Ross: The super-rich have run out of ideas

The stock market keeps hitting records, so all of you should be happy. But are you? No! Of course not. Yancy Strickler, the co-founder of the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, thinks it’s because the super-rich have run out of ideas.

“Like literally trillions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars sitting on the sidelines not being used because the super-rich people who have it don’t see any investments that are like worth their time,” Stickler said.

He says, in his new book, that companies should stop their relentless focus on monetary profits and invest instead in the growth and happiness of their employees and their communities.

“To create collective values, to create social cohesiveness, increasing education levels of our children, to stemming climate change, are amazing uses of money, but because they cannot produce a predictable financial return, we cannot conceive of that as being a real possibility right now,” Strickler said.

But you know what would make it a real possibility right now? If all of us resolved to instantly quit any company that doesn’t make us feel good about what we do. The way you’d instantly quit any company whose paychecks kept bouncing. All we have to do is adopt the mindset that we are owed a happiness wage as well as a monetary wage.

I say we all march to the front office and do that right now. Anybody? (SILENCE) Dang. We were so close.

You can hear Dave’s commentary every morning on Seattle’s Morning News. Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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