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The Past History of Humanity’s Investment To Make Our Future History

Economies are an essential part of our uniquely human way of being in the world.

For as long as there has been people, people have lived and prospered through enterprise for the concentration of effort to put learning into action collaboratively co-creating and sharing surpluses for taking the world about us as we find it, and changing it to be more a way we choose to make it.

Enterprise always needs capital to pay the costs of concentrating efforts that can only be recouped after surpluses have been collaboratively co-created and shared.

So people have always had social structures for aggregating surpluses to form capital for investment in enterprise.

History (and pre-history) shows that at different times people have evolved different social structures for enterprise design through investment decision-making as fit to ways people lived in those times.

All these different historically evolved social structures continue in our time, in forms adapted to our times, as from time to time, new structures are evolved to fit the changing needs of changing times.

Now is one of those times, when a new social structure needs to be evolved.

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a short history of contemporary capitalism

a shorter history of
Modern Times

a longer history of The Capitalisms

Across the long history of humanity’s pursuit of prosperity through enterprise, there has been a steady increase in the learning we have learned about the world about us, in all the many different domains in which we, as people, interact with the world into which we are born.  

Through that history, there have been a small number of changes in the social structures of Government, Enterprise, Finance and Civil Society through which we, as people, choose what new learning will be put into action collaboratively co-creating new ways for interacting with the world about us.

1. In the earliest aboriginal human economies of hunting, herding, fishing, gathering, and subsistence farming, surpluses were aggregated and deployed through the social power of tribal leaders for the benefit of the entire group, acting essentially as an extended family unit.
2. With the invention of grain agriculture, communal granaries evolved into temple complexes, where the bounty of the harvest was stored for safekeeping and distributed back out to the people by a priestly class. They were the ones who spoke to the heavens and knew the will of the season-giving gods to deliver sustenance.
3. As surpluses of grain supported surpluses of people, artists and artisans evolved into craftspeople and tradespeople, increasing the diversity of luxuries and necessities that could be enjoyed and used by people to take the world about us as we found it, and to change it to be more a way we want it to be. Growing diversity of work and wealth brought increased competition. Competition brings contention. An artisanal aristocracy evolved the form we know commonly as a king, with a treasury funded by taxes and other imposts (often plunder of adjacent kingdoms) and deployed for public works, which included the work of supporting the aristocracy in sometimes appropriately and sometimes excessive, royal style.
4. Kings can rule their realms through fiat and the kings’ currencies, but as kingdoms proliferate, the need and the opportunity for trade between kingdoms also increases. Bankers and banks evolved to move money among kingdoms and to equalize the currencies. Inventions of accounting and bookkeeping supporting lending on credit, and the system we know as modern banking, became the frontier of finance for indirect trading and exchange among the King’s subjects and between sometimes warring or remote kingdoms. Fire power in weaponry gave way to fire power in industry.
5. Fast forward to coal unleashing steam to drive engines.  Craftsmanship becomes industry.  Scale becomes the new frontier.  The corporation was invented to aggregate savings from individuals by selling shares in small increments. People traded them as commodities in public trading markets, which deployed the aggregations as equity in free enterprise organized and operated at ever-increasing scale. This expansion gave way to an increasingly global economy that expanded exponentially into a Western Frontier which the consequences of industry and society would blur. Racing across the horizon toward(s) scale was possible seemingly without consequence. We could always extract more from farther away. Growth, growth, more growth. Industry at scale created both the need and the opportunity for the retirement of individuals.
6. Enter the modern era.. with the invention of actuarial risk pooling, using the new science of statistics, the mathematics of probabilities and the law of large numbers, life insurance expanded in the 19th Century to socialize the costs of dying too soon. This system adaptively evolved into defined-benefit pensions in the 20th Century, which protected us from living too long.

This history of humanity’s pursuit of prosperity gives us six different forms of Finance as unique social structures of value-recognizing patterns, pattern languages, places and professionals for enterprise design through investment decision-making, each of which operates in our economy today.

This gives six different visions of prosperity co-existing in our economy today. 

Each evolved over time with a leap of new learning about ourselves and the possibilities for prosperity presented to us by the world about us. Each corresponds to an exponential expansion in the meaning that we mean by “we”.

Each is good, right, moral and just when it remains true to its own proper function.  

Each becomes not good, not right, immoral and unjust when it falls into dysfunction.

six historical leaps of new learning about the possibilities for prosperity

six exponential expansions to the meaning of who we mean by “we”

six social structures for enterprise design through investment decision-making

The Six Capitalisms

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Looking back from today over the earlier times in the history and prehistory of humanity’s pursuit of prosperity, we see our own adaptive networks economy evolving out of a previous economy of industrial progress, that evolved out of a previous trade-based mercantile economy that evolved out of a previous estate-based craft economy that evolved out of a previous economy of large scale grain agriculture that evolved out of the earliest aboriginal subsistence economies.

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