This author has no problem writing. The need to define this book is her challenge. I can’t ‘see’ it on the page. I can only ‘read’ what she wants it to be about and that’s a problem.

THE LETTER

Boom and bust; boom and bust. Economists call it the business cycle and say that’s just the way things work. But what if they’re wrong? What if, as seems to be happening now, the booms in our capitalistic system are destined to get shorter and help fewer people each time around, while the busts grow progressively deeper, longer and bring more human misery with every cycle? What if the root problems of capitalism run so deep that no amount of monetary stimulus, jobs creation programs or changes in who runs the country can solve the problem? What do we do when all the ideas we know how to apply to bring balance back to our system no longer succeed?

As with every other approach that’s ever served us – be it feudalism, the horse and buggy or hunting woolly mammoths – when all the fixes have failed, it’s time for a change. None of those systems were inherently evil and they all worked well for a time. When the world changes though, we need to change with it…or die. As conscious, thinking beings we can either do so thoughtfully and voluntarily, or we can wait until life gets so awful we’re left with no choice.  Either way, though, change is coming. The only remaining question to answer is this: will we embrace our current challenges and thoughtfully redesign our future with planning and foresight, or will we allow millions – perhaps even billions – of honest, hardworking people to suffer (or even die) before we pick up the broken pieces of our shattered civilization and start again?

This book opens a dialogue around that very question. After sixteen years as a successful stockbroker with a major Wall Street firm, I quit the financial services business in late 2007 and dedicated myself to writing “Sacred Economics: Designing a World That Works for Everyone” because I realized our entire global economic system was destined to fail, and fail for good. While working as a broker I’d witnessed the stock market crashes of 1987 and 2000, and I’d been warning my clients about the pending collapse of the mortgage and housing market since 2005. Yet still our national economists, those ivory tower thinkers we tend to turn to for explanations, were assuring us things were clipping along just fine. What therefore became painfully clear to me was that it was going to take someone from deep inside the industry, someone who had experienced its strengths and weaknesses from the inside out, to find the courage to stand up and tell some hard truths about what capitalism really is and why it can’t take us any futher, as well as point out the price our planet is paying to try and sustain it.

This isn’t a book that will tell you how to survive the apocolypse, or how to do better than your friends and neighbors in the next economic crash. It’s bigger than that. Nor is its intention to instill fear, or to shame and blame those who’ve promoted capitalism in the past. This book’s intention is to warn everyone of the rising economic tsunami – the rumbles of which we are already sensing as the wave begins to build – that can only be avoided if we stand together and help those standing beside us. I promise you, it will challenge some of your deepest – perhaps even most cherished – beliefs about life and humankind. It has to, because before we can change our world we must first change our minds…one mind at a time.

Video Critique # 9