Gongol.com Archives: June 2025
June 15, 2025
One of the hazards of living in a time marked by notable disruptive events in social, technological, and economic conditions is that some people who might otherwise be thoughtful or creative problem-solvers find themselves surrendering to hopelessness, despair, or anger. It's often called doomerism. It shows up in 4,000-word screeds and in 47-word social media posts. One example proclaims that we are at the mercy of "central planners" working at large investment firms who are no less powerful than the bureaucrats who tried to centrally plan the Soviet economy. ■ The problem is that the doom-saying narrative edges out constructive discussions about how to reform existing institutions and build better ones. Doomerism is, fundamentally, an ethos of helplessness. ■ The antidote isn't to merely dismiss the sense that something is wrong. Benjamin Franklin offered the advice that "One mend-fault is worth two find-faults, but one find-fault is better than two make-faults." Fixing what's wrong is a just endeavor. ■ What's needed is more of the honorable innovative spirit that drove Jack Bogle to start Vanguard, the investment firm. Bogle was compelled by the belief that ordinary people would benefit from participating in the investment sector through low-cost mutual funds, particularly index funds. And he didn't just conceive of the idea, he brought it to fruition. Bogle effectively created a cooperative arrangement. It was an honorable pursuit -- and it should be a model much more often, in many more fields, than it is right now. ■ Truly mutualized ownership, cooperatives, and employee-owned firms can offer answers to a lot of thorny problems. They should be easy to form (even for novices) and ordinary people should be given encouragement (and even inducements) to join them. It's good for a complex society to have a variety of firm structures well-represented in the economy, and it's vital for ordinary people to feel invested, both literally and figuratively, in the ownership of both problems and solutions. Whatever spurs more people to be "mend-faults" is worth a second or third look.
