Our ideas about financial investment have been fairly limited thus far. Investment has been all about maximizing financial return at any cost, even if that cost is environmental pollution, human dignity, or our moral compass. Our economy has focused narrowly on creating and spreading novelty, pushing the concepts of tradition, conservation, and values to realms outside of the market.
Tim Jackson delivers a piercing talk about how the role of investment must be reconceived not to create even more money or simply cater to the novelty-seeking tendencies of the privileged but to instead create conditions for people to flourish. "Investment is nothing more nor less than a relationship between a shared past and a common future." In our common future, the role of money ought to be to maximize the human return on investment -- and that requires first that we understand what it means to be fully human.