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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: 25041
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)
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#5. To: Willie Green (#0)
We need to build a new system: one that will balance economic growth with sustainability and human flourishing. capitalism isn't to blame for huma greed. There is nothing essentially wrong with the business model that takes unvestment by many to produce a product. However the idea that stockholders are entitled to super profits and CEO entitked to extravagant renumeration is what is essentially wrong with the system. What is needed is to measure more than profit and earnings per share and to truely determine whether real value is being gained from the endeavour. Whilst not being in favour of a carbon market there is a lot to be said for a tax or royalty or resources used including land so that there is an economic benefit to the community in general. This does exist in some extractive industries but should be more generally applied to limit unnecessary transportation of materials and waste. What I'm getting at is that in many industries there is massive waste and that waste is not valued and therefore all waste that isn't recycled should be taxed. If you have to dig a ton of dirt to gain an ounce of gold you should pay for the ton of dirt, niether should you be able to pile that spoil up in man made mountains
We need to build a new system: one that will balance economic growth with sustainability and human flourishing. capitalism isn't to blame for huma greed. The comrades conveniently forget exactly how communism worked in the USSR. Indeed people owned nothing and had state constructed, managed and provided housing. Indeed like most people everywhere, including those in so-called inner city ghettos in the U.S., Ivan and Natalia took care of their assigned housing quarters, keeping them clean, maintaining and enhancing their inner living spaces to the best of their financial capability. But the outer "public areas" of the state owned and maintained housing apartments and complexes, including stairwells, hallways and, where present, elevators (if working) were run down, unmaintained and often littered sh*tholes. It was my pleasure to have been invited to dinners and parties at more than a few of these public apartments. Irrespective of their economic status the people were gracious hosts and took pride in what was theirs (even if just temporarily and in name only). No-one, but no-one, felt any personal responsibility for what was just outside their front door and the rest of the state owned public access areas. For all of its shortcomings capitalism expands one's sense of responsibility for his private and public surroundings. And that's another manifestation of human nature. The State can never, ever fulfill, much less equal, the sense responsibility that comes with a sense (real or perceived) of ownership. Simply stated people value their private property and capitalism is the single economic systems that fosters broad, mass ownership of private property AND an expectation, if not demand, for the maintenance of public properties. The real evil of communism was that it ignored human nature and consciously worked to kill the individual human spirit. Socialism is not that far behind communism is this regard, it just is less of a heavy hand on the individual spirit, sense of accomplishment and sense of ownership. Every Russian and citizen of the former USSR knows the story of a bucket full of live crabs.
#11. To: SOSO (#7)
We all agreee that communism is a system of government that has been tried and rejected. However the absense of communism is not capitalism. Socialism has been successful in varying degrees. The fact is unbridled capitalism is just as evil as communism or unbridled socialism. We can agree that personal ownership of property is a natural right, however we have also determined that government is desirable for the collective good and to exercise its functions government needs to own property. It is undesirable for government to own the means of production excepting in wartime, however depending upon scale it may be necessary for government to participate in certain enterprise, at least until an industry is established. This is not socialism. We need to develop a system that has a social conscience so that heavy handed regulation is not necessary to ensure that individual rights are not infringed. Capitalism has demonstrated that it does not respect or demand ethical behaviour. Therefore individuals cannot be allowed to self regulate and government has proven to be ineffective in forseeing the need to regulate. Lets look to apply a simple test. Is any person likely to suffer losss or damage or injury by these actions, if so, then the activity cannot be undertaken whether it is profitable or not
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestCorporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health.
#7. To: paraclete, Willie Green, A Pole (#5)
Replies to Comment # 7. The real evil of communism
End Trace Mode for Comment # 7.
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