Corruption and ‘mismanagement”. Madoff defrauds charities of billions. The mayor of Baltimore has apparently gone on a shopping spree with gift cards donated for the poor. Millions of dollars are missing in Iraq, banks refuse to report what they have done with billions in public money. You can go further back – the Katrina frauds, or Enron: pick a story, pick a year, pick an amount.
Yet they are all one story. Someone, somewhere is saying “me! give me more… and more… and more”. There is a never-ending stream of takers, hands stretched out for more. Often, when the accounting is done, the hands belong to people who own more houses than they can live in, more cars than they can drive, more clothes than they can wear… but they want more.
It seems self-evident to me that these takers and grabbers do not understand economics. They confuse prosperity, which brings long-term comfort and security, with riches, which guarantee little except fear.
Prosperity is always community based. Personal prosperity and success require a safe, affordable and well-organized environment that supports other competent people, who can be partners in maintaining prosperity.
This type of environment includes schools, workforce education, reliable infrastructure, healthcare, transport systems, law and order etc. This all costs money, but when many can contribute to the economic base, the cost burden can be shared in a manageable way.
In a prosperous community, people know that it is in their interest to spend time and talents to have a good, secure life, but also worthwhile to invest in the well-being of their economic area.
The opposite approach, of “gimme gimme, more more” results in some people grabbing as much of the economic pie as possible, and holding on to it fiercely. Those who succeed in grabbing as much as possible (irrespective of need or ethics), then experience fear. Will someone grab it back? Is there a new tax, a litigator, a desperate thief, or a conman around the next corner?
All energy is then spent on defending one’s piece of the pie, rather than making the whole pie bigger, or the community base more prosperous.
There are two important casualties of the grab-as-much-as-I-can philosophy. These are trust and collaboration. This is especially significant because the new economy is being built largely by those who are willing to share knowledge and creativity.
Many problems today are complex, and demand a high degree of collaborative intelligence, and mutual give and take. The grabbers-and-runners short-circuit the whole process of innovation and growth, and make it much harder for others to stay the course in collaborative and trusting relationships.
Sometimes, I find that people recoil from helpful collaboration. They’ve been bitten before, and are looking for the catch, waiting for the snake to appear in the open hand offering ideas and support.
I’m not sure what we most need to learn: economics, ethics or history. Perhaps all three. But we need to learn it soon, and we also need to find some way of embedding the lesson in our community.
