@Snoro

Well, for one thing, if each government stubbornly insists on avoiding the application of MMT we'll be in big trouble, I think. I'm neither expert in nor a regular evangelist for MMT, but I have been gradually persuaded that its advocates are speaking sense and that monetary availability is better controllable than we're letting it be. There are thongs that must be done and done now, not later, so even if we have to print money to do them, that's what we need to do.

The REAL problem seems to me to be the fatalistic theory that markets are smarter than people and must be left to themselves, that the mythical Unseen Hand never fails. Sometimes timelines matter, and during Covid capitalism did (pardon use of technical term) crap to help. Gloves, lysol, tests, toilet paper were all in short supply because the Unseen Hand of the unfettered free market just was not interested.

Since I doubt the feasability of replacing capitalism wholesale, even as I recognize it as a key part of the problem, a change to stakeholder capitalism is essential so that corporate leaders can make decisions in the interest of entities other than The Almighty Shareholders, and be graded on such. Under stakeholder theory, entities like the general public and the environment, including a habitable climate, start to matter again.

Meanwhile, any focus on debt is a potentially very bad thing just now. Monetary availability for spending on necessary climate issues is key, to the point that they could and likely should block out all else society does for a while if the public really understood the threat. Avoiding a climate disaster needs to be humanity's key buskness just now if we don't want disaster recovery and, frankly, just plain death to be humanity's key business soon.

It is as if the people we trust to tell us what is right are comfortable with the preposterous notion that if we get debt in order but fail to prevent climate change's rapid onset, all will be well, and if we get climate under control but are left with debt, that's a disaster. That cannot be allowed to stand.

I know Mastodon readers are globally distributed, but speaking from a US-centric point of view for just a moment, since national debt here infects many conversations, I have to think the world will much more easily forgive us some debt if we stop destroying the climate than they will praise us for tightening our debt position at the expense of human civilization being laid to waste. And the choice is just that stark.

(Also, don't even get me started on "growth" as an economic metric of health. If we don't figure out a way to measure health sime other way, that alone will be the siren call leading us to foul our finite nest. We must come up with ways to measure, target and enforce sustainability and to seriously, even criminally, penalize exploitation of externalities for profit.)

#environment #capitalism #climate #NationalDebt #MMT #StakeholderTheory #StakeholderCapitalism #economy #EnvironmentalJustice #Degrowth #sustainability #debt #ClimateCollapse #ClimateCatastrophe #Extinction

@gwagner @FinancialTimes

Yikes. It is getting twisty.

I'm not a fan of the B-corp idea anyway bevause it accepts unfair fights. All companies should be accountable to stakeholders, including the environment, not just to shareholders. If only certain companies do this, their competitors have a market advantage so the odds of B-corp survival are poor. If it's a successful market strategy to care about the environment you don't need to be a B-corp to do it.

As I read it, a B-corp is authorization to spend, even lose, shareholder money doing good for the world and not have your stockholders sue you for breach of fiduciary duty. Indeed I'd think they should be able to sue you for not doing well by the social benefit promises you've made.

However here I see FT characterizing it as a "movement" as including "thousands of companies around the world who are certified as 'a force for good'.' This does not mesh with my understanding of their role.

Wikipefia says of B-corps that they
Include "positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as its legally defined goals, in that the definition of "best interest of the corporation" is specified to include those impacts".

My reading of them is that they aren't, or shouldn't be,, "blessed as good" but rather that they open themselves to criticism-with-teeth if they fail to make good on their promises of good.

People differ on what ethics is, but my personal definition of ethics isn't that there is a specific set of rules you comply with. That's just law and compliance is not ethics at all in my book. Ethics, to me, is a living process of continually asking hard questions of yourself, starting with "am I today right now ethical, and what makes me sure I've not drifted?" The answer to that can never be "I was blessed at birth as ethical."

To me, any notion that B-corps are blessed as ethical or that any one agency can certify unambiguously that someone is ethical is suspect. Organizations can perform independent audits and offer opinions, but that ought not end all discussion. Anyone founding a B-corp has asked for any stakeholder to challenge them.

We should be asking hard questions of the auditors as well.

#BCorps #capitalism #corporations
#StakeholderTheory #StakeholderCapitalism
#ShareholderTheory #ShareholderCapitalism
#ethics #compliance #law #FiduciaryDuty
#environment #labor

@straygoat

I completely agree though usually express it differently. I might say a company that cannot pay a living wage is not yet profitable, and it should not be permissible to skim "excess" until there is some.

Or, alternatively, you're profiting on your employees, not your product. Nothing to be proud of if this is your desired end state.

I like to think of a minimum wage as a bound on how much you can underpay folks to get your business started, and like those being underpaid are automatically founders who should automatically be buying priority stake (sweat equity) in the company equal to the delta between what can be paid in cash and what is offered in equity to acknowledge that these people are every bit as much taking a risk as those putting up initial cash.

That stake should not be dilutable by the games rich people play with excess cash. This is these people's lives and just because they have a terrible bargaining position doesn't mean they aren't owed human decency.

This is why we have government and regulated economic systems: to ensure that this money exchange model isn't just one more tool of rich to exploit the poor.

It's important to understand that power doesn't scale linearly with money. Money begets money and it hoards money, but after a while does not measure contribution. A person with a million dollars can make a second million much more easily than a person with zero can make the first million. And when big companies make money on workers, that should not be something where society lauds them for doing so and says "go forth and invent more ways to exploit".

And don't even get me started on regulatory capture as an obviously inappropriate way to magnify that power even more.

More thoughts in my 2013 essay Lien Times for Startups.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/08/lien-times-for-startups.html

#MinimumWage #LivingWage #SweatEquity #Equity #Inequality #BargainingPower #Economics #StartUps #Profit #Exploitation #Morality #Ethics #Law #Government #WorkersRights #Politics #StakeholderTheory #Capitalism

@Pampa
I doubt you could find a workable wholesale replacement for capitalism, at least on the necessary timescale.

But I think there are things that can usefully be done to make a dent in that space.

1. Regulate the ill effects. As long as the regulations apply uniformly, they still make for fair markets. Environmental and safety regulations, for example. But it wouldn't hurt in health care to outlaw "pooling", since each attempt to subdivide the market gives individuals worse bargaining leverage and Big Pharma more.

2. Socialize markets (i.e., convert to things like universal single payer) where fair prices are not achievable and/or where the public is better served by aggregate bargaining. Health care is an example. People cannot fairly walk away from extractive pricing if their life depends on a solution at any price. They have to take what's offered. So market pricing cannot be expected to converge on fair prices. Also, the timelines and levels of volume individual buyers have is not enough to bargain fairly, where collective bargaining would be.

3. Get rid of pressures in capitalism to only respond to shareholders. Here's a summary of why reverting to stakeholder theory instead of shareholder theory would improve things. (Bernie and Warren both had plans to do things like this in the US 2020 election. Their ideas could be used elsewhere.)

4. Get big money out of politics, so that those with large economic interest cannot purchase regulatory favor.

http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/01/losing-war-in-quiet-room.html

#Capitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #ShareholderTheory #StakeholderTheory #RegulatoryCapture #SinglePayer #EnvironmentalRegulation

Kia ora e te whānau. A belated #introduction. At work, I'm an #academic researcher and lecturer in #management in Wellington/Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand. My interests include
#Ethics in #Organizations, including #AI and #StakeholderTheory
#RemoteWork and
the role of #Technology in organising. #academia

Outside of work, I enjoy #cycling (even in Wellington's weather), trying to grow strawberries, and hanging out in the sun with my husband and/or cat.

V nice to meet y'all