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The Fallacy Of Capitalism
polaris_x
Posts: 13,559
The biggest unicorn and rainbows myth is this notion that current day capitalism is good for people. An economic system that does not factor the single most important line item in a societal ledger: SUSTAINABILITY
This undeniable truth will eventually be learned but it will be too late for many.
*******************************************************
http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2016/02/09/unless-it-changes-capitalism-will-starve-humanity-by-2050/#1cf3ed734a36
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)
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.
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.
Recommended by Forbes
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.
This undeniable truth will eventually be learned but it will be too late for many.
*******************************************************
http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2016/02/09/unless-it-changes-capitalism-will-starve-humanity-by-2050/#1cf3ed734a36
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)
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.
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.
Recommended by Forbes
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.
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Comments
Scholars with nothing to gain have been trying to help us baboons see the downward spiral... but we are all too narcissistic to care enough.
The human species is in trouble. I think we've crossed multiple critical thresholds without the means or will to reverse our direction.
Capitalism is based on human greed and that avarice is based on over-consumption of natural resources which will continue to drive an unprecedented number of rapid plant and animal extinctions. We humans fuss over the wall decorations while the foundation under us continues to collapse.
and not zombies.
www.headstonesband.com
But in the end all things work out as they will. Acknowledge there are so many beautiful creatures that have evolved over millions of years. Marvel at birds that come to visit during the winter. Just fascinating. So a shame one species ending their existence so quickly. They will though be back.
And keep in mind, many Americans don't have this position.
Not trying to make a depressing point.
And if it does matter, why?
Does it all even matter if we are just a collection of cells?
If it matters that we live at all then, yes because everything living is a collection of cells.
Is the universe better or worse off if it is full of nuclear waste or lush tropical rainforests?
As far as I know, the universe cannot be either one of those. And it were possible to be one or the other, the answer would depend on who's perspective you mean. To an atom bomb, a universe full of radiation would be like a life-time pass to an exotic island but to a tree frog, a bad trip in hell. And visa verse, in some fashion.
Certainly we humans like our existence but does it really matter at the end of the day?
Again, to whom? In a lyric, Grace Slick once said, "Doesn't mean shit to a tree." So to a tree, probably doesn't mean shit if we are or aren't. We might only mean something to other people (even our dogs and cats would revert to their former human-free state) but don't most of us share a lot of that interrelated meaning and intimacy?
Some of my thinking comes down to God created earth versus an evolutionary/big-bang creation of earth. If we are all here by chance, then whether we trash or don't trash the earth is really not good or bad in the sense we are behaving just like the early atoms coming out of the big bang and evolving with chance and no significant purpose.
I don't know if I'm making any sense. I just hear people say we really need to protect the environment and really at the end of the day it means protect the environment to sustain human life because at the end of the day looking at the billions of years of the earth's existence is there a "good or bad" environment, or does the earth just exist in whatever state it exists in? I'm not saying this as a reason not to protect the environmental, but more for a theoretical discussion. If a tree falls in a forest but know one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If humans don't exist on earth, is there an environment to classify as good or bad?
it's about our economic system, our food system, everything ... if we have $10 left to our name - are we gonna blow it all on a burger with fries? ... it's about industries that we continue to subsidize and prop up in the name of 'jobs' when in reality all it is doing is making a small percentage of the population fat cats ...
the current economic system is designed to favour a few based on short term exploitation of resources ... it is not meant for long term sustainability ... it's why eventually big oil will fail and all these other industries that seek to exploit ...
I agree that we are the only species jeopardizing all other species. Certainly on a micro level you can have some species bring havoc when introduced to a new part of the planet (Asian carp for example).
If we don't strive to lessen our impact and lower our consumption and population we will limit and annihilate ourselves. I really do believe that will be the end result of capitalism.
My money says they are likely the best sources for when that drop is dropped. My money says they are at a minimum investigating alternative sources for fuel... and likely would tap wells dry before revealing their findings.
I could be wrong though. They might just be harvesting what they can and as fast as they can- sucking whatever profit they might before the profits are no longer there for scarcity.
Another is the peak oil theory. I haven't seen as much on that as I used to (and we know it's not a theory, it's fact) that eventually oil has to peak, then fall. If Canada is willing to give up a million square miles (or whatever monstrous piece of wilderness) to tar sand, then you know the pickin's getting thin.
One peak oil scenario proposes that oil has been a relatively cheap, easily captured energy source for 100+ years and no one has yet found anything to match that kind of energy output per work needed to extract it (there's a formula for the scale of work/energy giving a value for least to most energy produced per work unit. I can't remember it right now). Something like solar, they say, cannot replace oil because it would take an adequate amount of that cheap energy to make enough solar to replace the oil and coal and when cheap oil runs low, demand will not be met for production of solar cells. They say even adding wind and other technologies will not work for the same reason. It's all in the formula and it makes sense. I wish I could find that in my brain. In any case, these theorists say we will not have the same high level of energy available in the future. That, if it happens that way, will have a big affect on everything.
But, by all means, drill baby drill, tap those tar sands, we need short term job growth or so help us civilization will implode!
It all started with the Fed, that half private half governmental body owned mostly by foreigners.