Is there anything we can do to change where the country is headed?
With so much disfunction across so much of society, can anything be done?
I believe there is a clear, if difficult, path for us to forge a better world, for everyone.
Let’s start with the basic assumption that the vast majority of people want the world to be better.
That we all want to eliminate hunger and poverty.
That we want people everywhere to have the opportunity to improve their condition, to adequately provide for their families.
Not only “get by” but actually enjoy themselves
That we want a healthcare system that works.
We want a healthy, sustainable environment.
We want the bounty of this wonderful planet to be responsibly harnessed and fairly distributed.
If we start with that assumption.
Something Needs to Change
The world’s been on the same trajectory for a few decades now. There’s been a lot of progress, but it led us to today. A place where most of us are unsatisfied with the status quo and anxious about the future.
It’s clear that governments (including local, state, federal, and other countries), for myriad reasons, are incapable of moving us in a constructive direction (see problems with the government). In terms of creating meaningful change, non-profits and charities play a role, but they are heavily out-gunned by the agents supporting the status quo. So is organized religion.
So Where Can We Turn to Help Us Make Progress?
How do we go about making things less bad?
For the past few hundred years we’ve been relying on “business” and “the free market” to organize how the Earth’s bounty is distributed. Through the free market, Earth’s resources are transformed into money, which makes its way through the world and to a large degree decides how the fruits of those resources are allocated.
As it stands, the purpose of every business is to make its owners as much money as possible. The more stock an individual owns in a specific business, the more they are rewarded for how efficiently that business uses (some might say exploits) available resources – including workers. In the pursuit of increasing profit, businesses do things like pay employees as little as they can, externalize as many costs as they can (pollution the most understood), lobby politicians to protect their profits, and pursue a whole host of other unsavory tactics.
It doesn’t make business managers bad people, they are responding to the environment and incentives we all live in.
But what if the power of business, instead of being focused on transferring as much money as possible to owners, was somehow organized around promoting humanity’s shared goals?
What if Capitalism was able to transform Earth’s natural and human resources into shared prosperity and happiness for all, rather than evermore more wealth for the already wealthy?
If businesses promoted the common good as their primary motive (rather than being a secondary, occasional by-product of pursuing self-interest), we would feel better about the free market steering the direction of progress.
In the current environment, it’s often difficult for a business to “do the right thing.”
There are CEOs out there that are good people. There are decent human beings on corporate boards.
Unfortunately, they are LEGALLY OBLIGATED to maximize profits. A CEO would be negligent if they didn’t push wages down, manipulate the government, exploit natural resources, externalize costs as much as possible, and all the other behaviors that are counter-productive to shared prosperity.
Harnessing the Free Market To Benefit Everyone
We aren’t going to change the fact that people want more money, and the power it grants.
But what if, to make profits, a business had to work with humanity as a whole?
What if a business’s stock price reflected how much it was contributing toward our common goals, rather than its specific profit motives?
Using the power of consumer choice, we can force businesses to benefit everyone.
Consumer Choice
What if before a purchase, you could know how aligned the company is with humanity? What if consumers could easily understand the full implications of their purchase?
If you were deciding between Coke and Pepsi, what if you could rely on a few simple metrics to help you choose? Before purchasing, you could evaluate how each company’s corporate actions align with your personal beliefs.
If the environment is important to you, you could base your decision on how helpful the business is in that regard – its carbon emissions, recycling rates, natural resource use; in short, its overall positive or negative impact on the environment.
If you care about ending world hunger, their respective impact on that issue would inform your decision.
Or if you care about how the company treats its employees, about how fairly it distributes its profits, you could use associated metrics.
And of course, if there was an easy metric that combined them all in a format you could trust, you could use that.
Using the Free Market to Drive Shared Prosperity
Less Bad is at the early stages of organizing what we hope will become a massive, collaborative effort to harness the power of business to help solve so many of our societal problems.
There are three main components:
- Impact Consumerism – Empowering consumers to use their money to push for meaningful societal change.
- The Humanity Index – Evaluating corporations’ impact on the most meaningful issues of the day.
- How We Fix Everything – A framework and roadmap to identify where we want to go and how to get there.
These three components work together to: create a framework and an evolving, collective roadmap; encourage businesses to be a meaningful part of that progress; and transparently measure and report on that progress.
It’s quite simple really.
Yes, it’s a big undertaking.
It’s easy to be a cynic, to think that this is a ploy from another derelict non-profit that lines its own pockets without really helping anything.
You’re free to think that everyone is horrible, that the situation is hopeless, and that humanity’s best days are behind us.
But what if they’re not?
More importantly, it’s up to us to determine the answer with our actions.
Really, what choice do we have? Do we bitch and moan but not do anything, until like three people have us living in their dystopia? Or scroll through our phone watching cat videos until the nukes start dropping?
Or do we try to grab the steering wheel and head in the direction of shared prosperity? Of cooperation. Of a dignified, meaningful life for everyone who cares to claim one.
The simple framework is an attempt to do just that.
I hope this simple explanation makes sense to you.
It’s still early days for Less Bad, but we’re hoping to have a real impact.
Please sign up for the newsletter to learn more.
