Here is a really interesting article on how people view their wealth in relative terms, and the exponential financial success of peers may make rich people most discontent!
Like the story of the 49 coins, those who allow external measures - money accumulation, fame/celebrity, power/influence - to determine their self-worth and joy will suffer from eternal inadequacy/inequality.
Mike Edwards questions whether the trendy concept of philantrocapitalism exemplified by Bill Gates is as effective as the uncritical buzz it is generating. And he raises questions worthy of consideration, including this one in his q&a:
…what are the actual effects of business involvement in activities that are intended to promote social change? Where is business involvement useful, where might it be damaging, and do we have the evidence to separate one from the other? Here’s a list of things that business could usefully do:
- pay your taxes
- don’t produce goods that harm people
- pay decent wages and benefits
- stop subverting politics
- obey regulations in the public interest
The problem is, philanthrocapitalism does none of these things.
Well, business actually has a pivotal role to play beyond the basic code of decency Mike Edwards lists above. As the primary force in the 21st century, the private sector can make enormous positive contributions into our lives.
I am a strong advocate of engineering market forces to achieve positive change, marrying the business model to the social mission, as we’ve endeavored to do for the last fifteen years at PeaceWorks.
And I am similarly an advocate of using entrepreneurial and creative practices commonly found in the private sector to maximize impact in civil society, as we try to do at OneVoice.
But beyond critical appraisal of "philantrocapitalism’s" effectiveness advocated in Mike’s article, what most resonates and troubles me about the unexamined noise with this and the broader concept of "corporate social responsibility" is that often it is used to mask dishonest or noxious behavior from corporations, to create bland appearances about business contributions to society while hiding under the carpet abhorrent behaviors that may be the primary driver of a business.
Certainly, a company cannot justify or sugarcoat ruthless practices, or an underlying business model that harms people just by affixing the "csr" motto to its ads. Unlike when people purchased indulgences from the medieval Church to swiftly absolve them for abominable sins, you cannot (or should not be able to) donate your way into brand heaven in the 21st century.
In sharp contrast to Mike’s provocative article, take a look at this piece in TIME Magazine where Bill Gates discovers the field of social entrepreneurship for humanity, dubbing it "creative capitalism." Gates first announced this discovery in Davos back in January, where he was given 45 minutes to share how he conceived a utilitarian servile version of social responsibility. It struck me he had just discovered and repackaged a field long in existence, just as he appropriated the netscape browser and apple’s operating system.
Social contributions should have a soul, a sentiment, and a sincerity of purpose. Corporations are driven by human beings, so hopefully they will be driven to make our world better because this too is their world. I have yet to meet a business person (or a human being) that does not care about the world. But the trouble is that sometimes some corporate business models or junctures present people with concentrated profit-maximizing opportunities that cause harm to society overall. And no amount of "CSR" should exculpate taking the wrong path - whether by lobbying the government to help a specific industry at the expense of the community or the environment, or by undermining competition, or any of the items in Mike’s list.
In the end, consumers will see through corporate efforts to manipulate causes just to make them look hip and responsible. Alas, along with the unscrupulous corporation so too will fall the credibility of this important space - the sincere intersection between doing well and doing good.
Thomas Friedman contrasts US energy policy and US behavior to the way Danes live and have structured their lives to be energy-efficient, and almost energy-independent.
Thanks to Stacy Perman for a profile about PeaceWorks, KIND, and OneVoice in BusinessWeek yesterday.
A study from Cornell University demonstrates a correlation between junk/unhealthful food and energy costs. Artificial stuff, junk food and red meat all require more energy and natural resources to produce than fruits, nuts, veggies, etc. So by eating real foods, you are not just helping your health - you are also helping reduce greenhouse emissions.
China seems intent on using its veto at the UN to minimize any interference with national sovereignty, even at the expense of basic human rights and values, to the point of again vetoing a UN resolution against Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s atrocious dictator, and seeking to fight an ICC warrant against Sudan’s genocidal President. Howard French just wrote an excellent article on this issue.
But what seems to also be missing from most analyses on this topic, is that China is not just trying to limit ‘foreign interference’ in national affairs but also just plainly trying to avoid having to pay any commercial price for being a global citizen. The United States and other Western countries incur a tangible cost for taking certain moral stances. Sometimes these principles are worth more than trade. It is truly immoral to pursue trading interests at all costs. The policy-making community, and CONSUMERS, have not weighed in enough on this issue.
It is a sign of how messed up the region can get that Palestinians in Gaza were motivated to throw rockets at Israel to try to undo the cease-fire agreement, rekindle the fighting, ensure a continued closure of the borders, preventing imports and trade, and thereby keeping at artificially high levels the prices of seeds they had purchased to sell to farmers within Gaza.
I am not making this up. Hamas, now motivated to keep the cease-fire, arrested Palestinian seed traders who had thrown rockets at Israel, and received their confessions.
Kenneth Pollack offers a compelling perspective on the effects an oil boom in the Middle East.
From apocalyptic threats by the Iranian regime’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to introspective and semi-neurotic analyses from Jewish supporters of Israel, you would think that Israel’s very existence is truly in danger.
It is absolutely the case that Iran’s nuclear efforts coupled with its on-the-record threats to erase Israel of the map of the world need to be taken seriously and that the world - and Israel - must rise to the challenge posed by the Iranian Ayatollahs’ vision of absolute and violent Islamic revolution.
It is also absolutely the case that the window of opportunity for a two-state-agreement gets smaller by the day, and that not seizing it when it’s available will be a tragedy for both the Palestinian and Israeli people because it will enslave them to eternal warfare and limit their potential.
But read Tom Friedman’s article, People Vs. Dinosaurs, to get a feel for why Israel is not just not "disappearing" as Ahmadinejad claims, but why it is going to continue to thrive and grow. Some excerpts:
[I]n the first quarter of 2008, the top four economies after America in attracting venture capital for start-ups were: Europe $1.53 billion, China $719 million, Israel $572 million and India $99 million, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Israel, with 7 million people, attracted almost as much as China, with 1.3 billion.
Boaz Golany, who heads engineering at the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T., told me: “In the last eight months, we have had delegations from I.B.M., General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart visiting our campus. They are all looking to develop R & D centers in Israel.”
Ahmadinejad professes not to care about such things. He was — to put it in American baseball terms — born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Because oil prices have gone up to nearly $140 a barrel, he feels relaxed predicting that Israel will disappear, while Iran maintains a welfare state — with more than 10 percent unemployment.
Iran has invented nothing of importance since the Islamic Revolution, which is a shame. Historically, Iranians have been a dynamic and inventive people — one only need look at the richness of Persian civilization to see that. But the Islamic regime there today does not trust its people and will not empower them as individuals.
…Iran’s economic and military clout today is largely dependent on extracting oil from the ground. Israel’s economic and military power today is entirely dependent on extracting intelligence from its people. Israel’s economic power is endlessly renewable. Iran’s is a dwindling resource based on fossil fuels made from dead dinosaurs.
Then peruse some of the newspaper editorials and op-ed pieces in Lebanon, Syria and Iran and you will get an idea of the obscurant and sad repression against the human spirit that bad governance is provoking.
I was initially persuaded by media and pundit assertions that what is behind this meteoric rise in raw materials is at least connected to "speculation" - ie, hedge funds plowing in billions into commodity future contracts and other financial investments that make the goods artificially rise in cost.
But look at the Deutsche Bank chart (which my law school buddy Stanley Haar shared with me) below.
Non-Exchange traded commodities have risen more than those traded on exchanges. Unless hedge funds are also buying the physical goods in all these sectors, the more likely culprits are sheer global over-consumption and over-consumerism. For years the mantra was that we should only hope the rest of the world will have a standard of living that is closer to the Western world’s. Now that India and China are more than catching up, we are learning how this taxes our planet.
A better plan would be for all of us to learn to live just a little bit more modestly and less wastefully.
