The Reformed Capitalist is a collection of bloggers who believe that pursuit of “growth” has been responsible for many of the wonderful things in our world today, but continued growth could be catastrophic to society.

In particular, the relentless drive toward business growth increasing profits will stymie the necessary changes to sustain an free and wonderful human existence.

Our author:

A Brief History

As a child of the 70s and 80s, I was taught that a successful life came from working hard, getting good grades and making more money than your parents. That narrative ingrained in my existence and drove many decisions in my young adult life.

As Millennials entered the workforce, I saw their generation had their own narrative that conflicted with mine. Of course, at first I though my narrative was correct and theirs was stupid. But eventually I realized we were both attached to false narratives, and everyone lives under the limited perspective of the time and location of their formative years.

That initiated a complete breakdown down everything I believed. I came to learn:

For hundreds of thousands of years humans were just another species in nature and not special.

Around the time of the Agricultural Revolution — 10,000 years ago — we shifted from a accepting our fate to controlling our fate. By increasing food production, we increased our numbers.

This increase caused a fundamental shift in how we were organized. Growing into towns and eventually cities. Splitting us into a worker/slave class and an elite class — with the elite class selling stories of the future improvement (aka growth).

This eventually led to the development of written language, religious evangelism, nationalism, currencies, debt, industrial revolution, scientific revolution, medicine, computers, artificial intelligence …. growth, growth and more growth.

Whether you believe the growth was good or bad, it is now the force that drives our existence.

I would argue that growth so far has been generally good — for humans (and corn), but through compound interest, we have reach a point where we have lost control of the growth.

We have 7 billion people, and the combined impact of population growth and innovation are overwhelming everything on the planet.

Currently, we have effective control over everything on the planet except a few things death, seismic geologic events and weather. And to be fair, we are increasingly able to at least influence all 3 of those.

I would argue humans (as a species, not as individuals) have become the G-d of the planet Earth. Even if you don’t like that term, you should accept that our future lies completely in the decisions we make.

Our conscientious alarmists warn us that there is catastrophe on the horizon. Global warming, clean water, food, disease all represent real concerns that could destroy civilization if not addressed. But there are all challenges that could be address, if we wanted to focus the time and resources. Don’t believe me, read the post about all of the positive world changing things we have created to address catastrophic problems.

What would prevent us from solving our biggest problems?

The relentless pursuit of profit growth.