Aspiring to Betterness

The journey exploring what’s after capitalism keeps getting more interesting. The plot continues to thicken.  Betterness: Economics for Humans, by Umair Haque, provides an inspirational view of how the future might be, or rather ought to be. Futurists should enjoy his style of challenging fundamental assumptions. I found myself shouting out a few amens!

In the tradition of Polak, he argues about the lack of vision. That a negative paradigm has emerged in which we are content to try and make the existing economic system more efficient. But we spend little time creating a vision of where we really want to go. He urges us to build the positive paradigm, which he calls betterness.

He has an interesting take on the flaws in the current system – not creating real value, or adequate returns, or jobs, or fulfillment…..yep, it’s not pretty, but not a surprise either.

One of my favorite ideas: “the economy isn’t an end in itself, but it’s a means to the end of a good life.” We’ve got so caught up in “fixing the economy” that we’ve lost sight of what it is and what it’s for. His Betterness concept is to update the pursuit of prosperity and to ignite human potential. He makes a clever distinction between “business” (today’s focus) and “betterness” (tomorrow’s vision).

Speaking of vision, here’s another gem. He critiques the current practice of creating vision statements – an easy mark there, but had a twist that I never quite saw that separated good from bad, or useful from usefulness. The bad ones are inward-focused, how we can be the best…..; the good ones are outer-focused, how we can help our customers achieve……. It may seem small or subtle, but it really made sense – the inward focus is business; the outward focus is betterness. Bingo!

I won’t give away the plot in terms of the specific components of the Betterness vision. The ideas are familiar, but put together in an interesting way. But for me, the real value in the book was the strong case made for a new vision. And the reminder that it needs to be built. Critique is vital, but we must also build.

In sum, Betterness is of great interest to us in our quest to see what might be next. We know there are lots of ideas out there, but no compelling vision. The ideas in this work are well worth considering; this short book is well worth your time! — Andy Hines

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