New World Order
See other New World Order Articles
Title: Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050
Source:
Forbes
URL Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhan ... humanity-by-2050/#7bc8a19e4a36
Published: Feb 16, 2016
Author: Drew Hansen
Post Date: 2016-02-16 17:54:41 by Willie Green
Keywords: None
Views: 24822
Comments: 163
Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale. • Species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate over the previous 65 million years (see Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School). • Since 2000, 6 million hectares of primary forest have been lost each year. That’s 14,826,322 acres, or just less than the entire state of West Virginia (see the 2010 assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN). • Even in the U.S., 15% of the population lives below the poverty line. For children under the age of 18, that number increases to 20% (see U.S. Census). • The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 (see United Nations’ projections). Capitalism is unsustainable in its current form. How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain? Human activities are behind the extinction crisis. Commercial agriculture, timber extraction, and infrastructure development are causing habitat loss and our reliance on fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change. Public corporations are responding to consumer demand and pressure from Wall Street. Professors Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg published Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations last fall, arguing that businesses are locked in a cycle of exploiting the world’s resources in ever more creative ways. “Our book shows how large corporations are able to continue engaging in increasingly environmentally exploitative behaviour by obscuring the link between endless economic growth and worsening environmental destruction,” they wrote. Yale sociologist Justin Farrell studied 20 years of corporate funding and found that “corporations have used their wealth to amplify contrarian views [of climate change] and create an impression of greater scientific uncertainty than actually exists.” Corporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health. We need to build a new system: one that will balance economic growth with sustainability and human flourishing. A new generation of companies are showing the way forward. They’re infusing capitalism with fresh ideas, specifically in regards to employee ownership and agile management. The Increasing Importance Of Distributed Ownership And Governance Fund managers at global financial institutions own the majority (70%) of the public stock exchange. These absent owners have no stake in the communities in which the companies operate. Furthermore, management-controlled equity is concentrated in the hands of a select few: the CEO and other senior executives. On the other hand, startups have been willing to distribute equity to employees. Sometimes such equity distribution is done to make up for less than competitive salaries, but more often it’s offered as a financial incentive to motivate employees toward building a successful company. According to The Economist, today’s startups are keen to incentivize via shared ownership: The central difference lies in ownership: whereas nobody is sure who owns public companies, startups go to great lengths to define who owns what. Early in a company’s life, the founders and first recruits own a majority stake—and they incentivise people with ownership stakes or performance-related rewards. That has always been true for startups, but today the rights and responsibilities are meticulously defined in contracts drawn up by lawyers. This aligns interests and creates a culture of hard work and camaraderie. Because they are private rather than public, they measure how they are doing using performance indicators (such as how many products they have produced) rather than elaborate accounting standards. This trend hearkens back to cooperatives where employees collectively owned the enterprise and participated in management decisions through their voting rights. Mondragon is the oft-cited example of a successful, modern worker cooperative. Mondragon’s broad-based employee ownership is not the same as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. With ownership comes a say – control – over the business. Their workers elect management, and management is responsible to the employees. REI is a consumer cooperative that drew attention this past year when it opted out of Black Friday sales, encouraging its employees and customers to spend the day outside instead of shopping. I suspect that the most successful companies under this emerging form of capitalism will have less concentrated, more egalitarian ownership structures. They will benefit not only financially but also communally. Joint Ownership Will Lead To Collaborative Management The hierarchical organization of modern corporations will give way to networks or communities that make collaboration paramount. Many options for more fluid, agile management structures could take hold. For instance, newer companies are experimenting with alternative management models that seek to empower employees more than a traditional hierarchy typically does. Of these newer approaches, holacracy is the most widely known. It promises to bring structure and discipline to a peer-to-peer workplace. Holacracy “is a new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss.” Companies like Zappos and Medium are in varying stages of implementing the management system. Valve Software in Seattle goes even further, allowing employees to select which projects they want to work on. Employees then move their desks to the most conducive office area for collaborating with the project team. These are small steps toward a system that values the employee more than what the employee can produce. By giving employees a greater say in decision-making, corporations will make choices that ensure the future of the planet and its inhabitants. 
(Credit: ZINIYANGE AUNTONY/AFP/Getty Images)
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 57.
#15. To: All (#0)
This is really funny as it has been capitalism has been feeding much of the world for quite sometime now.
should this be so it is because it is profitable to do so, but then it depends on how you define "much". has capitalism donated food to Etheopia? does capitalism feed China or India? I think by much you mean the middle class of the western world. Does capitalism produce surpluses because government subsidies them, they would not do it otherwise.. the argument is flawed
IDM it's being done by a capitalistic system, not a commie or socialist system but a capitalistic one. b"ut then it depends on how you define "much". Try this on for size, the U.S. is the world's largest agricultural exporter in the world. And not by a liitle, in 2008 the value of U.S. agricultural exports was $118.3 billion vs. the next country at just $79 billion. China was 10th at $35.9 billion. How do you like dem apples?
Here's some more apples for your pie. For the period of 1988-2009 the U.S. has been the world's largest supplier of food aid - and not by just a little. The U.S. was consistently 5 to 10 times higher in tonnage each year than the 2nd place European Community as a whole and 10 to 100 times higher each year than China. India has occasionally been in the top 25 over this period. Russia has only sporadically been in the top 25 supplier countries and only since 2003. So suck on those facts for awhile.
A few more facts for you to chew on.
It's an argument worth having. I just don't agree that "sustainability" is no more than a code word for "socialism". This is a classic legal problem of the commons, how to use a common resource for the benefit of all without destroying it for everyone. Let's look at the crisis in groundwater around the world via some articles posted here at LF. In California (and China and some Arab countries), wells are going dry due to overpumping. China is socialist, California (more or less) capitalist, Saudi Arabia theocratic. Yet all three are having to drill new water wells several miles deep and facing shortages. LF: California Land Subsidence Hits Record Levels, nativist nationalist, 2015 LF: US to overtake Saudi Arabia in oil as China's water runs dry, A K A Stone, 2012 LF: Pumped beyond limits, many U.S. aquifers in decline, TooConservative, 2015 LF: Seas Beneath The Sands, A K A Stone, 2007 LF: Time, Water Running Out for America's Biggest Aquifer, war, 2010 So is the depletion of groundwater by overpumping a socialism problem, a capitalism problem, a theocracy problem, or a sustainability problem? I'd say sustainability is the culprit, far more so than political or economic systems.
It seems to be a product of greed and the willingness to shortchange tomorrow in favor of today, and that seems to common to many economic systems. In the exalted USSR we have the example of the Aral Sea, not from groundwater pumping; but the same issues are at work. There was a book published in the 50's titled "Big Dam Foolishness" by Elmer Peterson, it's actually online. The guy was prophetic, but then again so were others when the lands around the 100th meridian went under the plow, and even in the writings of John Wesley Powell. Cassandra seems to have a lot of company.
#70. To: nativist nationalist (#57)
I've seen the photos, read the story. The Soviets diverted the lake's rivers for irrigation and made it shrink to almost nothing. It had been one of the four biggest lakes in the world, a hub of commerce, fishing, etc.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestUnless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050
#16. To: SOSO (#15)
capitalism has been feeding much of the world for quite sometime now
#22. To: paraclete, Willie Green, A Pole, All (#16)
Does capitalism produce surpluses because government subsidies them, they would not do it otherwise..
#25. To: paraclete, Willie Green, A Pole, TooConservative, All (#22)
#26. To: paraclete, Willie Green, A Pole, TooConservative, All (#25)
#27. To: SOSO, paraclete, Willie Green, A Pole, nativist nationalist, A K A Stone, Pericles (#26)
A few more facts for you to chew on.
LF: What California can learn from Saudi Arabia’s water mystery, Willie Green, 2015
#57. To: TooConservative (#27)
So is the depletion of groundwater by overpumping a socialism problem, a capitalism problem, a theocracy problem, or a sustainability problem? I'd say sustainability is the culprit, far more so than political or economic systems.
Replies to Comment # 57. In the exalted USSR we have the example of the Aral Sea, not from groundwater pumping; but the same issues are at work.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 57.
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]