Book Review – Betterness: Economics For Humans
Book cover for Betterness by Umair Haque.
2011 was the deafening crescendo that started in 2008 when the markets initially collapsed and started the tsunami that eventually touched the entire global financial market. But the financial world has been completely unmoved by the damage caused by their short-term unvisions and supercharged hunger for unending profiteering. As a matter of fact, the finance wizards have been so untouched that they continue to push their agendas with the help of the antiquated systems of government, business, education, military, and law. There isn’t a sector of institutional normality that isn’t in on continuing with the rigged game that they call an economy. But the one thing that is slowly changing is a shift in thinking by those who play a big part in this so-called game of life: the people.
Enter Umair Haque, an economist, columnist for the Harvard Business Review, and director for the Havas Media Lab, who speaks of the absolute necessity to shift from the stodgy, musty capitalism of old that has imprisoned us in a shiny McSerfdom to the concept of Eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is an Aristotelian concept of “human flourishing” that seeks to enrich mankind’s life with a well-balanced path of personal enrichment that has only a little to do with the golden sheen of tangible wealth.
Umair has spent the better part of a decade talking against the status quo experts who told the world how they should pursue business, government, and every other aspect of life. With his qualifications, you would think that more people would have been paying attention. But perhaps the auditory tide is finally shifting with the advent of OWS and other global people’s movements who have called out the ways of status quo as a sham that’s disintegrated our very way of life. We’re at a turning point in history once again, and we have added another powerful speaker to help us think our way into a new dawn.
Umair just released his latest book, Betterness: Economics For Humans, through the Harvard Business Review Press, and it should be a foundation piece for the new eudaimonic world that we need to build to replace the shattered one that now ensnares us all. Betterness is an e-book (available as an HBR Singles PDF, Amazon Kindle edition, or iTunes book) with 64 pages full of thought-provoking, paradigm-shifting, status quo shattering ideas that will serve as a torch-bearing moment that provides as much light as the Statue of Liberty did for people since her installation as the face of democracy.
Betterness is for the person who is ready to embrace the radical idea that our world is past due for massive reconfiguration. Not just a reboot, but an actual program rewrite. This book is a walk-through of four key Ancient Greek concepts (Eudaimonia, Poiesis, Arête, and Kairos) that step the paradigm shifter through the ruins of corporatocracy into a world full of possibilities that will enrich every person in mind, body, and soul. The days of punching into time clocks, filling our workdays with empty activities, and measuring our actions against soulless charts and graphs are over. It’s just taking a lot of people a lot of time to realize that those days are gone, and necessarily so.
Umair understands that we’re not just involved in a financial crisis. The entire world is in the middle of structural breakdowns that can no longer be patched over. Business of the old industrial age ran on the concept of measuring output, or GDP, in order to define its effectiveness through tangible profits at the back end of each business cycle. And though the numbers registering on corporate balance sheets everywhere continued to grow exponentially, the underlying factors that allowed business to survive were actually going backwards and negatively impacting the global wealth.
It turns out that we’re not measuring the right things, or perhaps that the measurements are incomplete for a broader, deeper view of how life really is. Umair has given us a new formula that can be considered as a starting point for the actual calculations that we should be making in order to grasp the true picture of life on a global balance sheet.
The Great Splintering has not only torn apart our economic prosperity, but it’s also torn apart the social contract that protected us all. And this led to the events that we’re all currently observing, starting with one man in a small town in Tunisia, but leading to global masses of people demanding a proper accounting of where and why we stepped off the path of good.
“The Corporation as You Know it is Probably Obsolete.” Our new goal is to put business as we know it out of business, and seek betterness of a higher order. And the good news is that there are countries out there that are already starting to create national balance sheets that measure real wealth in human terms. Of course, we’re only at the inception of this new path, but it’s going to be a new way of thinking for everyone, and especially for business.
This isn’t a book that only explains the negative returns of our current lives, because it’s also about what will be possible if we take on the challenges to change our habits so that we can envision what our future will be filled with. Umair gives us ideas, and they are filled with hope. But his most profound push is for us to go out and live a good life, a better life, and a meaningful life. What else would you expect from someone who ranked in the 2011 Thinkers50 list of the world’s most influential management thinkers.
And here’s a recent interview about Betterness that Umair did with Dylan Ratigan to whet your appetite:
