It’s Friday night and I’m kind of stoned from the medication my dentist gave me (for having two wisdom teeth removed).  I just went on Tiny Gigantic and read a post by Axel, who asks the question, “what comes after money and commerce?”  He points out that our current trading system (barter, money, credit) has not really advanced much over the years, and our economic system isn’t taking us to a good place - because companies make profit off of everyone’s (long term) loss.   He proposes that:

We need an economic framework that’s more holistic in its vision. We need to create a system that doesn’t encourage people to profit at everyone’s greater loss. Better yet, we need a system that rewards people for creating a greater good.

And my long-winded response on a Friday night: Greater good is hard to measure.  How do you put a value on ‘good’?  In this hypothetical system, would teachers get ‘paid’ a lot more handsomely than a doctor?  Or bankers?  I know some of my banker friends would argue that without what they do, Google and all those tech companies couldn’t have gotten funding, this thing called blog would not have happened and we wouldn’t even be talking about this.

I don’t have that big of a problem with the progress of our trading system.  The system is just this abstract thing without morality, it’s us humans who are doing the good or damage.  I have a much bigger problem with the evolution of our morality standards (we’re still killing people and more systematically than ever after so many years of civilization).  I wonder if our human nature would advance half as fast as our technology, would we be better off?  I’m not sure, but I think that would be a more practical and useful dialogue.  I would love for every ten sports discussions (or design discussions, for that matter), one is about morality and ethics.  It wouldn’t be a job for think tanks, but for all of us to talk about one simple issue, such as consumption and waste, at a time, and I think that will make the world a more tolerable space.