Around backwards
What do we incentivise for? If we pay bonuses for maximum profit, then those receiving the bonus will cut every cost to the bone, including costs that prevent cost blowouts in the future, like repairs, new technology, education, R@D. This gets us minimum or below the cost of living wages, humans as cogs, corners cut, and externalities ignored.
The hope will be that the ball can be passed far enough down the line to have it land on someone else’s lap.
This is the game we have been playing with our children’s future. But not as we might think in reference to government deficit. When a government is an issuer of sovereign currency, they can always pay for our future.
We have been passing the ball around the decimation of our environment, the hollowing out of our education and health care, our use of our energy savings account (fossil fuels) rather than the application of our human know-how and minds to the deployment of the abundance of energy that we have been gifted through sun and wind.
We have it around backwards. Imagine if we incentivised an increase in well-being for all?
If our leaders of industry and politics were given bonuses only if their enterprise added value to all stakeholders, not just today, but towards a better future.
Photo taken June 24th, 2020
