Personal Finance in the Metacrisis?

General
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What does personal finance look like in the Metacrisis?

A quick ChatGPT pointed me in the direction of more systemic points of view including Doughnut Economics. I see organizations on the 2R Ecosystem Map like Well Being Economy Alliance that also seem to focus more on the broader economic system.

I am interested in practical, tangible & personal financial guidance informed by a metacrisis perspective. Does anyone know of ideas & resources that already exist on this topic? Does anyone have personal thoughts or ideas to share?

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Hi @ianheffernan. It’s a topic the interests me quite a bit! My bookshelf is decently loaded with alternative economics books, so I’m there for in-the-weeds discussions of circular economics, multicapital, regenerative finance, etc. On the personal finance side, I like to start with the four Ikigai questions:

  • What do you love?
  • What are you good at?
  • What does the world need?
  • What can you get paid for?

The last question allows for conventional personal finance answers (like how to accumulate a retirement portfolio), unless of course one does not love capitalism or one believes the world needs something massively different than the current economic system. Then the question of personal finance gets contextualized by these larger concerns. It’s not just about which stocks to buy when.

To give a practical example, my current CS students, to have a professional future in that field, need to be diving into AI at breakneck speed. The ethics of such hyper-accelerated AI adoption - ranging from warfare applications to social surveillance to environmental harms - are dubious at best. So current students face a stark choice - lean into ethics and pursue a career in something like the hospitality industry. Or put ethical blinders on most of the time to keep up with the tech. There is not really a lot of middle ground here!

With respect to the four Ikigai questions, I tend to make “what do you love?” the ultimate tie-breaker. To me, that question is a proxy for inner development, spiritual practice, personal alignment with with universe, or of virtues and values in general. What does one’s inner voice say about pursuing this or that approach to wealth accumulation? Before we can really discuss the practicalities of this or that financial model, it’s important to have some sense of the boundaries around such questions. Some forms of money making may be difficult and unpleasant, but not unthinkable. Others really are (or ought to be!), unthinkable. It would hesitate to advise anyone on such matters, until that person has considered such questions from a very personal point of view.

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I am giving this question a lot of serious attention atm. I have been mindful of your questions, Ian, since you brought them last year. You represent your generation.

I’m seeing a lot of young, and not so young, burn out people, ditch game A, and set themselves adrift, and under resourced as they seek game b.

This is not wise. Often they start businesses or practices that attempt to monetise their services to others in a similar, under-resourced state. Look at the proliferation of wellness, behavioural change and development platforms and products. Not only do we seem to be preaching to the converted, we are trying to compete in a rather impoverished pool.

How many Sub stacks at $5 a month, can people bear? Where personal wisdom and saving our planet comes with a membership and price tag? Where being an audience and a follower is presented as a solution?

It seems to me we should get a little more strategic, and target where the money is, currently, and serve that sector in making the transitions that we know they need to do.

While I’m hugely in favour of economic solutions such as Doughnut Economics, I think we need to put our heads together on transitional practices, pragmatic, application of an extraction from the veins of capital into our new regenerative world.

We need to step out of game denial, and start playing the game in a way we can start to change the rules.

So for me the question is, in the spirit of @RobertBunge ikigai, where does the requirements of capital, intersect with what the worlds needs, and our young people, who have this perspectival advantage?

I think it is grave error to focus on inner development, and ignore systems change as it impacts us as individuals, as in earning capacity…we just don’t have the timescales to do one before the other.

Should 2R start a programs teaching the facilitation of institutional change? Companies, and all manner of institutions are struggling with an incredibly volatile world, can we train a generation to help them to transition? Be resilient in a world that is driving efficiency to collapse?

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That sounds very attractive to me! It’s the sort of curriculum I would like to contribute towards. IMO, it’s “what the world needs”.

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Great question - and very pragmatic / practical. there is the macro question and the micro question. personal finance is more on micro end - what do i do but obviously informed by macro picture.

one basic point would be to invest in “assets” that would be useful even in significant breakdown (though what “title” would look like at those moments is an open question). So agricultural land.

also would be your relationships and network - your social capital.

Love to hear from others their quick takes on this …

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On a very abstract level (to avoid getting bogged down in “capitalism” vs “socialism” vs “anarchism” vs “any-other-ism”), I like to think of economics as matter/energy flows in feedback loops. We all need a personal system for getting what we need. What it takes to capture matter/energy from a given environment depends a lot on that environment! So general cookbook formulas are unlikely to carry well from situation to situation. In the US case, that means harvesting personal requirements from a capitalist system that has imposed itself on the landscape by force over multiple centuries. Opting out of transacting with that system is not so easy to do. However, beyond getting bed, bath, and breakfast through conventional means, one need not allow one’s personal thinking to become entirely colonized by stereotypical thinking about income maximization, shareholder value as the only virtue, consumer commodities as a happiness delivery system and so on. Like @Gen suggested above, one can harvest some profits from Game A and then redirect those earnings to Game B. In my case, for example, instead working ever harder to get more cash, I’m “investing” in open source content creation, volunteering to support co-op business models, and working without financial compensation on social farms and landscape reclamation projects. Many adverts try to convince us we need to focus all energy on ever more luxurious commodity acquisition, but that BS can safely be ignored. Taking money from businesses (that are not inherently evil in all their details) in a “laborer is worthy of the hire” sort of way seems fine to me. As for assets that will survive breakdown, Warren Buffet (who certainly knows his way around assets!), recommends personal skills development as the most anti-fragile strategy available. Your education cannot be repossessed. Just be sure to study topics that in whatever the system becomes will be needed, necessary, and not easily obtainable by everybody else. In other words, strategize how to remain useful in whatever system(s) may emerge on the far side of chaos.

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Love the replies so far :slight_smile:
The main thing we really have IMO are:

relationships and network

In the realm of $ etc., at Bread Cooperative we develop tools for financial solidarity:

It is pretty amazing to see how these practices (which can be summarized as collective pooling of resources), that afaik emerged from worker collectives, were coopted and dismantled by the state and corporations. Luckily enough they are still alive in many parts of the world :raised_fist:

Also interested in how Category Intro - Lowimpact.org might be coupled with pension funds.

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This is all very cool!

My point of entry into this space is that I just got added to the board of directors for this non-profit organization: NSC App Development

It’s basically a co-op formed by recent CS and related graduates at my college for mutual aid in job search. They also are offering price-reduced IT services to other non-profits and community groups. What I’d like to do is get this IT and software talent focused on the needs of the sorts of commons-based initiatives you are supporting. If you can think of specific tools, platforms, etc. that would expedite commons-based operations, it would be very helpful to hear how our students might make a contribution.

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