 Hello, this is Gerrit Leonhardt. Welcome to another edition of Meeting of the Minds. Today I have with me from Sydney, Australia, Ross Dawson, futurist, author, strategist and a good friend. In the second half of the 20th century, the global economy grew by a factor of 10 times. Currently on pace for the next, this current 50-year period for the economy to grow by a factor of 6, while the population grows by another 2 billion from where it is today. So the question is, is it possible to continue to grow economically in a sustainable way? And there's many questions around that. One of it is clearly the environmental impact. Another is in the social impact. Another is in the divide between people. Is that growth going to be, if we do have growth at the expense of others? I don't think we know what will come out of this. I believe that we can have sustainable growth and that that is going to be predicated. The only way that can work is that all of that growth comes from the weightless. This is not from making more cars or bigger cars or more goods or more products. It is by making more value from the weightless, ideas, information, knowledge, services, relationships. And this is where all of the value has come in the last doubling of the economy in developed countries. The thing is we can continue to get growth and economic growth and economic growth that is well shared, that is sustainable but only if we focus on that weightless, knowledge-based information and ideas and creativity-based economy which we are creating today. In regards to growth and the future and sustaining growth, first of all, I think we have the completely wrong metric, GDP, measuring financial success based on unit sales and those kind of things. That is industrial economy. So GDP as a definition is becoming useless because it measures the wrong part, only one slice of the equation. And this is part of the problem. If you have the wrong metrics, then you also have the wrong means to get to the wrong metrics because it is a self-rewarding loop. So you are looking at how much we have grown and that wasn't enough, we have to grow more and it ends up being this giant spiral. So I think what has to happen is we have to have a defined different metric of success and not go back. This is like saying the record company is looking at saying, okay, we sold XYZ billion CDs and now we only sell one billion downloads. The two aren't related. They are in different timeframes. So if we are moving into the future and we are seeing 10 years from now, we are going to define success by many factors including what is referred to as the general happiness factors, the G&A, general growth happiness as a practice in Bhutan. But this definition of success being much less about individual slices but the whole slice. So I think what that means in terms of being sustainable, clearly our attitude of personal gain as the primary goal is not sustainable because as the numbers of people go up, it ends up eating up all of the resources. And as much as we can invent technology to make up for those lost resources, we're never going to get even on this. So we end up, if we think this through as a consequence, we end up with Volkswagen engineering and those kind of things as potential answers. But they bring us back to a simple thing is that if we think that we can construct our entire world to fit our paradigm, we're going to explode. I don't believe that's feasible. So if the metric is wrong, then our actions are also wrong. I think growth can also be like this and not just like this. So we can grow laterally. And there's been a lot of research about people being happy with a certain amount of money or unhappy without a certain amount of money and probably not conclusive results really. But I think if we're going to grow laterally, then I think that is sustainable rather than growing exponentially and individually. We've got pretty well established measures of economic value and gross domestic product and gross national income and so on are well used and well defined. So we need to add to those. There's many dimensions. One of them is, of course, in terms of how well people feel, I suppose, which includes health and happiness and engagement. I think there's also a social aspect in terms of social cohesiveness. Well, I suppose both cohesiveness and diversity, how do you get richness of society and of culture and self-expression and not easy to measure. We can get some ideas about whether things are getting better or worse, certainly. I think one thing we can actually can measure, and I don't know if there are any good measures yet, but we absolutely could measure is mutual value creation, where rather than value being created by one individual, one organization, being able to measure well how much is value being created in partnerships and collaboration. And I think we can build and measure in a way the collaborative economy in terms of how much things are shared. So getting these ideas or insights can help us to say, yes, we are improving where we are. But as a publisher, Tim O'Reilly, he talked about basically what's happening is that if there's an ecosystem you take out more than you put in, the ecosystem eventually dies. Because the attitude of people who take out more than they put in in the aggregate is not sustainable. And that's what we have now. So it's not that we're not putting in, but we're taking out more than we put in. In terms of money, in terms of energy, in terms of resources, in terms of natural resources, I mean water, whatever you have. And then there's this thinking that technology can fix this problem. So somehow we've created this huge mess, but we'll invent something else to make up for it, which is this techno-fix idea that you primarily have in the US. And the problem here is that clearly when we take out more than we put in, we can't sustain. So we have to reverse this and say, there's a reason that we're putting in more to sustain the thing at large. So this is why I call this the ecosystem or the biosphere kind of thinking. So I can prosper and I can be a big fish in a big sea, but I can't eat everything in the ocean. And so the problem is I think the kind of thinking is more like a collective idea that is the basis of this new system that we're going into because of the internet were driven to this networked thinking. And that to me would be sustainable. That would be my preferred future if we can think of it that way. How about you? I think when we say sustainable growth, most people mean sustainable economic growth. Clearly we're looking for growth and prosperity more broadly. So I think that it is important as well to look at economic growth. And one of the reasons is there are still over a billion people on the planet who are in less than a dollar a day. And there are around four billion people on the planet who are in less than ten dollars a day. They still need more prosperity. They still need more economic wealth to be able to create healthy lives of opportunity where they can get good education and to grow. And it is far easier to give that to those who have not by creating more wealth rather than simply taking away from those that have. There may be some of that as well. So I think we can focus on looking at how we can build sustainable economic growth. And I think that it is possible to do so, though if so it is imperative that that growth is available more to those who currently have not than those who currently have. Let me just relate a little bit to this. I mean the ecosystem thinking basically says that if I get you to be well, I can be in consequence also well by myself. And this is something that when you mention one billion people starving around the planet, this could easily be fixed tomorrow. The means for that exists, the money for that exists, but the political will to actually put that because it means that I have to give something and this is an inevitable solution for this. If we're going to solve terrorism, we have to get them to be well. That's the only answer. We can't kill all of these people because they're getting, and they don't care if they get killed, right? So there's no point, we can kill all of them. But the end result is that we have to get them to be well to solve this problem. It's just like energy is the same thing. If we're going to switch from the one trillion dollar a year subsidy of gas to consumers worldwide, the technology exists, all that stuff is there, but the political will is stuck with the five people who make all the money. And as long as that has to change, and I think this is part of the inevitable consequence, is that when we broaden who gets what, then we have a solution. So, and this is, I think, part technology is showing this, that everything that's networked and interconnected is extremely successful. You know, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Renren, QQ and so on. Everything that's really networked and interdependent is very powerful. Everything else is crumbling, and we have the same thing here with politics. So in a way, moving forward, it is less technological solutions and more political solutions. So this concludes today's episode of Meeting of the Minds. Thanks very much to Ross Dawson for being part of this today. If you want to know more about the show, you can go to meetingoftheminds.tv. We are also taking questions and inputs for the next show. Just use the Twitter hashtag meetingoftheminds and we'll be responding and trying to work your comments into our next show. Thanks very much for joining us.