Last week, I wrote about why the economy feels like a lie, why the numbers look strong while so many people feel stretched thin, anxious, quietly wondering if they’re the only ones who can’t make the math work. I wasn’t trying to be provocative. I was trying to name something I think a lot of us carry around but don’t say out loud.
Since then, the same question keeps coming back: Okay, but what do we actually do about it?
I don’t have a tidy single answer. But a few ideas have come to mind. Since it’s the Christmas season, I recently watched my favourite Christmas movie. It’s a story most of us know well, one that, watched closely, isn’t really about angels or miracles at all. It’s a Wonderful Life is an economics movie? I know that sounds like I’m ruining it, but stay with me.
George Bailey spends his whole life running a small building and loan so that ordinary families in Bedford Falls can own homes instead of renting forever from Mr Potter. It was the dream of his fathers which he eventually inherited. Potter isn’t a cartoon villain. He’s efficient. He’s powerful. He genuinely believes that concentration works better than sharing, that his way produces cleaner results.
Potter’s system is faster, more profitable, and easier to scale. But it leaves people smaller. Dependent. Replaceable. George’s system is messier, slower, built on handshakes, trust, and knowing people’s names. It’s inefficient as hell. But it gives people something Potter never offers: a stake. A piece of the thing they’re helping to build.
That tension—shared ownership versus concentrated power—isn’t a holiday fable. It’s the argument we’ve been having for forty years. And right now, the Potters are winning.
I Used to Believe the Old Story
I should be honest about where I’m coming from.
I used to believe in supply-side economics. Not reluctantly either, I felt it completely. I thought that if we focused on growth, efficiency, and incentives at the top, prosperity would follow for everyone. That belief shaped how I voted, how I worked, and how I defined what it meant to succeed. And for a long time, it seemed to work. Growth created jobs. Jobs paid wages. Wages let people build lives. The mechanism felt real.
What changed wasn’t only my values. What changed was the world. The mechanism broke, quietly at first, then unmistakably, and I had to decide whether to keep defending a theory or start paying attention to what was actually happening to people.
There’s another piece of this that’s harder to admit. I wasn’t just an advocate of American capitalism; I was shaped by it, soothed by it, in ways I didn’t fully recognise until I left.
For decades, Americans made an unspoken trade. As ownership faded and inequality widened, we were offered something in return: cheap abundance, inferior goods through the miracle of globalism. Bigger TVs. Constant upgrades. Disposable everything. It helped dull the stress of working harder for less. When I moved to Norway, I remember missing that ease of buying cheap stuff, that feeling of plenty. It took me a while to realize I wasn’t missing the products. I was missing the comfort they provided, the way consumption filled a space that should be filled by security.
In Norway, things are built to last, or they don’t make the shelves. Electronics come with extended warranties, enforced by law (eg, all TVs must last 5 years or the seller must replace it) because people expect to keep them. You don’t replace things constantly. And when you stop replacing things, something surprising happens: you stop needing stuff to soothe you. That wasn’t culture alone; it was design. A different set of choices, made at a system level, that produced a different kind of life.
This Didn’t Happen Overnight
Some people talk about our current moment as if it had appeared suddenly, as if a single new technology like Artificial Intelligence had broken everything last Tuesday. That’s not what happened. This is not primarily about AI, but what it will accelerate. This has been building for decades. And I think we all know it.
Machines replaced people a long time ago. Work drifted further from ownership. Productivity climbed while wages flattened. Step by step, year by year, labour mattered less, and capital mattered more. Now we’re entering a phase where we can produce more than ever while needing fewer people to do it. The logical conclusion is that we are approaching a complete separation of production and labour. When owners of the capital no longer need people, what will that mean for trickle-down theory?
Here’s something we tend to forget: for most of American history, people didn’t just work for wages. They owned something that created value. A farm, a shop, tools, a trade, a mill or even a college education. They didn’t just sell hours they sold what they made, using things they owned. The industrial age brought extraordinary progress, but it also quietly pulled ownership away from ordinary people and replaced it with paychecks. That trade worked when workers were essential. It works a lot less well when they aren’t.
Why the Numbers Feel Empty
GDP measures how much we produce. It doesn’t measure who benefits. It doesn’t tell you whether families feel safe, whether people have time with their kids, or whether anyone can afford to get sick. An economy can look healthy on paper while the people inside it feel exhausted.
Whenever we talk about shared ownership or wealth gaps, the old labels show up fast. Socialism. Communism. Failed experiments. But those fears come from another era—the same era that taught us Mr Potter was just “how business works.” This isn’t about tearing down markets. Markets are tools. They’re extraordinarily good at certain things. But tools don’t have values. We get to choose what they serve.
A History We’ve Mostly Forgotten
Employee ownership isn’t some radical invention. ESOPs were created in the mid-twentieth century and became genuinely popular in the ’70s and ’80s. For a while, they were a mainstream way for founders to step back without selling to private equity firms or distant corporations that didn’t know the workers or the community. They had bipartisan support—conservatives liked them because they preserved private ownership; progressives liked them because they spread wealth. Presidents from Nixon to Reagan endorsed them.
Like George Bailey’s building and loan, they were about continuity. About keeping something together instead of cashing out and walking away.
They faded not because they failed, but because louder, faster money took center stage. Over time, success came to mean something else. Family-owned companies gave way to venture-backed startups built to exit, not endure. Valuation mattered more than durability. Employees became inputs. Communities became optional. And Mr Potter won—quietly, by default, without anyone quite noticing the moment it happened.
One Way Forward
If machines and systems are doing more of the work, people need another way to stay connected to what’s being created. That’s where ownership comes back in. ESOPs are a modern version of something very old: giving people a stake in what they help build. They don’t stop progress. They don’t punish success. They make success belong to more people. They’re the building and loan in a world full of Potters.
I own a company together with some fantastic partners. We could sell it tomorrow and walk away with the checks. Instead, we’re choosing to sell it to the people who helped build it.
Not because we’ve figured everything out—we haven’t. But because we’ve become convinced that an economy where people no longer belong to anything won’t hold together. Ownership creates care. Care creates stability. Stability creates trust. And trust, in the end, is what markets actually run on. Pull it out from underneath, and the whole thing gets brittle.
Be a Bailey, not a Potter.
Last week’s piece named the problem. This one is an invitation to do something about it.
- To our leaders: stop recycling slogans from 1983 and start facing what’s actually changed.
- To business owners: remember that building something valuable doesn’t have to mean extracting everything on your way out the door.
- And to everyone else: start thinking less about what we can buy and more about what we can hold together.
George Bailey learned in the end to lean on his community, to understand that we all need to be co-investors in each other. Bedford Falls was richer for it—not in a sentimental, movie-ending way, but in the way that actually matters: people had a place that was theirs.
Better Places 