Capitalism means the greatest rewards go to owners.

If your concept of owner-capitalism is rooted in the image of the robber barons of the previous Gilded Age, it’s worth taking a look around at how ownership looks and is rewarded in the connection economy.

Internet giants own enormous (and enormously valuable) tangible and intangible assets ranging from search engines to our attention. The fact that we sometimes don’t have to pay for them might obscure the dynamic a little bit (you expect to see a robber baron actually making and handling money), but it hardly obviates the business model.

What’s perhaps even harder to see are the assets each of us own (or sometimes rent) and how they’re rewarded. Many of these are intangible, like college degrees. Others are only semi-tangible, like our emotional labor. (If you’re coaching someone, you yourself are the asset. The challenge, as most coaches learn sooner rather than later, is that you can only earn money from that asset when you “rent” yourself.) And some are rented (like this WordPress site.)

A few questions follow:

• What do you own?
• Do you own the right assets and use them well and generously?
• Are you acting like an owner in capturing value from and caring for the assets you own?

Ain’t no money in poetry
That’s what sets the poet free
I’ve had all the freedom I can stand.
— Guy Clark, “Cold Dog Soup”

***

Part of my own fear and anxiety around money is rooted in the idea (perhaps misguided, perhaps not) that managing money and participating in markets implies culpability for an often flawed system.

But another, perhaps deeper, part of it has to do with the idea of trading freedom for money. If, as they say, it’s called “compensation” for a reason, in what ways am I beholden to my sources of income — and how beholden am I comfortable being?

(NB: It’s possible to trade money for freedom or time, of course — you can hire a driver, a babysitter, a chef, an assistant, or even a vacuum cleaner. I just haven’t gotten to a point in life yet where I’ve been able to make big trades in that direction.)

With a little experience and some reflection, it seems that a feeling of independence and some level of intentionality are touchstones in my relationship with money. I never want to feel totally beholden (and I’d like more independence over time), and I prefer to earn, invest, and spend money with intention.

One of the easiest ways to do both of these is to start small. Even this daily blog is in some way a daily act of freedom (and I intentionally do it for free); meanwhile, with the money I do have, I’ve tried to manage progressively more of it on my own, and to allocate more and more of it in ways that strike the best balance I can see between shoring up my own foundations and doing the least harm to others who might be related to me by money.

The challenge, of course, is that the perfect “freedom” of having no money does not feel very free. Some amount of attention and intention is required to achieve sufficiency and independence in the world of money and things.

For a long time, I lived more or less in ignorance of all things financial.

Of course that had a lot to do with fear — the world of finance seemed big, opaque, and most of all complex. And therefore it was easier (in the short term, anyway) to simply bury my head in the sand.

Part of the fear, though, had to do with something other than confronting complexity. It was the intuition that money decisions are on some level moral decisions — and so the more I knew, the more culpable I might be.

In time, I came to see that there is such a thing as culpable ignorance, too. I’m using money (and it’s being earned, spent, and invested on my behalf) in the market as it exists.

The morals seem to be at least two: first, what I didn’t (and don’t) know about money can hurt. I’ve foregone a lot of potential earnings by failure to get a clue. Second, non-action does not confer blamelessness. Maintaining an unsophisticated relationship with money and markets wasn’t changing anyone or anything for the better.

From those two insights, I decided first to try to learn something about how money works in general and how my money works in particular, and then to ensure that I was making intentional decisions with the money I control.

I still don’t know much — and much of what I do know is uncomfortable — but I have found it easier to deal with the moral questions of money with a little knowledge and a little more control.

Start with Beth and the tacos, followed by the conversation in the car

The idea of a money story came in handy for me on a road trip last summer.

My friend and I stopped for lunch in Napa and ordered a fish taco at the upscale market downtown. We discovered with a bump that each order consisted of a single taco, for which $8 felt a little steep. One thing led to another, and we had the seeds of our first little conflict of the trip.

Of course it wasn’t really about the money: $8 — or even $16 — was a pretty small sum in the context of a month-long trip. Instead, it was really a clash of stories and values. Was an $8 taco a vacation indulgence or a “bougie” affront to good sense that couldn’t be justified even in context?

A day and a half later, we began the next big stretch of driving, and a few hours of relatively desolate Nevada landscape presented the perfect opportunity to open a conversation about our money stories.

We probably spent 200 miles trading stories about our experiences and memories of growing up, noting the similarities and differences, and gaining new appreciation for parts of ourselves and each other that we had never really dealt with directly in a decade of friendship.

Money stories are complex and often taboo, but they are always at play in our interactions with ourselves, others, and the choices we face ($8 taco, anyone?). It might not be easy, but asking someone about their money story can be quite revealing and — done right — enriching for both of you.

Next time the universe offers you an $8 taco, what might you learn about yourself and the people you care about?

The first time I heard the idea of a “money story” was during AmeriCorps orientation. Sitting beside a couple hundred young twentysomethings preparing to spend a year on a limited budget and a commitment to intentional living, a dynamic young woman pastor told us her money story and urged us to think about our own.

Of course, most of us were coming from a money story that allowed us to spend a year living on a stipend. I can’t say how others thought about that, but I can say that while the language of a “money story” was new for me, the experience of living on a stipend was extremely clarifying — especially in contrast to the money experiences I’d had (not all of them easy) growing up in the suburbs or attending a famous college.

Some of the most clarifying parts of the experience were when my unconscious notions of scarcity and abundance were challenged. The more I looked around, the more I began to see that I’d had access to more money and opportunity in some ways than the people I was then living among, and yet I’d also had less freedom in other ways. Conversely, I found I could have more fun and meaningful time with people with very little money. I also saw grown-ups barter and trade with each other, which was almost totally foreign to my experience.

One of the funny things about being a volunteer in a small community is that people tend to give the volunteers things, and many of the most meaningful experiences I had that year were free to me thanks to the generosity of others (many of whom didn’t have very much by the standards of the Boston suburbs).

After several months of being showered with such generosity, I came to understand that I did not want to live that way forever: sooner or later, I was going to have to take responsibility for the opportunities I’d had in the first 22 years of my life. But I also understood that I’d never be able to repay the generosity I’d been shown, and so part of taking responsibility for my independence would have to do with creating opportunities for other people in the same spirit of generosity I’d been shown.

What that means changes from day to day and context to context. But I always try to have the conversation with myself about opportunities taken and opportunities created, and whether the money story I’m telling or living at any given time honors the generosity that shaped my life.

In order to do “economics as if people mattered” (E. F. Schumacher), we had better start at least one step upstream of people: with nature.

Whatever words you want to put around the processes — extraction, production, value-adding, etc. — the inescapable fact is that economics, especially in the sense of property or real goods, is about people taking what they find in creation and doing something with or to it that they consider valuable.

(This suggests another question further upstream, as to where creation comes from and what responsibilities might inhere in the giving and receiving, but that’s a topic for another day.)

For now, let’s focus on a few assertions about nature the way nature works that might help us think about how we work with nature:

• Nature is almost unimaginably varied, complex, and interconnected. The ancient metaphor of the web is a good one; from a spider’s-eye view, it’s impossible to see the results of our actions in one corner of the web in their full expression in other corners.
• Nature abhors a monoculture. Industry likes to scale sameness: the bigger and samer, the better. Nature never does that. Instead, it produces infinite imperfect copies, usually with great respect for the particularity of place. Nature doesn’t grow all apples exactly the same size and weight by choice; it’s only as a result of industrial culture that we might see that as “natural” at the grocery store.
• Nature is resilient — within very exacting tolerances. Sometimes limits can be transgressed: a drought hits the land, or a person lifts a car. But resiliency implies an allowance for recovery. If you lifted a car, you can bet you’d be pretty sore and tired after the adrenaline wore off.
• Just because we can’t precisely see, feel, or measure a limit does not mean that no limit exists. In fact, those might be the severest limits of all.

To take another classical idea, each science (or discipline, in the modern sense) was fitted to a proper sphere.

Ethics was the science of the sphere of habit (ethos), and specifically the habits that form our characters. Our word “economy,” in contrast, comes from the Greek oikonomia, or the governance (use) of the things of the household, or oikos, which could variously mean family, home, and property.

I’ve always found it helpful to think of economics in terms of how we manage families, homes, and property, rather than specifically how we manage (or make) money, goods, and services in “the economy” of the colloquial sense.

Beginning from families and households rather than abstractions like GDP or supply-and-demand graphs helps me keep the fundamentally human element of economics more firmly in mind. After all, other creatures don’t really have economies in the way people do — certainly not at the scale that could shape the destiny of the planet.

And so, as we proceed — here and in daily life — let’s try to begin from the idea of “economics as if people mattered,” in E. F. Schumacher’s words.

To begin a new month’s investigation of a new topic, it’s important to begin again from first principles.

Again, the thread of the first three months of this year is to interrogate the topics of ethics, economics, and politics — in that order.

That scaffolding comes from the classical Greek tradition, in which thinkers like Aristotle determined that human nature was to live together, and that living together in society required that people learn to “rule” (or govern) first themselves, then their households, then their polity.

That sequence makes intuitive sense. If we truly are social by nature, then our fates are somehow bound together. And if our fates are bound together, then our adequacy to the progressively greater tasks of governing ourselves, our homes (and resources), and our communities will have progressively greater effects on the fate of society.

For if we cannot govern ourselves, we might harm another in word or deed. But if we cannot govern our money or politics — or if people who cannot govern themselves nonetheless control great wealth and power — the effects quickly and clearly scale to the level of the polis and perhaps beyond.

And so, let’s begin.