The Price Tag Is on You

By M.H. Stones

What price tag are you wearing?

EDUCATION: Moulds us into human resources
ECONOMIES: buy our time
GOVERNMENTS: label us since birth
MEDIA: sells our attention and emotions
HEALTH: packages our bodies
BELIEFS: manipulate our minds and souls
TECHNOLOGY: turns us into semi-gods & semi-robots

But behind each of these systems there is a secret. One that can help you work with them, change them and turn them to your and humanity’s advantage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398480490

M.H. Stones

M.H. Stones has lived in 10 countries, on 4 continents, and was schooled by 6 education models. Stones has worked with businesses, governments and media, gaining an immense insight into many of the current systems that shape our lives.

Book preview

The Price Tag Is on You

M.H. Stones

Austin Macauley Publishers

The Price Tag Is on You

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgement

You Are the Product

Education

The Brain Market

The Secret

Economies

It is a Free Market

The Secret

Governments

We Are All Born Equal But Some More Equal than Others

The Secret

Media

The Treadmill

The Secret

Health

How Healthy Is Healthy Enough?

The Secret

Beliefs

We All Believe in Something

The Secret

Technology

Who Is in the Driver’s Seat?

The Secret

The Biggest Secret of All

The Gift

Afterword The Final Dilemma

Notes

Your Voice Matters

About the Author

M.H. Stones has lived in 10 countries, on 4 continents, and was schooled by 6 education models. Stones has worked with businesses, governments and media, gaining an immense insight into many of the current systems that shape our lives.

Dedication

To the cornerstones in my life: my mother,

father and grandfather

And to all those who dare to

question and dream

Copyright Information ©

Copyright © M.H. Stones 2022

The right of M.H. Stones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398480483 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398480490 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

This book would not be in your hand if it was not for the inspiration and support of the Mindvalley Community, a visionary platform challenging the status quo and inspiring people to envision a better future for us all.

A huge thanks to my mum, for being my biggest fan and support, always. And to my daughter and son, for teaching me some of the biggest life lessons. I have grown up so much with them.

The author Shivya Nath was the first person to read the manuscript and I am so grateful to her, for her encouragement and honest feedback. I also would like to thank Jessica Raymond for reviewing and editing the text.

A big thank you to my mentors and guides who pushed me out of my comfort zone and challenged me each step of the way to write and publish this book. The ones who merit a special mention are my virtual mentors, Lisa Nichols, Vishen Lakhiani, Steven Kotler and Eric Edmeades. Their bright example has shown me that we can change the world, one step at a time.

Finally, I am grateful to all those known and unknown people, amongst them teachers, doctors, scientists and artists, who triggered the eye-opening experiences in my life that shed a very bright light on man-made systems and meshed into the giant puzzle represented in this book.

WHAT PRICE TAG ARE YOU WEARING?

You Are the Product

It was pitch dark. The wind swivelled in my hear. The dampness of the rain swashed through my body, getting deep under my skin, sifting all the way into my bones. The door opened and I was greeted by the warms of a soft glow. A distant chatter, sounding like bees buzzing in a beehive. The wood crackling in the fireplace, sending cosy orange tones into the space. Someone thrust a glass in my hand. My frozen bones, and brain, slowly came back to their senses. What sounded like incomprehensible background noise until a minute ago started shaping into words and phrases.

Space… Black holes…Magnetic fields… The Currents of Space…The subject sounded vaguely familiar.

Typical of a bunch of scientists, I thought.

But I was mistaken. The conversation veered towards smart phones and social media. How did we get from astrophysics and sci-fi to Instagram and TikTok in a matter of 30 seconds? What did interplanetary travel have to do with Facebook?

And then boom! One of those statements that turn the world upside down, We are just asked to produce workers. It was the voice of a friend who was a secondary school teacher.

What? That shook me up. Any remaining frozen icicles in my brain were definitely melted by now. It sounded shocking to me that teachers were labouring relentlessly at shaping my kids, yes, my kids, into products, namely workers.

Have you ever arrived at a dinner party and felt like an alien dropped out of space? Trying to make sense of everything happening around, piecing together the words like a puzzle. This is what happened to me that evening. But that day, I had an epiphany; one that led to me writing this book.

As it turned out, the conversation was about The Currents of Space. An epic journey into the depth of dysfunctional political, economic and social systems, disguised into a fantastic sci-fi story. Indeed, space and time travel are prominently featured in this classic saga. A book studied by 13-14-year-olds at school. Their tests were limited to recalling the character names and sequence of events in multiple-choice questionnaires. Essay writing and plot analysis were chucked out of the window. Yes, we could blame social media, over-information and over-consumption for stimulating shorter attention spans and shallower brains in our kids. But was this intentional? Or just a coincidence? Thus, the workers comment. The idea that teachers are asked to mould kids into human resources seemed novel to me at the time. Surely, this is an isolated event. Maybe it is just the system in the country in question?

However, as I started digging deeper into the topic, I discovered with fascination that education is a multi-trillion-dollar industry responding to the demands of labour markets to produce human capital. It is not the talents and abilities of students that guide teachers, schools and education systems to nurture them into better, more conscious and fulfilled human beings. Nor is the attainment of their full physical, intellectual, mental and emotional potential a priority. Not to mention, to become inspired stewards and guardians of the planet our very existence depends upon. No, it is purely and simply two words: market demand.

This discovery unleashed in me a whole new perspective into manmade systems. If collective systems mould our children from an early age into products, what other human aspects and attributes do they shape into products? Our brains and bodies? Our identity? And what are the systems, besides education, that are created and used to produce them? Economies, governments, religion, technology, media? What else?

Slowly, as I looked for clues, analysed the data and connected the dots, a picture started unveiling in front of my eyes. We are products of manmade systems. And education is the very first process that puts us, or should I say, nails us down on this production line.

Education

Coveted positions are occupied by people with high marks, who naturally support the system that brought them there. The fact that the education system controls the critical exams gives it more power and increases its influence over colleges, government offices and job markets.

Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

The Brain Market

We rarely think of education as an industry. Politicians sell it as part of their election package. Governments label it as a common good. International and humanitarian organisations designate it as a basic human right. And parents claim it is an entry ticket to a better quality of life. And students? How do students perceive modern day education? A bittersweet pill that one needs to swallow to reach their dreams? A waste of time? Or a ticket to a better life?

But, an industry? Surely not. An industry has clearly defined processes, inputs and outputs. It follows the rules of market supply and demand, and its ultimate goal is profit. So how can educating our children be an industry?

While it does sound crude, imagine a production line. It starts at Grade 1 all the way to Grades 11 or 12, sometimes followed by 3, 4 or even 10 years in higher education. The input? Your brain. The output? Your brain moulded into human capital validated and quality stamped by a shiny paper certifying you are a qualified and valuable resource. The higher the grade you attain and the shinier the papers you collect, the higher your human capital quality; a product you can proudly take to the labour market and sell as skills. Modern corporations have developed ever more sophisticated and confusing terms to express the same idea: competencies, abilities, expertise and versatility. All of these describe one thing: the price tag the system puts on your brains. The terminology used is particularly eye-opening: labour force, human capital, human resources and labour market.

This has led to a certain snobbishness in the labour market. The education industry produces, literally, a complete range of brains with many different product qualities. From a young age, we have learned that the more stickers and shiny papers we collect, the higher our value. This is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we even display them proudly in our offices and living rooms.

Looking at the spectrum of human capital market demand; people with the lowest level of education often fetch the lowest market prices, while people with a collection of stars and badges tend to fetch a premium. But beware, not all stars and badges have equal market value. Here is a small test for you: What comes to your mind when you hear the following names: Guangzhou University? Hartpury? African American Academy Ouagadougou? Chances are-a blank space. Possibly, a vague idea of where these institutions are located. Now, how about these: Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, Harvard, La Sorbonne? Most likely words such as prestige, academic excellence, and quality education spring to your mind. We are pre-programmed to associate these institutions with higher quality of education and thus a higher quality of human capital. We presume that these establishments produce big brains and fetch a higher market price.

This may sound ludicrous and provocative, but just replace for a moment the word student with the word shirt. You may buy a shirt on the flea market for as little as nothing. But a shirt with a label attached to it saying Ralph Lauren, Armani or Lacoste will most likely fetch hundred times more than the market stall one. This is why parents push their children to study longer and send them to prestigious institutions, hopefully, on prestigious courses (i.e., production lines) like business, law and politics. After all, they want the best for their progeniture—to fetch a higher price on the labour market.

A Quality Product

So, what is a quality education product? While countries seem to agree that their education systems produce workers, there is no general consensus on what a quality education product is. Each country has its own definition of what is a good and quality education output. This becomes obvious when it comes to the variety and degree of information schools shovel into the brains of kids and the balance between theory and practice.

I had the privilege or the misfortune, depending on how you look at it, to be educated in six countries and education models. It may or may not be linked to this, but I was also bitten by the bug of collecting shiny papers and stars and badges to prove to the labour market the quality of my human capital.

At the age of 15, I moved from a system à-la-Chinese to an Anglo-Saxon style education. Until then, I had painstakingly poured out my brains to learn the key battles in World War II, done chemistry and physics experiments, dissected frogs, drawn up-to-scale plans of mechanical machines, sewn my own clothes plus learned three different languages. All of these in school hours. Were these useful in my future life? Did they make me a better-quality product?

Let’s have a look at three of these education models and you can judge for yourself if and how they shape us into products.

The Eastern Model: You can have any colour as long as it is black

In the Eastern Model, there is a common belief that kids should have a broad knowledge base. Everything from sciences, literature and math, to art, music and sports is practiced from an early age. Future generations are inculcated with massive amounts of information at school. As if this is not enough, kids are subjected to multiple extracurricular activities: dancing, painting, martial arts, book clubs, language lessons, to mention but a few. Each child is raised as a future genius by their parents and grandparents.

This is particularly evident in China where one child is brought up by four adults. Thank you, One-Child Policy. Kids grow up with the mindset that they are rightful geniuses. And they are right. The Chinese education system produces ambitious high-achievers, but not necessarily the ones that should think too much for themselves. In return, this human capital gets a promise for a glorious future and never-ending job opportunities and prosperity.

While you may be quick to jump to conclusions, this does not mean the Eastern Model produces better and happier people. It just produces human resources that fit these countries’ particular market demand. The Chinese education system shovels out workers by the millions. They all need to be disciplined, obedient, diligent and loyal. Welcome to the world of standardised education.

Also, while I am using China as an example, many Asian countries follow the Eastern Model. Take South Korea as another example; about 70 % of its youth go to university¹ compared to an average of 40% in European countries who complete tertiary education².

Still sceptical? Recently, I had lunch with a Cambridge Business School lecturer. As we were discussing the future of education, we touched on the subject of Asia. Nearly a third of non-EU students in British universities come from China³. He mentioned casually, but very seriously, that if Cambridge was to accept the brightest candidates, they would be all Asian. Whatever the definition of brightest may be.

The Western Model: Three flavours of ice cream

On the other end of the spectrum is the Western Model. In a nutshell, it produces specialists. They inculcate basic skills such as reading, writing and numericity, and then focus on a narrow set of skills required by the labour market. This model believes in producing specific human capital for particular market needs.

Why teach kids where Mozambique is when they will spend most of their professional lives in London or Miami? Why learn other languages when 80% of business transactions and most likely as much information is available in English? Take the UK for instance. Some schools bundle biology, physics or chemistry into sciences, and history and geography into humanities. The latter does not venture beyond the social impact of industrial zones in local suburbs. Languages are optional and compete with other elective subjects, like media studies or economics. Maths is limited to calculating the number of possible two flavour combinations if given three flavours of ice. Vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice-cream, anyone?

This is a prime example of how education can skew the perception of kids’ talents and abilities. However, it is also a model which shapes student’s communication, analytical and logical skills.

While the Eastern Model follows the doctrine one size fits all or Ford’s famous mass production slogan you can have any car as long as it is black, Western Education has fully embraced marketing fundamentals. Market segmentation offers a human capital supermarket packed with labour products. From premium high-end to low-end affordable labour. Take a pick.

The Middle Path: Precise like a Swiss clock

Education is also a reflection of a country’s geographic, cultural and historic factors. Take a tiny country like Switzerland, for example. With four languages and 26 cantons packed with forbiddingly high mountains and just as many deep lakes, no wonder, its education model is as complex as its country’s topology. Kids spend a disproportionate amount of time learning three to four languages. By the age of 12, they would have had mandatory lessons in French or Italian, German, English and some Latin. And they would most likely be unable to write any of them fluently.

The other particularity of the model is segregating kids at age 12: low- and high-quality brains. In other words: kids with potential and kids under-performing. They have different school programmes, different classes and teachers. It is like putting the top tier on steroids and leaving the bottom one to go with the flow.

This segregation into production lines just deepens as children go further down the school production line. At the age of 15-16, you can literally leave school and integrate the labour market through an apprenticeship. It does not matter that you have never done a single day of chemistry and hardly any biology or physics. Alternately, if you were fortunate enough to be in the top tier, you could go to college and eventually, have the chance to be part of the academic elite. Bankers, lawyers, politicians, doctors, etc., etc. Basically, the people who have a say in how the country is run. You can also stick to the middle path. However, this means you are pretty much stuck in the middle, doing odd jobs.

While this model looks very rigid and labels prematurely brains as quality or good for nothing, there are ways to work around it. People have managed to negotiate its labyrinths successfully and upgraded themselves to higher quality products.

Needless to say, this model leads to a huge amount of frustration, broken dreams and very long years of study, should one choose to persevere to get the label of an elite human resource. It is not unusual to spend 8-10 years to complete a 4-year university course. What a waste of time. While this seems terribly inefficient and inhuman, there are fundamental geographic and historical reasons as to why a tiny country like Switzerland has created such an elaborate education model.

Switzerland was largely a country of artisans and mountaineers until about 100+ years ago. It needed physical labour to defy the elements and the laws of physics to conquer the mountains. In a nutshell, fight avalanches, dig tunnels and build cable cars. No wonder, some of the most impressive engineering infrastructure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was built here. The Aebola railroad and the Jungfrau cable car are stark examples of human audacity and precision.

In the winter when the snow was deep and the days where short, they would take long hours to work on wood carvings, fine mechanics, cheese and chocolate, perfecting not only their recipes but also precision skills. The very idea of apprenticeship was born from the labour market demand for precision and craftmanship that can be learned only by doing. This has also become the core of the Swiss brand which is sold so successfully around the world today, just like a Swiss cloth. Only time will show if this skillset will remain common human resource currency in the future.

There are no better education models, they have just adapted over the years to produce the skills that the local market demands. Each of these models are a reflection of a country’s culture, belief systems and perception, and must likely past, domestic market demand for human capital.

However, globalisation and technology have had a huge and disruptive impact on the education industry, setting it on an irreversible collision course. Do education systems still produce and supply the required human resources? Is the way we measure the quality of education products still valid?

How Long Is the Yardstick?

Besides labelling human resources and awarding them a quality grade by issuing shiny papers, stars and badges, governments and international organisations have created several tools to measure and compare the overall quality of education. You will have to bear with me here as the yardstick is quite distorted and complex.

Why does this matter? For one, these measurements give us a good insight into what shapes labour market demand. In addition, it provides us with a glimpse into the continuous efforts to standardise the production of human capital.

The United Nations measures education mainly by focusing on literacy reading, writing and counting skills. More recently, it has added information technology skills, although describing it quite elaborately as:

means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world⁴.

In a nutshell, basic labour market skills. If you don’t know how to read, write, count and use electronic devices, you are pretty much a sub-standard and lower quality product.

This is also reflected in UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 entitled Quality Education. In its own words, it aims to Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. ⁵While this sounds like a very noble cause, the goal does not outline specifically what it means by quality education. However, it does provide some valuable input on how education is measured, or at least the most basic skills required to produce a minimum quality of human resources⁶:

Shockingly low proficiency rates in reading and mathematics signal a global learning crisis.

This is the bombastic opening statement in the 2019 UN report on SDG 4. It estimates that about 617 million children and adolescents of primary and lower secondary school age lacked minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics in 2015; more than 55% of the global total. Shocking? One in two children around the world lack the most basic skills to access labour markets. This is as low as 12 kids out of 100 in Europe and North America, and goes up to 84-88% in Sub-Saharan Africa. While these numbers may be shocking in themselves,