The conversation of #IsThereEnough starts another, about #agreement, and suggests that wealth is about something larger than money. It is about increasing survival and raising our standard of living. Money is only a means of storing wealth, but it is not wealth itself. Money is backed by something. It is backed by people. When we say that, we mean that it is backed by #agreement. Agreement is an economic driver, measure, and builder. Human beings build all their wealth by agreement. They always have. That idea is so utterly simple that any 5 year old, taxi driver, or diplomat, in any country, in any language, anywhere on earth, can immediately relate to it. All of us know, instinctively, that everything we have flows from connection with others.
"You can't be at war
WHEN you're making agreement"
We humans are not all that good at that #agreement thing, though, aren’t we? For 70,000 years we have been good at war. And, when our wars are over, whoever won sets the terms of the agreement, and then wealth (and usually tilted all to the "winners") expands. This campaign, its ideas, and conversation, are about suggesting that we may be now ready to skip war, and go right to agreement, and maybe allow a few more people to thrive along the way.
Economics is an agreement. The one we are operating under contains a flaw, a bug in the software. It starts out with a false measure, a fictionally limited pie, that history has never proven, in fact, is limited. But because we all agree with that unproven idea and because we do not really challenge it, that agreement, false as it is, controls our economic results and just leaves people out of the picture. And, even if you yourself believe in abundance, if you live in an economic system that agrees with, and operates, out of scarcity, you are still (reluctantly) in agreement with it.
If there is not enough to go around, if that is really the case, then survival and war have to take over, in one form or another, (hot, cold, cyber, information) and some people get to live/prosper and some people do not. But that is a pretty big gamble. The far more likely path, mathematically, is that we have enough water, land, and shelter for everyone. What we do not have enough of is #collaboration.