Competition vs Collaboration!
Nick Hanauer is a successful billionaire entrepreneur, & venture capitalist. He founded, co-founded, & invested in dozens of companies. Nick has now established himself as a civic innovator, public speaker, & fierce critic of growing income inequality. His policy pieces on Politico, Bloomberg News, & TED have gone viral, reaching audiences of tens of millions.
Nick professes his adherence to capitalism but now thinks that our the system has now become largely a competition between highly cooperative groups -- competition between firms, competition between networks of firms, competition between nations. For Nick the reality is that successful businesses are built through cooperation by including the talents of everyone. He advocates a strategy built around cooperation rather than selfishness.
He preaches a more sustainable, more prosperous & more equitable society with a new rules for the economy. In his own words as told in his TedTalk:
1) First is that successful economies are not jungles, they're gardens, which is to say that markets, like gardens, must be tended, that the market is the greatest social technology ever invented for solving human problems, but unconstrained by social norms or democratic regulation, markets inevitably create more problems than they solve. Climate change & the great financial crisis of 2008 are two easy examples.
2) The second rule is that inclusion creates economic growth. So the neoliberal idea that inclusion is this fancy luxury to be afforded if & when we have growth is both wrong & backwards. The economy is people. Including more people in more ways is what causes economic growth in market economies.
3) The third principle is the purpose of the corporation is not merely to enrich shareholders. The greatest grift in contemporary economic life is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation & the only responsibility of executives is to enrich themselves and shareholders. The new economics must & can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community & shareholders alike.
4) Rule four: greed is not good. Being rapacious (usurious) doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath.
And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.
5) And fifth & finally, unlike the laws of physics, the laws of economics are a choice. Now, neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on a collection of beliefs regarded as proven when it is not. If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics. "
For this new economy to happen we must implement better control over those who manage our money.
#money #markets #people
