Reduce Liquidity, Increase Commitment
Despite how we've been trained, fewer options are often better
Philosophically, I have dark questions about measurement and design. However, we measure and design stuff in this world, so I can get on board (and I have even-more-skeptical questions about philosophy). If we’re going to measure and design things, I propose a change in one of the core principles often used to do these things: the principle of liquidity maximization needs to be turned on its head.
Today, everything can be chopped up into chunks, traded for a liquid intermediary medium (often money) and then forgotten. Land, organizations, risk, debt, and family structures. The explosion of constantly adjustable options via financialization and contract-development has created wealth, choices, and new stuff (innovation has become an awful, cliché word so I won’t use it). The world has tilted a bit too far into options unlimited territory though.
Some jobs have become gigs (and the rest are at-will), stocks are traded on a second by second basis, houses are easier to buy/sell/rent out for the night than ever before, and contracts have terms under which they can be torn up (for a price). While options hoarding seems like a beneficial pursuit (education, constant exercise, and capital accumulation are each options-builders), the reduction of options often contributes to an increase in meaning, compassion, and safety.
Imagine a five-year lockup on the purchase of shares in companies. When you buy equity in a public company, you would have to hold that equity. The emotional whims of markets would be calmed, because each investor would have to stay with their chosen horse far longer. Companies could be more honest about their situations, articulating difficult realities and executing longer-term plans, rather than juicing their stock prices week by week for fruit-fly-lifespan continuous trading.
Consider ten year employment contracts. Trust has eroded on both sides of the employer/employee divide. If companies had to offer a decade of employment, training would need to be significantly better and providing direct feedback up the chain would be necessary; when employment is as difficult to change as citizenship, the “voice” option might be utilized more often. Of course, companies would need to deal with problem managers and leaders while providing a more flexible ecosystem for people to move around within, in order to compensate for the reduced choices for the people inside. And issues of flexibility would need to be addressed (as today firing people is a top transformation strategy when environmental conditions change).
Perhaps state and local tax rates could fall when people have lived in a place longer, incentivizing commitment. Maybe land & home ownership could be tied to a time scale (sales of property allowed only after 20 years). Or consumers may not be allowed to buy another item for eight years after buying once and the selling company is required to keep that thing in good working order (farewell planned obsolescence).
At this point, every economist and market/freedom-oriented thinker is ready to jump down my throat: what would people do without choices? Isn’t the purpose of society to enable people to pursue happiness through unlimited choice-making? Won’t you ruin lives and destroy dreams and create disincentives for “innovation” if you kill freedom so egregiously? Doesn’t moving/quitting/consuming differently provide the key information for policymakers/businesspeople/personal relationships? But that’s only sort of how things work today. I’m not proposing setting and forgetting such these liquidity-reduction policies. I’m proposing an ideological shift away “options good, limitations bad” to “too many choices are bad for individuals and everyone”, followed by choice-limitation experiments and tweaking.
I don’t expect 60 American senators to read this piece and start legislating choice-reduction. What I do propose is for the designers and leaders of organizations to consider their choice-limiting options and explore how reducing possibilities can create higher individual and group wellbeing (and maybe also slow down climate change, reduce poverty, and increase happiness/meaningfulness). Mutual commitment may feel like a lost art from a different time, but we can and should rebuild it.