As the free market struggles there is a real need to think about what the alternatives might be. Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that “there is no alternative” to market capitalism. This system has generated wealth, but it has done so both by destroying the environment on which it depends, and by creating enormous human misery. As we enter the second decade of a global economic crisis to which no solution is in sight it is time to reconsider what the alternative should look like.
We know that there are a series of Grand Challenges which we must tackle. Climate breakdown threatens the very existence of our society, poverty blights the lives of billions of people, we are running out of antibiotics. We need a way to address these problems. But we must not lose democracy in this. Grand challenges are all-too-often deployed as a way to sideline democracy. What I outline below seeks to align an approach to our economy that aligns grand challenges with a more vigorous democracy to ensure that we use the technology at our disposal to tackle the challenges we must address.
It is particularly important to understand that free market capitalism’s strongest asset was its ability to effectively allocate resources in an information-poor context. Yet the world we live in, and especially our economy are now information rich. The business model of the big Silicon Valley companies, like Google, is entirely based on data for business (“if you’re not paying for it, YOU are the product”). What I propose is a method to turn this understanding of demand into social good, rather than trillion-dollar valued companies.
