Post Capitalism
It looks like Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act hasn’t died yet; the latest news is that some House Democrats are getting on board. I thought it had died but it’s still percolating. In other news I seem to be seeing more and more signs that people are reconsidering the current state of capitalism. I’m not sure if it’s because the news aggregators are just pushing what they think I want to read or whether the snowballing effect is increasing. I can’t tell the size of the interest in society – it’s probably still small.
Here are some reading recommendations from someone I follow in LinkedIn (Kenneth Mikkelson); he’s one of the authors of Neo-Generalist and I’ve written my thoughts on his book. He has an account in Scoop It ( https://www.scoop.it/u/LeadershipABC) and lists some really good reading materials that sometimes I do a post on, giving my thoughts on the writing. It looks like his range of interests dovetails with mine because I go through his Scoops periodically and find them interesting. Notice in the picture he says he’s forewarned us about capitalism.
Kenneth Mikkelson has also shown us a snapshot of an article in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf about the need to rethink the purpose of corporations. Unfortunately, that article is behind a paywall, so I can’t get at it. But again, people are saying and writing that the current capitalism we have needs to change from just shareholder focus to something else.
And finally, there was an article about the insidious effect of shareholder capitalism, although it doesn’t say anything about shareholder outright: automation have been increasing productivity and thus increasing value add, but the wealth from the value add is not being distributed to the labor. Instead the gains from the value add are going towards the investors. The tax cut that was put in place last year did not lead to increased investments in people through more jobs and higher wages; instead the tax cuts went to stock buybacks. The other impact of the tax cut was to replace workers with robots through the allowance for expensing immediately capital expenditures.
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