The Future is our New Frontier
The Economy. The Right Economy. And the Social Energy of Money.
Modern Humans do not think about the future.
Instead, we think about the past. And see our future as the forward projection of an historical trend line of lived experiences reduced to numbers, plotted on an imaginary line, the continuation of which is expected to be our future.
Then, we bet on that trend line.
Until things change, and the trend line fails, destroyed by a deeper reality of what it really means to be human in the world - a reality of lived experience that cannot be assigned a number, and reduced to a trend line - through which we create for ourselves a new experience of what is popular.
Then, we plot a new trend, shift our bets to that trend, and start once again on a journey into the future, riding wave after wave of booms that go bust, through a language and a logic of Growth through Creative Destruction.
This is the social narrative that we inherited from the Late 20th Century. It is a 19th Century social narrative of PROGRESS into an infinitely receding geobiophysical Frontier for endless market expansion, through technological innovation and economies of scale, that has been stripped of its humanity and reduced to GROWTH as the simple numerical increases in transaction volumes measured in prices paid in money, from one period of measurement to the next.
In this narrative, it doesn't matter what these transactions are, because more is always better.
That is the core axiom at the center of this story: more is always better.
This core axiom is a special pleading for the special interests of market professionals whose expertise is in knowing what to buy, and when to sell, to time and ride the waves of boom (betting on the trend) and bust (losing that bet when times change, people's choices get remade, and the trend fails) in market-clearing prices for incrementally liquid shares of ownership in large scale, long dated financing agreements that are bought and sold at market clearing prices, in anticipation of future movements in those prices, in the markets for maintaining market-clearing prices on such shares.
These markets need growth in share prices to maintain liquidity that attracts market participants and generates the trades that let market professionals earn fees and make profits.
It is market professionals that need Growth in the economy.
It is the special pleading for the special interest of market professionals in Growth that is at the core of American-style Capital Markets Growth through Creative Destruction that dominates the social narrative for choosing the right economy that dominates humanity in the 21st Century.
This special pleading is a promise that:
This is the social contract of 20th Century American-style Capital Markets Growth through Creative Destruction (booms that go bust) that shapes our expectations for how to shape the right economy, globally, today.
It is a failing social contract in the 21st Century.
It is failing because it is fundamentally flawed.
It is flawed because more is not always better. It depends.
More of what?
Better for who?
Lived experience teaches us that there are nuanced and evolving connections between quantities of money and quality of life. We need to be careful with the quantities, if we care for, and care about, the qualities.
Lived experience teaches us that money matters in our human way of being in the world. Money is the energy that shapes the economy within which we all live.
If we want to live well, we have to have the right economy. Which means we have to channel the flow of money as social energy the right way.
In the February 8, 2024 edition of the SystemShift podcast from Greenpeace , Amanda Janoo Economics and Policy Lead at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance - WEAll tells us that we should never forget to remember that the economy is not some thing that is other and "out there", that is given to us, in the way that the earth is given to us, or the solar system is given to us. It is us. We make the economy. It is our own uniquely human way of living, together, and apart, in a world we shape for ourselves out of the world of Nature into which we all are born.
If the economy we have is not right, we made it. So, we can change it.
Riffing off the poetry of the early 20th Century cartoon character, Pogo:
We have met the economy, and it is us!
The topic for discussion during this episode of the podcast is the way in which the economy we now have - what may be described as a GDP Growth economy - is not right for the changes in our changing times, in the 21st Century, and how the right economy should be less about more GDP and more about better wellbeing for all.
Deep into the conversation (@35:00) the focus shifted from What? to How? as host Carl Shlyter pressed Amanda as follows:
“[we are talking a lot about a] redistribution agenda…
But what about trying a pre-distribution schedule and pre-distribution mechanics where we actually don’t create [the problems] from the beginning?
…we already talked about the financial system and changing that in other episodes, but what other methods of predistribution could you have…?”
Amanda responds by refocusing the framing a bit:
“How do we move upstream and design an economic system that is itself already designed to ensure a more equitable outcome?” (emphasis added)
Amanda goes on to talk about business ownership structures like worker cooperatives, non-profits and the commons.
I am asking you to dwell with me on Amanda's use of this value-rich word "upstream".
Amanda is talking, as I understand her, about what is upstream from Government in the sociology of social choosing through which we, as a society, shape the economy to be the way it is, and will be.
What is this stream?
The prevailing wisdom of American-style Capital Markets Growth is that there is no stream. There is only the Markets and the Sovereign in a dueling duality of control over the choices that shape the economy: distribution and redistribution. Freedom and Compulsion.
In this social narrative, there is no pre-distribution. The Markets are the source and origin of all choices that shape our economy, as the perfect expression of our infallible collective wisdom as freely self-determining market participants, each freely determining for ourselves, in the free expression of our own best knowledge of what is best for us, individually.
Choices, of course, can only be made from among the available options. But there is no exploration of where those options come from. They come from business. But where "business" gets them is never really explored. We start with business as a given, and go from there.
Given by who?
Hence Amanda's important admonition earlier in the podcast, about the economy being us. The choices from which we can choose as free choosers in the market are not given to us by Nature, or some Deity or some other Ineffable Other.
We make them.
In part, through inquiry for insight and new learning about how the world about us (that is given to us by Nature or the Deity or some other Ineffable Other) works, and how we can take the world about us as we find it, and change it, to make it work more a way we choose to make it.
And also through enterprise for putting learning into action (as technology, in the original Greek meaning of the word, as art, craft and the work of human hands), making a surplus of artifacts of human insight and ingenuity that can be shared with others, in exchange for something else that is given in the exchange.
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What that other is that is given in exchange in our economy is money.
Money is a human invention. A legal instrument and social construct that empowers the exchange of surpluses between people who are separated by distances of space, time and social connection. You don't have to trust the other person, if you can trust their money.
That money is an IOU that in the language of the law is universally negotiable. It is a general claim upon the economy that can be redeemed anywhere, from anybody, in any exchange, simply by physically handing over physical possession and control of that money.
The thing we call money, its physical form, is less important than its social function, as a facilitator of exchange.
We each and all need money, personally and individually, through which to shape our own personal and individual best lives, as best we can, from among the choices that are made available to us, and others, from which we can choose by spending money, in the economy that we shape for each other, together, in society.
The enterprises that shape the choices from which we can choose, by the spending of money that we earn for ourselves through our participation in enterprise, also need money, to pay the costs of doing the work of putting learning into action collaboratively co-creating surpluses of technology that can then be made available for exchange with others.
The process by which money gets made available to enterprise we can call Finance.
And so, now, we can see that the stream of social choosing through which society shapes the economy:
And we can see that the Markets of the "Markets vs Government" duality are actually two different social choosing structures in the "stream" of social choosing:
Looking at the economy through this expanded sociology of social choosing:
we can see that if we want to explore the possibilities for shaping choices that will shape the right economy for social cohesion in the first place, predistributively, so that we don't make wrong choices in distribution that we then need to make right through redistribution, the place we have to look is Finance.
What do we see when we look to Finance?
Consider the recently launched Just Transition Finance Lab at the London School of Economics.
Their approach to financial system transformation for a just transition focuses on transforming:
for financial system actors that consists of:
There is no proposal for innovating new actors with new powers for shaping the new economy. Only proposals for giving existing actors new tools, and new accountability for how they use those tools.
This brings us to the power of what George Lakoff calls framing.
How we frame a problem determines what we can see as possible solutions.
The Just Transition Finance Lab frames the problems of finance as moral failings of the existing cast of financial actors. So the only solutions it can see involves recalibrating the moral compass for those actors.
If we change the framing, from moral failings, to wrong knowledge of powers and purpose, that opens up new possibilities for solutions through updating and upgrading our knowledge of power and purpose.
Let's look at Finance as an inventory of vocabularies of language and logic for:
We can see the different vocabularies of language and logic for moving money through these four movement by considering the choices that are available to each of us, for deploying our own personal savings. These include:
When we frame Finance as four movements of money, from individuals to enterprise, and back again, through six different vocabularies of language and logic for choosing where that money can, should and will be made to go for shaping (through the terms on which money is supplied) enterprise that shapes the technologies that shape the choices that shape the economy that shapes society and our shared future that presents each of us with the possibilities for how we can each shape our own individual lives, for living our best life, under the circumstances, and within those possibilities, we see that something has gone wrong with American-style Capital Markets Growth through Creative Destruction.
Fiduciary Money that is entrusted to Pension & Endowments fiduciaries for the purpose of delivering certainty of a dignified future quality of life for some, directly, that must also be, of necessity, a dignified future quality of life for all of us, consequently, is being turned over to Market Professionals, who are using it to extract maximum profits by externalizing maximum cost/loss/risk by timing and riding waves of boom and bust in market clearing prices for incrementally liquid shares of ownership in large scale, long-dated financing agreements in the markets for maintaining market clearing prices for such shares, through volatility and growth, in reckless disregard for the consequences of this extractive externalizing on expectations for a future quality of life, for contractually qualified recipients of contractually calculated payments, directly, on for all of society, consequently.
This is not a moral failing of Market Professionals. They are making choices according to the language and logic of the Market vocabulary in which they are expert.
It is a legal failing of fiduciary faithlessness by the fiduciary controllers of Pensions & Endowments who are not speaking the language and logic of the Stewardship vocabulary in which they are supposed to be expert.
The solution is not in changing the way Market Professionals deploy Fiduciary Money.
The solution is in changing the way Stewardship fiduciaries deploy Fiduciary Money.