Exponential Change and my letter to Glenn Beck

I am writing to you because my father and I have started to try to do something about where we find ourselves as a country and I wanted to let you know about it.

My father is writing again. You probably have not heard of my father, primarily because he sought to avoid fame when he was working. His name is George Berry. He is an actuary (as are my two brothers and I). My father is largely responsible for the health actuarial consulting industry as it exists today.

One of my favorite stories from his early years is the time he testified as an expert witness in front of a Senate committee concerning the cost projection for the Federal Employee Health Program back in the early 1970’s. The Blue Cross Blue Shield actuaries had made their projections and my father had made his. My father’s estimate was 1 billion dollars lower than all the others (a billion dollars was a lot of money back then).

At the hearing, my father was sworn in and the first Senator tried to sandbag him with the following question. “Mr. Berry, your estimate is 1 billion dollars lower than every other expert who has looked at this. Can you tell us in 30 seconds why you are right and everyone else is wrong?”

He had figured out that health care cost trends were cyclical and everyone else was using straight line projections. When the year was over, his estimate had been off by $16 million, or 1.6%. He will say it was mostly luck but he had nailed it. It was all up from there. He grew a very successful actuarial consulting practice over the next 15 years. He was involved in many high profile cases and projects. He retired in 1986 at the age of 46.

But then in the late 1980’s he noticed something was happening. Not just in health care but everywhere. He decided to come out of retirement to write about it and speak about it. Generally speaking, he got one of two responses from his audiences. They either gave him a puzzled look or they were openly hostile to him. He had never received this kind of response before and didn’t know what to make of it. So, in 1993 he set aside the work and retired to his farm in a remote part of Canada with my mother.

Then in October of 2009 he started to write again. Why? Because now what he had seen 20 years before had accelerated to the point where it was playing out everyday and very few people seem to understand it. People were afraid and angry and didn’t understand what was happening. The specific catalyst for him to write again was the first stimulus bill when Paulson spent $750 billion in the fall of 2008.

I don’t mean to be cryptic and I will explain what I am talking about but first please indulge me in an analogy.

There once was a pond that had a small lily pad in the corner. Everyday the lily pad doubled in size to the point where it completely covered the pond in 30 days. The question is when did it cover half the pond? Most people will say on the 15th day but that is not the answer. The answer is on the 29th day.

The essence of the idea is this. The world has always worked exponentially but for most of history it operated on the low end of the curve where it looked and effectively operated linearly. Therefore, people believed it was linear. With the hyper-accelerated development of communication and computing technologies in the past 25 years, reality has “moved up” the curve and is now operating exponentially. The problem is that people are still thinking linearly. Worse, they are trying to solve exponential problems with linear solutions.

I realize that description has actuary-speak all over it and I assure you my father does a great job making it understandable. As it turns out, he is not the only one talking about this sort of thing. For example, Ray Kurzweil talks about it in the context of technology, Jack Uldrich concerning business, Chris Martenson about the economy and Wayne Hodgins on education. You are doing it with regards to informing the public about government.

Each of those men communicates using the underlying principles in the context of a particular subject matter. My father has taken a different approach. His goal is to distill it down to its building blocks in order to understand how it works. He is doing this for two reasons. First, to help the average person understand how things really work and second, to help the average person use that knowledge to affect change.

When my father first saw it 20 years ago, it was just starting so it didn’t bother folks that much. But the internet and other factors, like Moore’s law, have brought it to a critical place. Back in the 1990’s he called what he was observing “CIC” (pronounced “kick”). CIC stands for Creativity, Information and Communication.

He realized back then that CIC brought down the Soviet Union. Today, it is what powers the Tea Party as well as the Stimulus bill – opposites to be sure. But one of CIC’s properties is that it is morally neutral. That is important. Those are just examples. CIC is everywhere.

CIC has an evil twin called CI. The latter is often present in old, top-down power structures that seek to retain their control by hoarding information. We see CI in the dinosaur media and in the current halls of Congress. There are reasons why the Tea Party is hated so much. Reasons that can be quantified, understood, and, yes, effectively countered once they are understood.

My father has written a book and I have put that book on a website. I want to assure you that this project has absolutely nothing to do with making money or getting famous. My father has enough of the first and spent years avoiding the second. This is about helping people understand what is happening and empowering them to affect it. As far as I can tell, your goal and this goal are completely aligned. It is one of the reasons I am writing to you.

The website is at www.29thday.org and, of course, is completely free to access. There is no advertising. My father has financed it and I built it. As I said, money is not part of this equation. The first few chapters lay out the CIC principles. The remaining chapters attempt to unpack those principles by applying them to contemporary events like Health Care, Terrorism and Immigration. By doing this, my father hopes to help the reader understand CIC and at the same time see how to apply it. The book is interactive in that it solicits reader feedback via Google Sidewiki and incorporates that feedback into text revisions.

Glenn, I appreciate your time. If you or one of your staff got this far in this letter, then I am deeply grateful. Like you, we want to empower people with the truth. If you think there is something to what we are saying, a quick word by you would send a lot of people to this resource.

I posted this letter last week but I wanted to post it again because there has been an update. Last week, some folks commented that a different format to the book would be helpful. I spent the weekend editing and now have a PDF version of the book through Chapter 2 for those who are interested. It has the format of a printed book versus the online HTML format.

For those who were put off by the HTML version or for anyone else who is interested, the PDF version can be found at here.

http://www.29thday.org/book/pdf/The_29th_Day_Thru_Ch_2_Jul_18_10.pdf

I saw your last thread on this and went to your site. I read the book until I got to the place where you mentioned watching Crash course http://www.chrismartenson.com/

That was the most important non-religious video I have seen in my entire life. It completely changed how I see my world.

And when you watch it with a background of Biblical prophesy study, it is very life changing.

Thanks. I’m trying to do all I can to make 29thday and Crash Course go viral. Think of it as an exponential thing. ;)

He realized back then that CIC brought down the Soviet Union.
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During the Cold War, I often only half joked with my husband that we should drop copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, and Any Rand's “ Atlas Shrugged” over the communist controlled countries. Do that and the people would soon free themselves.

I also joked that we could have won the Viet Nam War without losing one American life if we had parked a Navy aircraft carrier off the North Viet Nam coast and given any North Viet Nam officer and his family free passage to the United States with eventual citizenship.

Ideas are really the most powerful things in the universe. That the universe exists and that we have a place in it began as a glimmer of an idea in the mind of God.

By the way, please read my tag line.

I remember my brother explaining the rule of 72 to me about 15 years ago, what an eye opener.

Sorry, totally unrelated, but just another example of the impact of exponential growth.

And thanks for the article.

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