Our economy is organised around maximising profit. Never enough. Winner takes all. As a result of that value system a handful ‘winners own’ half the planet. That is utter nonsense to my common sense. And as is shown, counterproductive to a thriving humanity. I know from experience value is naturally differently attributed. My smallest economy is my home. There it turns out other rules apply. They emerged as mechanisms to minimise the efforts necessary to fulfil my needs.
The frame is simple and straight forward. Every choice comes at a cost. Maximising profit today will have it’s price later. No externalising possible, nothing to extract from elsewhere. During my lifetime it turned out that the same truth ought to apply to the global economy. To me it makes sense that the natural economical laws that rule my household should ultimately rule the world.
The current economy is based on an open model. Humanity exploits the world to it’s maximum. With the successful extraction of millennia old natural resources and externalisation of all costs we now threaten our own survival. We are littering and destroying our very own habitat.
We need to invent a proper circular economy. And in order to do that, we need to redesign the old model. It is based on competition. That needs some fundamental rethinking. Collaboration is at least an essential counterweight. My current guess we need at least a healthy balance between those two extremes of this dichotomy. And different measures. Inside well organised companies it is all about minimising costs while maintaining at least the minimal viable output. That logic seems identical to the one that applies in my very own household.
So it would be interesting to think about how this can be scaled to the world economy.
making things visible 