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

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 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.

But Bentoism also believes that our definitions of “rational” and “self-interest” are too narrow. We think rational value means financial value. And self-interest is all about satisfying our immediate desires. But neither perspective comes close to the full spectrum of what’s valuable or rational. Today’s thinking goes: It’s rational to behave in y

Our self-interest doesn’t stop with us right now. We don’t exist in a vacuum. We live within communities of people who are affected by our decisions, and whose decisions affect us. Our decisions impact our future selves, too.

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.

“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

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

LIFE GOALS

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