Forbes article about "... The Call For A Capitalist Reformation"

Larry Fink, Tucker Carlson, David Brooks And The Call For A Capitalist Reformation

Jay Coen GilbertContributor
Entrepreneurs
Co-founder of B Lab and the movement of Certified B Corporations.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaycoengilbert/2019/01/24/larry-fink-tucker-carlson-david-brooks-and-the-call-for-a-capitalist-reformation/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Larry Fink challenges. Tucker Carlson rants. David Brooks moralizes. Others wonder Can American Capitalism Survive? They all correctly diagnose the problem—a broken economic system that is not meeting the needs of the vast majority of people and that has embedded incentives that make it designed to fail in the more perilous times ahead—but they all fail to see clearly how long we’ve had this problem, what is its root cause, and what is required for its solution.

Capitalism did not go off the rails in the last 40 years. It may have metastasized into a financialized cancer, but capitalism’s cancer gene has been there since the beginning. Unconstrained, growth-at-any-cost, profit-over-purpose capitalism has destroyed the lives of millions upon millions of people for hundreds of years. They just weren’t people we typically cared enough about to behave differently or to question the system, as long as it was working for us. By “we” and “us,” I mean those who created and have benefited most from the capitalist system. But we are coming to a day of reckoning. If we do not properly diagnose the root cause of our potentially fatal illness, we will fail to develop or—worse—fail to use a promising cure.

That such diverse public figures as Fink, Carlson and Brooks are now recognizing what everyday people around the world have known and felt for a long time is good news. System change can only happen if there is widespread recognition that the current system is failing. But that is not enough: System change also requires a credible alternative.

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Apologies if posted yesterday.