The October 2024 issue of Compass magazine, the global voice of professional futurists, has just published an article by Institute for Economic Evolution founder, Vinny Tafuro. This quarterly magazine shares the diverse voices of professional futurists from around the world and is publicly available online for free.

Below is an excerpt from the article followed by the embedded full article.

Introduction

The world’s contemporary economic systems are in crisis. Environmental destruction and climate change threaten natural and human habitats, the colonization of human attention at the brainstem by algorithms, and the capture and consolidation of political power place a majority of humans in fiscal, physical, and mental precarity. Driven by inaccurate assumptions, data, and models mainstream economics provides no path forward without expanding the concept of work beyond the limits of fiscal capital. Regardless of where on the political or ideological spectrum these dominant economic models sit, they ignore up to two-thirds of the value created by the actions (aka work) of people–simply because those efforts are not exchanged for monetary compensation. This limitation is a straight jack to the individual and a cage to humanity’s potential.

The Labor Cage

The precarious state of workers and families today has created a litany of wicked problems undermining environmental health and social cohesion at every level. Poverty-driven health and education inequity robs children of opportunity. Family violence and financial hardship perpetuate violence in broader societal relationships. Addiction and social isolation destroy mental and physical health and drive deaths of despair. These burdens leave families unable to meet their own needs and block them from engaging in their neighborhood, civil society, and government to improve or often simply protect their standing.
Work today remains dominated by centuries-old worldviews with underlying myths and metaphors that go back millennia. The centering of patriarchy, stratified social order, and assumed dominion over nature are deeply rooted and stand as bulwarks to human flourishing. Men’s domination of women, other men, and nature was enshrined by the Alphabetic religions and recorded beliefs of philosophers such as Aristotle (350 B.C.). Elimination of the feminine as divine by the Bible and the assumption by Aristotle that, “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule” have served as the foundational justifications for slavery, colonization, and exploitation. These practices support the unjust structures of our contemporary social systems.
Without addressing these worldviews, the narratives that support them, and the systems they entrench we cannot address the future of work. I would argue further that we may not be able to address the future of civilized society.

Unlocking the Cage with CLA

Our poor relationship to work is deeply rooted at the beginning of recorded history. Despite two centuries of incrimental shifts toward egalitarian systems new narratives are needed as foundations for truly rebuilt systems and structures. While CLA allows current paradigm analysis we can use it aspirationally to imagine future scenarios in which work, human and environmental value, and time itself are experienced differently through a new lens focused on cultivating human flourishing and supporting greater individual expression. The table below contrasts a casual layered analysis of work in contemporary society and a future scenario where we interpret a new narrative at each level to create a very different paradigm.

Download PDF of the complete article.

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