Contours of Tomorrow

A guy was singing about economic theory. Classically, even. I was listening to the Freakonomics Radio podcast and heard about a new oratorio based on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. I admit that at first glance, "oratorio about economic theory" sounds a little like somebody lost a bet in grad school.

Still, one idea from the podcast discussion stuck with me.

The podcast described money as a mechanism that allows human beings to cooperate across enormous distances and scales. That framing immediately hooked into a lot of the ideas I tend to circle around in Contours of Tomorrow. Emergence. Coordination. Shared systems. The strange reality that civilization is built from billions of small interactions between people who will never meet.

It also made me think about how differently generations seem to experience capitalism itself.

Many younger people in my life have a deeply negative view of capitalism. Often they see it primarily as a system of exploitation and inequality. Honestly, given the world they inherited, I understand the reaction. If your experience of the economy includes impossible housing costs, crushing student debt, gig work, stagnant wages, and watching a handful of people acquire more wealth than some nations, skepticism starts to feel less like ideology and more like basic pattern recognition.

I grew up in a different emotional atmosphere.

I voted for Reagan the first time I was old enough to vote, though I never really considered myself conservative in the cultural sense. I was fairly centrist and probably very meritocracy-minded. I liked the idea that competence mattered. Initiative mattered. Innovation mattered. Conservatives often struck me as too socially rigid for my taste, even back then. My attraction was more toward the sense of movement and possibility that surrounded markets and technology during that era.

Capitalism, at its best, seemed capable of raising all boats. It seemed capable of creating prosperity out of ideas alone. Somebody invents a better process, a new product, a useful service, and somehow value appears where none existed before. Wealth was not always viewed as a fixed pie where one person’s gain automatically required another person’s loss. Sometimes it genuinely felt like human ingenuity could enlarge the pie itself.

The movies reflected that mood too.

The Secret of My Success (1987) treated corporate ambition almost like an adventure story. Working Girl (1988) carried a similar faith that talent and initiative could move someone upward. Even Ghostbusters (1984) is basically the story of unemployed academics launching a startup with questionable safety standards and a highly aggressive marketing plan.

That era certainly criticized greed. Wall Street (1987) was not exactly subtle about it. Still, there was an underlying assumption that markets, innovation, and enterprise were generally engines of progress. Capitalism felt dynamic. It felt like motion.

Today, many people experience the system more like a machine that already knows who gets to win.

At the same time, I still struggle with the idea that capitalism itself is inherently evil, because underneath the distortions and inequities there remains something genuinely remarkable. Adam Smith’s deeper insight was not simply about greed or self-interest. One of his most important observations involved the division of labor and the extraordinary things human beings can accomplish through specialization and cooperation.

That sounds abstract until you really start examining ordinary objects.

In The Pencil, Henry Petroski explores the hidden complexity behind something as simple as a pencil. Wood, graphite, rubber, lacquer, metal, mining, forestry, transportation, manufacturing equipment, supply chains, chemistry, engineering. Thousands of people contribute fragments of knowledge and labor toward the creation of an object so common we barely notice it anymore.

Nobody fully understands every step involved in making a pencil. Yet pencils continue to appear with astonishing reliability. Usually right up until the moment when you urgently need one and discover every pencil in your house has apparently joined a migration herd and disappeared together.

The Incredible Bread Machine explores similar territory using bread as an example. Bread turns out to involve an entire hidden civilization. Farmers, mechanics, truck drivers, fertilizer producers, mill operators, machinists, fuel suppliers, factory workers, software systems, distribution networks. The sheer amount of coordination hiding inside a loaf of bread is almost absurd once you start tracing it backward.

Nobody stands above these systems directing every movement. Civilization emerges from countless local decisions, exchanges, agreements, and adaptations.

That idea feels deeply connected to Contours of Tomorrow.

Much of human reality is built from shared symbolic systems that only function because large groups of people collectively participate in them.

Language itself works that way.

There is nothing inherently "rock-like" about the sound "rock." No law of physics requires that particular arrangement of noises to represent a hard chunk of minerals sitting on the ground. English speakers simply inherited a shared agreement that those sounds point to that object. Other languages use completely different sounds. None of them are objectively more correct.

In a very real sense, language is a shared fiction. Not a falsehood, but a collectively maintained symbolic system.

Money works similarly.

A dollar bill is paper and ink. A number in a bank database is electronic information stored in magnetic or solid-state memory somewhere in a climate-controlled building full of blinking lights and people drinking coffee. Yet collectively we agree that these symbols represent value, labor, trust, and future exchange.

Language allows thought to move between people. Money allows effort and value to move between people.

Both systems allow cooperation at scales far beyond personal relationships.

Of course, systems capable of creating enormous prosperity can also create enormous imbalance. I am very aware of the grotesque concentration of wealth in the modern world and the ways markets can drift away from human flourishing. Powerful systems optimize aggressively. Sometimes they optimize for outcomes that damage the larger system around them.

A river can irrigate farms or flood towns. Usually it depends on whether anyone bothered to build sensible boundaries.

Markets are incredibly effective coordination engines. They are less reliable as moral philosophies. Human beings still have to decide what kind of society they want these systems to support.

Maybe that is partly why the idea of an oratorio about economics lingers in my mind.

An orchestra and choir are both coordination systems. Individual musicians and voices perform specialized roles while following shared structures and signals. No single singer contains the whole piece. No violin understands the entire composition. Yet together they create harmonies and emotional textures far larger than any one participant could produce alone.

Civilization may work much the same way.

Billions of people contribute partial knowledge, small acts of labor, fragments of creativity, tiny moments of trust. Most of us will never meet. We still participate together in systems capable of building cities, feeding nations, inventing technologies, composing symphonies, and occasionally creating entirely new forms of prosperity from little more than an idea shared at the right moment.

That capacity still feels a little miraculous to me.

The challenge ahead is not simply deciding whether capitalism is good or bad. The harder and more interesting challenge is learning how to shape these vast cooperation systems so that more people get a seat inside the concert hall instead of hearing the music only faintly from somewhere out in the cold.