Fast Company’s Take on Capitalism
Statistics like that just makes me angry.
Last night I was up late reading Fast Company’s November 2019 magazine edition whose main title was “Capitalism Is Dead – Long Live Capitalism”. Of course, when I saw that at the bookstore, I immediately had to buy it.
Upon reading the magazine, it was not about the death of capitalism but about the growing acknowledgment that capitalism needs to change, whether a little or a lot. The version that we have today is ruining society. In fact, Fast Company posits that:
“Our economic system – once heralded for ensuring customer choice, stoking job creation and upward mobility, and sparking innovation – is failing us. The U.S., the paragon of capitalism, is experiencing crushing income inequality and struggling to provide affordable healthcare and childcare for working families as unprecedented climate change threatens even further disruption…Capitalism is in crisis.”
Fast Company, Stephanie Mehta, “From the Editor – Capitalism for Everyone”, p.10, November 2019
Finally, people are starting to recognize that the current capitalism that we have had for the last 30 (40?) years is not working for everybody. It works only for the few. Finally, finally, finally.
Fast Company apparently created a council whose purpose is to “do good” somehow, maybe to change capitalism. It’s called the Fast Company Impact Council. The editor wrote about this council which is made up of founders or CEO’s of fast growing companies or and innovative executives. There was a statistic that the editor threw out that implied that those on the council will be spearheading change.
But later on in the magazine, I saw a graphic that supplied more details. It is actually about 70% of the executives, whether founders of start-ups or CEO’s of Fortune 500, believe we need to only tweak capitalism.
Now I don’t know what a tweak or an overhaul would entail and it is probably similar to “the eye of the beholder” concept, but I suspect a tweak isn’t going to materially change things.
For example, is Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax a tweak or part of a substantial overhaul? It seems like a substantial change that would produce large benefits by spreading the wealth around society. Or how about her workers’ council – similar to Germany’s business board composed of both workers and executives? Is that a tweak or a substantial change? To me, all of Elizabeth Warren’s ideas (or plans) are pretty substantial changes and they seem like good ideas. How the wealth tax will work is a question to be resolved but we can at least start asking the questions and start working toward a solution. But they don’t appear to be tweaks to me. They feel like substantial overhauls that will produce enormous benefits to overall society. Small tweaks may allow rich corporate executives to find a way out of the rules. But we need overhauls to break the shareholder value philosophy.
All in all though, the magazine is a good read and is a good start in the conversation on what we should do about capitalism if we want to make America great again. Capitalism needs to work for everybody.
Topics in Magazine
Here’s a couple of topics/thoughts that the magazine broaches:
- A value reset is necessary – maybe shifting from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism which embraces society rather than shareholders alone.
- The Business Roundtable’s statement will only become meaningful when real actions are enacted.
- We must end the tyranny of quarterly financial statements.
- An interview with Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard who’s been working for decades on climate change and is a firm believer that capitalism needs to change.
- An interview with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He basically says that the rich’s philanthropy is fake.
- And a couple of smaller articles on how and who is changing the way business is conducted.
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