Call it a great act of Love
Call it a great act of Love, combined with a deep, long-term self-interest, in choosing the slightly hidden natural way to bring our long history of obsession with economic growth to a natural climax at an enduring peak of vitality and resilience. There’s a way we can duplicate how nature brings all sorts of other living systems to that remarkable fulfillment of growth.
It would take a courageous but practical choice of investors and businesses to show sufficient restraint in using profits to multiply their profits. That “compounding” of profits is the driving force behind the persistent exponential increase in the demands of the economy on the earth and humanity, now spoiling the commons. The growing financial wealth it also produces once didn’t come along with the current tidal wave of environmental threats we now face. We didn’t notice the connection because almost none of those enormous costs for our future are factored into the calculation of financial profits that the regular use of profits to multiply profits is based on.
It’s not that some people have not tried. For many years, environmental scientists have said we should make economic decisions by factoring in the real cost of the harms the economy’s ever-growing demands on the earth and society cause. We didn’t do it mostly because it’s hard to do. The problems are many. Perhaps first and foremost is that it calculating the whole cost of wealth directly condemns the economy’s role in delivering more of what everyone wants. The long list of disruptive strains on the ecosystems of the earth and human society is “cold data,” not “warm data,” so it just does not fit in marketing material for all the gifts the economy creates. That’s also part of the rationale for calling the self-restraint needed to taper off our ever-growing demands on the earth and humanity a “great act of love.” It would be exactly that, but to feel good about the practical steps, we also need to bring along warm data.
The great act of love, the one with the power to change the nature of our economy’s endless obsession with increasing financial wealth, would involve following a fairly simple and affordable rule. It would be a kind of “tithe,” a choice to spend a share of your financial profits on caring for the earth and our future. What that also does is reduce the share of our financial profits that goes to multiplying our demands on each other and the earth. Certainly, we owe it to ourselves and our richly varied but increasingly troubled societies. We owe it to them to turn a share of the profits we’ve used to multiply our burdens on them, to reverse that cold purpose with an act of love from our hearts for the earth and human societies. I call them the global FAIR rules for investor and business Fiduciary Asset Investment Restraint. A more stripped-down concept statement of it is in my regular research notes journal.
It also helps to convince oneself to walk through the paces of why and how to do it, such as reviewing the many dozens of signs of global distress that need relief from the economy’s ever-growing demands and see how it would affect someone financially to respond to them. It would be our collective choice to show restraint where it is needed, but the main effects would come from the natural changes to the economy, like that of taking our foot off the gas of an overheated vehicle. Doing so is not entirely risk-free, but the main effect, like the effect on a struggling machine, would be a great big global sigh of relief.
Where does the world economy need relief? I developed a list I call The Top 100 World Crises Growing with Growth. At the moment, the list of 100+ crises starts on page 5 and goes to page 18. It’s a work in progress that shows you fairly quickly why it would be so very hard to put a price on everything going so increasingly wrong on earth due to all our conflicting forces, like overloading and causing congestion in all our social and economic systems at once, a huge loss of value. There are eight general categories, and you are likely to think of omissions from the list as you think over the many increasing conflicts stirred up by our increasingly intense demands on the earth and each other as we exploit everything useful on earth as fast as investors give us the money to exploit them.
To look at the financial side, there’s first a difference in the FAIR rules between how savings from financial earnings are treated compared with savings from labor or creative services. The latter have burdens on the earth, too, but they don’t multiply exponentially or initiate the building of new business operations for extracting more financial wealth from the earth. So, at this stage, the FAIR rules are thought of as exempting all savings from work or creative services. It’s really the savings from the exponentially increasing demands of finance that don’t take someone’s creativity as much as just the quantity of money to turn into more money. All of us who have retirement savings would be affected, most of which are designed to grow as fast as possible. That part of retirement saving increases our burden on the earth in like fashion.
So far, I’ve also imagined the FAIR rules as having different levels of restraint for different kinds of investors, such as perhaps having more impact on hedge funds and banks than on middle-income retirees. For the sake of argument, just say the initial rule is that literally everyone’s financial savings would be taxed an extra 10% if they don’t spend 10% on qualified non-profit responses to healing the earth. There’s a long list of options. There’s the UN’s long list of SDGs, for example, the caring and competent work of many of the world’s active NGOs, and, of course, the long lists of growing signs of environmental and societal distress in the Top 100 World Crises Growing with Growth!
This is, of course, not about the cool logic of that arrangement, as useful as it will be for helping to settle disagreements over who is expected to sacrifice more for the common interest. We’ll ALL get to live in a world increasingly relieved of the ever faster-increasing burdens of supporting our current, now old, way of thinking of economic value. It’s really mostly about giving us a way to show our love for the living earth, each and every one of our amazing cultures, and each other.
