A Spherical Pie
“Fugazi, fugazi. It’s a whazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It’s no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real.”
The economy is a function of the whole. We look at parts of it as we might a vein that runs inside the body. Food, housing, finance, technology, and the variety of components that coexist to make up all that is. It has its fundamental areas that are essential but also evolves just as nature takes on diverse shapes in a moving environment. Changes from one century to another is evidence of the evolution. Letters written with feathers to letters written with pens and print. Carriages to spacecrafts.
At the very core, the fundamental of civilization and the economy is human. Take that away and the world is a different place. Crickets, Savanahs, jungles, minus the coffee shops. And so, the health of society is determined by whether the human being can fully be to participate in the system. Are people getting their oxygen and nourishment to do freely?
Today, we are witnessing distress. Record levels of debt, personal, corporate, and government. Record levels of wealth inequality. Corporate bankruptcies on par of recessionary times absent any market collapse. I don’t want to imagine what it might look like if the stock market collapses. Stress and uncertainty on whether systems are serving their purpose is now mainstream. International conflict swaying to the more extreme. Issues of legitimacy because of problems in efficacy. The precipitation is difficult to pinpoint but a monsoon is ever more likely if the trajectory continues.
Much of the dysfunction is less about the system but more how we think in reference to it. In the chase for growth, many forget they are fully dependent on the rest of the economy and other people. A company doesn’t make earnings without people spending on their services or products. An investor gets returns off a functioning business, and wealth off a healthy enterprise. Even a robber is dependent on the abundance of its victims. If there’s nothing to rob, then the bandit goes broke.
Currency, stocks, and symbols of value are an invention with profound implications. It’s an agreement to use forms of currency to simplify the transactional flow between people. Consider it a catalyst of creative energy that manifests things into existence. Through us.
Yet, the chase for growth for growth’s sake is where attention has been glued to. A sort of collective thinking along the lines that we must squeeze with utmost pressure to gain. And the trend has been to maximize at the behest of reducing the flow of money towards the source of gain. But do leaders not understand where profits come from?
Companies are more likely to succeed when the well of potential customers is large and flush with cash. If only a few people have disposable money, then players in the economy are competing over a relatively small number of real customers. An individual with a billion bucks will only be able to consume as an individual. They won’t buy a million shirts and eat half-million burgers a day. When a lot people have abundant resources, the rest of the economy flourishes.
Growth is pretty much a given, because it is driven by human activity. We are not inactive unless we are conditioned hold ourselves back or inhibited from action and creation. So, growth and evolution is not something we need to really worry about. Yet, when we are attached to growth for growth’s sake, then, in this obsession, attention goes to the measure that represents growth. Pump it up, pump up the numbers. In doing so, people lose sight of the big picture, that the entire economy is supported by a vascular system. Not seeing this is akin to shutting down one’s nervous system. Keep all the money and take away all the people, the money loses all value.
What matters is human. A person healthy, happy, and feeling wholesome will follow their interest and create from a place that adds authentic value to the economy and our experience of life. The currency we use is a means to make our creative output possible. Understanding this will make it easier to relax and manage capital without the fear of losing it, and to design policies that build a competent system. A system where the whole functions naturally, without limbs dying to frostbite and the rest of the body catching hyperthermia.