Japan's leading companies like #SumitomoGroup and #ToyotaMotor follow a principle known as "Three-Way Satisfaction." This ancient philosophy, promoting satisfaction among sellers, buyers, and society, aligns with modern #stakeholdercapitalism
https://joelhu.medium.com/embracing-the-ancient-wisdom-the-philosophy-of-omi-merchants-and-its-influence-on-modern-japanese-6f436c311ede?sk=82c401752594d9b9ef0bebe08293c016

@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

@teemo

Markets are wonderful tools for efficiently distributing resources (perhaps including wages) that get a bad rap because of the neoliberal push for demanding free, unregulated markets.

I'd like to find a way to keep most of the good while removing the downsides. A push in that direction (but insufficient in itself) is a move from #ShareholderCapitalism to #StakeholderCapitalism where company ownership (and profits) are shared by employees rather than those wealthy enough to own stocks.

@tarmoamer @jackofalltrades @Nonya_Bidniss @MarkBrigham @breadandcircuses

I'm not an "-ism"-ist. If anything, I'm a hybridist -- right tool for right job. But my point is I am not saying any of this to advocate some specific system over some other. I am instead observing that to have any coherent discussion, we must speak honestly about what we're up against. Even systems we like have flaws we should be honest about, and Capitalism certainly has flaws. It matters to know them so one can at least understand what even might be a fix or improvement.

Maybe the right solution is to replace it, but you'd want to know what you were replacing it with. And honestly, I don't think there is enough time left in the history of humanity (which is about to be wiped out by climate change). So we have the system we have.

We CAN regulate it, for example. (That's assuming, of course, we can get our political representatives to care, which is a problem for another day.)

I seem to recall Adam Smith saying this we the solution. He wasn't talking about capitalism but I think maybe employment law. I saw the quote but didn't mark it and have had trouble finding it. But I recall it was a suggestion that if you wanted morality in capitalism, it had to be encoded in law, and that if capitalists were left to their own devices they would likely turn to tyranny. So a well-regulated capitalism is one approach.

But ALSO, stakeholder capitalism is a variant that we had and worked better. Everything went to pieces when we converted to shareholder capitalism. Clyde Prestowitz tells the story of this in quotations I capture in my essay Losing the War in a Quiet Room.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html
Interestingly, Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine also traced the modern downward slide to the same place, the actions of Milton Friedman in the 1970's. I tend to believe this account, even though some have traced other influences to earlier (and not without good reason).

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both had proposals for returning to Stakeholder theory during the run-up to the 2020 election, and the notion of Stakeholder capitalism seems like, while it wouldn't fix everything, would be a big incremental improvement. It would make the Fiduciary Duty standard more flexible.

Right now you can do that for B-corps, but the bug is that you can't make the competitors of the B-corp do the same, so you're just putting yourself at disadvantage. People suggest that somehow a well-meaning B-corp has a market advantage, but that's not credible with me. If it had market advantage, all corps would do it anyway, and they don't. In my mind, B-corps are a license to lose money for the sake of being honorable without getting their principals sued. Others would surely characterize them differently.

Some sort of solution that involves an achievable rules change without overturning our basic systems seems like the approach I'd focus on if only for tactical reasons. We can talk forever about a world in which we did things entirely differently, but I just don't see how we get there. Climate Change will extinguish us long before that.

Bernie Sanders: Corporate Accountability and Democracy
https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-and-democracy/

Elizabeth Warren: Accountable Capitalism Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accountable_Capitalism_Act

#capitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #LegalPersonhood #LegalPerson #LegalPeople #conscience #ethics #morality #BernieSanders #ElizabethWarren

@alter_kaker @breadandcircuses Regarding the metaphor of sociopathy, I'm using it because it specifically is associated with lack of conscience. I have no mental health credential, so my use is purely descriptive from a lay point of view.

I don't by using this term mean to suggest per se irrationality (an inability to reason) as might come with some actual mental disorders. We're speaking metaphorically here, and metaphors are not literal equivalences. But rather I mean the kind of reckless indifference and appearance of actual cruelty that results in a weirdly logical way if you steadfastly fail (or refuse) to consider moral questions.

This is an artifact particularly of shareholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is better. See my essay Losing the War in a Quiet Room.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html

#capitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #LegalPersonhood #LegalPerson #LegalPeople #conscience #ethics #morality

@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

@davidstirrup

I doubt anyone will _actually_ implement those three laws, though I appreciate your support of them.

Restoring stakeholder theory to capitalism would at least allow more voices at the table and would give CEOs a valid reason not to just only care about shareholders, so it might at least be a pragmatic push in the right direction.

For example, Warren and Bernie both had credible plans for how to do something along those lines in the 2020 election.

The Accountable Capitalism Act was proposed as part of Warren's campaign:
https://www.warren.senate.gov/download/accountable-capitalism-act-one-pager

Bernie offered Corporate Accountability and Democracy:
https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-and-democracy/

#politics #capitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #morality #economics

@davidstirrup

Somewhere I recall Adam Smith making the point that if morality is to be had in capitalism, it must be encoded in law because those of means will become tyrants if just left to manipulate their power without rules. Maybe it was when he was talking about relationships of employers and employees, though really it's quite a general point. (If someone does know the quote I've been trying to find, please let me know because I often cite this observation, but from only vague memory.)

Morality is not something that would be discovered by capitalism, which is nothing more than window dressing on a gradient descent optimization engine. Any morality that is discoverable by capitalism is unnecessary because profitability will compute the same thing. But morality and profitability clearly come into conflict, and capitalism has no mechanism for recognizing that morality should win. Presently it does not.
"Fiduciary Duty vs The Three Laws of Robotics"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/02/fiduciary-duty-vs-three-laws-of-robotics.html

Even a mathematical optimization engine has limitations. It tends to prefer local optima (the hillclimbing problem, for those who want to google that) and they compute nonsense solutions if you don't bound them well. The same for capitalism. The problem with capitalism as practiced now is what I refer to as reductionism, the idea you have an abstract goal and that it's OK to substitute a model even though that model only approximates the abstract goal.

So you decide that a market solution to global warming is some sort of carbon offsets or a carbon tax or both, and then you stop caring whether the planet is warming and assume (wrongly) that it is sufficiently only to care whether you're making money. Doing so usually leads to regulatory capture as the answer, leading to you getting loopholes or lax enforcement that then make you richer and sure you're solving a problem you've never actually been trying to solve.

Regulation is needed, but also meta-regulation that makes it clear that while you can establish profit goals, other measurables must matter. To that extent, I think shareholder capitalism needs to go and stakeholder capitalism needs to be part of a solution (given that it's unlikely that capitalism itself can be removed). I'm not big on -isms (capitalism, socialism, etc). If I were, it'd be hybridism (right tool for right job).
"Losing the War in a Quiet Room"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/01/losing-war-in-quiet-room.html

There's also just the issue of what we value. Right now the public conversation is always that we value growth. That is unsustainable and we need to somehow change that discussion to value sustainability. Until we recognize that sustainability is more important than growth, we're going to be investing in the wrong things. I don't have a specific writing on this, though it has involve taxing megawealth and making sure that if we're going to be a rich society, that wealth is better distributed, so maybe:
"Tax Policy and the Dewey Decimal System"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/02/tax-policy-and-dewey-decimal-system.html

It probably also involves UBI. I didn't write the following to promote UBI (or any solution), just to analyze a particular issue from the bottom up. But after-the-fact it has seemed to me to function well as a partial defense of UBI because I think people's inability to know they'll survive regardless of their life choices, and their subsequent need to scramble for a job, even a sociopathic one, just to make sure they can eat, causes a lot of problems. If people felt more secure they'd be fed and housed and all that, they could afford to make more moral decisions. Morality tends to become more practical with surplus:
"Corny Economics"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/05/corny-economics.html

Sorry this was so long, but I hope you find something useful in those articles.

#politics #capitalism #UBI #taxation #sociopaths #sustainability #environment #socialism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #morality #economics

14/14 It is progressive liberal Stakeholder Capitalism that prevents Marxist radical rupture while laissez-faire libertarianism only makes it more possible.
#CommissarConservatives, #StakeholderCapitalism

1/14 Why don’t conservatives that push laissez-faire libertarian capitalism realize they are fulfilling Marxist philosophy about ending capitalism? #CommissarConservatives, #StakeholderCapitalism

@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

#StakeholderCapitalism is #Fascist #NeoFeudalism, full stop.

#AxisOfEasy 180: US Intelligence Bypasses Warrants Through Buying Data

https://axisofeasy.com/aoe/axisofeasy-180-us-intelligence-bypasses-warrants-through-buying-data/

##AxisOfEasy #DDOS-Guard #DeroHe #Discord #GameStop #gammasqueeze #GeorgeGammon #IOBit #JesseFelder #LACNIC #Lyft #Parler #Pixlr #ShinyHunters #StakeholderCapitalism #TomWoods #WallStreetBets