Digging Holes to Save the World

A very expensive hole indeed — Apeldoorn — ©2018 Bard

I have many friends and colleagues that want to have a positive impact on the world. They genuinely want to leave this world a better place than they found it. When I ask how they think to accomplish this, the answer is disappointingly predictable.

They want to make a lot of money. First to become financially independent, so they don’t have to follow someone else’s orders. Then to become rich enough to have enough money to spare to start spending it on good causes. In the end, they tell me, they will be able to direct most of their wealth to where it does the most good.

What a wonderful sentiment.

The problem is, of course, that it won’t work. Becoming rich enough to be able to funnel significant amounts of money to causes big enough to make a noticeable impact is still an exception. Not necessarily because people aren’t smart or don’t work hard enough, but simply because of statistics: it is by definition impossible for the majority of a population to be richer than average. Some will jump out above, some will sink to the bottom, but most (and that includes you and me, and almost everyone we know) will be pretty much stuck in the average band between those two extremes, not rich enough to have much discretionary funds to give away.

But the real problem in this ‘making money to save the world — scheme runs much deeper. It is a fundamental problem with the way money works in our possession-based economy.

Money has been designed to be an extraction mechanism. We don’t make money; we extract it by taking more value from the system than we put in. The fortune I amass is now mine, no longer accessible to the system I extracted it from. It is no coincidence money was tied to gold (or other precious metals) for so long: money is made by mining value that is freely (as in not owned by anyone) available, and then transforming it into something that is only owned by some individual or imaginary entity such as a bank, corporation of government. It has been moved from being commonly available to being privately owned.

Apart from being a concentrator of wealth, that extraction process is never 100% efficient, either. No matter how ‘clean’ we think we operate, the concentrated value we are left with is always less than the total of the distributed value we collected and condensed it from. Value inevitably gets lost in the process. Making money creates wealth, but destroys value. Always.

Making money to save the world is like digging a hole to fill another one. Even if you could dig at 100% efficiency, you would still have a hole, only somewhere else. But because you can’t, you actually end up with more hole(s). You will have made things worse, not better, in the end.

Having a positive impact on the world will have to be done through other means than money alone. We can’t repair the damage we do using the very mechanism that causes that damage.