Design Economics Podcast with Vinny Tafuro

We don't have to have a lot of government regulation if, in fact, what you did was to get economists to calculate externalized costs and make them part of the business model itself. You can't give always this constant way of making money is to make sure that you externalize your costs to someone else. That will, in fact, has destroyed the society. So it isn't a matter here of trying to favor government over companies. Companies, I believe, are in fact a very good place for democracy to occur.

You simply can't allow a particular group of leaders to cheat.

Hello, and welcome to season two, episode two of the Design Economics podcast, where we explore how design thinking driven by data is revolutionizing economics for the twenty first century. My name is Vinny Tafiro, a futurist, economist, and your host for this episode. My guest today is Doctor. Stan Dietz, a National Communications Association distinguished scholar whose work and expertise has taken him to universities and organizations across the globe. Stan specializes in designing interaction processes that enable diverse stakeholders to make creative decisions together, exactly the kind of systems thinking we need to transform economic institutions.

So with that, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Doctor. Stan Dietz.

Thanks so much. It's a very ambitious podcast, I'm excited to be part of your discussions. You seem to be hitting on some of the really core issues of society today.

Thanks. It's been a journey to get here, and I think this has been a good format for kind of really discussing some of the things that bring design thinking and economics and can hopefully change some paradigms. So I want you to introduce yourself a little bit about your current work on co generative democracy and relational constructionism and kind of what you do day to day as well.

Okay, yeah, I'm a retired professor, so I kind of put that in a kind of context, and so I continue to write and just have a brand new theory book that just came out. But the projects are a mixture of different things. They range from, I completed a few months ago, a court ordered investigation of Southern California Gas Company, primarily around safety culture and the issues that might deal with public safety. I've worked a fair amount with the nuclear industry across the world. I went to Fukushima, and was part of the, analysis of how decision making in companies impacts nuclear power plant decisions since mostly everybody else knows everything about nuclear power plants, but not necessarily about ownership conditions and how that works, which became core in this particular accident.

I also work in Mexico and Colombia with various kinds of community development programs. Before that I worked in Brazil with some of their stakeholder programs around principally building power plants and flooding areas and things, questions of that sort. And so it's a variety of projects, you know, I basically do what the next phone call is. The most active one at the moment is looking at the impact of AI on sustainability projects around the world because it both it gives the possibility of a networking system and sharing of understanding across these projects, but it also raises lots of questions about native knowledge and logarithms, how those logarithms represent the kind of value systems that exist in different kinds of sustainability projects. So a variety of different kinds of things.

That's, I might have to put a pin in the AI and sustainability projects for a conversation. You know, when Eric introduced, suggested connecting us, you know, I was most drawn to your ideas about designing interaction processes that enable diverse stakeholders to make creative decisions together. How they relate to my ideas that I've come up with on how philanthropy in the civic sector can be reframed as social capital, and looking at that as investments in social capital infrastructure as opposed to charitable contributions because it feels good.

Yeah.

So if we could talk on that a little.

Okay. Wow, what an opening. Well, let me first talk about the design question, because I've worked a lot with collaborative decision making, internal to companies as well as within different kind of communities. And when you start talking about collaborative decision making, you get the eyes rolled very quickly with, oh no, not another meeting. And it's an interesting case, you know, where here we are in probably one of the longest living democracies that has existed, and we hate meetings.

In fact, I think meetings now exceed snakes in public speaking as the greatest fears that people have. Why is that? Well, we do it poorly. I mean, the basic reason we hate them is they take up a lot of time. We don't necessarily like ourselves when we're in them and so forth.

And so the design issue is about the question of what do we do when we're talking to each other that makes us thrive and feel good rather than what more typically happens in the case of meetings. And part of the problem of meetings, I've always argued, is they believe in a kind of instant democracy, right? We take a variety of people of different backgrounds and so forth, we put them in a space and stir, and we make believe somehow magic is going to happen and good decisions will take place, even though we know that doesn't occur. And so what I'm working on instead is to say, okay, so what would it take to think about democracy not as something which happens instantly because you're a human being, but to think of this as an incredibly difficult social skill that takes years to perfect and to work at, and now let's look at what it takes to make that actually exist in meetings. And so design says, let's think about the architecture of the meeting itself.

Who is included, you know, which is often not a very thoughtful kind of thing. Where is it going to occur, what time is it going to occur, what are the processes of talk that we're going to advocate there, how are we going to adjudicate our differences, you know, actually start asking a whole set of questions which are usually not asked, they just assumed. We're going to vote at the end, we're all going to get a chance to speak. The kind of things that we know lead to almost always disaster. Everyone's had their chance to speak, and either we don't make a decision, or we vote and end up with half the people happy and half the people not, or we end up with a compromise, which just simply equalizes all the dissatisfaction of everybody in the room.

So you look at how these things occur, and design thinking within the notion of communication interaction really suggests that we know a lot about how to make these things work better. We know how to include people. We know how the process should occur. And and so so I've worked a lot with groups trying to get them to understand design thinking. And when you do this, of course, you run very much in contrast to their native notions of democracy.

Oh, you mean we're not all gonna have a say? You know, as if that is the nature of democracy itself, or we're not gonna vote? You know, these are things that they've come to associate with democracy, which, you know, we'll talk later about them being articulated together, that the idea of democracy and these practices are treated as if they're the same, even though democracy happens in many different forms, creativity comes out of different forms of democracy that often don't include everyone having a say and certainly don't include voting, but rather the rising of consensus around creativity and things like that, that were typical processes do not enable.

Yeah, I think that that idea on the meeting dynamic, because yeah, it's like, oh, you have a meeting, it's gonna get solved, but there's power dynamic, there's a culture dynamic depending on the company, all sorts of different dynamics that come into that, which actually has me thinking about the idea of this in economics. When we talk about if the meeting is where everything is solved in an organization, then the marketplace is supposed to be where everything is solved in the economy, and so it's like, okay, well the marketplace will figure it out, but traditional economics doesn't really acknowledge the power dynamics of the marketplace. We rail against government regulation while the idea that companies can manipulate their messaging and now algorithms, they can get their, the ability to manipulate their message for individual users or customers has become far more ingrained, and so I I just think there's an interesting parallel there between the meeting analogy or this idea of what happens in a meeting and what's happening in the marketplace Yeah. Because we don't have the tools.

Yeah. Presumably, the the market logic is itself a communication process. Right? It translates needs and desires of people into a message system, which provides that, and it's done without talk, right? It's done because of purchasing patterns and so forth.

The difficulty is that marketplace and marketplace ideas is treated as if it is a singular thing that somehow is linked deeply into some basic notion of capitalism, the conditions of which don't exist anywhere. I mean, if you even go back to Adam Smith, I mean, you know, when he talks about the wealth of nations, he only uses the word corporations twice, both in a negative sense, because his belief was that corporations would always screw up marketplaces, that they would collude with governments to, in different ways, have different effects. And so at the very beginning, our notion of how a marketplace and a capitalist system should work and how that actually has developed are radically different. And that, you know, they're just simple core problems. Not all values of society translate equally well into the economic logic.

They're hard to price and hard to decide what they cost. The monopoly of the systems and the power dynamics of systems constantly work against this being a good representation of society's desires. Advertising, of course, adds on top of that. The nature by which we reward executives adds another layer on top of it. In other words, market is not a simple thing.

We need to talk about what are the conditions of the market, how does it represent different kinds of values, what kind of values can and cannot be represented, how free is it, you know, most activities by most companies today are not to respond to competition, they are in fact to suppress competition. Yeah. And if that is the case, then the marketplace cannot work like their ideals that they uphold and defend, is supposed to work.

The complexity there, and this is something, you know, as I look at the simplicity with which economics tries to present market dynamics and forces, and almost the fact between whether it's externalities of counting pollution or social impact or the regular terminology of nature and natural forces for things that impact the economy, like the economy crashed or there was a storm, or there was this disruption. We almost kind of imagine it into this place that's uncontrollable and not part of it, but as we get AI and generative information and we have more data and more of these things, all of a sudden, corporations have all

of this

ability to gather data and act on that data. Governments have access to that data, but economics as a field just sort of like, we don't really look at that data. It's just GDP and it's transactions. Where I wanna go with that is, you had said somewhere that corporations can be a better site for democratic innovation than maybe public or government institutions, and so I wanna maybe dive into that a little bit on this acknowledging that we have so much more that the corporate system has access to that it didn't have access to one hundred years ago.

Yeah, let me take two parts of that. One, the changes that are taking place and the other, really why I look at democratization of corporations as being more important really than governments. So let me start with the first piece of that. When we actually look at decisions made that impact people's lives and ask where those decisions are made, and this includes such things as working hours, distribution of income, the treatment of the family, the identity of human beings, the use of natural resource. I mean, you start naming, and almost all of these decisions are made within the corporate context.

They are not made within the governmental context. At the very most, the government may regulate and direct it somewhat, but nonetheless, the firsthand decisions are made there, impacting absolutely everything in our lives, the use of resources, the distribution of income, the products we produce, everything. And so in some sense, a democratic system in the government and an autocratic system in corporations will always fail to be very democratic. I mean, it doesn't have control over the decisions, even if it had legitimacy, which it doesn't. I mean, we don't even grant legitimacy to governments to regulate most of these things, especially in this time even less so.

This is the site where I think it's very important we think about democracy. I mean, can't be voting every four years. Democracy has to be what are the decisions that impact our lives and how are they conducted, and who gets to say in those decisions? What are the forces that shape them? Now AI on one hand can possibly intervene in this, right, because a lot of what's happened in organizations have been highly value driven decisions by upper management that have nothing to do with the health and well-being of companies.

And therefore AI presumably now is a counter to the kind of ideological way that upper management was, hey, my AI may actually at some point say, you're paying your management too much.

I have thought of that. Jeff Bezos has that quote of your margin is my opportunity.

Yeah.

And at some point, if AI can pass an MBA program, why can AI not also replace a C suite executive?

Well, it's not about replacing them, but actually to do calculations. Efficiencies. Yeah, mean, keep looking at efficiencies at the bottom, the heavy inefficiencies are at the top. These executive salaries are frequently more than the profitability of the company. And and and that AI can point out.

So there's a certain thing. But the idea that AI is going to be a democratic system and democratize is pretty shortsighted. I mean, Europe is doing a much better job of looking at how logarithms are produced, what it is, and k. But this is a system which has no morality, if you wish, and in some senses has no insight. I mean, it's a plagiarism system, right?

And therefore, it is totally dependent upon what it plagiarizes. And right now with government, our government rewriting documents and so forth, AI will not necessarily recognize a doctored document coming out of CDC versus what the scientific report was unless we teach it to in fact be very sensitive to governmental document, doctoring of it, which often factors the top executives, and they're not likely to necessarily be sensitive to that. And we also take certain kind of things. I mean, forty years ago, I was working with the London School of Economics around accounting systems, trying to admit that accounting systems themselves are deeply value laden. What things count as matters, and therefore, simply profitability as an outcome of an accounting system that you don't investigate tells you nothing.

I mean, the shift that took place under the Reagan administration of counting retirement funds as a business asset rather than a business liability. Change is a lot, the whole picture. Right? It does. And it's the reason why, you know, so many of the retirement systems collapsed and the business collapsed because it was never treated as a liability.

It was treated as a cash cow over here that could be used for different purposes, right? Accounting And itself, with AI becomes reliant upon. AI doesn't ask the questions, what are the value systems on which that accounting system was based? It only captures for you the report of these things. Yeah.

And even in in most companies, I did a paper years ago on forms. I mean, we we don't think about the notion of the form being the whole record of what is worth knowing. Mhmm. And if you start looking at actual forms and ask, what is what is this saying about what is worth knowing, and how will collecting that data versus collecting this data play out when AI grabs it?

Yeah, that's the creation of the form itself is a filtering of the information you're going to collect.

That's right, it's tremendously biased in the sense of what it treats to be important. I know we don't have a good form in companies that collects. These are people that help other people.

Yeah. And then was that the decisions and that's the decision side of the answer. Is there a second part of that or was that kind of the

two part? No, I think that's the important part is that AI is doing is not necessarily now leading to better knowledge. Is self, it's dependent upon systems which we're not self investigating. And it also doesn't capture very well very specific knowledge that business needs. And most of this we call tacit knowing.

The kind of knowing that happens over experience from workers, which in the nuclear industry, tacit knowing in the workplace is the whole game. Yeah.

Oh my god. Yes.

And so and the AI systems don't capture this well. So looking at it as a democratizing force, I I think, has a lot of limits to it.

That makes a lot of sense. But what about the corporation or corporations as democratic, innovative spaces?

Well, we have the possibility of that, right? I mean, if we were to honestly say that these are dem or these are just places that decisions are made around democracy, you can't wait for government to make those decisions. They're made here. Then we have to ask the question, how do we in fact reform decision making processes there that now represent the wider set of human values? And how do we do that in such a way as they maintain profitability and other kind of things?

And I think we actually know quite a lot about how to do that. Where we see more collaborative decision making taking place, we see that profitability is not necessarily helped by autocratic management. You know, highly collaborative decisions that represent diverse values frequently have led to greater profitability. And now with the gradual growth of B Corps, we have actual, you know, real examples of highly successful companies that are clearly both in their decision process collaborative, but intending in that collaboration to make sure that a full set of human values get represented. And so we already know the decisions are made there, and therefore we ought to be concerned about them from a democratic institution standpoint.

And we now also know that there are very collaborative ways of making decisions that do not necessarily reduce profitability. That can represent human values. It's simply a matter of how do we put these into decision chains, how do we get them into the decision chains early enough that they're not considered as an add on and so forth.

Gotcha. Yeah, so maybe moving into the creativity side of this, because you have in your, the politics of mediation, talk about the five trends that are happening right now. And so I think this is kind of a blending of where paradigm the paradigm is changing whether economics wants to acknowledge it or not or whether our systems want to acknowledge it or not. Things are changing. But does that also mean that that's an opportunity to bring in creative ideas?

You you mentioned B Corps. There's the work of Marilyn Waring on time use surveys as ways of seeing how people really value their time and energy as opposed to just GDP. So could you maybe go over those five trends and kind of where that might be intersecting?

There's a number of things that we know, right, about how society is transforming. I mean, interdependence is clearly one of those, and as much as we try to maybe separate more United States from the world economies today, The fact is that we're interlaced in ways, COVID pointed it out so deeply that we could no longer understand supply chains, all the things that people just took for granted. Suddenly now we have to understand this level of interdependence. As we would usually say, everybody lives downstream now. You just don't have the possibility of not doing that.

While before we might have talked about that as a specific set of conditions. And so one of the forces we're feeling is the notion of interdependence. And I've always argued that interdependence is what's made diversity really so important to us. Pluralism in society probably has always existed all across the world time, but that pluralism never was much of an issue as long as everyone was separated. It's when you are no longer separated, right, that this now becomes an issue.

And you know Ben Barber I think probably said it best, he said, you know, this condition really requires this, what I might call a declaration of interdependence instead of independence, That we have to recognize in this new context that there's a totally different game. We cannot simply build systems that try to keep us safely apart. We've got to build systems that make us productive together. And building systems that make us productive together is where I get to interaction design and other kinds of things. A second piece of this that I think is really important in this is the whole speed of all this.

No one has calculated very well how speed has impacted this. And I learned this first when I was a undergraduate. I was one of these 18 year olds coming off the farm that was used to hiding under desks as our nuclear strategy in the 1950s. And I get to college, and my history professor stands up and says, you all think that you live in the first generation that has the ability to wipe out all people in the face of the earth. He says, not true at all.

We've always had the ability to do so. It's just very slow with sticks and stones. And generally, somebody will stop it. Okay? Yeah.

The difference is speed. The difference is speed. The irreversibility of action is the difference. This is what the Trump administration, part two, learned that didn't know in part one. The game is speed.

Yes. Court systems are Very much so. Your counterbalance and court systems are slow. If you do a lot fast, the system itself is not built to do things fast. It's slow and deliberative in its very nature.

And therefore, has really mattered. I mean, Harvard gets back its grant funding six months later. You know, what does this mean? Who has jobs? Who does not?

Yeah. I'm I live in Boulder, Colorado, and NOAA and NIST and all the big federal labs are here that do most of the atmospheric research, most of the things around the standards and all these kind of things. And, you know, everybody in my neighborhood has lost their job, regained their job, and lost their job, and, you know, the speed It's whiplash. Yeah, the speed at which this thing occurred made sense that the systems couldn't respond faster. So I think everything we do here has to be noted in terms of speed.

And so even advertisement, it is not simply that advertisements are there, It is the speed at which they occur and the difficulty of counteracting them in the same time frames. So that's a piece of this. And this comes right into another piece that I think is important, and that is this growth of mediation. And the mediation is maybe not a term that immediately comes to fits people's minds, but if you think about it in this way, that everything we've ever seen has always been mediated. The world doesn't come to us directly, it comes through our ears and nose and eyes.

Yeah. Yeah, there is a mediation that takes place, and we understand with glasses we can change how that becomes mediated. How we view. And beyond that, though, we've always had, of course, our neighbors and our friends and others who told us about things, and that system allowed us to understand what lies were. I mean, I lived on a farm.

We never lied. Why would you? Every neighbor would tell your parents before you get home. Yeah. Because in that system, it doesn't work.

With the growth of mediation, it means that the that more and more we're responding to events and things happening further and further away from us. And the amount of things that mediate between us and the event that we're experiencing has grown. In other words, media itself, television, radio, and so forth, mediates between an experience at some distance and what we come to feel and experience. Social media is very powerful because it now means that we can have experiences around lots of things at lots of distances that are heavily mediated. And with this mediation, of course, became sponsorship.

So if it is mediated, somebody finally figures out, I can pay for how it is mediated. If you think about it in the sense of it is the person who can sell glasses changes how you see the world. And so suddenly our experiences are not simply mediated in a simple sense, our experiences are sponsored. And in sponsorship, it means that the payers, the people that can pay, have a greater opportunity to shape how we experience, what it is we see in the world, how we feel about ourselves, who we think we are. In other words, every aspect of our experience now becomes increasingly sponsored.

But that sponsorship is largely hidden because it treats itself like a documentary film does as if it is absolutely transparent, as if it did nothing, that all it really did was simply allow you to reach out and touch something at a distance. And therefore, it hides itself behind its presumed realism. And that hiddenness behind realism makes sponsorship very hard to understand. It makes the notion of lying very difficult for people to get a handle on because it doesn't operate like it did in the system by which we have developed systems and responses and ways to manage it. And so another piece of this change, of course, is just simply the degree of mediation, the ways in which sponsorship enters into mediation, and the matter by which that then produces for us experiences leads us into belief systems that we would never have on our own, never would have developed in our own communities.

No, and I think that's the speed of it that you mentioned earlier on change applies here very much too, because this has been a thirty year process from when CNN first decided, hey, we can broadcast news twenty four hours a day. And then Fox News came out, and all of a sudden they were like, we can segment the country by ideologies, and one network can sell one set of ads, the other can sell another set of ads. The thing that we've gotten to today, though, is now it's so granular because you only had four broadcast networks for decades, then you had two news networks on Now you've got just an unlimited source of mediators, because I almost, when you first said that we're highly mediated today, was like, well, wait a second. Part of the problem is we're getting information from across the world unmediated, but that's not true. It's mediated through something.

It's just happening instantaneously. I may be following I remember, I think it was probably Fukushiku, the nuclear accident. My brother was living in The Middle East at the time, and I was living in The US, and we were following it on Al Jazeer and Twitter, but that was mediated. It just was mediated very fast as opposed to going through, you know, the Southeast Asian news desk of an entity and then broadcast to x y z.

Yeah. I mean, I learned this experience fairly early. I'll give you a of fun example. My father was a little nuts, a very exciting innovative farmer in Indiana, which itself is an interesting context. He, in about, I guess it was about 1970, he decided to go out and buy a 10 foot wide aluminum satellite dish, you know, like you see at major radio stations and stuff.

At that point there were only three broadcasting satellites, and so he got a dish that he could manipulate so it could track anyone, and nothing was protected because what farmer in Indiana is going to rip off the content of one of the three satellites, right?

No.

And so, you know, I'm sitting there as a person coming home from college and realizing he can get 580 stations. And so we're sitting there trying to figure out what we're gonna watch. And I finally said, you know, this is crazy. I mean, what is and he says, well, this is the only way I can see the Chicago Cubs play anywhere in the world. Yeah.

So so the variety meant that he could be very selective and narrow. In other words, the thing that came with this is that you can have anything you want, but if they can ideologically appeal to you, you can narrow your information. So when Walter Cronkite sat there and said something, it would talk to everybody. When Fox News says something, it goes to a collection of people who are already predisposed to want that message. The possibility of widespread democratization of information had the opposite effect.

It led to the possibility of insulation against anything that would challenge some something that somebody could produce for you as a core value system, which is where we get to this notion of articulation. Somebody was able to package this in such a way that you didn't want anything to disrupt it. Yeah. It tied it together, mediated your experiences so that you understand yourself and the world and information in a very specific way, and you became more and more exclusionary of any other point of view that could challenge that. And therefore widespread distribution didn't create democracy and more widespread knowledge.

It led to the possibility of much more narrow and ideologically tainted understandings of the world.

Yeah. And now is that you know, part of the challenge with that is is the the business motive of our media companies, which I always, you know, try to you know, our our tech entrepreneurs, you have love to use the term first principles.

Mhmm.

And they're like, well, this is what business does. I'm like, business does that because economics told it to. Mhmm. And so how do we you know, is there a way to wind that backwards or add to what corporations or what economics tells businesses they're capable of to change that narrative?

Yeah I think but there are a couple different issues here, right? The one is that the business looks for whatever they can make money from, which means that a lot of human experiences and a lot of things that might be potentially interesting to us are not able to figure out a way to monetize it. In other words, human happiness, we're struggling to trying to find ways that you can monetize that, right? Yeah. Lots of other things you can't, right?

And so the business model itself, which if it is a model which says that our goal is to maximize value for shareholders, I mean and that's not necessary. No. I mean, we we we had two little interesting little tricks of this thing. Right? First, that the company itself is defined as maximizing the the shareholder value.

And two, that managerial prerogative will rule. Therefore, management and company become the same thing. Yes. And so when you do that, what you've now done is to displace the public entirely because the business is not to fulfill your needs or all the things we believe or that will make profit if it fulfills this need. There are lots of ways you can manipulate around the quarter report and so forth Yeah.

That can change shareholder value because we don't have a loyal market. Right? It can shift around quickly. It doesn't like anybody's counting on the health of the company. It's counting on what it can do in a quarter.

And then Marangio prerogative says that the value system, the managers, especially now that they become primary shareholders, now dictates the kind of decisions that the company will make, even if the company is being driven into the ground. And so the the simple economic model is too simplistic in terms of what happens in reality in the system. If those two things were changed, for example, if we had a shareholder model which included all the stakeholders, which we have in many European countries, or if we had a decision process that didn't prioritize management, but rather the collaborative will of a company, right? In other words, if we could change those things, we would rapidly change how these things work. And it doesn't.

I mean, is not a simple thing. Economics is whatever economic system we have, right? And therefore, there is an economic system around B Corps that actually has a different economics than the economic system around shareholder companies. Yes. And so it becomes very important that we not say the economists say, the economists themselves are frequently working within a frame, which you say, if you assume these things.

Yeah. Then

Well, that's it's almost as if economics has become a restriction on the ability of companies to do more as opposed to a reflection of what companies are capable of. And I look at this like, you know, when I first stumbled on b corps. If all the b corps you know, the the metrics that the b corps use for certification could translate to macroeconomic ideas or to industry ideas or to state ideas, but the economics field says, well, but we're still just gonna look at the financials, even though you have a few thousand companies now around the world that have proven that, hey, if you do this, the company health as well as the shareholders perform well, and so how do we how do we nudge that to happen on the economic side?

Right. First of all, economics is being practiced as not interested in just the financials. These are incredibly value laden systems. Yes. I mean, we pretend it's just about the but no.

We make decisions all the time that benefit upper management that is disastrous for the company. This is not just the financials. This is a particular version of that. And the use of the notion of we have to pay attention to the economics is almost always an attempt to stop the conversations we need to have. It's an ideological move, not a factual one.

Because

So it it's the motive, and that's the the short term and I see this with private equity happening so many times over now, or that the company has left a shell, but the managers and the investment and the shareholders all did well.

Yeah. We can be entering a recession right now and have the stock market as high as it's ever been. I mean, these are not connected because the system itself is a distorted system of representation, and by design it is that.

So how do we get an undistorted version of this and get that out? Because I think that's, you know, the idea, this is on the idea of economic literacy, you know, and giving people the tools and vernacular to talk about these things. I think one of the things you mentioned when we had our pre conversation on this last month was canonization as a concept of bringing ideas, and I wanted to see if you can maybe expand on that, if I had heard that correct or if there was some other way of looking at that.

Well, no, yeah, I think it is about changing the very most fundamental notions of how we value system and how we calculate things. I mean, that is a part of trying to make a determination of how we might change these things. And so one is, of course, you know, the kind of things that we might expect. A corporate owned media is not advocating b corps. No.

I mean, it's it what we've got here is a system that is too tightly woven up. Antitrust legislation being actually practiced would make actually a lot of difference. Part of the difficulty right now is we stop doing true antitrust thing. And Yeah. The most recent case, you know, that we have now of, you know, the basically news media caving because they want to merge.

Right?

Yeah. Like

One more statement of that we know we can violate antitrust normal antitrust legislation if we, in fact, give over to basic and authoritarian regime. Right? And and so that's very important that that so antitrust laws we have on the books are built for manufacturing. They weren't built for the new industries, which are majorly knowledge industries. Yeah.

And therefore but even ones that aren't, like food distribution systems and so, trusts are a major part of the problem. And actually working toward breaking up the these trusts into competitive markets would make some difference. It would in fact give a lot of the B Corps that struggle a greater opportunity because some of them struggle precisely because supply chains and everything else are locked up by corporate giants, Yep. Which have already violated most of of trust legislation. So so one piece of it is to try to show how things work.

Another piece of this is to start trying to get antitrust legislation that actually matches the time that we are in. And then the the ideological part of it, you know, the the ways in which television itself rewards a particular kind of lifestyle and way of being matters. Yeah. I mean, that a Trump could be treated as if, you know, you know, you're fired being the best management strategy. Right?

There there is no subtlety in it.

But it is. It became popular because it was an image that people had of what they would like to be as a manager. It was never a representation of good business decisions. Yeah. I mean and and therefore but the media plays that.

Right? Part of the reason why nobody goes after Trump even in office, quite apart from how you feel about it, we recognize that the media doesn't pursue this like I would a political figure. They pursue this like a to a businessman. Did he get a good deal? Not.

Yeah. Was he acting morally? I mean, and that logic which comes through the ideological notion of media of what business should be, which are trying to avoid taxation and so forth, right, as if that is to be expected. Yeah. In contrast to what it is to be a public figure, which is to think about the social good.

That is not a necessary thing, right? That has been produced and is reproduced endlessly by media's choice in how they pursue acts of corruption and so on and so forth. And so these are things that are all changeable. I mean, they came to be. They can come to not be.

Yeah. They require a certain kind of literacy, right, to do so, and they require major players to commit to it. One of the things that we're seeing right now that I think is is is ultimately, it's not a very healthy thing is that the the rich political the rich folks who have a sense about the good of society are all of a sudden thinking themselves great because I'm going to divest all my money before I die, right? Bill Gates strategy played out with other people other places. And so what they do is end up giving their billions of dollars for health and other things the government should do.

But to make up the gap, the government's not doing them. Well, the wealthy people, when the more conservative ideologies, is pumping all their money into the political process to make sure governments don't do it. Yeah. And and so you got two strategies here, which ultimately lead to billions and billions of dollars of people that have good hearts making up for the pact that people are creating a government has no heart. Right?

And and that's a disastrous combination. I mean, if a Bill Gates put his money into politics, he could have fed more people, probably.

Probably. Although I I'll I'll dig on that a little bit in the fact that, this, in the foresight realm that I'm in, there's a dialogue of fact, are we beyond the nation state? You know, these institutions are built for a different time in a different place. Right. Is there, you know, and this is, you know, kind of to the earlier segment of the introduction earlier, the idea that the social sector has never been counted as part of economics because we didn't have social we we couldn't count that kind of stuff, or I guess when Adam Smith's age, like, understood the the theory of moral sentiments, but at that time and in that space, the church was really the thing.

That was your third entity. You had the market, you had the church, you had government. Does the social sector, as looking at this as infrastructure that we can now manage and count and influence, does that have a place where maybe some of the things that government has historically done, maybe the social sector in coordination with markets could actually do it if markets valued that?

Sure, yeah, if we had markets that valued that, governments could pass away. We really in most cases have governments simply because markets won't do it. Yes. And and the moral difference is is not only a matter of I mean, a good share of the early people in the American government were atheists. It wasn't religion.

It was not Yeah. I mean, do you listen to Walton you listen to any of them. Right?

I mean, they're all deists. I I I remember in my twenties, I went to

my head. Sense of morality.

Yes.

I mean, quite apart for how you wanna locate that, they were moral human beings.

Yes.

They could be nasty, they could be anything, but they were moral human beings. That's what's partly what's different. The real part of this, I think, is that we have enabled tremendous amounts of cost externalization. It's not just we can't calculate the social. We've allowed the corporate context to externalize most of the costs.

Yes. And they externalize it to people which then blame governments as governments try to provide the safety nets from the externalized cost. Yeah. Poverty is an externalized corporate cost. Yes.

It it it is produced by, in fact, a particular way of calculating and making decisions that make sure you don't have to provide health care for people, that you don't have to pay them a fair wage. Other words, you name the things that allow this massive cost externalization. The failure to raise a minimum wage to keep up with the inflation is a cost externalization. The company no longer had to find ways to be creative and productive within a social sense. It could simply externalize that cost to people, and it's tremendous cost, right?

I mean, when I, you know, was born, a single person working in the house could have a family, own a house, and do all these things. Today, two people working, often one of them working two jobs can't do that. Right? That is a cost that is produced in society. It is not the absence of people or government doing their job.

It's an externalization of costs by companies. So we don't have to have a lot of government regulation if in fact what you did was to get economists to calculate externalized costs and make them part of the business model itself. You can't give always this constant way of making money is to make sure that you externalize your costs to someone else. That will, in fact, has destroyed the society. So it isn't a matter here of trying to favor government over companies.

Companies, I believe, are in fact a very good place for democracy to occur. You simply can't allow a particular group of leaders to cheat. Yeah. And and so, you know, the rationalization of economic systems is to, one, get, you know, entire lifetime or, you know, cradle to grave costs some things. Fine if you wanna use plastics.

You just have to calculate cradle to grave as part of the cost of using plastics. It is fine that you have workers that are this sort of that, but you must provide for them the things that they need to live within a society. And it's not, you know, executive salaries are not high because there's a scarcity of executives and workers as well because there's a conquerors of workers that has nothing to do. They keep treated as if this is a supply, situation, a demand situation. It's crazy.

It is Absolutely ideologically based, systematically screwed system.

Yeah. So you mentioned the cradle to grave. I think this is a good way to kinda move into it at the end here. You know, we've talked about B corps too, and so I'm I'm wondering when we look at, you know, the potential of shifting things, is there something that, the B Corp movement for a long time, the B Corp movement started was vote with your dollar, and letting people know that the certified B let you know that there's certain transparency and whatnot. Is there a new level of that?

Because if companies aren't gonna do it on their own, other companies, and you've got economists that are like, Well, we can't count that. We'll just keep externalizing. How can the B Corp community in itself, and more broadly, the stakeholder oriented idea of business conscious capitalism? Because there are multiple movements, and I don't believe that every company ever needs to become a b corp, but if we have enough of them talking. So is there something you're seeing in that that might push the other side, you know, the economics and the traditional business sense to to kind of have to answer to it?

Mean, I'm not seeing it. I mean, what I'm seeing, of course, is the concentration of wealth and the feeling of justification of concentration of wealth, a new kind of superior human beings, you know, the the that's what I'm hearing. And they have the resources to constantly play a model that is their model. And they're getting massive government subsidies to play their model. In other words, the the system right now is lined up in such a way that it's very hard for alternative actors to get a space to play.

A b corp doesn't have the advertising budget. I mean, precisely because of its nature. It doesn't spend its money trying to get people buy things they don't need or to sell concepts out of them, but the other side does. And it's a it's a peculiar group of wealthy right now. It's like the robber barons were, you know, century and so ago.

It it was a peculiar mentality of an innate superiority, which kind of works with the white nationalism that you see, is a particular kind of concept of we should have a lot of children, we should be protected, we should live not in the world that we build. In other words, this is this is new to us. Now it's nice to say all wealthy are that, but there's a significant piece that is, this gaming system. I I think the only hope that comes with this is to get leadership that is really willing to push the other message, that is willing to be honest and to start talking about and I don't think the Bernie Sanders stuff re evoking the unions is the answer to that. It was the rise of unions that gave Us managerial prerogative as a as a trade off.

It isn't, you know, because that's how we killed collaboration. Yeah. I mean, if you remember, most of the strikes in the 20s were in fact the workers showing up and locking management out. It wasn't that going to work. No.

I mean, so there was a trade off, right, if we did this thing. But I do think it is a new sensibility that begins to teach the American public how it works, why you're feeling what you're feeling. And it has to do so with actually taking into account, you know, the thing that Clinton did, probably that not everybody else has been able to do, is when he talked, people said he knows and understands my pain. And what's been lost in the left and the oh, but really a centralist movie. There is no left in America.

But the centralist movement in America is that no one feels like they understand the pain. Yeah. And people feel like Trump understands their pain, at least. Yeah. And so I think it is a matter of getting a new kind of leader that really can understand what people are going through, and this is painful, but to teach them how the mechanism got screwed.

Yeah. And to start pushing back with antitrust legislation, with making the tax rate real, that you can't simply take a lower tax rate by capital gains rather than income, that you, you know, you actually start looking at this and you do some things that are really relatively minor that have big effects. For I've always argued that there ought to be a sales tax put on the buying and selling of stock. If short termness is our problem in society, make short termness expensive.

That makes sense. Even Trump, I think in the last couple of weeks, made a comment or announcement about not having companies file quarterly and instead every six months, and now, of course, there's a lot of how much is that about transparency, or is it really about slowing down the markets? But I, you know, I I have often like, this quarterly cycle that we're on, families don't plan quarterly.

No no it's

Why would a corporate, a multinational corporation have to plan quarterly? Like it's just mind numbingly fast.

Speed is the issue, right? Again going Speed. Back The speed is a big piece of this thing. And and so how do you slow? Well, one is you make it expensive to be fast.

Yeah. And and I and, you know, if you do the calculation on even a small transaction costs, it's a tremendous. We could do lots to the deficit in a hurry with the transaction. Yeah. I mean, and and if we would we do is to make the system have to be more sensitive to long term health of companies, how they're actually functioning within the system and so forth.

On the other side of it, you know, institutional investors are making a big share of this today, and we don't see the kind of move that should be made making pushing institutional investors to, in fact, contain more values. Yeah. It's actually to do in this. We're

Yeah. I and I brushed I I I I was introduced to that early early on in my own journey here with Professor Lynn Stout. I don't know if you knew her. She wrote a book, The Shareholder Value Myth, and it came out in, I think, 2012, but it was at The intro to the book was basically the Deepwater Horizon oil spell, and how the minority of shareholders who are institutional shareholders are the ones that pushed BP to cut corners, not the retirees that were holding long term that lived in the Panhandle Of Florida and had their businesses or homes or livelihoods devastated by it. That idea as a lever mechanism on taxing share trades or stock trades?

Because most of us, we're told it's long term, but the ones that are really gaming the system, they're doing it quickly.

Yeah. There and and, again, this is where mediation matters. The we the actual person doing the investment has no capacity to shape the way the investment is being made. It only itself becomes a return on investment in in the most narrow economic terms. And so and and and, you know, you don't under you understand why the investment firms wanna show a higher return and therefore lead to unethical and asocial behavior.

I mean Yeah. That fits but that's also things that both are screwed up in the system and are fixable in systems. Mean, this thing grew slowly and step and step and is not hard historically to translate the particular decisions that were made at times. And it's not going to go away in a hurry, a revolution is not going to do it. It's going to have to be systematically looking at the spaces.

That's why I think communication matters. That is the spaces by which we look at this in terms of trying to get publics really engaged in decision making, finding successful models of companies that do include multiple stakeholder values in decision making, and of course to be able to scale them in different ways.

Yeah, well Stan, think that's probably a good place to start winding down because that really is acknowledging that we're going too fast and unwinding those systems with intention. Could you maybe go into a little bit about how people can engage with you, any work that's coming out that you'd like to share?

I mean, it's easy to engage with me. I'm very public with my email address and everything else. I'm on all the social media except x and those kind of things, which I I find incredibly boring and wasteful of time. The so so it's easy to for people to ask me about things. The book that just came out on communication theory is actually much broader than what people think of it in that way.

You know, it really is a statement about democracy and democratic institutions and how we might intervene in those. So, I mean, and of course, even that, that book would have been different if it had been post Trump rather than pre Trump. Yeah. He was writing because the specific issues right now are much more in terms of how do we perform a response that I mean, it's no longer talking about how do we get dialogue. It's how how do we stop lies.

I mean, it's a different thing. But but people can, and and I'm happy to help them with how to how to reinvent things like joint fact finding, fact checking, and other kind of things that really would make a difference in these systems. And so there are projects like that too that I'm happy to talk to people about.

Great. Well, I'll put stuff, the information in the show notes too with this so people can find it there. And, Stan, I just wanna thank you for spending the time with us today and for being on the show.

Okay. Thank you so much. Good luck with it all.

Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Design Economics Podcast. We will be back next month with another engaging conversation. You can find the design economics podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Please check out our show notes on our website, designeconomics.io.

The design economics podcast is produced by the Institute for Economic Evolution, and I am your host, Vinit Tafiro. Thank you for listening.