Tag: éducation

Des merveilles pour distinguer l’important du futile

Je commence cette mise à jour par le compte rendu d’une situation à la frontière de ma vie privée et professionnelle. Je veux la soumettre à une analyse aussi rigoureuse que possible, puisque c’est du bon matériel éducatif, surtout pour mon cours de gestion. Voilà la description des faits. Il y a six semaines, j’avais rencontré un vieil ami d’école à une réception d’anniversaire d’un autre ami d’école. Il m’avait demandé si je pourrais préparer un business plan pour son entreprise de recyclage. Plus précisément, il s’agissais d’un business plan pour accompagner une demande d’emprunt plutôt substantiel, quelques 4 millions d’euros. J’avais dit « Oui, bien sûr » tout en étant bien sûr que la conversation n’aura pas de suivi sérieux dans l’univers extra-réceptionnel, bien sûr.

La semaine dernière, néanmoins, ce vieil ami d’école m’a appelé pour donner ce suivi hautement improbable. On a eu un rendez-vous d’affaires, avec lui et son associé, vendredi dernier, le 27 Juillet. Depuis cette réception d’anniversaire, le projet avait gonflé. Il ne s’agissait plus du business plan pour accompagner une demande d’emprunt : maintenant (enfin, vendredi dernier) il s’agissait de toute une stratégie à préparer, dont la relocation des installations industrielles de l’entreprise des deux emplacements courants vers un troisième emplacement en train d’aménagement. J’avais été demandé aussi d’agir comme conseiller dans un dialogue difficile avec les autorités locales en ce qui concerne l’aménagement du terrain industriel qu’ils viennent d’acquérir. Le business plan instrumental et modeste avait évolué en une forme de vie économique presque autonome. Un phénomène tout à fait normal après des réceptions réussies.

Mes interlocuteurs m’avaient demandé quel serait mon honoraire. J’avais répondu qu’il me faut un peu de temps pour arranger tous ces faits nouveaux dans ma tête – ce qui était 100% vrai –  et que j’annoncerai mon honoraire par email ou bien, au plus tard, à l’entretien suivant prévu pour le 31 Juillet. Ce second entretien était supposé être une session de travail, où mes clients m’auraient montré leurs installations industrielles présentes et m’auraient présenté au directeur de la banque locale coopérative avec laquelle ils avaient déjà commencé de négocier le crédit en question.

On avait le rendez-vous prochain prévu pour le 31 Juillet. Pendant le weekend 28-29 Juillet j’ai fait un peu de recherche sur le secteur de recyclage du plastique ainsi que du recyclage en général. Je me suis fait une idée de l’accessibilité d’informations et sur les prix de rapports sectoriels offerts par les sociétés de conseil. J’ai préparé un contrat pour ce boulot et le 30 Juillet, dans la matinée, je l’ai envoyé par email à mon ami ainsi qu’à son associé. J’avais fixé mon honoraire à 0,18% de la valeur d’emprunt que ces gars-là envisageaient, dont 0,06% comme rémunération fixe et 0,12% comme « success fee » payable après la signature du contrat avec la banque. Trois heures après l’email, l’ami m’appelle : « Tu sais, on a vu ce contrat et on renonce. Tu es trop cher pour nous. On annule ». Bon, pas de problème. J’ai terminé la conversation d’une façon amicale.

Voici les faits. Maintenant, l’analyse scientifique rigoureuse. Question no. 1 : Quelle est la catégorie générale pour laquelle cette situation est représentative ? Ici, je fais une démarche des plus fondamentale. Ça s’appelle : abstraction et généralisation. Pour étudier quel phénomène que ce soit de manière scientifique, j’ai besoin de le comparer avec d’autres phénomènes qui au moins semblent similaires. C’est une grosse différence entre l’approche scientifique et l’approche dramatique, la distinction au sujet de laquelle vous pouvez lire plus en étudiant la philosophie herméneutique ou bien la phénoménologie.

Pour établir le lien entre un phénomène particulier et une catégorie générale, le truc utile qui marche vraiment bien consiste à séquencer la situation, donc à la représenter comme une séquence plutôt qu’un évènement singulier. La séquence d’évènements, dans ce cas, comme je viens de les raconter, semble significative à partir de cet entretien vendredi 27 Juillet et je pense que je peux la représenter comme ceci :

Séquence de base (ce qui s’est réellement passé) :

Évènement A (commun) : Entretien => Évènement B (l’autre partie, mon pote) : demande de fixer mon honoraire => Évènement C (moi) : déclin de fixer l’honoraire, demande de temps pour réfléchir => Évènement D (moi) : recherche préliminaire, préparation du contrat => Évènement E (moi) : envoi du contrat par email => Évènement F (l’autre partie, mon pote) : contact téléphonique, annonce du retrait  

Maintenant, question technique : est-ce qu’il y a dans cette séquence des fragments qui pourraient se dérouler d’une façon différente ? Je considère l’entretien initial comme donné. Rien à modifier à l’évènement A et B. J’aurais pu fixer mon honoraire intuitivement dès le premier entretien, comme mon pote et son associé m’ont initialement demandé. J’aurais donc pu modifier l’évènement C. Comment ceci aurait modifié le reste de la séquence, donc quelles séquences alternatives auraient pu avoir lieu ? Je peux formuler cinq alternatives, spécifiées ci-dessous :

Séquence alternative « 1 »

{Évènement A (commun) : Entretien => Évènement B (l’autre partie, mon pote) : demande de fixer mon honoraire} => Évènement C (moi) : je propose un honoraire sur le champ => Évènement D (l’autre partie, mon pote) : l’honoraire est accepté et le projet commence => Évènement E (moi) : recherche préliminaire => Évènement F (commun) : l’entretien de travail le 31 Juillet  

Séquence alternative « 2 »

{Évènement A (commun) : Entretien => Évènement B (l’autre partie, mon pote) : demande de fixer mon honoraire} => Évènement C (moi) : je propose un honoraire sur le champ => Évènement D (l’autre partie, mon pote) : l’honoraire est rejeté et on arrête tout

Séquence alternative « 3 »

{Évènement A (commun) : Entretien => Évènement B (l’autre partie, mon pote) : demande de fixer mon honoraire} => Évènement C (moi) : déclin de fixer l’honoraire, demande de temps pour réfléchir => Évènement D (moi) : recherche préliminaire, préparation du contrat => Évènement E (moi) : envoi du contrat par email => Évènement F (l’autre partie, mon pote) : honoraire accepté, on commence le projet, l’entretien de travail le 31 Juillet 

Séquence alternative « 4 »

{Évènement A (commun) : Entretien => Évènement B (l’autre partie, mon pote) : demande de fixer mon honoraire} => Évènement C (moi) : déclin de fixer l’honoraire, demande de temps pour réfléchir => Évènement D (moi) : recherche préliminaire, préparation du contrat => Évènement E (commun) : l’entretien de travail le 31 Juillet, présentation du contrat => Évènement F (l’autre partie, mon pote) : honoraire rejeté, on arrête tout  

Séquence alternative « 5 »

{Évènement A (commun) : Entretien => Évènement B (l’autre partie, mon pote) : demande de fixer mon honoraire} => Évènement C (moi) : déclin de fixer l’honoraire, demande de temps pour réfléchir => Évènement D (moi) : recherche préliminaire, préparation du contrat => Évènement E (commun) : l’entretien de travail le 31 Juillet, présentation du contrat => Évènement F (l’autre partie, mon pote) : honoraire accepté, on commence le projet, l’entretien de travail le 31 Juillet

 

L’analyse séquentielle indique une direction à suivre en ce qui concerne ce truc d’abstraction et de généralisation. En premier lieu, c’est une situation de négociation complexe entre un prestataire des services et un client potentiel. Je peux placer cette catégorie générale en des contextes différents. Le contexte le plus immédiat sont des situations où un chercheur académique comme moi reçoit une proposition préliminaire de travailler avec une entreprise, comme conseiller. Le contexte un peu plus large est fait de toutes les situations où un individu négocie avec une organisation sa coopération ponctuelle, à temps fixe et limité, sur un projet. Un contexte encore plus large est composé de tous les cas de négociation préalable à la prestation d’un service ou la fourniture d’un produit.

En termes éducatifs, je peux appliquer cette situation, ainsi que la façon de l’étudier, à la gestion des projets, au marketing et à la gestion des relations clients et enfin à la gestion des relations sociales en général. Le plat à emporter, jusqu’à maintenant, dans cette étude de cas, est le séquencement comme outil analytique de base. Comme mon grand compatriote, Alfred Comte Korzybski, aimait le dire, tout ce qui se passe se passe en séquence.

Maintenant, je pose la seconde grande question : quelles sont les conséquences possibles de cette situation ? Change-t-elle ma vie de façon significative ? Vous avez le terrain partiellement dégagé sur celle-là : séquencez. Lorsque nous parlons des conséquences d’un évènement, il y a deux séquences alternatives de base : celle qui inclue cet évènement, contre celle où cet évènement est absent. Ces deux sentiers essentiels se décomposent en des sous-sentiers détaillés, comme cette situation précise pourrait être présenté dans ma vie de plusieurs façons différentes ainsi que son absence pourrait prendre plusieurs formes distinctes.

Voilà qu’une autre méthode analytique trotte sur ce terrain partiellement nettoyé par l’application d’analyse séquentielle : l’analyse praxéologique. Cette fois, je me concentre sur l’expression « de façon significative » dans la formulation de la question. Je définis mes objectifs et le sentier le plus rationnel de les atteindre et sur ce fond, je dessine cette situation précise. La question technique est : « Dans quelle mesure cette situation influence mes objectifs à long terme ou bien mon sentier vers leur achèvement ? ». Le schéma analytique que j’aime appliquer dans des cas comme celui-ci est la liste des questions classique de la Programmation Neurolinguistique :

  • Qu’est-ce que je veux achever ou atteindre dans 10 ans à partir d’aujourd’hui ?
  • Comment saurais-je que j’ai achevé ou atteint ce que je veux ? Puis-je mesurer l’achèvement de ce que je veux ? Si oui, comment ?
  • Comment les autres sauront-ils que j’ai achevé ou atteint ce que je veux ? Puissent les autres mesurer l’achèvement de ce que je veux ? Si oui, comment ?
  • En résumé de (1) – (3), comment puis-je décrire, avec détail, la situation que je veux avoir dans 10 ans à partir d’aujourd’hui ?
  • Quels obstacles peuvent apparaître sur mon chemin ? Si tous ces obstacles surviennent de façon concurrente, quel scénario alternatif et négatif peut se produire ? Maintenant, si j’enlève ces obstacles un par un de mon chemin futur, quels seraient les scénarios intermédiaires ?
  • Que puis-je faire systématiquement, tous les jours, pour achever ce que je veux ? Quelles protections dois-je prendre contre les risques énumérés dans (5) ? Quels points de contrôle (objectifs intermédiaires) je ferais bien de me fixer ?

Vous avez pu remarquer que cette liste est applicable à plusieurs cas différents. Vous pouvez l’utiliser pour une stratégie personnelle, mais vous pouvez aussi bien en faire une mutation pour la stratégie d’une organisation. En ce qui concerne mes propres plans, j’en donne un résumé concis et simple. Je vois deux moments importants dans ma vie : ce qui se passe ici et maintenant ainsi que ce qui restera de mes actions après ma mort et que je laisserai comme mon héritage. Ça, ce sont des trucs importants. Tout le reste, c’est du paysage. Les trucs importants, j’y engage mon cœur et mon intellect, tous les jours. Le paysage, je le contemple, je l’admire, mais je ne m’en fais que de façon instrumentale. Je sais que ce que je fais bien c’est la recherche, l’éducation et le support quotidien que je donne à certains de mes proches. Certains, pas tous, car j’ai appris que ce support est de l’énergie, cette énergie est limitée et elle vaut la peine d’être dépensée uniquement dans certaines relations humaines.

Je peux prédire avec une dose raisonnable de probabilité ce que j’achèverai si je fais ces choses tous les jours. Maintenant, je passe à la question suivante : dans toute cette situation avec mon ami, sa proposition de coopération et mon approche personnelle, ai-je fait une erreur ? C’est une question presque automatique lorsqu’on perd une occasion. Si oui, en quoi mon erreur consistait-elle ?

Pour aborder cet aspect, j’introduis encore une autre méthode d’analyse des évènements : l’approche éthique. Dans son essence, l’éthique consiste à attribuer une valeur à chacune de nos actions ainsi qu’à hiérarchiser ces actions selon ladite valeur. L’analyse éthique telle que je la pratique est fortement teintée de praxéologie. J’assume que j’ai une énergie personnelle limitée à dépenser et que je me dois de la concentrer sur les actions les plus valeureuses.

Mon analyse éthique commence avec la question toute simple : « Est-ce que toute cette situation a produit un résultat de valeur quelconque ? ». De mon point de vue, la structure du contrat que j’ai préparé est une valeur. J’ai dû réfléchir vraiment à fond sur mon rôle, en tant que consultant, dans une situation comme celle-ci, lorsqu’un entrepreneur me demande de préparer un business plan qui, à son tour, est supposé de servir pour mettre une sorte d’ordre général dans une entreprise en pleine ébullition. Ce contrat, il implique une certaine démarche et une philosophie d’action, où la mesure-clé dudit l’ordre est la capacité de l’entreprise de maintenir un flux non-négatif de trésorerie, donc de maintenir une liquidité financière essentielle.

Cette liquidité veut dire que si elle est bien solide, le taux d’intérêt sur un gros emprunt comme c’était le cas ici, dans les 4 millions d’euros, peut osciller dans les 3,5% par an. En revanche, si pour des raisons variées ce flux de trésorerie vacille et devient négatif, l’emprunt passe dans une catégorie de risque plus élevé. Le taux d’intérêt grimpe alors aux environs de 5% ÷ 6%. La différence entre les deux est donc de 1,5% – 2,5% du capital emprunté par an. Avec un emprunt sur 10 ans, ça monte à quelques 15% ÷ 25% du capital emprunté. Voilà ce que je voudrais épargner à mon client si je prépare un business plan pour un projet d’investissement industriel important.

Maintenant, une chose importante : est-ce un échec de ma part de ne pas avoir eu ce contrat ? Honnêtement, je n’arrête pas de me le demander. D’une part, oui, bien sûr. Il vaudrait mieux d’avoir ce contrat que ne pas l’avoir, c’est évident. D’autre part, lorsque je calcule la proportion arithmétique entre l’honoraire que je voulais et les conséquences financières possibles de quel facteur de risque que ce soit, dans cette entreprise particulière, mon pognon il a l’ai ridiculement insignifiant. Je pense donc que lorsque mon pote m’a dit que j’étais trop cher pour eux, cela voulait dire, en fait, que la lecture calme du contrat leur a fait prendre conscience, à mon ami et à son associé, que soit ce n’est pas du tout un consultant dont ils ont besoin soit que ma philosophie dans ce projet n’était pas du tout la leur. Dans les deux cas, ils ont bien fait de l’annoncer dès le début, cartes sur table. C’était honnête et raisonnable.

Voilà donc que je viens d’utiliser une situation de ma propre vie pour tester l’approche pédagogique que je voudrais développer dans mes cours. Pas no. 1, comprendre ce qui se passe. La compréhension vient plus facilement lorsqu’on décompose les évènements comme des séquences. Pas no. 2, placer ce qui se passe dans un contexte plus large et ce contexte plus large, il est principalement fait de nos objectifs et des structures de notre action. L’analyse praxéologique fait des merveilles pour distinguer l’important du futile, ici. Pas no. 3, donner une dimension éthique à la situation et comprendre les valeurs en jeu. Pas mal comme méthode d’enseignement. Ça a de l’élan et de la profondeur.

Je continue à vous fournir de la bonne science, presque neuve, juste un peu cabossée dans le processus de conception. Je vous rappelle que vous pouvez télécharger le business plan du projet BeFund (aussi accessible en version anglaise). Vous pouvez aussi télécharger mon livre intitulé “Capitalism and Political Power”. Je veux utiliser le financement participatif pour me donner une assise financière dans cet effort. Vous pouvez soutenir financièrement ma recherche, selon votre meilleur jugement, à travers mon compte PayPal. Vous pouvez aussi vous enregistrer comme mon patron sur mon compte Patreon . Si vous en faites ainsi, je vous serai reconnaissant pour m’indiquer deux trucs importants : quel genre de récompense attendez-vous en échange du patronage et quelles étapes souhaitiez-vous voir dans mon travail ?

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My own zone of proximal development

 

Let’s face it: I am freestyling intellectually. I have those syllabuses to prepare for the next academic year, and so I decided to let my brain crystallize a little bit, subconsciously, without being disturbed, around the business plan for the EneFin concept. Crystallization occurs subconsciously, and I can do plenty of other thinking in the meantime, and so I started doing that other thinking, and I am skating happily on the thin ice of fundamental questions concerning my mission as a scientist and a teacher. The ice those questions make is really thin, and if it cracks under my weight, I will dive into the cold depth of imperative necessity for answers.

You probably know that saying about economics, one of my fundamental disciplines, besides law, namely that economics are the art of making forecasts which do not hold. Nasty, but largely true. I want to devise a method of teaching social sciences, and possibly a contingent method of research, which can be directly useful to the individual, without said individual having to become the president of something big in order to find real utility in social sciences.

I am starting to form that central principle of my teaching and research: social sciences can be used and developed similarly to geography, i.e. they can be used to find one’s bearings in a complex environment, to trace a route towards valuable and attainable goals, and to plan for a realistic pace as for covering this route. Kind of a fundamental thought comes to me, from the realm of hermeneutic philosophy , which I am really fond of, and the thought goes as follows: whatever kind of story I am telling, at the bottom line I am telling the story of my own existence. Question (I mean, a real question, which I am asking right now, not some fake, rhetorical stuff): this view of social sciences, as a quasi-cartographic pathway towards orienting oneself in the social context, is it the story of my own existence? Answer: hell, yes. As I look back at my adult life, it is indeed a long story of wandering, and I perceive a substantial part of that wandering as having been pretty pointless. I could have done much of the same faster, simpler, and with more ethical value achieved on the way. Mind you, here, I am largely sailing the uncharted waters of ‘what could have happened if’. Anyway, what happened, stays happened.

OK, this is the what. Now, I want to phrase out the how. Teaching means essentially two things. Firstly, the student gets to know the skills he or she should master. In educational language it is described as the phase of conscious incompetence: the student gets to know what they don’t know and should develop a skill in. Secondly, teaching should lead them through at least a portion of the path from that conscious incompetence to conscious competence, i.e. to the phase of actually having developed those skills they became aware of in the phase of conscious incompetence.

Logically, I assume there is a set of skills that a person – especially a young one – needs to find and pursue their personal route through the expanse of social structure, once they have been dropped, by the helicopter of adolescence and early adulthood, in some remote spot of said structure. My mission is to use social sciences in order to show them the type of skill they’d better develop, and, possibly, to train them at those skills.

My strictly personal experience of learning is strongly derived from the practice of sport, and there is a piece of wisdom that anyone can have as their takeaway from athletic training: it is called ‘mesocycle’. A mesocycle of training is a period of about 3 months, which is the minimum time our body needs to develop a complex and durable response to training. In any type of learning, a mesocycle can be observed. It is the interval of time that our nervous system needs to get all the core processes, involved in a given pattern of behaviour being under development, well aligned and acceptably optimized.

My academic teaching is structured into semesters. In the curriculum of each particular subject, the realistic cycle of my interaction with students is like 4 months, which gives room to one full mesocycle of training, from conscious incompetence towards conscious competence, plus a little extra time for outlining that conscious incompetence. Logically, I need to structure my teaching into 25% of developing the awareness of skills to form, and 75% of training in those skills.

One of the first syllabuses I am supposed to prepare for the next academic year is ‘Introduction to Management’ for the undergraduate major of film and TV production. It is part of those students’ curriculum for the first year, when, essentially, every subject is an introduction to something. I follow the logic I have just outlined. First of all, what is the initial point of social start, in the world of film and TV production? Someone joins a project, most frequently: the production of a movie, an advertising campaign, the creation of a You Tube channel etc. The route to follow from there? The challenge consists in demonstrably proving one’s value in that project in order to be selected for further projects, rather than maxing out on the profits from this single venture. The next level consists in passing from projects to organisation, i.e. in joining or creating a relatively stable organisation, combining networks and hierarchies, which, in turn, can allow the sprouting of new projects.

Such a path of social movement involves skills centred around the following core episodes: a) quickly and efficiently finding one’s place in a project typical for the world of film and TV production b) starting and managing new projects c) finding one’s place in networks and hierarchies typical for film and TV production and d) possibly developing such an organisation.

Such defined, the introduction to management involves the ability to define social roles and social values, peculiar to the given project and/or organisation, as well as elementary skills in teamwork. As I think of it, the most essential competences in dealing with adversity, like getting one’s s**t together under pressure and forming a realistic plan B, could be helpful.

Good. Roles and values in a project of film and TV production. What comes to my mind in the first place, as I am thinking of it, is once again the teaching of Hans Georg Gadamer, the heavyweight champion of hermeneutic philosophy: historically, art at its best has been a fully commercial enterprise, based on business rules. Concepts such as ‘art for the sake of art’ or ‘pure art’ are relatively new – they emerged by the end of the 19th century – and they are the by-product of another emergence, that of the so-called leisure class, made of people rich enough to afford not to worry about their daily subsistence, and, in the same time, not seriously involved into killing someone in order to stay this way.

One of the first social patterns to teach my students regarding the values of film and TV production is something which, fault of a better word, I call ‘economic base’. It is a value, in this business, to have a relatively predictable stream of income, which is enough for keeping people working on creative projects. The understanding I want my students to form, thus, is precisely this economic base. How much do I need to earn, and how, if I want to keep working on that YT channel long enough for turning it into a business? What kind of job can I do whilst running such a project? How much capital do I need to raise in order to make 50 people work on a movie for 6 months? I think that studying the cases of real businesses in the film and TV production, and building simple business plans on the grounds of those cases can be a good, skill-forming practice.

Once this value identified, it is important to understand how people are most likely to behave whilst striving to achieve it. In other words, it is about the fundamentals of social competition and cooperation. A simple version of the theory of games seems the most workable, in terms of teaching tools.

The economic base for creative work makes one important value, still not the only one. Creation itself is another one. Managing creative teams is tricky. You have a bunch of strong personalities, and you want them to stay this way, and yet you want them to reach some kind of compromise. I think that simple role playing in class, paired with collective projects (i.e. projects carried out by teams of students) can be instructive.

I am summing up. I am a big fan of long-term tasks as educational tools. Preparing a simple business plan, specific to this precise industry (i.e. film and TV production), paired with training in teamwork, should do the job. Now, the easy path is just to tell students ‘Listen, guys! You have those projects to complete until the end of the semester. Just get on with it. We will be having those strange gatherings called “lectures”, but you don’t have to pay too much attention to it. Just have those projects done’. I have already experimented with this approach, and my conclusion is that it generally allows those clever ones to prove they are clever, but not much more. It is a pity to watch those less clever students struggling with a task they have to carry out over the length of one semester.

I want to devise come kind of path in my students’ zone of proximal development : a series of measured, feasible lessons, leading to tangible improvement. Each lesson covers 6 steps: i) define the project to carry out, as well as its goals and constraints, make a plan, make a team, and make them work on the thing ii) purposefully lead to a crisis iii) draw conclusions from the crisis iv) define the improvement needed v) carry out the improvement and vi) check the results.

As I see my usual schedule over one semester, I can arrange like 5 such sequences of 6 steps, thus 5 big lessons. Now, I am thinking about the kind of core task to carry out in each lesson, so as the task is both representative for film and TV production, and feasible in class. Pitching the concept of a movie is a must, and the concept of a YT platform seems to be a sensible idea as well. I have two types of business concepts, and I feel like repeating each of them twice. That gives 4 sequences of training, and leaves one more in reserve. That one more could be, for example, a content store, in the lines of the early Netflix.

Good. One thing to tick off. As I am having a look at it, the same pattern can be transferred, almost as it is, into the curriculum of Principles of Management, which I teach to the 1st year undergraduates in the major of International Relations. In this particular case, the same path is applicable, just the factual scope needs a bit of broadening. Each of those complex, sequenced lessons should be focused on a different type of business. Typical industrial, for one, something in the IT sector, for two, then something really scientific, like biotech, followed by typical service business, and finally something financial.

Now, I jump. It happens all the time in my mind. Something in those synaptic connexions of mine makes them bored with one topic, and willing to embrace the diversity of being. I am asking myself what I can possibly teach to my students, in terms of finding one’s way across the social jungle, on the grounds of the economic theory which either I fully embrace or I have developed by myself. Here come a few ideas.

‘However inventive and original you think you are, you are as inventive and original as quite a bunch of other people’. This one comes mostly from my reading of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction and neighbourhood of equilibrium. How can it be useful? If you want to do something important, like starting a business or a social action, going for a job connected to expatriation etc.? Well, look for patterns in what other people do. Someone is bound to have the kind of experience you can learn from.

This is deeper than some people could think. As I work with my students on the general issue of business planning, this particular approach proves really useful. There are many instances of complex business planning – the ‘what if?’ sequences, for example – when emulating some existing businesses is the only sensible approach.

The next one spells: ‘Recurrent bargaining leads to figuring out sensible, workable compromises that minimize waste and that nobody is quite satisfied with’. This principle refers to the theoretical concept of local Marshallian equilibrium, but it is also strongly connected to the theory of games. Frequently, you have the impression of being forced into some kind of local custom or ritual, like the average wage you can expect for a given job, or the average rent you have to pay for your apartment, or the habitual way of settling a dispute. It chafes, and it hurts what you perceive as your own originality, but people around you are strangely attached to this particular way of doing things. This is a local equilibrium.

If you want to understand a given local equilibrium, try and figure out the way this equilibrium is being achieved. Who? What? When? How? Under what conditions does the process work, and in which cases it doesn’t? In other words, if you want to figure out the way to influence and change those uncomfortable rituals around you, you need to find a way of making people bargain and get a compromise around a new ritual.

Comes my own research, now, and the fundamental principles of social path-finding I can phrase out of that research. I begin with stating that population matters, in the most numerical sense. The rate of demographic growth, together with the rate of migration, are probably the most powerful social changes we can imagine. Whatever those changing populations do, they adapt to the available supply of food and energy. At the individual level, people express that adaptation by maximizing their personal intake of energy, within socially accepted boundaries, by maintaining a certain portfolio of technologies. Social structures we live in act as regulators of the technological repertoire we have access to, and they change as this repertoire changes.

Practical implications? You want to experience creative social change, with a lot of new types of jobs emerging every year, and a lot of new products? You need a society with vivid demographic growth and a lot of migration going in and/or out. You want security, stability and predictability? You want people around you to be always calm and nice to each other? Then you need a society with slow or null demographic growth, not much of a migration, and plenty of food and energy to tap into. You want to have both, i.e. plenty of creative change, and people being always nice? Sorry, pal, not with this genotype. It just wouldn’t work with humans.

I am consistently delivering good, almost new science to my readers, and love doing it, and I am working on crowdfunding this activity of mine. As we talk business plans, I remind you that you can download, from the library of my blog, the business plan I prepared for my semi-scientific project Befund  (and you can access the French version as well). You can also get a free e-copy of my book ‘Capitalism and Political Power’ You can support my research by donating directly, any amount you consider appropriate, to my PayPal account. You can also consider going to my Patreon page and become my patron. If you decide so, I will be grateful for suggesting me two things that Patreon suggests me to suggest you. Firstly, what kind of reward would you expect in exchange of supporting me? Secondly, what kind of phases would you like to see in the development of my research, and of the corresponding educational tools?

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Making my brain dance to a slightly different tune

 

I have those many different things running in parallel. I believe it is called ‘living’. I am trying to handle that complexity without inventing special metaphysics for that occasion, like ‘It is pointless to do X, I should entirely focus on Y and Z’. Over that half of a century that I have been in this world, I have come to appreciate the fact that my individual existence is truly a complex singularity. What is pointless is the denial of that fact.

Anyway, I keep nailing down two things: my business plan for the EneFin project, and my teaching programmes. As for the business plan, I made a big step forward in putting all its pieces together in my last update in French, namely « Deux cerveaux, légèrement différents l’un de l’autre ». Now, I am going to do something I like doing, i.e. reading backwards. A few years ago, I found out that reading backwards any text is really informative. You probably know that postulate of transformative grammar that each statement in language has at least two layers of meaning: the deep structure, which contains a lot of information, and which we almost never use in current communication, and the superficial structure, which we use in the verbal expression properly spoken, and which is a contracted and generalised version of the corresponding deep structure.

I found out that when I read a text backwards word by word, which goes like ‘like goes which word by word backwards text a read I when that out found I’, and the text is really complex, that inverted reading sort of peels off layers of meaning and allows to get more information out of that piece. I am going to do the same, just idea by idea, and not really word by word, with that summary of business plan that I introduced in « Deux cerveaux, légèrement différents l’un de l’autre ».

So, the last idea, put in the first place, is that in the market of FinTech utilities, supposed to facilitate the development of new businesses, three pricing strategies are available. Strategy #1 is that of relatively high commission levied on each transaction done at the corresponding FinTech platform, and that relatively high price would be around 5% of the value being transacted. Strategy #2 goes the completely opposite way and sets the transactional fee at a level comparable to that applied by typical brokerage houses in the stock market, like 0,4% ÷ 0,7%. Strategy #3 tries to go sort of the middle way and sets the transactional fee at a rate similar to that charged on a typical bank loan for SME (Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises), which is currently around 1,6% if you know the right bank for you.

There is a catch in this strategic choice. There is a general assumption regarding the connection between financial markets and real business: the latter has a definite need for capital, based on the value of the current output, and on the parameters of the Cobb-Douglas production function. In this specific case, it is the aggregate need for capital from the part of small, local investment projects in the field of renewable energies, in Europe. Those guys need a definite amount of capital, let’s call it K, conformingly to the tradition of economic sciences. That stream of capital generates a stream of financial fees on giving that capital a lift on its journey, and that stream of financial fees is the market, where FinTechs dwell.

Strategy #1 defines a market worth 5%*K, Strategy #2 drives it down to (0,4% ÷ 0,7%)*K, and Strategy #3 settles for 1,6%*K. You understand? For each strategy, I assume that my EneFin project would be one among many to use it and thus each strategy would define a financial market. If the majority of players goes for Strategy #2, the really aggressive, low-price one, any FinTech business with higher fees, like in Strategy #1 or #3, would almost automatically face a glass ceiling. On the other hand, if the first FinTech settlers in that market go for Strategy #1, at 5%, it leaves to the others a whole range of possibilities. The choice between those three strategies is not only numerical. It is a choice between various levels of aggressive competition, too.

Whatever the final choice, the reverted reading of my own ideas has proven fruitful. I found a hole, to stuff up with information. How much capital do new projects in renewable energies really need, in Europe, at the aggregate level? I start that estimation with the data I have, and then I will do some rummaging online. I will use the theoretical construct known as LCOE, or ‘Levellized Cost Of Energy’. With It being the capital invested in period t, and Mt standing for the cost of maintenance in period t, accompanied by the cost of fuel Ft in period t, the real output of energy Et allows calculating LCOE with the formula below:

LCOE

With renewables, fuel is for free, hence Ft = 0. The capital that suppliers of energy need for investing in the new capacity of new projects, and for maintaining them in good condition is equal to K = ∆Et*LCOE. Quarterly reports published by the European Commission allow estimating the typical LCOE, in the market of renewables, at some €0,06/kWh, with a descending trend. In like 5 years from now, we can expect LCOE being closer to €0,04/kWh. As for the ∆Et, my own estimates allow ranging it between 82 TWh and 107 TWh a year. As I convert the terawatt hours into kilowatt hours, and do the ∆Et*LCOE, it gives €4,94 billion ≤ K ≤ €6,42 billion a year.

This is my own educated guessing. Now, I go and ask IRENA, i.e. the International Renewable Energy Agency. It proves to be a good idea. I find something interesting. According to my own estimations, the output of renewables in Europe, in 2017, was around 3 670,45 TWh, which, in turn, allows guessing an underlying capacity of 3 670,45 TWh/ 8760 hours = 419 TW. In means that what I computed as capacity actually used makes like 82% of the capacity installed. As I run the same kind of check for 2015, I have the output of renewables at 3 423,5 TWh, which corresponds to a capacity of 390,8 TW, and IRENA provides 465,4 TW of capacity installed, for the same year 2015. Capacity used divided by capacity installed, in this case, gives like 84%.

It generally holds in the presence of two-sided, anti-bullshit test. Capacity installed is usually greater that the one actually used. The opposite is impossible, whilst equality between these two is hardly conceivable, and risky for the energy system as a whole. If I base my calculations of capital needed on the delta of capacity installed, I need to add that overhang of capacity left in reserve, yet financed. I target this one as a surplus of 20%. Consequently, my calculation of capital required morphs into €5,93 billion ≤ K ≤ €7,71 billion a year.

I apply my three alternative strategies to that fork of aggregates, and I get the numbers shown in Table 1 below. It is clearly more than what I computed in « Deux cerveaux, légèrement différents l’un de l’autre ». Given the logic underlying these two alternative calculations, I would rather go for the second one, i.e. that in Table 1. There are more empirical anchors in this second calculation. Still, this is the estimated need for capital in the whole European market of renewable energies. The financing scheme proposed in the EneFin concept suits most of all those relatively small, strongly local projects. Probably, they make just a fraction of those aggregates in Table 1.

Table 1

Estimated value of the market in financial services for the suppliers of renewable energies in Europe, € billions
From To
Strategy #1  296,31  385,46
Strategy #2  29,63  38,55
Strategy #3  94,82

 123,35

As I see and feel it, that business plan for the EneFin project still needs some ripening. I am letting it crystallize in my brain. Take your time, business plan. Take your time. Anyway, what really counts as my personal creation is what will remain in this world after I am dead. I am changing my topic. I turn towards teaching and the preparation of syllabuses for the next academic year. I am using this same occasion to write some educational takeaways for my website.

As it comes to teaching, I feel like shaking it off a bit. Each year, I have more and more teaching hours, at the university. In the academic year which has just ended, it was over 500. In the one to come, it is likely to go over 700. I want to reassess my goals and my values in that process. This is an interesting thing I discovered quite recently, as a matter of fact: casual tasks can be done acceptably well without putting much of myself in the doing of them, but a big, solid workload requires real emotional involvement, at least if I want to do it really well and not to burn myself out in the process.

So, here is the list of the main subjects I have in my schedule for the next academic year:

  • Management: I teach it in two different, Undegraduate majors, and in two languages. I teach that curriculum for the major of International Relations, in English, and for the major of Film & Media Management, in English as well. Besides, I teach in Polish the same subject for the same major of Film & Media, Polish track.
  • Business Planning/Innovation planning – teach it in Polish, in the 3rd year of Management major for undergraduates. This is supposed to be an integrative, advanced course, with little theory and a lot of practical work.
  • Microeconomics – in the English track, I teach it in the first year of International Relations’ major, Undergraduate, basically to the same students whom I work with in the course of management; I am going to teach similar curriculum in the Graduate major of Management, English track as well; in the Polish track, this is a complementary course for the 1st year of Information Technology undergraduates.
  • Economic Policy – I teach this curriculum in the English track, 3rd year undergraduate in the major of International Relations.
  • International Trade/ International Economic Relations – the slash I put in the name of this subject means that it consists, in fact, in two similar subjects I teach at two different levels, i.e. Undergraduate (International Trade) and Graduate (International Economic Relations), of the English track in the major of International Relations
  • Political Systems – English track, Graduate level, major Management

Good, so this is the inventory of what I do, and now my big question is: what do I really want to do in what I do? What do I want to achieve in terms of teaching outcome? What do I want my students to learn?

The first part of my answer is pretty simple: I want them to learn science as such, i.e. the scientific method, and I want them to become basically proficient in using that method for building their own social roles in an intelligent way. I want to train them at the sequence made of observation followed by hypothesising, which is further followed by empirical verification and communication of results. One of the big lessons you can learn, when practicing this sequence, is that it takes time and smart coordination of your own actions. Science, understood as a method of dealing smartly with that bloody mess we call reality, requires both creativity and rigour, and these two traits are the second major takeaway I want my students to have, in my classes.

This basic education goal comes from two plain observations. Firstly, there are things you can learn in a classroom, and those which you just can’t. Secondly, we are coexisting with an emergent form of intelligence, the digital one, and we need to adapt. Can you learn management in a classroom? Certainly not. Management is a craft and an art, in the first place, and only secondarily this is a science. As craft and art, management is, most of all, fierce inter-personal competition inside a complex social structure. Yes, there is ethical management. Yes, there is management for higher a purpose. Yes, you can imagine ethereal beings like that. Still, if you want to do any management at all, you have to stay in the game inside an organization, and in order to achieve that simple goal, you need to be efficiently competitive.

Can you learn international relations in a classroom? Once again, the answer is: hell no. If, one day, you try to put together a policy, a social action, or a business at the international scale, you can really learn what international relations are. If you can’t learn management in a classroom, and can’t learn international relations, what is the point of teaching them at a university? If you ask this question, you are bloody touching the essence of the thing, as I feel it. I named some of the things you can’t learn in a classroom, so what are the things you can?

In order to understand the learning you can have out of any situation, the essential thing is to understand what is happening in that situation. In a classroom, we are basically having a conversation in a semi-organized group. Semi-organized means there is a basic division of roles – I teach, students learn and take exams – but we have a lot of flexibility when it comes to ritualizing the whole situation. I can play the distant, cold, exigent bastard, or I can play the nice guy. Students can play the smart ones, the diligent ones, or can play fools.

If you have a semi-defined social role, both you and your social environment will push towards defining it completely. This is what we, humans, do: we shape our social structures so as to make social relations acceptably predictable. Thus, in a classroom, the most fundamental process of learning that takes place is the transition from semi-defined social roles to the fully defined ones. Students essentially learn how to make themselves into the social role they think their social environment expects them to endorse.

I remember one student, from the last Winter semester. He had that special style, combining Gothic elements, such as demon-looking, all black contact lenses, with a vaguely androgynous clothing and haircut. Apparently, a rebel. Still, it was nothing short of amazing to watch this alleged rebel in his virtually desperate efforts to find a role in the group, i.e. in relations with other students and with me. That guy was literally experimenting with himself, and tried to play a slightly different role at each of the 30 classes scheduled in the semester.

Thus, in a classroom, what we have in terms of the most fundamental teaching, is a partly controlled environment for training students in the definition of their own social roles. It is like: ‘Look, you can read this book, and you can use that reading to endorse various stances. You can play the dumb one, who doesn’t understand anything. You can play the diligent one, who wants to get extra points by writing an optional essay. You can play the smart guy, and challenge me in class on the grounds of that book. In short, you can learn how to use large parcels of theoretical knowledge in order to experiment with your own social identity’.

OK, enough writing in that update. I feel like switching, as it is my ritual, to French, once again, to make my brain dance to a slightly different linguistic tune.

I am consistently delivering good, almost new science to my readers, and love doing it, and I am working on crowdfunding this activity of mine. As we talk business plans, I remind you that you can download, from the library of my blog, the business plan I prepared for my semi-scientific project Befund  (and you can access the French version as well). You can also get a free e-copy of my book ‘Capitalism and Political Power’ You can support my research by donating directly, any amount you consider appropriate, to my PayPal account. You can also consider going to my Patreon page and become my patron. If you decide so, I will be grateful for suggesting me two things that Patreon suggests me to suggest you. Firstly, what kind of reward would you expect in exchange of supporting me? Secondly, what kind of phases would you like to see in the development of my research, and of the corresponding educational tools?

Support this blog

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The other cheek of business

My editorial

I am turning towards my educational project. I want to create a step-by-step teaching method, where I guide a student in their learning of social sciences, and this learning is by doing research in social sciences. I have a choice between imposing some predefined topics for research, or invite each student to propose their own. The latter seems certainly more exciting. As a teacher, I know what a brain storm is, and believe: a dozen dedicated and bright individuals, giving their ideas about what they think it is important to do research about, can completely uproot your (my own?) ideas as what it is important to do research about. Still, I can hardly imagine me, individually, handling efficiently all that bloody blissful diversity of ideas. Thus, the first option, namely imposing some predefined topics for research, seems just workable, whilst still being interesting. People can get creative about methods of research, after all, not just about topics for it. Most of the great scientific inventions was actually methodology, and what was really breakthrough about it consisted in the universal applicability of those newly invented methods.

Thus, what I want to put together is a step-by-step path of research, communicable and teachable, regarding my own topics for research. Whilst I still admit the possibility of student-generated topics coming my way, I will consider them as a luxurious delicacy I can indulge in under the condition I can cope with those main topics. Anyway, my research topics for 2018 are:

  1. Smart cities, their emergence, development, and the practical ways of actually doing business there
  2. Fintech, and mostly cryptocurrencies, and even more mostly those hybrid structures, where cryptocurrencies are combined with the “traditional” financial assets
  • Renewable energies
  1. Social and technological change as a manifestation of collective intelligence

Intuitively, I can wrap (I), (II), and (III) into a fancy parcel, decorated with (IV). The first three items actually coincide in time and space. The fourth one is that kind of decorative cherry you can put on a cake to make it look really scientific.

As I start doing research about anything, hypotheses come handy. If you investigate a criminal case, assuming that anyone could have done anything anyhow gives you certainly the biggest possible picture, but the picture is blurred. Contours fade and dance in front on your eyes, idiocies pop up, and it is really hard to stay reasonable. On the other hand, if you make some hypotheses as for who did what and how, your investigation gathers both speed and sense. This is what I strongly advocate for: make some hypotheses at the starting point of your research. Before I go further with hypothesising on my topics for research, a few preliminary remarks can be useful. First of all, we always hypothesise about anything we experience and think. Yes, I am claiming this very strongly: anything we think is a hypothesis or contains a hypothesis. How come? Well, we always generalise, i.e. we simplify and hope the simplification will hold. We very nearly always have less data than we actually need to make the judgments we make with absolute certainty. Actually, everything we pretend to claim with certainty is an approximation.

Thus, we hypothesise intuitively, all the time. Now, I summon the spirit of Milton Friedman from the abyss of pre-Facebook history, and he reminds us the four basic levels of hypothesising. Level one: regarding any given state of nature, we can formulate an indefinitely great number of hypotheses. In practice, there is infinitely many of them. Level two: just some of those infinitely many hypotheses are checkable at all, with the actual access to data I have. Level three: among all the checkable hypotheses, with the data at hand, there are just some, regarding which I can say with reasonable certainty whether they are true or false. Level four: it is much easier to falsify a hypothesis, i.e. to say under what conditions it does not hold at all, than to verify it, i.e. claiming under what conditions it is true. This comes from level one: each hypothesis has cousins, who sound almost exactly the same, but just almost, so under given conditions many mutually non-exclusive hypotheses can be true.

Now, some of you could legitimately ask ‘Good, so I need to start with formulating infinitely many hypotheses, then check which of them are checkable, then identify those allowing more or less rigorous scientific proof? Great. It means that at the very start I get entangled for eternity into checking how checkable is each of the infinitely many hypotheses I can think of. Not very promising as for results’. This is legit to say that, and this is the reason why, in science, we use that tool known as the Ockham’s razor. It serves to give a cognitive shave to badly kept realities. In its traditional form it consists in assuming that the most obvious answer is usually the correct one. Still, as you have a closer look at this precise phrasing, you can see a lot of hidden assumptions. It assumes you can distinguish the obvious from the dubious, which, in turn, means that you have already applied the razor beforehand. Bit of a loop. The practical way of wielding that razor is to assume that the most obvious thing is observable reality. I start with finding my bearings in reality. Recently, I gave an example of that: check ‘My individual square of land, 9 meters on 9’  . I look around and I assess what kind of phenomena, which, at this stage of research, I can intuitively connect to the general topic of my research, and which I can observe, measure, and communicate intelligibly about. These are my anchors in reality.

I look at those things, I measure them, and I do my best to communicate by observations to other people. This is when the Ockham’s razor is put to an ex post test: if the shave has been really neat, other people can easily understand what I am communicating. If I and a bunch of other looneys (oops! sorry, I wanted to say ‘scientists’) can agree on the current reading of the density of population, and not really on the reading of unemployment (‘those people could very well get a job! they are just lazy!), then the density of population is our Ockham’s razor, and unemployment not really (I love the ‘not really’ expression: it can cover any amount of error and bullshit). This is the right moment for distinguishing the obvious from the dubious, and to formulate my first hypotheses, and then I move backwards the long of the Milton Friedman’s four levels of hypothesising. The empirical application of the Ockham’s razor has allowed me to define what I can actually check in real life, and this, in turn, allows distinguishing between two big bags, each with hypotheses inside. One bag contains the verifiable hypotheses, the other one is for the speculative ones, i.e. those non-verifiable.

Anyway, I want my students to follow a path of research together with me. My first step is to organize the first step on this path, namely to find the fundamental, empirical bearings as for those four topics: smart cities, Fintech, renewable energies and collective intelligence. The topic of smart cities certainly can find its empirical anchors in the prices of real estate, and in the density of population, as well as in the local rate of demographic growth. When these three dance together – once again, you can check ‘My individual square of land, 9 meters on 9’ – the business of building smart cities suddenly gets some nice, healthy, reddish glow on its cheeks. Businesses have cheeks, didn’t you know? Well, to be quite precise, businesses have other cheeks. The other cheek, in a business, is what you don’t want to expose when you already get hit somewhere else. Yes, you could call it crown jewels as well, but other cheek sounds just more elegantly.

As for Fintech, the first and most obvious observation, from my point of view, is diversity. The development of Fintech calls into existence many different frameworks for financial transactions in times and places when and where, just recently, we had just one such framework. Observing Fintech means, in the first place, observing diversity in alternative financial frameworks – such as official currencies, cryptocurrencies, securities, corporations, payment platforms – in the given country or industry. In terms of formal analytical tools, diversity refers to a cross-sectional distribution and its general shape. I start with I taking a convenient denominator. The Gross Domestic Product seems a good one, yet you can choose something else, like the aggregate value of intellectual property embodied in selfies posted on Instagram. Once you have chosen your denominator, you measure the outstanding balances, and the current flows, in each of those alternative, financial frameworks, in the units of your denominator. You get things like market capitalization of Ethereum as % of GDP vs. the supply of US dollar as % of its national GDP etc.

I pass to renewable energies, now. When I think about what is the most obviously observable in renewable energies, it is a dual pattern of development. We can have renewable sources of energy supplanting fossil fuels: this is the case in the developed countries. On the other hand, there are places on Earth where electricity from renewable sources is the first source of electricity ever: those people simply didn’t have juice to power their freezer before that wind farm started up in the whereabouts. This is the pattern observable in the developing countries. In the zone of overlapping, between those two patterns, we have emerging markets: there is a bit of shifting from fossils to green, and there is another bit of renewables popping up where nothing had dared to pop up in the past. Those patterns are observable as, essentially, two metrics, which can possibly be combined: the final consumption of energy per capita, and the share of renewable sources in the final consumption of energy. Crude as they are, they allow observing a lot, especially when combined with other variables.

And so I come to collective intelligence. This is seemingly the hardest part. How can I say that any social entity is kind of smart? It is even hard to say in humans. I mean, virtually everybody claims they are smart, and I claim I’m smart, but when it comes to actual choices in real life, I sometimes feel so bloody stupid… Good, I am getting a grip. Anyway, intelligence for me is the capacity to figure out new, useful things on the grounds of memory about old things. There is one aspect of that figuring out, which is really intriguing my internal curious ape: the phenomenon called ultra-socialisation, or supersocialisation. I am inspired, as for this one, by the work of a group of historians: see ‘War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies’ (Turchin et al. 2013[1]). As a matter of fact, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his “Social Contract”, was chasing very much the same rabbit. The general point is that any group of dumb assholes can get social on the level of immediate gains. This is how small, local societies emerge: I am better at running after woolly mammoths, you are better at making spears, which come handy when the mammoth stops running and starts arguing, and he is better at healing wounds. Together, we can gang up and each of us can experience immediate benefits of such socialisation. Still, what makes societies, according to Jean Jacques Rousseau, as well as according to Turchin et al., is the capacity to form institutions of large geographical scope, which require getting over the obsession of immediate gains and provide long-term, developmental a kick. What is observable, then, are precisely those institutions: law, state, money, universally enforceable contracts etc.

Institutions – and this is the really nourishing takeaway from that research by Turchin et al. (2013[2]) – are observable as a genetic code. I can decompose institutions into a finite number of observable characteristics, and each of them can be observable as switched on, or switched off. Complex institutional frameworks can be denoted as sequences of 1’s and 0’s, depending on whether the given characteristics is, respectively, present or absent. Somewhere between the Fintech, and collective intelligence, I have that metric, which I found really meaningful in my research: the share of aggregate depreciation in the GDP. This is the relative burden, imposed on the current economic activity, due to the phenomenon of technologies getting old and replaced by younger ones. When technologies get old, accountants accounts for that fact by depreciating them, i.e. by writing off the book a fraction of their initial value. All that writing off, done by accountants active in a given place and time, makes aggregate depreciation. When denominated in the units of current output (GDP), it tends to get into interesting correlations (the way variables can socialize) with other phenomena.

And so I come with my observables: density of population, demographic growth, prices of real estate, balances and flows of alternative financial platforms expressed as percentages of the GDP, final consumption of energy per capita, share of renewable energies in said final consumption, aggregate depreciation as % of the GDP, and the genetic code of institutions. What I can do with those observables, is to measure their levels, growth rates, cross-sectional distributions, and, at a more elaborate level, their correlations, cointegrations, and their memory. The latter can be observed, among other methods, as their Gaussian vector autoregression, as well as their geometric Brownian motion. This is the first big part of my educational product. This is what I want to teach my students: collecting that data, observing and analysing it, and finally to hypothesise on the grounds of basic observation.

[1] Turchin P., Currie, T.E.,  Turner, E. A. L., Gavrilets, S., 2013, War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies, Proceedings of The National Academy of Science, vol. 110, no. 41, pp. 16384 – 16389

[2] Turchin P., Currie, T.E.,  Turner, E. A. L., Gavrilets, S., 2013, War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies, Proceedings of The National Academy of Science, vol. 110, no. 41, pp. 16384 – 16389

Une courbe élégante en « S » aplati

Mon éditorial

Hier, dans ma mise à jour en anglais (“The dashing drip of Ketonal, or my fundamental questions for the New Year”  ), je me suis permis de formuler une sorte de compte rendu de tous les projets sur lesquels j’ai l’intention de travailler en 2018. D’une part, c’est comme une liste de résolutions pour le Nouvel An mais d’autre part c’est un premier pas sur mon chemin vers un peu de mise en ordre dans ce p****n de bordel – créatif, certes, bordel quand même – qui est tout à coup apparu dans ma vie professionnelle. J’ai découvert – tout récemment, en fait – que je suis capable d’achever quelque chose comme du développement personnel lorsque je combine du chaos avec de la cohérence. En ce qui concerne le chaos, la vie donne tout ce qu’il me faut. En ce qui concerne la cohérence, l’écriture est une bonne stratégie. Ecrire, dans une forme proche de celle d’un journal personnel, m’aide à mettre de l’ordre dans des idées échevelées. En plus, j’ai découvert que l’écriture marche le mieux dans mon cas lorsque je m’adresse à un public, par exemple à vous, les lecteurs de mon blog. Cette fois aussi, ça a marché. Dans cette mise à jour d’hier, comme je divaguais (oui, je le dis franchement, je divaguais un peu) sur ces différents projets que j’ai sur la planche à présent, mes idées avaient tout à coup commencé à prendre une cohérence respectable.

Alors, mon ordre personnel dans du chaos personnel s’articule autour de deux projets principaux : d’une part, je développe un site Internet éducatif, dévoué à l’éducation en sciences sociales à travers la participation dans de la recherche réelle, et d’autre part, je développe un projet d’investissement ciblé sur les soi-disant cités intelligentes, ou « smart cities » en anglais. La première de ces deux idées, le site éducatif, est quelque chose que j’avais en tête pour pas mal de temps déjà, et que je suis en train d’amorcer à travers ce blog-même. Ce qui me manquait, c’était une sorte d’idée distinctive de base. Comme élève d’abord, étudiant ensuite, j’avais toujours une réserve profonde vis à vis des manuels classiques. Depuis que je suis devenu prof et chercheur, je pris une conscience même plus aiguë de la superficialité des manuels, en comparaison du savoir scientifique à proprement dit. Bien sûr, l’étape suivante après les manuels, c’est l’éducation interactive. C’est intéressant, mais là, je me sens un tout petit peu mal à l’aise. Etre interactif dans le cadre d’un contenu typiquement standardisé pour l’éducation, n’est pas encore tout à fait ce que je veux faire avec les étudiants. Le terrain où je me sens vraiment dans mon élément, c’est l’éducation à travers la participation dans la solution des problèmes réels à 100%. Les sciences sociales sont mon champ de recherche et l’éducation la plus réaliste qu’on peut y avoir c’est l’application de l’outillage scientifique au développement des projets d’investissement, d’action sociale, ou encore des projets politiques.

Avec tout le côté excitant et (un peu) grandiose de confronter des étudiants des sciences sociales directement avec des cas réels, je suis conscient du fait que cette idée peut aussi bien s’enliser dans un phénomène bien connu : si vous apprenez aux gens à nager en les jetant directement dans de l’eau profonde, beaucoup d’entre eux vont tout simplement se noyer. L’éducation, dans quel domaine que ce soit, consiste à créer, pour l’apprenti, un sentier fait de tâches qu’il est objectivement capable d’accomplir, donc de tâches où son système nerveux peut enregistrer un succès qu’il serait intéressant de reproduire, encore et encore. Je sais par expérience que la recherche scientifique, au moins si on l’approche de façon vraiment sérieuse, est une tâche ardue. Même des chercheurs bien rôdés ont des crises de découragement. Alors le vrai défi éducatif consiste à prendre des cas réels, et des objectifs de recherche cent pourcent ancrés dans la vie réelle, et en même temps, les diviser en des petits pas scientifiques abordables pour les novices.

Ce que je mijote est donc un chemin éducatif, dans le cadre duquel je vais guider les étudiants dans une approche scientifique des situations réelles. C’est alors que mon second projet pour cette année entre en scène : l’investissement dans les cités intelligentes. Tout d’abord : pourquoi ? Tout d’abord : parce que ça m’intéresse. Ensuite, j’ai récemment eu la preuve du bien-fondé de ces intuitions que j’avais partagées avec mes lecteurs à propos d’une monnaie virtuelle reliée au marché d’énergies renouvelables. Si vous daigniez de jeter un coup d’œil chez https://www.wepower.network , vous verrez pratiquement la même chose que mon idée de Wasun, que j’avais décrite plusieurs fois sur ce blog ( regardez, par exemple : ‘Being like silk, espousing the protrusions of Vatenfall’ ou bien ‘Les moulins de Wasun’ ). Finalement, si je veux jouer le rôle d’un mentor dans l’application des sciences sociales à des entreprises réelles, eh bien, il faut que je tienne la forme, moi-même, en ce qui concerne l’étude de tels projets.

Je commence par consulter professeur Google sur le sujet. Voilà qu’il me retourne quelques adresses utiles : http://www.smart-cities.eu , par exemple, ou bien http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/index_en.htm , ou encore http://www.smartcitiesineurope.com . Comme d’habitude, j’effectue une lecture superficielle de ces sites juste pour avoir une idée de ce qui se passe. Là, une précision est due : lorsque j’écris « une idée de ce qui se passe », je l’entends dans le sens le plus fondamental. Ce qui se passe c’est un ensemble des phénomènes qui se passent, c’est-à-dire qui démontrent du changement dans le temps. Avoir une idée de ce qui se passe au sujet des cités intelligentes veut dire identifier des variables, objectivement observables et mesurables, qui montrent du changement. La première variable que j’ai pu observer est le nombre des villes en Europe qui mettent en place, à des échelles différentes, des projets de cité intelligente. Ce nombre est en train de croître. C’est une expansion qui – en des termes théoriques – a tout l’air d’un phénomène de contagion. En sciences économiques, nous modelons des trucs comme ça avec des fonctions qui tendent vers un niveau hypothétique de saturation. D’habitude, c’est une fonction logistique ou bien la densité cumulative de probabilité de l’occurrence d’un phénomène donné dans des cellules séparées d’un marché. Dans les deux cas, on a une courbe élégante en « S » aplati qui tend asymptotiquement vers le niveau de saturation. Avec un peu d’Excel, un peu de temps à tuer et un peu d’imagination mathématique on peut donner à cette courbe des contorsions intéressantes, mais ce qui m’intéresse vraiment à ce point-ci est ce niveau hypothétique de saturation. Quelle est la taille du marché des cités intelligentes en Europe ? Ce marché est composite : il englobe des travaux de construction, de la mise en place d’infrastructure(s), des plateformes du type Fintech (finance plus utilité en ligne) et même des logiciels pour les téléphones portables. Je me demande combien des gens et combien de capital peut joindre ce mouvement.

Alors voilà mon premier challenge de recherche dans ce projet des cités intelligentes : prédire la taille du marché et en même temps imaginer un chemin éducatif pour apprendre aux étudiants en sciences sociales comment formuler une telle prédiction.