The Economy Is the Root System
As a society we spend enormous energy and almost unimaginable amounts of money fighting for causes we care about, and too often we fight them one at a time. Climate over here. Wealth inequality over there. Gender equity in its own silo, education in another, health care walled off in a policy debate all its own. We build separate campaigns, separate coalitions, separate funding streams. And still the problems metastasize.
These are not separate problems. They are shoots of the same vine. And we keep cutting back shoots while the root system pumps out new ones faster than we can cut.
The root system that exacerbates the growth of these systemic symptoms is the economy — specifically, an economy built to serve shareholders and investors first, and everyone and everything else second. It runs on a single logic: the financialization of everything, in which every problem, resource, and relationship is eventually reduced to an asset and judged by the returns it throws off. Once you see that logic, you see it everywhere, driving every shoot on the vine.
We get what we measure
To understand how the root system pumps out these toxic shoots, we have to look at what this economy decided to measure. Fifty years ago, the Milton Friedman doctrine shifted the purpose of the corporation from creating value for a broad set of stakeholders (workers, communities, customers) to maximizing value for a single stakeholder: the shareholder.
To achieve this, the economy financialized. It replaced the messy, complex reality of human thriving with clean, abstract metrics: Quarterly Earnings Per Share (EPS), Return on Investment (ROI), and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The markets were then engineered to chase these metrics relentlessly. But as the markets chased them, the actual underlying realities those metrics were supposed to represent began to retreat.
What this looks like in reality
Consider what an economy optimized for shareholder returns actually does.
If your primary obligation is to maximize returns to capital, then a stable climate is a cost to be externalized. Emissions are free to dump; cleanup is somebody else's bill. We ask companies to decarbonize against their own incentives, then act surprised when progress stalls. It isn't a failure of willpower. It's the system working exactly as designed.
Look at the modern corporation. Because financialization demands endlessly rising stock prices, executives realized that actually investing in the core metrics of a healthy business (R&D, worker training, sustainable supply chains, community infrastructure) was too slow and expensive.
Instead, they chased the financial metric of EPS. They did this not by building better products or paying workers more, but through financial engineering: stock buybacks, wage suppression, offshoring, and deregulation. The metric (the stock price) skyrocketed, but the core metrics of a healthy economy retreated. Middle-class wages stagnated. Job security vanished. Supply chains became brittle. Customer experience plummeted. The market chased the numbers, and the underlying reality retreated.
Wealth inequality follows the same logic. When the winner of every deal is defined in advance as the shareholder, wealth flows upward by default. The numbers are staggering: billionaire wealth rose more than 16% in 2025 alone, to a record $18.3 trillion, growing three times faster than the previous five-year average. The world's richest 1% now own more wealth than 95% of humanity. This is not a glitch. It is the predictable output of a machine that treats returns to capital as the point and wages as a cost to be minimized.
Gender inequality lives in the same structure. An economy that counts only what is bought and sold renders the unpaid care work that holds families and communities together, work still done disproportionately by women, economically invisible. We are not making tangible what we value in our economy.
The lack of progress in education and health care are so challenging to understand until you view them through this lens. No one argues that sick children or good schools don't matter. And yet the outcomes still curdle not because we stopped caring, but because we don't know how to defend what we care about against financialization. That's the deeper trap. It isn't only that a shareholder-first economy ignores the things it can't price. It's that it steadily converts even the things we love into assets to be optimized. Hospitals get run for margin, care homes get bought by private equity, students get loaded with debt, and schools get judged by return on investment. Financialization doesn't wait to be invited; it colonizes. So the fight was never really about proving that education and health are valuable. We know they are. The fight is that we lack the tools, the language, and the rules to hold a line against the logic of returns. And inside a system where capital always wins, that line keeps getting moved.
Different symptoms. One design.
Why single-issue fights hit a ceiling
This is why so much well-funded, well-intentioned advocacy hits a ceiling. We are asking a system to produce outcomes it was never built to produce, and then blaming the people inside it when it doesn't.
The 2019 Business Roundtable statement is a perfect illustration. That year, 181 CEOs signed a pledge to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, communities, not just shareholders. It was hailed as a turning point. Five years later, researchers found what most of us suspected: little had actually changed in how those companies were governed. Stakeholderism never displaced shareholder primacy as the organizing principle. A pledge is not a redesign. As long as the underlying rules, incentives, and fiduciary duties still point to shareholder returns, the outcomes point there too.
You cannot value-statement your way out of a structural problem.
Impact investing shows the same ceiling from the other direction. The field has exploded, with impact assets under management now at roughly $1.6 trillion, up from $1.16 trillion in 2022, growing at around 21% a year. An enormous amount of capital and sincerity has flowed into doing good. And yet the systems it aims to repair keep deteriorating. Why? Because the defining promise of impact investing is impact with financial returns, impact that pencils out for the investor. That “and” is doing quiet, decisive work. It keeps the shareholders’ return in the room as a veto. Anything that would genuinely repair a system but shrink returns to capital simply doesn't clear the bar and never gets funded. So the capital pools where impact and profit happen to align, and flows around everywhere the deepest repair is needed. A model that still requires capital to win can't finance the changes that require capital to give something up.
The test arriving right now is AI
If you want to watch this dynamic play out in real time, look at artificial intelligence. Worldwide AI spending is projected to hit roughly $1.5 trillion in 2025, and AI firms captured 61% of all global venture capital that year. This is financialization at its most concentrated and fastest-moving, filling an ocean of return-seeking capital, reshaping the economy in months, not decades.
The response from the do-good world worries us, because it repeats the pattern. Enormous energy and funding are pouring into keeping AI from becoming an existential threat. That work matters. But it is one aspect of safety, and treating it as the only aspect quietly sidelines the harms already landing: biased systems making decisions about who gets a loan, a job, or bail; the labor displacement reshaping millions of livelihoods; the staggering energy and water footprint of the data centers colliding head-on with the climate fight. A safety agenda narrowed to a single far-off risk leaves every present harm unfunded and unfought.
And this should give us pause. Much of the money flowing toward “safer AI” is still structured to earn a return. The same philanthropists and funds backing safety are often invested in the very companies building the frontier, expecting those investments to pay. Once your safety work has to pencil out financially, those investments become a losing proposition and are likely to be cut. You will fund the version of safety that protects your returns and pass on the version that would slow the technology down, cost the incumbents money, or redistribute its gains. Against $1.5 trillion a year, a safety movement that still needs its investments to win isn't a counterweight. We will be powerless in the face of that much capital if the people who claim the mantle of safety are quietly financially aligned with the thing they say they're guarding against.
The alternative already exists
The alternative is not theoretical. It is already being built.
A wellbeing economy is one designed from the ground up to serve human and ecological flourishing rather than growth-at-all-costs. And a growing group of governments has stopped treating that as a slogan and started treating it as policy. Scotland, New Zealand, Iceland, Wales, Finland, and Canada formed the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership to do exactly this, to share what works and what doesn't as they rewire the machine.
New Zealand's Wellbeing Budget, launched in 2019 as a world first, is the clearest example. Instead of measuring success by GDP alone, it directed spending against a broader set of outcomes: climate and environment, child wellbeing, mental and physical health, and closing gaps for historically excluded communities. That reframing funded things a growth-first budget routinely skips like housing upgrades, free school lunches, free menstrual products in schools, mental health investment. Notice what happened when the scoreboard changed: climate, child poverty, health, and equity stopped being competing line items and started being co-beneficiaries of the same design. The approach isn't finished, it isn't perfect, political winds shift and reforms can stall. But it proves the core point. When you change what the economy is for, you change what it produces.
That is the whole argument in one sentence: fix the root, and the shoots change together.
What this means for us
We think this reframes the mission itself.
It means we stopped thinking of ourselves as backers of a dozen separate causes and started thinking of ourselves as backers of one: an economy that puts wellbeing at the center. It means the highest-leverage thing we can fund is not another downstream program to offset the damage, but the upstream work of changing the rules including the metrics governments budget against, the fiduciary duties companies answer to, and the definition of who wins when a deal gets done.
It means measuring ourselves differently, too. Not just by the shoots we managed to cut back this year, but by whether we shifted anything at the root.
None of the big, hairy problems we care about, climate, inequality, gender, education, health, get solved while shareholders and investors remain the assumed winners of every transaction. But every one of them becomes solvable the moment wellbeing becomes the point. That is not a reason for despair. It's the most concentrated source of hope we have. We don't need a different miracle for each crisis. We need to change one thing, and change it well.
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