Dear visitor,
Please note that I have moved to new blog http://tonyphuah.wordpress.com, because after I learned about the insight of “not over-” / “not too much”, Moderation and balance, I think I have moved to new phase of life and a new blog is better to reflect it. I am no longer just “thinking for Sustainability” but “thinking and doing”, moving and idle, balance between active and passive.
Please subscribe to the new blog to keep updated. Sorry for the inconvenience. I will not move the blog again as the new blog is just my name, I will not need to change the name of the blog again if I would move to new phase of life. Very sorry for this time.
I will leave this blog as it is and post new posts to the new blog. So please subscribe the new blog as I will update the new blog from time to time when inspiration comes.
Sorry again and thanks for your interest.
Tony
Tony Phuah’s website
It’s good as long as not over-. • Moderation • balance
Have you ever envisioned one day we will spread out of the earth and live in outer space? Or you may have other vision of future you would like to have. Regardless of what kind of vision you have, it is important for you to have one, to achieve what you really want.
This is the most important lesson for me in my journey of pursuing sustainability. It is the source of motivation to act. It is the source of commitment to persist. By building a shared vision with others, it is the basis of reconciliation of our differences (races, religion, language, culture) and basis of cooperation to overcome difficulties along the way to our vision.
Share vision, get committed, then we can start to talk about the problem and the solution.
Problem: Current state of the world is not what we want (envision). There is a gap between our vision and current state of the world. The problem is how to reduce the gap.
Let’s say our vision is ‘one day human will go out of the earth and live in outer space’.
Current state of the world: global economy hits the limit to growth, rich get richer, poor get poorer, prices hike, food crisis, political instabilities, failed states, terrorism, global warming, peak oil, threat of epidemic… In short, it has overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity and going to collapse.
Solution: Find out the root causes and design the systematic solution that can manage it towards our vision.
The deepest cause of all collapses is the natural mechanism of evolution to select quality by quantity growth.
Therefore, since it is not our vision to collapse, we can change the direction of the current global civilization to what we want.
Actually our current global civilization is not without achievement. Compared to Middle Ages, we have free market (freedom begets ingenuity) and fair democracy (fairness ensures voice of everyone born being heard, participatory). But why we still cannot prevent collapse?
Freedom begets ingenuity, good, so we have science and technology. But extreme freedom without restrain also enlarge the gap of human due to inherent variability of the human quality. This can be seen by disparity of rich-poor gap. The original purpose of democracy institution is to provide timely feedback so that freedom is not taken into extreme, but unfortunately due to large human quality gap, the institution is still being captured.
Therefore, what is lacking is mechanism to control the gap of human quality. This mechanism is necessary for achievements of ingenuity to be sustainable. Without this mechanism, market and democracy will eventually fail.
The mechanism required are ‘Rich pay poor for not to give birth’ and ‘Equal quality education opportunity’. The latter is important for intergenerational mobility.
Other important policy is ‘Balanced integration’. Learned from many issues caused by current model of globalization/Europeanisation, economy integration should be synchronised with social(cultural) and political integration. If social(cultural) and political integration takes time, economy integration should also be put to a halt. If we are not too hurry, sooner or later, we will integrate. Intermarriage is the ultimate integration.
In summary, “Free market, Fair democracy, Rich pay poor for not to give birth, Equal quality education opportunity and Balanced integration”. This will transform our world to a better and better world.
Let’s have vision now.
Share vision, get committed, improve ourselves.
Tony
Thinking for Sustainability
Thinking for Sustainability 
6 comments
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18 October 2011 at 5:33 am
Aljazeera
It seems like you’re saying that the poor are without quality. And that in paying them to not have children, you’re encouraging them not to pass on their genes, which, as you logic seems to say, must be bad, because they are poor.
While I like the idea of human quality improvement, this is simply crazy and misinformed.
18 October 2011 at 9:55 am
Tony 隆吉
Hi Aljazeera, calm down and contemplate the whole mechanism carefully. ‘Rich pay poor for not to give birth’ does not mean poor cannot bear children. The poor can always have baby by stop receiving the payment. It is completely voluntary.
So the poor can choose to: (1) keep giving birth, so cannot get payment. Their high number of children suffer poor nutrition, poor nurture (too many children to attend to), poor schooling opportunities and eventually little chance of social mobility; (2) totally rely on this payment for their livelihoods without striving to change their lives, therefore do not bear any children; (3) have fewer children and use this payment to improve nutrition and better nurture their fewer children. With narrower rich-poor gap (as rich pay poor), their children’s chance of social mobility will be higher.
So which one is wiser? Do you see how the mechanism is working out?
Of course the government/society plays their role to provide universal education (quantity and quality).
19 October 2011 at 1:01 am
Aljazeera
The underlying problems have yet to be addressed.
First, what is supposed to convince the rich to engage in such a transfer? Take America for example: large income and wealth inequality gap, yet the myths prevail that if you work really hard, anybody can get rich. And progressive taxation is still labeled as class warfare. So what can you do to convince the wealthy to simply pay the poor for doing nothing?
Additionally, education isn’t the only solution for poverty. I’ll use America as another example because I have the most experience with it. The health care system can easily bankrupt even the most pernicious saver with an accident that can happen in a moment. There are people with good educations struggling as well! Or for another example, farmers struggling against agricultural corporations; even with today’s higher food prices, companies like Monsanto are driving these workers into debt with equally high seed and fertilizer costs, and they could still have a bachelors in Agriculture. Reform of world agriculture, health care, and financial systems is necessary to fight the underlying causes of poverty because the current systems are contributing to the problem.
My original closing comments were certainly belligerent, sorry about that.
But I will continue to argue that such a human quality plan must be comprehensive and globally-minded, and with only three bullet points you simply can’t achieve that.
3 November 2011 at 12:59 pm
Tony 隆吉
To reform you require people’s support, which means you need to communicate with them, inform them and educate them most of the time. You will find education is so important to any proactive change. The education I mean is not just graduate from university, but critical thinking – knowing what happening, understand why it happens and determine how to reach goal. Universal quality education will make your endeavour much easier.
“what is supposed to convince the rich to engage in such a transfer?” – good question. Build a shared vision with them – “What do you (the rich) REALLY want?” Money is just a means to an end (happiness, family, children, sense of community, respect, survival). Only when they clarify what they really want and realise that they can only obtain it sustainably by controlling the rich-poor gap, proactive and sustainable change can happen. (In the meantime, push by the poor like demonstrations help.)
These are not simply three bullet points. These are three basic strategies that I have devised for a long time that are necessary to improve human quality and unite our strength globally, prepare us to spread out the space in the future.
10 November 2012 at 12:56 am
mad max
The world is waiting for someone that is very smart to supply it with a new vision for the future. OsiXs is a brilliant think tank or group of scientists that have it right in my opinion. Read “common sense 3.1”. Then you’ll get it.
10 November 2012 at 4:57 am
Tony 隆吉
Vision has to be built together for people to make commitment to it. Watch the last video in this post.
Her paper is in this post.