António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, laments the inequities finance produces. His full address to the general assembly can be found here, including his scathing review of the role of finance in the world.
Global Reform
What follows is my summary of his remarks:
We must go into emergency mode to reform global finance. Let’s tell it like it is: the global financial system is morally bankrupt. It favours the rich and punishes the poor. These imbalances are not a bug, but a feature of the global financial system. They are inbuilt and structural.
I agree with many of António’s observations. But they are undesirable consequences of a cause left undefined. Seeing this debacle coming more than ten years ago, traversing the catacombs of venture capital, asset management, economics, and policy, I discovered the consequences would never be fixed by band-aiding one undesirable outcome at a time.
Fix The Game
Like many other manmade constructs we have built to manage ourselves, the real problem with finance is that it does not promulgate systems or investment programs that adhere to an overarching evolutionary theory for humanity. You cannot expect predictable outcomes from systems that do not promote the embedded theory.
Let me put it in terms we can all understand.
When you put twenty players divided into two teams on a soccer field that have never played soccer, you should not expect those players to adhere to the gameplay of soccer when they have not been previously informed about the theory of soccer.
Cause Over Consequence
Without an evolutionary theory for humanity, you will never get people in finance to support and arbitrate the needs of society. Instead, you will produce vile maxims of growth for the sake of growth with the ideology of a cancer cell; the short-term Bronze Age want of humanity.
Here is the hierarchical design of a method that fundamentally improves the regenerative outcome for humanity, for all systems designed to manage humanity:
Nature’s Truth => First-Principles => Human Theory => Systems => Rules => Enforcement
One Game
Finance has been given free rein with how it arbitrates humanitarian value. And thus, it does whatever it wants instead of what humanity needs. Since it must dawn on us by now, nature, not humanity, defines the gameplay of human excellence and longevity, not human wants. Still, human needs must dictate the gameplay of finance.
We cannot blame the people in finance for the lack of an apriori human theory of gameplay we want them to play. Do not hate the players. Hate the game. You can thank me later for defining what the gameplay for humanity should look like.
Spoiler alert: it is nature’s game.
