The Science and Art of Regenerative Economics

The summer he left JPMorgan, he says, he had promised himself time off. The first day he went back into Manhattan was September 11, 2001. He had a 9:30 meeting downtown about a charter school company he had invested in. A man came into the subway car at City Hall. He announced that a plane had hit the trade center. Fullerton was 41, with three young kids, no job and no career. He could not explain to them what world they would grow up in. He read Limits to Growth, the 1972 MIT study for the Club of Rome. Around 2004 he did a systems workshop with Dennis Meadows, one of its authors. They stood in a circle holding hands to feel a feedback loop. Someone asked Meadows how we would know when collapse had begun. His answer: that is easy, the first thing to go will be our ability to cope.

The polycrisis is the symptom, he says. It is the social, political, ecological and financial mess, all tangled together. None of us can hold it in our heads at once. A layer below it he puts the myth of separation. It splits men from women, left brain from right, and humans from a thing we call nature. It splits Black people from white, and immigrants from the rest of us. The myth is old. The Western scientific revolution sped it up. The Newtonian way of thinking we were all taught breaks things into pieces without our noticing. So we see only symptoms and call the symptoms problems. If we are in tech, we think life is for solving problems. If we are in finance, we think it is for optimizing return on capital. Twenty years of sustainable business and ESG never touched any of this.

The last shift this size, he says, was from the medieval world to the modern one. The Earth stopped being the center of the universe. The church's reading of God's wishes came into doubt. For fifteen hundred years before that, astronomers explained the wobbles of the planets with epicycles. They were patching a theory that had to be true. Galileo proved Copernicus right and got house arrest. Fullerton thinks this shift is at least as large, in how we perceive what we are looking at. The consequences are larger because of the size of the human footprint. Paradigms do not let go easily. We still call it a sunrise.

Newton's laws of gravity gave the world a clockwork universe. A couple of centuries later, a few men in England, France and then America wanted to be the Newton of economics. Adam Smith's subject had been political economy. They took the politics out because it was the messy part. With mechanics you can run equations that give answers. Fullerton found the page in Fisher's foundational textbook that says it outright. Take the mechanics. Substitute an individual for a particle and disutility for work. Then the only reason to labor is money. That is the math under neoclassical economics today, at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Fisher built a hydraulic machine to model the economy, twice.

Modern finance is the next layer of the machine, and the part he knows. Its design is to optimize the risk-adjusted return on capital. In practice that means using natural capital and social capital as inputs. The only limits are not breaking laws most of the time and not violating regulations some of the time. The inputs build the central mountain of financial capital. The other two mountains get drawn down as needed. The result is a world with enormous financial capital, planetary boundaries breached, and grotesque and accelerating inequality. The same algorithm organized the resources that built the modern age. Finance is not bad, he says, and neither are the people in it. The algorithm was designed for a different context. Neoliberals and socialists both run it. That is why he will not take the left-versus-right bait.

Seeing is believing: show me the model, build the company, prove it works. Einstein's point, he says, is that the reverse is also true. A theory is a belief system, a story that is neither proven nor disproven. The story we tell decides what we are able to see. The sun-rises-in-the-east story held the Earth at the center for fifteen centuries. The economy-as-machine story was invented when there were far fewer than a billion people. The economy's metabolism was trivial against the planet then. The planet was the same size and held far more life. The metaphor he expects to replace it is an organism, a network or an ecosystem. He thinks a future historian will date the end of the modern era to the first quarter of this century. The bell, he says, is 9/11.

Ben's provocation over the break is that a regenerative era is what comes if we get it right. Fullerton pushes back. The arrows are indeterminate, he says. The story does not change with the outcome. A light brush fire gets put out, same story. The forest burns down, same story. The forest recovers through the regenerative process, which is how life works. He takes comfort in the project being bigger than his lifetime. Andrea Illy, the coffee maker, once brought a photograph of a cathedral to a talk they gave together. The builders never sat in it. That is how he gets out of bed for work that feels trivial against the scale.

Through impact investing he got involved in holistic planned grazing. It mimics how buffalo roamed. The herds were dense because of wolves. Hooves broke the hardpan, so rain soaked in like a sponge instead of running off. Manure was left behind, and the herd kept moving. Grass gets torn up but not to the dirt, then rests, like muscle after the gym. These are perennial grasses, so most of the energy goes to the roots. The roots pull carbon into the soil. That is why there are twelve feet of soil under Iowa. He has stood on a corn farm in Iowa beside a cemetery four feet higher than the field. Cows are a tool for replicating the natural system, he says. The fight should be with the industrial meat system that feeds them corn, not with the animal. The question that follows him off the ridge: what if we managed the economy as a living system?

The word regenerative is about to be an adjective in front of everything. He wants it kept for its real meaning: the process that describes how life works. We could study that process for the rest of our lives without understanding it. If sustainability is the outcome we want, regeneration is the process that delivers it. So the work is learning the process. He defines regenerative economics as the application of nature's patterns of systemic health, self-organization, self-renewal and regenerative vitality to socio-economic systems. The first move is to reconnect politics to economics. That means power cannot be ignored.

Reductionism goes back to Newton. Break what is too big to grasp into parts. Measure the parts, model the system, control it. Wes Jackson, the plant geneticist, says there is nothing wrong with the reductionist method. The trouble starts when we confuse the method with the way the world works. A phone is complicated. Nothing inside it changes when you plug it in. A living system's context changes all the time: more rain or less, generational trauma, a bomb on the house. It has to adapt. Our smart people are good at building machines and at optimizing one variable. They are bad at complexity. They are worse at noticing which kind of problem they are holding. The polycrisis makes problems, so we point AI at them. AI is built on reductionism.

One: the economy is a living system, not a machine. He would now say the economy is a story, a language. But the language has to be designed on living systems. The economy is the interface between humanity and the biosphere, and it is made of human beings. Two: there is a science of living systems, a century old, with patterns and principles. That is a fact, not an assertion. Three: suppose the human economy is to stay alive. Then someone has to explain why it would be the only living system exempt from those patterns. That gives a compass unlike anything in neoclassical economics, business school, or the politics of either party. All of them accept the machine story.

He learned recently that Irving Fisher was a leader of the American eugenics movement. Fisher was a conservative, so perhaps no shock. John Maynard Keynes was a eugenicist too. He offers that to anyone still pointing fingers across the aisle. He assumes neither man was simply evil. Each had a rationale. He raises it for what blinded them. They accepted that not only the economy but society was a system to be controlled. Complexity is not controllable. At the foundation of the story we tell about economics is an idea about control and power. A better historian could trace it to patriarchy.

Of the eight principles, the one he calls most important is being in right relationship. Anyone familiar with indigenous wisdom will recognize it. The whole living-systems view lines up with the ancient wisdom traditions. He finds that awe-inspiring. We went through mechanistic thinking and came back to what those traditions intuited. We know the place for the first time, as Eliot put it. Gregory Bateson, father of his friend Nora Bateson, used to hold up his hand in talks. The room offers a hand, a wedding band, five fingers, all nouns. What makes it a hand is four relationships, invisible until activated. The parts could look like anything and still function as a hand. Learning to see what we already look at is not a trivial project.

The second principle he teaches is one he learned from an ecologist, so it does not sound like a tree-hugger thing. His feet are empowered to participate in the circulation of oxygen. That is good for the feet down there in the global south. It is good for the rest of him too, because he can walk and run. Disempower most of the parts of a system and the whole system fails to benefit from them. He puts the disempowered at more than half of this country. He could argue ninety percent of humanity. Then he asks why the social system is sick. The arts were disempowered when they were made an elective. This turns inequality from a moral case into a survival requirement. He wants to see what that does to a policy agenda.

His theory of change comes from Donella Meadows, lead author of Limits to Growth. He dedicated the book to her without ever meeting her. Her paper Places to Intervene in a System lists the leverage points. It puts the paradigm at the top. The ability to let go of paradigms is above that. So this one will have to go too someday. Letting go of the old one was a no-brainer for him, a spear in the chest. For most of the Wall Street people he has talked to, it is not. A paradigm is an identity. It is like an atheist asking the pope to give up Catholicism. It is hardest for someone over sixty and successful whose whole life is built on it. So the change will not be led by the sixty-year-olds. That is where the room comes in.

He had given up on reading Fuller until a friend insisted on Grunch of Giants, the short 1983 critique of capitalism. The critique is not that good, he says. The beginning and the end are. Nobody had told him Fuller used the word regeneration. He quotes the last pages: nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system, and if we discover the laws that govern it and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success. The book also makes clear what happens if we do not.