The Fourth Economy Quotes

“At that moment, when you feel like you were born into the wrong society or culture, you have a few choices. You can ignore the gap between the world around you and what you feel within. There are lots of ways to do this, from TV to drugs to desperately trying to succeed within the world’s big social inventions. Another way is to rail at the world for its failings, creating a narrative in which you are right and “they” are wrong. Or you can be humbled by trying to change the world around you just enough to realize your own potential.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“If a drug failed as often and had as many side effects as western marriage, the FDA probably would not approve it.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Within the West, the big social inventions have always been happy to define the individual. At various times and to various degrees, social programming has had a ready answer to the question of what the good life meant: being a good Christian, a good citizen, rich, an A student, or a good manager or employee. Imagine defining yourself instead as someone who defines institutions rather than being defined by them. Then imagine what sort of social invention you would have to engage in to create something akin to a school, a church, a government, or a business that would facilitate the person you aspire to be. No Lutheran will ever be as fully expressed as Martin Luther. No Mormon will ever realize her potential the way that Joseph Smith did. No Muslim will ever be more righteous than Mohammed. No Christian will ever be more perfect than Christ, no Jew more law abiding than Moses. Millions – even billions – of people do honor these amazing men by following their example, trying to emulate them. Yet what is interesting is that if a person were really intent on following their example they would refuse to be constrained by their example. That is, if you really want to imitate Joseph Smith or Mohammed or Martin Luther you would never become a Mormon or Muslim or Lutheran. You would, instead, start your own religion in which you subordinate tradition to your own convictions and revelations. You would trust in yourself enough to create rather than imitate. If that sounds irreligious to you, you are wrong. No follower of these men is more religious than they were. (And of course at the time, most people thought of these men as heretics, not true prophets.) Progress is the product of invention. Specifically, progress depends on social invention that subordinates the past to the future, that changes what has been created by past generations in order to realize what is possible for future generations.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“to be nobody but yourself -  in a world which is doing its best,  night and day,  to make you everybody else -  means to fight the hardest battle  which any human being can fight . never stop fighting. - e.e. cummings”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs for one simple reason: to be free. If you give that up, then you stop being an entrepreneur, and to hell with that. -          Wilson Harrell, founder of over 100 companies and former publisher of Inc. Magazine”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“We don’t normally think of the empirical method as heretical, but it is. A person who can trust his own senses and reason doesn’t need authorities to explain his world. He can, in fact, defy authorities when the facts and his reasoning lead him there. And worse, he is trading their revelation for his observations.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Csikszentmihalyi’s less known book is Evolving Self. This is about creating meaning. At the moment we experience flow, there is little difference between playing a video game and performing surgery that saves a life. After that moment of flow, there is a very real difference. The ideal is to experience flow while doing something that matters. Markets direct our attention towards creating value for other people, which has the potential to give our lives meaning, letting us point to value we have created.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“one’s life begins when he is born and one’s life story begins when he realizes that he was born into the wrong family. I would expand that somewhat, to say that anyone paying attention must eventually have a moment in which he wonders if he has been born into the wrong society. I suspect that you would have to be on some fairly strong drugs to escape those moments when you feel like a Martian.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“The Great Depression in the 1930s turned many young people away from corporations towards communism. By contrast, the Great Recession in the first decade of this century seems to have turned many away from corporations towards entrepreneurship.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“It may be no coincidence that the world’s richest man is a computer programmer. Programmers have “theories” about how software will behave when they change a line of code. Those theories rarely hold up to their first encounter with reality. Unsuccessful programmers could probably wax eloquent about how things should be different. Successful programmers just debug their code. Such a profession would quickly wean a person from idealistic notions about how to make a change. Successful programmers soon learn that it is more profitable to challenge their own thinking than to curse their computers when faced with unexpected results.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“I recently had a lawyer tell me that based on her experience; about 80% of lawyers hate their career but cannot go into anything else because they are burdened with student loans that preclude a change.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“The question is whether we will structure our consciousness or if someone else will. For social inventors, the challenge is even greater: their task is to structure the consciousness of others. It is not just a cute saying that social change begins with a change in consciousness. What people are unaware of, they cannot choose. Some people are aware only of what lies before them; some are aware of possibilities that are not yet visible.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Knowledge work is where agricultural work was at the dawn of the industrial economy. Then, the machines of the industrial economy, like the steam shovel and cotton gin, automated manual work. Now, the software of the information economy, from ATMs to self-driving cars and the AI able to make medical diagnosis, is automating knowledge work.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“startups take fewer employees. “In 1999, the typical new business had 7.7 employees; its counterpart in 2011 had 4.7.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Until now, the big institutions have defined self. The church has defined what it means to be religious, the corporation what it means to work. It will be a very different thing for individuals instead to define these big institutions. Yet that is what the popularization of entrepreneurship and the rise of social invention will mean.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Perhaps teachers and parents should add this to their list of admonitions and lessons: “Warning: contents of this society have been known to create feelings of stress and alienation; provoke wars, homicides, and suicides; and pollute the habitat you need for survival. Most of what we tell you, you should question. You can improve it. This is, really, just the best we have been able to do up until now and it could be that improvement will actually overturn much of what we now accept and advocate. Learn about your culture and your place in it, but do not cling too tightly to it. What we’re teaching you probably needs to change, and soon.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“The audience - this was 1912, a time before cell phones, TVs, or even radio - had no idea that Roosevelt had just been shot until he dramatically opened his suit jacket to show the spread of blood. When his aides saw this, they panicked at the sight and again insisted that he rush to the hospital. He again shook them off. (Aspiring public speakers who see in this great potential for gaining audience attention are advised to stay with the more traditional opening joke.)”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Corporations create wealth and define how it is shared. They define working conditions, salary, wages, and benefits. Holy days used to be defined by the church, but now it is the corporation that defines for the workforce which days are holidays. Politicians have to win the approval of corporations in the same way that kings, centuries earlier, had to win the blessing of the church.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“rogrammers have “theories” about how software will behave when they change a line of code. Those theories rarely hold up to their first encounter with reality. Unsuccessful programmers could probably wax eloquent about how things should be different. Successful programmers just debug their code. Such a profession would quickly wean a person from idealistic notions about how to make a change. Successful programmers soon learn that it is more profitable to challenge their own thinking than to curse their computers when faced with unexpected results. There is no reason that communities could not formulate policy in a similar way. Two reasons that it is not is because of our still rudimentary understanding of system dynamics and our insistence on placing blame on individuals rather than trying to understand systems.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Millennials were the first generation to grow up with game controllers. They are not spectators. They are participants.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“No Lutheran will ever be as fully expressed as Martin Luther. No Mormon will ever realize her potential the way that Joseph Smith did. No Muslim will ever be more righteous than Mohammed. No Christian will ever be more perfect than Christ, no Jew more law abiding than Moses. Millions – even billions – of people do honor these amazing men by following their example, trying to emulate them. Yet what is interesting is that if a person were really intent on following their example they would refuse to be constrained by their example. That is, if you really want to imitate Joseph Smith or Mohammed or Martin Luther you would never become a Mormon or Muslim or Lutheran. You would, instead, start your own religion in which you subordinate tradition to your own convictions and revelations. You would trust in yourself enough to create rather than imitate”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Choice is one level of freedom, but design is a higher”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“It was not until the late 19th century that the term innovation had a positive connotation:”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“It seems likely that the Internet will do for the corporation what the Guttenberg press did for the church. That is, it will break up structures we had always assumed were permanent: it will render temporal what we assumed was timeless.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“pay gap could be less about market realities than the fact that the corporation has yet to be democratized.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“[T]he very point of emancipation … is not to give power to those who have earned the right to it, but to lift the helpless to a level where they are free to learn how to use the right. “Those who oppose freedom argue that as illiterates, as slaves, as children, they cannot manage the household, which is true though illiberal. The political history of the West has been a running battle between the "realistic" deniers of one freedom after another and the generous ones who gambled on another truth, that capacity is native to all and depends only on fair conditions for its development.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“The test case of the civilizations in America suggests that we are predictable creatures, driven everywhere by similar needs, lusts, hopes, and follies.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Entrepreneurship is social invention that creates new systems.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“What is perhaps most interesting about this change is that in each succeeding generation, one’s way of being has been defined less by the society one is, by chance, born into and defined more by personal choice. There is little reason to believe that the ratio of intentionality and choice to chance and destiny will not continue to rise. Increasingly, individuals will define their lives rather than leave that definition to the society into which they are born. This is already happening.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization