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.

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.

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

Is it a Wall Street world or a Community world? A Prisoner’s Dilemma world or a Stag Hunt world? Part of it comes down to just what we call it. That’s how powerful hidden defaults can be.

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.

LIFE GOALS

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

EXPANDING VALUE Bentoism isn’t a utopian clean slate. It builds on the world around us. Like financial maximization, Bentoism strives for rational and measurable principles. Bentoism seeks to expand some of the tools of financial maximization to a wider set of values. And like Adam Smith, Bentoism believes good things happen when people act in thei

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.

“PLA to be world-class force by 2050,” read the front page of China Daily.1 Beneath the headline was a picture of President Xi Jinping and a row of People’s Liberation Army soldiers. The year leapt out: 2050. Distant, but not too distant. Thirty-three years away from that moment. I’ll probably still be alive then. A thought hit me. While China was