Embodied Economies: How our Economic Stories Shape the World | Denise Hearn

Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world - affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they in turn shape us. What myths continue to constrain us, and how might new stories emerge to scaffold the future? This talk will explore concepts we often take as gospel: profits, competition, economic value, efficiency, and others -- and asks how we might reshape them to better serve planetary flourishing -today, and well into the future.
Denise Hearn is a writer, applied researcher, and advisor focused on how economic power and paradigms shape our world. Hearn holds an MBA from Oxford Saïd Business School and advises governments, financial institutions, companies, and nonprofits on antitrust, economic policy, and new economic thinking. Hearn is currently a Resident Senior Fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and co-authored The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (02018) with Jonathan Tepper.
Hearn's work is published in The Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post and she currently writes the Embodied Economics newsletter. Hearn is also Advisory Board Chair of The Predistribution Initiative - a multi-stakeholder project to improve investment structures and practices to address systemic risks like inequality, biodiversity loss, and climate change.
This event is part of Long Now Talks, a series launched in 02003 by Stewart Brand to explore compelling ideas about long-term thinking from speakers around the world.
The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization - the next and last 10,000 years - a timespan we call the long now. Our work began with The Clock of the Long Now, an immense mechanical monument, installed in a mountain, designed to keep accurate time for the next ten millennia.
For the last two decades, Long Now Talks has invited speakers to explore their work in the context of the next and last 10,000 years for a live audience and for millions online around the globe. Long Now Talks are recorded live in San Francisco, many of them at The Interval, our public gathering space. Featuring craft cocktails, artisan coffee and tea, a library that stretches from floor to ceiling, and prototypes of The Clock of the Long Now, our space aims to inspire curiosity and wonder.
You can support these Talks by becoming a Long Now member:
longnow.org/join
Our global membership program connects over 11,000 people across more than 65 countries to our library of long-term thinking. Long Now members actively support long-term thinking and help us deliver Long Now Talks as videos and podcasts to over 19 million people and counting around the world.
Subscribe to Long Now on KZbin
/ @longnow
Subscribe to the Long Now podcast & newsletter
longnow.org/subscribe
Explore all of our Talks on longnow.org
longnow.org/talks

[@antitorpiliko]

Love the full version, great talk

[@lomotil3370]

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:10 *🌐 Economic narratives: Economic stories shape societies, and questioning prevailing narratives is crucial for long-term civilization. Denise Hearn explores the impact of economic paradigms on our values.* 04:39 *🌀 Labyrinths and human connection: Labyrinths, ancient archetypes, connect humanity across cultures and time, serving as a physical embodiment of collective stories and spiritual paths.* 11:17 *📚 Economies as stories: The economy is not a neutral machine but an emergent phenomenon based on adopted stories and values, formalized through law, regulation, and technology.* 15:25 *🔄 Antitrust policy shift: Antitrust policy, focusing on consumer welfare over the last 45 years, led to tech giants' rise with little scrutiny, contributing to market concentration and challenges in addressing non-price effects.* 19:48 *💸 Efficiency myth: The promise of lower prices from efficiency gains in mergers often failed to materialize, leading to higher inequality, low wages, reduced growth, and innovation. Market fundamentalism contributed to these issues.* 21:50 *🔄 Structurelessness and power: The idea of structurelessness, similar to laissez-faire philosophy, can mask power dynamics. Liberalizing markets without addressing fundamental questions allowed the economically powerful to establish control.* 22:31 *🌐 Profit paradigms face a disconnect with planetary realities like climate change and inequality, prompting attempts to use private finance for solutions.* 23:27 *🤔 Reflecting on the concept of profit, it's not a constant or self-evident idea; its historical evolution is explored, revealing it as a recent construct from the mid-19th century.* 25:34 *💰 Pre-1850, local businesses often didn't report profits, with the focus on ending the year with a surplus. In the industrial era, profit came from lowering costs and reinvestment.* 27:08 *💹 Financialization since the 1980s changed profit dynamics; companies now earn profits by rearranging financial assets on balance sheets, not just from providing goods and services.* 28:31 *🔄 Profit sources today include innovation, but too often, corporations decouple profit from productive investment, relying on market control or financial engineering for gains.* 29:41 *🔄 Profit paradigms can reshape capitalism structurally, emerging from the possibilities in each moment of capitalism's history, influenced by forms of capital and cognitive orientations.* 30:37 *🔄 The resistance to restructuring capitalism is attributed to a legal and regulatory system that is easy to game, co-created from fractured thought patterns and resistant to innovations.* 32:56 *🔄 The challenge for 21st-century finance is restraining economic reasoning, identifying areas the market should not touch, as applying market reasoning to everything may not solve crises.* 34:48 *🔄 The metaphor of the Labyrinth teaches lessons about the collective journey, letting go of certainties, and understanding life as a continual flow, inspiring a co-created new story.* 39:51 *🌐 Despite systemic inertia, signs of hope exist in threads woven by individuals challenging the status quo. The potential for emergent shifts and systemic effects through alternative ideas remains.* 44:25 *📚 Indigenous scholar Tyson Yapor emphasizes the challenge of distinguishing wrong stories from right stories, highlighting the time and community effort needed for genuine shared truths to develop.* 45:07 *⚖️ Markets are not isolated; they are public creations governed by democratically determined rules or social norms. Understanding their embeddedness in societal dynamics is crucial.* 46:02 *🤝 Markets are constructed with shared assumptions or norms, and their functioning is intertwined with societal dynamics, making them subject to moral judgments and social co-creation.* 48:32 *💬 Markets involve complex interactions, and the speaker recounts an initiative called "Access to Markets," highlighting challenges faced by entrepreneurs dealing with gatekeepers in supposedly free markets.* 50:12 *💼 Institutional investors are reevaluating traditional benchmarks, recognizing the failure to internalize externalities. However, the challenge lies in creating new incentive structures and avoiding the pitfalls of assetizing more elements.* 52:05 *🌐 Regulatory approaches, including competition and antitrust measures, are being explored, but there is a need for concurrent and substantial efforts to address the size and scale of the problem in the financial system.* 52:57 *👀 The speaker finds hope in the increased awareness and understanding of systemic issues, particularly regarding private equity, as more people recognize the consequences of existing financial systems.* Made with HARPA AI

[@GhostOnTheHalfShell]

One has to love M Friedman's contribution to the Bork doctrine, where pesky competitors competing in a marketplace can be replaced by judges and economists efficiently replacing an actual competition with their models.

[@GhostOnTheHalfShell]

In all, mainstream economists muse that their 'perfect' ideas of human mind means they should govern academic disciplines like anthropology, psychology and sociology, despite the smoking crater of failure their policies have wrought in consolidation, privatization, and now financialization. Given half the chance, they'll try to invade physics and cast down the 2nd law of thermodynamics.