a Copernican Revolution in thinking about enterprise, the economy, prosperity and investment,

shifting the focus from Capitalism to 

aggregating surpluses saved by individuals through investment professionals who invest those aggregations into enterprises pursuing those values that the investment contracts used by those investment professionals are designed to value in their social contract with popular choice

On five of the six capitalisms, the links are complete.
On one, the sixth one, the stewardship one, they are not.

We need to complete them.

completing the incomplete links in stewardship capitalism

adaptively evolving a new form of investment contract for connecting
Superfiduciary Stewards investing for sufficiency to
enterprises pursuing perfection in their social contracts with popular choice 

restoring correct function to all of the currently incorrectly dysfunctioning capitalisms 

discovering Peace as the New Frontier
for prosperity through fundamental fairness
in the sharing of collaboratively co-created adaptively evolving surpluses
of learning put into action providing ourselves with a provisional sufficiency
of having enough of what we need right now,
a sufficiency that is constantly changing, as times change,
and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes,
through inquiry, insight and the invention of new learning that empowers
new earning that empowers new spending that empowers new savings that empowers
new investing in yet more new learning, earning, spending, saving and investing,
and so on, and on, and on and on, in an open-ended, self-regenerating and,
in that sense, evergreen  process
that is always shared sufficiently, in patterns that are uneven, but not unfair 

Wall Street is one of the capitalisms.  There are five others. Six, in total.

These capitalisms are social structures of value-recognizing frameworks, processes, places and people for aggregating surpluses saved by individuals and deploying those aggregations as investment in enterprise for evolving prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes. There are six different capitalisms, six unique social structures for financial intermediation, each putting its own unique learning about enterprise and prosperity into action in its own unique ways.  

1. Family & Friends investing for IMPACT

2. Church & Philanthropy investing for MISSION

3. Taxing & Spending investing for POLICY

4. Banking & Lending investing for PROFITS

5. Markets & Trading investing for GROWTH

6. Superfiduciary Stewardship investing for PERPETUATION

What’s missing in the currently popular learning about enterprise, the economy, prosperity and investment that we call Capitalism is due respect for the fade in the flourish and fade of popular choice, as times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes.

It’s not that common sense does not recognize both the flourish and fade. It’s that Capitalism as corporate finance is designed only to value the flourish. It simply ignores the fade. So in the current Wall Street paradigm, as enterprise achieves practical perfection, and the value being valued in its social contract with popular choice shifts from Growth to Perpetuation, the enterprise as corporation is compelled to transform itself into the corporation as mutual fund, acquiring other enterprises in order to continue satisfying the incessant demand of the trading tape for continued growth in share price.

control over more and more of the economy gets concentrated
in the hands of fewer and fewer ever larger and larger
corporate bureaucracies

corporate bureaucracies that are accountable
only to the constant demand from the trading tape
for constant growth in their share price

demand that is fueled by professional traders
trading professionally, with other people’s money

money that we entrusted to our pensions and endowments
to generate adequate cash flow, forever
in a ‘forever’ that is good for us to flow into

this is not giving us a ‘forever’ that is worth flowing into

to end the takeover of our economy by giant corporate bureaucracies
we need to give the stewards of our pensions and endowments a different choice
for how they can invest the savings for sufficiency we entrust to their good judgement
into enterprise on Main Street, directly
and not just though Wall Street, derivatively

that will also give enterprises the option to exit the trading markets
as they approach practical perfection in their social contract with popular choice

A pension is not an individual, or an agent for one or more individuals. A pension is the steward of an actuarial risk pool, a fiduciary with a duty under the law to do what is prudent to do, for the purpose of keeping its actuarial risk pool properly full, and flowing. This is a duty that stewards owe to all of society.

It is a duty that experience is showing cannot properly be discharged by trading in securities on Wall Street.

Because the Wall Street social structure of investment decision-making is designed for individuals who do not have the size, the purpose or the time it takes to negated investment with enterprise directly, it deals with enterprise only indirectly, and derivatively, by maintaining a market and a market clearing price for shares of stock or other securities that individuals can buy or sell, in small denominations (relative to the capital needs of industrial enterprise), at idiosyncratic times, opportunistically for a price that is derived from present expectations for what the future market clearing price will be, expectations that are derived, most fundamentally, from expectations for changes in the scale of cash flow generation within the enterprises that are owned and controlled by the corporations issuing those shares.

• There must be one market, in order to maximize pricing efficiency.
• There can only be two modes of being in that market, either as buyer or as seller.
• There can be only three possible outcomes to any trade: profit, loss or break-even.
• There are only four points of data that are relevant to any decision to buy or sell: the issue, the quantity, the price and the trends.

This social structure is perfectly fit to the powers and purposes of individuals investing their own savings, for their own account, in pursuit of their own idiosyncratic and opportunistic purposes.

It is not a good fit for the purposes and powers of superfiduciary stewards of pensions and endowments that have the size, the purpose and the time it takes to negotiate with enterprise directly. They do not have to speculate, derivatively.

Wall Street wants the enterprise to be a corporation with limited liability and unlimited life.  Those are the attributes created by the law.  An enterprise, however, is not a creation of the law. It is a creation of people. It is a physical coming-together of people to put learning about the way the world about us works into action collaboratively co-creating surpluses of that learning that can be used by others to take their world about them as they find it, and change it to be more a way they choose to make, surpluses that are valued by and exchanged with others through actual, physical transactions.  Laws are essential to these transactions. They are accidental to enterprise.  Laws of enterprise formation, like incorporation, become important when the transaction is for investment.  Then the choice of entity is very important to the design of the investment. However, the investment must fit both the physical enterprise and its legal form.  If it does not, the design is not good.

Every enterprise makes a journey over time though the flourish and fade of its social contract with popular choice.  At different points in this journey, popular choice values enterprise for delivering different values to the people. At a certain point in this journey, the value that popular choice values in enterprise is Growth, through continuous improvement in the efficiency, availability and affordability of the surpluses it offers to popular choice. During that time, the legal form of enterprise formation as the corporation to facilitate investment through the issuance of securities for trading in the securities trading markets can be a good design for enterprise.

In the fulness of time, however, every enterprise approaches a point of practical perfection in the expression of its learning, after which it is not physically possible to make significant further improvements in its offering to the people.  At that time, the value being valued in its social contract with popular choice shifts, from Growth to Perpetuation. The people are happy if the enterprise just keeps making available to them a practically perfect expression of the learning they like, need and want.

At that point, an investment that requires continued Growth is no longer a good fit for that enterprise and its social contract with popular choice. A new investment is needed, to replace the investment that demands Growth, a new investment that values Perpetuation.

A social contract for Perpetuation can be a good fit to the fiduciary duties of superfiduciary stewards of pensions and endowments, to generate adequate cash flows, forever, in a ‘forever’ that is worth flowing into.

Evergreen provides the design.

For over 400 years, up until 1972, common sense and common wisdom told the law of fiduciary duty that buying something at one price in hopes of selling it (without really doing any work to change it in any meaningful way) at some unknown future point in time to some unknown and unknowable, but hoped-for, future buyer for some unknown and unknowable, but hoped-for higher, future selling price is speculative, that speculation is never prudent and is, therefor a violation of fiduciary duty.

Then, in 1972, the law decided to ask Wall Street what it thinks. Wall Street gave us the only answer that makes sense to Wall Street: “diversify a portfolio of trading positions in the markets for trading securities”. That is, invest on Wall Street.

Since then, and for over 40 years now, that is the wisdom – the wisdom of Wall Street – that has guided our fiduciary investors. These last 40 years have been great for Wall Street professionals. They have produced some benefits to the economy more general. But for our pensions and endowments, and for all us, it has been a bumpy ride. And it does not look like it is going to end well.

It’s time for the law to speak with common sense once again about the wisdom of stewardship investing. This time, we have to talk to Main Street, not Wall Street.  We have to talk to individuals as both savers and investors, and also to social change makers. To engaged citizens. To enterprise leaders. To finance professionals. And to students of the economy.  

We have to talk to YOU!

What do you think of pensions exiting Wall Street, and giving enterprise also the option of exiting Wall Street, by going evergreen?

In the Wall Street paradigm, reality is reduced to a trend line that rises constantly and forever.

Common sense tells us this in not true.

It is a myth that contains a kernel of truth, but that truth gets wrapped up in a whole lot of nonsense.

The truth is there is a phase in the social contract between enterprise and popular choice during which popularity is increasing, and the enterprise is valued for growing in scale and improving the efficiency, availability and affordability of the surpluses it is organized to collaboratively co-create by learning into action.

The nonsense is that this is all an enterprise ever does, and that it does it forever.

Venture Capital has taught Wall Street to acknowledge that before the trend line of Growth begins, there is the Valley of Death. This is the period during which enterprise must spend money to build its social contract with popular choice, and to get its Growth going. However, Venture Capital is still part of the Wall Street social structure. It, too, believes ultimately in the trend line of unending growth.

Common sense knows better. It knows that, yes, there is a Valley of Death, and also, yes, there is a point at which the popularity of enterprise stops growing, and just keeps going.  That is the point when enterprise has practically perfected the surpluses it offers to others. This period of practical perfection in the social contract with popular choice will continue for some time. For some enterprises, it may continue for a very long time. But always, in the fulness of time, times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, making new choices that are more fit to the functions of their times, and letting other once popular choices that fit the functions of an earlier time, fade into history.

This creates a problem, and an opportunity.

The problem is that Wall Street has no capacity to finance perfection, and no capacity to recognize the fade into history.  It insists that enterprise perpetually grow its share price, in defiance of history.  That creates booms that always, eventually go bust, distorting the flourish and fade of popular choice into alternating cycles of Growth and Recession/Depression.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We now have vast sums of the savings of society entrusted to pensions and endowments, not for growth, but for sufficiency against life’s uncertainties. The stewards of these shared savings have a fiduciary duty to generate adequate cash flows, forever, and to invest in a ‘forever’ that is worth flowing into. This purpose of stewardship to generate cash flows is pretty much a perfect fit to the value of perpetuating practically perfect surpluses in the social contract between enterprise and popular choice. What is needed now are new channels and new mechanisms for connecting stewardship investment with enterprise pursuing perfection in its social contract with popular choice; new frameworks, processes, places and people for bringing stewardship and enterprise together, a new capitalism.

That need is creating the opportunity to adaptively evolve the proven reliable equity payback form of investment contract commonly used to finance institutional real estate into a new social structure of value-recognizing frameworks, processes, places and people for directing stewardship investment into enterprise pursuing perfection through negotiated agreement on strategies and possibilities for regenerating cash flows, indefinitely, and on priorities for sharing out cash flows as – and for as long as – they are regenerated.

A new capitalism. An evergreen capitalism.

collaboratively co-creating a new prosperity of peace through sufficiency sufficiently shared in patterns that are uneven, but not unfair

restoring correct function to an incorrectly  dysfunctioning financial system

responding to a need that is also an opportunity

If one takes a long view of the story of human history, going all the way back to the earliest times, when the first person threw a stone or wielded a club as tools for taking the world about them as they found it, and changing it to be more a way they chose to make it, it is possible to construct a narrative of the evolution of the capitalisms as different social structures for investment decision-making though which a society decides what new learning about the world about them can, should and will be evolved through enterprise for putting that new learning into action collaboratively co-creating surplus artifacts of that new learning that are valued by others for their use in taking their world about them as they find it, and changing it to be more a way they choose to make it and that can be shared with those others through an exchange of value for value that provides an origin story for all six of the capitalisms we have available to us today.

1. An aboriginal form of capitalism can be seen in the consensus decision-making within the extended family unit of the clan or tribe, led by the personal authority of a patriarch, matriarch or other head person, or counsel of elders.
2. A second form of capitalism can be seen in the centralized authority of the temple priests who preside over societies that prosper through large scale agriculture.
3. A third form can be seen with the rise of the king, the king’s law and the king’s coinage, as craftsmanship and trade enrich the lives of still fundamentally agrarian societies.
4. A fourth form can be seen in the rise of private banking and lending, replacing the king’s coin with bank notes as the currency of the day.
5. A fifth form arises with the incorporation of industrial enterprise, and the evolution of markets for trading in corporate shares.
6. A sixth form evolves out of industrialization, with the creation of insurance as an actuarial risk pool for socializing the costs of dying too soon within a statistically significant population of statistically similar pool participants, and of pensions as actuarial risk pools for socializing the costs of living too long in an urbanized, monetized and industrialized society, where money is necessary, even for the necessities.

Each of these different social structures of the capitalisms evolved in the context of a particular kind of economy. In modern times, we can see the evolution of our modern portfolio of capitalisms in the evolution of the mercantile economies that evolved out of pre-existing land-based aristocracies that evolved into the industrial economies of the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries, that began evolving in the late 20th Century into the network economy that we are living in today.

Each time a new social structure of capitalism evolves to fit the needs of a new kind of economy, the pre-existing capitalisms continue, although sometimes in appropriately modified forms, so that today we have six different social structures for investment decision making and six different capitalisms.

Wealthy families and individuals pool their personal resources to invest in enterprise when they see values that will have a positive impact on their own. This impact may be simply a good way to provide income while preserving or increasing wealth. It may also be a way of generating wealth for Family & Friends that does good for the economy and society more generally – or at least does not harm.

Individuals give to their church or to charitable philanthropies so they can give to others in need. These grants are an important form of investment in enterprises that share surpluses with others because that is what is right and good. These enterprises pay returns on those investments by doing work that advances the mission of the church or philanthropy and the individuals who support them.

Enterprise requires government to supply the infrastructure – physical and social – of exchange.Government aggregates surpluses through taxes and spends those surpluses on enterprises that are seen as advancing the policies of the governed, WHEN government is functioning correctly. When government is not functioning correctly, taxes are experienced as oppressive, and spending as profligate OR taxes are inadequate to properly fund the spending that is necessary to support policies required to create conditions for enterprise, exchange and a prosperity of fundamental fairness.

Any economy that collaboratively co-creates any significant wealth of choices for its participants uses tokens as a technology for trading debts that get created when exchanges of physical surpluses are made in exchange for a promise to deliver an agreed value in return at a later point in time. We call these tokens money.  Money needs to be managed. Accounts must be kept, and the integrity of those accounts, and of the money itself, must be perpetuated. We use banks to keep our accounts and perpetuate the integrity of our currency. Banks invest through the lending of credit to enterprises that are seen as having the wherewithal to repay those loans. That wherewithal comes from Profits, past and future..

In the 19th Century, in the West, fossil fuels were used to motorize the means of production, making large numbers of functionally identical individual units of what lawyers call “widgets” that could be sold at low unit prices to mass markets. This gave birth to two new realities. Economies of Scale and the Laws of Large Numbers. Enterprise at industrial scale requires investment also at industrial scale. Securities trading was invented to aggregate surpluses saved opportunistically by individuals in amounts that are small relative to the needs of industry and the masses to be deployed in support of enterprises operating at industrial scale.  Individuals buy securities at a current market clearing price that is expected to be less than that price will be at some later point in time, when the buyer wants to become a seller.  Enterprises are financed through securities trading if they are growing in scale.

The invention of enterprise at industrial scale and exchange through mass market retailing gave us Economies of Scale and also the Laws of Large Numbers. Industry increased urbanization. Increased urbanization increased reliance on money to meet life’s necessities and uncertainties. In the 19th Century learning about the Laws of Large Numbers was applied to aggregate individual surpluses into actuarial risk pools as a technology for socializing the costs of dying too soon within a statistically significant population of statistically similar individuals. We call this life insurance, or just insurance.  In the 20th Century, this learning was applied to aggregate individuals surpluses into actuarial risk pools as a technology for socializing the costs of living too long within a statistically significant population of statistically similar individuals. We call this pensions, or retirement, more generally.  Each of these actuarial risk pools, whether for insurance or for retirement, are managed by stewards who invest pooled funds entrusted to their good judgment to generate adequate cash flows, forever, by valuing enterprises that regenerated their social contract with popular choice, and the cash that flows from such regeneration.

Instead of investing through its own, unique fit-for-purpose social structure, we have stewardship trapped in the Wall Street trading markets, desperately seeking to generated adequate cash flows, forever, though portfolio diversification and peer benchmarking.

This is not working.

For them.

Or for us.

Investment is how society decides which new learning for collaboratively co-creating prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes can, should and will be put into action through enterprise for putting learning into action taking the world about us as we find it, and changing it to be more a way we want to make it.

Investment works in two primary movements:

1. it aggregates surpluses saved by individuals for a shared purpose; and

2. it deploys those aggregations as investment into enterprises it recognizes as pursuing values that align with the purpose for which the savings it has aggregated are being saved.

When investment functions correctly, values and purpose are aligned.

When it dysfunctions incorrectly, they are not.

Today, investment is dysfunctioning incorrectly. That is because we have surpluses saved by individuals to provide ourselves with sufficiency against life’s uncertainties in the form of pensions (for retirement) and endowments (for education and for philanthropy) being invested through Markets & Trading into enterprises pursuing growth. This pursuit of growth is not delivering sufficiency. It is delivering, instead, all manner of dysfunctionality. Pensions are failing while corporations hoard cash.  The enterprise as corporation has become the corporation as mutual fund. Physical growth in efficiency and affordability through economies of scale has become the concentration of control over more and more of the economy in the hands of fewer and fewer larger and larger corporate bureaucracies. We are creating prosperity, but increasingly, we are not sharing it fairly.

It is powerfully empowering to see that this dysfunction is being caused, at its root, by a technical mistake in how we define standards of fiduciary prudence for the superfiduciary stewards of society’s surpluses saved for sufficiency through pensions (for retirement) and endowments (for education and for philanthropy).

That mistake was made in 1972, when a group of well-meaning lawyers, trying to help pensions and endowments generate better cash flows, overlooked what has turned out to be critical structural difference between individuals investing opportunistically and idiosyncratically for our own account and institutions investing other people’s money entrusted to their good judgment programmatically and perpetually. Since they did not see the structural differences between individuals and institutions, these well-meaning lawyers took it upon themselves to declare that what is properly prudent for individuals to be doing in a market dominated by individuals should also be prudent for institutors to do in markets dominated by institutions.  They wrote this principal into a model law that very quickly became the law.

For over 40 years now, we have been experimenting with this standard of prudence that is the same for individual and for institutional fiduciaries.This experiment has proved two things.

1. Investing stewardship funds as equity into enterprise is good for enterprise, for the economy and for society.
2. Doing so through Wall Street trading is not.

The data is in that proves that institutions are actually different from individuals, not only in size, but also in purpose and it time.  Individuals invest opportunistically. Institutions invest programmatically. Individuals invest idiosyncratically, to manage life events: we buy when we have some surpluses saved; we sell when we need those surpluses back to spend on life events. Institutions invest in perpetuity, to generate adequate cash flows, forever: they buy when they have savings to invest, but they never really need to sell, and if they do, they use the proceeds to buy something else.  Institutions have an actuarial risk pool (or equivalent) to keep full and flowing. They need always to be investing to meet that need.  That changes everything about how the markets for trading in securities work.

A market that is dominated by individuals investing to manage life events moves to the rhythm of buy-and-hold.

As that market gets taken over by institutions as perpetual buyers, buy-and-hold becomes buy-low-to-sell-high becomes buy-high-to-sell-higher. Speculation takes over. The markets fall into dysfunction.  Engorged by the vast aggregations of pensions and endowments that always have to buy, prices always go up, because there is more demand for higher prices than there is authentic growth in enterprise through economies of scale.  The Markets boom, but those booms are always bust that have not happened yet.  When these booms do go bust, the consequences are catastrophic.  Think 1907, 1929 and 2008.  And as you consider the time between 1929 and 2008, remember that the markets were dominated by individuals from 1929 to 1972, because regulation kept insurance and banks out of the markets, and pensions didn’t really become significant until the 1940s.  Up until 1973, pensions, along with endowments, were not allowed to trade in the markets. It was consider illegal as a violation of fiduciary duty, because it was not prudent.  Only since 1973 have pensions and endowments been allowed by law to trade in the markets. It, took until the 1980s for pensions and endowments to shift their investment practices over to securities trading. In the 1980s, we had Merger Mania, the collapse of both real estate and the savings and loan business, and the invention of consumer credit card debt.  In the 1990s, we had the dot.com bubble and Long Term Capital Management.  The 2000s opened with Enron and closed with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.  Now, where are we?

The learning here is that the markets for trading in securities were created by design for individuals. They only function correctly when they are dominated by individuals. Some professional speculation is necessary to keep the markets liquid, but the level of speculation that the markets can tolerate, before degenerating into dysfunction is limited.

The markets were not designed for institutions. They do not function correctly when dominated by institutions. Institutions need to design their own frameworks, processes, places and people for investing in enterprise correctly and functionally.

Since the mistake we are making that is causing all this dysfunction is technical, the correction we need must also be technical.

When we get radical in the Latin sense, by “going to the root”, we can see that this dysfunction is arising because we are missing a proper point of connection between surpluses being saved for the purpose of sufficiency against life’s uncertainties and enterprises pursuing values that are authentically aligned with that purpose.

Evergreen, at its core, provides that connection by giving us a new form of investment contract that is created by design to properly align stewardship of savings for sufficiency with enterprises that are pursuing values that align with the purpose of those savings. We call this new form of investment contract designed for aligned stewardship of sufficiency an evergreen equity split, because it is, in its most essential form, a legally enforceable contract for splitting the cash flows to equity between enterprise leadership and their stewardship investors that is open-ended, on-going, automatically self-regenerating, and in that sense, evergreen.

To evolve this new form of evergreen investment contract, we have to look at the different values that different enterprises may be pursuing at any given point in time, in order to pick the right enterprises to connect to, and the right form of investment contract for making that connection the right way. When we look at the different values that different enterprises are pursuing at the same, we begin to see that the same enterprise actually pursues different values at different times. We begin to see that every enterprise is defined in large part by a social contract it enters into with popular choice. This social contract flourishes for a time, and then fades in the fulness of time, as times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes. In fact, every enterprise follows this same pattern of pursuing different values over time, as its own social contract with popular choice flourishes and then fades over time.

As we study this pattern of flourish and fade driving enterprise to value different values at different times, we discover new insights into the nature of Investment, at a technical level, and into the way society and the economy work, at an existential level.

Technically, we come to see that we, as individuals, save our surpluses for different purposes, and that these different purposes align most truly with different values that different enterprises are required by their different social contracts with popular choice (that is, with us) to value at different times. We can then begin to see how it is that different learning about connecting savings to enterprise, and about aligning different purposes to the right, and different, values, form the core of different social structures of value-recognizing frameworks, processes, places and people for putting that learning about financial intermediation into action, aggregating surpluses and deploying those aggregations into enterprise. As we drill down deeper into the functioning of these different social structures of financial intermediation, we begin to see finance as a form of times-series partnership among different forms of financial intermediation that provides different forms of  investment to enterprise at different points along its journey, from initial Inspiration to practical Perfection, matching the different purposes for which surpluses are saved with the different values that enterprise must be valuing to optimize its social contract with popular choice as that contract values different values over time.

Then, we have this realization. Today, this time-series partnership stops at Growth.

Enterprise does not stop at Growth.  Enterprise reaches for Perfection, and once it arrives at a practically perfect expression of the learning it is organized to put into action, it is rewarded under its social contract with popular choice if it continues to make that perfect expression perfectly available. For a time. Perhaps for a very long time.  But always, in the fulness of time, there comes a time when the times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, making new choices as better fit to changing times, and letting previously popular as perfect-to-their-times choices fade into history.

Enterprise does not stop at Growth. Investment currently does.  And that is why investment is currently dysfunctioning today. Pensions are failing, while corporations hoard cash. More and more control over our economy and prosperity is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer actual individuals. Increasingly, we are creating surpluses in our economy that are being shared in patterns that are not fair. As we move further and further away from fundamental fairness, we move further and further away from peace in our times. We are collaboratively co-creating for ourselves a future filled with non-peace through dysfunctional investment decision-making that is replacing prosperous adaptation with privileged protectionism.

The way to change the course of present history is to correct for this dysfunction by making Investment continue beyond Growth, onwards towards Perfection, and beyond that, into history.

We can do that by adaptively evolving new standards of prudent stewardship for pensions and endowments as aggregators of surpluses saved for sufficiency.  Because perfection in enterprise turns out to be a pretty good match to sufficiency in savings.

At this point, we begin to feel a certain awkwardness of language. The words we need to share these insights, and to co-creatively collaborate in putting these insights into action, don’t really exist yet. Not with the proper precision of meaning and richness of context we need to give them. We need new words that mean what we need them to mean in the context of this new learning about investment in sufficiency and the pursuit of perfection in enterprise and the flourish and fade of popular choice, and the way times change and people evolve prosperous adaptation to life’s constant changes, making new choices that are a better fit to changing times, and letting previously popular as fit to their times choices fade into history.

As we consider these new words, we reach another insight. We control our economy through our vocabulary. The words that we use to express the learning that we put into action making decisions about how to save and where to invest, are the words we use to decide, through enterprise, what our future can, should and will be made to be.

Right now, we are all trapped in a vocabulary of Growth that is failing us. We need to adaptively evolve a new vocabulary of Practical Perfection that includes Growth but that also can take us beyond Growth, into prosperous adaptation.

Evergreen is that new vocabulary.

Technically, evergreen is a vocabulary of investment. Existentially, it is a vocabulary of prosperity, a prosperity in which peace is seen as the correct measure of success in the economy, and non-peace an indicator that the economy is not functioning correctly. It is a vocabulary that tells us that if the economy is dysfunctioning incorrectly to give us non-peace, the proper point of inflection for making the required correction may very well be investment.

Let’s drill down to learn more.

The currently popular vocabulary used in the design of enterprise is the Wall Street vocabulary of Growth.

The new evergreen vocabulary for the design of enterprise is a vocabulary of Peace.

Growth is part of Peace. Peace is bigger than Growth.

where “adequate” means sufficient to keep an actuarial risk pool (or equivalent) correctly full, and flowing

discovering the possibilities for
doing finance differently

three new framework for designing investment by fitting enterprise within the economy through civic engagement in collaboratively co-creating the adaptively evolving Hypothetical Reasonable Persons standard of fiduciary prudence for superfiduciaries

It takes a Manifesto

Images for making thoughts about the right relationships visible.

for putting new learning about enterprise design, expressed in a new vocabulary of words and images for making thoughts visible,
into action creating enterprise, and the economy, by design

a new CORRECTIVE process

Why do we need a new process?

CORRECTIVE

deconstructing how the economy is (not) working now, and how we can change the economy to make it work more a way we choose

a new CREATIVE process

learning the skills of designing in evergreen

CREATIVE

designing Stewardship agreements with enterprise on strategies, possibilities, and priorities for sharing cash flows programmatically

a new EXPRESSIVE process

people in places participating

EXPRESSIVE

collaboratively co-creating an adaptively evolving Hypothetical Reasonable Person as the community standard for prudent stewardship

a new EXISTENTIAL process

choosing peace as the new frontier

EXISTENTIAL

choosing peace,

with the earth,

with each other,

and with ourselves

like a set of Russian nesting dolls, evergreen is at its core a critical process that sits inside a larger creative process that sits inside a larger social process that sits inside a n even larger existential process for collaboratively co-creating our adaptively evolving human way of being in the world

empowering prudent stewardship to keep us moving towards the peace of fundamental fairness

the peace of a prosperity of fundamental fairness

collaboratively co-created through civic engagement in adaptively evolving prudent stewardship investment in optimizing the flourish and fade of the social contract between enterprise and popular choice 

creating by design
a new way
of
creating enterprise
by design
that is a better fit to the functions of our times