Too few have too much wealth

Jeff Mowatt
Aug 24, 2017 · 5 min read

You’ll hear it from Oxfam, The World Economic Forum and Richard Woolf today but few will know that it was the US President Bill Clinton who was warned about it 21 years ago when the founder of a for-purpose business served on the steering group of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

In his position paper for people-centered economics, Terry Hallman drew attention to how the money creation function of the Federal Reserve allowed wealth to accumulate in the hands of a minority, with the consequence of many becoming disenfranchised and turning toward violence:

“Listen: these people are not going to go quietly into the night. Once a person is intentionally cast aside, all prevailing social contracts which might pertain no longer apply and all previous bets are off. It becomes self-defense for the intended victim.

Once a nation or government puts people in the position of defending their own lives, or that of family and friends, and they all will die if they do nothing about it, at that point all laws, social contracts and covenants end. Laws, social contracts and covenants define civilization. Without them, there is no civilization at all, there is only the law of the jungle: kill, or be killed. This is where we started, tens of thousands of years ago.

By leaving people in poverty, at risk of their lives due to lack of basic living essentials, we have stepped across the boundary of civilization. We have conceded that these people do not matter, are not important. Allowing them to starve to death, freeze to death, die from deprivation, or simply shooting them, is in the end exactly the same thing. Inflicting or allowing poverty on a group of people or an entire country is a formula for disaster.”

The paper concluded:

“There is nothing wrong with individuals becoming wealthy. It is only when wealth begins to concentrate in the hands of a relative few at the expense of billions of others who are denied even a small share of finite wealth that trouble starts and physical, human suffering begins. It does not have to be this way. Massive greed and consequent massive human misery and suffering do not have to be accepted as a givens, unavoidable, intractable, irresolvable. Just changing the way business is done, if only by a few companies, can change the flow of wealth, ease and eliminate poverty, and leave us all with something better to worry about. Basic human needs such as food and shelter are fundamental human rights; there are more than enough resources available to go around — if we can just figure out how to share. It cannot be “Me first, mine first”; rather, “Me, too” is more the order of the day.”

It began with a question of purpose:

‘At first glance, it might seem redundant to emphasize people as the central focus of economics. After all, isn’t the purpose of economics, as well as business, people? Aren’t people automatically the central focus of business and economic activities? Yes and no.

People certainly gain and benefit, but the rub is: which people? More than a billion children, women, and men on this planet suffer from hunger. It is a travesty that this is the case, a blight upon us all as a global social group. Perhaps an even greater travesty is that it does not have to be this way; the problems of human suffering on such a massive scale are not unsolvable. If a few businesses were conducted only slightly differently, much of the misery and suffering as we now know it could be eliminated. This is where the concept of a “people-centered” economics system comes in.’

What it reasoned about putting the needs of people over shareholder value is something which is still being heard today from leaders of businesses like John Mackey, Mark Beniof and the B Corporation movement.

Interviewed about his work in Eastern Europe when introducing P-CED to the UK in 2004, Hallman told a diaspora organisation:

‘Essentially, P-CED challenges conventional capitalism as an insufficient economic paradigm, as evidenced by billions of people in the world living in poverty in capitalist countries and otherwise. Under the conventional scheme, capitalism — enterprise for profit — has certainly transformed much of the world and created a new breed of people in capitalist societies, the middle class. That is a good thing. But, capitalism seems to have developed as far as it can to produce this new class of fairly comfortable people between rich and poor, at least in the West where it has flourished for quite some time.

The problem is that profit and money still tend to accumulate in the hands of comparatively few people. Money, symbolically representing wealth and ownership of material assets, is not an infinite resource. When it accumulates in enormous quantities in the hands of a few people, that means other people are going to be denied. If everyone in the world has enough to live a decent life and not in poverty, then there is no great problem with some people having far more than they need. But, that’s not the case, and there are no rules in the previous capitalist system to fix that. Profit and numbers have no conscience, and anything done in their name has been accepted as an unavoidable aspect of capitalism.’

A fuller version of the story may be found in the Long Term Capitalism challenge

By 2008, even a president-in-waiting knew about it, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden served on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations

Is it only hubris which prevents collaborative action? Why does Richard Branson follow our every move in Ukraine? Why did Stephen Howard of Business in the Community coopt our arguments, and join a hijack of our social enterprise development plan?

Why does the Blueprint for Better Business reiterate the argument for people over profit?

Why does Oxfam’s own CEO now say that people should replace profit as the bottom line?

As the man who died doing it put it to Bill Clinton:

“Economics, and indeed human civilization, can only be measured and calibrated in terms of human beings. Everything in economics has to be adjusted for people, first, and abandoning the illusory numerical analyses that inevitably put numbers ahead of people, capitalism ahead of democracy, and degradation ahead of compassion.

“Each of us who have a choice can choose what we want to do to help or not. It is free-will, our choice, as human beings.”

Isn’t it time to put away the brandstanding and join in?

)

Jeff Mowatt

Written by

Putting people above profit, a profit-for-purpose business #socent #poverty #compassion #peoplecentered #humaneconomy

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade