Making Hunger Mind Friendly
| Comments
Earlier in the year, I was honored to have been selected as one of fifteen non-profit leaders to participate in the American Express - Aspen Institute Academy 2.0 which took place last week in Aspen, CO. It was a rich, inspiring, and thought-provoking experience, and an unbelievable privilege to spend a week on their campus in Aspen to reflect on Good Society.
Arturo Gonzalez, one of the fellows in my cohort, and also an Atlas Corps fellow/hunger fighting compatriot at Kids' Food Basket, posted this lovely reflection on his experience at Aspen.
One of my big takeaways - of many - was a selection from Hernando de Soto's book, "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else." In it, he describes how a system of legal property makes capital "mind-friendly." He writes (emphasis mine):
"What distinguishes a good legal property system is that it is "mind friendly." It obtains and organizes knowledge about recorded assets in forms we can control. It collects, integrates, and coordinates not only data on assets and their potential but also our thoughts about them...The revolutionary contribution of an integrated property system is that it solves a basic problem of cognition. Our five senses are not sufficient for us to process the complex reality of an expanded market, much less a globalized one. We need to have the economic facts about ourselves and our resources boiled down to essentials that our minds can easily grasp."
In essence, a system of legal property helps us understand the concept of ownership. Understanding ownership helps us maximize economic value by enabling the efficient transfer of ownership.
This is fascinating to me: the process of making something nebulous - such as the right of ownership - concrete and therefore, transferable, making the invisible visible.
Big, hairy social problems are often invisible and therefore challenge our ability to adequately conceptualize them and have the "mind-friendly" frameworks to create solutions.
However, there are exciting examples of how we are beginning to create legal systems of property and exchange that make these problems more mind-friendly. For example, quantifying the social, health, and economic costs of food insecurity is an emerging field of research that aims to make hunger and food insecurity more mind-friendly. Conceptualizing food waste as wasting scarce resources like water, land, and labor is another way to look at the unbelievable energy cost of throwing away perfectly edible food.
This is exciting. By making what is invisible visible, we can more easily engage with these problems, attach costs and calculate value in order to guide our policy decisions. Continuing to find ways to help people have the frameworks to understand big, hairy societal problems, and to effectively communicate them to stakeholders, is key to our success to creating novel solutions for them.