The whole story of endless economic growth needs to go as well as the worship of the individual ego's right to do whatever it wants and human supremacy. The new story needs to recognize the interdependence of everything and what sustains the web of life on a small planet. The earth is teaching us this.
I believe that as climate change continues, and the autocratic/technocratic energy gobbling governments consume themselves, people will be either fighting each other for survival or joining together in cooperative networks creating their own islands of governance. The latter obviously offer more promise. And there is a body of literature now that this is how our ancestors survived.
As an old cynic, I gotta say it, I told you's so. Blue collar workers add genuine wealth to society by creating products and services of real value, from food to cars to houses, but we don't get paid much. All the big money is "made" by "suits", in amounts far beyond anything a carpenter or welder could ever hope for. But it's just paper, numbers on a balance sheet, bits on the bank's computer. A mirage, ephemeral, bogus, unreal. Which is why it requires a narrative, a belief system, based on unsustainable delusion, a pyramid scheme in which the ultimate marks are future generations, being robbed blind by their own parents.
Those trillions of dollars of "wealth" lost as the markets crashed, never existed. Real wealth is food, shelter, and soon, bullets and powder. Keep yours dry, hard times have arrived.
"Those trillions of dollars of "wealth" lost as the markets crashed, never existed."
I said the same thing after the crash of 2008... the market cannot "lose" what it didn't have in the first place. It was all speculative profit, enumerated in stock and bond certificates. But unfortunately that's how my industry (finance) works now. Everything and everyone is a data point on a P&L spreadsheet.
What an amazing historical political summary. Doesn’t give me a lot of hope things will resolve in a positive way.
The biggest impediment or gate to finding a path forward for humanity is going to be climate change. No matter what ideology is in control, in people’s lives, the real defining events are going to be created by extreme weather.
We’re going to have to remake our local community relationships to survive the extreme weather events that will be more and more common with each passing year.
That is going to be the real defining situation in all of our lifetimes.
Actually that's a really good point. I've never believed that we'll act in time to materially change the direction or impacts of climate change. I keep those thoughts to myself mostly, because the optimists can be pretty harsh to the doubters. Humans don't act in concert on a large scale until things get supremely difficult. But you might be right, the actual material impact could be the catalyst that FORCES people to figure out new systems and ways of forming community... and different ways of economic organization.
Yeah the Dems like Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, and that new guy heading the DNC are pretty much ineffective because they have no clue what is really going on with the 90%. I believe there is no way they can catch up. Since they are part of the top 10% (not as bad as the tech bros/oligarchs but still pretty bad) they want to hold onto their own comfortable future prospects and retirements so they don’t want radical change that they believe could put that in jeopardy. They are so delusional it’s very sad and I say this as a 74 yo woman who is a “boomer elite”! Ha, as a retired public school teacher with a chronic health condition…sure I’m educated but my retirement is very different than that of the Democratic leadership. I will do what I can to resist what is happening and support my community and I will also tell the Democratic leadership they need to get out of the way. Otherwise they will be equally responsible for the demise of the USA.
This was a fantastic read and while things are getting worse especially for multi-marginalized people, seeing the exact framework of how we got here explained does give me the drive to want to fight back in ways that I can. Thank for all the hard work you’ve put into these newsletters.
This piece should be the final obituary for both the Democratic Party’s geriatric delusions and the center-right’s fantasy of a policy debate about marginal tax rates while fascists torch the library. But will anyone read it like it's the last map out of the crumbling labyrinth?
Here’s the prescription - unvarnished, unsentimental, and unapologetic:
1. Narrative A is Winning Because It’s Simple, Cohesive, and Viciously Repeated.
That’s not an accident. It’s been strategically manufactured over decades with relentless, well-funded messaging. Unless the pro-democracy coalition starts crafting emotionally resonant, repeatable stories that punch through the noise, it’s over before it starts. Policy papers won’t save us; compelling mythos might.
2. “Restoration” Politics Are a Dead Religion.
Democrats clinging to a Bidenesque belief that the institutions will hold and norms will bounce back are functionally no different than doomsday cultists waiting for the rapture. There’s no rebuilding the old world because it wasn’t torn down; it collapsed under its own hypocrisy and rot.
3. A Vacuum of New Ideas = A Fertile Breeding Ground for Authoritarianism.
We’re drowning in policy proposals but starving for vision. “Populist economics” has been hollowed out by the right and abandoned by the left. Want to win the future? Name a better one. Sell it. Seed it. Teach it. Tell it until they beg to believe it.
4. Protest Voters Want Fire, Not Compromise.
The swing bloc isn’t centrists; they’re the rage-quitters. The ones who’ve been so crushed by systems that they’ll vote for the wrecking ball if it means someone finally sees them. If your strategy is to win them over with moderation and milquetoast messages, you deserve to lose.
5. Stop Trying to Win Old Battles. Start Inventing a New World.
Degrowth, middle-out, cooperative economics, post-work paradigms, AI-powered mutualism; whatever it is, make it emotionally resonant and built for the world of tomorrow, not the world of The West Wing. If it doesn’t land like gospel on TikTok and Substack, it’s not ready for prime time.
So here’s your directive:
Stop trying to resuscitate a corpse. You can’t “both sides” a totalizing narrative war. Luz didn’t just identify the battlefield; he drew a blueprint for insurgency.
Someone must build the counterforce, rally the decentralized coalition, and transform the future.
We need a radically new narrative of the possible. And that doesn’t mean a new spin; it means a new physics, a narrative that accounts for collapse and imagines rebirth.
My next series, Digital Insurgency: The Algorithm Wars, launches tomorrow.
Agree 100%... it's been SO painful to watch the Democrats fail decade after decade because they are absolutely TERRIBLE at messaging. While the right was "strategically manufacturing" a world-ending victim/hero narrative (see the "BIG Big Lie" series on LiteralMayhem) the Dems were holding coffee klatches and giving crochet lessons. Even now, as the country burns, they sit on their thumbs... here's an idea: why aren't pro-democracy Dems and allies on FOX News EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. giving the counterpoint? And if FOX won't invite them on, then hold a press conference outside FOX headquarters and hammer home a national message about "conservative media bias"... get out there and bring a gun to a gun fight, instead of a three-bean casserole and asking for bipartisanship.... but ultimately, you're right we need to invent a new world. We need new IDEAS, and until we get some we'll remain in a world of hurt... figuratively and literally. Thanks for reading!!
How can you “champion liberty” when you are kidnapping people and wisking them off to a prison without due process?
People forget our problems began with Reagan’s failed “trickle down economics;” with Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy; with Citizen’s United allowing candidates to be “bought;” with NOT concentrating on making the middle class stronger* (which is best for our country and occurred post WWII) but making the rich richer.
We need to get back to:
• strengthening the middle class;
• abandoning Citizen’s United;
• making EVERYONE pay their fair share in taxes (including corporations);
• raising or erasing the cap on contributing to Social Security to make it sustainable;
In the meantime, CONTACT Mike Johnson and tell him to let the Republicans and Democrats VOTE on the tariffs and let the VOTE be CONFIDENTIAL. Let it come to the floor for a VOTE! This is STILL a democracy! Congress represents ALL the people, NOT just one person or party. It’s called
Robert Reich and Paul Krugman are great sources I subscribe to also. And yes, I wrote a few weeks back about the problem with the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially as it applies to people who are smart at one thing and assume they're smart at everything. I call them "expert inexperts" and they are a really big part of the problem... all of them, from Musk to Thiel, to Andreessen, to Ellison... the whole bunch.
Thank you. It's been knocking around my brain for the past sever years and it took this long to shape it into something cogent and readable. We're all in this together.
I'd sign onto that sentiment... and am actually working on a much longer piece on that very topic. But to my mind it's part of larger societal problem that the economic profession has been allowed to define the terms of engagement. That they've co-opted a lot of terminology. Case in point is the word "rational," which when applied to behavior has devolved into meaning "self-interested profit-seeking"... and why is the "market" the supreme arbiter of everything? Seems like we want to distill everything, and all human behavior, into some version of economic modeling. It's a kind of madness.
Seems to me like they've already embarked on that process... and elected governments are rolling over. Just look at how Europe is watering down its consumer protections in the digital sphere. They have some of the strongest protection measure around. But in the name of "competition" and "innovation" (i.e., tech monarchy) they're diluting what makes them unique in the world.
To keep up on the latest (scary) AI developments I recommend ChartingGenAI by Graham Lovelace here on Substack. It's a comprehensive newsletter covering the latest not just on the tech, but on the policy, legislative, and regulatory fronts as well--- and he covers the topic globally not just in the US
Great to see this kind of analysis, wish more people (at least in the 'liberal' world I see most of) would accept ideas outside of their well worn tracks.
"how do we sustain that without eating and digging the planet out from under ourselves?"
I appreciate some of the framing of time scale in this essay. If the burden of a population on its resources is too great, that population can for some time run a deficit. I certainly don't know when that happened, but can't help but think it happened some time in the last century. In my lifetime, the world population has tripled, which is hard to get one's mind around given that we were a highly industrialized, interconnected species seventy years ago. What if where we are now is unsustainable, and indeed unsustainable even for half the current population? Furthermore, maybe the deficit has been maxed out and will no longer allow further borrowing?
A correction of this scale would make all the rest moot. A hungry, destitute, desperate population in the hundreds of millions if not billions would be catastrophic for a highly interconnected, technology dependent civilization, no? This planet will not support eight thousand million subsistence farmers.
Thank you Rick. Personally, I think that the "framing of time scale" is a HUGE part of the problem. We have, in a sense "dumbed down" our sense of time. The obsession with immediacy, both behavioral and perceptional, really crimps our ability to reflect and make pro-social decisions. But it's hard to see a way out at the moment, because all the pressure is still pushing toward more+faster. Slowing that ship and turning it around will likely take generations.
Kate Raworth took a critical look at modern economics by asking “what is the economy for?” and observing that the absurd current answer is growth”. She proposes recentering the goal to something we actually want.
Thanks Sarah. Great link. The "planetary boundaries" concept is actually making some inroads among big investors--but really only a small fraction in terms of investible assets. The issue is that the soil is poisoned against this kind of reason. The whole trajectory of ESG (Environment/Social/Governance) is an example of why narrative is more powerful than reason. Over the years it evolved from a fringe idea of investing in "good companies" into a fairly robust analytical framework for investing in ANY company--arguing that every company needs to take into account its social, environmental and other impacts because not doing so creates business risk. What happened? The right wing zealots tarred this entire concept as "woke" and began a systematic program to kill it. Big states like Texas actually used public money (in vehicles like public pension funds) to sue money managers from using ESG considerations in making investment decisions. Whether it's ESG or Raworth's "Donut Economics" ... if the soil of public discourse is poisoned against the every idea of it, none of it can take root. Somehow we need to re-seed the public imagination about what's possible and why we should want something different.
The ESG example is good; I haven't followed whether it’s also being sidelined internationally, where it was being taken up (because it’s obviously a good idea).
Another corrosive notion in the US is the hysteria about the deficit, which allows all sorts of stupidity. Maybe it’s too late now, but we are (were) the richest country in history. The idea that we can’t afford health care, social safety net, infrastructure, etc. is (was) ludicrous. In the current protests I’m seeing recognition growing that it’s not lack of wealth, but stealing the wealth that makes people feel poor. That’s a narrative worth spreading.
That's why I am such a fan of The Long Memo... they are masterful at poking holes in rote stories... in particular the piece on 2/27 on taxation and the national debt; and the piece on 3/3 about wealth distribution in America. The challenge now is to write completely new narratives that have not been tried before. The wealth redistribution programs of the mid-century worked for a time, but their time is over. We cannot go back to those old ways because the top1% will just defeat them next time in the same way they're defeating them now. If we want to prevent "theft" of wealth... as John Grant commented above... we need an entirely new system of economic organization, and that will take generations to take root and flower as the human imagination and human customs, mores, and behaviors need generations to adjust and adapt. I believe it can happen, and I hope for the sake of my grand-nieces and grand-nephews that it will.
We see examples of this everywhere. Has it always been like that?
As a kid I just accepted the narrative my parents taught me. I didn’t start asking questions until I was a young adult and started traveling and living on my own.
My parents never traveled, and their narratives have never changed.
Narratives are a part of how human psychology works. I'm not an expert on it; but "narrative psychology" posits that stories are the basic building blocks of how we build an identity and how we understand the world. One of my favorite quotes from a psychologist (whom I hope to interview in an upcoming podcast) is "For better or worse, stories are a very powerful source of self-persuasion, and they are highly internally consistent. Evidence that doesn’t fit the story is going to be left behind." When we get too locked into our stories we can end up refusing to see the world as it is. It's a human failing that's not specific to any one group, but something we all have to work to challenge in our lives.
I am so glad you shared this!!! I read about her several years ago, and couldn't for the life of me remember her name. I even tried googling "doughnut" model, but to no avail.
After reading Martin's article above, I immediately thought of this model.
Thanks Dan. None of us wanted this, I suspect. But it's been a long time coming. And it's going to be a long time fixing it... but the biggest challenge is just admitting the truth of where we are, as difficult as that is. Can't move forward without recognizing that first.
The whole story of endless economic growth needs to go as well as the worship of the individual ego's right to do whatever it wants and human supremacy. The new story needs to recognize the interdependence of everything and what sustains the web of life on a small planet. The earth is teaching us this.
I believe that as climate change continues, and the autocratic/technocratic energy gobbling governments consume themselves, people will be either fighting each other for survival or joining together in cooperative networks creating their own islands of governance. The latter obviously offer more promise. And there is a body of literature now that this is how our ancestors survived.
Anyway, this is my story.
Solarpunk
LunarPunk
As an old cynic, I gotta say it, I told you's so. Blue collar workers add genuine wealth to society by creating products and services of real value, from food to cars to houses, but we don't get paid much. All the big money is "made" by "suits", in amounts far beyond anything a carpenter or welder could ever hope for. But it's just paper, numbers on a balance sheet, bits on the bank's computer. A mirage, ephemeral, bogus, unreal. Which is why it requires a narrative, a belief system, based on unsustainable delusion, a pyramid scheme in which the ultimate marks are future generations, being robbed blind by their own parents.
Those trillions of dollars of "wealth" lost as the markets crashed, never existed. Real wealth is food, shelter, and soon, bullets and powder. Keep yours dry, hard times have arrived.
"Those trillions of dollars of "wealth" lost as the markets crashed, never existed."
I said the same thing after the crash of 2008... the market cannot "lose" what it didn't have in the first place. It was all speculative profit, enumerated in stock and bond certificates. But unfortunately that's how my industry (finance) works now. Everything and everyone is a data point on a P&L spreadsheet.
What an amazing historical political summary. Doesn’t give me a lot of hope things will resolve in a positive way.
The biggest impediment or gate to finding a path forward for humanity is going to be climate change. No matter what ideology is in control, in people’s lives, the real defining events are going to be created by extreme weather.
We’re going to have to remake our local community relationships to survive the extreme weather events that will be more and more common with each passing year.
That is going to be the real defining situation in all of our lifetimes.
Actually that's a really good point. I've never believed that we'll act in time to materially change the direction or impacts of climate change. I keep those thoughts to myself mostly, because the optimists can be pretty harsh to the doubters. Humans don't act in concert on a large scale until things get supremely difficult. But you might be right, the actual material impact could be the catalyst that FORCES people to figure out new systems and ways of forming community... and different ways of economic organization.
Borders will be irrelevant when the profound effects of climate change force 100s of millions of fellow humans to move to tolerable climes.
Yeah the Dems like Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, and that new guy heading the DNC are pretty much ineffective because they have no clue what is really going on with the 90%. I believe there is no way they can catch up. Since they are part of the top 10% (not as bad as the tech bros/oligarchs but still pretty bad) they want to hold onto their own comfortable future prospects and retirements so they don’t want radical change that they believe could put that in jeopardy. They are so delusional it’s very sad and I say this as a 74 yo woman who is a “boomer elite”! Ha, as a retired public school teacher with a chronic health condition…sure I’m educated but my retirement is very different than that of the Democratic leadership. I will do what I can to resist what is happening and support my community and I will also tell the Democratic leadership they need to get out of the way. Otherwise they will be equally responsible for the demise of the USA.
This was a fantastic read and while things are getting worse especially for multi-marginalized people, seeing the exact framework of how we got here explained does give me the drive to want to fight back in ways that I can. Thank for all the hard work you’ve put into these newsletters.
Thx to TLM for bringing in new voices to further elaborate on TLM's analyses ...
and thx to Martin Luz for beginning the conversation towards what a better vision of the future will look like.
This piece should be the final obituary for both the Democratic Party’s geriatric delusions and the center-right’s fantasy of a policy debate about marginal tax rates while fascists torch the library. But will anyone read it like it's the last map out of the crumbling labyrinth?
Here’s the prescription - unvarnished, unsentimental, and unapologetic:
1. Narrative A is Winning Because It’s Simple, Cohesive, and Viciously Repeated.
That’s not an accident. It’s been strategically manufactured over decades with relentless, well-funded messaging. Unless the pro-democracy coalition starts crafting emotionally resonant, repeatable stories that punch through the noise, it’s over before it starts. Policy papers won’t save us; compelling mythos might.
2. “Restoration” Politics Are a Dead Religion.
Democrats clinging to a Bidenesque belief that the institutions will hold and norms will bounce back are functionally no different than doomsday cultists waiting for the rapture. There’s no rebuilding the old world because it wasn’t torn down; it collapsed under its own hypocrisy and rot.
3. A Vacuum of New Ideas = A Fertile Breeding Ground for Authoritarianism.
We’re drowning in policy proposals but starving for vision. “Populist economics” has been hollowed out by the right and abandoned by the left. Want to win the future? Name a better one. Sell it. Seed it. Teach it. Tell it until they beg to believe it.
4. Protest Voters Want Fire, Not Compromise.
The swing bloc isn’t centrists; they’re the rage-quitters. The ones who’ve been so crushed by systems that they’ll vote for the wrecking ball if it means someone finally sees them. If your strategy is to win them over with moderation and milquetoast messages, you deserve to lose.
5. Stop Trying to Win Old Battles. Start Inventing a New World.
Degrowth, middle-out, cooperative economics, post-work paradigms, AI-powered mutualism; whatever it is, make it emotionally resonant and built for the world of tomorrow, not the world of The West Wing. If it doesn’t land like gospel on TikTok and Substack, it’s not ready for prime time.
So here’s your directive:
Stop trying to resuscitate a corpse. You can’t “both sides” a totalizing narrative war. Luz didn’t just identify the battlefield; he drew a blueprint for insurgency.
Someone must build the counterforce, rally the decentralized coalition, and transform the future.
We need a radically new narrative of the possible. And that doesn’t mean a new spin; it means a new physics, a narrative that accounts for collapse and imagines rebirth.
My next series, Digital Insurgency: The Algorithm Wars, launches tomorrow.
Agree 100%... it's been SO painful to watch the Democrats fail decade after decade because they are absolutely TERRIBLE at messaging. While the right was "strategically manufacturing" a world-ending victim/hero narrative (see the "BIG Big Lie" series on LiteralMayhem) the Dems were holding coffee klatches and giving crochet lessons. Even now, as the country burns, they sit on their thumbs... here's an idea: why aren't pro-democracy Dems and allies on FOX News EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. giving the counterpoint? And if FOX won't invite them on, then hold a press conference outside FOX headquarters and hammer home a national message about "conservative media bias"... get out there and bring a gun to a gun fight, instead of a three-bean casserole and asking for bipartisanship.... but ultimately, you're right we need to invent a new world. We need new IDEAS, and until we get some we'll remain in a world of hurt... figuratively and literally. Thanks for reading!!
How can you “champion liberty” when you are kidnapping people and wisking them off to a prison without due process?
People forget our problems began with Reagan’s failed “trickle down economics;” with Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy; with Citizen’s United allowing candidates to be “bought;” with NOT concentrating on making the middle class stronger* (which is best for our country and occurred post WWII) but making the rich richer.
We need to get back to:
• strengthening the middle class;
• abandoning Citizen’s United;
• making EVERYONE pay their fair share in taxes (including corporations);
• raising or erasing the cap on contributing to Social Security to make it sustainable;
In the meantime, CONTACT Mike Johnson and tell him to let the Republicans and Democrats VOTE on the tariffs and let the VOTE be CONFIDENTIAL. Let it come to the floor for a VOTE! This is STILL a democracy! Congress represents ALL the people, NOT just one person or party. It’s called
the “Trade Review Act of 2025 .”
202-224-3121
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-weigh-using-power-congress-rein-trump-tariffs-rcna199555
“Malignant Stupidity”
“The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy:
Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the
*Read “The Common Good” by Robert Reich
Robert Reich and Paul Krugman are great sources I subscribe to also. And yes, I wrote a few weeks back about the problem with the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially as it applies to people who are smart at one thing and assume they're smart at everything. I call them "expert inexperts" and they are a really big part of the problem... all of them, from Musk to Thiel, to Andreessen, to Ellison... the whole bunch.
A brilliant piece which absolutely articulates what I’ve been thinking for sometime in my rather muddled and disjointed way.
Thank you. It's been knocking around my brain for the past sever years and it took this long to shape it into something cogent and readable. We're all in this together.
It seems to me that Americans are like Fanatical Capitalists, even acting against own interests, to create a kind of Paradise Utopia Capitalism.
I'd sign onto that sentiment... and am actually working on a much longer piece on that very topic. But to my mind it's part of larger societal problem that the economic profession has been allowed to define the terms of engagement. That they've co-opted a lot of terminology. Case in point is the word "rational," which when applied to behavior has devolved into meaning "self-interested profit-seeking"... and why is the "market" the supreme arbiter of everything? Seems like we want to distill everything, and all human behavior, into some version of economic modeling. It's a kind of madness.
Just watch out for the Dark Enlightenment narrative. The monarchists are waiting for their chance to play god.
Seems to me like they've already embarked on that process... and elected governments are rolling over. Just look at how Europe is watering down its consumer protections in the digital sphere. They have some of the strongest protection measure around. But in the name of "competition" and "innovation" (i.e., tech monarchy) they're diluting what makes them unique in the world.
Yikes I’ll look into those laws . I’m in the US so not as familiar
To keep up on the latest (scary) AI developments I recommend ChartingGenAI by Graham Lovelace here on Substack. It's a comprehensive newsletter covering the latest not just on the tech, but on the policy, legislative, and regulatory fronts as well--- and he covers the topic globally not just in the US
Thanks for the recommendation
Great to see this kind of analysis, wish more people (at least in the 'liberal' world I see most of) would accept ideas outside of their well worn tracks.
"how do we sustain that without eating and digging the planet out from under ourselves?"
I appreciate some of the framing of time scale in this essay. If the burden of a population on its resources is too great, that population can for some time run a deficit. I certainly don't know when that happened, but can't help but think it happened some time in the last century. In my lifetime, the world population has tripled, which is hard to get one's mind around given that we were a highly industrialized, interconnected species seventy years ago. What if where we are now is unsustainable, and indeed unsustainable even for half the current population? Furthermore, maybe the deficit has been maxed out and will no longer allow further borrowing?
A correction of this scale would make all the rest moot. A hungry, destitute, desperate population in the hundreds of millions if not billions would be catastrophic for a highly interconnected, technology dependent civilization, no? This planet will not support eight thousand million subsistence farmers.
Thanks for writing, and for publishing this work.
Thank you Rick. Personally, I think that the "framing of time scale" is a HUGE part of the problem. We have, in a sense "dumbed down" our sense of time. The obsession with immediacy, both behavioral and perceptional, really crimps our ability to reflect and make pro-social decisions. But it's hard to see a way out at the moment, because all the pressure is still pushing toward more+faster. Slowing that ship and turning it around will likely take generations.
Nice piece.
Kate Raworth took a critical look at modern economics by asking “what is the economy for?” and observing that the absurd current answer is growth”. She proposes recentering the goal to something we actually want.
https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
Thanks Sarah. Great link. The "planetary boundaries" concept is actually making some inroads among big investors--but really only a small fraction in terms of investible assets. The issue is that the soil is poisoned against this kind of reason. The whole trajectory of ESG (Environment/Social/Governance) is an example of why narrative is more powerful than reason. Over the years it evolved from a fringe idea of investing in "good companies" into a fairly robust analytical framework for investing in ANY company--arguing that every company needs to take into account its social, environmental and other impacts because not doing so creates business risk. What happened? The right wing zealots tarred this entire concept as "woke" and began a systematic program to kill it. Big states like Texas actually used public money (in vehicles like public pension funds) to sue money managers from using ESG considerations in making investment decisions. Whether it's ESG or Raworth's "Donut Economics" ... if the soil of public discourse is poisoned against the every idea of it, none of it can take root. Somehow we need to re-seed the public imagination about what's possible and why we should want something different.
Yes. Narrative shifting is essential.
The ESG example is good; I haven't followed whether it’s also being sidelined internationally, where it was being taken up (because it’s obviously a good idea).
Another corrosive notion in the US is the hysteria about the deficit, which allows all sorts of stupidity. Maybe it’s too late now, but we are (were) the richest country in history. The idea that we can’t afford health care, social safety net, infrastructure, etc. is (was) ludicrous. In the current protests I’m seeing recognition growing that it’s not lack of wealth, but stealing the wealth that makes people feel poor. That’s a narrative worth spreading.
That's why I am such a fan of The Long Memo... they are masterful at poking holes in rote stories... in particular the piece on 2/27 on taxation and the national debt; and the piece on 3/3 about wealth distribution in America. The challenge now is to write completely new narratives that have not been tried before. The wealth redistribution programs of the mid-century worked for a time, but their time is over. We cannot go back to those old ways because the top1% will just defeat them next time in the same way they're defeating them now. If we want to prevent "theft" of wealth... as John Grant commented above... we need an entirely new system of economic organization, and that will take generations to take root and flower as the human imagination and human customs, mores, and behaviors need generations to adjust and adapt. I believe it can happen, and I hope for the sake of my grand-nieces and grand-nephews that it will.
“Narrative is more powerful than reason.”
We see examples of this everywhere. Has it always been like that?
As a kid I just accepted the narrative my parents taught me. I didn’t start asking questions until I was a young adult and started traveling and living on my own.
My parents never traveled, and their narratives have never changed.
Narratives are a part of how human psychology works. I'm not an expert on it; but "narrative psychology" posits that stories are the basic building blocks of how we build an identity and how we understand the world. One of my favorite quotes from a psychologist (whom I hope to interview in an upcoming podcast) is "For better or worse, stories are a very powerful source of self-persuasion, and they are highly internally consistent. Evidence that doesn’t fit the story is going to be left behind." When we get too locked into our stories we can end up refusing to see the world as it is. It's a human failing that's not specific to any one group, but something we all have to work to challenge in our lives.
I am so glad you shared this!!! I read about her several years ago, and couldn't for the life of me remember her name. I even tried googling "doughnut" model, but to no avail.
After reading Martin's article above, I immediately thought of this model.
Another great article plus all the very interesting links. Thx
Thanks for reading!
Agree no going back. All over the world people are searching for new narratives forward
This is not the ideas I wanted, but desperately needed, on a Monday morning. It’s sobering but well thought out and presented. Can’t wait for more.
Thanks Dan. None of us wanted this, I suspect. But it's been a long time coming. And it's going to be a long time fixing it... but the biggest challenge is just admitting the truth of where we are, as difficult as that is. Can't move forward without recognizing that first.