Correctly Executing a Corrupted Code

In a recent post to LinkedIn, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEALL) shared a critique of GDP as a failing measure of wellbeing in the economy, under the arresting title of What's the Problem with GDP?, using the compelling graphic that I pirated from their post and reproduced (without permission) above.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/weall_earthovershootday-beyondgrowth-postgrowth-activity-7224791346748821506-ziqg

The truth is there is no problem with GDP when it is used for the purposes for which it was invented: as a measure of the sale of national economies.

There is something seriously amiss with measuring scale, and Growth in scale, as a proxy for the right economy for informing a cohesive society on a planetary scale in the 21st Century.

What’s wrong with that?

GDP Growth is a useful measure within a social narrative that shows us the economy as the production and distribution of goods and services in markets for allocating scarcity through price in which all social choices are made either through the Markets(capital and commercial) or by Politicians/the Sovereign.

This social narrative and sociology of social choosing supports a social contract that:

• calls on each of us and all of us to work hard to produce and consume more,
• on the promise that
• more will always be better, and
• that as freely self-determining market participants, we will each always be free to freely determine, each for ourselves, our own fair share of this more that is better.

This is the prevailing social contract for Growth.? It is the special pleading for the special interest of capital markets professionals in placing and keeping the Capital Markets at the center of our human world.

It is

• a Late 20th Century replacement of
• the Post-War American Dream of a house in the suburbs, a car in the drive, and a good (corporate) job, with a good (corporate) pension
• that replaced the Late 19th Century American Dream of Go West, young man!
• that was the last gasp (before a half-century of industrialized warefare on a global scale, once the Frontier stopped receding) of an early 19th Century social narrative of Progress into an infinitely receding Frontier (that is not really infinitiely receding) for endless market expansion (that is not relly endless) through technological innovation and economies of scale (that reach a point of dis-economy) that was the special pleading for the special interest of capital markets-financed, fossil-fueled industrialism,
• that replaced the special interests of bank-financed, sail-powered global merchants that is called Mercantilism (see D'Maris Coffman ) during the 18th Century;
• that replaced the special interests of a landed aristocracy that dates back centuries, to the Middle Ages, following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Let’s call the prevailing social contract for Growth, Corporatism (in search of a handy handle).

This contract for Corporate Growth that we inherited from the closing decades of the 20th Century is failing us, in the opening decades of the 21st Century.

It is failing us because it is fundamentally flawed in at least these three ways.

1. More is not always better. It depends. More of what? Better for whom?? What are the costs? Who bears those costs? Fairness matters.? Equity matters. Inclusion matters.? If we want a contract for social cohesion within a planetary population, it has to be inclusive, equitable and fair. Corporatism is icnlsuive, but only to a point. It is fair, but only for some. It is equitable, but only if you have money.
2. People do not make choices in the markets. Money does.? Or, rather, people make choices in the markets by spending money. The more money you control, the more freedom you have to choose.? The less you control, the less freedom you have to choose. If yo don't have any money, you don't have any freedom. Not really. So, who controls the most money in our economy today? (Hint: it’s almost certainly not who you think.)
3. Money matters.? And because money matters, Finance also matters, as the institutions of agency, authority and accountability through which society aggregates money set aside by others and deploys those aggregations as money made to flow into enterprise for its use, for a purpose, for a time, at a cost and on terms, that form the businesses that form the technologies that form the choices that form the economy that informs society, and our shared future.

What we are getting from this social contract for Corporate Growth is not the promised perfectly fair sharing of scarcity through the freedom of self-determination.

What we are getting is more and more for fewer and fewer (Wealth and Power Concentration) that is leaving less that is less for the rest (Wealth and Power dissipation) in a cascading cavalcade of social discord that manifests as:

• short-termism;
• market eltisism;
• corporate gigantism;
• financial system instability;
• retirement security insecurity;
• cultural and ecological unsustainability;
• Dark Money capture of politics and public discourse;
• political divisiveness degenerating towards violence;
• a growing inability for Civil Society and Citizens to hold our institutions of agency and authority accountable for their instutional exercises of their instituitonal owers true to their institutional purposes.

What are those institutions? What is their purpose? What are their powers? How do we hold them accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercise of their institutional powers true to their institutional purposes?

If we want to evolve 21st Century society and economy beyond Growth as measured using GDP, a good place to start would be an expedition in the imagination for inquiry into our social institutions of social choosing in search of insight, and new learning that can inform social innovation, and prosperous adaptations to the changing circumstances of our changing times in their 21st Century.

A good place to start that inquiry is with the question I asked above: "Who controls the most money in our economy today?"

The answer is not the Capital Markets, although that is the answer the Capital Markets want us to believe is true.

The answer is the fiduciary stewards of the tens of trillions, collectively, worldwide, in society's shared savings aggregated into social trusts for the social purpose of socially provisioning the social safety nets of Workplace Pensions and Civil Society Endowments, as forever promises of a dignified future quality of life for some, directly, that is also, by necessity, a present and a future dignifed quality of life for us all, consequently.

Our common sense does not see this.

Because our commom sense has been captured by the Capital Markets, who want us to only see the Capital Markets.

We need to teach ourselves to look past the Capital Markets, to see Fiduciary Money for what it truly, legally, is: society's shared savings with the power and the duty to bargain for the common good.

A power it is currently not using.

A duty it is currently not fulfilling.

Because the code of common sense has been corrupted. We need to shut down, and restart, to reboot the code, and purge that corruption.