Disrupting Scarcity for Good

Last week, two very different pieces caught my attention.

The first was a paper called Fixing the Holes in Economics, which argues (in the most British policy-wonk way possible) that much of mainstream economics is based on outdated assumptions about human behaviour. It calls for new models that account for factors such as trust, institutions, and our actual social lives. In other words, things that don’t always appear in spreadsheets, but nonetheless shape how we interact and make decisions, including financial ones. 

To quote the author:
Economists have long been bothered by a ‘problem’ that, for most people, seems like a good thing. Humans are a lot more cooperative than economic theory implies. You might call it ‘nice’. …Excessive cooperation appears to be widespread.

Honestly, not something I’ve thought much about.

The second was a podcast episode from Money with Katie, all about social wealth funds. (I just found her recently, and I enjoy her hot takes on personal finance in the much-broader-than-usual context of social norms, unbridled capitalism, etc.) Social wealth funds are public investment vehicles. Katie and her guest discussed Norway and Alaska’s oil funds. Unlike Alberta, where private investors, mostly non-Canadian, reap most of the profits from oil reserves (check out Linda McQuaig’s The Sport and Prey of Capitalists for a history of Canada selling off public goods to private interests), these jurisdictions consider oil a public good. They collect the returns from these publicly held resources and return the gains back to the people, either through annual dividend cheques or through well-funded social programs. It’s a way of organizing money around collective benefit rather than individual accumulation. 

Most interestingly, they made a case for publicly held shares in profitable companies over trying to collect a share of this wealth through taxation. For example, while countries struggled to collect taxes from Apple, Norway held shares of Apple and received its dividend payments on time and in full. 

Interesting, right? I had never considered it, but taking shares in wealth-generating companies instead of collecting taxes from the shareholders might be a brilliant move.

My brain was tickled by how both of these pieces—whether explicitly or not—challenge the story of scarcity that underpins so much of our economy, and, by extension, so much of our nonprofit and advocacy work.

So today’s post is about that - not a fulsome examination of these two concepts, but a quick look at one place they intersect. One of the essential shifts, albeit one I haven’t written as much about here: from scarcity to sustainability.

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