In episode 233 Peter shares an economics and futures journey with Vinny Tafuro including from Adam Smith to Kate Raworth and from the Theory of Moral Sentiments to Design Economics. Vinny is a founder of the Institute for Economic Evolution and is a pioneering advocate for the twenty-first-century economy that is disrupting society’s rigid institutions and beliefs.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References
World Futures Journal: A New Design Economics Framework Published
Tafuro Research & Education Kollective (www.vinnytafuro.com)
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: As both a trained futurist and economist I saw a lot of what I tried to do as work arounds attempting to circumvent the dominant economic paradigm. Honestly it was hard to imagine a better form of economic thinking. Luckily there are others who did not shy away from doing just that.
Vinny Tafuro: When I started this journey the first book was very much me exploring how things work because I know people that read it are like, okay that's really great, but what do I do? And then the second book, unlocking the Labor Cage was my look at like, how we could potentially solve some of these problems. And when we started the Institute for Economic Evolution, that's really when I had looked at whether it's neoliberal demand side or supply side, we're only counting GDP. And I was realized if we look at economics as a design thinking field we can elevate it. So it's not about my ideas about how the economy could work. It's going, how does any idea about how the economy and how organizations and nonprofits run, what can we use? And so that's where I came with this idea of like design thinking and economics or design economics.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Vinny Tafuro. Vinny is a founder of the Institute for Economic Evolution. A polymath and curious by nature, he is a pioneering advocate for the twenty-first-century economy that is disrupting society’s rigid institutions and beliefs. Vinny’s economic and foresight projects explore the societal and economic shifts being catalyzed by human culture as a result of technology, corporate personhood, and evolving human cognitionVinny Tafuro
Peter Hayward: Welcome to Future Pod Vinny.
Vinny Tafuro: Peter, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation and and sharing stories with you.
Peter Hayward: Ah, excellent, another storyteller. I will be in my element, mate. So let's start with the Vinny Tafuro story. What is it, how did you get involved with the Futures and Foresight community?
Vinny Tafuro: It's, it was a journey like I think many. I was interested in the future as a child, Nova Television programs on PBS in the us. And most of my early career was kept open in doing web and internet marketing and being a consultant in those fields and. In 2011 or so, in the US you had the Occupy and Tea Party movies.
You had, you started having some change that was going on and I was inspired by the blogs that I was writing and a friend that I would run with and. I had this idea to write a book and I didn't know what I would write a book about, but all of a sudden I found myself inspired and started putting notes down in a iPhone, note file about the future of how the economy would work.
And in that process, I published a book called Corporate Empathy, which led to this. Process of oh, okay. If companies can act with empathy what changes when an entrepreneur files, their articles of incorporation and when they go public and all of a sudden they become exploitative because small business has this kind of moral compass of the small business owner.
And you've got this change that happens as things scale up, and that first book was a lot of learning of how things. We're set up in the past to get to where we were in this kind of weird system of exploitive kind of business that was just rapp and not taking care of the people that made the businesses work.
From that, I ended up, I got involved with the Conscious Capitalism Movement stakeholder Capitalism Certified B Corps which were like this idea of companies that could walk and chew gum at the same time. They could balance the needs of different stakeholders and make their vendors partners and work with the environment and treat their employees as team members.
And as I did that, I looked, I was like, okay, if we do this. W how do we solve? 'cause my, my, my earlier career in the Internet, I started seeing what was happening. Like I saw in the advertising industry what was happening with digital media a lot earlier, that we were tracking people's habits, that advertisers and marketers had this data available to them.
But when you looked at economics. We were still rational actors. And so that led to a second book. And that second book was What if we changed Economics to look at all value creation as valuable? And I didn't know what I was talking about at the time, but at the time I called it Unlocking the Labor Cage.
And it was this idea that we can. It doesn't matter how much we automate the jobs we have today, if we count everything that humans do, whether it's artistic, whether it's wellness, whether it's caretaking for the elderly or children, we have a lot of work to do. And then when you add all of the scientific and medical and philosophical questions we haven't answered yet.
There is a lot of work that the human species has to do, but our economic system doesn't value that work. And so that led me to, I need to work further on this. And I was looking at graduate programs. I had made friends back in 2015 with Joe Tankersley a for a former Disney futurist working in the field.
He actually was on our board for Conscious Capitalism in Florida and he introduced me to Andy Hines and at the University of Houston. And we had a conversation about the future of capitalism a decade ago. And it's interesting 'cause we left that and we talked about it and we left it up in the air.
But I found myself five years later, a friend was in the University of Houston certificate program. For foresight and all of a sudden I was like, I had looked at economic programs and economic graduate programs. Didn't look at what economics could be, it looked at reinforcing what it was. I looked at my background, my, my undergraduate degree was communication, so I looked at communication graduate programs, and that didn't fit either.
Both of those programs would've had to be, I would've had to bend the tool too far to make it work for the work I was doing. And so when I revisited the Foresight Program, it was a no brainer. Like I decided very quickly, I was like, this is the pro. I emailed Andy, I was like, I wanna talk to you about the program.
And I emailed him and literally within a week, I think I applied and got into the program officially. And what was wonderful is.
I had started this graduate program and I, and at the same time I had a nonprofit, the Institute for Economic Evolution that was working on what the future of economics would look like, and I described the graduate program and the whole foresight field as a way of getting intangible ideas out of my head in ways that people will understand through the frameworks and tools as well as the scenarios you could build.
I think early on, I think it was in the first semester of the program that I had written a scenario and I shared it with my mother, and it was the first time she was like. I understand that. And I was like, oh, stories and scenarios. Put people in that future as opposed to telling 'em this is the technical way of how the future might work.
And so that's how I landed in it. And now it's been this process of going, how do I expand and balance this with the. Work that I wanna do in how economics can work to support how our futures are built, and then also helping people at an individual level and at an organizational level, see the future in an optimistic, positive way.
Peter Hayward: Cool. I will confess to being an economic undergrad. Studied at Melbourne University and they taught, when I did it a long time ago, they taught macro predominantly, but they also spent a lot of time teaching the history of economics and that really helped me understand. The way economics was shaped was going back to the originators of people who I didn't call themselves economists, Adam Smith, Marx, everything else, but how economic thought has really moved around tremendously.
But it at its, I would say Vinny at, its at its core. If you go back to Smith and let's start with him. Let's call him, Genesis. There was a strong, empathetic social humanitarian concept at the core of economics. And one of the ways I see the history of economics as I see it emerge to the Chicago school was that they slowly had to take that out to turn economics into a science.
We have to take people out of the process. We have to take values and ethics out of the process. And what I hear that you with empathetic capital is that we're trying to put the human back in because you can't take the human out of economics. It's not possible. It's a human system.
Vinny Tafuro: Absolutely. Yes, that is something that, you know when I look at it in Adam Smith's first book or earlier book, was the Theory of Moral Sentiments.
And in that he identified, he called it sympathy. And it's only, I think in the 1960s that, or 1990s rather, that scientists identified empathy as. A different emotional action and capability within mammals from sympathy. But Smith understood this in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and that book is not required reading, whereas the Wealth of Nations says, and I think you can't understand one without the.
Peter Hayward: But I think you've picked on a very interesting point because you've also touched on advertising, and I go back to people like Vance Packard and that kind of stuff that the original people who got into, in the nicest possible way, advertising is about manipulating people's desires, aspirations, drives, and can we be, can we become more sophisticated in how we manipulate people?
And that's the advertising industry. But then of course, now we've got this technology that says if you think that was manipulation,
Vinny Tafuro: let's unleash the algorithm on that. Yeah. And that's I think part of it is advertising is a tool. That we can use one way or another. And I think the, this is that kind of the first principles idea we're going back and what I looked at is often when we look at Silicon Valley, we look at the tax sector on a global se.
If we're only counting the monetary transactions of what business does, then we're going to emphasize. A limited amount of what advertising or what marketing or what companies can do in influencing people. And I think that's a shift. We don't measure that. We don't look at social capital, we don't look at the quality of life.
I was turned on to, a speech that Robert Kennedy gave when he was running for president in 1968 on GDP and the fact that it measures everything except that was that which was worthwhile. And it's one of those things when you look at the work of Marilyn Waring from New Zealand, the idea of time surveys, and I know the talk she did, it did at TEDx Christchurch, I believe on the fact that if you measure, if you evaluated the economy or society on time, use that the care sector. Dwarfs the financial sector. Yeah. And so how can we make smart decisions at the government, business, social sector, or individuals if we're ignoring two thirds? Of the value that is actually going into the society.
And so that's where I look at whether it is neoliberal or demand side, it, whether it's Mark or Smith Keynes or Friedman, none of them look beyond GDP. You've got, the Smith camp that has the invisible hand and you've got the left that's got, this kind of social, safety net.
But we're not counting the data because maybe there's something the nonprofit sector, the social sector can do. Maybe there's more that we can do, and so it's if we don't count all the data, we can't make better decisions.
Peter Hayward: I'm pushing back, not because I disagree, but I think I'm gonna challenge that.
The reason we can ignore the social sector women's work is that we ignore them anyway, so they've always been ignored. If we acknowledge them as producing value, then how can we get away with ignoring them?
Vinny Tafuro: That's a good question. And that's I think the idea that we've always ignored it, and this is something that I loved when I got involved in Foresight and New Futures, is the women that I discovered. That have laid groundwork and that Marilyn Waring, I've already mentioned with time use surveys, like there is already nationally recorded data that is better than potentially GDP and counting a, an overall picture.
And then you look at the work of Riane Eisler and that was the first time I'd heard the term macro historian and you look at her PR partnership society models. What is the definition of, we've always done it that way. Because in the span of, a hundred years, 200 years, we've always done it that way in the span of 3000 years, maybe.
We haven't always done it that way. When you think about it, Cleopatra the pyramids are more ancient to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us. Our perception of vast time is very limited. And then I look at the work of Hazel Henderson in the sixties and seventies of quantifying environmental capital.
And I really think I look at GDP as a metric was created in the fallout of the Great Depression and the crash we had. GD we count, we had production before the crash and before GDP was a metric, but it wasn't until the crash that Congress in the US said, Hey, can we count this stuff? And I believe it wasn't until the sixties when you know.
Lakes were catching on fire and rivers were polluted and we had this model. They went, wait a second. We're in a crisis here. We need to count it. We started in counting environmental capital and evaluating that, and I believe COVID as a gla, as a global pandemic and the move that we've had towards populism and authoritarianism.
This is the crisis of social capital. And so when I look at it that land, labor, capital. I believe the human element of that, if Adam Smith was alive today, there wouldn't be an invisible hand in his work. He would be like, there is social capital, there is social fabric, there's social network. We have words for these.
We have ways of understanding and quantifying these things now, but economics as a field doesn't count them yet. Yeah, and that's not a flaw of social capital. It's a flaw of economics, not counting and using better metrics than it had previously.
Peter Hayward: I imagine too, I imagine a toughie. Will be how we value indigenous knowledge and indigenous benefits in such a way that they are not colonized or turned into something that we value, but they exist as value for people from culture.
And I would imagine that would be a huge, but again, opportunity. To say how do we value things? And who determines what the value of something is? And I think that
Vinny Tafuro: A differentiation point there is are you appropriating and exploiting or are you learning from and evolving? And I think that is something we have historically appropriated and exploited.
And I do believe as we go forward, as we have these conversations, we become more sensitive and aware of the ramifications of expanding culture of changing culture. That it really is a, how do we authentically learn from different groups and how do we then evolve all of our systems together because we're learning from each other as we go.
And it's, I think, the intention. Is very important there. And that's what I'm hoping. And I optimistic look at as we have generational shifts and empathy shifts as we expand beyond nation states into whatever this next phase is, that we start to be able to be authentic about how we learn from and evolve culture together collaboratively as opposed to appropriating and exploiting.
Yeah.
Peter Hayward: As I like to speculate and bounce silly ideas in the podcast, and you talked about how, the famous burning Cleveland River was a tremendous incentive to do something about pollution. Is the idea of self and mental health. And the costs of when health goes wrong. Is it possible, do you think, when we talk about valuing what a society makes that we actually can put a value in for people being happy or satisfied or whatever, as opposed to the cost of what it takes when people are unhappy and damaged, if you like, so to speak?
Vinny Tafuro: This we have, I used early childhood education often as a kind of. As a way to describe this, we understand that if children are ready for kindergarten or whatever their primary school is, they have a certain level of performance compared to ones that don't. We know in the us.
At the third grade is when children start reading to learn instead of learning how to read. And if they don't hit that marker, their outcomes are different. And then we know when they get into middle school, they're about 12, 13 years old. If we don't keep them engaged, then they have negative outcomes.
And so we understand these things. Like these are not things that are just ideas that may or may not be true. Like we're really getting aggressive, but we don't understand how to do it at scale. We understand how to roll out a new app at scale. We understand how to roll out an algorithm at scale.
And, but the thing is, we have these algorithms quote unquote, for how to cultivate a well-balanced individual, but we don't have the economic system to fund it or the agreement on how to fund it and how to make it work. And then when it comes to like actual, like mental health, a aware mental health as a wellbeing thing, we're only just.
Learning about it. I think, I look at, I just had a conversation earlier this week with a friend who, we're realizing, I, he is a millennial, I'm a Gen Xer. Our parents didn't have access to the same. Emotional intelligence that we're talking about today. This the conversations that we have and generations before that.
And I think it's just gonna be one of those things as generations generational change and this kind of recycling as we go through, I think is really been how we move forward on it.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. You then get into the valuing of community and community value.
Again, I think I'm struck by the work of Putnam with Bowling Alone and how much we didn't value what community produced, the sense of community being a. A commons, so to speak.
Vinny Tafuro: Yeah. And that's, you look at the work, going back to Smith, there were these kind of defaults.
The church was hugely influential at the time, and so that social safety net was already automatic. Yet when we moved into the neoliberal era, we had this atomic family. All of a sudden, we wanted to break everything down into its parts and then expected it to keep the same fabric. And we've lost that.
And I think, some of the things, you don't appreciate it till you lose it. And potentially as a society, are we getting to that point of, wait, we didn't appreciate this thing. We lost it. How do we now rebuild it?
Peter Hayward: So Vinny, given we've heard a bit about who you are and how you think and what you're interested in, what are you specifically paying attention to around you? What are the things that are getting you excited? Possibly? What are the things that are getting you scared, but how's the future emerging around you?
Vinny Tafuro: I have in the last, 15 years that I've been focused on what the future of this, what economics can be, what society can be if we start looking at things differently. I am extremely optimistic about where the balance of our younger generations that for this is all they've ever known.
And their interest in what happened before them. I look at something even on the superficial level, of pop culture and music that has been re-emerged, that has come back, whether it's, seventies music or different genres of music that are, that youth are interested in how this interest in the past.
This presence that they have of this is the way it's always been, and there's a future. Like they're looking forward because they still have decades and decades ahead of them. And while they've been handed a little bit of a mess, I think they're, they want to work on it. And I think there is the data, there is the capital, and I believe we're getting the will.
To make larger shifts and to move towards newer systems. And I think that is the part that I'm most optimistic about is the fact that we've got all of the tools, we have everything we need. Do we actually know how to put it together? Do we actually put it together in the right combination? And that's, I think what leads into what I fear the most is how badly does the system have to break?
For that, I look at it on an individual level. At what point does somebody hit rock bottom? And go, okay, I have to make a change if I'm going to live through this. And I think societal level, we're at that. And that's the part that scares me is what is the rock bottom? Because I thought we were there a couple times and I've been unfortunately surprised that we weren't.
Yeah. And I looked at it back in the Occupy and, back in 2011 when I was exp in inspired to write the first book, I was like, oh, this is the point. And it wasn't. So I think that's the bound that, that's the yin yang that I'm like at is I'm very optimistic on the arc of, many years we will make the turn.
I really believe we will. It's just how rough will that transition be?
Peter Hayward: I, again, my take on it and I'll let you analyze what I think. I actually think the. Big change that I've seen has been through the digital creation of content producers. So we've now got an economic, you mentioned music. I obviously extend that out to gaming and everything else digitally related.
But what I now see is that what is called the economy of music, for example, or the economy of games is no longer managed and controlled by large corporations. They are certainly there, but there's now so many more people now in the supply and consumption side of this thing, and what I see is a whole lot of people that are growing up with both the tools to become a supplier. The willingness to be a consumer and they're creating things of value that I don't think economically fit inside the measurement model at the moment. I think they're producing a lot more goods, so to speak than we can count. And I wonder whether it'll become so apparent that there's such a large commons of values that is not being counted in a ways that is particularly helpful for policy education, everything else.
Vinny Tafuro: Yeah. What I find interesting in that question is the. Material that's being created and the quantity is just unfathomable. When we look at how much content is being created and then there's pockets of value and there's pockets of distraction or there, there's these two kind of things. Is it valuable to.
Positive self-development or is it attention dragging and addictive and spiraling somebody, down a rabbit hole that is not positive for their desired goals. And I think that comes down to, I, I've, a number of people said, we're in the attention economy now, and I would push back on that.
As when newspapers were sold in the afternoon on street corners by Newsboys saying. “Attention! Read all about it!” We were in the attention economy. Yeah,
and I think that's part of the challenge is we're not seeing that the economic system that is driving. Our technology today is the same exact technology that was driving newspapers a hundred years ago that was driving colonialism 400 years ago, that we have not changed that system. That system is still underlying, that operating system is still there.
And so when I look at the purpose of business is to create profit. That's based on this simplistic look of not measuring more things. And that's why when I started looking at like the B Corp movement, they're focused on changing individual companies to think holistically. But nobody in that.
Field, or nobody in that area is focused on how does economics change itself to be more holistic? And that's why, the work that I'm primarily focused on now is bringing design thinking into the field of economics so that the metrics and the measuring stick that organizations, individuals and governments used use, has more robust understanding of society as a whole and balances different capitals.
Peter Hayward: Is it fair to say that economics as a, I'll call it a discipline for the sake of it, or a science, if you want to call it that it's been critically pulled apart by its own practitioners and has been for quite a while. There are plenty of people inside the field that are actually coming up with alternative theories. There continues to be many people trying to change the science, so to speak, change the rules, and you've got the inertia and attraction of the current model. If you want to change economic systems, you to some extent have to go with a particular type of political system that supports that economics. And is that one of the reasons we're stuck at the moment. That political systems are finding it tough as to what they need to become at the same time that we've got an economic system that's probably a hundred years outta date.
Vinny Tafuro: Yes. And I believe what it's a carton horse. I, it is. I, in my opinion, what you look at it and Milton Friedman had said this, that, their job as economist was to develop the tools that would be lying on the shelf, that in a crisis would be picked up to be used. And that's really what kind of happened in the late sixties and seventies was the Keynesian economic model was falling apart, and Neoliberalism had been actively developing their ideas since the forties.
And it was in that moment of crisis that they were able to hand those tools to the political society at the time and go, these are the tools that will change and fix things. And for a time they did work. They did appear to work as we were growing and, but we had all these other changes that were happening at the same time and we weren't looking holistically at that.
And so what I really look at now is what's gonna change first. And the I published an article in the World Futures Journal in I think 2023 on creating this idea of design thinking and economics. And it was really an idea, 'cause Kate Raworth with her donut economics, Hazel Henderson, so many of these people that have robust different ideas are not in the economics department.
I use Kate Raworth as an example all the time 'cause she's at Oxford. But she's not in the Oxford School of Economics. She's a renegade economist, and so what I find now is I believe there are more people outside of the orthodoxy with better ideas. Yeah. Than the orthodoxy. The challenge is there isn't a unifying language because we're the neoliberal paradigm and even Keynesian paradigm, it was all focused on GDP and financial capital alone.
Social capital was the, in, in Europe it was more of a government safety net. In the US it was more of the church as a safety net and environmental capital. We didn't have the tools to count yet. Now that we have those, neoliberalism doesn't have an answer for how do we count those kinds of capitals.
But all of the other ideas don't have a unifying language. And that's where when I looked at design thinking, as a field, and I said if we start evaluating all of these things and using a vernacular that brings them together on the fact that they're designed systems that use more data, then we have a unifying language.
And now we have a way of linking all of these different ideas in a modern economic. Theory that is more holistic and really then renders the thinking that focuses on GDP only as really becomes irrelevant. When that happens. I don't know. But that is the toolkit. I believe as we, as that gets built in that crisis, that either, are we gonna make the change sooner or later that is that toolkit that we put together and we're able to move forward with.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And is the crisis in democracy. And the crisis in institutions and the lack of societal trust of elites is that holding us back or actually providing a kind of interregnum where people who have the ideas will get a chance to develop them when the political system changes to what it has to change to.
Vinny Tafuro: So I really believe that the challenge that we have now, whether with populism in the political system, the elite part of whether it is the tech sector, the billionaire class, all of these things, they're starting right now. They're still able to pick. People against each other that have more in common than don't.
And I think as this becomes more and more hypocritical, more and more blatantly, like we're being pitted against each other, because I think you're starting to see that. I know there are. COVID was extremely difficult in the fact that it made us it separated us all, put us all on screens. And I believe you're getting this kind of pushback now where people are meeting in person, people are talking in person, and you cannot act the same way to somebody who thinks differently in person.
I. In large crowds, different things but when it comes to really having authentic conversations, you start to get past those things. And I think we're start to see the other person's point of view and where we're at. And so I'm hopeful that transition, that we start having more of those, that we start unplugging from the algorithmic kind of environment that we're in and start getting into more authentic conversations.
And that starts helping people to see that, it's. A class thing, not a race thing. It's a political control, not a party control. And start having those conversations.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, Vinny. Let's just spend a bit of time in communication. So how does Vinny explain to people what Vinny does when people don't understand what it is that Vinny does?
Vinny Tafuro: That is the hardest question, right? It is. It depends on what aspect I'm looking at on the economic side that is really trying to resonate with. Who were, the third tenet of design economics, when you look at this idea is economic literacy. And right now when it comes to talking about the economy, you can choose a team, capitalist or socialist, right or left, blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, how do we start bringing these ideas and making them understandable to wider audiences? That's why I love, Kate and her donut economics. It makes it visually understanding. The same way neoliberalism put the supply and demand graph on a screen and, oh, that's simple. That's obviously the way the world works.
So how do we simplify these ideas to make them, because economics has spent a lot of time and energy over the last 50, 60 years of using complex math. That is beautiful on paper, but completely non-functional in the real world and passing it off as a hard science and how do we counter that, then when it comes to more professionally, I really look at, when it comes to the strategic foresight work that I do, when it comes to. Personal futures or personal foresight in individual work. It's, I take it as easy, like how do you take what's on that vision board that you've created and sit with it and create a, futures wheel of how you can make that a reality and how.
You may or may not shift along the way, like you might not get to that reality. But if you take an you're still gonna be moving towards those directions. And then similarly on, when it comes to organizations whether non-profit for-profit government is really looking at I help you create scenarios and plans that help you navigate your strategic plan.
So I often use, if you're strategic, people understand strategic planning and it's like strategic plans are where you want to go in the next five years. Foresight and as a strategy is goes, okay, how do I look 15 years out for signals so that as I'm moving through my strategic plan when a weak signal that we talked about in our foresight project shows up.
Rather than being caught off guard, you can go, wait a second. We talked about this in our session with Vinny. You know this is part of our let's dust off that PDF and look at it and go, how did we say we might respond to this when we were thinking clearly about it as a scenario? So maybe we can make better decisions as we move forward on our strategic plan.
So that's the three sectors in how I approach them. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: When I was consulting and also teaching I would say organizations don't have futures. Only people have futures. We call it an organizational future, but it's actually a human future that we tend to share with others.
And so when we are talking about concepts like corporate empathy, redesigning economics, I would imagine you are finding a lot of people have got a big hole on the inside about what their life means.
And there's a disconnect by the way, organizations use them. And you come in and you talk about the need to run the business better but the kind of conversation you are having with people is about that hole in themselves as to who they think they are and what value they are as human beings.
Vinny Tafuro: this is the, how does moving through time and aging and learning put you in a place? I recently, like I have become more authentically my high school self. In the last decade than I had in the decades before that because as the elders in my life age and change, as I experience the I, more of my mentors are younger than me today than older.
And I am I'm very warmed to be able to look at it that way because I have mentored young people and some of those people have now become mentors to me in a way that I didn't expect. And I think that is something that as we move through this, there were these visions and you go I forget where I heard it recently, the two, two most important people in your life are your childhood self.
And yourself at the end of your life and what they would say about where you are today. And I think that is unfortunately because of the productive society of being a human producer instead of a human being, that we as a society we've done that. And there was a time when, my, my grandfather worked in a steel mill.
There were times where you couldn't, and I think we're at a time now, we're having a reckoning with ourself as a species, as a society of how do we become more, how do we start satisfying these things. And I think, you know that is the big question. And I think we do have a lot of holes in ourselves right now, and I think there are people filling those holes.
For themselves and helping others do that. But there's still a lot of work to do. I think that's part of the human experience is getting through that journey.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. For what it's worth, mate, I think you are, I think you've got a little shovel and I think you are helping to fill holes in people because you are letting them talk about things that organizationally they don't necessarily get time to talk about.
Vinny Tafuro: Yes. Thank you.
Peter Hayward: So Vinny, you've mentioned design economics and you've talked about aspects of it. I suspect there's a bit more going on under the hood that you need to explain to people. So maybe just flesh out and draw together what you're trying to do with this thing you call design economics.
Vinny Tafuro: Sure I would love to. I believe, when I started this journey I was coming up with, the first book was very much me exploring how things work because I know people that read it are like, okay that's really great, but what do I do? And then the second book, unlocking the labor cage was my look at like, how.
We could potentially solve some of these problems. And when we started the Institute for Economic Evolution, that's really when I had looked at, okay, no matter what, whether it's neoliberal demand side or supply side, we're only counting GDP. And I was like realized if we look at economics as a design thinking field.
And we can elevate it. So it's not about my ideas about how the economy could work. It's going, how does any idea about how the economy and how organizations and nonprofits run, what can we use? And so that's where I came with this idea of like design thinking and economics or design economics. And what we boiled it down to was three basic tenants.
The first tenent being the fact that economics as a field has to acknowledge that change happens. And this is the idea we talked about in Adam Smith's day. We couldn't count social capital, but today we have the data sets and databases and numbers. We can count social capital. Now we know things about social capital we didn't have back then, the same way we know about carbon and the environmental capital.So therefore, we must acknowledge the paradigms change.
The second [tenet] is this idea that we can't punish creativity. Too much in, and this is why so many heterodox economists are outside of the orthodoxy because the orthodoxy reinforces what's currently thought of in economics. And so we can't punish creativity.
So these new ideas, whether it's Kate Raworth, Marilyn Waring all of these things that come together and are new ideas. And then of course is the third, that we mentioned earlier, that I touched on is this idea of economic literacy. That the way economics has been practiced in the last 60 years has been by complex math.
So it's one of the only fields that when you ask a question, people will preface themselves and say, I'm not an economist, but here's my opinion. Whereas if you have a geopolitical crisis somewhere in the world, nobody prefaces. Their statement and says, I am not a trained geopolitical expert, but this is my opinion on X.
They just say their opinion. Why has economics been able to insulate itself so much? That people will go, I'm not an economist, but, and it shouldn't be. And so those are our three tenets. That's really what I believe is no matter what the idea is. If you understand systems change, if you're being creative with your idea and you're making your idea understandable by larger amounts of people, then you are practicing design economics, and we now have a language to unify all of these ideas behind.
Peter Hayward: Riel Miller has spent a lot of time talking about what he calls future literacy, that we need to become much more creative and innovative in how we imagine possible futures. That if we've got a very narrow base of ideas, of possible futures, then by nature, futures and foresight just will not be as powerful as it could be.
I wonder whether. Economic literacy is a way to broaden or make accessible expanding futures literacy, especially through the ideas that economics is different and how different economics can create different ideas of the future.
Vinny Tafuro: So futures literacy is part of what I think, as I learned about futures literacy and this idea of teach the future and this giving people vernacular to talk about the future, that's what inspired a lot of the work that said, oh, wait a second. How do we create. Economic literacy, and I look at them very intertwined.
I think this is why the foresight and futures field has been so integral in me developing my own ideas because it's so important to give people language to talk about it. You think about a baby will cry. The baby knows what it's wants, but it doesn't know how to say it. Language and literacy at all different levels are so important.
And I think that's something we have to focus on. And I think economic literacy needs to be important to the foresight and futures community because, I look a lot of ideas like, and this is where I believe like solar punk and some of these ideas that are future and speculative. We need the bridge to get there.
And we need the economic systems that how is that future going to run economically? Because even if you look at Star Trek, we got there, but what were the steps to get there because that's a hundred years from now, or whatever it was. And I think that the intertwining of economic and foresight literacy for futures literacy is very important.
Peter Hayward: Cool. Vinny, it has been an absolute joy to have this conversation. I have had a wonderful time bouncing economic and futures ideas off you. It's been it's been great.
Vinny Tafuro: Thank you, Peter. It has been wonderful for me as well. This has been a pleasure speaking with you. I was looking forward to it and I'm so glad we got to do this.
Yes, thank you.
Peter Hayward: Thanks for, thanks mate for spending some time with the future POD community.
Vinny Tafuro: Anytime
Peter Hayward: I hope you found Vinny's ideas on better economic thinking coupled with better systems hopeful and inspiring. Maybe check out Vinny's books too and the Institute of Economic Evolution, links on Vinny's show page. Future Pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod, then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.