Umair Haque rants

These are taken from his unofficial blog. The guy is in serious rant territory, but he is good at it

Everything below is a quote/copypaste from
Source: http://umairhaque.blogspot.com
Because the truly poisonous effect of industrial age institutions, by undercounting real costs, and overcounting real benefits, isn't merely that they limit us to creating fake, thin artificial value and ponzi-like hollow "profit" today--but, more perniciously, that they shatter the incentives for great achievement tomorrow. They crumple the human spirit, smash the human psyche, dull the human brain, and toxify the human heart

Hence, here's what a nation who wants to be tomorrow's powerhouse of prosperity really needs: a 21st century plan to reboot industrial age institutions. To reimagine and rethink the clunking, belching contraptions known as "GDP", "the corporation", "investment banks", "credit ratings", "jobs", "government", and more. To reimagine them as eudaimonic levers--tools that can amplify not the just "industrial output" of nations, but which can ignite and spark the highest human potential; levers that can raise people not merely into lowest-common-denominator faux-designer Jersey Shore material plenitude--but into meaningfully well lived lives. At it's worthiest, an economy is an engine not merely for "enrichment"--but for human prosperity.

We've forgotten what the economy's for. It's not a lowest-common-denominator tool for vulgar material plenitude, or a brain-dead mechanism for mere financial "enrichment"--but, at it's best, it's highest, it's most enlightened, it's fundamentally worthiest, an economy must be an engine of human prosperity: a eudaimonic lever. A lever strong enough to raise human potential to unseen--and perhaps even undreamt of--heights.

Here's what all the above really says: far from a wishful ideal, eudaimonia's a razor-sharp necessity. No society in which the returns to rent-seeking outweight those to creating, building, transforming, and bettering can prosper. No society in which people are treated as chattels to be bought and sold by and to the highest bidder can be said to meet any definition of human prosperity.