Our guests Hunter Lovins from Natural Capitalism Solutions and Amanda Janoo from the Wellbeing Economy Alliance help us to expose the gap… more like a chasm, really… between the bedtime story of our economy (Freedom! Perfect markets! A magical balancing act aggregating to the greater good for all!) and the reality of neoliberal economic theory taken to the extreme (Inequality! Climate change! Pandemic!).

What’s more, they give us the beginnings of a road map for transforming our economy, and capitalism as we know it, to be in service of the long-term well-being of our ecosystems & communities.

Guest appearance by Ruchi Nadkarni, alum of the Sustainable Innovation MBA at the University of Vermont.

Learn more and subscribe to our Courage Collective e-letter at www.decadeofcourage.com

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With Courage,
Dana Gulley

Transcript:

Lovins: The conventional wisdom of why capitalism rocks is that it promotes freedom and central planning. Where the government tells you how the economy is going to run impinges on this freedom. And it’s likely to get it wrong.

Janoo:  So the economy is generally presented as this really unique system or space that is separate and distinct from our societies, from our culture, from our politics, because it’s governed by its own natural laws.

Janoo: There’s this idea that you don’t need any rules or regulations, or really any intent because if it’s left to its own devices, it’s just going to naturally self-regulate.

Lovins: The wisdom of people, of all people individually, making these choices in this free market will aggregate to the greater good for all.

Janoo: All people are fundamentally rational and selfish and individualistic. And the magic of the economy is that this invisible hand somehow ensures that everyone’s greedy instincts actually makes everyone better off.

screech

1:26

Janoo: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot in there that’s not true.

Lovins: I analogize it to what Winston Churchill said of democracy. It’s the worst system in the world, except for all the rest.

DANA’S INTRO

Dana: For too long, we have been told these myths about the beauty of corporate capitalism and neoliberal economics, and today, we’re gonna bust them. It’s your host, Dana Gulley here, and I gotta say: the stakes are high. Personally, they’ve never felt higher. I write this from my new home state of Oregon and it is not an exaggeration to say there are currently wildfires burning all around me. People in my neighborhood have upgraded their coronavirus masks to gas masks due to the hazardous air quality. And in cities like Portland, which have seen months of Black Lives Matter uprisings to condemn police brutality and demand racial equity, these gas masks were already in regular use as protection from tear gas at nightly protests.

2:19

The sheer scale and force of these challenges – pandemic, climate change, white supremacy playing out in the mainstream – can be paralyzing. Full stop. But it is at their intersection that movements can unite, unleashing possibility – the opportunity for something different, more and better. You see, each of these issues is connected by an economic system that just plain doesn’t work anymore, if it ever really did.

And the good news is, more of us are coming to understand that our economy needs to change, now. Even Pope Francis just condemned the “dogma of neoliberal faith,” blaming the magic theories of free market capitalism for driving mass inequality, violence, and a suffering planet.

The Pope’s pronouncement is no small thing. But I’ve got even better news: countries, companies and communities around the world are actually starting to do something about this.

Amanda Janoo, Knowledge and Policy Lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance says: “the economy’s not something given it’s not governed by some magical laws. It’s something that’s made and remade all the time on the basis of our individual and collective decisions. We have the capacity to produce and provide things in a way that directly improves social and ecological wellbeing.”

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance is far from the only entity working on an overhaul of our economic system. We spoke also to Hunter Lovins, President & Founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions.

Lovins: I call it creating an economy in service to life.

So, while we’re currently working in service of an economy that is failing the vast majority of us, not to mention the natural world that all of our lives depend on, according to Lovins and Janoo, we can do something about that. We can use our collective leadership to transform our economy to work for us, rather than the other way around. We can create an economy that combats climate change and racial inequality – one that builds an equitable, just and harmonious world.

Sounds almost too good to be true, right? It’s not.

4:28

Okay so, welcome to Decade of Courage, a podcast to unite thought leaders, business leaders and activists to co-create a new vision for our economy – one that challenges the status quo – in order to deliver real solutions to the problems plaguing our communities & planet.

Again, I’m your host Dana Gulley, and by telling stories and sharing examples of companies and communities that are on the leading edge of transforming the role of business in society, we aim to inspire the collective courage that we will surely need this decade. There are many who have been working to build new, inclusive economies, forward economic justice and promote natural capitalism for a long time. In this podcast, we will feature their work, learn from them and connect their ideas to the businesses that have been leading change from the inside out.

Here in our very first episode, we have chosen to start by learning more about the economy because through moments of crisis like we are in right now, as long as I can remember, we have often been told: we need to bail out the economy, we need to work to get the economy back on track, we need to… As if the economy’s health and wellbeing is a proxy for our own.

This message–that we are here to serve our economy–makes some sense, under the presumption that by doing so, it’ll serve us back. But that’s a very big presumption. When I look around, I see an economy that, at it’s best, accumulates wealth in the hands of the very few. I see an economy that has fueled our climate crisis. I see an economy that has created vast inequality throughout the United States driving a wealth gap that is divided by race. According to the Brookings Institution, in 2016, “the typical net worth of a White family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family.”

We have a lot of work to do this decade, and instead of focusing on getting this version of our economy back on track – the one that has created such big problems – I want to understand, can we transform it to do better? And if so, how?

Thanks to our conversations with Amanda and Hunter, we’ve pieced together a journey that will take us from the tribes of pre-humans, the study of which have helped to prove that indeed, we are not all driven by greed and selfishness – which is the premise of dominant economic thinking today, to a room in Mt. Pelerin, Switzerland in 1947 where neoliberal economic theory was born, to the early 1970s, a time when that theory was translated into the mainstream economic policies we still have today. The result of these policies? An economy off the rails, a capitalist system far removed from its original intent and a greater need than ever for an intervention – or several – to get us on track.

We better dig in.

PART 1: A vision for what’s possible

7:03

As we prepare to dive into the problems, and before we get to work on understanding the root causes of those problems, we start by naming a vision for the world. It is only by having the courage to envision a better, brighter future that we can do the work to achieve it. We’ll do our best always to include a moment for “visioning” in each of our episodes. This time around, we turn to Ruchi Nadkarni, a recent graduate from the Sustainable Innovation MBA (or SIMBA) at the University of Vermont. We asked Ruchi what she sees as an inclusive economy.

Ruchi Nadkarni: I would say thinking about stakeholders at the fringes, and how they are affected by policy, by business strategy, by corporations, the environments that they live in. Really giving them a voice at the table and considering their experience and input when creating products, markets, services.

SIMBA is producing the next generation of business leaders who are focused on using a business degree not to get rich or gain status, but to be equipped to disrupt the idea and practice that the business of business is just business. No, the business of business must serve a greater purpose than only maximizing profits. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

This next generation of business leaders has the courage to envision a different economic system. That’s the first step. And it’s the hardest.

8:21

Ruchi Nadkarni: We need to have novel economic metrics like wellbeing, quality of life, and really measuring the things that people value, and that adds value to their lives.

Ruchi gives us a North Star to orient towards. By bringing those “fringe stakeholders” the people and even the ecosystems that are undervalued by our economy, into the front of our minds, we can begin to imagine what it would look like if our economy centered these stakeholders, instead of pushing them to the margins.

Amanda Janoo – remember, we’ve already heard from her and we’ll keep hearing from her this episode, she believes this kind of change is possible.

Janoo: I feel that we have the capacity and we have the resources to ensure that we can build a system where we produce and provide things for one another in a way that that does ensure that people feel that they have the things that are, are necessary for their own flourishing

DG: As I mentioned, Janoo is the Knowledge and Policy Lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, or WEALL.

Janoo: WEALL is an alliance of organizations, activists, academics, individuals, and policy makers who are all committed to economic systems change, and building an economy that is in service of people and planets.

PART 2: Framing the problem(s) with neo-liberal, corporate capitalism

9:38

WEALL recognizes that our current economy is causing way more harm than good. We want to understand why it functions the way it does. So, we asked Amanda what’s untrue about the “magical self-regulating” power of the economy that she described at the top.

Janoo:  This idea that the economy is somehow separate or distinct, and it’s self-regulating out there in the ether is kind of insane because, um, the economy is really just the term we use for the systems we build to produce and provide for one another.  People make up the economy, it’s a, it’s a system developed by humanity.

Gulley: OK, I have to interject: there’s a lot here already. Call me naive, but I’ve never thought about it so simplistically: the economy is not its own, separate thing, it’s us. We make up the economy. You and me. All of us together.

Janoo: In recent history, this profound belief, um, in this sort of magical self-regulating power of the economy led governments around the world to reduce regulations on business and finance, to reduce and privatize public social services and activities, and to remove trade restrictions or barriers, because the idea would be that if we just unleash this economic force, that we’re going to generate tons of wealth and then it will ultimately trickle down and everybody in the world is going to be super happy and great.

Gulley: Spoiler alert. It doesn’t trickle down. Amanda goes on to explain that, left to its own devices, “freed from government regulation”, the economy AKA our collective efforts (because, again, remember, we are the economy) has indeed generated huge amounts of wealth. WE have generated huge amounts of wealth. But this wealth doesn’t reach us all. Instead, it accumulates at the very top.

Janoo: When we’re freeing the economy, we’re really just freeing those who already have more economic power. So meaning rich people and corporations.

Gulley: I understand that some of us are taking greater risks – like the entrepreneur who puts all of her savings on the line to start a business. She should see a greater reward for taking that risk. But, how much greater? And at whose expense? And as a result of this “freed economy” who can and can’t get to a place of having savings to risk in the first place? The notion that hard work will get you ahead in our economy – it’s just not that simple.

I understand this intuitively and acutely. I was raised with my brother by a single mother who worked the night shift for over 20 years to provide for us. That whole time, she was struggling – as if her life and her family’s lives depended on it… because they did… – she was struggling to just keep her head above water. Not to get ahead. To survive. And survive we did, thanks to her struggle.

On the two or three family vacations we did take when I was growing up, we went to visit our family in Canada. We’d pile into whatever barely-hanging-on car we had at the time, notify the local mechanic–who we depended on and vice versa practically as family over the decades– about our route, counting on the fact that he would bail us out if we got into trouble as he always had. We’d count our blessings and off we went – I think of all my mom’s courage, traveling so far from home and across national borders when there was so little by the way of a safety net… the margins were so thin.

And that’s the irony. Because we’d arrive in Canada and visit with our family there and you could feel the difference. My Canadian family wasn’t rich, but they were comfortable. They had a little cabin on a lake in Quebec they’d travel to from Ontario. They had cars that were dependable, a house without a leak in the roof. And not only this! They mostly worked as teachers – or in the case of my cousin’s husband, following his passion by working at a comic book and record shop – all with a certain comfort that, for example, they wouldn’t go bankrupt because of an unexpected illness. The wealth disparity in the United States that many of us have just come to accept – especially those of us who are financially comfortable – it’s just not the same in Canada. So, as the three of us courageously embarked on our journey from our home in New York, north to Canada, the irony is just how much safer we would have been there. How much more taken care of.

Granted, the point of life isn’t only to be safe and take care of one another. But ensuring that we are all safe and taken care of: I do believe this should be a fundamental goal. Part of the bedtime story of capitalism is that you unleash innovation, and that if you were to regulate business, you’d quash it. But I can’t help but imagine all the innovation we’re missing out on while people struggle to meet their basic needs. There has to be something between leaving people to fend for themselves and a world without innovation.

Janoo had another point, and it’s one that we’ll hear Hunter discuss in greater detail: The inequality our economy has perpetuated has led to instability and a rapidly degrading planet. It occurs to me – this isn’t good for anyone.

I’ll admit, and this is in my white privilege showing, reckoning with the fact that this struggle in America, this wealth disparity our economy perpetuates… is by design… that takes some unlearning.

So, I want to understand why. Why do we live day in and day out with a system that isn’t working for most of us? Amanda mentioned that baked into this economic theory that we’re living, wealth is meant to trickle down. Why did we think trickle down economics would work? Where are the roots of that theory?

15:03

This September marked the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s Free Market Manifesto, which may have something to do with all this. The title of Friedman’s essay, which was published in the New York Times on September 13th, 1970 was “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits…” It’s not that Friedman didn’t think there were serious problems in the world that needed fixing. He did. But his argument for the best way that business could make a positive impact on those problems was to maximize its profits, and thus returns to shareholders. Essentially so that shareholders could amass wealth and donate to causes they believed in. Of course what is terribly lacking in this argument is how to account for the problems that businesses themselves – through their operations – were causing. The damage that would grow exponentially as businesses focused only on increasing their profits. And the fact that philanthropy would never be able to keep up.  The relative success of this essay–and Friedman’s near celebrity status, for an economist at least, unleashed a vital (not to mention dangerous… and toxic…) belief system that we have been functioning within ever since:

What the business world has come to call shareholder primacy: the notion that a business’s job is to maximize its returns to shareholders above all else. I’m pleased to report that there is now widespread understanding that shareholder primacy is a myth. We’ll go into much greater depth about this next episode, but for now, Hunter helps us understand the circumstances in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland in 1947 that led to Friedman’s manifesto, and another important piece of the puzzle: The Powell Memorandum.

Lovins: My name is Hunter Lovin’s. I am president of natural capitalism solutions. We are a nonprofit that works with companies, communities, countries, helping them to implement more regenerative practices profitably.

Lovins: The myth of shareholder primacy arose out of an ideology called neoliberalism. This was invented by 36 men, and yep they were all men, who met at a hotel outside Montreux, Switzerland place called Mont Pelerin in 1947, to try to frame the perfect discipline of economics. 1947 Europe’s in ruins, a man named Ludwig Von Mises was appalled at what national socialism, Nazi-ism, had done to trash Europe. A man named Frederick Hayak was scared to death of the rise in the East of Soviet collectivism, central planning, and a man named Milton Friedman believed that the individual is the only legitimate economic actor. They and 33 of their close buddies argued for 10 days, and then came forth with this ideology of neoliberalism. That freedom, individual freedom, is the only thing that matters expressed within the market, because markets are perfect. And in this perfect market, you against me will somehow aggregate to the greater good for all.

I can’t totally imagine what it would have felt like to exist in the world in 1947 – the year before my own mother was born – just after World War II, but I can’t help but be leery of the potentially narrow-minded perspectives of these 36 men and the Mont Pelerin Society (which by the way, is still active – their biannual meeting for September 2020 in Oslo has been postponed due to the pandemic). And it turns out my leeriness is right.

Digging into the history of the Mt. Pelerin society further, I found an essay by Dr. Lars Cornelissen, whose research is on the intellectual history of neoliberalism. He’s a Faculty of Philosophy at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and he explains that neoliberalism was formed in opposition to political and economic philosophies like collectivism and planning – as we heard Hunter explain. But more, that neoliberalism was formed in opposition to another political movement – decolonization. There were some fundamental, and racist, beliefs among many of the original creators of neoliberal economics about which countries were capable of standing up functioning economies and which weren’t.

I’m finding more and more that peeling back the layers of the onion on just about any topic tends to get you to white supremacist mindset, quick. But, okay, I want to hear more from Hunter.

19:27

Lovins: Friedman went back to the Chicago School of Economics and spread this across economic schools the world around the Mont Pelerin society that they formed got its members as advisors to every head of state on the planet. Three of them as heads of state, many of them as central bankers, but they remained a somewhat wonkish ideology until in 1971, the US chamber of commerce asked a man named Lewis Powell to write a memorandum of how business could re-legitimize itself. This is right after the sixties, sex, drugs, rock and roll, the cultural revolution in the western world and business was feeling somewhat beat up. Powell argued, and you can go online and download the Powell memorandum and read it, and it is somewhat chilling to do so. Powell argued that business is essential to freedom, and that business must recognize that it is under attack and to survive it must seize and assiduously use power.

Hunter goes onto explain how the Powell Memorandum led to five entities, including, you guessed it, the Koch Brothers, to put $5 million each for five years into creating and endowing the Heritage Foundation, Hudson Hoover, Heartland, American Enterprise, Cato, ALEC – giving rise to powerful organizations each with neoliberal economics – the ideas that all humans are greedy bastards, that when you’re in a down economy, you don’t help people, you leave them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps – with these ideas built into their very DNA. Under a decade after the Memo was published, with the election of Ronald Regan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., neoliberalism became the dominant global economy.

Lovins: The upshot is the ‘08  financial collapse, now the pandemic and the greatest economic collapse ever around the world, this system doesn’t work, more to the point it’s wrong.

It’s based on bad science, this notion we’re all greedy bastards isn’t true. If you look at the archeology, the anthropology, the evolutionary biology go back to when the tribes of pre-humans were down to as few numbers as the now endangered mountain gorillas, pre-humans almost went extinct.

The tribe that survived, they cared for each other. They found the skull of an old toothless man. They’ve found the skeletons of cripples. If you’re a greedy bastard, you’re in it for number one, you’re not going to take care of a crippled person. You’re not going to take of a toothless old man. These people survived because they cared for each other. And Dr. Paul Lawrence at Harvard, Dr. Michael Pearson at Fordham have shown that what it means to be human is not only to acquire and defend, but also to bond, to care and to create meaning. This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It’s who we are as humans. And you are here today because those people were your ancestor. Their DNA is in you.

Shareholder primacy. This notion of the only thing that matters is delivering value to owners. Bullshit! The meaning of life is to care.

The science says the meaning of life is to care about one another. Many of us just understand this to be true. And yet, our economy is built on a different premise: that we’re greedy and selfish. It feels like this is a pretty fundamental flaw. Amanda Janoo had something to say about this, too:

Janoo: I think that one of the most important changes we can make is to move beyond the assumption that has become really ingrained at least here in the United States, that we’re all inherently selfish. Because it’s a framework for looking at the world and you can always find examples to reaffirm this belief, but in reality, neuroscience, anthropology, and just common sense will show it to be false. So we are happier and we’re healthier when we’re generous and we build trust and thriving societies by caring for the needs of others and by engaging in the natural environment.

I couldn’t agree more. So, in large part the reason that we have an economy that accumulates wealth at the top, at the very few, and that has exacerbated inequality and environmental degradation is because a group of white men got together almost 75 years ago, when the world looked COMPLETELY different than it does today, and decided that all humans were inherently greedy and selfish and overwhelmingly obsessed with themselves above their communities, their natural environment, and the planet.

24:43

Does this sound right to you? Would you describe yourself this way? This doesn’t resonate with me. Yes, a lot of my motivations probably could be described as selfish, but they’re also pro-social. Meaning, I am happier when I know I can be healthy. My health depends on the health of my natural environment. Therefore I am happier when my natural environment is protected. Psssst, that’s not even the whole of it! I also believe the natural environment has inherent value and should exist even if it doesn’t benefit me in any way. I could go on. I won’t. I think it’s clear that this is just garbage. I am not alone when I say – as humans, we fundamentally want to heal our planet, heal our communities – this is in fact the only way we can know we’ll be okay – is if we can all be okay. Maybe that is selfish, but it’s not the kind of selfish that Friedman was talking about.

But this is really just the tip of the iceberg. So, this neoliberal economist Milton Friedman spells out this manifesto giving companies permission – wait wait wait. Let me rephrase that: this neoliberal economist Milton Friedman spells out this manifesto emboldening and empowering shareholders to hold companies’ feet to the fire if they are doing anything less than maximizing their returns. Give your employees a fair, livable wage? NOPE, give that money to us instead. Utilize packaging that costs more but can be recycled or repurposed? NOPE, give that money to  us instead… or if you must, pass that cost down to the customer… perpetuating this idea that it’s up to us as consumers to dig our way out of the chaos that the private sector and these shareholders have been perpetuating, while companies can wash their hands of any responsibility in the name of shareholder primacy.  And of course this then causes greater inequality, because those who have money to invest – the shareholders – can grow that wealth faster thanks to the increased profits of the companies they are investing in. But those who are earning paychecks, don’t see that same growth in their wealth, especially given what companies had to do to their paychecks in order to increase their own profits. But like I said, we’ll get into this way more in our next episode.

For now, I want to understand more about how neoliberal corporate capitalism has played out.

27:07

Lovins: It has created the greatest inequality that humanity has ever known. And as Thomas Piketty, the great economist who wrote the book Capital in the 21st Century has shown this inequality is causative of economic collapse. And so we are lurching from collapse to collapse to collapse.

We now live in the sixth greatest extinction. More species are dying out now than died out when the dinosaurs were around, we are in a global climate crisis caused by the pillaging of the Earth’s fossil fuel resources and the practice of industrial agriculture decarbonizing the soil.

These problems sound familiar. This is the world I know. The world I have always known – the one that many of us have spent our adult lives – and even our youth – working to change. It’s both empowering and infuriating to learn how we got here.

But there’s more. Hunter explains that markets really aren’t perfect after all. In fact, we subsidize incumbent industries like big ag’ and fossil fuels to the tune of millions of dollars per minute, resulting in a system more akin to “corporate socialism” than capitalism. Where you socialize the losses, but privatize the profits. Some call it crapitalism, others call it cheater capitalism, but the long and short of it is that it has helped to keep the very companies in power that have been at the heart of exploiting neoliberal economics. And it’s unsustainable.

Lovins: As Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the old book The Limits to Growth pointed out if something is unsustainable, that means it will stop.

But it’s worth noting that even despite this cheater capitalism, renewable technologies are outcompeting fossil energy everywhere on the planet.

Lovins: And this is why you see now the collapse everywhere of the oil industry, the shale industry, the coal industry, the fracking industry, the oil field service companies, these things are going down. So of course the good capitalists are crying for federal bailouts of the oil industry. Like wait till we believe in markets or not.

29:27

So, let’s recap so far. Neoliberal economic policy says humans are all greedy. It says it is this greed (and perfect markets) that will make everything balance out. It says government intervention, regulation is bad. Shareholder primacy, which is supported by and based in neoliberal economy policy says, it is a company’s JOB to do everything it can to increase its profits – at the expense of any and all. It doesn’t have a responsibility to society, it has a responsibility to its shareholders. And it gets this permission, again, from this hands-off, government is bad, neoliberal economic policy stuff. And all this has made certain incumbent powers very wealthy and thus very embedded in our political systems. Meaning even with the tides working against them, when an industry like renewable energy manages to eek its way into first place, to be the “winner” that our system is so focused on protecting… these incumbent, status quo industries, in this case fossil fuels… call for a bail out? By the very public that have been left out in the cold? OK, people, this is some serious gaslighting. Some capitalists might be listening to this with anger – that my ideals are too radical, bordering on the edge of socialism. But no, I’m trying to explore the true opportunity for a transformed capitalism. Meanwhile, the hypocrisy!

As we sit with the fact that incumbent industries are playing it both ways – demanding freedom when it comes to fewer regulations but seeking bailouts when they are outcompeted, we turn back to Amanda who urges us to take a step back – to see the bigger picture, and start with a vision for what we are trying to achieve with our economy in the first place.

Janoo: I think the focus on promoting the economy for the economy’s sake has had really devastating consequences. Ultimately if we recognize that the economy is a construct of society and that it’s really just determined by the ways that we engage with one another and our natural environment, we can kind of start to realize that we probably need some purpose for it, right? We need some kind of values or vision for, for what this system is supposed to actually provide to us.

Janoo: So obviously coming from the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, to us what’s really important is flipping this idea of what we’re seeing in the newspapers constantly right now, which is this idea that we need to get the economy going again, right? Like that we need to, we need to do everything in our power to stimulate the economy as if it’s something that we’re here to serve, as opposed to recognizing that it’s something we create and should be in service of us and our long term wellbeing.

So this begins one with shifting the narrative to recognize our own role in it, to really realize that we are the economy. Um, and that since we are the economy, we have a role and responsibility to really mold and direct it according to our values and objectives.

Yes! This feels empowering. There is agency in this “flipping of the script” that Amanda references: that not only can we change our economy, but we can build intention and purpose into it, so that it serves us and the wellbeing of our lives and planet. But how do we put this into practice?

Janoo: So it’s, uh, the Wellbeing economy governments partnership, which is the WEGo sort of partnership is a collection of governments that have committed to moving beyond GDP as the metric of progress, and have begun to really prioritize and strive to understand the things that are really important to their societies and their communities’ vision of wellbeing.

33:38

Wait a minute! This is what Ruchi was talking about when she shared her vision for a healthy, thriving community – you remember, that recent graduate from the University of Vermont – she pictured a society where stakeholders have a seat at the table and wellbeing is prioritized… one that uses DIFFERENT metrics of success instead of GDP. And this is happening??

Janoo: Currently the WEGo partnership is New Zealand, Iceland, Scotland, and Wales, but more countries and States are interested in joining. And the first step is actually to understand what is important for wellbeing, right? And it does vary across even these governments. And so in New Zealand, so much importance is put on Maori and indigenous culture and wisdom. And in Scotland, you know some of their key outcomes are things like people grow up feeling loved and cared for. In Wales, the idea of being a really responsible member of the international community is important, right? To have honor in the way in which we engage with one another and we care for one another beyond our societies’ limits, yeah? Like these, these boundaries that we place. And once you start to identify these kind of core values and these key outcomes, it really transforms the direction you head.

35:03

This makes me wonder, how would we answer this question in the United States? What’s important for our wellbeing? A visioning process to tease this out sounds like it would be a critical starting point for transforming our economy. And Janoo explains that indeed it was in New Zealand, where they not only developed a vision for what wellbeing means to them, but they have worked to integrate it into their budgeting process, allocating resources to places that help them meet that vision.

Janoo: They looked at some different dimensions regarding child wellbeing, mental health, the environment and strove to create a certain section of their spending every year that was going to be oriented towards these particular outcomes. And so even within the WEGo partnership themselves, it’s still the beginning of a journey, so they have the vision, right? And now they’re trying to figure out really the strategy because it’s a very different way of structuring governance, of structuring an economy if you’re really speaking to, to these kinds of outcomes.

Dana: I’m inspired by the notion that several countries and states are seeing the value in naming a collective vision as a place to start and changing the metrics they are using in order to measure progress. This seems far and away better than the place we’ve been starting for several decades now: the premise that we’re all greedy and selfish.

But I’m hearing Amanda, more work needs to be done to figure out the strategies by which we can achieve the visions for our economies. For this, we turn to Hunter:

Lovins: A good capitalist stewards and enhances all forms of capital. The crapitalists care only about money and stuff. That’s only half of the forms of capital. There is also human capital, which is not just exploitable workforces, but it’s intact community. It’s the transmission of adaptive values through generations. And natural capital, which is not only exploitable raw commodity resources, but intact ecosystems that deliver to us the services of things like clean air, clean water, fertile soil, the ability of the natural system to absorb and detoxify our wastes. There are dozens of these ecosystem services. A stable climate, pollination. We’re finding this out now as bees are dying off. What’s the cost of hand pollinating all of agriculture?

You can’t do it. And as Einstein famously said, “when the bees die, humans will not be far behind.” Pollination is an ecosystem service. It’s not on anybody’s ballot sheet. Nobody’s counting it as a form of capital, but it is a very real contribution to the economy that we do count. And without it, you encounter well perhaps existential losses, it does, Einstein said that it could be the end of humanity. Now, if you count the value of these ecosystem services and the ecological economists like Dr. Robert Castanza have done this, Dr. Gretchen Daily, and every time you count the value of ecosystem services, it is at least as much or greater than the value of the economy that we do count.

I like how Hunter is outsmarting capitalists at their own game- well, her own game – because she identifies as a natural capitalist after all… she is essentially saying “Ok, so this is the premise for capitalism. So then, what about this? And you clearly forgot about that.” I like this because she’s so sharp – and by the way she can often be found rocking her cowboy hat on or off her Colorado ranch, making her even cooler – but I also like it because it gives us the beginnings of a roadmap for how we could use the best of capitalism to work towards combating climate change and investing in communities. I don’t think we’ll get there with private sector solutions alone, but we need the private sector to stop making things worse and we need the private sector to start leveraging some real solutions. In this case, she has suggested several: we need to expose and do away with the idea that incumbent industries can demand freedom when it comes to regulations but seek bailouts when they are outcompeted. And we need to change the way that “winners” in capitalism as we know it are only focused on making money and producing stuff. These are just two forms of capital, as Hunter points out. What about human capital? What about natural capital?

So, what is the role of individual companies in all of this? How can they lead this change and incorporate the value of other forms of capital into their business models? Spoiler alert: we’ll be focused on understanding how companies are leading this change throughout much of our first season. But for now, Hunter:

40:08

Lovins: Now you have the whole benefit corporation movement, B corps, companies with purpose. You even have Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock. One of the biggest financial institutions on the planet saying if your company doesn’t have a purpose beyond making money, my company doesn’t want to invest in you.

Okay, this is no small thing. BlackRock has $7 trillion – with a “T” dollars assets under management. For some context, the entire annual US GDP is around $20 trillion, and this is like, a third of that. And they’ve come out publicly, multiple years in a row now, demanding that their portfolio companies embed ESG, environmental, social, governance principles, specifically related to climate risk, into their business models. Some may claim that these are just words, but I’d argue that BlackRock has shown that there is actually some bite behind that bark. In 2020 alone, they have voted against management at 53 companies citing insufficient climate risk management. Meaning, they are using their power as investors to push for big change inside these companies. And they’re not alone:

Lovins: You have a fastly growing social impact, environmental impact investment movement, where people are saying, I don’t want to put my money into crapatalist companies. I want to put my money into companies that are doing good for people and the planet. Yeah, I want them to make a profit, but that’s not why they’re here.

Gulley: Great CEOs like Ray Anderson said, “if you think the purpose of business is profit, I suggest you think again. Businesses make a profit because they’re here for a higher purpose.” Same thing that now Unilever is doing, Danone, General Mills. These are all companies that are saying it is our responsibility to tackle climate change. It is our responsibility to tackle inequality. We are pledging to become a regenerative company and regenerative means regenerating human and natural capital as well as financial capital and manufactured capital. And this to me is the essence of real capitalism, of natural capitalism.

I asked Hunter what gives her hope.

Lovins: Hope is not a strategy. And as the, uh, the great climate activist Greta Thunberg says, “I don’t want your hope. I want you to feel the fear that I feel, and then I want you to act.” At the same time, hope is also a human trait. And when we have it, we can be inspired to continue working, to go beyond ourselves. And there is much to be hopeful about. We are in the midst of the transformation away from fossil energy to renewable energy. We know how to be a hundred percent renewably powered by as early as 2030. That’s what, 20 years before the UN says the world has to be entirely off fossil fuel. We know how to do regenerative agriculture. This is agriculture that takes carbon out of the air and puts it back in the soil. Rolling climate change backward at a profit.

In Colorado people think we’re an extractive industry state. We’re not. The oil and gas industry has said you can’t limit us, we provide the jobs for the people of Colorado. Craft brewing provides almost as many jobs as oil and gas. The outdoor industries provide six times as many jobs and revenue as does oil and gas. Clean energy twice as many, Colorado was already transitioning to being a more regenerative economy. Now we just need to make this visible to everybody and show how we drive a recovery based on regenerative industries. We know that when you invest in clean energy, you create 10 times as many jobs as if you invest in a coal fired power plant. So let’s start investing in what works. Let’s start investing in ourselves in our people.

44:35

Gulley: Okay, I don’t know about you, but I’m ending this episode in a totally different place than where I started. For a while there, things just seemed like they were going from bad to worse… an economy premised on the worst parts of humanity, rather than the best, the reality that freeing the economy really just means freeing it for those who already have wealth, learning that this whole massive system is meant to just regulate itself, and balance itself out… and that some believe we can continue to count on that, even as we face greater and greater inequality and the impacts of climate change are accelerating all around us. Happening to us.

But now I’m hearing Amanda – that we can flip this on its head: envision an economy that is in service to us. And I’m hearing Hunter, that we can look at capitalism more holistically as a way to meet that vision we co-create. And just now, a whole slew of examples of companies and cities that are working towards systemic change. These examples can inspire us, and give us momentum.

Lovins: The economist, Dr. Randall Wray, promoter of an approach called modern money theory, has shown that particularly in a down economy, you can print money. If you invest it in people, in education, in healthcare, in wellbeing, in productive industries, it will pay for itself. We have the money. It will not bankrupt us. So let’s build a world that works for a hundred percent of humanity.

46:09

Closing

Gulley: I mentioned at the beginning that the stakes are high, and this is true for all of us. But even for me personally, I’ll share there’s a certain ceiling to how high my highs can get, and yet the pit of despair can feel bottomless. Even beyond climate change, the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter uprisings, the leadership vacuum in national politics, to put it lightly… there’s something else making the stakes feel so high right now. And it’s no small thing. More and more, everyday, I’m coming to understand that my liberation is wrapped up in yours.

A simple sequence of events tells a much bigger story. Breonna Taylor & George Floyd were murdered at the hands of police, like so many others before them, each with a name, each with a story deserving to be shared. There was a massive, organized response. Black Lives Matter uprisings garnered so much widespread attention, pointing to so many opportunities for change. Yes! And yet, the police brutality has continued despite the spotlight of a loud and angry public being shone. So what does that spotlight really reveal? So much privilege. So much power. So much protection keeping the status quo – the dominant forces – safe.

I have a little print that I picked up in August of 2017 at the Bread and Puppet Show, a quirky and storied theatre company based in Glover, Vermont. It reads: Resistance of the Heart Against Business as Usual. At the time, I purchased one for each of my 22 classmates. I was going to be  graduating with them just a few days later, and I was going to be giving the graduation speech. I wanted something to give to each of them as a gift. As we embarked on our journey, on our path, setting out to do good in the world.

48:06

In hindsight, I was only just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding the damage that “business as usual” has caused in our society and the work – the amount of resistance of the heart – that it will take and by whom, so many of us, to undo it.

For those of you that have been organizing for a long time, you know just how long the road ahead is. For me, I’ll be vulnerable and admit, everything I learn or come to understand makes the problems feel ever bigger, even more intractable.

I’ve been fighting for the protection of our natural world for over 15 years. And the same power structures that pollute our rivers, cut down our trees, and continue to profit from the exacerbation of climate change… these are the same power structures that profit from environmental racism and racial inequality. 

And as a queer, nonbinary person, I realize now that my desire to feel included, to have a seat at the table, has often meant feeling the need to keep dominant powers–heterosexual, cisgendered white men–comfortable at the expense of my own visibility. Authenticity. Allyship.

What I am coming to understand is, if your movement and my movement are wrapped up in one another, and more of us are realizing this, didn’t we all just get more powerful?

The movement for black lives, for reckoning with climate change, for dismantling business as usual, these movements are growing, getting stronger, and just maybe, if they can come together, they have the power to make massive change.

It may have taken me 32 years, but I’m showing up, full force, full tilt. And I’ll use my seat at the table–alongside so many courageous, marginalized people– to push for transformative change.

And because that might not be enough, I’m joining the movement to build another table altogether.

We gotta push from within and we gotta change the system. We gotta do both.

The good news is, there are so many fantastic people and projects doing both of these things, and we’re going to highlight them throughout this first season of Decade of Courage to give you inspiration and ways to get involved.

50:19

While we’ll be looking to weave different ideas together, here are a couple of our fundamental beliefs:

• First, change is not easy, but it’s inevitable. So, we can go down kicking and screaming, or we can step up to the challenges, step into the spaces where status quo conversations are happening and together, Lead. The. Change. We believe the private sector has a huge role to play in this leadership.
• Next, leading change in the face of so much uncertainty requires courage.
  • In this case, courage to be wrong. Courage to speak truth to existing power structures. Courage to trust that not one of us is free until we are all free. Courage to shift the neoliberal economic norms that have been allowed to govern your business and take that governance back – and distribute it more equitably to all of your company’s stakeholders. But most importantly: courage to believe that a more equitable, just and harmonious society and planet is possible.
• In the words of the great Brené Brown: “Courage is contagious. Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver.” In that spirit, we believe this has to be the decade of collective courage… where individual acts of courage mixed with radical interdependence lead to collective courage. Stare down the systems that have concentrated wealth in white communities and concentrated pollution in black and brown ones and implement new strategies that will make us all more free.

And as more of us come to understand that, we are going to reach a tipping point that will create a bigger opening than ever before for us to usher in that equitable, just and harmonious society we dared to believe was possible.

We hope you’ll join us. We’ll get there faster. And we’ll be so much more powerful if you do.

Podcasted Revolution

Credits

52:21

Decade of Courage would not be possible without an amazing team.

Thank you, of course to our interviewees Hunter Lovins from Natural Capitalism Solutions and Amanda Janoo from the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, as well as Ruchi Nadkarni.

A huge thank you to our Community & Design Lead, Diane Abruzzini from Mindframe Digital  and our Editorial Committee Amy Hall and Julie Keck.

We will always be grateful to our friend and original concept collaborator, Michael Krulin.

Decade of Courage is brought to you by Third Peak Solutions, a consulting firm that helps companies build systems-level purpose into their DNA.

I got to say, all of our music is original and we are so proud of it – – composed, recorded and mixed specifically for this podcast by MMINS and performed live, though socially distanced, in a church in Pittsburgh. The music features Phil Collier on Keyboard and Percussion, Miles Tucker on Saxophone, Wayne Tucker on Trumpet, RJ Williams on drums and percussion, and Brian Crimmins AKA MMINS on bass, guitar and percussion. Justin Murrell was our Associate Music Producer and Danielle Walker AKA Inez was the Assistant Engineer.

Sound mixing and editing by Neat-O Sound.

Our pilot episode was written and produced by me, Dana Gulley.