What is wrong with this concept of value/wealth creation?

Abdul Semakula
2 min readSep 16, 2020

Help me, critic, this in the comments; especially that ‘Planet & Society’ invest in value/wealth creation. Thank you.

Our wealth concentration obsession is entrenched in the flawed narrative that wealth is exclusively created by businesses. Whereas wealth is the product of businesses innovating to extract planet’s resources with ‘global society’s knowledge and cooperation under governments’ fertile environment.

Making a $1M is a million times quicker today than it was 1,000 years ago, not because entrepreneurs are smarter, sleep less, or take riskier ventures today, but because the smartest, hardest and riskiest building blocks are already done by the global society.

Think of the alphabet, the Hindu-Arabic numeral, algebra, calculus, and millions of other inventions — these are the result of incremental, diverse, knowledge collaboration on a global scale. And in a knowledge-intensive economy, these are things the current corporation can’t do without.

The system has made us believe that the products/services we buy to improve our wellbeing are created entirely by businesses and consequently businesses own all generated wealth.

But value cannot be ‘created, monetised and owned’ at scale without input from four entities;

  • Planet: every consumer product/service has to use some components of the earth.
  • Society: from a goldmine of knowledge, science and discoveries generated over 5,000 years of global- cooperation, civilizations, cultures, absence of violence to markets, without global cooperation, businesses would have to start from a prohibitively costly vacuum.
  • Governments: provide physical, economic, political, and legal infrastructure.
  • Businesses: innovate, and invest time/money into a need for a product/service.

That businesses have to own 100% of generated wealth is an injustice to planet and society. An injustice millennials/Gen-Zs are beginning to understand and feel only recently, as data from consumer studies suggests.

An injustice we see and experience now in the form of climate change, inequality, poverty, extreme violence among others. Which is why;

“Only one in five feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them” and there’s an overwhelming ‘sense of injustice’ (76%) and ensuing ‘demand for action’ (78%). — 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer.

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Abdul Semakula

Systems Innovator co-creating bottom-up a distributive & regenerative future at https://opencollective.com/nvc