Often heard in our modern tale of triumph, like Perseus
slaying Medusa, is the glossy version of a business person who has beat all
odds to become the most successful, most imitated, and ultimately, the most
wealthy in their field. Heavy books are
written about them—can you go into a bookstore without having Steve Jobs stare
you down? The almighty business heroes
comprise the bulk of our mythos that feed the global capitalist imagination. Warren Buffet. Oprah. Bill Gates. They don’t even need a full sentence because
you already know their stories.
There are many lesser-known heroes of this sort, but the
story usually goes: He began life poor, but was resilient and worked hard to
follow his passion, and now he’s made something of himself. Because of his relentless efforts, he is
rewarded with lavish trips, and has the
world at his fingertips. That could be you if you just tried hard enough! The
story rarely highlights any crisis in conscience he may have had, nor the
decision that was made to resolve that feeling of moral uncertainty. Did he take credit for others’ work to
advance himself? Did he treat others fairly along the way? Did he outsource production to evade
inconvenient environmental and human rights regulations? Did he fund an
expensive marketing campaign to manipulate people’s understanding of their
needs? Was a price point set that is
reasonable, or do only some people have enough purchasing power to get those
goods? Did he cut benefits for employees to increase shareholder satisfaction?
Those issues of conscience are largely ignored because they
don’t add up to numbers and cents. It is
only when the hero flouts all sense of social accountability and the abuses are
egregious that people take notice.
I have two friends who have been effortful and unwavering in
their individual career paths. They both
have a deep interest in what they do to earn a living. With decades of study and professional
practice, the services they provide exceed standards of excellence. They certainly exceed market standards, yet
in this marketplace, they find themselves constantly struggling. Earning a
living has been no small feat. They have
mostly adapted to their impecunious lifestyles, but as their friend, I notice
the small ways in which their freedom is held in check. There is a pervasive sense of caution about
how they spend money, which circumscribes their socializing, leisure outings,
and personal effects. Luckily, they
haven’t suffered from the kind of poverty that deprives many people from food
or housing. They have been able to get
by.
These are two very bright, conscientious, and diligent
people! Their inability to “make it” is
not from a lack of capacity, hard work, or passion. If these were the factors that created the
magical recipe of social success, what explains their unsavory and skimpy rewards? Their work produces a net benefit to society
by helping individuals to be healthier.
It is not for a lack of “need” in society that their work doesn’t earn
them much of a living. There is plenty
of need, but not enough market demand.
They don’t have the resources to stimulate demand in the market economy,
even though I’d argue that the world would be a better place if people lined up
for days to grab their services instead of the new iPhone.
What about all those people with passion and a good idea who
put in double-time and their life-savings that no one hears about? We don’t like to talk much about them
either. Not as inspiring.
If you leave a pot of cold water out on the counter for
days, you’ll see that the water level gradually reduces. Why?
As the H2O and air molecules smash into each other passing
energy along, eventually some of the molecules gather enough energy to escape
their liquid form. The water turns from
liquid to gas. But! This is not from
what we call boiling. To say, “molecule
A escaped its liquid burden” is true, but it is not a fair representation of the
state of the whole. Similarly, I could
say that person A never smoked a day in his life and he got lung cancer, while
person B smoked religiously for four decades and had clear lungs. Would it be accurate to say that smoking
prevents lung cancer based on these examples?
I just saw a story in which a woman eats French fries and no fresh fruit
or vegetables, and her cholesterol is around 170. Should we now recommend that diet to reduce the
incidence of heart disease?1
With the sheer size of the human population, we will always
be able to find outliers that seem to bolster an idea or belief. We may have to go digging to find those
examples, but they are out there. The
problem is that we end up lying to ourselves, and our policies reflect this
distortion of reality. Social planning
is not an optional policy that we can either have or not have. Some people believe as Dave Hinnaland
does: “Let us have the means and options
to chart our own path. Don’t hamstring us with rules and regulations. And let people that are willing to go out to
work take a chance, let them have the opportunity to do it. We don’t need a big hand hovering over our
head telling us what we can and cannot do.”2
To do any kind of project requires some kind of planning,
even when you work alone. What will you do first? What resources do you need?
How much time will each step take? When
you work on large-scale projects such as highways, vertical farms, hadron
colliders, and hospitals, you need lots of planning, and lots of
collaboration. Rules help facilitate the
process. And whenever someone “takes a
chance” there is the possibility of failure—that’s why it’s called a “chance”
instead of a certainty. What Dave
probably isn’t aware of is what he really wants. He wants the freedom to pursue his
goals. (Whether those goals are perverse
or not is another matter and not the topic addressed here.) Despite the known illusion of free will, we
like to feel as though we have a sense of control. Exercising a sense of autonomy promotes our
feelings of wellness. So, does having a
market system lubricated by the controlled-scarcity of money meet this need? Do
less planning, less coordination, more competition, and more insecurity really help
us achieve this goal? If so, where is
the evidence? In the few outliers, our
heroes? It certainly cannot be found in the colossal gap in income, where the
richest 20% have 75% of the world’s income. Is our only fix to this problem to
“get people” to be more heroic? Is that
really the best we can come up with? Will my friends be better off if I repeat
over and over: “work harder!” If I yell it, “WORK HARDER!!” does that help?
Is it possible that more intelligent planning, with a more
comprehensive view of life systems and their closely knitted ecosystems could
yield better results? Truly, we don’t have a lot to lose by making a more
concerted and savvy effort using the latest findings in research. We are already losing now, by a huge
margin. Every life ravaged by poverty is
a needless death of talent, passion, and intelligence. Poverty is not natural nor is it immutable. We need a fundamental system change to
resolve this growing problem. We need a
stable infrastructure in which life insecurity is not the constant worry of far
too many people. To go back to my water
analogy: we need to find a new heating element that energizes the whole pot of
water. It may be quite different from
what we’ve been trying, but we have now some amazingly sophisticated tools and
knowledge to bring forth a more sustainable and healthy society. Let us repurpose them from money maximization
to wellness maximization. Just because
you cannot put a face to our global market system (as I tried to do in a recent
blog post) does not mean it is not dangerous.
Hitler is reviled by the Western world, but if we compared who was the
worst evil, the market system would crush Hitler by magnitudes beyond
comprehension. We need to remove the
cultural blinders that are stitched together by these fairy tale outliers, and
see the danger for what it is because it is fundamentally incompatible with a
prosperous and sustainable culture.
1. http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/adult-picky-eater-will-only-consume-three-kinds-of-food.html
No comments:
Post a Comment