I’ve been trying to come up with a better metaphor for the economy. To be useful, the metaphor’s got to get us out of the brain-dead government vs. market trap. My first try: the economy as an ecosystem.
Here’s how it might be useful. Say a conservative and a liberal are arguing about the market. The conservative talks about nimble, risk-taking entrepreneurs, the liberal about big businesses that crush the little guy. Both are right – because they’re describing different animals.
The market isn’t a single entity, it’s many different actors with different characteristics. It’s the funny, warm guy who owns the fabulous toy store near my house, and it’s the multinational fueled by child labor in Bangladesh. It’s the start-up creating a really cool green invention, and it’s soul-deadening behemoths like Haliburton that suck millions out of the government. The economy as ecosystem gives us a way to for capture that complexity.
The economy-as-ecosystem metaphor can also capture the world outside of market/government. Take the weird world of Open Source software. It’s at the heart of one of the great recent triumphs of capitalism -– the rise of the Net. And yet it’s based on free property. It’s easy to fit this weird duck into the economy-as-ecosystem metaphor.
And by treating corporations, governments, and nonprofits as actors in an ecosystem, the metaphor helps us see patterns across these actors. Conservatives rant about how the government takes away our freedom. Liberals rant about how much power corporations have over us. But if you’re getting stomped, does it really matter if the boot doing the stomping is the DMV or your health insurance company? Either way you feel powerless. And preventing people from being powerless, not whether government or market is more of a threat to liberty, is the problem we need to solve.
The same’s true for most jobs. I’ve worked for corporations, governments, unions, and nonprofits. Liberal “evil corporation”-speak notwithstanding, I’ve seen more similarities than differences in how organizations treat their workers.
I’m still wrapping my head around the economy- as-ecosystem metaphor. It’s more of an intuition than something I can put into words. And there are too many pieces of my first cut model of the economy that don’t neatly fit into this metaphor. But it’s not a bad place to start.
Next up: thinking about how to shape this ecosystem..
