Inclusive growth

Draft version – 0.1

Inclusive growth cannot be delivered by redistribution of benefits alone – it requires the democratisation of innovation and creating the distributed conditions for all of society to innovate and contribute to making the future.

These few words challenge some fundamental beliefs, assumptions buried in lazy economic growth strategies. Strategies which almost entirely focus on high growth startups, spaces for high growth startups, subsidising large scale real-estate and building outdated skills factories.

1. FROM INVESTING IN 1% STARTUPS TO UNLEASHING ALL OF US: Much our of current economic development logic is focused on developing high growth businesses – in the hope of driving spill-over benefits. This economic model is built on picking privileged people from a concentrated human capital pool – who have extraordinary access to social networks, craft learning from emerging markets, and who will create concentrated forms of value to support and accelerate the concentration of capital. This is a self fulfilling prophecy/strategy – concentration begets concentration and venture capital drives this concentration. This is an economic model which only fuels the few, accelerating the 1% – all in the persistent hope that the reality of 20th century trickle-down economics will be overturned by the meritocratic illusion & possibility – anyone can have idea – ignoring the actual probability of that reality.
2. REDISTRIBUTION IS NOT ENOUGH: Inclusive growth cannot be sustainably delivered by minimum wage increases. We need to democratise value creation in order to justifiably democratise the return on value creation. This means fundamentally reimagining our models of managing & recruiting – from command, control and vertical accountability powered by bad robots – to hosting, enabling and horizontal accountability powered by distributed, intelligent, autonomous organisms (DAO called humans). Only by democratising the means of value creation can we create the necessary politics of change where we view every human from the capacity to contribute (13.8 Billion year evolutionary machines are more powerful than any AI built!) not the roles we are forced to occupy to survive.
3. DEMOCRATISING INNOVATION: Concentrated capital drives concentrated innovation and thereby concentrated wealth creation. We need to democratise innovation in our society, cities, organisations and institutions – re-recognising, embracing and investing in the capacity and necessity to innovate everywhere. We need to embrace how the RSA prize model originally (19th century) used to support innovation of the small and everyday – in all parts of industry & making not just the high growth and the few. Embracing models of planning the development of the city which favour massive micro development and democratising wealth and assets. We need to re-imagine our instructional infrastructure to support and empower the democratisation of innovation as opposed to its concentration.
4. INCLUSIVE SOCIETY FOR INCLUSIVE GROWTH: Exclusive growth itself is a symptom of numerous other factors & drivers beyond the workplace – from a dominant cultural ideology (illusions of meritocracy) to education (schools as skills factory to fulfill the needs of our productive assets & their owners). Inclusive growth requires us to reframe our prejudice of increasingly viewing welfare as a tool for those 10% in greatest need, but a collective necessity for unlocking all our potential us as a civilisation (not the differential advantage of one of us over the other). Our collective development infrastructure from universities, schools, nurseries, to our welfare system need to be reframed as investments to unlock our democratised innovation capacity – be it civic, cultural, scientific, or economic – not as pre-planned fodder for existing productive assets. This creative tension is a necessity and the positive mismatch between the dependency needs of current productive assets and future humanity is a feature not a bug. A feature to drive innovation and inclusive growth.
5. NEW COMMONS BUSINESS MODELS: Private Growth by itself cannot drive long term inclusive growth. We also need Commons business models at a societal scale, to persistently recognise our intergenerational responsibilities, but also reflect the reality some our assets are not divisible, but systematically contribute and distract in the commons. In this future we need to acknowledge the critical role of societal business models – from Universal Basic Investment, to collective Catastrophe bonds, to Sovereign City Asset Funds, pooling publicly held developable land.

Photo Credits to Wikihouse Foundation

Thank you to the brilliant Jeremy Mack Wright — for editing this piece!