I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways in which the liberal communities I’m attached to carry bias.  Race, class, sure, but also other kinds of bias.  This is about our bias against business and money.  It was originally a Facebook post, but it got long and I think it needs to be more permanent.  In working with a client recently, I was helping to reframe their approach to money, and it got my gears turning.

It’s amazing how much just listening to Wharton’s satellite radio for a couple of years in my car gave me access to a different way of thinking–about money, about corporate structure, about the role of these things in shaping the economy, about responsible structures in capitalism.

And understanding that stuff better, having access to voices and real humans talking about it (mostly Wharton professors, pretty good at explaining stuff) helps expand the repertoire of things I can random-access, which is how I synthesize my learning and make new ideas. It means that my eyes don’t glaze over when I look at a budget sheet; it means that when I want to think about an idea for my business, the spreadsheet helps me evaluate it.

BUT most important is that it breaks down the false barriers. Liberal social-change-oriented people tend to resist talking about or engaging with money or business structures. And it consistently shoots our momentum in the foot. We can’t afford to ignore a huge part of the available data because it…what, makes us uncomfortable? We can’t do it with race, we can’t do it with sex…AND we can’t do it with money. Or profit or business. It’s killing us, and putting us at a huge disadvantage relative to people with less liberal values.

We don’t need to take on the values that stereotypical corporations have in order to use the learning and information they have. But we do need to use every tool that’s out there. Including this one.

Listen to business radio. Get the Wharton channel if you can. (Wharton is a business school; they can’t help being educational. If NPR had a business channel, this is what it would sound like.) Read business and finance magazines. Read critically; look for bias; break down statistics. Don’t just assume it’s good interpretation. But learn how the system works. Then you can use it.