Tipperary Live Column: No balance if share price alone measures success

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been on a bit of a soapbox, waxing lyrical about the pros and cons of capitalism as it’s practiced in the modern world, while advocating for a change to a more inclusive model where everyone’s boat rises with the tide,writes Karl Clancy in his Tipperary Live Tipperary Live column.

As individuals we probably feel entirely powerless and within the constraints of our system we pretty much are. For as long as we are consumers who buy more than we need there will be companies there to take advantage of our desire for more. We can't effect change unless everyone were to decide en masse to buy less, but that’s not good for the economy, right?

What exactly is the economy? It’s the free flow of goods and services in exchange for money. Where do the goods and services come from? They are made by people. Who buys the goods and services with money? The people, using money given to them by the companies for making the goods and services. So what would happen if we stopped buying the goods and services?

We’d lose our jobs because the companies wouldn’t have the money to pay us because they get the money from us when we buy. If we don’t buy they go out of business and we lose our livelihoods. It’s the very definition of a rock and a hard place!
So how do companies persude us to keep the system going? They make a product that at first is desirable. Then that product becomes necessary and finally it becomes an obligation as it has pervaded society so much that it’s not possible to function within a society without it. In order to change anything we’d have to change the way society works and that’s terribly inconvenient. Convenience is one of our new gods. Next day delivery, instant access to information, restaurant bookings and food deliveries are all examples of this and it isn’t going to change because the system has adapted to make it easy to self perpetuate.

Corporate leaders tell us that they create jobs and wealth at the top and that it trickles down to everyone’s benefit but in reality the converse is true. Wealth siphons upward, not down. They are wholly dependant on us continuing to consume. Heck, we even call ourselves consumers!

It isn’t exclusive to business either. When you vote for a politician because they do well by you locally, remember that at a national level they vote with their party whose agenda is often diametrically opposed to the well being of the masses in favour of the well being of the economy. The local benefits are far outweighed by the larger picture of national and global trade. You will give more than you have received, but you will give it in ways that go unnoticed. Duties, Vat, stealth taxes and increased service charges are all ways in which you pay but that’s just the tip of an iceberg. A quick look into carbon taxation alone will leave you bewildered as to the logic behind it.

So what can I do, as an individual? Not a whole lot if I want to live in the world as it stands. I might move myself to an island somewhere and live totally off grid but that throws the baby out with the bath water. I’m 52 and medical care may well be important in my twilight years! Engagement with the system requires balance.

Companies following the share price alone to measure success have no balance. Consumers buying every new toy have no balance. People buying to replace perfectly good items just because they are told that somehow their lives will be enhanced or transformed have no balance. Balance comes from asking questions and the single most important question in the world is ‘Why’. Why do I need a new phone, or car or coat or trainers or watch? Why should I spend money or go into debt to attain something? Ask why for everything. If you can give yourself a credible answer then by all means have at it. The ability to think critically about how we engage with the world is how we change the habits of the world, because we are the world.
It’s not in creating an ideology that promises the best, most utopian set of values that change can be made. It’s in accepting that those values really are utopian and that utopia isn’t a real place. We aim for the stars certainly but accept that we may never get to them. The values of universal care and well being will always be subject to variation and we will invariably fall short. That doesn’t mean we don’t try.

For humanity to evolve its way of behaving towards each other doesn’t require dismantling the system just moving its focus from a single metric, the pursuit of individual wealt, to another way, the pursuit of universal wellbeing.

When we put people on the cover of Forbes and Time for the value they have added to humanity’s well being and how successful they are in making everyone’s lives better, we’ll be on track. When we define better as feeling contented, cared for and about, and with a capacity to care for others in the same way as ourselves, we will have taken our first steps. If we can strive to make advancements and breakthroughs where it counts in science and medicine and global health without profit being the primary reason for doing so, we’ll have begun to learn what it means to have humanity.

At the end of the day we’r all just people making choices. Let’s make sure they’re good choices for everyone, because the choice you make for someone ten thousand miles away today may be the choice they make for you tomorrow.