The avoidance of injury, loss, theft and predation. Safety is the constant most likely to be solved by pooling: insurance, policing, regulation, and public health all work by spreading a risk that no individual can carry. It produces two kinds of business — those that prevent harm and those that pay for it after the fact — and the second is usually larger.
66 frictions in this map are rooted here.
Its neighbourhood
Everything this entry connects to directly. Click any point to follow it.
Infancy
- Keep a fragile newborn alive
- Cannot tell what is wrong with a non-verbal baby
- The mother's body and mind must recover from birth
- A manufactured product replaces a biological one
- The infant does not sleep, so neither do the parents
- Manage waste many times a day for two years
- Billions of non-degrading diapers
- Someone must watch the infant every hour, but someone must also earn
- Pooled infants share every infection
- Move an infant through a world built for adults
Childhood
- School ends hours before work does
- Engineered food outcompetes real food
- Children catch everything and cannot stay home alone
- A child can die, and the parent knows it
- The child develops differently and the system is not built for it
- Screens hold attention better than parents can
- The world outside the home can kill a child
Adolescence
Early adulthood
Household formation
Parenthood
Midlife
Late career
Retirement
Decline
- Cannot manage washing, dressing, eating, or moving alone
- The family caregiver breaks
- The mind fails before the body
- A fall can end independence in an afternoon
- A dozen medications, each with its own schedule
- Repeated hospital admissions, each one worse
- Cannot shop, cook, chew, or swallow
- The last illness has begun