Markets for Good and Whatever Else You Got

The Convening

We had a symposium (we like to call it) in the Dumpter last night with me and my imaginary friends drawn from the books below my feet, long since unread, but providing a degree of protection against the cold in winter, and against rain in summer, if I burrow into them.  Our topic, to which Blake, John Dewy, Dickens, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Edwards, or their imaginary avatars, contributed with great energy was The Future of Good. We did reach a consensus which I see fit to share with the world at large, insofar as the world sticks its head into the dumpster and hears my faint voice, mumbling.

Our Findings

• The Future of Good is corporate. The social will be mined and owned with wealth moving into fewer hands, the hands of those who own, manage, and control, govern in fact, the life world formerly known as civil society.
• The rich will get richer as Dynastic Wealth Consultants teach Wisdom, dispensed as advertising, marketing, think tank thinking, and family legacy brand building to those who lead us into markets that we might not hunger or thirst.
• Through the assistance of their Consigliere, corporate and then dynastic wealth will capture and suborn all three branches of government.
• The humans producing and produced by this Market for Good, will be the Future of Good - with no language or literary imagination other than money, investment, markets, and brand narratives. (Four Capitals, Social Return on Investment, Balanced Scorecards, The Hero's Journey to Success and Significance).
• Impact investing ("why not make a good buck and do good?  Why be a sucker and give money away when you can do more good buying our Future of Good Impact Investing Index Fund?") will supplant much philanthropy.
• Nonprofits will become more businesslike to package themselves in Markets for Good as result getting investments.
• By way of counter trend, more will join religious organizations, or create their own religious aura, some for purposes of branding, some to escape into fantasy, some as compensatory, but many because in houses of worship the Text still speaks, in mysterious ways, to humanity as the sea to the ambiphian.
• The struggle to brand Truth, Beauty, Virtue, Wisdom and the Holy will vie with ego and orgasm as the highest impulses to which purchases (and identity via purchase) can be tied.
• Wisdom Consultants, finding their membership exceeding the demand, and wanting to raise professional standards, will develop a Code of Professional Ethics, a Canon, bylaws,  a 1,000 question objective test, and a five star rating system, to distinguish themselves from amateurs, cranks, sycophants, and charlatans.
• The phrase Wisdom Consultant will be trademarked. Lists of Wisdom Consultants stripped of their title for violations of professional conduct will be published. Conventions of Wisdom Consultants will be held.  Annual awards to the Wisest in sundry categories will be given. 
• America's Got Wisdom will help aspiring wealth consultants achieve fame, and they will find clients among the winners of lotteries or rising families. But the real work of dynastic wealth counseling will be done behind the scenes, for very few, who own the show.  

Waking to a Hangover

With dawn, and the inevitable hangover, my imaginary friends disappear back into their Tomes, and another day begins of restless and fruitless begging. If I would afford an accordian, I could be a busker, if I knew how to play. Maybe I can get a micro-loan to advance my social entrepreneurship.

 

Comments

[dqkelley]

I had the same trip! Investment crowding out giving ! Philanthropists pouring money into Funds that rent out their money for them while they get a tax deduction and try to figure out if mankind is their business! I tripped out on the Chronicle of Philanthropy!