How To Reinvent Our Future

An excerpt from In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work

An excerpt from In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work

• The book is available as audio, ebook, and if you’d like a signed version (and to support a local bookstore!) you can order that here

From Chapter 20: Opportunities

Finally, we need to embrace a new mindset. In addition to Derek Thompson’s abundance agenda I’ve outlined, we should also embrace what Martin Gurri coined “an adventure mindset,” valuing high risk and innovation more than fear-mongering and political impotence. To fully embrace this mindset and agenda, we need systems and institutions in place that allow us to do so. Changing the economy and our collective financial health is truly about policy and demanding more from our policymakers.

In the coming years, the likelihood of seeing progress on all of this largely hinges on a confluence of political will, public demand, technological advancements, and global collaboration (which is kind of annoying). Substantive progress demands international cooperation on some level and domestic cooperation always. Things like:

• Climate change: International summits like the Paris Agreement, the World Economic Forum, and other big, flashy hangouts often end with world leaders making promising announcements about ambitious interventions and new targets, but they have a spotty record regarding follow-through. Pledging to reduce carbon emissions is one thing; navigating the logistics of modernizing outdated power grids, building renewable energy infrastructure, figuring out how to store renewable energy, getting approval from Congress to pass necessary bills (in the United States’ case), etc., is another.

• Healthcare: In the United States, everyone knows our healthcare system is abysmal. However, steps to change it often get bogged down in political debate or lobbying pressures, and patient welfare is put to the side in favor of profits. Other countries have figured it out, and the United States can, too.

• Housing Crisis: We don’t have enough affordable homes, and bureaucratic funding, red tape, zoning restrictions, and lack of funding can stall all these projects. Policymakers need to collaborate with the private sector to build more homes. (The government can’t do everything, but they can incentivize everything.)

Yet, significant headway (American individualism, lobbying resistance, all of that) requires aligning policies with financial mechanisms, such as green bonds or carbon pricing, to incentivize businesses to adopt sustainable practices. Grassroots movements, environmental advocacy, and an informed electorate will be paramount in pushing policymakers toward more assertive action—and it will happen. This can seem like a long road, but it’s one that we can walk. We know what to do, but we need to start walking and, along the way, convince others that it’s the right path for everyone. Humans are so brilliant and innovative. The emergence of artificial intelligence and the fast advancement of technology show us that. The key to our collective future is enabling everyone to create brilliant and innovative changes and improvements that foster a sustainable world.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talked about how many people end up in fields adjacent to their real dreams just to feel close to what they truly want. Of course, we can’t always get what we want; the world does not exist to fulfill our desires. But carrying that truth—recognizing where our passions are—is really important. The more we can say, “This is what I care about; this is what my community cares about,” the better we can be! Of course, doing so isn’t easy. We must find one another again, but that might not be the answer. We are stories upon stories, and as the Japanese Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro put it, “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: this is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

The way forward for the economy and society at large is some form of reconnection. As the Canadian comedian Norm Macdonald said, “We are not superior to the Universe but merely a fraction of it.”

1. Policy is fundamentally broken. (We already knew that.) We know that we can fix it. We just have to engage with the capital-S System and each other.

2. However, policy is broken because we have forgotten about the people underlying the economy. We have become so accustomed to the “consumption-on-demand” society we operate in that we have forgotten that this society is based on people. We have to tell better stories to learn to cooperate with one another again.

We have to find hope and avoid cynicism. As Maria Popova said in her 2016 commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania:

Today, the soul is in dire need of stewardship and protection from cynicism. The best defense against it is vigorous, intelligent, sincere hope—not blind optimism, because that too is a form of resignation, to believe that everything will work out just fine and we need not apply ourselves. I mean hope bolstered by critical thinking that is clear-headed in identifying what is lacking, in ourselves or the world, but then envisions ways to create it and endeavors to do that. In its passivity and resignation, cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.

There are things to be nervous (yet excited) about, like artificial intelligence. The Austrian priest and social critic Ivan Illich talked about how we “are degraded to the status of mere consumers” as the power of the machines around us increases. There is a world in which humans and machines grow together—AI can make humans smarter, for example—but there are trade-offs to that. Not to get too woo-woo, but the energy we create determines the way we engage with the world around us and, in turn, shapes our collective future. The philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist described our communion with reality this way:

The world we experience—which is the only one we can know—is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it. Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, Alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets.

But we also have to learn to accept that suffering is intrinsic to the human condition—a tenet of many religions and something the secular world could take more cues from. Mary Gaitskill, novelist and essayist, wrote:

Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It’s to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the “story” must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending. To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life, and art based on the empowering message and positive image is just such a refusal.

I know it’s hard—I struggle with all of it! Overthinking, anxiety, loneliness (being human mostly), and some other rocks in my shoes. And it’s hard to maintain positivity with the toxicity of social media—a world built on takes, on monetized opinion, on who can yell the loudest.

Imagination, which Ursula K. Le Guin described as “an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human,” is important. But so is real-world data. We have to make sure people get paid enough to live. We have to use our imagination to create a better world in which all of us can live.

People are the economy. So let’s make the economy about people.

Thank you so much for being on this journey. I am so excited to share this with you.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.