OK, I’m biased, but I think my new home office – the shedquarters – is coming along rather nicely. The log burner is working and the greenhouse through which you enter the office is now built. If I could just get the darned email to work. Pictures to follow soon.

Up to my eyes at the moment reading material for the next issue of What’s Next and sorting out the website for Futures House. Also a final few trips coming up – Copenhagen, Milan and Paris – then it’s get What’s Next and Brainmail up.

So what have I got for you today? How about a quote, a statistic, a research finding and an observation?

The quote: “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” (Gloria Stein).

The stat: Drivers in the UK spent almost £8,000,000,000 on parking in 2011 (The Scotsman).

The Study: Researchers at Bristol University (UK) have found that beer drinkers drink faster when given a curved glass rather than a straight one. The reason? Possibly that it’s harder to tell how much you’ve drunk with a curved glass. (The Week).

The observation: Why am I starting to see so many people taping over their cameras on their iPads and laptops?

Here, as promised, is the link for the new timeline taken from my new book Future Vision that shows four alternative paths for the future. BTW, there’s a mistake. I’ve mixed up George Bush with George W. Bush. Too late to change now!

Have you noticed how ‘Bling’ is booming in developing countries such as Russia and China whilst at the same time ideas such as frugality and sustainability are taking hold in other parts of the world? Well apart from the economic situations being different, another reason could be that consumption patterns change significantly as prosperity develops.

A few years ago two economists called Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst at the University of Chicago found that, all other things being equal, African Americans tended to spend more of their income on cars, clothes and jewellery. Another study has put a figure against this. Typically, an African American family will spend 25% more on cars, jewellery, clothing and personal care compared to a white counterpart, with the difference being made up by less expenditure on education.

This isn’t just a lazy racial stereotyping either. Looking at different countries similar patterns emerge with lower income groups spending lavishly on luxury goods. So what’s the explanation? According to the economists what’s going on is that poorer people spend on luxury goods to prove to others in their immediate peer group that they are not poor. Hence what a gold Rolex says is not “I’m rich” but rather “I came from a poor background and did well”.

As individuals (and nations) get richer this spending shifts from ostentatious products to more discrete services and experiences. A shift also occurs towards spending on goods that are externally directed (cars and clothes for instance) to goods that are less visible to the outside world. In other words countries, like people, want to show off how wealthy they are but eventually this need wears off.

This finding obviously has significant implications for luxury goods companies although one suspects that they know this already. As for what’s next, expect time and space to become the ultimate luxuries along with goods and services that are only available to a limited number of people that fulfil certain non-financial criteria.

According to a recent news story, 25% of them have difficulty walking and many of them are becoming disabled by rapid weight gain and a lack of proper sleep. The story in question is about battery-farmed chickens, but it could equally be about our children.

In the UK, 25% of children between the ages of eight and ten years old have never played outside unsupervised. Meanwhile, Australia is in the middle of an allergy epidemic. According to the government, 40% of Australian children suffer from an allergy of one kind or another. Holy guacamole.

One reason for this is probably because our houses have become too clean and our kids are not exposed to enough dirt. Filth yes, there’s plenty of that on the various screens we allow them to sit in front of, but kids (and chickens) need to scratch around outside. But I don’t think blaming technology is fair. The real culprit here is parental paranoia. We have become afraid of life itself. For example, back in 2003 there were less than 200 non-food anti-bacterial products launched onto supermarkets shelves worldwide. By 2006, this had jumped to 1,610.

And it’s not just microbes we’re trying to ban. Many schools now have a strict policy relating to food allergies. Bags are searched every morning to identify illegal foodstuffs, which can include yoghurt, homemade cakes and, of course, anything that has ever come into contact with – or might have once said hello to – a nut. Nuts? I’d say so. But we are putting fear in front of fact.

The food allergy epidemic is largely a myth. According to the US Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FANN) around 150-200 people die each year in America due to allergic reactions to food. But according to the US Centre for Disease Control the actual figure is closer to 10. That’s a big difference. And let’s put this into perspective. Around 40,000 people are killed every year on American roads, including more than 2,500 kids. I suspect the ratios would be similar in other countries.

Don’t get me wrong here. Food allergies are real and  do kill. A few years ago a fourteen-year-old Melbourne boy died whilst on camp due to a food allergy. However, exaggerating the risk could be doing more harm than good because it feeds a culture of fear where children are overwhelmed by anxiety. Moreover, nothing can ever be 100% safe and squeezing the risk out of one area only displaces it somewhere else. Risk will not disappear simply because you regulate it.

I think we are creating a false sense of security and learned helplessness in other areas too. In some schools, running in the playground has been banned because children might bump into each other or fall over. Some schools have even gone so far as to introduce soft, impact-absorbing surfaces to replace old-fashioned dirt or tarmac.

The same thinking has resulted in games such as conkers and even skipping being banned on health and safety grounds. Perhaps this is working – when was the last time you saw a kid with grazed knees or a broken arm? These kids exist but they are an endangered species. This is a shame because these accidents actually have a benefit. They teach kids to push the boundaries, but to be careful. They also teach resilience. Moreover, according to some experts, these surfaces may actually cause more serious accidents because children believe that they are safe.

Our protectionist and interventionist impulse may be harming us in other areas too. For instance, schools are now asking parent helpers to supply personal information that will be used to conduct criminal background checks. Good idea? Possibly, but the implication is that all adults are guilty until proven innocent. The plan could also backfire in a number of ways.

First, the checks could result in less parent helpers. Fancy coaching football at the weekend? Well how would you feel about it if it meant ongoing criminal checks?

The argument in favour of checks is that if you are innocent you have nothing to worry about. But what worries me is that once we start to view all adults as potential sex offenders there will be subtle changes to how everything from policing to law making operates. Did you know, for example, that unaccompanied children on BA flights can sit alongside women, but not alongside men. All men, it seems, are now suspect.

Second, spontaneous acts of random kindness could disappear under a mountain of bureaucratic red tape. Fancy baking a cake for the school raffle? You can’t. The cake may have come into contact with nuts and we can’t tell whether you’re a nutcase until you fill out a form.

To be civil means to be polite or courteous and civilisation is built upon the idea of mutual trust, which has started to evaporate. But most people are still trustworthy and most things are not dangerous, but if we teach our children that they are not we are laying the foundations for a society where fear becomes an epidemic.

Where to start? A number that recently jumped out for me was that a charity called the Child Poverty Action Group in the UK spent £1,551,000 of its income of £1,990,000 on wages (Daily Telegraph). So the primary activity of this non-profit is its own existence?

Also spotted was a piece saying that almost 50% of parents impose a gadget-free days on their children each week and another from last month about expensive electronic gadgets displacing low-cost and free outdoor play.

However, my favourite article over the past days has been a post on the Fast Company website about the benefits of silence – or at least why some of the quietest people at work can be the most productive.

I’m now off. I’m going to listen to the album Grace by Jeff Buckey and seeing which combinations of words come out of my fingertips…

(PS Thanks Orkneylad).

Funny. I’ve just been in hospital for the day. Seems it’s a false alarm, or at least not what I thought it was. This is slightly annoying on one trivial level, because I’ve spent the last month spending like there’s no tomorrow on the warped basis that there may be no tomorrow. I’ll now have to get used to £10 bottles of wine again. What a difference a zero can make. Add a few more zeros and you could write a good film script about someone that spent borrowed money on a similar basis and then had to make it all back again – fast.

On a more serious note I now agree with someone who said that it should be compulsory for all adults to spend 24-hours in a public hospital, especially A&E. It gives you a perspective that’s rarely available elsewhere. You could see this today. People came into the ward in the morning and by the afternoon their lives had totally changed. What they thought they were – and were going to be – had totally changed in the space of a few hours. I don’t think that anyone could take selling something like tinned soup seriously after something like that. You’d surely have to do something more meaningful.

I also liked the sense of equality. Also the fact that the exposure of human flesh to others somehow bared your soul as well. There was a strange connectedness with strangers. A conviviality that’s somehow often lacking elsewhere. Maybe we all need to get semi-naked more often.

One thing I did manage to do during my blissful, but occasionally tense, six hours in distraction-free limbo-land was finish off Future Babble. This is really a rather good book, especially if you are involved with any kind of long-term forecasting or planning. I especially liked this quote from Alistair Cooke, from the 1970s I’d guess: “In the best of times our days are numbered anyway… and so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world’s crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place. The opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.” Amen to that.

A runaway milk tanker may hit me tomorrow, but, if not, things should vaguely start to getting back to normal. I’m also fired up about writing something of real substance for a change. I doubt that this will be the blog, although given enough time you never know. It could be What’s Next, but I feel a new book is coming on. The result, of course, be junk, but I’m getting a feeling about something that’s widely felt but rarely said.

I’m getting hugely behind again. One of my kids is now sick, so after 8-weeks of school holidays he managed to be back at school for a day before he was off again.

Rushing to get something done for a workshop in Luxembourg this week and another in Switzerland next and then need to proofread Future Vision and read material for the next issue of What’s Next. Future Babble is 90% read (thoroughly recommended), as is Grace by Jeff Buckley, which I’ve been listening to a lot.

Excerpt from Future Babble:

“As for why we believe expert predictions, the answer lies ultimately in our hard-wired aversion to uncertainty. People want to know what’s happening now and what will happen in the future, and admitting we don’t know can be profoundly disturbing. So we try to eliminate uncertainty however we can. We see patterns where there are none. We treat random results as if they are meaningful. And we treasure stories that replace the complexity and uncertainty of reality with simple narratives about what’s happening and what will happen. Sometimes we create these stories ourselves, but, even with the human mind’s bountiful capacity for self-delusion, it can be hard to fool ourselves into thinking we know what the future holds for the stock market, the climate, the price of oil, or a thousand other pressing issues. So we look to experts. They must know. They have Ph.D.s, prizes, and offices in major universities. And thanks to the news media’s preference for the simple and dramatic, the sort of expert we are likely to hear from is confident and conclusive. They know what will happen; they are certain of it. We like that because that is how we want to feel. And so we convince ourselves that these wise men and women can do what wise men and women have never been able to do before. Fundamentally, we believe because we want to believe.”

Lot’s more from Future Babble via the New York Times here

Just been in Switzerland visiting a chocolate factory (it was a tough job, especially the chocolate tasting part at the end). I’ve also continued reading Future Bable by Dan Gardner, which is really good. It’s essentially about the futility of long-term forecasting. I’ll post a couple of excerpts over the next few days.

Remember what I said yesterday about people switching off? Total rubbish.