prosperity we make through the designs we choose to finance

I was watching a documentary on PBS a while back about the famous sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson. He’s the guy who studies ants. In 1975, he published a book that he called On Human Nature. In this book he shared his observations about how similar ant societies are to human societies

This made quite a stir. At the time most anthropologists were busy studying chimpanzees, as our closest genetic relative.

E. O. Wilson pointed out that chimpanzee societies are not really that similar to our societies. Chimpanzees don’t collaborate the way we people do. In this way, people are more like ants, according to Dr. Wilson.

Dr. Wilson got the collaboration right, but he missed this other part. He missed the part about creativity.

Ants are not really like people, because ants are not creative. Ants do not have a history. The history of ants is that there were some ants, then there were some different ants. But they all just did the same ant things.

Ants do not have culture. They do not have civilization.

People do.

 

People make history. That’s what we do. Our lives today are very different than the lives that our parents lived, and those lives are different from the lives of their parents, and so and on back into the darkest recesses of Time, when Man first picked up a stick, and lit a fire.

Ever since then, we have been making things, and the thing we make the most is change. We do that collaboratively, as Dr. Wilson pointed out. We also do it creatively.

Human history is the history of our creative collaborations in taking the world about us as we find it, and changing it to be more a way we like it to be. This history is creative. It is collaborative. It is also adaptive. And evolutionary. Dr. Wilson missed that also. Ants don’t evolve. Generation after generation, ants are just ants.

In some ways people are just people from one generation to the next. In other ways, each generation is also unique, the creation of its own creations.

And these creations are always getting better, generation after generation.

That’s the evolutionary part. Every time one generation makes a change in one thing, that creates both the need and the opportunity for other generations to make other changes, in other things.

exploring new possibilities for effective global governance through exemplary superfiduciary stewardship

there is another way

What if superfiduciaries can use their power to negotiate with enterprise to inject social and environmental sensabilities into enterprise operating at global scale?

Superfiduciaries, of course, could not rule by force of arms, and would not be accountable through democratic processes.

Supefiduciaries would not “rule” at all. They could, however, negotiate with enterprise concessions to the public interest as conditions to financial sponsorship as consistent with their fiduciary rights and responsibilities as superfiduciary stewards of superfunds set aside by society for social benefit.

A retirement fund, for example, could conclude that in the exercise of good stewardship over the evergreen ongoingness of its actuarial risk pool, it needs to take action to prevent confrontation with catastrophic climate change affecting future generations. This action might include R&D type support for new, climate neutral, energy choices, and also investments in a managed transition to a new energy economy.  This is something the Wall Street system cannot finance, because transition is not growth. The size of the energy industry after a transition to a new portfolio of regionally optimized climate neutral energy choices will not be significantly larger than that industry is before that transition.

It just will still be.

“Still being” is not something that Wall Street understands, values, or can finance.

It is, however, an important component of good stewardship of society’s superfund set-asides for social benefit.

finance is how society chooses which technologies for making prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes can, should and will be pursued through enterprise, and at what scale

The evergreen economy is an expanding universe of technologies evolving as prosperous adaptation to life’s constant changes, where “technology” is understood in the authentic Greek meaning of the word as,

“practical knowledge of how the world about us works, and how we can change the way the world works to make it work more a way we choose”

Increasingly we live in a motorized, monetized, industrialized, enterprised, urbanized and globalized economy in which many of the social and environmental threats to sustainable prosperity that create the need that is also the opportunity for good governance in the public interest can no longer be contained within the political boundaries of national governments.  Or kept outside those same boundaries.

This is giving impetus to a nascent conversation about the need for a new system of global governance.

This is raising all manner of questions about the ability of human bureaucracy (which all forms of government employ, and depend upon) to remain accountable to personal autonomy through democratic processes at this scale.