Betterness: Economics for Humans (Kindle Single)

That lives lived meaningfully well place real wealth above shareholder value, people above product, outcomes above income, and are a consequence of striving for better—instead of just “busier.”

The terra incognita we’ve never explored is whether it’s possible for prosperity and human exchange not merely to go less wrong, but more right.

When an organization can say, “We exist to create this specific kind of marginal wealth because it has these consequences for people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations,” it has crafted an ambition.

This crisis of real wealth may well be not merely situational, but structural, no evanescent crash, but what economists call a bad equilibrium—a toxic convergence decades in the making. The different forms of bucket emptying—wealth destruction—are long-run trends, not transient phenomena. All have been under way for at least a decade, and most as l

Today’s economy rewards people most for merely allocating existing capital. That’s not a recipe for prosperity; it’s simply a game of musical chairs.

Once upon a time, it took a royal charter to incorporate; today, it takes a mouse click and a credit card. Yesterday’s pathologies are today, if not totally conquered, then at least mostly vanquished, and the recipe for sending them packing now formulated, packaged, and dispensed by the dozen under the label “liberalize, privatize, and stabilize.”

See the difference? “What are we here to do, on a daily basis, and what is our day-to-day raison d’être?” That is the second fundamental question every organization must ask. Mission and intention both answer it, but in very different ways. A mission specifies, daily, how an organization will do business with its customers. But an intention specifi

That a good life is composed more of what you can’t buy than what you can.

Ask yourself: What kind of products won’t we offer? What products and services will we discourage people from consuming?