CAPITALISM |
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Capitalism, which replaced feudalism in the early modern period at least in the western half of Europe, is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and the creation and manufacturing of goods and services by businesses and industry for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labour and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, investments are determined by private decision and the parties to a transaction typically determine the prices at which they exchange assets, goods, and services. |
Early human settlements were dependent on proximity to water and other natural resources. Because of opportunities, they gradually settled elsewhere, went into societies and communities, organized states and laws, created highest levels of thoughts and strived for justice, peace and happiness. But mankind faced also natural disasters and artificial disruptions, all effecting our moral attitude, ethical thought, emotions, values and capacities. |
THE CASE OF MORAL CAPITALISM (booklet) |
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What's the Matter with Capitalism |
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On invitation of the NEXUS Institute, Angus Deaton gave the lecture
"What's the Matter with Capitalism". "Society as a whole would benefit from the power of the free market: for decades, the West blindly believed in this economic fairy tale. It turns out we couldn’t be further from the truth. Social and economic inequality is greater than ever and the number of people living in poverty in the Western world is growing exponentially. Sir Angus Deaton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on poverty, and in his Nexus Lecture he addressed the problems in our current capitalist model and what needs to be done to distribute wealth more fairly and to fight poverty while having a thriving economy". |
MORAL CAPITALISM |
Moral Capitalism is a field theory that integrates intangible moral considerations with traditional micro and macro economic postulates. In sum, Moral Capitalism asserts that interest and virtue are not necessarily in conflict; that virtue is an extension of interest rightly understood. From the perspective of contemporary academic philosophy, the framework of Jurgen Habermas most closely supports this approach to private property and free markets as preferable institutions for human civilization. Habermas points out that human actors engage a variety of realities in the course of performing their individual and collective discourses while alive in this Red Dust world.
One reality is what Habermas calls “Normativity” – the perceptional realities of the mind, the heart and the conscience. From dreams to ordinary thought in conventional languages, from mystical insight to scientific formulae, the realm of the mind and the spirit powerfully attracts the human being. Moral Capitalism holds that business must partake of Normativity as well as of Facticity. |
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What capitalism is seems to be clear to many, but within the entire chain from raw material extraction to consumer benefit there are many ideas and opinions about how profits (and burdens) are distributed:
The economic system of capitalism: Time to change functioning? |
The purpose of a company and tools: - social and religious teachings - ESG factors and integrated reporting |
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In order to make progress, Caux Round Table brings the “idea” of sustainable development as it has been defined and agreed upon by the governments of the world through the Sustainable
Development Goals (officially ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’): |
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Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism 2017 Global Dialogue
November 5th-8th, Wittenberg Center for Global Ethics
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The Increasing Importance Of Distributed Ownership And Governance |
Fund managers at global financial institutions own the majority (70%) of the public stock exchange. These absent owners have no stake in the communities in which the companies operate. Furthermore, management-controlled equity is concentrated in the hands of a select few: the CEO and other senior executives. On the other hand, startups have been willing to distribute equity to employees. Sometimes such equity distribution is done to make up for less than competitive salaries, but more often it’s offered as a financial incentive to motivate employees toward building a successful company. According to The Economist, today’s startups are keen to incentivize via shared ownership:
This trend hearkens back to cooperatives where employees collectively owned the enterprise and participated in management decisions through their voting rights. Mondragon is the oft-cited example of a successful, modern worker cooperative. Mondragon’s broad-based employee ownership is not the same as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. With ownership comes a say – control – over the business. Their workers elect management, and management is responsible to the employees. REI is a consumer cooperative that drew attention this past year when it opted out of Black Friday sales, encouraging its employees and customers to spend the day outside instead of shopping. I suspect that the most successful companies under this emerging form of capitalism will have less concentrated, more egalitarian ownership structures. They will benefit not only financially but also communally. Joint Ownership Will Lead To Collaborative Management The hierarchical organization of modern corporations will give way to networks or communities that make collaboration paramount. Many options for more fluid, agile management structures could take hold. For instance, newer companies are experimenting with alternative management models that seek to empower employees more than a traditional hierarchy typically does. Of these newer approaches, holacracy is the most widely known. It promises to bring structure and discipline to a peer-to-peer workplace. Holacracy “is a new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss.” Companies like Zappos and Medium are in varying stages of implementing the management system. Valve Software in Seattle goes even further, allowing employees to select which projects they want to work on. Employees then move their desks to the most conducive office area for collaborating with the project team. These are small steps toward a system that values the employee more than what the employee can produce. By giving employees a greater say in decision-making, corporations will make choices that ensure the future of the planet and its inhabitants. |
Rethinking Capitalism |
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Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, recounts the unstoppable rise in Asia. Ruth Cairnie, strategist at Shell, talks about competition and innovation and journalist Joris Luyendijk talks about his conversations with money hungry bankers in the City of London. |
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VEDANTA |
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Vedanta, also known as Uttara Mīmāṃsā, is a Hindu philosophical tradition that is one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy. Avula Parthasarathy, popularly known as Swamiji (born 8 June 1927), is an Indian philosopher and exponent of Vedanta, one of the ancient philosophies of India. He translates the subtle philosophical themes into a practical technique of living. He has multiple degrees in literature, science and law, and completed a postgraduate degree in international law from London University. Renouncing a shipping business early in life, he has dedicated his life to study, research and propagation of Vedanta. His writings, discourses and seminars have featured in international press and television media. Business, sport and film celebrities regularly seek his counsel. |
A BRIEF COMMENT |
Calculating individuals will bring about the best social-economic organization: the homo economicus In the early modern era, there was a period of conflict between kings and parliament, overseas trade and of materialism, utilitarianism, revolution, and homo economicus, who is out to satisfy needs in an efficient, rational or logical manner. This era was characterized by rapidly accelerating scientific discovery and invention, wars and revolutions, capitalism and economic liberalism, theories that assume that the satisfaction of needs by calculating individuals will bring about the best social-economic organization. It was also in this era where Adam Smith, moral philosopher / political economist, examined the nature and causes of wealth. Human happiness (happy planet index) and liberty is served when we as individuals have sovereignty. |
The time of the rise of neoliberalism
The 20th century was a strange and confusing century of wars, technological changes, youth cultures, individualism and postmodernism. In 1920, Keynes described in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” the era of the first globalization with the words: “What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man was that age which came to an end in August 1914. … The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea, the various products of the whole earth, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon |
Keynes became known through the book ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’, published in 1936. It was the time of the rise of neoliberalism, a theory of politico-economic action, according to which human welfare is best served by the liberation of private freedom and skill of enterprise, within an institutional framework of highly private property, free markets and free trade and with a role of the government to create and maintain such a framework. The economic theory behind neoliberalism initially stems from the monetarism that the Chicago economists adhered to in the 1970s, which has two key points:
Capitalist values lived on through the dissemination of libertarian ideas, in particular through the highly popular novel of Ayn Rand’s bestseller Atlas Shrugged, “a capitalist manifesto” that depicts a utopian picture of capitalist, transforming society as a whole and reduce all interpersonal relations to money trade in contrast to human capital, the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value (World Bank, World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work). |