Keywords: Big Money. Sick. Cure?
Theories of Social Change that do not include keeping our institutional of social decision making healthy won't work
“The real problem is simply that sick societies have sick institutions”
Jay S Kaufman
This quote is from an article that is locked behind a paywall to which I do not possess a key, so I may not be understanding the author's real point, but the quoted reference to sick institutions is too tempting to pass up.
First, because it shines a spotlight on the importance of institutions as social structures for social decision making, which is something Modern Economics wants us to believe is not true. Modern Economics wants us to believe that all decisions made within society are made as the sum total of the aggregated choices made by individual self-interested, utility-maximizing rational actors acting rationally to match Supply to Demand (or Demand to Supply) through competition on price under conditions of scarcity within markets for maintaining market-clearing prices.
If all decisions are made by individuals, individually, then the only point of leverage for changing social choice is moral shaming of individuals (see Bill McKibben). This ignores the fact that institutions for social decision making do exist, and that these institutions make decisions for society according to the decision-making logic that is hardwired into that institution, BY LAW (that is, by the law of their formation).
Second, because it shines a spotlight on the truth that institutions can be healthy, making sound decisions for society according to correct insitutional logic, or sick, making unsound choices according to a corrupted institutional logic.
The sickest institutions we have today are our institutions of intergenerational fiduciary ownership: our Pensions & Endowments.
These are the real BIG MONEY institutions for social decision making through Finance in Modern Society today. (Corporate Finance - Wall Street, or the Markets - only look big, because they have taken over the real big money entrusted to Pensions and Endowments, and bent it to their purposes)
These BIG MONEY financial institutions are hardwired by the law of fiduciary duty for prudence and loyalty to future generations, and to the future of current generations, to programmatically provide certainty against certain of life's future uncertainties: income security in a dignified retirement; or income to support various civil society institutions and activities.
But they have been taken over by a different institution for social decision making through Finance, the institution of Corporate Finance, and they are being made to make decisions for where the money will go according to the logic of Corporate Finance (do the best we can today today, and worry about tomorrow tomorrow). This is NOT the logic of prudent intergenerational loyalty to our future.
This capture of Pensions & Endowments by Corporate Finance is making both these institutions sick. And that sickness is spreading into other institutions of social decision-making, in Finance, in Government and in Civil Society.
That widespread institutional sickness is infecting individual decision making as well.
That's my diagnosis.
Is there a cure?