Are We Gambling With Our Future, or Investing in It?

We often get asked about our stance on market rate returns. Embedded in the questions are an assumption that investing means one thing. Buy in, wait, watch the number go up, sell. This is not how we think about investing at all. Because most of what the finance community calls investing today is not investing at all. It is betting. And the two are as different as a casino and a construction site.

Most of the market is a bet on a number, not a stake in a thing

Walk onto the floor of the public stock market and watch what actually happens. Shares change hands in seconds, bought and sold based on where the price is headed next, not on what the company makes or whom it employs or whether the world is better for its existence. The overwhelming majority of trading is one owner selling to another owner. None of that money reaches the company at all. It is chips moving across a table.

And the bets keep getting shorter. The average share is now held for a matter of months, down from roughly eight years in the middle of the last century.

This is what speculation is: profiting from the swing in price rather than from the thing being priced. The point isn't the company. It's holding the chip while it's worth more than you paid, then selling before it's worth less. It is a bet on an outcome wrapped in the language of a boardroom.

We want to be careful here, because it would be easy to hear this as a lecture aimed at anyone with a retirement account. That is not what we mean. If your savings sit in an index fund, you are not the gambler. You entered the only door the system left open. 

The “responsible” table is still a table

The honest response to all this was supposed to be responsible investing - ESG screens, values funds, the promise that you could keep your seat at the table and feel better about it. And we want to give that its due. It was a real attempt by real people who meant it.

But it never left the casino. It just moved to a table with a recycling bin next to it. Many ESG funds hold nearly the same companies as the ordinary index sitting beside them, because the ratings that sort “good” from “bad” have no shared definition and no shared scorecard. The major agencies disagree with one another so sharply that their scores barely line up, while the credit-rating agencies, grading the same companies, agree almost perfectly.

So a company earns its halo for one green commitment while the rest of the business runs exactly as before, and quietly walks the commitment back the moment it costs a quarter of returns. In 2025, BP dropped the emissions targets it had spent years championing and pivoted back to oil and gas, its CEO calling the reset “an unwavering focus on growing long-term shareholder value.” They pitched it as reassurance.

A screen laid over a casino is still a casino. You have changed which chips you are willing to touch. You have not changed the game, which is still: bet on the number, and get out before it drops.

The house writes the rules

It would be comforting to blame bad actors: the greedy trader, the cynical fund manager, the CEO who signed a pledge he never meant. But they didn't write the rules they're following.

When the only obligation an investment recognizes is the return to whoever holds the share, then everything else — the workers, the supply chain, the river downstream, the town the factory sits in — becomes an externality to be minimized on the way to the number. That harm is the system working exactly as designed. We keep asking the market to protect things it was never built to see, and then acting surprised when it doesn’t.

A casino is not broken because you left with less than you came in. That is how it is designed.

Productive investing means owning the construction site

So what is the alternative? Not a more ethical bet. It is building something rather than speculating.

Productive investing is capital that actually reaches the thing being built and stays there long enough to matter. It is money that funds a company to hire, a cooperative to buy the building its members work in, a fund to put ownership in the hands of the people doing the labor. The return, when it comes, comes from what the money built, not from selling the chip to the next person at a higher price. You are no longer betting on the number and instead are underwriting the thing the number is supposed to represent.

This is also why we feel so strongly about employee ownership. When a company changes hands, the people who should be first in line are the ones who actually BUILT it, the ones who gave it their working lives, year after year. Not whoever shows up to the transition with the fattest wallet. And that wallet is usually full of tax subsidies and borrowed money, not patient capital bringing the best long-term deal for the business. The casino rewards the biggest bet at the table while a productive economy rewards the people who built the thing everyone else is betting on.

Getting here took us years, and we won’t pretend it was a single clean decision. It meant broadening the only question the industry taught us to ask — what will this return? — into a fuller one: what does this money do to people, to a place, to who gets to own what, on its way to a return?

Doesn't productive investing mean giving up returns? We ask this too, as it's the deepest reflex the industry trains into us, that anything good must be paid for in yield. But the question was never whether the returns exist. It's who stands first in line for them. A real business in a real town earns real money, and at the construction site that return is shared with the people who built it, workers, neighbors, the town itself, instead of swept to whoever holds the most chips. What you give up isn't a return. It's the claim to all of it. (We'll take this apart properly in a later post. It deserves its own.)

The alternative is not theoretical. It is what we already fund

None of this is a thought experiment. The construction site is already being built, and capital is already flowing to it.

It looks like Unlock Ownership, a multidonor fund seeding employee and community ownership instead of concentrating it further. It looks like mission investments and grants deployed across the full spectrum of capital into the people and places building a wellbeing economy in practice. It looks like the coalition we’ve joined in Washington State to rewrite the rules from the ground up, down to organizing a citizens’ assembly to rethink how the state taxes itself. 

This is the whole of our theory of change in one line: that we should stop funding the bet, and start funding the thing being bet on. Every one of these is boring in the best way. Nobody is getting rich on a price swing. People are getting ownership to build sustainable and stable lives, communities and planet.

The invitation

We don’t think the answer is to shame anyone for the chips they are holding. Nearly all of us were told that this was the only game to play. The invitation is quieter and harder than that: to stop mistaking the casino for a productive economy.

We don’t need better odds at the same table. We need to walk out of the building and go help lay the foundation of a different one. It's the most productive thing our money can do and, we’d argue, the only thing that was ever really worth calling an investment.