Influencers and Followers

By Steven Coutinho

How much of what you choose is of your own free will, and how much is influenced by the will of others? Why do only a few make choices that lead to wealth while the many remain in fear?

Influencers & Followers takes you on a journey of narratives and how Influencers concentrate wealth into their hands by influencing the choices of Followers. You'll discover how Influencers use the narrative of gods to justify tyranny, the narrative of color to colonize, and the narrative of consumerism to glorify work.

This book is not only a colorful expose into the dark Machiavellian world of the myth-makers. It also combines the latest insights from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to explain how our brain internalizes narratives to make meaning of reality - influencing how we think, behave, and choose.

 

Finally, Influencers & Followers proposes solutions to redistribute wealth more equally by redesigning money and our monetary system, transforming education, and building awareness.

Given current conflicts, political landscapes, and environmental decline, this book's goal is timely: to help people choose from their own interests - instead of the interests of others. You have to admit, with a title like this, is there really a choice? Welcome to the world of Influencers & Followers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Coutinho
• Release date: Apr 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224127603

Steven Coutinho

STEVEN COUTINHO worked as regional managing director of Royal Bank of Canada in the Caribbean before pursuing his dream: empowering postcolonial minds. His firm, Xpand, helps leaders unlock the true potential of people, drawing on decades of experience advising governments and companies on sustainable growth. Steven holds a Masters in Medical Physics, cum laude, from the University of Groningen, and an MBA from the Wharton School. With a catchy title like Breaking Rank though, why should you care about his rank? Go on, read the book, you'll be glad you did!

Book preview

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THINKING OUTSIDE NATURE’S BOX

BREAKING RANK

BE FEARLESS

HOW TO STEAL THE WORLD

www.StevenCoutinho.com

First published 2024

Copyright © 2024 Steven W. Coutinho

All rights reserved.

Published by Coutinho Publishing, a division of Coutinho & Company.

Edited by: Dr. Niall Kishtainy

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

Illustrations inspired by Dominic K. Coutinho

Cover and illustrations by Lera Balashova

Dedication

To my mother, Yvonne,

and my father, Walther:

Without you, not me.

In more ways than one.

I miss you both dearly.

Machiavelli: by Force or Fraud

If you watch the ways of men

you will see that those who obtain great

wealth and power

do so either by force or fraud,

and having got them

they conceal under some honest name

the foulness of their deeds.

INFLUENCERS & FOLLOWERS

Dedication

Machiavelli: by Force or Fraud

Introduction: Influence, Choice and Inequality

PART I. THE ART OF THE NARRATIVE

1. Why do we believe in narratives?

2. How tyrants amass wealth

3. How Original Sin keeps everyone occupied

PART II. INFLUENCING CHOICE

4. Why do we choose what we choose?

5. Why do Influencers and Followers choose differently?

6. Lessons in persuasion

PART III. CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

7. Correcting the mistake in money

8. Learning how to look differently through education

9. The awareness to leave the waiting room

Appendix: money, belief and happiness

Acknowledgements

About the author: The Philosopher Banker

References

INFLUENCERS

&

FOLLOWERS

Introduction: Influence, Choice and Inequality

History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great.

― Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad (1997)

THE WAITING ROOM EXPERIMENT¹. Ever heard of it? There’s a crowded waiting room of people waiting for the doctor. They’re all actors, though—except one. Suddenly, a buzzer goes off… and all the actors stand up and sit back down again! This goes on for just three buzzes until the test subject, who now feels really out of place, acts on her urge to also stand up and sit down! She can't rationally explain why she chose to behave this way—following others just ‘felt’ like the right thing to do. To make matters even more interesting, when all the fake patients had gone to the doctor and departed, leaving her alone, she continued to stand and sit at the sound of the buzzer. Actual patients that later entered the waiting room, picked up on her behavior and started doing the same!

So what happened? The answer is that the choices of the patients were influenced by some unseen experimenters who used a simple buzzer to trigger their need for social conformity. Social conformity evolved in our ancestors over millions of years as a reaction to fear: the fear of being excluded from a social group that could provide for our safety. Fear is an invisible emotional force that is influenced by the environment around us, but most of us are not even aware of those influences, nor how much they shape our choices. This includes choices about how we make, save, and spend money. Choices about money are important because they determine how much we can spend on essential needs, our level of dependency on others, and how we dedicate our time. Choices about money ultimately influence our wealth. So if we tie together the idea of people's choices in a waiting room being influenced by invisible experimenters, and people in society making choices about money, some questions arise: when it comes to our wealth, how much of what we choose is of our own free will? How much is influenced by the will of others? How do we even really know?

This book explores an alternative explanation of wealth and inequality by examining what creates wealth in the first place: our choices and the forces that influence them. As you will soon discover, most of our choices are influenced by narratives that induce an emotion of fear. Those narratives have been developed by what I call Influencers. No, not the Influencers with a few million or so followers on social media. I’m talking about capitalists, politicians, religious leaders, and media conglomerates who control the minds and actions of billions of Followers (those who believe in the narratives) without them even realizing it. Yeah, big bad-ass stuff. Influencers have influenced much of how we think today, who we think we are, and how we choose—especially when it comes to our choices with money and who gets to have it. This foundational idea has nothing to do with any conspiracy theory, though. It is grounded in institutional analysis you’ll discover throughout this book. Take, for example, a quote from Influencer Goustav Le Bon taken from his book ‘The Crowd’. It had a significant influence on Western leaders at the beginning of the twentieth century:

The masses have never thirsted after truth.

Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men’s minds is the only real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against.

Take another quote from Walter Lippmann, adviser to US President Woodrow Wilson. He once wrote about the need to manufacture consent in a democracy using narratives. He called it a useful technique of control that was necessary because:

The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.

With Influencers using ideas like these to influence Followers, what could possibly go wrong?

Divisions and struggle

Divisions within society are, for many people, so obvious that it has become an overlooked aspect of life. I became aware of such divisions because my father, an economics professor and politician, always used to point them out to me. White and Black, judges and cleaners, nobility and peasants (no, I’m not that old, but my dad apparently was), the haves and the have-nots. All these divisions come down to classes that ‘can’ and classes that ‘cannot’. Likewise, in every company and political party, there were just a few choosing for the many. My dad always said that every society has just a handful of decision makers who can call the shots—the masses were simply wood for the fire. Ouch. Nearly every month throughout my youth, he reminded me, There are show horses and work horses. Ensure you belong to the show horses. i.e., don’t be a Follower. Honestly, it was tiring, until I later realized in my own career the effects of such divisions: constant animosity between execs, managers, and workers, sometimes in the open, mostly slumbering. Then came the struggle with the labor unions which always seemed to have this idea that ‘their people’ were being exploited by ‘us execs’.

The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, saw the struggles that came from division, too. He believed that the hoarding of property in the hands of the few would result in struggle because the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of many and excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade [the rich man's] possessions.² In plain English, this means the emotions of Followers will eventually drive them to steal shit from Influencers.

Karl Marx, the famous economist and philosopher, saw the struggle too. Over a century ago, he wrote: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. In other words, the emotions of Followers will eventually lead them to beat the shit out of Influencers. Looking at our world’s historical conflicts through the lens of class struggles shines a new light on everything from the wars in Ancient Greece and the assassination of Julius Caesar to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement in 2011 with its slogan, We are the 99%. Now, where did that number come from?

Earlier that year, economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article in the magazine Vanity Fair³, Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. In it, he spoke of the damaging impact the economic divide had on American society and how the fate of the wealthy 1 percent was bound up with how the other 99 percent lived. He also wrote how the portion of wealth that 1 percent owned continued to increase. In the mid 1980s, 1 percent of Americans owned around 33 percent of US wealth. When Stiglitz wrote his article in 2011, it had risen to 40 percent. Inequality has continued to rise since then. So, how has division evolved in the rest of the world?

Wealth inequality numbers at a global level have been sparse until recent decades. We know inequality fell dramatically from the beginning of the twentieth century in some of the world’s largest economies, until the 1980s. In Western Europe, for example, the top 1 percent owned almost 55 percent of all wealth in 1910, but dropped to just 20 percent in 1980⁴. This drop had to do with factors such as the Great Depression, the destruction of wealth brought on by the two World Wars, nationalization of industries and greater government control over the economy⁵. By the 1980s, the top 1 percent in most large economies, owned anywhere between 20-30 percent of all wealth⁶. Since then, however, the downward trend has reversed, and wealth concentration is on the way up again. While little is known about the recent global trend of inequality at a worldwide level, large-scale deregulation, privatization, and increased international trade seem to be driving the division. So, where are we today as a result? According to Credit Suisse’s World Inequality Report⁷, today, 1 percent of everyone owns 48 percent of everything. The UK-based charity Oxfam⁸ adds insult to injury: they claim that today, only twenty-six families possess as much wealth as the sum of wealth in the hands of half the population on earth.

So what about the rest? If we look at how the remaining 52 percent of wealth is distributed among the rest of the world, division is just as shocking. Forty-six percent owns around 51 percent, resulting in half of the population owning 99 percent of all wealth. Where does it leave the other half of the world? With about 1 percent. Eyewatering, isn’t it?

Why care about inequality?

Now, you may be shrugging your shoulders: So what? As long as I have a job and can go about my everyday life while avoiding all these struggles, how does inequality affect me? For one, that job may soon disappear. In January of 2024, the IMF published a report predicting that forty percent of all jobs will soon be taken over by artificial intelligence (AI), worsening worldwide inequality⁹. Second, job or no job, there’s a price tag attached to inequality that we must all pay—and it’s not small. In their book ‘The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better’ the authors present a whole list of costs to society when inequality rises: lower mental health, higher levels of drug abuse, more physical health issues, less social cohesion, lower life expectancy, more obesity, lower educational performance, unsettling crime, increased debt and here’s another one: worsening climate change. While I write this chapter, the world has gone through heatwave after heatwave, with September of 2023 smashing all temperature records to date. The constant hunt for more wealth by a few Influencers comes at the cost of every resource on the planet. The byproducts of these resources are now found spread across our oceans, the air we breathe, and the land we live on. The Followers who are simply surviving in this game choose to focus on their own survival first. Yet our very existence as a species is now at stake. Soon, both Influencers and Followers will have to fight to survive. Soon, the struggle will be at everyone’s doorstep.

With all this in mind, take another look at your own society: who is taking responsibility for the environment. Is it left to the few, or does everyone have the time to pitch in and assume responsibility? What about safety: is it safe to walk in every part of your city, or are there also ghettos with bullets flying everywhere? Is good education and healthcare available to everyone or just the happy few?  Now think about the affordability of good quality food: how much does it cost to buy good healthy food, and is that affordable for everyone? Or are there some people who simply don’t have a choice outside of the one-dollar special at McDonalds? Still not worried about inequality and its effects? If you are, let’s look for a solution.

Hungry for a solution

Many books have been written on inequality, so why another one? Surely, by now, we must know what causes inequality, so we can just work towards implementing solutions that solve it? Let’s briefly examine how different thinkers in recent history have looked at inequality. We start with the book that kicked off the whole inequality debate in the first place: ‘Cours d'économie politique.’ It was written by Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto at the beginning of the twentieth century just before inequality started to fall. Pareto observed that eighty percent of the wealth in Italy was owned by twenty percent of the population. He found the same wealth distribution in Germany and Switzerland. Pareto then tried to prove that the distribution of wealth in society isn’t random and that a consistent pattern appears throughout history in all parts of the world and all societies.

Curiously enough, this 80-20 division, now called the Pareto Principle, isn’t limited to wealth inequality either: eighty percent of total points in the NBA are scored by twenty percent of the players, eighty percent of sales comes from twenty percent of clients,  and even Tinder is not immune: eighty percent of women go for only twenty percent of the men. It seems that for many outcomes, roughly eighty percent of consequences (the many) come from twenty percent of causes (the vital few).

What’s even more fascinating is that the 80-20 division also applies to its own ‘children’: multiply 20% by 20%, and you get 4%. Multiply 80% by 80%, and you get 64%.  Do this one more time: 20% multiplied by 4% is roughly 1%, and 80% multiplied by 64% is 51.2%. Look familiar? Look back at the infographic above; 1% of everyone owns nearly 50% of everything, and slightly more than 50% owns only 1%! The same infographic also shows that 86 percent owns 13 percent. Although not precise, you have to admit the numbers are uncannily similar. Pareto did not explain the 80-20 division nor how to solve for inequality. However, this strange regularity points in the direction of a natural process this book will explore in detail—along with solutions to halt the process.

Along came economist Thomas Piketty, who attempted to explain the division of wealth. Following the publication in 2014 of his book ‘Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century’, there was enormous media coverage on inequality, even attracting the attention of leaders worldwide. Piketty argued with pages of data that the unprecedented concentration of wealth happened because the return on capital was greater than economic growth. Ultimately, Piketty’s argument comes down to math: Influencers with inherited wealth simply reinvested their income and watched it grow even more. He didn’t explore how the ancestors of Influencers were able to amass wealth in the first place, though— Piketty just showed how Influencers continued to grow it. That growth is called compounding, which Albert Einstein famously referred to as the eighth wonder of the world. Politicians who ruled that world soon jumped on the bandwagon: former US president Barack Obama called rising inequality the defining challenge of our time, the Pope called on governments to redistribute wealth to the poor, and the then head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, declared that reducing inequality was a priority because it threatens the stability and sustainability of the world economic system. What world leaders, however, did not say was how they would solve it. This reminds me of Beatles singer John Lennon, who once sang: You say you want a revolution, but then added a characteristic barb: we’d all love to see the plan.

So, let’s look at those who devised a plan, starting with economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. In 2007, he published ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’, which looked at the past eighty years of American history in the context of economic inequality. Krugman argued that government policies have played a big role in widening the income gap from the 1980s until today. He advocated a new New Deal which includes focusing more on social programs and universal health care—and less on national defense.

Then there’s British economist Sir Anthony Atkinson, who also took a stab at making a plan. Atkinson has arguably done the most of anyone to develop the economic analysis of inequality over the last 50 years. He also mentored Piketty. He felt, however, that Piketty’s analysis in ‘Capital’ was a description of the problem but missed a solution. In his book ‘Inequality, What Can Be Done?’ he sets out an actual plan for reducing inequality, focusing initially on Britain. He would, for example, overhaul certain taxes that favored the wealthy. Some of these taxes, for example, taxed large homes proportionally less than small ones. He also proposed to increase benefits for those who had less in society. Of course that would cost serious money, but—if the politics allowed for it—a new progressive income tax would bring in serious revenues.

So, what happened to both Krugman’s and Atkinson’s plans after their publication? Nothing. Why? Because politics did not allow for change. Changing one’s behavior—as we saw with the patients in the waiting room—resides in a choice. And as you will learn from this book, the choices of those who ‘have’ are very different from those who ‘have not’. It’s precisely that difference in choice that ensures inequality remains. The solution to inequality ultimately lies in changing