Hello World. Long time lurker, hardly ever writer.
I've been enamored with OWS since it began so many moons ago. The strength and passion of those is an inspiration to us all. I've always had a nagging feeling that this movement was going to be bigger and more important that anything we've experienced in my generation (Gen X'er, I am). What I didn't expect was to learn about the need for this movement in business school.
Below the fold....
I'm currently enrolled in business school part time while working during the day. I decided a couple years ago I needed a change and business school seemed to fit the bill. Before applying I remember worrying that I just don't have the temperament to be a successful businessman... ethically. What if I was asked to break a law? Fire an employee for no reason? Dump toxic waste into the environment and/or cover it up? Did I really have what it takes? Why should I have to worry about compromising my morals and values just to be a successful businessman?
Well, it turns out I don't have to do that and I shouldn't be feeling that way. And, IMO, OWS is going to forever change business in this country for the better. Why do I feel this?
Well, for one of my classes on global strategy, we have an assignment to present to our class a provocative perspective laid out in a current book. Something that business school doesn't necessarily teach us and we may not agree with. Something to spur thought and conversation. The book our group chose was Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (And Redeeming Promise) Of Our Country by William Greider and published in 2009. And boy is our professor right that this book is not your typical business school book!
I'm just going to blockquote my notes for Chapter 11 - America the Possible that I'm using to create our presentation. I don't think this will be bad juju for me, but if so I'll take it down. Obviously this is just one chapter, but it highlights the need for citizen engagement and a movement exactly like OWS.
Random bolding by me where I wanted to make sure to highlight a point in our presentation.
- All the issues America faces has led Greider to conclude that “America is in much deeper trouble than is generally realized and that restoring national well-being will require profound change - a historic transformation in how we live and work as well as in how we are governed.”
- Historic change requires incautious optimism, patience to understand that this may take generations but we must start today, involves great risks and the very real possibility of failing and looking foolish, and clear eyed thinking free of false pride and patriotic evasions.
- We must change ourselves and our idea of progress because the terms for economic growth as we’ve always known them must be changed for our good due to the ecological reforms needed, death of mass consumption, prolonged stagnation, and less work being available
- Over the last 3 decades, a trend has played out after each recession: economy grows again, but the growth rates are lower and slower to restore prosperity to the working class in the form of job growth and higher wages
- Federal Reserve’s conservative monetary policy combined with globalization’s erosion of US wages and jobs was to blame for this.
- Fed hold’s back the natural expansive energies of the economy to ensure price inflation is subdued - mostly to appease Wall Street.
- Business, finance, and government elites have ignored the risk of the implosion of domestic demand.
- Greider hopes for a small-d democratic rebellion - “a nonviolent uprising of citizens that breaks through the political barriers and forces insiders to incorporate their views in decisions” - aka Occupy Wall Street
- When growth fails, the political system loses its cover (i.e. when the economy is growing, the income inequality is less noticeable and people have hope they can join the ranks of the top 1%)
- If we are living in the richest country on earth, why does it have to be like this?
- It’s not the people who have failed, it’s the system that failed the people
- “The awkward secret about the American growth engine is that it thrives by wantonly wasting the noneconomic ‘assets’ of people’s lives, the lost potential of their time on earth. These are ‘priceless’ because they cannot be bought or sold. Their true value is unknowable, even to the individual. The growth engine wastes their future - the full range of possible experiences that ought to be commonly available in this very wealthy nation.”
- Ecologists look at this a similar way, the price of economic growth is the destruction of nature and we are quickly bumping into the limits of growth due to the finite capacity of the natural world to sustain life
- Neither the wasted human lives nor the losses to nature are factored into the economic accounting, nor are they redeemable.
- Business doesn’t take these factors into account, they are focused on reducing their costs and not the costs to people or nature, their profits and not the consideration of human lives or society’s needs and values
- Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare - Herman E. Daly, John B. Cobb, Jr
- Calculates full consequences of growth by combining indicators of social and ecological gains/losses with standard economic measures of output/wealth
- For the Common Good - US growth was negative for overall society
- GPD no longer makes sense, we need to rethink the meaning of progress that takes a broader range of factors into account, such as the human condition
- We can no longer work to maximize gains in the present while leaving consequences to future generations to figure out
- “My larger point is this: The US is still behaving like an impoverished developing country that thinks it must pursue ‘growth before justice,’ sacrificing people, society, and the environment in order to climb still higher on the ladder of wealth accumulation.”
- The US is like a confused teenager, cocky and refusing to mature
- Steady-State Economics - Herman Daly
- Rejects growth as we know it as a fixation on expansive accumulation that does not take into account good or ill consequences
- Describes an economy with dynamic equilibrium that fulfills our needs without destroying the planet
- Foundation for sustainable development
- This ecological footprint - measure of how much humanity and industrialization have encroached upon and diminished nature’s capacity to replenish life
- Re-imagining America’s future
- “What would we need to put in place to sustain general satisfaction and to open wider paths for individual fulfillment?”
- Have to redefine progress to take shared values and life into account
- Americans understand practical realities that bad luck and bad choices can and do happen, however “they want (and deserve) better odds, a fair shot at securing the joys of mortal existence and the distinctive pleasures of being American.”
- “Americans might ponder this: How well does our society enable people to fulfill their commonsense expectations? Is the country moving toward or away from this goal?”
- The people must feel empowered to stand up and demand the change required
- Six large imperatives to guide transformation and restore the country’s well-being
- Restore moral principle and public obligations to financial system and corporations
- Write tough new rules to govern behavior of financial sector and get rid of too-big-to-fail banks
- “Government can replenish our battered social reality by reversing the forces that for three decades have depressed wages and destroyed work for broad ranks of Americans.”
- Take on the Federal Reserve
- Re-evaluate role in the global economy
- Large and permanent public workforce to handle infrastructure, new businesses in fields of energy and ecology that private business is neglecting
- People need and deserve assurances that their “essential needs” will be met
- Healthcare, schooling, comfortable old age (a new national pension system to replace the loss of private ones), affordable transportation, stable housing
- Reinvent American capitalism
- Reform the values and operating assumptions of business/finance to take into account wasteful destruction and values of society
- Labor laws that protect collective representation and allow workers to become worker-owners who can help shape company culture, values, and direction
- Democratize capitalism
- Federal government has to yield some power to state and city governments to encourage new social and economic innovation at a local level that will be more responsive to its citizens
- This will encourage local projects and competitions among communities where best practices can then be shared for the good of all.
- Most important: thicken our democracy - giving citizens active influence over government
- Citizens need more opportunity to shape their lives that city council meetings and voting, they need to be able to insert themselves into decision making
- How can we afford any of this?
- We need to better prioritize what we want - if other countries can afford things like guaranteed healthcare and modern high-speed rail, why can’t we?
- The problem isn’t money and being able to afford it, our per-capita income is $10K higher than Japan, $11K higher than France, $12K higher than Germany
- Yet we rank lower than many countries in multiple categories like children living in poverty, income inequality, and more
- Work-life balance in US is far behind other developed countries, with far less benefits
- One reason for this is the strong labor movements and union membership in Europe
- The point is, the issue is not cost. It’s the desire of the elites and business.
So that's just one chapter, but it's a great book, and it's amazing to me that he said in 2009 that a group, just like OWS, was the only thing that might save our country. Here's to hoping he's right!