Reforming capitalism
I recently read the school of life’s book called “How to Reform Capitalism”. If you are the type of person who thinks about how to make the world better, you might find this book interesting. The author is frank about the fact that capitalism fails many of us, but the book does not focus on the causes of, or solutions to income inequality, or pollution. These problems are often attributed to capitalism. Instead he focuses on how capitalism fails to meet our needs that are higher than survival. One of the themes that I found most exciting was that advertisers promise that their products will bring us love, belonging, self actualization etc., but the products themselves fail spectacularly to meet those needs. The author proposes that businesses could do a much better job of selling things that meet our higher needs. He doesn’t go into specifics but the message is inspiring. I finished reading the book thinking about how businesses could do a better job providing the things that we need the most. Here are some of my ideas:
There should be a massive ad campaign to get more people to see therapists and mental health counselors. So many advertisements promise to fill a hole in our souls. Shoes and makeup will attract friends, fancy cars will make people respect us. We are told through billboards that if we spend an enormous sum of money on a house, our families will be healthier and happier. Food and alcohol commercials make it clear that friendship and belonging are easy to find in the consumption of brand name products. Nearly every ad that we see is promising to meet some deep need that we have. Many of these needs could be meet or eliminated through therapy. Perhaps we feel the need to buy a fancy watch so that people know that we are successful, but we really need a therapist to help us see that our father never praised us. With this insight we might not want to buy that watch so much anymore. Maybe we were weird and awkward as a teenager and feel like if we wear fashionable clothes, we might finally be cool enough to hang out with the “in crowd”, even if you have not spoken to the “in crowd” in years. I imagine an industry group representing therapists commissioning an ad campaign that would promise peace and acceptance and a better life, and actually be able to deliver those things. The ad campaign would be as appealing and well done as an ad for a Rolex watch, but much less misleading.
Fitness studios might change their focus in a way that allows customers to get fit, but promotes the creation of new friendships in a genuine way. Maybe customers that attend a certain number of classes are invited to exclusive meals, or trips. Maybe fitness studios and coffee shops could collaborate so that after a workout, there is a way to seamlessly transition into a casual refueling session. Maybe competitions between class sessions could forge more unity between the people that attend the same class session every day. As adults, it can be hard to make new friendships. Many of us are more lonely that we were in college. Fitness studios might be able to generate friendship as well as fitness. With all consumer goods available on amazon, local retail space will need to be filled with something, it might as well be something that amazon cannot provide: personal relationships.
“How to reform capitalism” also made me think that museums might be able to fulfill some higher level demands that most traditional business cannot. Why not have a museum dedicated to happiness? There could be exhibits on all of the research that has been conducted on happiness. Interactive exhibits could have visitors reenact happiness studies. The museum could profile people that are happy, cities that are happy, companies that help their employees live happily and anything else we could learn from. Why not have a museum on forgiveness, friendship and romance? These museums could be temporary and travel from city to city. I dream of having a traveling museum dedicated to good city planning and how that could help us live more social, happy and sustainable lives.
There are a million other ways that companies could fulfill our hierarchy of needs.
The book did ignore some of the larger problems associated with capitalism: environmental degradation and inequality. I see these problems as some of the biggest problems that we need to fix and I was a little disappointed that the book did not try to address these problems. From my reckoning, there are ways to address these problems:
- Replace the GDP with the GPI (genuine progress indicator) so that we measure more than just the money in a country, we should measure how well the country is doing in ways that actually matter.
- Companies should use Triple bottom line accounting. Triple bottom line accounting includes money, environmental impact and impact on human beings. A company is not successful if they are destroying the environment, their employees are unhappy and poor.
- Create a carbon tax
- Mandate equal pay for equal work
- Affordable college and trade school tuition for all
