The Urban Proletarian of XXI century

Charles Dickens was a fierce and devoted critic of poverty, unregulated market speculation, inefficient institutional apparatus and social stratification of English Victorian society. But Charles Dickens lived in the 19th century and now we are in the 21st century. How many things have changed?

During the last years I saw the birth of a new class of workers in the Spanish society of  21st century. Some of the characteristics of this new age of urban workers are the following:

Urban proletarians:

They are well educated young professionals, squeezed by companies and qualified as A+, 1+ or outstanding, as a way to offer a promising future in the company and make them work more hours.

They live in single rooms rented for around 400 € in the biggest industrialized cities.

The follow the same routine from monday to friday: home - job- home. There's no time for anything else.

Weekend wasters:

Saturdays is time to go to the supermarket, and Sundays is time to tide the room and have a rest.

Some weekends, they take the car and drive 200 km to see their families. On Sunday they come back.

In the nights, they drink and go out, looking at alcohol as a cheap way to turn off penalties and forget a horrible week.

Proletarians 2.0:

They have no time for friends during the week, but have more than 500 friends, contacts or follwers in social media.

They are 2.0 proletarians, they have no social life but all of them have a Tablet and a smartphone.

They don't watch TV, but follow twitter news and other RSS.

They don't go to the cinema, but watch film premieres through the internet.

Dressing code and stratification:

Stratification and clasicism through the dressing code: Blue collars and white collars.

The tie is business men's handcuff as foremen with wips were for roman slaves.

Money & Life conciliation:

No one is waiting for them at home. The sleep alone.

They don't enjoy the life, although they earn good money

The most desirable value is freetime, but companies give money instead of holidays.


Maybe you see yourself indentified with some of them. Maybe it's time to think about what's really important and change.

How to write, by David Ogilvy

I've just read Sincrono and found a curious 'how to' from David Ogilvy. You can follow the link back to read it in Spanish or keep on reading this post.

What you're going to read is an extract of a memo entitled 'How to write', written by David Ogilvy and sent to his employees on september 1982.

(Source: The Unpublished David Ogilvy: A Selection of His Writings from the Files of His Partners; Image: David Ogilvy, via Ogilvy & Mather.)

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing*. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning—and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don't write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David

World's exponential growth

Probably the most interesting video I've seen this month and by far this week is just about the arithmetic of Ln2.
I know it sounds a little bit boring, but maths, applied with common sense and in the right way changes a simple figure into reliable data and predictions to the future.

The correct use of Ln2 provides the user the ability to predict when a figure is going to double if it grows with a constant rate, let's say e.g. 5% per year.

The arithmetic is very simple: nº years = (Ln2)/(5%) = (100*Ln2)/5 = 14 years

You can do the arithmetic in your mind easily due to 100*Ln2 = 70. Also 70/5 = 14

That means that a figure that grows 5% per year would double in 14 years.
If the growth is 7% a year, it would double in 10 years. (nº = 70/7 = 10)
If the growth rate is 10% it would double in 7 years and so on.

So, why is this so important? Let's see what's going to happen in the World in the next years.

GDP Growth rate

China and India's GDP grow at a rate of 10% per year and Brazil's GDP at a rate of 7.5%. Germany's GDP growth rate just at a rate of 3.5%.
That means, and figures and arithmetic don't lie, that China and India will double their GDP, and therefore the market value of all final goods and services produced in that countries, just in 7 years: 2019!
Brazil in 10 years: 2022! And Germany, which growth rate is the biggest in EU, at a constant rate of growth, will double in 20 years: 2032.

Population Growth rate

That's another important figure for The Earth's future. In the 80's the World growth rate was 1.9% per year (we were 5,000 million people in the World). Now we are 7,000 million people (40% more just in 25 years) and our growth rate is 1.1% per year. That means that aproximately in 2080 we'll be 14,000 million people. I know that's imposible cause there aren't enough resources for everyone so something is going to happen before 2080.



Maybe it's the WWIII, maybe is just an illness like the Black Death or the Great Famine (killing more than 300 million people in 14th century).

Fortunatly, the biggest and advanced countries in the world are reducing their birth rate and converging to small families with 1 to 2 children per woman, which will ensure the equilibrium between people and resources.

Unfortunatly, there are still some countries with more than 2 children per woman (which are experimenting the highest population and growth rates), and that tradicionally had health problems and high mortality but now, due to health care systems and medicines, the mortality rate is improving sometimes faster than we're changing those people minds about having small families.



Ahmadineyad stick his finger in our eyes (again)

Yesterday, Iran's president Mahmud Ahmadineyad jeopardized world's economy by spreading the rumour of reducing Iran's fuel exports. Although the rumour was finally not true (just included a few more clauses like not to use force majeure is case of contract termination), the government of Iran shows its claws again and make the energy problem a headline in today's news.

Can we support a world based on fuel when fuel is held by those countries?

Shall we hurry up to change into green energies?

What's going to happen when the new Arab Spring runs to South Middle East and the Arab countries: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, ...?

Hopefully, Saudi Arabia's king Abdullah Al Saud is still young (just 87 years old) and his son Mutaib Al Saud (59 years old) ensure the continuity of Arab-Western relations for a long time. =)

The times they are a changin'

Don't know why, but cannot keep out of mind Bob Dylan's song The times they are a changin' . Maybe that's because we're living a new age of changes: Arab Spring, China's world leadership, end of the capitalism as we know it, ...  "Not a age of changes but a change of age" as Juan Carlos Cubeiro says in his blog: Hablemos de Talento (Let's talk about Talent, only in Spanish).

Enjoy the song.

And here I go again...

And here I go again, preparing my next trip to Spain. Hopefully, with a better professional horizon than when I left. But, who knows?

Nerver surrender, never retreat. Just keep walking, keep moving forward. 

Be Happy. Be Audacious

Two days ago, I was in the train from Cologne to Hannover and I read the following words in the HBR magazine:

Now is the time for audacity, not austerity.

It's curious to read these words from a HBR editor, but Scott Berinato pointed out the key point for those who watch these days the news: Should Europe focus more on promoting innovation and employment or keep on with deficit's corrective measures?

I know it's a difficult question but making the wrong decision could change the future of the European Union as a whole, and therefore, the future of those who live under the 12 golden stars' flag.
What's going to happen? What are Europe's goals for the next few months? And for the next 5 years?

Looks like we cannot link our professional future to those decisions related to european and national policies, so what can we do?
"Be Happy. Be Audacious" are the words from Adi Ignatious, HBR's Editor in Chief. (HBR, Jan-Feb 2012), and probably reflects perfectly the philosophy of this Blog.
I'm not sure if "audacious" is the right word but under the economical perspectives of these times we're living, we should look back and read the Eneida, from Virgilius (70 b.C - 19 a.C), and its wonderful statement:

Audentes fortuna iuvat. (Fortune favours the bold) 

Good luck!

Spain's Cultural problem

One of the biggest problems of Spanish economy is employees' mediocre mindset.

Against the thought of some experts, the problem isn't just the Crisis, in which I include all the 'small' crisis we have at the same time: real state crisis, the public debt crisis, the financial crisis or the labour market crisis, but people's behaviour under some extreme circumstances.

Since 35 years ago, Spain's been a modern and democratic country, where all the society moved to become equal in rights and duties. But for the past few years, Spain has lost the spirit to improve and learn. From school to the job market, through high school and university, Spanish people join the mass, feeling safe in the knowledge that behaving like the others, you become part of them and noone is better than other. We've been waving the flag of democracy and equity, but forgeting that being equal is not a result, but a starting point to grow and become better and why not, set differences between people.
Now is time to change our minds and support these young people with willingness to improve and learn, instead of laughing at them if they try to speak better english or get better marks in maths. 'Nerds' are not anymore 'Nerds'. They are well educated people with knowledge and capacity to be better day by day. 'Nerds' are the future and present of a society that has been for too much time leaving them out.

Fight Always for what you want - Even under water

Source: google.com via Chris on Pinterest

History of world's GDP

Interesting graph published by The Economist.

It shows the percentage of all the goods and services (what economists' call GDP) produced in history that was produced in each of the 21 centuries.

Interesting to note that 55% of history's GDP was produced in the XXth century. But perhaps more interestingly, 23% of the goods and services produced through history were produced during the LAST 10 YEARS!!!

Finally, it is also interesting that 28% of the person-years lived through history were lived in the XXth century (reflecting both the increase in population and the increase in life expectancy) and only 6% of years lived were lived in the last 10 years. Of course the implication is that the income earned by the average person has increased exponentially. Another example that our economic system is not as bad as many want us to believe!



Text directly quoted from: Xavier Sala i Martin, http://salaimartin.com/random-thoughts/item/205-history-of-worlds-gdp.html