I am glad to see Douglas Ruskoff weigh in on our current situation. He’s a fantastic thinker, humanistic and often contrarian, the author of many books including the recent Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, which is about the foolishness of senseless innovation. If I read Rushkoff correctly, he sees economics as a distinctly human, connected enterprise, and the absolute opposite of where our commercial leadership has taken us.

He presents some major, major ideas:

• The recent goal of business has been to make every company a holding company, one whose purpose is the acquisition and/or management of debt as opposed to a group of competent people who do things for other people
• People at all levels have become more interested in the perceived value of assets (homes, shares of companies, CDOs) than the actual value that they might ever produce
• Most of these ideas are supporting people who may not even be in the system – long-gone investors, maybe even dead guys
• The monetary system is not about encouraging trade, but often preventing trade
• The American Revolution came about because England forbid people from providing each other with services
• LOCAL CURRENCIES used to be very popular and could be again
• We were probably better off economically in the Late Middle Ages (the Black Death notwithstanding)

We need to revisit our total concept of value creation. It’s great that Rushkoff is lending a hand.