Our Uniquely Human Way of Making The History That We Live Out Of The Future Possibilities That Are Given To Us
We start with these three truths about our uniquely human way of being in the world.
- We are born into a world that is not of our own making.
- We are endowed with the capacities for inquiry, insight for figuring out 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 to make; and for putting learning into action taking the world about us as we find it, and changing it to be more a way we choose to make it through enterprise and exchange.
- The world into which we are born is constantly changing on its own. Also the changes we choose drive other changes we did not choose. So that our times are constantly changing. And we are constantly evolving prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes. Or not.
Inquiry begins when the world about us does not work quite the way we expected that is would. Driven by frustration, or maybe just idle curiosity, we work to understand why what we expect should be happening is not what actually is happening.
Insights are formed as people begin to see what is different, in experience, from what we expected, in anticipation. Insights show us new possibilities for how we can take the world around us and change it to work more a way we choose to make it.
Visionary individuals leading creative enterprise see the possibilities for developing new insights into a new social contract with popular choice, generating cash flows through commercial exchanges with people who value those changes, and are willing and able to pay a price to get their benefit.
Which brings us to consideration of what a price is, and how it gets paid.
Enterprise is a physical coming-together of diverse people with diverse insights and abilities to specific insights into how the world about us works into action collaborate in co-creating changes that are surplus to the needs of those collaborators. These surpluses of change in how the world about us works can be shared with others who did not collaborate on their co-creation for their use in making the world about them be a way they choose to make it.
These exchanges can be made for surpluses created by others in a direct exchange of surpluses for surplus. This would be a direct barter, as in “I’ll give you some of my extra beans, if you give me some of your extra rice. Then we both can eat better, enjoying a meal of beans and rice, instead just beans, or just rice.” This is the essence of all enterprise, exchange, and human prosperity through collaboration and sharing. It is a fundamental and therefor also universal human experience that is the basic building block of all economies and all humanity’s pursuit of prosperity. It is familiar to everybody and therefor understandable by everyone.
Exchanges can be made for some surplus that is generally useful to many, and so can be given to others to complete other exchanges. Precious metals have long served this function, where one party will a surplus of silver to another party, in exchange for a surplus of some other artifact of human ingenuity and collaborative co-creation. A practice has long been common for quantities of metal to be stamped into coins that are guaranteed as to quality and quantity by some governmental authority, usually the king of a country in an aristocratic economy.
Exchanges can also be made for a simple promise to provide equivalent value in some undetermined form, and some undetermined future point in time. When exchanges are made for promises, some token is needed to represent both the fact that the promise has been made, and the quantity of value promised. This token can take the form of a note printed on paper. When the note is personal to the promisor, its value is limited to other persons who value the promise of that promisor to deliver the promised value.
Money is a form of note printed on paper by a governmental authority who declares such money to be legal tender for the payment of debts. This makes this money useful to all persons who complete exchanges within the scope legal authority of the issuing government.
Historically, this paper money was designed as a claim check that could be redeemed from the issuing government for a specified quantity of precious metal such as gold or silver. Such paper money often circulated in concert with coins minted by governments out of metals that were valued as a universal value, so that entire money systems existed of both paper notes and metal coins, all of which used metal, directly or indirectly, as a universal measure of value to complete exchanges indirectly, between persons and enterprises that did not need exactly what the other had to offer in exchange.
This is the price paid in money.
Money is a marvelous invention, and that for two reasons.
First, as we have seen, it facilitates indirect exchanges between enterprising individuals for the sharing of surpluses through complex networks that support increasing degrees in specialization and increasing varieties of choices that people can make for how we want to take our own little experience of being in the world, and change it to be more a way we choose it to make it be.
Second, money can be saved, and accumulated, and invested to make more money.
Investment works like this. Enterprise requires concentrations of time effort and expertise to collaboratively co-create surpluses that are popular with other people, and can be traded for price payable in money, or other value. To keep it simple, let’s focus on modern enterprises, completing exchanges for a price paid in money as the legal tender of an issuing government. Enterprise needs money to spend on doing its work of collaboratively co-creating surpluses before it can make money by completing exchanges of its surpluses with others, for prices paid in money.
When the visionary leaders of collaboratively co-creative enterprises need money, Finance provides it.
Finance is a social structure of vision-valuing patterns, pattern languages, places and people for aggregating surpluses saved as money, and deploying those aggregations of savings in visionary leaders of creative enterprises whose vision Finance values.
Money makes Finance possible. Finance makes enterprise at scale and in diversity possible. Enterprise at scale and in diversity makes it possible for a population to collaboratively co-create a rich diversity of surpluses that are sufficient to their needs, and to circulate those surpluses sufficiently within their population and across their generations, while constantly evolving new surpluses that are better fit to changing times as prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, making new choices more popular as better fit to changing times, and letting previously popular choices fade into history as a good fit in an earlier time.
This is the history of humanity’s pursuit of prosperity. It is a history of constantly creating a new future history through inquiry, insight, enterprise – and Finance
It is open-ended, ongoing, self-regenerating – and, in that sense, evergreen.