What is Feast & Famine World?
Growing GDP, falling unemployment: life must feel better than ever. And if more people feel miserable, the media and politicians attempt to explain it away by lack of access to the “correct” information. “You don’t understand,” the thinking goes, “in fact, you feel better than ever, here are some numbers…”
FFW is part a personal* research project aiming at explaining what GDP, unemployment and the other available measures of economic success are missing and how to define a more suitable one featuring the one truly scarce resource - time.
FFW is also a personal publication, in which research findings are shared with the public and anyone in academia who would like to replicate or review the findings.
At the intersection of economics, philosophy and politics, FFW asks the questions that are regularly ignored by economists and politicians: “why despite all this technology and progress you are more stressed and have less time?”, “does it really have to be so hard to survive?” or “why keeping up with Joneses is so difficult to escape?”
One right question is better than a hundred answers to the wrong questions
After nine years of economic studies and a 30-year career managing small and large companies, analysing a dozen industries, starting up and growing businesses I still don’t have many answers.
Instead, I am left with an ever expanding list of questions that have convinced me that 1) some key tenets of the economic theory are no longer (or have never been) valid and 2) the way we measure economic success is flawed and needs to change urgently if we are to avoid cataclysms.
But let’s start with an innocent teaser question:
If resources are scarce**, how come every business would tell that selling the product is the hardest thing they do?
*) Important impartiality statement: FFW is not funded by any entity, there are no paid employees or contributors. All views expressed, data and research are those of the author unless otherwise stated in the posts.
**) a key tenet in Economics 101
About the man with a duck on his head
Edmund: And what if I arrive in a French peasant village, dressed in a Robin Hood costume and there *isn’t* a fancy dress party?
Baldrick: Well, to be quite frank sir, I didn’t consider that eventuality, because if you did, you’d stick out like a…..
Edmund: (interrupting) Like a man standing in a lake with a small painted wooden duck on his head?
The logo is inspired by a classic comedy series Blackadder (Blackadder Series 4 Episode 2 Corporal Punishment). Sometimes when your life depends on it and you need an escape kit, our economic system delivers a wooden duck.
-WH
