A New Conversation at the Vanguard of Public Discourse

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance shares with us in this post to LinkedIn, a short video of WEAll co-founder Katherine Trebeck who explains the story of WEALL as being about

seeing the economy as not a goal in its own right, but about needing to design and deliver the economy to serve the needs of people and planet, and also about seeing the economy as nested within society and nested within the natural world. So, not on top of it, or not even on a par with it, but subservient and sitting within society and the natural world.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/weall_across-different-new-economy-frameworks-ugcPost-7302641304314802176-zfhH

Personally, I am left ill-at-ease by this story that wants us to believe that society and the economy are different ways of being human in the world, and that society should not be made subservient to the economy, but it should be the other way around: the economy should be subservient to society.

I find more ease in a story of the economy as a mutual aid society for sharing an abundance of technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people living our own best lives as best we can, under the circumstances then prevailing, every day.

In this telling of our tale, what we call society and what we call the economy are interwoven to form our uniquely human way of being in an artificial world that we make for ourselves, through our technologies, out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born.

In this telling of our human tale, technology is Promethean Fire, the gift of knowledge about how the world about us works, and how we can take the world about us as we find it, in some specific way, and change it to be more a way we choose to make it in that specific way.

Fire, in this telling of our tale of being human, is a metaphor for energy for doing this work of putting knowledge as technology into action changing the world about us, to make it be more a way we choose to make it.

That energy is in part physical, the forces of Nature, and in part social, the forces of our human insight and initiative.

Changing the world through the work of putting technology into action requires a concentration of human effort.? It produces a surplus of artifacts of that effort, in abundance for sharing through exchange.

As humans, we concentrate our effort through enterprise as a social configuration of physical Knowledge + Networks + Routines for putting technology into action constructing surpluses in abundance for sharing.

We effect that sharing through exchanges using money to keep a count, and maintain accounts, of who has given and who has taken through these exchanges, in order to maintain a sense of equity and fairness in the concentration of effort and sharing of abundance sufficient to social cohesion within the population, perpetuating a shared sense that it is better for each of us to be a part of this process, than to stand apart from it, or tear it apart.

In our uniquely human way of being in society, through economy, using money, the thing we choose to use as money is important only for its integrity and reliability as a means of counting and accounting for transactions between people. Michael Mainelli invites us to understand money as "a technology that people use to trade debt". As a lawyer, I learned to understand money as a legal instrument for effecting transactions between people who are separated by distances of time, place and social connection: "you do not have to trust the other person, if you can trust their money".

Both of these visions of money let us see that money functions as the social energy through which a population directs the insight and initiative of individuals within that population towards some activities ("you can make money doing that") and away from others ("there's no money to be made there").

This lets us see that the function of money is very important, socially and economically, but the thing itself is not.

Through the process of enterprise and exchange using money, populations of people construct, and episodically deconstruct to reconstruct, a safe a dignified house for humanity within built environments of Urban, Rural, Curated and Left-Alone landscapes along the creative edge of a constantly changing and adaptively evolving Human Partnership with Nature, choosing new beginnings to fit the circumstances then prevailing, through inquiry for insight into new learning that can inform innovation, making new choices more popular as better fit to the circumstances then prevailing, while letting previously popular choices fade into history as a good fit to circumstances prevailing at an earlier time, driving the flourish and fade of the social contract between enterprise and popular choice on its journey from innovation into history, that is the real engine of our human wellbeing, and the true story of our human history.

The challenge for every population is to manage this flourish and fade for social cohesion sufficient to their individual and shared wellbeing and longevity.

This moves the focus of inquiry to this question of how do people manage this flourish and fade.

Here the answer is money.

We each use money, individually, to construct our own personal and private worlds, in which to live our own best lives, as best we can, under the circumstances then prevailing, out of the world of technology choices that we construct together, through enterprise and exchange, out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born.

We learn in order to earn. We earn in order to spend. We save what we choose not to spend, and we invest what we save, in new learning that empowers new earning the empowers new spending and new saving and new investing and new learning, and so on, forever.

We also all use money together, to choose which enterprises will be included in our shared public world of technology choices, through institutions of agency, authority and accountability:

• inquisitively, through Civil Society, as institutions for curating knowledge and inquiry;
• predistributively, through Finance, as institutions for aggregating money set aside by others as savings for investment in financing for enterprise, and allocating those aggregations as money made to flow into enterprise, for its use in doing its work of paying cost-for-value in order to exchange value-for-price, for a time, at a cost, and on terms that inform the way the business does its business of expressing technology as artifacts of human effort that inform choices for others that inform the economy that informs society that informs our future;
• distributively, through Enterprise, as institutions of Knowledge + Networks + Routines for paying cost-for-value to exchange value-for-price by putting technology into action constructing a surplus of choices in abundance for sharing with others through exchange; and
• redistributively, through Politics, as institutions for exercising the public fisc and public force to enforce compliance with social norms curated by Civil Society that are essential to pubic health, public safety and social cohesion.

We talk a lot today about Enterprise, as the Markets, and Politics, as Government (in what George Lakoff and Gil Duran call The Great Markets vs. Government Regulation Debate, over their FrameLab Substack). This narrative of contention within a duality of Markets vs Government shows up in the WEALL narrative of the economy subservient to society, and not on top of it.

What we don't talk enough about is Finance as how society chooses where the money will be made to flow to inform the Enterprises that inform the economy as a mutual aid society.

That is, in part, because Finance has been merged, in the prevailing narrative, with Enterprise to form the Markets, as the Capital Markets, which are presented to us, in this prevailing popular narrative, as being the whole of Finance.

Only not really.

Because within this narrative, Finance also includes:

• the Government, as the keepers of the public fisc;
• and Philanthropy, as the so-called Third Sector;
• and Banking, which is somehow always perceived as intertwined with Government, although it is not the same as the public fisc;
• and Individuals/Households/Families, both the wealthy and the not so wealthy, variously perceived as savers, and investors, as participants in the Markets, and customers of Banks, as contributors to Philanthropy, and payers of taxes and voters in elections;
• and Institutions, as both Financiers in their own right, and Investors in the Markets.

So, within the chimerical simplicity of the prevailing narrative of conflict between the nimble superiority of the Private vs. the bumbling cumbersomeness of the Public, between Business vs. Government, Price vs. Policy, individual vs. collective, freedom vs coercion (the so-called tyranny of the majority), efficiency vs bureaucracy (but what is the corporation but a bureaucracy?), there lies a much more complicated reality of money being made to flow through multiple different institutions of Finance, each with their own unique language and logic for choosing where the money will be made to flow, for what time, at what cost and on what terms.

This makes no sense to our common sense. So we stay out of it, leaving Finance to the experts.

Which leaves us without the ability to hold our institutions of Finance accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of their institutional authority/power true to their institutional agency/purpose/mission.

Which leaves us without the ability to maintain social cohesion sufficient to our own longevity as a society living together through economy.

Which is the crisis at the heart of our polycrises of inaction on climate and biodiversity and habitat longevity and social equity and planetary health, on a planetary scale.

To resolve this core crisis of institutional unaccountability, we need to launch an inquiry, curated by Civil Society, in search of insights and new learning to make sense of Finance so that we can hold our institutions of Finance properly accountable to our shared common sense through a new conversation at the vanguard of public discourse about making the right money flow in the right way into the right enterprises for, doing the right work, in the right way, for the right time, at the right cost, and on the right terms to inform the right businesses for informing the right technologies for informing the right choices for informing the right economy for informing the right society for informing the right future of social cohesion sufficient to longevity under the circumstances then prevailing.