H.O.P.E.  Higher Order Profit Evaluation.  

The acronym is a joke, but the idea is serious. 

Our political economic system is sadly off track.  We have a sense of the problems facing the world today -- climate change, jobs, immigration reform, widespread discrimination -- and an economy that systematically shifts income from those who work to those who extract rents from capital.  How can capital be put to use in ways that will lead to a better future, one with a stronger foundation, providing meaningful work for the younger generations of people?  We need a way of thinking about value on a higher order.  Value cannot simply be measured by prices at a given time.  We need a better calculation of value that thinks about how exchange impacts the future; we need value that incorporates time.  We also need value that incorporates impact on the community; we need value that incorporates an understanding of how people's lives will change.  

I've spent the last 20 years doing social and cultural research through participant-observation fieldwork.  This is the cornerstone method of cultural anthropology.  One thing I've learned is that if you want to discover where the action is in some cultural or political sphere, you simply have to go to a lot of meetings, get to know people, follow their information streams, and participate in their worlds.  It is strikingly easy to see, when you there firsthand, where the strong potentials for the future are, who can build energy and what kinds of organizations are tackling problems effectively.  If we think about scaling this ethnographic method in such a way that we can reinterpret value (over time) through the lens of specific communities, then I believe we may be able to start transforming the ways we, and in turn the larger economy, determine what is of value and why.

That's why we need "higher order profit evaluation."  And I propose that incorporate an ethnographic sensibility into the calculation can help us overcomesome of the distortions of our economic system that have arisen from turning social relations into fungible, abstract money.