“Economy” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a thrifty and efficient use of material resources”. Other wordings of course exist, but I feel this one does the best job. So when we say “The economy…”, we’re really saying “The system we’ve designed to utilize resources in an efficient way.”. Now this makes sense, given that through Capitalism and the pursuit of profit above all else, we essentially mandate efficiency. On paper, this sounds like a good setup. But I see a problem with the definition of the word economy; one that, as far as I can tell, is responsible for a substantial barrier to the reliable creation of prosperity. That problem is purpose, or rather, a lack thereof.

An economy is just a method of using resources efficiently. A working, stable economy is simply a working, stable method of using resources efficiently. What it lacks is purpose; direction. So what if we’re stupid good at using resources. We could, if we so chose to, create a production process and allocate materials for the purpose of producing a rubber ducky for every man, woman, and child on the Earth, and we could do so with a ridiculous degree of efficiency. We could iterate the design to use less material, streamline the production processes to minimize human involvement by designing modular, robust and scalable automation, and establish highly-automated dynamic systems for the transportation and delivery of our duckies. We could do all this, and we could do it in a stupid efficient way, if we so chose. But I think it’s pretty clear that this course of action absolutely does not constitute an efficient use of resources. Not that rubber duckies aren’t awesome, of course.

As I see it, there are two elements at play here. ‘The economy’ as it’s traditionally understood: The production chains, infrastructure, and organizations that make stuff happen. Then there’s the seemingly overlooked ‘purpose’ element. The direction, the foreman, the brass. The decision makers. We call them ‘job creators’.

This is our chosen method of divining ‘purpose’: We provide resource access (cash) to those who demonstrate themselves to be worthy of wielding resource access (those who achieve financial success), and then those people choose what resources should be used to what ends. Elon Musk, for example, could have chosen to pursue DuckX instead of SpaceX, making it his will to create and provide not cheap rockets, but free duckies instead. It’s his money, it’s his prerogative. Luckily however he chose to do something that most people would agree is a “good use” of resources. Unfortunately for every Elon Musk there are dozens of Donald Trumps and Kevin O’learys who choose to use their resource access in the pursuit of more resource access, instead of striving to achieve meaningful progress.

Now that’s not to say those kind of people are useless. You don’t acquire a fortune by being useless. But they have chosen to profit from exploiting problems, instead of solving them. There are people who seek to make a difference, and people who seek to make a profit. One directly solves a problem by applying resources in an efficient way with the goal being the solving of the problem. The other exploits the problem by creating a solution and working to maintain control of it, not really aiming to solve the problem, but seeking to create a perpetual sort of fix. A good example of this is telecommunications companies in Canada.

You would think the point of creating a telecommunications company should be providing telecommunications services to people. It’s not. The point is to make profit. We have the technology, the know-how, the resources (material and human), and the demand to establish and maintain state-of-the-art communications infrastructure, and yet, the state of internet infrastructure and service in this country is dismal. Why? Because a few companies have found it’s much more profitable to artificially limit the technology; to abstain from striving to provide the best we can create, and instead pursue a perpetual oligopoly and profit by over charging for an artificially scarce resource.

My point is this: There is no one unified effort to use resources to achieve the things we democratically decide we want to achieve. The closest thing we’ve got is the much despised government and the constant battle to fund/defund projects. We have no business calling the economy “the” economy, as it’s not. There’s Musk’s economy. There’s Trump’s economy. There’s my economy, and your economy. Our world; our very notions of freedom are built upon the idea that what I do in my home or business with resources that I’ve attained control over is nobodies business but my own. If I want to build rockets or mass produce duckies, and I have the resource access required to do so, then nothing aught stand in my way.

A colony of ants could be said to have it’s own economy. Many resources are used to maintain a colony, and each flows efficiently to where it needs to be. In a natural ant colony millions of autonomous individuals collaborate to construct, expand, and maintain a colony. Each ant, on it’s own, is able to decide where to go, what to do, and how to go about it… and yet, each seems to follow a very strict set of rules. Ants communicate via scents and movements and are able to relay complex instructions very fast. As such they can react very quickly to changing circumstances. Together, they are able to build vast societies with millions upon millions of individuals and often times bountiful stores of valuable resources. What is it about ants that allows this degree of natural collaboration? Is it the queen? Or just their natural instinct? If our countries were ant hills, and businesses were ants, what would our colonies look like?

Our ants, our businesses, are too autonomous. They too have strict rules in place to govern their operation, however, their rules are for the most part self-imposed. We have no all-powerful entity directing the actions of our ants (at least since we discovered that monarchy doesn’t work so well for us). Our queen is demand. Our instinct is to profit. Our ants perform based not upon what needs to be done for the good of the colony, but rather, what provides the most to the individual. We have millions of highly capable, competent entities each tugging their own direction, using resources for their own personal gain and relying as little as possible on the others. Tunnels would be dug, food collected, young cared-for based not on what would result in the most powerful, efficient colony, but what would provide the most immediate gain for the individual doing the work. It would be absolutely efficient in the eyes of the individual ants, but chaotic and ineffective as a whole.

This situation exists at the same time that we’re trying to rationalize the idea that “the economy” is the thing that creates prosperity, when in reality, it’s individuals with passion, ideas, and resource access that create progress. The economy simply facilitates that by enabling the flow of resources and labor. It’s not the pump, pipes, faucet, or hose that grows crops, but the will of the farmer and the availability of water. Of course sturdy tools and infrastructure make a huge difference, the point is that given water and space, the farmer’s own hunger will drive his efforts. In the same way, given the resources and time, a human’s own desire will drive their innovation.

The system that we have now is designed to ‘weed out’ those who are not passionate. Who would squander resources. Who would be inefficient. But we go too far. We should not relegate those who are not so obviously worthy of resource access to a life of poverty, but rather, a basic existence with avenues to achieve something more, should the desire ever come. Even those who may seem useless may just have some untapped potential. Instead of casting them aside because of their refusal to seek it out, we should provide them with dignity and allow them to live. One day they may decide to do something more with their lives, but until then, they aught be comfortable at least. Lest they lose interest in participating in our society at all. A refusal to pursue profit should not be treated as a refusal to be productive. Most of us want to be productive, but can’t quite seem to find the circumstances that work for us. Many of us wish to solve problems, but to do so one must pursue profit. If people could simply choose to use their time and brains when they wanted to pursue what they wanted, I suspect there would be a lot more output from the “takers” of this world. Not profit mind you, but tangible progress, and perhaps more importantly, genuine happiness and fulfillment.

We purposefully reserve the ability to have a meaningful impact for those who demonstrate themselves to be worthy of such an ability. And yet many who attain this ability demonstrate themselves to be anything but worthy of it through greed and decadence. A world could exist where resources are allocated based on the merits of what they are to achieve, instead of the whims of those who manage to accumulate funds. We could create the means to live from birth to death in a dignified way on a massive scale, in the same way that we’ve created processes to supply automobiles and cellphones to every corner of the Earth. We have the potential to create an economy that is absolutely capable of allowing us to mass produce robotic automation in abundance in a very efficient way. What we lack is the will. What we lack is purpose.

The engine is running, but we’re too busy bickering over who gets to drive to decide where to go.