Truly valuable or substantial content is that which coordinates the actions & behaviors as effectively as money can, based in a true anthropology of man. It maintains both his uniqueness & timeless interdependence.

Such an economy of harmonized truth discovery reinforces meaning, while it diminishes the noise; by a kind of interior harmony.

There is a language or a way of speaking that is more noble & honorable than pursuit of money, because it harmonizes motives and actions above the motive for self-interest or material gain.

-Bailey Clark
@baycclark.eth 

In the industrial revolution, the focus of the economy shifted to an equilibrium of rule for private gain. 

There was a shift out of the feudal economy, to political economy.

The task of the centuries 1600’s to 1900’s was efficient production of goods, so that everyone had enough to survive.

Once the United States “solved” the problem of subsistence, we moved on to problems of consuming as a way to treat our over-consumption. 

As markets for natural health, weight loss, exercise, came about.

The US moved to a corporate economy, where the task was to drive demand for the mass produced goods. 

We needed to get people to buy manufactured goods in large quantities, so they would be happy and comfortable and have a high standard of living, and the US could have a high GDP.

And companies could now offshore the industrial economy in the name of the international free markets, and we could proclaim that international finance and liberal democracy made the poorest nations richer and brought people out of poverty. 

And it was true in the short run.

The corporate economy or psychological economy, was focused on bureaucracy and technocratic management. A very different orientation than the industrial economy.

It extracted the value not only of material goods, but of the psychological goods.

Large brands began to dominate the economy, to manufacture the ideology of consumption, that buying mass produced goods in large quantities was best for everyone.

Then, in the 21st century, we moved into a digital economy, which seemed to be a universal library of human experience.

And yet we continue to live as though we are still in a corporate, brand based economy.

The first large internet companies, made all of their money from advertising revenue, a business model adopted from the television media. 

But this business model gives no thought to the human aspect of content, to what human beings actually want to use the internet for. 

The corporate business model does not care about the substance or meaning of content, only about the metrics that can be extracted.

Why do people use the internet? 

Why is it so fascinating?

“All men by nature desire to understand.”

The internet allows anyone to learn and to understand.

The large internet companies served an economy that was transitioning, 

from mass production and mass marketing, towards an economy of minds. 

And the large technology companies were optimizing for profitability, they were not optimizing for the economy of minds, or for cultural understanding.

It wasn't necessarily intentional. These companies had to survive in a Wall St. world where profitability was value.

Yet the central focus for users of the digital media was the content, the substance of the internet.

And the lifeblood of its economic sustainability, is learning, or is the truth.

Content that isn’t truthful does not survive in the long run. And content that isn't profitable doesn't survive in the short run.

There must be a way in which content can be optimized for both truth & economic sustainability, simultaneously.

And this would constitute a science, or a paradigm.

“Money and God appear as competitors for the role of the Good that is adequate to explain human behavior”

The reason that we are obsessed with markets and prices is because they appear as the good that is adequate to explain human behavior.

This is how many political economists still think of markets.

The problem with this is that it tends to raise the market to the status of an idol -- it tends to deify the market -- to make it seems that prices, quantities, dead machines are the good that explains human behavior, the reason for human behavior.

But why is it that prices coordinate human behavior so well?

The ancient notion of economy or ‘oikonomia’ was as the Divine Economy, the Economy of Salvation.

An economy of motion that organized the cosmos, by the hand of God. 

Truly valuable or substantial content is that which coordinates the actions & behaviors as effectively as money can, based in a true anthropology of man. It maintains both his uniqueness & timeless interdependence.

Such an economy of harmonized truth discovery reinforces meaning, while it diminishes the noise; by a kind of interior harmony.

There is a language or a way of speaking that is more noble & honorable than pursuit of money, because it harmonizes motives and actions above the motive for self-interest or material gain.

And the actual equilibrium of economy is based in this harmony -- between self-interest and what is above & beyond self-interest -- with the latter organizing the former.

It was as true for the ancient Greeks as it is today, that the things of man, not tech alone, are the foundations on which a good city stands.