Michael Edwards gives us a much-needed reality check on the rhetoric, performance and potential of the efforts of many to reform markets and make them serve new social purposes.
While giving credit where it’s due to all the well-motivated efforts of socially responsible investors, social venturers, philanthro-capitalists, social enterprises, Edwards points to all the often-downplayed tensions and contradictions in these now fashionable activities. He points to the problem of business people trying to reform citizens organizations and imposing business practices and metrics quite at odds with their social goals and performance.
As an early citizen organizer (of the environmental group Citizens for Clean Air in New York City in the 1960s), I personally experienced such misguided efforts by well-meaning management consultants and aspiring politicians and lawyers who all identified with our goals of cleaning up New York City’s air. However, few of them understood the challenges of working with an all-volunteer organization – or our radical agenda of joining up with Ralph Nader in the Campaign to Make General Motors Responsible.
Similar conflicts described in Small Change show how little these social dynamics have changed. Edwards is rightly suspicious of the metrics borrowed from accountants to measure performance of civic groups working for social justice, empowering disadvantaged groups, let alone trying to change social structures that perpetuate poverty and social exclusion. For example, today’s crisis-prone global financial casino generates poverty, inequality and is the flywheel of social and ecosystems destruction. Yet entrenched interests, lobbying and campaign funds still prevent the US Congress from reforms and will no doubt lead to the next crisis.
Edwards focus on the microeconomics of these dilemmas leaves little accounting for the macro-level changes he so ardently advocates: the need to correct money-based scorecards of “national progress” such as GDP. He seems unaware of the many efforts focused at the European Parliament’s BEYOND GDP Conference in 2007 which convened statisticians of health, education, poverty gaps, environment, including all the new indicators such as the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators I developed with the Calvert Fund. Edwards is still money-focused – now the main block to new thinking. There is no shortage of money. We see it being printed on TV as central bankers reward their brethren and bail out their Wall Street friends. Today’s money circuits are corrupted and overloaded, and the new money-free electronic barter and trading platforms are bypassing Wall Street. We now see that finance is itself the ultimate bubble and must be downsized by, for starters, a financial transactions tax (which I have advocated since 1995). Edwards and I centrally agree that no philanthro-capitalist will join us at Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil), a typical social enterprise, as we work to downsize finance and tax its excesses.
The war of attrition Edwards describes between markets and governments continues – nowhere more bitterly than in the USA still steeped in market fundamentalism. Yet we must evolve markets beyond Robert Reich’s view of the limited responsibility of companies to obey the law. The need is to correct toxic economic textbooks and prevent business models based on “externalizing” costs, just as these sort of corrections are also needed in GDP. Socially responsible investors have won significant victories in promoting full-cost prices, life-cycle costing and triple-bottom line, ESG asset valuation models. These social innovations are over-looked in the otherwise useful book.
Hazel Henderson, President, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil); author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy; and co-creater, Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators
The Practical Visionary by Corinne McLaughlin with Gordon Davidson, Unity House 2010; excerpt from the Foreword by Hazel Henderson, President, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil); author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy; and co-creater, Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators
I welcome The Practical Visionary for so many reasons. Most important is the fact that our planet is now our programmed learning environment – and is teaching us directly. Our global economy is going through many wrenching crises and transitions – due largely to limited human understanding of the natural systems of our wondrous planet. Myopic economic theories mistook money for the real wealth of nations: enlightened, healthy people and healthy ecosystems…This book is valuable on so many levels, distilling the experience of two world-class agents of positive social change. Corinne and Gordon are the kind of role models needed today, particularly as citizens of maturing industrial countries living through the transition from the age of fossil-fueled Industrialism to the now rapidly-dawning solar age. Corinne McLaughlin has documented this new world with clarity, wit and deep understanding, so as to help us all along the way forward.
Green CITYnomics: The Urban War against Climate Change edited by Kenny Tang, Greenleaf 2009
Useful review by many experts of the state of play in many cities in their efforts to address climate change issues. This is a fast-evolving field with cities networking within global organizations, including ICLEI and the Innovative Cities Network. The city of Curitiba, Brazil, long an innovator in city planning under its architect mayor Jaime Lerner is not mentioned. In March 2010, Curitiba hosted the Network of Innovative Cities and announced itself as the Climate Prosperity City. Other notable efforts are the Ecocities conferences and the Integral City approaches in Canada. A worthwhile addition to the studies of climate change adaptation and mitigation. – Hazel Henderson
Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson, Earthscan 2009
A useful re-statement of all the good arguments made over the past 40 years for transforming public policy beyond erroneous economic models. Summarizes the debate and the conclusions on the need to move to low-entropy models based on better understanding of real human needs and goals of equitable, ecologically sustainable prosperity. Some strange omissions, including E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973) in its heavily focused British literature and the ascribing of the European Commission and the European Parliaments Beyond GDP conferences in 2007 (www.beyond-gdp.eu) to the OECD. A good introduction for those unfamiliar with this 40-year old debate. – Hazel Henderson