Five Ideas That Matter

The rewards we get from what we do and buy have trended towards the financial and material for many years BUT are now trending towards the non-financial. The most obvious example is the unexpected but game changing momentum behind online reputation systems, review systems and collaborative filtering systems.

Terms such as good capital, spiritual capital index, spiritual capitalism, and ethical capitalism are negligible in quantity before the past decade.

For example “ethical capitalism” as a term is referenced around 7,000 times in Google Timeline, since 1880. Almost 5,000 of those references have come in the past 8 years, peaking during this crisis.

By way of contrast, Technorati records only 1 blog post tagged ethical capitalism in the three months prior to writing this article (March – June 2009) and a very low level of references to ethical capitalism within posts (the term “profit” outperforms ethical capitalism by around 3,000:1).

The prevalence of the term “profit” however needs putting in context , as the web is also alive with consternation around issues such as “progress” and “crisis of capitalism”. Currently the tag “progress” is closely associated with the tags “grant” and “loan”.  Over the past three months there have been approximately 50% more blog references to crisis than progress, an indicator of where the collective consciousness is moving.

The term spiritual capitalism  likewise begins to make an appearance towards the millennium and then retains strong interest on Timeline. 2009 is a peak, with spiritual intelligence gaining ground over the past week.