Yancey Strickler - This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World

Yancey Strickler is a writer, speaker and co-founder of Kickstarter. He has appeared widely across the media around the world and been profiled in Wired, the Financial Times, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Forbes, and Vox. He was one of Fortunes 40 Under 40, on Vanity Fairs New Establishment List, and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. The Spectator called him one of the least obnoxious tech evangelists ever.

For Koji, and the rest of Future Us

IT STARTED WITH A HEADLINE .

It was fall. I was walking in New York City with my wife and son. I saw it out of the corner of my eye.

PLA to be world-class force by 2050, read the front page of China Daily. Beneath the headline was a picture of President Xi Jinping and a row of Peoples Liberation Army soldiers.

The year leapt out: 2050. Distant, but not too distant. Thirty-three years away from that moment. Ill probably still be alive then.

A thought hit me. While China was planning for 2050, my own country, the United States, couldnt agree whether to pay that months bills.

Where should we be in 2050?

I couldnt stop thinking about this.

The book in your hands is an answer to that question. Not the answer, an answer. But before we get to 2050, first we need to know where we are right now.

Today the world is dominated by an idea I call financial maximization. The belief that in any decision, the right choice is whichever option makes the most money. This is the default setting that runs much of our world.

In business, economics, and finance, the importance of financial growth is as fundamental as it gets. The whole point of having money is to make more of it.

But the force of financial maximization thats emerged in recent decades is something different. Its bigger and more powerful than its been before. The drive to financially maximize has come to dominate many of our organizations, our institutions, and even our dreams. Money is becoming all that matters.

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short, wrote a book called Liars Poker about his experience working on Wall Street right at the moment financial maximization took off in the 1980s. Lewis writes that his fellow traders assume that anything that enables them to get rich must also be good for the world. It didnt matter whether their actions created jobs or destroyed them. All that mattered was that they were making lots of money doing it.

This is what financial maximization has done to society on a mass scale. It has convinced us that in any decision, the correct choice is whatever option makes the most money, with no concept of good or bad beyond that. Good and bad are too irrational for financial maximizations Terminator-like thinking. It only cares whether theres less or more. And it always wants more.

As financial maximization has grown, its influence has breached the riverbanks of finance. In a widening array of areas, were increasingly wired to believe that the right answer is whatever produces the greatest financial return. Other values come second, or not at all.

The focus on financial growth isnt wrong. Without financial security, life spans for people and organizations decrease. Thats bad. Money is important. Its just not the only form of value we should protect and grow.

Financial maximization has trapped us with three assumptions: (1) that the point of life is to maximize financial wealth, (2) that were individuals trapped in an adversarial world, and (3) that this situation is inevitable and eternal.

We see these ideas as truths. Theyre not. Theyre ideas that previous generations proposed and accepted. Theyre assumptions that separate us, keep us powerless, and limit our imagination for the future. Theyre ideas that we must reexamine if we want to go somewhere new.

This book is about a simple idea.

That a world of scarcity can become a world of abundance if we accept a broader definition of value.

We recognize that there are many valuable things in lifelove, community, safety, knowledge, and faith, to name just a few. But we allow just one valuemoneyto dominate everything else. Our potential for a more generous, moral, or fair society is limited by the dominance of money as the be-all and end-all. It puts a ceiling on what we can be.

Until very recently, conversations like this were on the fringes of society. But in recent years theyve become more mainstream. In 2019, Fox News host Tucker Carlson sharply questioned financial maximization during a fifteen-minute monologue on his prime-time show. He said:

At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.

The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America was more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They havent so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot

We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. Theyre day traders. Substitute teachers. Theyre just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They cant solve our problems. They dont even bother to understand our problems

For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us its more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.

Market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. Youd have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

Across the political spectrum, people can feel that financial maximization has taken us off course.

This book proposes what we should do instead: end financial maximizations reign as the primary driver of human activity by expanding our idea of value.

The goal isnt to get rid of money. Its not to eradicate greed. Its not anti-profits, either. The goal is a world where values like community, knowledge, purpose, fairness, security, tradition, and the needs of the future also have a rational say in the big and daily decisions we face. Not just whichever choice makes the most money.

I believe that future is possible. And I believe it can be here faster than we think. By 2050 we can expand our idea of rational value beyond financial maximization, and grow value in new ways.

The year 2050 is more than a round number in a newspaper headline. Its a generation from now. Thirty years away from this moment. Thirty years is the right timescale to think about significant change.