Reject Ego-nomics, Embrace Eco-nomics

Science has given us a clear warning. By the end of the current decade, humans must reverse the damage we are doing to the Earth or face an almost-certain risk of that damage becoming irreversible. Human self-extinction is a likely consequence.

For far too long, we have followed the policy guidance of unfettered capitalism—an economics devoted to growing the fortunes of billionaires without regard for the consequences for the living Earth and most of Earth’s inhabitants. Focused on maximizing individual financial return, contemporary economics is more accurately known as ego-nomics. Featuring the Latin word for “I,” the teaching of ego-nomics is best confined to history courses reviewing the devastating consequences of the human embrace of this flawed theory as settled science.

Finding our way to a viable human future will require the guidance of a true eco-nomics. “Eco” comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household. Grounded in biology and ecology rather than finance, the new eco-nomics will guide us to an ecological civilization devoted to caring for the living Earth’s household and all its living beings.

Of course, navigating the essential transition to an ecological civilization presents daunting challenges. There will be no winners on a dead Earth. Consequently, we have a shared interest in joining in common cause to create the alternative future now within our means.

The environmental and social failures of modern society highlight two foundational self-evident truths that conventional ego-nomics ignores. First, Earth is our common home and the source of our existence and well-being. Second, money has no meaning or utility beyond the human mind. Indeed, most modern money is only invisible electronic traces stored on computer memory chips.

Ignoring these truths, ego-nomics has guided us to a world that confines the vast majority of the planet’s people to servitude to the already rich, whose defining purpose is growing their personal financial assets. The resulting growth in inequality is beyond obscene.

In January 2023, the World Economic Forum reported that the financial assets of the world’s super-rich were growing by $2.7 billion a day. The average billionaire was gaining roughly $1.7 million in new financial assets for every $1 in pay received by a person in the bottom 90%.

Earth is distinctive among the planets we have so far observed in its ability to sustain life. And we humans are distinctive among Earth’s beings in our ability to choose and create our future together. This gives us special privileges—and special essential responsibilities consistent with what science now identifies as our distinctive human nature. As science affirms, mentally healthy humans get deep satisfaction from caring for others.

We also now know that a small minority of people, deprived of proper care in their earliest years, find pleasure in demonstrating their power over others by inflicting harm. They suffer from a grandiose sense of superiority and self-entitlement known as narcissistic personality disorder. Such individuals have a disproportionate presence among society’s wealthy.

The flawed and selfish promises of ego-nomics promoted by these individuals have so misled us that we have allowed money to replace mutual care in mediating our relationships with other people and the living Earth. This love for money now so dominates our consciousness that we have come to idolize financial predators.

The challenge of our time is to fulfill our true and largely unrealized human potential by learning to live as beloved communities rooted in mutual caring and service to one another, and to the natural and human commons consistent with our true nature.

The new eco-nomics calls us to:

1. Replace GDP with valid indicators of beneficial economic performance.
2. Confront and dispel the illusion that money is wealth and that growing money benefits us all.
3. Embrace biology and ecology as the disciplines most foundational to eco-nomics for an ecological civilization.

We currently debate a choice between socialism (an economy ruled by politicians and public officials) and capitalism (an economy ruled by private financiers). Many of us are fearful of the potential melding of the two into fascism.

Yet we rarely mention the people-power alternative, rooted in democratically self-managed communities and markets foundational to an ecological civilization. Realizing this alternative will require that financial assets are equitably distributed to assure that re­sponsibilities for making significant decisions are truly shared. Predatory, monopolistic, profit-maximizing corporations will need to be converted into worker/community cooperatives responsible for serving the needs of all their stakeholders.

We need to minimize reliance on money as a substitute for caring relationships. The private banking system that currently operates beyond accountability to national governments and interests must be replaced by a global system of community banks cooperatively owned and operated by the communities in which they do business.

We are not dealing with a broken system in need of repair. We are dealing with a failed system in need of replacement. We will achieve this transformation to an ecological civilization only through a people-powered meta-movement in which the world’s people come together, guided by a valid eco-nomics, in a unifying commitment to creating a world that works for all life on Earth.