From the Gilded Age of Capitalism to a Golden One — The Complete Series
By Rob Schuham, Co-Founder of Undercurrent.
Up until Covid struck, popular culture felt like a gigantic immersion into the land of the fabulous. The fashion and entertainment industries were on a hot streak, celebrities luxuriated in exotic destinations, music and art festivals thrived, real estate was booming, corporations enjoyed outsized market valuations, and restaurants, bars and cultural attractions overflowed. Startups were rocking, and even failure was considered a badge of courage as you could easily get funding to try all over again. Unemployment was at record lows. It was a “workers market.”
Or was it? Were people’s real lives the same as their digital personas? Was the bubbly economy felt everywhere? Was any of this a true reflection of culture across America and the world? Was this going to continue forever? Were things lurking beneath the gilded surface that were too dark to see? Or simply too uncomfortable to confront on an individual level? Where was Main Street in this picture? Where were the disenfranchised? Or the workers whose average compensation is 278 times less than the average CEO?
Too late, we now all have a sense that something failed us. We can blame the nature of the pandemic. We can blame the continuing ineptness of leadership at the federal and national levels in the U.S. and around the world. But that culpability is ultimately on all of us too. It’s not just a partisan issue (although some of it certainly is). We all contributed to the systemic failure that created the conditions for pandemics in the first place. We all bought into the stories and mythologies of capitalism as we knowingly or unknowingly purchased products that were made by (or services provided by) corporately-irresponsible organizations. Every to-go cup of coffee you sipped on, every plastic bottle of water you drank, every new countertop appliance you bought off Amazon and every new smartphone made of mined minerals. And you may even own stock in some of them.
When I say “we,” I’m not pointing a finger at you. I’m pointing a finger at all of us. You may be in the small minority of people that not only revolted against the “system” (I’ll get into that later), but practiced social responsibility at a deep level. You may drive around in an electric car or hybrid, eat organic food grown locally, drink local micro-brewed beer, and have a small carbon footprint in general. If you do, great! But you would be in a privileged position vs. the rest of the country, and the world. Chances are, if you have a 401K and aren’t divested of fossil fuel corporations, toxic chemical companies and processed food giants, or you travel by air frequently, attend large high-carbon-footprint events, and are just living the best life you can, you are indeed a part of the problem. We all are! You’re not a villain, rather you’re a “bit actor” in a much larger game that tilted the board of humanity into a false sense of security because we’re all drinking from the same gilded capitalism goblet.
Many of us have been thinking about and talking about the need for a more socially responsible version of capitalism for years now. We cross our fingers with every new administration, every recent election cycle, every TED conference, World Economic Forum and UN General Assembly, every time we break a new temperature record. We talk about it all the damn time. So maybe the question of the moment is what’s different now?
The answer is that we are actually in a very different moment. In fact it’s one of the most radical and altering moments in over a century; an unprecedented confluence of crises; health, medical and financial. Together these three are hyper-acute, resulting in record unemployment, record gyrations in the equities markets, but most importantly, pain, suffering and death (some of which was clearly avoidable). This is magnified by a glaring lack of coordination, intelligence and political will at the federal government level to manage all of these interconnecting vectors, thus worsening and prolonging the problems.
But what dimensionalizes this even further is that other existential threats have not disappeared by any means. The climate crisis is still here (albeit we’ve had a quarantine-correlated 25%+ reduction in CO2 and methane emissions from January to March). Asymmetrical nuclear threats, the weaponizing of AI and/or nanotechnology, the crisis of runaway technology, the chemicals all around us and in us, and of course threats of other pandemics, both zoonotic as well as bioengineered, are all still very possible. And there are the unknown unknowns; cyber and/or terror attacks while we’re distracted and weakened, natural disasters and others only captured in the most dire risk assessment models that could result in a flock of black swans.
Let’s focus on two systemic failures that collided to ignite and create the crisis we’re currently in, climate and health. John Fullerton, Founder of The Capital Institute, shines a light on “the relentless pursuit of shareholder value in the name of capital efficiency” that’s extended man’s footprint into forests, savannas, ice shelves and a multitude of delicate ecosystems all over the world. As a result, zoonotic transfers of diseases from animals to humans will continue to occur and spread as a result. And we live in an era where someone can go from the deepest jungles to a pub in London in 24 hours. Or in this case, a business meeting in a city in Asia that has a wet-market to a crowded restaurant In Milan in roughly the same amount of time.
So now we have a direct correlation. But this has also created an unforeseen real-life proxy. These two fragile “system actors” are also colliding in other ways. To paraphrase a recent McKinsey article, “Addressing Climate Change in a Post-pandemic World,” climate risks and pandemics are similar in that they both represent physical shocks, which then translate into an array of socioeconomic impacts. By contrast, financial shocks alone are largely driven by human sentiment, and are only remedied through restoration of confidence. Physical shock can only be remedied by addressing the underlying causes. Our recent collective experience has been far more shaped by financial shocks than physical ones. But the pandemic offers us a taste of what a full-full-fledged climate crisis could entail in terms of simultaneous exogenous shocks to supply and demand, disruption of supply chains and global transmission and amplification mechanisms.
This is all scary. But this is also a pivotal moment in human history that could result in a significant transformation, the likes of which we’ve never seen. A collective recognition that we need to change things post haste. For an inflection point to vector in a net positive way we need to undergo a deep examination and re-imagining of large swaths of our governance, social and healthcare systems. We also need to closely look at the fragile economic systems we exist in and re-think the tenants and levers of capitalism which not only have culpability in the stunning collapse of so many economies of “stable” developed nations, but as explained earlier, are having a direct impact on the causal roots of the very health crisis we are facing in the moment.
This all translates to a critical need for re-designing and re-engineering our larger systems so as to massively decrease fragility. We need to usher in a new era of human and planetary resilience. An era of regeneration, circularity, connection, collaboration, healing and overall wellbeing for life.
This is far from a novel idea. At Undercurrent, we are part of a chorus of growing calls for companies to leverage this time as a phase-shift for capitalism. In this novel moment the forces that pull the levers of governance and democracy are confronting the exact same thing: A common enemy that unites all of us.
So the next question is the “how?” Here’s where it starts getting good. We are already doing it.
Never before have we seen a global consortium of corporations radically collaborating with each other as they are now. In this case, it’s to solve a problem of the commons. Companies have stepped up in incredible ways. Whether it’s manufacturers shifting production lines to produce much needed frontline medical equipment, or the bio-tech world coordinating and rapidly prototyping health solutions, companies are opening up IP and data sharing in an unprecedented fashion.
Companies are learning new skill-sets in collaboration (vs. competition). Leadership and workforces are feeling a generational call to be a part of a collective set of solutions, to save lives and to reduce human suffering. They are also fighting for their own sovereign economic survival at the same time. Truly unprecedented.
So what does a path from the gilded version of capitalism we just left behind to a golden one look like? How do we take these new skill-sets and ways of working and turn them into muscle memory? Is there a chance we can even habituate them? Can we aim the collective towards solving other existential threats, or find opportunities inside the problems that translate to mutual prosperity? Let’s look at a potential path, including “watch-outs,” that moves us to a world we all want to see. From this introduction, we’ll explore the following:
Phase 1: Wartime Efforts
Phase 2: Existential Collaboration
Phase 3: Circularity and Regeneration
Phase 4: Governance and Policy
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Phase 1: Wartime Efforts
As previously stated, many companies are stepping up to help manufacture much needed medical equipment and Personal Protection Equipment (PPE). Others are working on testing kits, vaccines and treatments. And the companies that are participating are working at an extraordinary pace. Partnerships are being formed, typical large company bureaucratic bottlenecks are being blown open, innovation is accelerating, moonshots are launching, and in general, we are seeing capitalism in its finest hour for many companies in this wartime moment.
Further, private-public partnerships are being formed in a matter of days vs. years. “We are all in this together” has taken an entirely new meaning, one not seen since World War II. Collaboration, rapid prototyping, team-building, transparency, decentralized decision-making, self-organizing and other cultural features that have been evolving over the last few decades within large corporations, are now being exercised outside the walls and campuses. When you begin interoperating with cultures that are different than yours, it necessitates an enormous amount of flexibility and adaptability. It’s also a race against time. In fact, time is the collective’s competition. Thus, a lack of cooperation as a go-forward option dissipates quickly.
As of this writing, there are hundreds of vaccine candidates under development, with several in trial. Pfizer for example announced that it would help develop and distribute BioNTech SE’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate, planed for clinical trials later this month. Also in April, the World Health Organization partnered with Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, WeChat, TikTok, Pinterest, Slack and Giphyand for a hackathon to promote the development of software to take on challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic. Further, Ford teamed up with GE Healthcare to produce 1,500 ventilators in April and 12,000 by the end of May. And Ford engineers, collaborating with 3M, also quickly designed a streamlined powered air purifying respirator (PAPR) to safeguard doctors, nurses, and first responders.
Over the next several months, and possibly the next year, the notion of working with your competitor vs. against, could become socialized and accepted. Worst case, we learn how to cooperate in times of crisis. Best case, we like it so much that we find ways of working together to experience mutual thriving. This leads to the next phase.
Phase 2: Existential Collaboration
It’s amazing what happens when internal drivers and fears around marketplace competitiveness become trivial as compared to non-trivial shared existential fears and drivers around our very own survival.
What ensues is a re-casting of the story and narrative of your “why?”. It’s not about an expression of your values and vision that’s commercialized through your company in order to build wealth at the expense of your competition. Instead, it’s your vision (or a new one) that’s manifested through a connected group of humans inside yours and other companies.
In Phase 1, we came together as a country and a planet to overcome obstacles and solve a global health crisis. We learned how to band together, move through ideological differences and see what can actually happen when we all put our minds (and hearts) together to solve massive problems. The challenge now is to leverage this momentum and find ways to solve other problems collectively that could present the world’s largest opportunity in history.
Think about pooling intellectual property and capacity, innovation capabilities, manufacturing scale, academics, science, data and resources to solve such existential challenges as:
- Massively scaling renewables and migrating away from fossil fuels
- Zero waste to landfill
- Scaling up regenerative agriculture
- Removing plastics from our oceans and waterways
- Eliminating virgin plastic all together and developing non-polluting, non-toxic replacements
- Removing toxins and pollutants in general from all over the planet
- Helping to change harmful health habits (and our food supply) to dramatically reduce obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and others
- Eliminating the harmful human-programming effects of social media, including helping to restore democracy in the process
- Invent protocols, or change over harmful industries in order to reduce depression, anxiety, suicide, addiction and other mental health maladies
- Reinvent and re-imagine our medical system
- Eliminate human trafficking and the motives
- Dramatically reducing inequality
- Reversing the loss of biodiversity
- Hardening grid systems against cyber and terrorist attacks
- Drastically improving access to healthcare, education and nutrition
All of the above can’t be done at massive scale without radical collaboration and radical coordination. The question is how can we create new systems that incentivize and motivate the corporate and small business worlds to do so?
Importantly, many financial upsides to address the many challenges we face have already been identified. For example, a report by the Business & Sustainable Development Commission identifies in excess of $12T in business opportunity being unlocked should we aggressively pursue solving the 17 UN Global Goals.
To go one step further, Leah Lazer, Catlyne Haddaoui and Jake Wellman of the World Resources Institute identified research that found that investing in 16 low-carbon measures in cities (which contribute to over 40% of total global fossil fuel energy emissions) could cut global urban emissions by 90% by 2050 and has a net present value of almost $24 trillion, equivalent to nearly one-third of the global GDP in 2018. This means that between now and 2050, the total benefits of these investments will exceed their total costs by almost $24 trillion. Most of these returns are the result of cost savings from decreased energy use and improved energy efficiency, as well as decreasing the use of materials like cement and steel. For example, investments in making the vehicle fleet more electric and fuel-efficient would pay for themselves in as little as eight years because they would lower the cost of powering those vehicles. Retrofits to make buildings more energy-efficient would save money on heating and cooling bills long into the future.
However, all these figures underestimate the true scale of the returns, because they do not include the wider socioeconomic and environmental benefits that arise from, for example, a healthier and more productive population, reduced traffic congestion or robust ecosystem services. Moreover, all investments would unlock significant emission reductions, and collectively form part of an attractive bundle of low-carbon investments.
Finally, ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) companies who see their role in society as a key value — who also tend to have more collaborative cultures — demonstrated higher performance pre-Covid. The top ESG companies in the world were outperforming the S&P prior to the pandemic, and according to Benjamin Allen of Parnassus Investments, some of the largest ESG funds are mostly beating the S&P as of this writing.
In this Existential Collaboration phase we identified the massive societal and economic benefits to intra-, and inter-, category collaboration and cooperation. We have also identified the skillsets and building blocks to getting here.
Next onto the building blocks…
Phase 3: Circularity and Regeneration:
Undercurrent partner, and Founder of Natural Capital Solutions, Hunter Lovins and her co-authors identify in their recent book, A Finer Future, that humanity is in a race with catastrophe. She inquires as to whether or not “the future is one of global warming, 68 million migrants fleeing failed states, soaring inequality, and grid-locked politics? Or one of empowered entrepreneurs and innovators working towards social change, leveling the playing field, and building a world that works for everyone? While the specter of collapse looms large, we have a unique and novel chance to thread the needle of sustainability and build a regenerative economy through a powerful combination of enlightened entrepreneurialism, regenerative economy, technology, and innovative policy.”
When we come to this point in the phases of a new capitalism, we have by now been exercising new muscle memory in the collaborative and cooperative service of people and planet. We have leveraged technology and advanced sense-making toward creating an economy that’s in service to life, rather than the next quarter’s earning reports. Yet at the same time, we have identified a massive multi-trillion dollar opportunity for businesses. We have essentially gathered the environmental economics evidence, outlined the principles of a regenerative economy, and are now on to a policy roadmap to achieving it, including:
- Transforming finance and corporations
- Reimagining energy, agriculture, ecosystems, and how we work
- Enhancing human well-being
- Delivering a world that honors all of nature
What exactly is a Regenerative Economy? Hunter Lovins’s co-author John Fullerton’s reprises his paper “Regenerative Capitalism” and identifies 8 key principals:
#1: In Right Relationship: Understands that the ecosphere is composed of nested systems, living and nonliving. Recognizes that the human economy is embedded in both culture and the ecosphere and must operate in dynamic and cooperative relationship with them, respecting cultural needs and planetary limits. Allows for critical value adding exchanges to occur at all scales in reciprocal relationship, in contrast with commoditized transactions.
#2: Views Wealth Holistically: Defines wealth in terms of the well-being of the ‘whole’ rather than only what is reducible to money. Redefines wealth to mean multiple kinds of capital beyond financial wealth. Recognizes that numerous dimensions of human and natural capital cannot be measured in monetary terms but must be nurtured as intrinsic components of holistic wealth.
#3: Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive: In a world in which change is both ever-present and accelerating, the qualities of innovation and adaptability are critical to health. It is this idea that Charles Darwin intended to convey in this often-misconstrued statement attributed to him: “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals.” What Darwin actually meant is that: the most “fit” is the one that fits best i.e., the one that is most adaptable to a changing environment.
#4: Empowered Participation: All healthy living systems are self-organizing and operate through continual negotiation with one another and in constant ‘conversation’. So too, a healthy human economy requires the empowered participation of individuals and groups, negotiating in their own enlightened self-interest as they naturally promote the health of the whole.
#5: Honors Community and Place: Each human community consists of a mosaic of peoples, traditions, beliefs, and institutions uniquely shaped by long-term pressures of geography, human history, culture, local environment, and changing human needs. Honoring this fact, a Regenerative Economy nurtures healthy and resilient communities and regions, each one uniquely informed by the essence of its individual history and place.
#6: Edge Effect Abundance: Creativity and abundance flourish synergistically at the “edges” of systems, where the bonds holding the dominant pattern in place are weakest. For example, there is an abundance of interdependent life in salt marshes where a river meets the ocean. At those edges the opportunities for innovation and cross-fertilization are the greatest. Working collaboratively across edges — with ongoing learning and development sourced from the diversity that exists there — is transformative for both the communities where the exchanges are happening, and for the individuals involved.
#7: Robust Circularity Flow: A regenerative material economy mimics the metabolic process found in resilient living systems, up taking what we now discard as ‘waste’ in an ongoing, productive, circulatory, and value-enhancing flow. Likewise for the circulatory, value-enhancing flow of information and money.
#8: Seeks Balance: Being in balance is more than just a nice way to be; it is actually essential to systemic health. Like a unicycle rider, regenerative systems are always engaged in this delicate dance in search of balance. Achieving it requires that they harmonize multiple variables instead of optimizing single ones. A Regenerative Economy seeks to balance: efficiency and resilience; collaboration and competition; diversity and coherence; and small, medium, and large organizations and needs.
“A Finer Future” lays out the policies and practices needed to transform finance, corporations, energy agriculture and governance including case stories of how this is already being done. It’s a playbook for how we rebuild from the COVID crisis, and avoid the other looming emergencies facing humanity.
Charting the course to a regenerative economy is inarguably the most important work facing humanity in this phase. In Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, she identifies seven ways to fundamentally rethink economics into one that works for all:
1. Change the goal — From GDP to a doughnut (regenerative) one
2. See the big picture — From self-contained market to embedded economy
3. Nurture human nature — From rational economic man to social adaptable humans
4. Get savvy with systems — From mechanical equilibrium to dynamic complexity
5. Design to distribute — From ‘growth will even it up again’ to distributive by design
6. Create to regenerate — From ‘growth will clean it up again’ to regenerative by design
7. Be agnostic about growth — From growth-addicted to growth-agnostic
What’s encouraging is that the movement to a regenerative economy is now getting support from unlikely sources. The Business Roundtable, a group of CEO’s representing some of the largest 181 companies in America, in August of 2019 had identified that “Maximum shareholder profits no longer can be the goals of corporations.” Almost 60% of CEO’s said they see the business value of sustainability according to Accenture. And some of the largest companies in the world including Microsoft and Starbucks have committed to eliminating their carbon footprints and actually reversing their carbon transgressions over time.
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, which manages over $7T in assets, says “Profits are in no way inconsistent with purpose — in fact profits and purpose are inextricably linked.” And in the recent 2020 Davos Manifesto, it was stated “(A company) consciously protects our biosphere and champions a circular, shared and regenerative economy.”
Words like “Regenerative” and “Circularity,” while not new to communities, researchers and authors who have been deep in identification and creation around these principals, have finally emerged into mainstream business culture. Many successful companies that embrace ESG (Environment, Social Governance) practices are performing at higher levels than non-ESG ones.
The movement had effectively begun, but now in combination with identified upside potential from wartime efforts and radical collaboration skillsets, we can leverage this crisis to accelerate towards the next generation of well-being based capitalism.
However, corporations alone can’t do this. Political will has to be generated to legislate and even constitutionalize a new era. And the next phase addresses this…
Phase 4: New Governance and Policy:
The crisis has illuminated a number of weaknesses in Government institutions across the globe that we are all experiencing, and paying the price for. It’s not just our medical and economic systems. What it’s also revealing is the fragility of Government’s social contract with its own citizens.
The crisis is laying bare inequality income disparity, environmental degradation, gutted and/or woefully ill-equipped social services departments, and other hollowed out government branches. Oliver Laughland and Lauren Zanolli of The Guardian examined the disproportionate impact on minorities in the U.S. African Americans and Latinos are less likely to be able to work from home and more likely to be forced to take public transportation, increasing their risk of exposure to coronavirus. Minority and low-income communities are more likely to experience food insecurity, which is linked to higher rates of obesity and diabetes, and less able to stockpile supplies. Thomas LaVeist, Dean and Professor at Tulane’s school of public health and tropical medicine says, “If you look at the health conditions that we (now) know dramatically increase the risk of death if you’re infected with Sars Covid-2, African Americans have much higher prevalence of every one of those conditions. Diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, you name it, African Americans have a higher prevalence.’
“It’s an education system issue, it’s a health and resources system issue and it’s a public transportation issue,” said Cedric “C-sharp” Redmon, a local rap artist and youth ambassador for the city of St Louis who is part of the city’s (Covid-19) outreach efforts, as he attempted to pinpoint the root causes of the disproportionate death toll. “There’s a lot of stuff that would need to be rectified in order to stop something like this again.”
It’s also magnifying the deep ideological divides on a national and local level which drives an uneven response and favoritism (Governors who were “nice” to the President got more ventilators to save more lives), and unfairly leaves states, cities, agencies and bureaus behind. Which means even citizens who are politically aligned with the current administration are directly and negatively impacted. So everyone loses when this happens.
According to a recent article in the Financial Times, radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labor markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income, guaranteed jobs and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.
The above lays out some of the domestic challenges government policy makers will face. On an international basis, governments will need to embrace coordinated responses to Covid and other future pandemics. Best practices (such as mandated quarantining and testing) will need to be shared, as will economic responses.
In Phase 2, it was identified that companies and organizations could start to see the benefits of radical collaboration. Governments could likely see the same response here as well. Some will respond with deep isolation as a pandemic response, however we will likely see over time that you can’t contain something you can’t see, and that the most efficacious way forward is collaboration and coordination. Accountability and information-sharing is key. Critically, responses will need to be even, analytics based, and not random or haphazard.
Accordingly, corporate reporting and accounting for externalities will need to be standardized. In an article by Jeffrey Unerman of the School of Management, Royal Halloway, University of London says “For most companies, interactions with nature … are not visualized on a company’s profit and loss statement or on their balance sheet. They remain ‘externalities’, or issues without internal consequence. However, there are several potential drivers that may lead to such externalities being internalized in the future including increasing regulatory or legal action, market forces and changing operating environments, new actions by and relationships with external stakeholders, plus an increasing drive for transparency or voluntary action by businesses because they recognize the significance of transparency to future success.”
This is hard, but doable. And there have been several experiments by organizations over the last few decades in order to achieve global acceptance and ultimately be enforced by the securities and exchange commissions.
SASB (Sustainability Accounting Standards Board) has been a notable force and is being adopted by some large companies. SASB states “Its standards are designed for inclusion in financial reports. In the US, this takes the shape of the Form 10-K. U.S. securities law firmly undergirds SASB’s work and process, providing a solid foundation for the use of SASB standards by U.S. companies.”
Other organizations and standards like SEAR (Social and Environmental Accounting), GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) Standards, TCFD (Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures), the GHB Protocol, IR (Integrated Reporting), and shareholder reporting based on internal Corporate Social Responsibility efforts have all been been in play as well. They are all important in that they have kept the conversations vibrant around putting nature and humanity writ-large at the forefront of all stakeholders.
If these phases are implemented, we very well could be on our way to implementation of a “Golden Age” of capitalism. Government policies and approaches will take time, however let’s look at a transitional landscape as recently identified via a recent scenario planning exercise where Deloitte and Salesforce identified four possibilities that could take place over the next 3–5 years. Some are optimistic, some are gloomy. I’m going to focus on a combination of two that intuitively feel most likely; “Good Company” and “Sunrise in the East”
“Good Company”: In this scenario Covid-19 pandemic persists past initial projections (including resurgences due to countries “opening up” too quickly), placing a growing burden on governments around the world that struggle to handle the crisis alone. A surge of public-private sector partnerships emerges as companies step up as part of the global solution. New “pop-up ecosystems” arise as companies across industries partner to respond to critical needs and drive much-needed innovation. Social media companies, platform companies, and tech giants gain new prestige.
Ultimately, companies shift further toward “stakeholder capitalism,” with a more empathetic stance to how they can best serve their customers, shareholders, and employees to rebuild after the crisis. Economic recovery begins late 2021. Recovery is slow in early 2022 and speeds up by the second half of 2022.
“Sunrise in the East”: The Covid-19 pandemic is severe and unfolds inconsistently across the world. China and other East Asian countries manage the disease more effectively, whereas Western nations struggle with deep and lasting impacts — human, social, and economic — driven by slower and inconsistent responses. The global center of power shifts decisively east as China and other East Asian nations take the reins as primary powers on the world stage and lead global coordination of the health system and other multilateral institutions.
The ability of China, Taiwan, and South Korea to contain the outbreak through strong centralized government response becomes the “gold standard.” China significantly ramps up foreign direct investment efforts, bolstering its global reputation. Economic recovery begins late 2021, with notably quicker and more robust recovery in the East.
I will combine the two in order to lay out a vision for what I see as a possible version of a “Golden Age” of capitalism, and a more optimistic government policy stance over time:
- Public-Private partnerships continue to increase, given the high values placed on innovation and fast crisis response.
- As the importance of sharing IP and data rises, so do new laws and regulations that support and encourage these practices.
- Public private partnerships create a “commons” where benefits of such practices are equitably shared amongst companies and governments.
- Governments can “turn on” and reward the private sector to address both crises, as well as long-term chronic and slower-rolling crises such as climate, loss of biodiversity, air/land/water pollution, inequality, human trafficking, animal cruelty, access to healthcare and nutrition, mental health and so many others.
- Governments recognize the value of pricing-in harmful externalities, and reduce or eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for harmful companies.
- New accounting practices are put in place that blend SASB and others like ESG standards in order to align balance sheets with socially and environmentally sound business practices.
- Renewable, regenerative and humane practices are incorporated throughout government and incentives are implemented to re-imagine and/or reboot our energy, agricultural, infrastructure, military, law enforcement, civil service, telecommunications, public transit and health care sectors.
- Health, Environmental Protection agencies, Food and Drug administrations, Social Security and welfare agencies and child and other protective services are strengthened and given more operational capacity.
- Governments leverage contact-tracing on a limited basis in order to control and manage health and safety. Surveillance via facial recognition, geo-tracking is significantly “rate-limited” via human rights laws.*
- Treasuries and Central Banks are re-thought and re-imagined to hold financial institutions more accountable, while reigning in the impact of Index Funds, esoteric financial products and other instruments and products that have been abused and cause harm.
- Social media and platform companies, while having an important role, are reigned in on advertising and content standards, as well as privacy. People regain control of their data.
These shifts start to move us towards a world where the well-being of people and planet come before shareholder primacy. It’s the basis of a new form of circular capitalism. It’s mutual thriving. And, it can also lead us to a post-capitalism world where all things living benefit.
*The drawbacks of ubiquitous surveillance and a corresponding reduction of our liberties are important to consider, and I have addressed this in a recent article titled “Reigning in Runaway Technology.” We will be debating and politicizing these tradeoffs for years. But we are in a new world. Pandemics are real. And so is the need for at least a rudimentary methodology of tracking and tracing infectious diseases. There will need to be legislation that protects our privacy, but also can do what’s necessary to keep us all healthy. It’s an affront to many. But in the U.S. for example, the question will be how to work within the framework of our constitutional rights in order to achieve something that could ensure our collective health? Legal scholars and the courts will be in debate for years to come.
Conclusions:
There are challenges and obstacles to everything I have described above. Does a golden age of “mutual thriving” mean ubiquitous surveillance and runaway technology? Can companies still perform and grow if collaboration is seen as more important than competition? Can we truly achieve a phase-shift given a deeply rooted economic system that currently only rewards performance? Can we really put nature on the balance sheet and get it federally mandated?
I recognize that there is much utopian thinking here. However, I believe that we will be faced with a stark choice as we grind through the pandemic and attempt to bolster the economy… and ask ourselves who do we want to be? My fingers and toes are crossed that we answer that question in a way that not only impacts the way we vote, but how we rewire our massive and complex systems for resilience and planetary health.
At Undercurrent we see an emergence of the new Capitalism, one that looks many generations ahead, where nature and society are essential stakeholders. As we say, “if you’re worrying about a bad quarter, you’re gonna have a bad century.”
Special thanks to Hunter Lovins for her valuable input and edits. And to Bud Caddell as well for edits.
Special thanks also to Daniel Schmachtenberger, Tristan Harris, Jordan Hall, Jamie Wheal and a host of other brilliant people who have helped enlighten and inspire me on the fronts of which I write.
