The poor clients could only scratch their heads in confusion as they tried to decipher the gobbledygook from folks who were most decidedly not putting their interests first. And there were no rational alternatives. Those early pioneers addressed those needs wholly, helping them with those decisions together with looks at taxes, retirement and estate planning. They planted the seeds of a new authentic profession. No one had ever done that before. Thinking big.

Then they went even bigger. They began the College for Financial Planning. They instituted designations and started codes of ethics. They began membership associations and brought folks together within their vision. Of course, they did not have the sophistication available to us today. Pioneering is not sophisticated work. It is just thinking big.

It must have felt a bit like entering King Tut's tomb. They took the flickering lamp of "thinking big" into the unknown. In so doing, they changed the world. Especially, they revolutionized those staid industries of insurance and securities along with a couple more such as banking, accounting and law with ripples extending everywhere. In so doing, they discovered awesome treasures affecting millions of lives.

Of course, they could not have known where their thoughts were leading. How could they know what they had started? But 41 years later, we have both privileges and the responsibilities of seeing that cave illuminated, many of its nooks explored. But not all the treasures have been revealed. Now it is our time to "think big."

"Thinking Big" expands and fertilizes our gardens of knowledge. It takes us into fields our founding pioneers could not have imagined. Most especially, thinking big takes money away from the macro and into the worlds of the individual, worlds that have been excessively challenged of late.

Finology's most notable characteristic is that it works with numerators-one person at a time. Classical economics has mightily dissed it for the past couple of centuries. Thinking big says it is time to put our feet down.

The denominator folks, the macros, have in fact, dominated financial thinking and financial theory. They set the vocabulary and the rules of economic theory. They bulldozed individuals and marginalized us. Not that this is necessarily wrong for the development of macro theory. They needed to minimize the moving parts. Unfortunately, it is desperately wrong for the development of comprehensive economic theory that includes human beings. "Comprehensive" means "all inclusive." The macros forgot to include human beings.

Oops.

Note:
1. There is no word in the English language to describe the relationship between individuals and money. The implications of this are startling.
2. The macroeconomic view of individual humans is to confine them to that insulting filament of a human icon known as "Homo Economicus."
3. The macros see Homo Economicus, i.e., human beings, as serving "rational," narrowly defined self-interests and personal utilities. Of course, there is nothing at all human about Homo Economicus. Indeed, his very existence, even in theory, is an insult to authentic human beings everywhere. Nonetheless, he controls the economic/financial theory of large-scale systems-not a good thing, IMHO.
The macros view money as value-neutral. This fits with Homo Economicus, but it does not fit with authentic human beings for whom money is actually value laden.

We cannot cut the individual out of the large-scale conversation. What works theoretically for denominators does not generally work in actuality for numerators. Finologists are primarily in the numerator business. We have something to contribute to the large-scale conversations and their critical implications.