The One Question We Need to Be Asking: Who Is It For?
Let’s face it, economics is made up — it’s not intrinsic or natural law — it’s a mere invention
For years I’ve resisted fully speaking to what I’ve felt emerging from within. Which is that our economic system is upside down. I’ve resisted it because, well, it’s our economic system. Because there are all sorts of learned academics, billionaire hedge fund managers, financial analysts, journalists, and highly complex economic models and theorems that tell us how things are supposed to work.
But . . .
We’re failing to ask the most important question we could possibly ask about our economic system: Who does it serve?
Let’s face it, economics is a man-made invention. It’s not intrinsic. It’s not natural law. It’s not scientific cannon. It’s an invention.
But who invented it?
Answer: people in power, wealthy people, landowners and landlords.
But this is not to be a diatribe about the evils of the elite. This is about all of us. All of us who have learned about economics from weighty and authoritative sources. We’ve learned about it and noticed that nearly everyone under the sun fully subscribes to it. Who are we to question the prevailing wisdom, the financial experts, and government officials who feed us the indices like they’re the word of God?
The jobs report, the GDP, inflation, the DOW, the Nasdaq, and on and on. It’s self-fulfilling because the more authority we ascribed to a thing, the less we’re willing to question its efficacy and the more we blindly follow it.
But who is it for?
I read a few years ago about how some rather powerful people lobbied for Milton Friedman to win the Nobel prize in economics, which once secured was immediately adopted as the gospel of economic theory. I wasn’t able to find a citation to verify this story, but it makes sense. Again, the question is, who does the system serve? Why would we (or anyone) want to lift up Milton Friedman’s model of business existing solely for the increase in profit?
Profit for who? Profit for what reason?
Are my words rubbing you the wrong way? Are you thinking, we need profit so business can thrive because when business thrives there are more jobs and the quality of life improves?
Of course. This is the prevailing wisdom. It’s called supply side economics, which means the more large organizations profit the better the economy will be because they use their profits to stimulate productivity and jobs. But there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that supports the claim.
It’s logical, but it doesn’t pan out. Higher profits mean large organizations buy back their stocks to raise share prices, which enriches its leadership who sit on piles of stock options. Or it can mean more mergers, or the parking of cash profits in offshore tax havens. It can mean all sorts of things, while more jobs or higher paying jobs usually lie at the bottom of the boardroom agenda.
We hold “profit” as the pinnacle, the overarching, the most important of all objectives.
Why?
I’m saying it now. I’ve been holding it back for years for fear of being deemed a long-haired, pot smoking, hippie, radical. Yes, my hair is long, but I’m not a hippie and I don’t smoke pot. Well, maybe I am a radical. Is that so bad? Don’t we need more radical thought? Radical ideas? Why should we be afraid of it?
Indigenous people have held the concept of living for the seventh generation unborn for tens of thousands of years. That’s their GDP. Our great, great, great, great grandchildren. Imagine that. Living for our progeny who we’ll never meet, who will likely be born in a different century.
Why should we live for the seventh generation unborn? Because it’s awesome. Because it’s joyful. Because it deepens our purpose, which give us a more fulfilling life.
We’ve been going along with the flow for too long, and in the process we’ve poisoned our environment, become a more divided country, perpetuated war and starvation, and on and on. We’ve wrought so much harm and devastation merely by following along and believing in a system that we’ve been spoon fed with, led to believe in by thousands of experts, a media system, a paradigm, a construct. It’s too much to disagree with. It causes us to question our own sanity, as I’ve been doing for some twenty years.
The thinking goes . . . I must be insane for thinking this way because the only people who see it this way are the wacko radicals, the crack pots, the has been’s and never will be’s. I don’t want to be one of those. I don’t want my words and my credibility discounted because my thinking is too radical.
But my thinking is radical. And we need it. We need to bust out of our human rut of entropy, of ever-increasing complexity and confusion, of mortgaging future generations for our own appeasement.
And what I’m really talking about is love. Yes, that’s right. Living for the seventh generation is all about love. Loving the future. Loving our children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s children. Loving nature. Loving trees and shrubs and insects and soil and the clouds and the Milky Way.
Love is the opposite of fear. Fear says we need more jobs, and therefore more profit. Fear says we need more money, which again means more profit. Fear says we need to justify our worth by being successful in the way culture defines it, which is financial success.
Love says we serve. We serve those who need most. Love says we are equal with all life. Love says we are caretakers. Love says never take more than we need. Love says we contribute. Love says enough is enough. Love is courageous.
Who does the system serve? Let’s ask the question.
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I would appreciate the opportunity to dialogue with your team. We have an outside-the-box, new economics white paper linked below.
There’s no question that traditional economics is failing us. On the other hand, the traditional rant against the rich doesn’t move the ball down the court. There isn’t a rich family alive on the planet they can eat enough food for one person to go hungry, live in a big enough house for one person to be homeless, or consume enough education or health care for anyone to go with out. Radicals have the exact same confusion over money and wealth that everyone else has. There is no cheese down that hole.
Sacred economics, feminist economics, Donut economics, Buddhist economics, Caring Economy economics, Freakonomics…
Everything posing as new economics has been merely new values plastered over old exchange-token economics, including crypto-token economics. Cryptocurrencies took the very worst feature of money… speculation instead of producing needed goods and services… and turned it into an engine of creating more billionaires, but not creating meaningful jobs or bringing a single community out of poverty. Of course, it also drags along the outdated baggage of economic crashes.
Here is why we propose that a new Business—Community Wealth Ledger that lives in the Commons and operates from design principles—akin to the Internet and the Visa Chaord (Hock)— can repair the global economy at today’s pace of mobile apps and social media. All the needed technology is finally mature from the local-to-global levels.
Ledgers don’t crash. Ledgers don’t experience inflation, recession or politics. Ledger entries can’t be hoarded. There is no such thing as entry flight from ledgers the way there is money flight from communities. No one can lend ledger entries for interest nor invest them for speculative gains. These are all the features of tokens.
In ledger economics, the focus becomes production for human advancement. Every advance in technology; economic infrastructure; human skill, knowledge and creativity; and our ability to deploy ever-greater amounts of free and abundant renewable resources—would raise the quality of life across-the-board, while shortening working hours and reducing damage to the natural environment. This is the paradigm shift that can address our global social, economic and environmental problems.
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A paradigm shift in business leadership can carry us to win-win cooperation that lifts up everyone. Solutions must be systemic, not Band-Aids.
10mn intro https://bit.ly/2SfsOGU DEI podcast https://tinyurl.com/ycsj4d8y
New economics essay https://rb.gy/olyseu
If this resonates, let’s schedule a first conversation. I have an exciting 12 1/2 year history in New Mexico in business, activism, Solar home construction , emotional growth and healing, and spirituality. It is where my work was born.
Beaming love, light and blessings on your journeys. Joel
Joel Hodroff
Inventor
Social Entrepreneur
Economic Futurist
Joel@Scryp.io
How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone? ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
Awesome, Glenn! On the money! (Pun intended). Being concretized confidence in a social system, money can be structured to serve the whole. And as you beautifully articulated, the bottom line for accomplishing that restructuring is love. Love is how a financial system profits everyone. To move in that direction, we can focus our investments in entities that are socially and globally responsible—and support those in our circle who love the planet (and what people are doing to contribute) unconditionally.