Why You Don't Have Your Fair Share of the Economy

One woman’s quest to make it fairer and how you can be a part of it

“Your bank balance is like your report card for your life,” said my workmate, sipping her tea before placing the cup back on the table between us.

I raised my eyebrows.

If that’s true, most of us would be close to failing. In a class of several billion, only a handful are getting A’s and B’s, and the rest are sitting on a solid D-.

We are not likely to starve, but how many of us will experience a flight in first class? A house with a swimming pool? A wedding that takes over Venice?

Is it because we don’t work as hard? Not likely. It’s because wealth can grow all by itself, but not many of us have tapped into this seemingly infinite resource.

Why not?

Can that be changed?

What is this thing we call the economy anyway?

Let’s break it down.

A Brief History of The Economy

At its most fundamental level, the economy is a representation of human production and consumption. The invention of trade allowed early humans to stop worrying about their daily subsistence and turn their minds and hands to other occupations.

If I can go to a market and buy a fish for dinner, I don’t have to spend my day knee-deep in a river. Instead, I can build a plow and provide it to the farmers surrounding my village so there is more grain in the market for everyone. I can build a furnace to heat metal and shape it to fit a horse’s foot so that they can pull that plow for a longer day.

Over time, we needed a way to represent this labor that would standardize it for exchange. And so this obscure concept called money was invented.

An obscure, imaginary concept it may be, but it builds trust, as anyone who has read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens knows. It allows us to cooperate in societies spanning billions of individuals.

So, by that logic, at its heart, money = work.

Risk as a Service

As our capacities expanded, work became not just goods, but also services. And one of those services was risk.

Risk is everywhere, and it has a price.

What if I say I’m going to pay you using the sales of the grain in my storehouse and there’s a mouse plague?

Source

The wealth I would have used no longer exists.

I need money, so someone offers to lend it to me. Maybe a family member or close friend. But if they depend on the same spoiled grain, they may not have the means either.

So someone else would lend me the money, on the assumption that next year, mice won’t destroy my grain, but I would agree to pay them a bit extra for their assumed risk.

And so the concept of “interest” was born.

Over time, this payment for assuming other people’s risk morphed into the understanding that not only can money be exchanged for physical goods and services, but that it can naturally grow more of itself. Money could suddenly earn more money by the mere fact of its existence.

The Birth of Capital

The idea of “capital” emerged in its most basic form in the 13th century, as a descriptor for the assets of a merchant or trading firm. But it soon evolved into a descriptor for anything that produces more value without being consumed in the process - a store of value that is not consumed like fuel or food, but rather can generate more value all by itself. Examples include physical things like machinery and tools but under this new paradigm money, stocks, and bonds also fall into this category.

With the advent of capital, interest was no longer a finite, personal transaction where the borrower paid the lender for assuming the risk of giving them money. Instead, it was a system of generating income independently from the actual production it represented.

It’s the formalization of capital that allowed interest to become systemic—no longer a transaction, but a structure. —ChatGPT¹

This meant there was another conceptual shift. Instead of thinking in terms of lending, we could now talk about “investing”.

The Rise of Ownership Without Work

Starting with entities like the Dutch East India company, the “joint-stock company” came into existence. They functioned under the concept that investors could own parts of companies without any contribution of labor, whether physical or intellectual.

The fact that their resources were pooled meant investors’ liability was limited and the profits could be distributed among them.

Since labor was abundant and replenishable and the money to fund large projects was scarce, companies were incentivized to attract and reward investment. Therefore, the mentality emerged that a company’s first priority was to maximise returns for shareholders.

Workers within the companies were excluded from the pool because they had neither the means to invest in the companies they worked for, nor the negotiating power to influence direction or decision-making.

Even though financial capital is no longer the scarce resource it once was, and investors’ risk is tempered by a number of mechanisms, the corporate gospel of companies being optimized for maximal returns for investors still holds today.

The creation of the stock market industrialized a system that was already formalized under the banner of capital, which grew from the logic of interest. Profit was no longer tied to labor, but to risk exposure.

And driven by the steamroller of compound interest, this set up has led to the unequal distribution of wealth and power that typifies today’s global marketplace.

One person is asking if this paradigm deserves a rethink.

We Should Own The Economy

Elle Griffin

is a prolific writer on Substack and other media who envisions an economy that is distributed more equitably to benefit a much larger proportion of the population.

She imagines a world where the economy is better adapted to today’s reality where labor is no more abundant than capital, even if our social structures are built as if it still is. A world where workers benefit from the profits they are delivering. Where communities benefit from the wealth they are building. And where the democratic and governance structures that define our financial systems incentivize and facilitate the transition.

It’s an ambitious project that she is taking on publicly. She is researching alternative systems of corporate ownership like employee equity structures, cooperatives, and profit sharing. These things and many others already exist, but are somewhat niche, and Elle would like to change that.

She is reporting via her newsletter, The Elysian, to encourage community discussion and participation. The content will then be turned into a book called We Should Own The Economy, which itself is a representation of the collective ownership model she advocates for.

Rather than seeking a publishing deal, she raised an advance from her audience through WeFunder, hitting her initial goal of $50,000 within months of opening, and the round is still open and growing. Crucially, instead of going back into the pockets of a big publisher, profits will be distributed back to the investors.

In her own words:

I’m writing a vision for an economy that creates a better future for all of us, not just a bunch of shareholders.

I find this project super cool for a number of reasons. I’ve read enough of Elle’s writing to know that she has the endurance and skill to see it through, and the humility to grow and learn as she goes.

She has traveled to Spain to visit Mondragon, a leading example of employee ownership that feeds its profits back into the communities that work within it. She interviewed the president of Central States Manufacturing, a company where the drivers and machinists are millionaires.

Importantly, she is conceptualizing ways to make the broader sharing of wealth beneficial to owners and business leaders, since without the right incentives, these transitions simply won’t occur.

Her vision extends beyond the future of capitalism, to governance, democracy, the environment, and technology, as she explores the ways that individuals and groups are busting paradigms to benefit the many across the world.

Other authors are invited to participate in her vision with shared content on Substack and inside her Slack channel, where anyone who vibes with the movement is invited to introduce themselves and talk about the ways they are questioning and shifting modern culture.

These ideas are not idealistic dreams with no grounding in reality. A good friend of mine works in a company with an employee share program and she has paid off and renovated her London home and has no debt, while I am still renting at the same age.

The idea that more employees could take home six-figure bonuses when their companies do well would see a raising of general living standards and allow not just the occasional first class flight, but a greater feeling of stability to guide us into the technologically advanced future we’re facing.

How You Can Help Change the Narrative

I invested the minimum amount of $100 into the book, and I encourage everyone to read her treatise and consider investing.

You can join the conversation by subscribing to read The Elysian where you will see the chapters unfold and you can comment and share your own ideas and experience.

Maybe more of us can be getting B’s and above on our report cards, if we had access to more of the money that really does grow. Just not on trees.

1. Here is the conversation with ChatGPT that helped to put this article together: https://chatgpt.com/share/685f3533-8728-8007-93a3-3de5dce0d5c7