In a recent article published in the on-line journal Evonomics, Eric Beinhocker, Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, writes in a post he titles,  It’s Time for New Economic Thinking Based on the Best Science Available, Not Ideology:

“stories, narratives, visuals, and memes are needed to shift the media and public thinking.

“So what might such a new narrative look like? … I believe it will contain four stories:

  • A new story of growth
  • A new story of inclusion
  • A new social contract
  • A new idealism”

Whatif

  • the right new story of growth is really a story of making a happy history of moving towards a future of more that is better, filled with enough jobs, money and stuff, where “enough” is provisional, created by design to be beautifully fit to function and authentically right for its times, and also changing by design over time, as times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes
  • the right new story of inclusion is really a story about investment as how society decides which ideas for creating by design prosperous adaptation to life’s constant changes can, should and will be evolved through enterprise, and about a new form of investment for a new form of investor that empowers civic engagement in designing enterprise through investment decision-making guided by evolving community standards of prudent stewardship for pensions and endowments as stewards of society’s shared savings aggregated and maintained to provide income security for retirement, for education, for philanthropy and for our shared future, forever, investing in enterprise cash flows, directly, to generate cash flows that support good stewardship, indefinitely, optimizing the flourish and fade of popular choice, as times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant change
  • the right new social contract is between enterprise and popular choice, a contract that flourishes and fades over time, as times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, created by design to be beautifully fit to function, and authentically right for their times
  • the right new idealism is fitness to function, created by design to be authentically right for its times, as times change, and people create by design prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes in an economy as an adaptively evolving and expanding network of intellectual and interpersonal connections between people for doing work and creating for sharing with others a surplus artifacts of technology that people use to take the world about us as we find it, and change it to be more a way we choose to make it, a technology that evolves adaptively over time through inquiry, insight and the construction of new knowledge that empowers new enterprise for doing new work that adds new surpluses to the wealth of choices people can make for taking the world about us as we find it, and changing it to be more a way we choose to make it, as times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes

Whatif

the currently popular visual of prosperity as a trend line

 

fades as a new visual of the economy as a network of connections between people

becomes popular, and good stewardship of this adaptively evolving and expanding network becomes the new meme for prosperity in the 21st Century….and beyond.