I do think that a proper start, though, would be to go back to fifth grade and take a more complete view of capitalism as a system, revisiting its basic definitions.

I’m calling our view incomplete if we don’t consider how capitalism, like any system, articulates and makes plans for its externalities and forseeable failures. But, we have not heard much discussion around, “Yep, capitalism is what we want, but as with any system, let’s talk about how we’ll handle its failures.” Glad Bill Gates is using his weight to put that thought out there.

He does recognize that the traditional mechanisms, laws and social programming, are not working to mitigate or address failure.

But capitalism can do very well with those failures unaddressed.

Civil society probably can’t. …China seems to recognize the risk of a few million disgruntled people united by conspicuous disparity.

But I don’t think we cut straight to a moral appeal at the point of realizing the limits of laws and programs.

I think policy led by overt consideration of the natural and inherent failings and how we fix them (using laws, social programs, other) would be a solid start that might lead to real innovations that could take on pretty big scale. This isn’t the same as starting with the moral approach. Morality has the leading place for me, but it’s impact will be limited if we can’t make “the right thing” a natural outcome as well as a leading call to action.

Addressing failure as a natural thing and addressing it sytematically would make us set real goals, e.g. not the eradication of poverty, but rather the eradication of the patterns of the same folks and geographies being destitute, relegating poverty to a natural imperfection, but one that isn’t so sytemically wide and one that can be fixed when it occurs and reoccurs. Innovation in this context would be powerful.

We’ve done it with cars already…

People buy cars knowing that they will break down and nobody freaks out. No rallies or concerts to eradicate car brokenness. We don’t assign merit to cars on a zero sum basis when considering this breaking down: “My car works. Cars are good.” “My car’s broken. Cars are bad.”

Cars are cars. They break. We fix em. We keep it movin.

Seems like capitalism could at least get that treatment.