firms on the coasts. Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL and now the CEO of technology-investment form Revolution calls this shift the “third wave” of technology businesses (after the internet and then the companies that built businesses on the internet).

Conservation: Politicians want to handcuff the entire nation to the hubristic promises of the Paris Treaty and similar grandiose but ridiculously impractical global schemes. Meanwhile, Fallows found many localities and private donors setting aside land for conservations at a fast and increasing pace. We don’t need the Paris Treaty when individuals dedicate themselves and their private property to local conservation in their home towns.

Immigrant assimilation: Small and medium-sized communities do well at assimilating migrants because they stay away from the national political issues and associated hate campaigns. They focus on jobs, neighborhoods, new services, and civic engagement. Many of these small communities have been welcoming immigrants for decades, and that’s why they’re good at it today. When they experience an outflow of their home-born population as a result of industrial and technological change, they welcome newcomers from outside to participate in the revitalization process.

Competent, popular and integrated civic governance: Fallows writes, “Even as national politics induces trust and despair, most polls show rising faith in local governance.” Mayors serve multi-year terms, and realize that they’ll encounter their neighbors  – the people who pay the city’s taxes and rely on its services – in daily life. Accountability is face-to-face. Many communities are working with supportive tech companies to improve the quality and responsiveness of local services. And citizens have proved willing to raise local taxes for projects they believe in, such as parks, swimming pools and libraries. Fallows also points out that there is significant training for local officials to co-develop projects with their citizens. Imaging that: trained and responsive politicians.

What are the common threads behind these local trends, which are so favorable in comparison to the horrors of a and state level authoritarian bureaucratic government? Fallows suggests three:

Interconnectedness.

At the local level, people and organizations are working towards common goals, using online platforms and other tools to connect citizens and their governments. With the public much more involved in the future of their local communities and much more connected to officials, much more involved in decisions, participating much more in school innovation, and sharing information with the companies that support them, a civic renaissance can occur.

Moreover, there is a second level of interconnectedness. The local communities themselves are connected with other communities across America.  They share ideas, about schools, art projects, conservation and civic-tech, including both examples of success and learnings about what doesn’t work. Emerging civic networks make locals recognize they are part of something bigger, a shared revitalization and a common path.

High engagement.

“If you want to create a great community, you move someplace that needs your help.” This means, says Fallows, taking responsibility for the world outside one’s front door – for the reinvention and sustenance of the community where you live. Don’t leave it to politicians. Engagement could include attending PTA meetings or joining a group that addresses some local problem. Many great transformational movements start from local roots, because that’s where engagement takes place.

Local information.

The perceptions of decline with which we contend are often the products of national media and national commentators – a distorted picture of events beyond the actual experience of the reporters. And local media are strained to survive economically today, so they often just regurgitate national reporting. It is important to nurture local media – including local newspapers – who not only report the truth about local conditions, but also encourage the engagement of the local population in civics by acting as a catalyst and a central point of knowledge-sharing. The specific knowledge of local time and place, as Hayek described in The Use Of Knowledge In Society, can be utilized to generate a special kind of innovation and betterment.

Interconnectedness, engagement and local information. We can all promote these practices in our local communities to revive our home towns.

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