There are facts, and then there is interpretation. Is that glass halfempty or half full? The authors of "The New Capitalists" are definitely"half-full" men....They set out a vision of a new "civil economy," the goal of which issustainable prosperity brought about by "responsible management."
Cynics might stop reading at this point, but they would be wrong.
The argument is not being offered up by a rabble of anti-globalization protesters. Davis is a leading corporate governance expert, and Lukomnik is a former deputy comptroller for New York City and is now a financial consultant. Pitt-Watson was until recently chief executive of Hermes Focus asset management, an activist fund manager.
The whole piece is worth a read.
But - here's a point to ponder. "Capitalism" is a definition, or a justification, of an environment. As such, it directs our attention the wrong way. What is more interesting to focus on is the product of that environment, or of communism, or of socialism, or of pretty much any resource-distribution algorithm - the large-scale organization of humans into some kind of larger active structure. One such species is the "corporation." And, as they say "for profit" is a tax strategy, not a business strategy.
In fact, anything that's alive has to take in more energy than it expends, if it is to continue to live and survive. Arguments over rates only change the time constant or estimated time at the destination. Overly rapid growth is self-destructive and miserable to live near, but popular among stressed small-scale investors seeking 37% on their money. Very large investors will tend to be looking for anything that's sustainable at any true return greater than zero.
Many advocates of public health get carried away with environmental protection and forget that losing one's job has a pretty large health impact too. If the economy goes totally sour, people's health will go sour too. On the other hand, and less obvious to business leaders apparently, it goes the other way. If the population of humans that are being used as workers or consumers all goes broke or dies off from pollution or poverty, there goes the business.
So, both public health and business, kicking and screaming, are going to have to come together and work together to solve the joint problems of survival and sustainability, and multiple levels, cellular, organ systems, humans, families, neighborhoods, communities, states, countries, continents, and planetary. These only look like separate problems because both sides are using too narrow a time-window for planning strategy and assessing impact.
Besides, after a fairly short period, maybe within our lifetimes, some corporation, legal or otherwise, may succeed in taking over everything. Then what? At some point the question comes up, once you own all the marbles, what are you going to do with them?
Then, there's no one left to blame for things that go wrong, or systems that start failing right and left. Then, the "natural accidents" that Charles Perrow writes about will start happening more and more frequently, despite, or more precisely, because of misguided theories about the nature of top-down "control" of complexity.
Machines may be controllable, but living, complex, adaptive systems are not controllable in that sense. This is a problem that has to be faced, whether coming from business, capitalism, pure greed, or the most altruistic religion.
These are "system" problems, and we're surrounded with them, because they're the sludge that's left over after all the easy problems got solved, after everything that was linear and reductionistic got reduced. Efforts to forcibly make the rest of life into a "linear" solution and to "get into line" are doomed to fail, because, alas, they are loops and loops don't reshape into lines without breaking them.
As is obvious in fields like enterprise-wide information processing, just trying to keep this complex mess from crashing is becoming a full-time job, with every part migrating on its own. It's like herding cats. As the world gets smaller, the slack gets less, and the systems interact more and more. That's the world we need to develop the tools to address - the heavy interaction end, and how to make that work at all, period.
(photo by alanconnor )
technorati tags:capitalism, governance, ethics, sustainability, future, vision, responsibility, accountability
1 comment:
Interesting commentary, and consistent with the book, which points out how owners of corporations have become reflective of society as a whole, and spends a fair amount of time and effort discussing time frame mismatches.
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