REVIEW: Strickler, This Could Be Our Future

<p>I recently read a book that has a few ideas that could relate to Millennial Social Thought (MST). The book is <i>This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World</i>, by Yancey Strickler. He is a cofounder of Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website. The two points of the book that relate most closely to my interests are Strickler's condemnation of profit maximization as a guilding influence in decision-making, and the idea of Public Benefit Corporations (PBC), a different legal structure for businesses.</p><p>Firstly, he says modern society has been based on the premise of financial maximization, which he says has three components:<ol><li>the point of life is maximizing financial wealth,</li><li>we live in an adversarial world, and</li><li>the first two points are inevitable and eternal.</li><ol>Of course, my training as an economist would tell me that (1) is the result of the liquidity of money and the limitless sources of utility, and that (2) is the result of scarcity. People want to maximize their money value because, as Homer Simpson's brain explains to him when he finds $20 instead of a peanut, "Money can be exchanged for goods and services." Even if I satiate my desire for one means of wellbeing, there are others. Uncertainty about the future and the natural desire for novelty mean that I'm almost never going to get to a point where I think, "I have enough for the rest of my life." Even if I <b>did</b>, I have people around me whose wellbeing is of interest to me, like my children, and they have circles of affinity, too, which might not even exist yet, like their children. How many of them are there going to be, and what are their interests and needs going to be in the future? The safest gameplan is to maximize my financial wealth.</p><p>That's before we even address the fact that the world has finite resources. I know a lot of futurists picture a world where scarcity might no longer hold for some resources, but unless we end up with a superabundance of all sources of utility, there will always be scarcity at least in some metric. So while Strickler presents the dominance of financial maximization as a recent phenomenon (which he pins on Milton Friedman), I view it more as the human condition.</p><p>When Strickler writes (p. 71), "More than employees, customers, or its own future, shareholders and the stock price were the priority" of business, he intends it as an "ain't it a shame" line, but I view this as just the legal necessity of business. The owners want to maximize their welfare, and liquid money allows them to each do that in their own way. When Strickler writes (p. 110), "The case against financial maximization isn't anti-money. It's pro-money. It's just pro-people, too. In service of people, money can be a very positive force," I think the same can be said of financial maximization within a value system. It's not financial maximization that Strickler has a problem with, it's the amoral application of it.</p><p>Strickler wants us to have a constraining value system, which is the idea of PBCs. Instead of existing for the benefit of the shareholders, which produces the motivation of financial maximization, PBCs have explicit values. As Strickler writes, these firms are "maximizing and optimizing for a different set of values" (p. 163); "a broader spectrum of values is so crucial" (p. 152).</p><p>In the 1950s Simon Kuznets and Abraham Maslow developed ideas about humans' ability and willingness to solve problems. Maslow's hierarchy of needs shows that people must solve basic concerns before they are in a position to address advanced ones, and the Kuznets curve shows that we will accept worsening of less-crucial problems as we pursue the improvement of more-pressing ones. If I had to sum up Strickler's argument, I would say that we've become rich enough of a country to sacrifice some financial maximization for the purpose of other goals. That may be true, but it's also something that maybe only someone in a privileged economic position could argue. But that's the audience Strickler is addressing, the people in the influential positions who determine what values their corporations will pursue. He writes, "To go back to Maslow's hierarchy, there are people and organizations that have fulfilled their safety and security needs. They can afford to be more generous and more long-term oriented because they aren't facing profound existential threats every day" (p. 175). Of course, different people will have different opinions about when they've reached that level of security. The more the social contract disintegrates, the more you have to grab for yourself because there will be no safety net should you miscalculate. Retaining more for yourself then further destroys social goods. But things can work in the opposite direction, as well: a more-generous society can encourage me to be less grasping because I know my peers won't allow me to end up destitute. I see Strickler's book as an attempt to coordinate the change of direction. He quotes John Maynard Keynes: "When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals" (p. 194). But it requires a great change to the moral code to dislodge wealth accumulation from the pinnacle of social importance.</p><p>I argued at the beginning of this post that concerns for the future and for others in my circles of sympathy can drive wealth maximization. Strickler sees rational self-interest as producing financial maximization only for me and only in the present (pp.130-3). I think that's just a matter of disagreeing about how much concern people have for their kin and future selves. As Bruce Cannon Gibney argues in <i>A Generation of Sociopaths</i>, the Baby Boomers are a uniquely selfish generation that can't see social or future goals that would discourage the maximization of personal consumption. As Deirdre McCloskey points out, the lack of ethics in economics doesn't mean that we should make economic decisions without a system of ethics. It's the return of public ethics that Strickler needs for his system to work. He tries to convince the rich that they have enough that they can now afford to behave ethically. But I'm not sure that any amount of money is enough to convince an unethical person of that. The ethics have to come first.</p>