I see some practical failings of this theory. For example, I am confident that when I wake up in the morning, I want to drink a cup of coffee because I want the caffeine from the coffee – I do not want the caffeine simply because someone else wants caffeine. It seems like a fairly straightforward example of when we desire something simply for ourselves. Maybe food, and human necessities in general, are exceptions to mimetic desire.

But the failings of the theory are not actually what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about how mimetic desire is much more obvious than perhaps ever before.

As brands grow in popularity and power all over the world, we are given a perfect example of mimetic desire in action. I believe that a brand fundamentally tries to sell its products through mimetic desire. Think about this. If someone tried to sell a handbag that was completely identical in every way to one made by Gucci, only it lacked the Gucci label, it would sell much less than the actual Gucci handbag (this happens every day all over the world). Why is this? The product is identical. All it lacks is a little label on the inside that says 5 letters. The difference in the cost of producing these two products is likely less than 5 cents – the cost of the label on the inside of the bag. And yet the difference in cost of the label to the consumer is probably at least $500, if not thousands of dollars. There is clearly something else at play that makes many more people want the bag with the label than the one without, despite the outrageous price differences.

There are probably two reasons that someone wants the Gucci handbag over the one without the label. Either they know someone who has the bag, and they admire that person and want to emulate them, or they’ve seen Gucci’s advertising and want to be like the person in the ad. These are both on a basic level the same thing, but it’s worth mentioning the difference.

In each case, someone buying a Gucci handbag is only wanting the bag because they’ve seen someone else with it, and they want to emulate that person’s style. No one thinks “The economic difference between this Gucci bag and an identical one without the label is five cents, but I will pay hundreds more for it”. That is not logical or intelligent in any way. But because of a desire to imitate someone else’s desire or possession of the item, people end up going against economic reasoning and purchasing the Gucci product nonetheless.

You might ask why the first person to buy a Gucci handbag bought one, even though they hadn’t seen anyone else with one yet. In my opinion, this is the role of advertising. Its role is to create the image of ideal customers using the product, in order to create mimetic desire. Someone will desire the image and style of the person in the advert, which causes them to desire the product with the label. Again, they desire the product through someone else’s possession or desire.

By these inferences, mimetic desire is the basis of brands’ success. Mimetic desire is visible more in the world today than it ever has been previously. We all wear branded clothing, and wearing a brand is a sign that we indeed succumb to mimetic desire.

I like reducing things to fundamentals. And in my opinion, the fundamentals of brands and advertising is mimetic desire. Without it, they wouldn’t have a role or purpose. If people can keep in mind mimetic desire when advertising or creating a brand, they may be more successful.

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to a website called 500px. I’d never heard of it before, so I assumed it was a new website, but turns out it’s been around since 2009 (it just didn’t make any progress in its first couple of years). It’s a photography website, similar to Flickr, but much better.

I fell in love with 500px when I started using the search box to search for different cities. I think I first searched for Istanbul, since it’s a city I’ve always wanted to go to but have never had the chance. After searching for a city, you’re immediately presented with page after page of beautiful images taken by some of the world’s best photographers. There are photos of people, and photos of architecture – and together, the photos helped me to gain an understanding of what Istanbul is like without actually visiting there. To use the phrase from a previous post of mine, I discovered different ways of life.

The photos I love the most on 500px are street photos. Street photography involves capturing parts of a city, and people in a city, in their natural environment. You’ll rarely get two street photographs that are the same, because streets change every single day. You’ll see photos of people in their natural setting – from businesspeople in New York to people in slums in various cities in the world. From these photos, you can learn about how people live their lives, and what people in different cities do every day.

I think this is very powerful. The ability to learn about how other people live their lives is important, as it allows you to empathize more easily and gain a lager understanding of the world.

Seeing these photos of different cities that I loved so much gave me the urge to pick up a camera and try it myself. Over the past few months I’ve shot both with film and on a new camera I bought, a Fujifilm X10. You can see my photos here.

I’m absolutely loving street photography. I’ve always enjoyed walking the streets of a city for hours on end, but have previously thought that there was no real purpose to my wandering. Sometimes that was fine, and I didn’t need a purpose, but other times I wouldn’t go out, thinking that I should stay inside and get some work done. But photography has given me that purpose to walk cities for whole days – because I can help other people understand a city in the way I’m seeing through my photography.

I find it amusing how I previously thought all there was to photography was tapping an icon on my iPhone. I never really saw the purpose in photography other than to share experiences with your friends and family. But all of a sudden, after I discovered the knowledge I was gaining through other people’s photographs, I started to gain a love for doing the photography myself. That happens often – we dismiss things until we personally gain from them.

If you’re wanting to check out some street photography, here are two photographers whose photos I cannot get enough of: Thomas Leuthard and David Mar Quinto. Enjoy. And consider picking up a camera yourself if you enjoy their photos.

I was incredibly sad to hear that Sir Paul has passed away today.

New Zealand needs more people like Sir Paul. We need more people who realize what makes New Zealand a great country, but also look at the realities of the situation this country is in. But more importantly than that, we need people who look at how New Zealand’s situation can be drastically improved over the coming decades. Sir Paul did all of these things, and that’s why I have been so influenced by him, and so admire him.

I’ve seen Sir Paul speak a number of times. Regardless of whether you agree with his viewpoint or not, you cannot help but think about how New Zealand can be improved. And that, in itself, is an immense contribution to New Zealand. To get thousands of people thinking about improving this country greatly increases the chances that improvement will be made.

You only need to look at this post I wrote to see the impact and effect Sir Paul has had on my thinking. He’s provided me with the grounding evidence as to why New Zealand needs to be improved, and has inspired me to get New Zealand to a much better situation in the coming decades.

Thank you, Sir Paul.

Let’s all aspire to care as deeply about this country, and do as much for it as Sir Paul did.

For those of you who don’t know, the theory of comparative advantage is a theory put forward by the economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. It says that even if a country has an absolute advantage in the production of most goods over another country, it can still gain through trading with other countries. Absolutely advantage refers to when a country can produce a good at a lower cost (with fewer resources) than another country. So long as two countries have different opportunity costs for different goods that they produce (which all countries do have), then they can gain through trade.

Let me run through an example to make that a bit more clear.

On the above image (credit to bized.co.uk) the production quantities of two goods, maize and wheat, are shown on the x and y axes, and the production possibility frontiers for two countries, A and B, are shown within the diagram. You can see that country A has the absolute advantage in the production of both maize and wheat, as at any quantity, it will produce more than country B can. However, the different gradients of the two production possibility frontiers tells us that the countries have differing opportunity costs for the two goods. If we were to insert numerical values for the quantities of maize and wheat produced, we could in fact work out these opportunity costs.

If both country A and B specialize in the production of the good that they can produce more efficiently, then each country can gain from trade. Let’s assume that country B specializes in producing wheat, and country A specializes in producing maize. If they both produce a quantity of zero of the opposite good, and devote total output to the production of their specialty good, they will then be able to trade to gain a total quantity of both goods that is higher than they otherwise would have achieved by individual production. This is due to the increase in efficiencies because of specialization, and the division of labour.

For a more in-depth explanation with actual values to prove the theory, do a Google search. I want to get into why the theory of comparative advantage amazes me.

Without analysis, it is easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking that an exchange of a good with someone else leads to a gain for one person, and a loss for the other person. But that simply cannot be the case, or else no one would trade. This is where comparative advantage – and subsequently trade – are, in my opinion, wonders of the modern world.

Trade makes the world non-zero sum. In other words, someone (an individual or a country) can become wealthier without making someone else poorer. Trade leads to mutual benefit. Both people who engage in a trade are better off. No matter whether we are talking about an entrepreneur exchanging money for someone’s labour, or two countries exchanging goods, the gains are mutual. One person does not win at the other person’s expense. By extrapolating this, we can see how we arrive at modern economies with huge amounts of wealth. The gains are endless. The more trade that occurs, the more wealthy societies become, because trade is non-zero sum.

This debunks, on a theoretical level, many myths about trade helping rich countries and hurting poor countries. By trading, both countries benefit. It is possible for one country to benefit more than the other, yes, but both benefit. And that is a hugely desirable thing. This also applies to individuals. In other words, if a rich person and a poor person trade, the rich person does not gain by hurting the poor person. Both people mutually gain. This is because they both have different opportunity costs for what they spend their time doing.

I don’t know about you, but to me this is simply incredible. Every time I think about it, it amazes me. It explains how economic growth and development through trade occurs, and also explains how countries can continue become wealthier, and help poorer countries to grow at the same time.

Even if you’ve known about comparative advantage for a while, and been previously amazed by it, I hope my naive excitement through this discovery has got you thinking about it some more.

Even a couple of years ago, most of our social activity on the Internet was done on specific websites. We went to Facebook.com to use Facebook, and Twitter.com to send tweets. It was inherently obvious when we were using a social website or feature on the Internet, because that social activity was in most cases stand-alone.

Now, “social” is just embedded into the Internet, and our devices. We can now tweet from any screen on our iPhones/iPads, and almost every large website has social sharing buttons and other features. Many people are accessing social websites more through third-party means than through the company’s actual website.

By this corollary, I’m saying that Facebook is a feature.

Just think about that for a second. When it was reported that Steve Jobs called Dropbox a feature, not a product, the Internet went up in arms. And here I am calling arguably the biggest website and hottest company in the world a feature.

But: is being a feature necessarily a bad thing?

Yes and no.

No, because by being a feature you can enable more users. In Facebook’s case, more people are inclined to use Facebook when they can access it from every device and website they’re on. It reduces the friction involved in using Facebook, and usage will increase as a result. This is why Facebook has spent so much time with the social graph trying to get the “like” button embedded into every website.

But for Facebook, it’s also a bad thing. Being a feature implies that people use Facebook through third-party providers, and the value that Facebook offers is most useful when used in conjunction with another activity. This means less ad revenue for Facebook. Less views on Facebook’s actual website is a direct loss of advertising revenue. Not a good thing for Facebook.

In my opinion this is why Facebook is trying to encourage users to do more things through Facebook’s actual website. They’re encouraging people to read news through Facebook, with the Guardian News Reader, and do everything else from playing games and listening to music through Facebook. It would seem a smart thing for Facebook to do, considering they need people to visit their website in order to gain revenue.

Facebook can’t stop people using their service more as a feature than a stand-alone product, and they benefit when people use Facebook through third-parties For this reason, I think we’ll see an effort on Facebook’s part to gain revenue through third-parties. Whether this is a Facebook version of Google Adsense, or some other method, will be interesting to see. But it seems an obvious next step for Facebook to do.

It took Kerry’s family months to find out what had happened to him. The news then changed the family forever, with Rob’s other older brother committing suicide.

It is one of the most gripping stories I’ve ever heard, partly because there was no way for me to escape from it or feel removed. The documentary is brilliantly done, Rob is a New Zealander, and he even showed up at the cinema at the end of the movie to answer questions that everyone had. I couldn’t feel as though I was so distant from Kerry and Rob’s story that I could simply escape from it or feel that it didn’t apply to me.

The documentary showed how political systems, such as the Khmer Rouge’s, affect people all around the entire world for no apparent reason. There is no logical reason why a New Zealander should be tortured in Cambodia, and there never will be answers as to why it occurred. But as Rob said after the movie finished, the story needs to be heard so that a similar system cannot happen again, and existing systems as horrible as the Khmer Rouge’s can be changed.

If everyone in the world watched this movie, the world would be a better place. I don’t think anyone could watch the movie without feeling torn apart inside, and wanting to stop anything similar from ever occurring again.

Thank you to Rob, for having the guts to tell the story in a documentary, and for showing up at the cinema and answering questions. And to everyone else, I hope you’ll actually act on my advice, and see this movie.

Here’s the trailer:

Now I’m very willing to hear people’s views on the effect new products are having on society. But to me, the viewpoint that the author of that blog showed was outrageously simple.

I completely believe that the Khan Academy is the start of a fundamental improvement in education around the world. The Khan Academy, besides letting people take lessons online, is changing many people’s mindset in regard to education. And it’s that change in mindset which is needed the most.

Previously, students have known that if they miss a lesson in class, or don’t understand a teacher, they’ll have to try and learn something just from a textbook, or take extra tutoring. A teacher was the primary gateway to being able to understand concepts. But all too often, students would get discouraged if they didn’t understand a teacher explaining a concept, and then the whole class moved onto a different topic before they could understand something. There’s nothing more frustrating as a student.

But now, students are starting to learn that they have a great teacher available to teach them anything that they want, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and every single day of the year. No matter what concept you’re stuck on in school, Salman Khan is there to explain it again, and again, and again, until you understand it. And it’s not just Salman Khan – you can find hundreds of other teachers on YouTube to teach you anything that you can possibly want.

That’s mindset shift number one that the Khan Academy is bringing about. It makes students realize that they can learn something as many times as they need to until they understand it.

But perhaps more importantly, the Khan Academy is showing people that the role of a school has entirely changed over the past few years. Schools are no longer the sources of knowledge. They are simply places where you can get help from a teacher on your homework – personalized help that Salman Khan can’t give you – as well as the place you go to do tests. (Along with sports, friends, cultural activities). That’s a huge shift. People are starting to question the value that they get out of going to school, and whether they could learn more by going to physical school less often.

The Khan Academy has got people questioning the role that schools play. And that’s been needed for a while. When students all around the world start thinking that something isn’t right, that they can learn more on the Internet than when they’re actually at school, that’s when things will start to change for the better as more people become frustrated.

A change in mindsets is, in my opinion, one of the prerequisites of a total revolution. This is why I think the author of that blog post totally missed the mark. He looked at the Khan Academy in isolation, rather than looking at the broader changes it’s causing.

The bigger, and more important part of the Khan Academy, is starting to come. That’s the ability to test yourself through Khan’s website. When people can not only learn concepts through a website, but be tested on their understanding of them through the website too, that’s when education is really going to start going through massive change.

However, I did have to give some context. Specifically, I felt as though in order to talk about the future of education, I needed to establish why things need to be improved from where they are now.

There are a multitude of reasons for why change is necessary in education, but one sticks out because it encompasses the majority of the others.

For decades (even centuries) schools succeeded because they were places where you could gain access to information that you could not find elsewhere. You had a virtually endless source of knowledge in the form of textbooks and teachers.

But now, I can access more information on my phone on the school bus than I can once I actually get to school.

That changes everything.

The cost of information has continued to decrease ever since the birth of the Internet, and will only continue to decrease as processing power of computers increases. At the same time, however, the cost of education, in a formal environment, has continued to increase, and will continue to do so.

And there’s our problem, in fundamental terms. Schools no longer offer as much to students. They can’t even offer a better way of learning, because some of the best teachers in the world teach online through YouTube for free.

The rest of my talk was around the importance of harnessing people’s creativity, and the use of different technologies going forward. I’ll write about them here in future, but wanted to set up those posts with why education needs to be improved.

I’ve also been astounded by Singapore’s growth. Less than thirty years ago, New Zealand provided aid to Singapore. Now, its GDP is over two and a half times that of New Zealand, and is growing at a much faster rate.

Recently, I’ve been trying to find out how Singapore achieved this growth and turned itself around, in the words of Lee Kuan Yew, “from third world to first”. It went from a nothing-country, with no natural resources and screwed-up politics, to an international powerhouse in a few decades. How many other countries can claim the same feat? And what aspects of Singapore’s growth could be replicated by other countries, like New Zealand?

There are huge numbers of factors that contributed to Singapore’s growth. But through reading Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs (the leader of the PAP, the leading political party that turned Singapore around) I’ve found a few key things that the growth can be attributed to. Indeed, Lee Kuan Yew himself gives them huge importance, and says that they helped to turn Singapore around.

Read these points, and consider them on their own, regardless of your pre-held views about Singapore. Whatever you think of Singaporean politics, we can all learn from and discuss these policies.

Here in New Zealand, and in most western countries, it is largely looked down upon to live in government housing. Government flats (“council houses”) are rented to people who need them, and are in most cases very run down and not in pleasant areas of cities. But it’s precisely because they are rented that they end up being run down.

In Singapore, the government builds and sells most of the apartments. It doesn’t rent them. People are allowed to purchase the apartments under certain conditions, for example by being a recently married working couple. They purchase the apartments at low cost from the government and are entitled to the capital gains from the property.

Lee Kuan Yew says that because they let people own their property, people have a vested interest in making Singapore a better place. The value of their property is tied to Singapore’s success, and therefore they want to improve Singapore. Also, they take pride in their house and wouldn’t dream of damaging it. It is because people own their houses that people care so much about Singapore, and work harder than they would otherwise.

Why don’t we pursue similar policies on a large scale?

In Singapore, politicians are regularly paid over SG$1million per year (the Singapore and NZ dollar are about 1=1). In New Zealand, and most countries around the world, we’ll scoff at this and call it ludicrous. “There are people working for $12.50 an hour and they’re earning over a million!?”. But in New Zealand, we will never have as many talented people willing to run our country with what we pay them. Many people are not altruistic, and are not willing to take huge pay cuts to work for the government.

Singapore takes the view that to get the best people leading the country, you need to pay them what they’re worth in the private sector. As a result, they’ve had incredibly competent leadership, and have seen huge success.

Think about it. Before you go up-in-arms against high pay, think about whether having the best leaders available to us is something that you want.

Singapore’s healthcare system is among best in the world. Unlike New Zealand, they don’t call it “free healthcare”. But let’s face it – healthcare isn’t free in New Zealand. You pay for it every day of your life, in higher taxes.

Instead, every worker has a compulsory health savings account that they contribute to each day they work. If they fall ill, they pay their medical bill out of this savings account, which adds up over the years. The savings account is transferable amongst family, so you can use money from the account to pay for anyone in your family’s health bills.

“But what if you run out of money in the account!?”. Then the government steps in and pays the rest for what you need. You’re not left without help when you need it, but the government doesn’t pretend that you’re getting something for free.

Because the health system runs privately, it has healthy competition, and they are forced to continue to keep the highest standards in the world and use the newest medical equipment. In this way, you could say it’s a better health system and cheaper than in New Zealand. Because it’s more efficient, people get access to it at a lower cost.

Lee Kuan Yew made it one of his first priorities in office to reduce the power of the labour unions in Singapore so that Singapore could become a true meritocracy. He found that people couldn’t hire and fire at will in too many industries, so there was mass complacency and people were very inefficient at their jobs. By reducing the power of the unions, Singapore became based on merit – and this has allowed the competitive, high-achieving, productive society that Singapore is today.

It also allowed Singaporeans to travel to top companies and universities around the world, and allowed foreigners to work and study in Singapore. No one expected anything, but knew they had to work for it – and therefore everyone worked to their full potential.

This also helped to create a strong financial centre, which is the core of Singapore’s growth (although a reduction in taxes, especially capital gains, also helped to achieve this).

Ignore your prejudices for a moment and just think about if any of this could be applied to New Zealand, or whatever country you’re from. My aim is to get a debate going. If the consensus comes out as a “no”, that none of this could realistically work in New Zealand to create growth and prosperity, then so be it. But if some of these could help to improve New Zealand, then let’s get thinking about it and doing something.

These points have come from Lee Yuan Kew’s book From Third World To First. He’s also written other memoirs, titled The Singapore Story. He is someone whom I admire hugely. It is not often that someone can say that they led a modern powerhouse from nowhere to a position of such power and wealth in a matter of decades.

After introducing me, the article quickly jumps to lengthy thoughts from Dr. Andrew Cardow, a “creativity expert” (what on earth is that?) from Massey University. He begins talking about how entrepreneurship and creativity should be “integrated into the school system”, and how he “wasn’t surprised” that I am bored with school.

This is where I need to clarify my thoughts, as I hold hardly a single similar thought to Dr. Cardow.

I do not think entrepreneurship should be taught in schools. Entrepreneurship is a process that can be encouraged, but not taught. I actually think that the more ignorant people are as they enter the business world, the better they can perform in some aspects, as they can “think outside the box”. Entrepreneurship also needs to be discovered naturally, not shoved into people’s faces in a classroom.

Schools should not try to teach entrepreneurship. What they can do, however, is simply introduce the concept to students. They can show people that there is an alternative route to being an employee for your entire life. This is a lot easier for schools to do. They do not need to take an active role in “teaching” anything, and they have no formal “outcomes” that they need to meet. They can help just by pointing people to information about entrepreneurship on the Internet, or by inviting successful entrepreneurs to speak to students once in a while.

I was also quoted saying “I see value in the education system getting people up to a certain point but we have to recognise that is not good for everyone.” This is one of the things that I strongly believe, but because of the context of this quote, what I meant was not made clear.

Everyone is most creative at a different point in their life. Some people are most creative at age 12 or 13, others past 30. But our education system says “it doesn’t matter when people are creative, because they all need education first and foremost”. I think it does matter when people are most creative. When people are bubbling with ideas and just want to focus on getting the ideas into the world, that’s a time when education will probably do more harm than good. The world needs that creativity to launch great products and ideas that improve the world, and give people joy. The world does not need another worker thinking the same as everyone else.

So education is necessary up to a point. For some people, that point will be an advanced university degree. For others, it will be after primary school. Our current education system punishes anyone who is most creative at an early point in life, by greatly increasing the risks they have to take in life in order to act on their creativity.

What we need instead is an education system that allows people to come and go at different points depending on how they want to be using their creativity or learning, and not punish them for leaving at an earlier point than others. In other words, education is important and should always be available to everyone – but it should not be tied to someone’s age or test scores. This is what I talk about in the article when I mention “individual education systems”. And creating a system like this is something I strongly believe in.

I hope that clarifies what I meant and where I’m coming from.

PS: A condition of any interview I do in future will be that I am not referred to as “whiz-kid”. That term makes me physically cringe.