EPILOGUE
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It’s a long way from the New York Stock Exchange to the rolling hills of Wisconsin, many miles from that Greco-Roman edifice to the cherry red, LEED-certified headquarters of Organic Valley—itself down the road apiece from George Siemon’s old farm. It’s a return journey, I think. It takes us back to where we began—back to when economies existed to meet human needs, not to ratchet up earnings per share, quarter after quarter. Back to a place where there’s dirt under our feet. Water tables. Biotoxins accumulating (or not accumulating) in the flesh of toddlers. The place where we live. Planet Earth.

At the start of these journeys, the source of our troubles seemed to be the stock exchange—the ancestral home of the founders of the industrial order, the robber barons. If any of us ever manage to get inside the New York Stock Exchange, we’ll see that it’s now just a backdrop for CNBC. A ghost town. The real action has moved elsewhere, everywhere: hedge funds, investment banking firms, our own 401(k) plans, the pension plans of firefighters like Michael Haroldson, the endowments of colleges and foundations, the balance sheets of the troubled banks and nations of Europe.

The problem’s not on Wall Street but in us. For the last half-century we’ve been living in the midst of an economic explosion, assuming that it will go on forever. It won’t. We live in the real world, not the world of stock markets and collaterized debt obligations and balance sheets. We need to live more consciously in this finite world. When there’s less growth, how we divvy things up becomes more critical. If financial income keeps trying to grow more than the incomes of everyone else, it becomes more extractive. The wealthy become wealthier by extracting more from the rest of us.

The problem is that even as our world changes rapidly, in our minds we’re still trying to play the economic game by the rules that the robber barons left us. The rules that say financial capital is sacred beyond all else. The rules that say capital must expand quarter by quarter, forever. The rules that say those who own the most property have the right to rule.

If those rules are in our ideas, they’re also—and more rigidly—in the ownership and financial designs of corporations and capital markets. They’re embedded in the structures of Financial Purpose, Absentee Membership, Governance by Markets, Casino Finance, and Commodity Networks.

There are some today who are unintimidated by the ritual incantations of P/E ratios and return on equity and shareholder primacy. There are a few—actually, quite a few—standing up and suggesting that perhaps the measure of our lives is not how much we accumulate for ourselves but how much we feel alive and enliven those around us. Maybe the measure of our success is not how extractive we are but how generative.

The ownership revolution begins in the human heart. It begins when we allow ourselves to hope that a different kind of economy just might be possible. The ownership revolution becomes a force when we allow ourselves to imagine that generative designs might one day become not merely a sideshow but a beacon. A collective ideal.

Set aside for a moment the task of trying to imagine the entire world embodying a generative economy; the real world always departs from our ideals. The reality of democracy is far from ideal—but still the democratic values of liberty, justice, and equality remain our ideals. Where are the corollary ideals in the world of the economy? The regulatory approach of stopping this or preventing that is not about ideals. That’s why few people burn with a zeal for regulation. We need regulation; we will always need it, and more of it. But it’s time to dream a deeper dream, the dream of an economy that is built around ideals like fairness, community, and sustainability—an economy that in its normal functioning tends to create fair and just outcomes, benefits the many rather than the few, and enables an enduring human presence on a flourishing earth.

That world is possible. This is the heresy that the keepers of the temple do not wish us to utter: there is an alternative.

When we begin to share a common vision, that vision can spread if it finds fertile soil in the human heart. It takes root in the things we care about, in what we value. When our values shift—as they are beginning to today, with ecological and financial crises looming larger—then the ground of social legitimacy shifts. This makes change possible on a broader scale. As the tumultuous 20th century taught us, and the more recent Arab Spring showed yet again, even the most dictatorial regime proves weak in the face of a people enlivened by ideals. We become enlivened when our hearts are touched by something real, something we long for, collectively—something we naturally value in our heart of hearts.

As values and legitimacy shift, the ground of the social order begins to shift. It has done so before and can do so again. Social legitimacy shifted beneath the monarchy. Beneath slavery. Beneath racism and sexism. On a less grand scale, we’ve seen the ground of legitimacy shift beneath the perceived necessity of eating meat and the attractiveness of smoking cigarettes. We’ve seen it shift toward recycling, choosing organic food, buying local. Things that begin on the fringe move toward the mainstream. What at one time is accepted as normal comes to be perceived as unseemly, distasteful.

Can we imagine the ground of social legitimacy shifting beneath the capitalist value system that sees financial capital as the goal above goals, the pinnacle? Can we imagine people saying, “Enough financial wealth—I choose life”?

Many of the people I visited in this book have already made that shift. Happily. Like the organizations they lead, they’re not interested in maximizing their financial wealth. They know it’s possible to have plenty and recognize that enough is enough. There are other things they value more highly, like being happy, living authentically, feeling alive. Living well in community. Leaving the world a better place.

If we can imagine such values spreading in the culture—if we can imagine massive wealth being seen not as the ultimate prize but as vaguely distasteful, and if we can imagine people realizing that great wealth is in reality a kind of relentless, extractive demand laid on the shoulders of those least able to withstand it—then change is likely to come.

Once values and legitimacy are there, we can build the social architecture. It may be that we do both at once: we build the values and legitimacy by building the architecture. These things are a matter of strategy, policy, ideas. Ownership designs.

TWO RESPONSES TO A HURRICANE

A few thoughts about strategy. Let’s start with the fact that there are two ways to respond to a hurricane. First, you pull people out of the water, get them off rooftops, and provide them with food and shelter and blankets. But if that’s all you do, you doom the world to an endless string of hurricanes, increasing in frequency and severity. The second response to a hurricane is to tackle the challenge of global warming. That’s a longer-term response that leads far afield from blankets. It leads to putting a price on carbon, driving and flying less, weatherizing homes, and living in smaller homes—as well as all the other byways and alleyways that our culture has yet to fully explore. Ultimately, responding to a hurricane means changing our civilization, root and branch.

It’s the same with a financial hurricane. The first response may be to shore up the banks, strengthen regulation of finance, tighten expenditures among governments facing debt overload, help people facing foreclosure and unemployment. But if that’s all we do, we’re dooming the world to an endless string of financial crises, increasing in frequency and severity. We need to begin focusing on a longer-term response in addition to immediate responses. That means confronting the uncomfortable fact that our economy is built to manufacture so-called wealth, which in reality means an endlessly growing house of financial claims. We need to build a new economy designed to sustain life.

This longer-term strategy includes creating deliberate ways to advance the ownership revolution, ramping up the nascent, emergent movement we’ve seen thus far. This is potentially among the most transformative strategies we can pursue, because ownership is about who decides everything else in an economy.

Ultimately, we will need to change the operating system at the heart of major corporations. But if we begin there, we will fail. The place to begin is with what’s doable, what’s enlivening—and what points toward bigger wins in the future. The place to begin is with advancing generative alternatives.

At the policy level, this may mean, for example, taking steps to advance employee ownership and the growth of cooperatives. It might mean working not just for solar power but for distributed ownership of solar power, not just for wind but for community wind. It may mean supporting community development financial institutions and community development corporations in a much bigger way.

We might take a lesson from the Maine lobster industry and tackle the issue of corporate power by trying to make certain areas of the economy off-limits. We might draw a bright line prohibiting extractive ownership models from operating in certain sectors, like education and health care. We might decide that these are areas where only generative models should operate. We need to begin making the case that it’s OK to make a profit, but maximizing profit is a dangerous game. It’s not a game that can be played everywhere.

When the next financial crisis hits, we might take a generative approach, shifting assets to cooperative banks and credit unions. The United States could create more state banks, and other nations might emulate the Bank of India. The next time a major corporation needs a government bailout, we should require it to recharter as a generative company, writing into its articles that a majority of board seats are reserved for public interest directors and employees. Instead of trying to abolish the Federal Reserve, as some at Occupy Wall Street suggested, we might propose that it be turned into a generative institution, with seats for folks besides the banks.

But we don’t need to wait for federal policymakers in Washington or European Union leaders in Brussels to lead the way. At the individual level, we might consider moving our money to the community and cooperative banking sectors. We can shift our assets to responsible investing. Join or start a Slow Money group. Buy and invest locally. Join a food co-op. Find community loan funds and invest as much as we can.

We might consider generative alternatives for retirement. Instead of pretending that each family will have enough financial assets to live comfortably to the end of life—a model that’s failing a lot of us—we might explore cohousing. Instead of doing reverse mortgages as a way to get money out of our houses, maybe we create ways to sell our land to community land trusts, allowing us to continue living in our homes, even as we create new affordable housing for future generations.

Ultimately, advancing generative alternatives is about creating the designs into which the future can flow. Today’s major corporations may seem eternal. But as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, creative destruction is ever present in capitalism. In industrialized nations, an estimated 15 percent of jobs are destroyed every year, and new jobs replace them. It’s the same with companies.¹ Hypothetically, an entirely new economy can come into existence every seven years. Think of the transformation of the recording industry from vinyl to CDs to digital. Think of the death of many newspapers and the growth of the Internet. Think of declining oil reserves and what that will mean for auto and oil companies, and for the growth of wind and solar power. In the not-so-long run, trying to remake the operating systems of the major companies of today may be less important than getting the next economy into the right kinds of ownership. We might aim for 20 percent of the economy to be generative within ten years, 30 percent a decade later, and so on. One day, a shift in the zeitgeist—perhaps a citizen uprising—could make generative design the new norm.

Perhaps most important, instead of seeing all these things as random and disconnected, we need to recognize that they form a coherent whole. They are part of a single movement for a generative economy. It is when we embrace a common vision and a common language that our separate efforts become one movement. And that movement gains momentum.

RESPONDING, NOT CONTROLLING

The thoughts offered here are nothing like a blueprint for the redesign of capitalism. They’re gestures, idea starters. Transforming the social architecture of the economy is as large a task as tackling global warming. It will take many minds.

In talking of strategy, it’s important not to delude ourselves into thinking this is a process over which we have control. Old ways of organizing our world are breaking down. This is not something we can stop. But it is something to which we can respond. Our greatest challenge lies in the realm of imagination and ideas. Capitalism has been such a totalizing force that it has left little room—politically, economically, philosophically—where alternatives could take shape.

Our task is to reimagine our economy. Our challenge is to dream deeply enough, all the way down to the root social architecture with which civilized life began, when humans stepped out of the life of hunting-gathering and took up the settled life of agriculture. That root economic architecture is ownership—the source of untold blessings and untold mischief over thousands of years, today potentially the source of renewal and rebirth.

Many unexpected events might intervene to move change along. On the positive side, there could be galvanizing media events, similar to the role that Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, played in shifting attitudes toward climate change. One possible galvanizing event with generative design, for example, is the United Nations’ declaration of 2012 as the Year of the Cooperative. Other forces include the ownership movements of every kind taking shape across the globe. Unions and community foundations are working with employee ownership groups to spread the model of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry to other cities. Social enterprise initiatives are taking root at places like Harvard, Yale, and Oxford, with funding from people like Jeff Skoll, former president of eBay. A movement for the solidarity economy is occurring in Quebec and Latin America. And many groups and nations around the world are working to advance employee ownership.

On the negative side, there could be new financial crises, spikes in the price of oil, a massive season of hurricanes, new citizen revolts. On many fronts, things are likely to be messy, and get messier. How it all might come together to create deep change is impossible to say. But what else besides massive disruption could change the operating system of capitalism?

We might recall a prediction made a half-century ago by economist Robert Heilbroner. “Capitalism will inevitably change,” he wrote, “and in the longer run will gradually give way to a very different kind of social order.”² The deep transformation of the capitalist order may not be an idle pipe dream. It may be something closer to an inevitability.

That’s not to say we’ll come through it unscathed. Things may get harder than we think we can bear. But we will come through. That’s something I said to Leslie Christian in our phone conversation about limits to financial growth.

“It’s going to be OK,” I said. “This is not something I think. It’s something I know. Even if I can’t say exactly how I know it.”

“You need to write that,” she said. “People need to hear it. I need to hear it.”

I take confidence, in part, from systems thinking, which teaches us that crisis is a natural part of how systems evolve. Living systems have the ability to make sudden, creative leaps into novelty, reorganizing themselves into something wholly new. They do this when they’re undergoing intolerable stress. At critical points of instability, some new way of organizing things emerges.

This may be what generative ownership design is: the something new emerging—the thing we need, at the very moment we need it.

There’s something else I take comfort in, and that’s the resilience of life. My sister Valerie Kelly, now a hydrologist with the US Geological Survey, had the good fortune of visiting Mount St. Helens as part of her graduate studies, following the massive volcanic eruption there in 1980. The place initially looked like a wasteland. Rock and mud covered it thickly for 20 square miles, with trees flattened like matchsticks and forests seared by heat up to 17 miles away. In this moonscape, it seemed nothing could have survived. Yet over time ecologists found that some animals had survived, finding refuge under overhangs and in burrows beneath the snow.

“Scientists expected the vegetation to fill in slowly from the outside,” Valerie told me. “But instead they found microzones protected from the blast, which extended out to meet one another.”

Mount St. Helens proved a story not only of devastation but also of unexpectedly rapid renewal. It transformed scientific thinking. According to pre-blast ecological theory, the land should have been rendered virtually sterile. Instead, there were species of toads, frogs, and salamanders, some of them previously endangered, that took up a robust new life there before their predators recovered. More than 120 new lakes and ponds were created by the blast, and somehow water-loving creatures crossed miles of near-desert to populate them. The blast allowed a rapid adaptive response known as ecological release. Three decades later, there’s far more variety and exuberance than before the eruption.³

As I listened to Valerie and read other scientists who spoke of refugia, of those forms of refuge found in crisis, I found myself thinking of the community land trust, the metaphoric house still standing after the subprime mortgage blast. I thought of the cooperative banks, community banks, and credit unions that remained healthy while Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers melted down. I thought of that lone Bank of North Dakota, which other states rushed to emulate. I thought of the community investments that made money during two financial meltdowns.

Where the next disruptions will come from, or when they will come, we don’t know. But perhaps we can find refuge by organizing ourselves around serving the needs of life. This may be how—even as things break down—we carry on the generations, one after the other, in unbroken flow. The way we’ve organized life on earth will not continue. But we will.

From the multiplying crises we face, a new worldview is already emerging, along with a new set of values, like sustainability, community, sufficiency, and fairness. These are new forms for the age-old pursuit of happiness. When these values are embodied in institutional form, in various kinds of generative ownership design, they will become enduring. When enough of the microzones of generative design extend out to meet one another, they might create, ultimately, not only a new economy but also a new social order—possibly an age of inclusion, with more variety and exuberance than the industrial age. It may be that what we’re moving toward is an age defined not by the nature of our machines (however green they become) but by the nature of our connections—an era when we may find dominion’s end.