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The Anthropology Of Finance As A Social Structure For Circulating Surpluses Through Investment
Very few individuals accumulate sufficient savings to be able to make investments in enterprise of any truly significant size.
When visionary leaders of creative enterprises need money to pursue a social contract with popular choice, doing the work of collaboratively co-creating surpluses of learning into action for taking the world about us and changing it to make it more a way we choose to make it that can be shared with others in exchange for a price paid in money or other value, very often the saved earnings of many different individuals must be aggregated to a scale required to meet the needs of enterprise.
This is the work of Finance:
- aggregating earnings saved by individuals;
- deploying those aggregations as investment in enterprise;
- sharing with the individuals whose savings provided the funds for investment a share of the earnings realized on that investment.
Finance is a social structure of vision-valuing patterns, pattern languages, places and people that aggregate savings for a common purpose, and invest those aggregations in enterprising visions that align with that purpose, when Finance functions correctly, circulating sufficient surpluses sufficiently, throughout the population and across the generations, constantly evolving prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes in patterns that are reasonably inclusive and fundamentally fair.
Finance does not always function correctly. When it does not, the values of investment do not align with the purpose of savings. Surpluses do not circulate sufficiently, and the population does not evolve prosperous adaptions to the changes taking place.
The social order disintegrates. There is no peace.