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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: 31467
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.
(Credit: ZINIYANGE AUNTONY/AFP/Getty Images)
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. (1 image)
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 50.
Go to Russia and see the effects of socialism. I would like to see you on your knees thanking the Lord you were born in Ameerica.
#18. To: GarySpFC (#17)
I would like to see you on your knees thanking the Lord you were born in Ameerica.
You will not see me thanking the Lord for being born in america, I was born in a better place, one that can see the rationale for ensuring that everyone is looked after. Call it socialism if you like, but I think of it as responsibility.
You can scoff but communism might be a step on the path of reform for some places, China for example; the rotten system had to be swept away. This can give rise to excesses as it did in Russia and China and it too must be swept away. The great difficulty is controlling capitalism so it produces wealth for all and not just wealth for some
#24. To: paraclete, GarySpFC (#18)
The great difficulty is controlling capitalism so it produces wealth for all and not just wealth for some
Yeah, you are right. Under communism Russia and China both produced a broad and deep middle class with a high standard of living, broader and deeper than the U.S. BTW, what color is the sky in your world?
#29. To: SOSO (#24) (Edited)
Before Communism, Russia and China were worse for most people. So was Vietnam. What Communism excels at is getting everybody into a house, getting everybody basic health care, getting everybody enough to eat, and getting everybody literate.
The Communists have made sure to shore up the bottom to a universal standard of decency.
Ever been through the Tijuana slums, where people are living in cardboard huts, or seen images of the poor places in India, where people are literally starving and living in mud?
Well, the Communists take all of the property and redistribute the wealth, and they bring up the bottom. China always had famines. Their last one was under Mao, during the transition. They don't have famines anymore, because Communists are good at shoring up the bottom.
Illiteracy rates in poor countries are high, but Communists educate everybody and get to high literacy rates in a generation.
The POSITIVE legacy of Communism in all of those countries is that it took what was a completely backward, half-literate society that had starvation and people perishing from the elements, and brought everybody, all the way to the bottom, up to a working class standard of living.
And that is quite an achievement, one that capitalst countries do not achieve. The bottom rung in America is more miserable than the bottom rung was in Soviet Russia.
That said, once those levels of need satisfaction of the bottom have been rounded up, and everybody else has been rounded down, Communism hasn't gone anywhere, because it has always gotten entangled with war with the rest of the world, and war is expensive.
China is a new thing, though. Thanks to size and nuclear weapons, the ChiCom homeland is a secure sanctuary, and the Chinese seem to be transitioning from universal working class Communism to middle class Communism. The nationalist leaven in that bread makes the Chinese model unappealing to neighbors, but everybody loves money, and the Chinese have great gobs of that, so even Goldman Sachs is eagerly sucking at that tit.
Cuba, for that matter, seems to also have succeeded at it, and that in spite of having been under a US embargo.
The US ideological fear was not that the Communists would take over the world. It was that they would SUCCEED. We did what we could to ensure that it wouldn't, but we were not successful in killing it in the crib.
European socialism takes the Communist ideal of rounding up the bottom to a standard of decency, but retaining considerable upward mobility. It's an appealing model, but there is not enough wealth redistribution to make it actually sustainable.
Trump sees it, and realizes that getting the American lower class back into factories here, at the expense of cheap goods at the store, is a national security issue.
None of the other Republicans see it, or will.
#50. To: Vicomte13 (#29)
Well, the Communists take all of the property and redistribute the wealth,
You are nothing more then a covetous thief like your father the devil.
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