GOOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines:
To live out goodness, fairness, and love
Economics
"Every time you spend [and earn] money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”
~ Anna Lappé
Both GOD-centric and GOOD-centric value love, goodness, and fairness; so, we must try to align our economic systems with these values. With what values does our corporate capitalistic economic system currently align? Greed, selfishness, the commodification of people, profits as the supreme good, disparaging of anything that detracts from the bottom line. Wrap your head around this: Human beings are supposedly the smartest creatures on the planet; yet, we have created economic systems which devalue us and make us miserable. How smart is that?
Let’s shake off the old capitalism vs. socialism bugaboo because neither works in its pure state: pure capitalism because people are too selfish and pure socialism because people are too lazy. It just makes sense that public social goods such as education and healthcare should not be profit-driven; while other goods such as housewares and tennis shoes should be. Do we really believe that medical researchers will stop looking for a cure for cancer if there isn’t a big financial reward as an incentive? How lowly do we regard each other? Let’s set up economic systems which align with the values we most cherish: love, goodness, and fairness.
The time is ripe for having this discussion since globalization and artificial intelligence (AI) are well on their way to altering our economic models whether we like it or not:
At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion…When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created? (Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?)
A team from Morgan Stanley predicts that 50% of current jobs will be lost to AI. The jobs of the future are likely to be on-demand temporary, freelance, or gig in form employing fine manual dexterity, creativity, and/or social intelligence content. The problem is that these on-demand work arrangements usually come without healthcare benefits or any promise of employment beyond the short-term. The GOOD-centric exterior spiritual discipline of service challenges us to organize our evolving economic system so it reflects and supports a world in which love, goodness, and fairness thrive. In keeping with the Understanding Complexity bottom-up approach, I will suggest guiding principles to be worked out at the local level with the strongest new systems emerging to become a more-than-local presence.
