10-time author and designer with a focus on change in organizations and communities. HappinessChoice.com. Contact Jack at jack(at)happinesschoice(dot)com
A zen perspective on how we think about the future
In the consulting company McKinsey’s magazine What Matters, science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson writes about climate change and post-capitalism in an article Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme: Capitalism evolved out of feudalism. Although the basis of power has changed from land to money and the system has become more mobile, the distribution of power and wealth has not changed that much. It’s still a hierarchical power structure, it was not designed with ecological sustainability in mind, and it won’t achieve that as it is currently constituted. The main reason I believe capitalism is not up to the challenge is that it improperly and systemically undervalues the future. I’ll give two illustrations of this. First, our commodities and our carbon burning are almost universally underpriced, so we charge less for them than they cost. When this is done deliberately to kill off an economic competitor, it’s called predatory dumping; you could say that the victims of our predation are the generations to come, which are at a decided disadvantage in any competition with the present. Second, the promise of capitalism was always that of class mobility—the idea that a working-class family could bootstrap their children into the middle class. With the right policies, over time, the whole world could do the same. There’s a problem with this, though. For everyone on Earth to live at Western levels of consumption, we would need two or three Earths. Looking at it this way, capitalism has become a kind of multigenerational Ponzi scheme, in which future generations are left holding the empty bag.The current models of capitalism need to evolve in ways that include attention to the future other than being a large landfill for products of the capitalist present. Socialism and other models can just as easily factor the future out of its equations. For the hoards of wealthy who cringe at even the thought of a "post-capitalism", the future doesn't need to be the enemy of science or politics. When the future is no longer the enemy, more of us thrive in the present, and beyond.
10-time author and designer with a focus on change in organizations and communities. HappinessChoice.com. Contact Jack at jack(at)happinesschoice(dot)com
10-time author and designer with a focus on change in organizations and communities. HappinessChoice.com. Contact Jack at jack(at)happinesschoice(dot)com
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