So What Do We Do About It?
So in my last post, I got pretty ranty. I just wanted to get some thoughts out; it’d been a minute.
But I got some really good feedback that elicited both a “GREAT IDEA!” and also “fuck, I didn’t do that did I?” and it’s essentially to do what John Oliver does at the end of every episode after telling you about the horrors of something or other that he and his team decided you needed to now worry about lol. They give you a “what should you do about it” – inevitably the first thing he tells you is gonna be something you can’t do alone, which gets us back to the problem of collective action.
But then you get some tangible West Wing esque “what’s next” directives.
I tried to do that in the last post, but feel like I missed the mark. I gave some ideas, how we could do the collective action changes, but what about the individual changes? What things can YOU do to make the world a better place, or at least find ways to better yourself to make everything feel a little better in spite of the horrors we deal with on a daily basis?
So with that in mind, I’m gonna give some specific things that have helped me, acknowledging that we’re not all the same and these won’t all work for you, but maybe the methodology or thought process I went through will trigger something for you of an action you can take that will get you to a similar end state even if we’re taking different freeways to get to the same destination.
And what I’m going to do is essentially just jump to the end of the post. So if you want the beginning go back to this sucker from last week: https://www.empatheticengineering.blog/blog/20260317-the-world-is-still-exhausting/
Alright diving right in, the first suggestion I made was “Teaching Civics instead of History”.
Let me go into a little more on “what I mean by that”.
I don’t think I ever had any thought of “was this moral” or “was the group doing this good or bad”. I mean, we knew the winners and losers, and we knew that the Nazi’s were bad. And stuff like that. But it wasn’t ever a “here are the reasons that things happen” or an actual interrogation of the motives.
It’s very possible that is just me being a terrible student in History lol – I just wanted to get the answers right and move on. Totally copping to that up front. I thought it was boring.
But the first time I had to actually interrogate my feelings and see what I thought not just about the things that happened in history but why they were happing and the motives of all the parties involved was in a class at USC on Genocide. It was a crazy class, where we had a lot of really intense debates, and read really interesting books by people who at the time just seemed like academics, but then turned out to be important political figures (Samantha Powers’ A Problem From Hell was the standout).
The reason I think it’s important is because it’s easy to take history as just a series of events and timelines. If you think about it in timelines and events though, you disconnect from it. You can’t learn from a series of dates. You just see things that happened. But look at the Reichstag Fire. All I remember about it from the things I learned in school is that it is what allowed for the Nazi’s to go from being “in power” to “taking over” the German government.
But did you know the guy they suspected set the fire’s body was exhumed in 2023?!? BECAUSE THEY THINK THAT HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN DRUGGED INTO CONFESSING TO DOING IT ALONE. Like yo. Everything we know is based on context given at the time that MIGHT NOT BE ACCURATE.
Think of the logic of what happened in the context of the fire… the fire was set “to protest fascism” according to reports at the time, though the Nazi power structure used that as an excuse to instead crack down on… communists? And then use that to amass more power, then to do everything they did to start the holocaust and WW2. And sure, it could have all hinged on the random action of a solo actor who was actually trying to protest everything to come… he also could have been a patsy!
But honestly, it doesn’t MATTER who started the fire as much as how the people in power USED the situation to their advantage to stoke hate among the German populace to create the circumstances for everything that came after. And learning about government manipulation, not just saying “propaganda is bad” but more explaining how that affected real people, and the ways to combat it in your own life are the things that I think are more important to us all. Not just to keep the government from taking advantage of us, but for everyone to use to see whether they’re in a situation where they’re being manipulated!
The civics lessons of how to be better citizens rather than just taking the government at their word has applications in business and even family! Sometimes you have to see the motives and the manipulations so you can then combat them, and that type of learning feels like it’s not the focus. Instead it’s learn when the Boston tea party happened, or when did the Lee surrender at Appomattox or whatever, and yea sure, those things are important events… but the dates don’t matter to me. The order might matter. But we over index on dates or tangibles rather than the civics of it all because… wait for it… they’re easier to test.
The second opportunity I gave was “Teaching Business instead of Economics.”
This is a little harder to specifically explain, because it feels very similar. I mean, really what’s the difference between Business And Econ? So let’s start with how they’re taught (or at least how they were taught to me lol).
Econ is treated very much as a science – it has rules, laws, and math that can explain what’s really going on in both macro (large scale btwn different countries, looking at GDPs, etc) and micro (smaller scale, individual businesses, sales, etc) scales.
More specifically, Econ was lectures and tests and business classes were much more communication based, team based, practicing the acts of business and seeing how the human interaction component affected the outcomes.
If I think about taking Econ classes, the first thing I think of is the supply/demand charts. You were always supposed to be able to plot the dynamics of supply and demand against one another to find that “Sweet spot” where your demand and supply create the best outcomes. But real world economics aren’t able to be plotted on a graph in order to predict the future. Think of how many dumbass MBA’s are out there plotting revenue charts that just keep going up at the same rate they’ve been going at. Think of how many people predict outcomes that never come to pass in the economy. It’s a grift. It’s a sham. There’s no prediction method that is “better” about the economy.
And “the economy” is such a nebulous being that unless you’re working in government it’s not really a thing that you should be thinking about.
What you SHOULD be thinking about is your own personal situation and how you fit into that larger economy. Which is more about understanding your context, understanding your roles, and being more on the human end of the economy – i.e. business! So what happens when you do that?
Think about your employee stock purchase program as an example.
You’re buying shares in the company you work for (thereby becoming an “owner”) at a slightly discounted rate! It sounds like a great situation! But that “great situation” depends GREATLY on your situation.
- By buying shares in the stock you work for, you’re creating additional risk. If your company goes under, now not only is your job gone, but so is your investment
- What’s the logical explanation for your employer giving you that option? It’s not just to make you feel good. It’s because if you’re buying shares in the company you’re now more invested and more likely to work harder, without demanding more money, and working to prop up YOUR BOSSES share value!
- They’re also locking in your money – they’re locking in your purchase price for the amount of money you have, but they’re likely not going out and BUYING shares on the open market, they’re taking shares they have and allocating them to you at a market rate. Which allows THEM to control their cost basis on their held shares, selling off high cost basis shares when they need to increase losses and create a tax haven, or selling off lower cost basis shares when they need to show gains and provide value to their shareholders!
This is one SIMPLE scenario and I’m likely leaving out a ton of other considerations you should be making (i.e. do you already have a different portfolio that isn’t highly concentrated? are these shares or are they options? blah blah blah).
And none of that is science or math, and none of it is intended to be easy value judgements. It’s meant to be in depth thought and conversation about what’s driving toward your goal. Because in the end most of the “economics” we’re doing is placing very high value bets on things. The stock market, while positioned very inventively as a means to own parts of different companies you believe in, is nothing more than a fancy betting market. But instead of treating it as such, we treat it like it’s a given. Like it’s mathematical. But if it was, you would only have winners and losers at the announcement of financial data. You’d never have it happen because of investor sentiment. Because the sentiment would be based on… math.
Which is why I stopped being a financial advisor and instead decided to pursue a different career. Because I wanted to do the math, figure out what companies are doing really well, and figure out how to deal with stuff. But it wasn’t that. Because the market isn’t that. It’s just a fancy version of any other prediction market.
And that’s why I’d advocate a more robust teaching of business and less robust version of “economics”. Because even though in action they tend to be analyzing the same things, business at least is a little more honest about it’s lack of scientific rigor, and admits that it’s more a humanities based subject.
That brings us back around to “A complete upending of how we invest in businesses”.
Phew, this is a heavy one, but it builds on what we were just talking about. The way we “invest” in businesses is through prediction markets. Yes, we created the stock market to be less about speculation and more about giving people a way to profit from the massive gains that the industries we thrived in were creating. But, we’re people, and therefore we’re imperfect, and any system we create will have imperfections as well.
Our current system doesn’t reward you for finding companies that are doing good things in the world, it instead incentivizes people to amass wealth in the form of stocks, then leverage that wealth to borrow money that then compounds their wealth. It’s really just grifting by design.
But then we get to the inevitable “John Oliver” question of “what can we do about it?”
Well, first let’s just acknowledge that this isn’t something one person can independently change, this is again a collective action problem. And I think it’s also important to acknowledge that this is also the exact reason that people who initially championed crypto currencies touted as their reasons for creating the markets in the first place – democratizing wealth and decentralizing from the current power structures so that we all have access to the same level of wealth. Granted, they were, I know this is shocking… just creating a different grift.
So it’s hard to give a specific recommendation without immediately thinking “Well, won’t this all just turn into a grift anyway?”
But the ways I would change this area probably going to just sound like “communism” for a lot of people, and I get that.
Which is why you’ll not be shocked when my first answer is “we should pay more in taxes”. I know I know, this is gonna be everyone’s least favorite suggestion. But it’s because I think that there are things we treat as corporations made for large scale profits, that could easily be reoriented to the public good, not create any less wealth, and yet have that wealth benefit the populace instead of the individuals who are lucky enough to run or be heavily invested in those companies.
Let’s use PG&E, my local utility provider, as an example (and yes, I’m gonna oversimplify this and I’m going to probably miss some detail or mess something up, but this is a thought experiment not a lab experiment so we can all deal).
PG&E is a private utility, and as a result they need to post revenue and profits and provide detail on how they’re doing financially to their stakeholders constantly. And while profits are important, PG&E provides gas and electricity to people, which isn’t something that’s OPTIONAL in our society, so really, is the biggest thing we should judge PG&E on be their ability to make money? Or should it be on some other metric, like public good provided?
If they were operated by the collective “we” (this is also known as government) then we could reorient the goals of the organization from profits, to say… uptime for electricity. Or say, not having pipes explode and destroy neighborhoods. Or under grounding wires to limit the exposure to wildfire risk.
We could even decide collectively that they don’t need to MAKE money, they just need to use their money to provide the most public good.
Now there’s an obvious problem you’ll point out which is “but it’s the same people running it right? and how do we decide what is “the public good"". Yea, I know there’s a lot of complications that come into play. But that’s why you then layer on the idea of… wait for it lol… I’m sorry ya’ll, I’m gonna do it though… universal basic income.
Imagine, you’re now unburdened from worrying about keeping your home or food in your fridge. You have enough to live no matter what, you have enough for electricity, water, food, and a home. Now you’re just trying to do what you think is best for yourself and the people around you.
And I get it, that’s very antithetical to a lot of the American ethos, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and creating empires and all that bullshit. But really, why do we want any of that? I don’t know, I don’t want an empire. I don’t want opulent wealth. I don’t need to spend every other weekend on the Amalfi coast, or in Kauai, or anything like that. I just want a solid life to start, and if I could then work a little harder when I want to do something that isn’t necessary but desirable, that’d be totally fine! I know I wrote about it before, but it’s something that you see in both Star Trek and it’s fun friend The Oroville – the idea that you shouldn’t NEED to work to live. But you should be able to work if you have a drive or desire to do something specific in the world! And we shouldn’t value you only based on your work, we should value you first as a human, then we can value your additions to society ON TOP OF THAT.
I realize how out of touch with reality all that sounds, and likely I’m just being an idealist, which is fun sometimes but also sad when you start thinking about the implementation of it, and it all comes back to “yeesh, ok well not all people believe what I do huh?” lol. Because really that’s part of the problem – as you build larger and larger systems, you have to deal with more and more different beliefs and values, and by trying to appeal to everyone you slowly stop providing any real value because your area for consensus keeps shrinking (it’s like the game that we used to play at the beginning of get to know you sessions when kicking off summer camp season – you start off pairing everyone up and say “find five things you have in common” then you pair up with another pair and find five things, then again, then again, until you get to the whole group and EACH TIME it gets harder and harder and you have to get less and less specific.).
So what am I really recommending… I don’t even know ya’ll. I guess let’s at least EXPERIMENT with different means to invest in our society that aren’t just trying to amass wealth by betting in prediction markets?
Phew, this was a long one and took a long time to write which is why it’s coming out on a Saturday instead of a Friday.
Thanks for bearing with me, and if you dig this… ping me and let me know and I’ll try and do more stuff like this.
Be kind to each other and have a great weekend!