FLOW Vision News, February 2008

In promoting "entrepreneurial solutions" we include not only those forms of social entrepreneurship that are possible given today's policy environment, but more importantly those entrepreneurial solutions that will become possible with a different policy environment.  Government institutions encourage some entrepreneurial possibilities and discourage others.

The simplest example of this is in the area of energy policy.  A green tax shift that shifted from payroll taxes to carbon taxes would create two dramatic changes.  On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of employers would make very different decisions about how many employees to hire.  It would become "cheaper" to hire employees; a given payroll budget could either be used to increase the salaries of existing employees or to add new people, or both.  With all employers facing a similar set of incentives, all employees would find themselves valued more than they were before, but this effect would be especially powerful for those who are paid the least in our society – payroll taxes are an insignificant factor in executive compensation but a large factor in the compensation of low-wage employees.  While this shift to increased value of human labor would not solve all problems of unemployment and job quality, it would be boost in the right direction.  It is one of the biggest gifts we could give to the American working poor and to the businesses that employ them.

At the same time, many thousands of products that are not yet profitable businesses would become so if carbon taxes made coal-based electricity and oil-based fuels more expensive.  There are thousands of devices that could make homes more electricity efficient, ranging from new window screens and coatings and storm windows to more efficient appliances to automatic lighting systems to new types of insulation and on and on and on.  Likewise with automobiles – not only would new fuel-efficient automobiles benefit from increased demand, but fuel additives that improved mileage would be in greater demand, as would various devices that could be installed on existing automobiles, as well as hybrid autos – including a pedal car hybrid.  At the same time, patterns of work and commuting would change, housing that required less commuting time would become more valuable, various flex-time and work from home options would be explored more, electronic conferencing would receive a boost, etc.  It could be that increased demand in electronic conferences could fuel the creation of low-cost sophisticated virtual reality meeting rooms with hyper-realistic interaction. 

Many of these are not currently regarded as "green businesses," and yet in terms of energy savings some might have a more profound impact than do the current generation of "green businesses."  This not to be critical of existing "green businesses," but rather to remind people of the large realm of uncharted territory of green innovation yet to be explored, much of which might not be regarded as "green" in today's world.

Most who support entrepreneurial solutions today try to persuade people to purchase green products and "go green."  There is an active "green" culture in the U.S. today that strive to persuade others to do as they do.  Not only do government institutions define the boundaries of entrepreneurial possibility, they thereby also insidiously define the boundaries of cultural possibility.  For instance, it is an old stereotype that the French love wine whereas the British prefer beer and port.  But these preferences are due to eighteenth-century tax policy:  After a tariff was passed targeted at French wine, it became disproportionately expensive in Britain shifted British national tastes away from wine and towards beer, on the one hand, and port, from Portugal, on the other.  Now we regard it as a cultural difference.

One of my favorite thought experiments is to consider what our world would look like culturally today if, say, starting in the 1840s, and growing to cover a majority of Americans in the 1930s, the U.S. government had chosen to provide free public housing to all Americans and tax deductions for education, rather than public schools for all Americans and the mortgage interest deduction for homeowners.  For the purposes of the thought experiment, let's add that instead of an 1860s legal decision declaring "A man's home is his castle," (following a British tradition that dates to feudal times) our legal history had long ago decided that "A parent's right to educate their children as they saw fit is sacred" but that the government had a right to intervene in housing decisions and arrangements as it sought fit, even intervening in private housing arrangements when it was declared to be "in the public interest" to do so.

With a public-spirited commitment to provide free public housing for all, perhaps single adults would get a single room unit with 300 square feet and families would get a standard apartment of 800 square feet with three tiny bedrooms using cutting-edge 1930s building technology.  Over time, as it was discovered that some contractors were not building homes built to appropriate standards, a government certificated education program would be required for contractors and construction workers to ensure that they consistently produced high quality homes according to the government interpretation of 1930s "best quality" building standards.  Our homes would receive periodic inspections from government-certified home inspectors who would repair and replace those defective parts and materials that were listed in the official home repair manual.  There would be no homelessness. 

There would be a small, marginalized private apartment building industry, but because free public housing dominated the market, the materials used even in the private market would mostly be the same as that used in the public market.  In most states, there would be regulations that forced private builders to build private apartments in a manner similar to the standards set by public housing using only government certified builders.  Because the private apartment industry was so marginal, units therein would be more expensive and lower quality than in our world.  It would be considered normal to live in public housing, and many would consider it elitist and extravagant to pay for an apartment when the government supplied a "perfectly good" one for free.  There would be a national debate about the deteriorating state of public housing, but most would regard their own neighborhoods as adequate even while being concerned about the squalor elsewhere.  With everyone living in public towers, those hippies and fundamentalists who went out into the country and "built their own" unit in isolation would be regarded with suspicion and considered "undemocratic."

At the same time, with all payments on education tax deductible, we would now have three, going on four generations of Americans who had had a greater incentive to spend more on education, of all sorts, because those expenses were tax free.  A more diverse market in education would exist, with hundreds of thousands of education entrepreneurs creating surprising innovations.  Children would learn more academically, while enjoying it, having less homework and spending more time with their families, and learning lifelong habits of well-being.  There would be wealthy educational entrepreneurs who specialized in creating highly customized educational programs for students with special needs, families with special interests, or students with unusual aptitudes.  There would also be wealthy educational entrepreneurs who had specialized in mass-producing consistent, high quality plain vanilla education programs that incorporated the innovations of those programs of the vanguard a decade later. 

Highly capitalized education corporations would hire the best expertise in human development, and those individuals who had an unusual ability to design and replicate systems of human development would be highly sought-after professionals with salaries to match.  The entire world of education would be highly differentiated with many different kinds of specialized positions we can't imagine, some offering in-home educational opportunities, some offering diverse wilderness and deep cultural experiences, some cultivating the ability to think creatively, others the ability to intuit the feelings of others, some developing entrepreneurial visioning to an extraordinary degree, others developing the capacity for understanding the human body from the inside out.  A small attempt at "public schooling" would be rejected after a short period as an embarrassment to those who had originally endorsed it.

In short, instead of a shallow, hedonistic culture with rebellious teenagers living in enormous houses (the average American under the poverty line lives in more square footage than the average European), we would today be known as a culture that was highly attracted to learning, well-being, and human development, but with small, dull, crowded apartments.  Teenagers would be committed to learning and well-being, with teen social hierarchies based on who was doing the coolest learning stuff, but perhaps they'd have sullen, angry attitudes about their dull, tiny homes.

Sound implausible?  Perhaps.  But consider the cultural effects of Soviet communism:  Vibrant intellectuality in math, physics, and chess, where creative freedom was allowed, and a leaden conformity in the social sciences and broadcast media.  Talented people want the freedom to create always and everywhere

Let's liberate the entrepreneurial spirit for good in education, housing, health care, and everywhere, so that we may enjoy the fruits of such creativity in all aspects of our life.

To receive our monthly newsletters in your inbox, sign up at www.flowidealism.org