This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World

Prisoner’s Dilemma and Stag Hunt are two rational but fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. One is competitive: Earth is a planet of people plotting in interrogation rooms against one another. The other is cooperative: if we hunt together we’ll get more food.

You hear that phrase a lot when it comes to new ideas: “it seemed like the thing to do.” If other people agree—as people did with the high five—it becomes A Thing. There’s no steering committee that gives the green light. There’s no stamp of approval. There’s not a grand design. It just happens. The truth is there is little order. The status quo pe

The top earners saw their hourly wage climb 27 percent between 1979 and 2016.11 But for the middle class it grew just 3 percent over those same years. Just 3 percent since the Walkman was invented, and as other costs have skyrocketed.

The truth is that everything is made up. The same way Kickstarter was made up. Some people think of something and try to bring it into existence. If other people start believing in this new idea, it becomes real.

Once I started seeing the world this way, I couldn’t unsee it.

LIFE GOALS

Financial maximization says that in any decision, the rational choice is the one that makes the most money. This is the underlying “why” behind many of our choices. The right-hand turn of modern life.

Pink names three drives that he believes speak to our higher values. Pink identifies: Autonomy: the desire to have a say over what we do Mastery: the process of getting better at what we do Purpose: the meaning behind what we do

THE END OF RAISES Three years after Milton Friedman’s New York Times essay put financial maximization into the bloodstream, a strange thing happened. People stopped getting raises.