Financing Our New Maps
The sociology of humanity’s pursuit of prosperity is evolutionary, entrepreneurial, financial — and democratic
In an interveiw with David Sloan Wilson published under the title Evolving the New Economy: Tim O’Reilly and David Sloan Wilson on August 27, 2018 on evonomics.com, Tim O’Reilly makes the following statement:
Re-envisioning the world definitely involves drawing a new map, though. Old maps get out of date, and we have to see the world afresh to keep up with the new possibilities. Scientists redraw the map, but so do poets and artists and politicians and entrepreneurs.
And it is financiers who intermediate which maps will be made available to the public at large.
This is the true story of the history of humanity’s pursuit of prosperity.
We are born into a world not of our making.
We are endowed with the capacity through inquiry and insight to learn how the world into which we are born works, and how we can change the way the world works to make it work more a way we choose to make it.
Times change. People inquire into those changes, generating insights into changing times, and learning new ways of seeing the world and its changes.
Enterprising individuals see the possibilities for putting that new learning into action, collaboratively co-creating surpluses of artifacts of that learning-put-into-action that can be shared with others, through gift or exchange.
People in enterprise need money to co-create surpluses before those surpluses can be shared.
When people in enterprise need money, people in Finance with a capital “F” provide it. Finance is a social structure of value-recognizing patterns, pattern languages, places and professionals for aggregating surpluses saved by individuals and deploying those aggregations as investment in enterprise for putting learning into action through enterprise for collaboratively co-creating surpluses for sharing.
People in enterprise and people in finance succeed if people through popular choice form a social contract with the enterprise being financed that flourishes over time, before fading in the fullness of time, as times change and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, making new choices more popular as a better fit to changing times, and letting previously popular choices fade into history, as a good fit to an earlier time.
This is the pulsebeat of prosperity.
Times change. People through inquiry and insight evolve new learning about those changing times. People in enterprise see new possibilities for putting that learning into action creating surpluses that will be valued by others. People in Finance decide which people in enterprise are seeing the possibilities right. People through popular choice decide which people in finance are seeing enterprise right. When enterprise, finance and popular choice are aligned, and working correctly, there is peace. When they are not aligned, and not working correctly, there is nonpeace.
This is a new map of the social structures — the sociology — of enterprise, finance, prosperity and peace for seeing the economy as working correctly, or not.
Let’s see if we can get this new map financed, and made available to the people for popular choice.
