Manifesto

A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution

Consider this. When the last bubble was in internet technology, welfare was minimally affected – jobs were lost. When it shifted to housing and credit, welfare was affected more – houses and saving were lost.
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Today, it’s shifting in large part to energy and food. What happens when hypercapitalism causes a food bubble? What happens when the masters of the universe in Greenwich bid up the price of food for India, China, and Africa’s huddled masses?
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Here’s the answer: marginal starvation. Lives are lost.
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How do we begin reorganizing the industrial economy? By using markets, networks, and communities to alter the way resources are managed: to weave a fabric of incentives for sustainable growth and authentic value creation into the economy – a new economic fabric that’s meaningful to people.
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Google utilized a market – AdWords – to utterly eviscerate a stale, broken media value chain. Here’s a more visceral example. Muhammad Yunus revolutionized finance – not by collecting more money to lend, but by using communities to fundamentally alter the value equation of lending to the poor. The result was industry transformation.