This post is going to kick off a series that I’m dubbing the society series. It will explore how our society determines and pursues meaningful goals. I’ll look at each “meaning system” we currently use including our economic, political/legal/government, religious, media, philanthropic, and education systems. I’ll look at how each system helps us define and pursue meaning, the unique value that each one provides, and how these systems relate to each other.
Collectively, these systems determine how society “makes decisions.” So we gotta look at each one to understand the whole!
By the end of this series, we’ll hopefully have a clear picture of how the current collection of meaning systems came to dominate. Only by knowing how our current system provides value can we hope to envision a better one.
We’ll start with the economy.
The Economy
It’s a loaded and hazy word. Eco-no-my. On the surface it’s a complex beast covered in interest rates, recessions, debt, investments, salaries, stock markets, bankruptcies, valuations, fiat currencies, and a mix of private and public sector participants. The economic unit we call money is an emotional topic for many, commonly used as a metric for self-worth and hoarded like it’s going out of style.
This post will explore the foundational goals of an economic system, ignoring most of the noise seen on the surface. By appreciating what an economy is trying to get done, it opens up new possibilities for how it could be improved by leveraging modern technology. While Satoshi and others solved the double spend problem, blockchain in of itself doesn’t revolutionize our economy.
What’s The Economy Supposed to Do?
The original Greek word for “economy” was “oikonomia,” which means “household management.” I find that etymology a telling one. It’s as though we’re all sharing one big house and we need a chores system to make sure our house is kept orderly and in a constant state of improvement.
As it happens, our house is pretty messy in this 21st century. To take the metaphor literally for a sentence: we fill the atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide, we spill oil and trash into the oceans, we cut down and light the trees on fire, we fill the fresh drinking water with little tiny pieces of plastic, we leave trash all over the place, we drive other species to extinction, we kill the soil. Our economy isn’t enabling us to maintain a super well-ordered house.
That said, our economy has been an incredible tool that has provided immense value to how we’ve approached the future.
So What is the Current Economy Good At?
The current economy is good at trusting that human decision making will result in a better future. Our economic system decentralizes decision making, giving many participants the opportunity to contribute to our future.
Adam Smith wrote two classic works in the second half of the 18th century that earned him recognition as “The Father of Economics” and “The Father of Capitalism.” These works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, each possess the same underlying assumption that inspired our current economic system.
Adam’s underlying assumption that remains the foundational insight of our current economy is that “human nature” is the right guide for our society. He assumed that human nature could be trusted to make “moral decisions” and that human nature could be trusted to decide how to allocate capital.
His trust in human nature was well founded. After all, 300,000 years of human civilization had been driven exclusively by human decisions. What alternative to trusting human decisions could Adam possibly have imagined?
He saw our empathy, competitive nature, and instinctual self-preservation as tools that could be leveraged to trend our society in a generally good direction. Adam’s strategy of “trust the humans” was the right strategy.
An economy based on a “trust the humans” assumption excelled at avoiding overly destructive decisions since we all share the same basic survival instincts. That’s not to say our economy hasn’t spawned its fair share of destruction, but on the whole our species has succeeded so far.
From healthcare, to food, to housing, to telecommunications, to transportation, to entertainment, and beyond…all of these needs are met by people motivated by our economic system. It’s a wonderful thing.
How Do We Improve the Economy?
The economy improves when it helps us make more meaningful decisions.
In 2022, speaking from an American perspective, many people are discontent with their participation in the economy. It’s common that people don’t feel a sense of purpose in their job. McKinsey surveyed over 1,000 U.S. employees about purpose in their job, and a majority of people said they find their purpose through their work, but only 18 percent said they received as much purpose from their work as they want. Point being, the economy isn’t effectively aligning people with purpose.
Something about our current economy is not influencing us to make meaningful decisions. That sucks from both a life experience standpoint as well as for the future of our species. So what do we have to change in order to increase the existential relevance of our economy?
We need to question the underlying assumption. The belief that we should rely exclusively on human decision making to direct our energy is out of date. As our computer technology has developed we’ve gained a decision making companion.
We need to evolve our economy into a system that integrates non-human intuition. The complexity and timeframes of our problems, from climate change to pandemics to supply chains, have surpassed the ability of humans to make the most meaningful decisions. We need to leverage our machine companions.
While you may look at society and see everyone carrying computers in their pockets and companies using computers for their operations, we have yet to actually evolve society’s decision making systems to give machines a seat at the table.
To avoid confusion, when I say machines, I don’t exclusively mean artificial intelligence. I also mean using machines to collect information from humans to help inform decisions. As an example, social media products like facebook and search products like google collect large amounts of information from users. That information could likely be used to help our society make more meaningful decisions than which ad to serve someone. Without computers, we could not collect those insights.
The Next Economy
Our civilization’s most foundational resource to improve itself has been human decisions. We’ve had no other collaborators. Our decision making systems, including our economy, have understandably been built to motivate the most meaningful human decisions.
The next economy needs to motivate the best machine-enabled decisions alongside human decisions.
That will mean devising “meaning systems” that get the most out of our human machine collaboration.
For example, if you view the global network of computers that we call the internet as a participant in our global economic system, it raises new questions for how we could evolve our economy. For one, how should we incentivize people to interact with the internet? If interacting in a certain way would help society make more meaningful decisions, shouldn’t we pay people for those interactions?
Next Up
There’s more to explore related to how we should evolve our economy to increase the meaning of the decisions it motivates. We’ll return to the economy in a future post. For now I want to churn through each of the “meaning systems” at a high-level first so we can start to see a complete picture.
The next post will explore our political/legal/government system. We’ll ask similar questions as we did of the economy in this post. How do our governments make meaningful decisions? Where do they succeed? How do we improve their relevance?
Until next time,
Michael
I’m reading a book called Stolen Focus by Johann Hari - and the chapter I read today talks about incentives and social media and how the creators of social media have all sorts of meditation and mindfulness tools/programs for their employees who create platforms that are based on getting more eyes on and more clicks which robs the user of focus. And all because of the incentives - the companies make more money from more time spent on the scrolling - as opposed to incentives towards luring the user to a more fulfilling life. The incentives for a more existentially relevant society will have to coincide with the incentives of social media platforms to be successful - because that’s who is directing our attention right now. None of this is new to you as that’s a part of the start up business acumen, but for most of America, I suspect the nuances are hidden and they believe they are exercising free choice rather than aligning with a company’s incentives.