Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56535
It's the natural instinct of governments to pump resources into the economy, but the bailouts and the stimulus package are in some ways futile efforts to try to restore the world to the way it was. The truth is, we can't. We're witnessing the death of the "Chimerica" consumerist model, where Ameri- cans borrow money so they can buy more goods so the Chi- nese can build more coal-fired plants to make more goods. That model imploded, and I don't think it can come back. What we're now experiencing—finally, in earnest—is a transformation to a more sustainable form of commerce and enterprise in a more sustainable world. That's the backdrop for everything that's happening now. Big Green, Little Green While I believe change is imperative, I don't expect the existing incumbent institutions to lead the way in developing the new green technology we will need for a sustainable world. In the developed world, powerful embedded interests resist change. They also must operate within a fully built-out infrastructure and a society bound by restrictive rules and regulations. These huge, centralized, incumbent institutions are likely to produce what I consider "green giant" technology. They want to cover the American Midwest with giant windmills or build solar thermal farms in the Southwest. Those plans suit the institutional structure that's already in place, so they're not disruptive. That kind of technology scares me a little, because gov- ernments don't have a very good track record at creating big, centrally directed solutions to the world's problems. For proof, just roll the clock back to the 1960s and '70s and look at nuclear power. The "green giant" solution puts a lot of money on a couple of bets, and they can go very wrong. We're just not smart enough to predict all the unin- tended consequences. I'm much more optimistic about the "little green" model of small-scale ventures offering distributed solutions. Thousands of little ventures run little experiments; they might fail small, but everyone learns big. They aren't destructive because, if the technology doesn't work, the experiment is over. It's the wisdom of the hive operating at a very local level. That's the way real innovation happens, not in big-bang top-down solutions. Knowledge trickles up. It's easy to add cost and features to low-cost solutions. It's much harder for modified solutions to trickle down. When technology reaches the tipping point, it's astonish- ing how quickly it can scale up. First it works in one commu- nity, then five communities, then ten, 20, 50. At that point, 26 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2009 it's ready to tip. I think we're on the verge of that with many, many different ideas, including distributed generation of renewable energy, point-of-use water treatment, biomateri- als, and nanotechnology. The best early example is wireless cell phones. In less than a decade, we've gone from under a billion people who have wireless access to more than 3 billion. That's phenomenal. Half of the world is now connected. From this example, we know technology can spread very rapidly. The Rural Revolution I believe that the new technology for sustainability will be incubated in developing nations where immense growth is occurring, like China's towns and India's villages. Take China, for instance, where the central government is intent on relocating people from rural to urban areas. Until recent- ly, migrant workers were moving to factories on China's east coast, but now many of those factories are shuttered. Today, migrant workers are moving back to the country— or, rather, to small cities in rural areas. The Chinese call them towns, but they're human settlements of 75,000 to 100,000 people, and there are approximately 20,000 of them. Over the next decade, 200 million people will move into those kinds of settlements. Similarly, take a look at India, where about 700 million of its 1 billion people live in rural areas. The thriving business communities in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mumbai have taken a hit with the global meltdown. The Indian stock mar- ket is down 50 percent, real estate prices have crashed, and investments have been pulled out of the country. Yet rural India is in relatively good shape. There was a really good monsoon last year, and the farmers have money