Sometimes when I am in a mood for a PJ, I brag to my friends that I tasted my first success in business as a six-year-old. My friends get mightily impressed and invariably ask me, what exposure to business did I have so early in life? Their wondrous wows soon turn into unmentionable profanities when I tell them that I won a game of Vyapaar as a six-year-old. So far, I have managed to not get physically injured for bragging about my ?business success in cradle? credentials. The game of Vyapaar or Naya vyapaar, as it is nowadays called, is a replica of a board game called ?Monopoly?. Monopoly was invented in the US in 1930s by Charles Darrow, supposedly in an attempt to design a game to understand the Great Depression (1929-1939). The game itself is named after the economic concept of monopoly, the domination of a market by a single entity. The popular view is that the game is an elementary replica of the way an economy works. Coming to think of it, the game not only crudely demonstrates how economies work but also how they fail. The game ends when one player wins by causing everyone else to go bankrupt.

The power of dice in the game is a proxy for the power of impersonal market forces in the economy. As a child, when the dice rolled in my favour and I hit a jackpot, I jumped in glee. If the dice rolled against me and I got parked in ?Jail?, I grumbled. Nothing much has changed when I look at my behaviour in the business world as a grown up. When the economy is doing well and I am busy raking moolah left, right and centre, I profess that the blind market forces are great. If they give me a bad deal and I wind up on the street, I protest.

One major difference between the game and the real economy is that in the game, I had no control over the roll of dice. In the real world, I would like to believe that it is not just a game of probabilities, or at least, chance does not play a very large role. Chance isn?t causing booms and busts in the economy. They happen to us because of the choices we collectively make. Economics is the story of how we manage our stuff-what we do with what we have. There is no impersonal market force determining which direction economies should go. Rather, we decide. We decide whether to put research money into renewable energy or explore new oil fields, produce fuel-efficient vehicles or manufacture diesel-gulping SUVs. We determine according to our philosophies the way our economies get moulded. Philosophies tell us whether we should choose the economics of cooperating over competing, preserving over exploiting, nurturing over dominating. Philosophies help us decide if we choose to do more with less or less with more.

If our economics reflect us, I mean if in fact they are our philosophies gone public, then I would like to believe that we have the power to renovate our economics by evolving our philosophies. We know that we don?t have to be stuck with one brand of philosophy, which means that we do not have to be stuck with one framework of economics either.

English philosopher Francis Bacon put it very aptly when he said, ?knowledge is power?. Today, however, the big question that we need to ask ourselves is what are we doing with the power of knowledge. With the same knowledge, we can turn the earth into a peaceful paradise or a radioactive dump, an equitable economic community or an Orwellian economic slave colony. What?s the use of all our knowledge if we lack the inward growth to use it wisely?

But, then again, it is not all bad news. Sure, it is depressing to think what our philosophies must be, given the world as it is. That said, it is also hopeful and downright empowering to realise that the power to change things lies with us. Yet, to make these efforts most effective, we need to rethink the philosophies that cause the bummers in the first place. If our current economics, for instance, seems to suggest that boom and bust due to impersonal market forces is a necessary evil or that rising economic inequities are inescapable, we do not have to implicitly accept that there can be no better economic framework. If, for example, our economics claims that the ultimate objectives for corporations should be wealth creation and profit maximisation, even if it is through dividing and destroying, we don?t have to accept that as the gospel truth with no alternative.

Today, we need economics with a superior philosophy. An economic response to cure the present-day ills with a similar philosophy would be like using ?band-aids? on broken bones. The philosophical structure has to be reset before real healing can begin. Challenging ourselves to look beyond, and review the philosophies that underlie our economics, will spur us to evolve our economics for greater good. And, maybe as a starting point, we can begin with a new game for our children called accha vyapaar as a signboard, for times to come.

The author is CEO, Quantumphinance