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Human Capitalism

Our economic crisis is evidence that our economic system is broken.  What has happened is an over emphasis on what is called financial capitalism.  Financial capitalism in a nutshell is the buying and selling of financial instruments to make a profit as opposed to making money from selling products/services or working for wages.  There is nothing wrong with financial capitalism but leaving it unchecked and allowed to operate unfettered is a bad thing.  We need to return to a economic system that is more “human centered” or what is called human capitalism.  We need to invest in people more through education, training, health and most of all jobs.

Albert Einstein once said:

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

We need a different way of thinking.  Let’s consider what the current and dominant economic philosophy has brought us:

1. High infant mortality rate and high rate of mothers dying during childbirth:  U.S. ranks a very weak 29th in the world - tied with Poland and Slovakia in infant mortality.  U.S. ranks 41st out of 171 nations for the rate in which mothers die during childbirth.  The main reason for these horrible statistics for one “the world’s richest country” is lack of access to quality health care.


2. Low adult literacy rates: Low literacy rates hurt our economic competitiveness.


3. Wage stagnation: Many workers never shared in the “economic prosperity” of the late 1990s and 2000s.  Wages for low and middle income people, after accounting for inflation, were stagnate.


4. 12.5% of population lives in poverty, 13.3 million children living in poverty and over 45 million people without health insurance: This is not good for any society.  Poverty and lack of health insurance negatively impacts economic competitiveness, public health and creates social unrest (keep people down long enough at some point they start rebelling and this can happen in the U.S.).


5. Shrinking middle class and income inequality.  A healthy and stable economy needs a strong middle class.
 

6. How many people do you know that must work until 65 years old because of health insurance/medicare?

Our economic policies for the past 30 years has been dominated by “trickle-down economics”, “less government interference”, “free-market” will solve our problems mentality.  But this way of thinking does not work by itself.  We need other ways of thinking.

We need an emphasis on “human centered” economic policies.  We need human capitalism to influence our thinking in developing economic policies.  Human capitalism is the investment in people in the form of education, training, jobs and health to produce positive returns for the economy.  Everyone, especially government, businesses and unions, has a role in the development of human capitalism.

At the end of the day, it will be hard working people that will lift us out of this crisis.

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