78 Posts Found

Mariana Mazzucato has demonstrated that the real driver of innovation isn’t lone geniuses but state investment. Now she’s working with the UK government, EU and UN to apply her moonshot approach to the world’s biggest challenges.

Editor’s Note: Mazzucato also has a couple of interesting TED talks, including this one:

Content: Article, Multimedia Content | Authors: João Medeiros, Mariana Mazzucato | Source: Wired | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.

Content: Quotation | Author: Winston Churchill | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

The sort of world that is being produced by the market managerialism that the business school sells is not a pleasant one. It’s a sort of utopia for the wealthy and powerful, a group that the students are encouraged to imagine themselves joining, but such privilege is bought at a very high cost, resulting in environmental catastrophe, resource wars and forced migration, inequality within and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Martin Parker | Source: The Guardian | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, MBA Related

Within the business school, capitalism is assumed to be the end of history, an economic model that has trumped all the others, and is now taught as science, rather than ideology.

Content: Quotation | Author: Martin Parker | Source: The Guardian | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, MBA Related

In the business school, both the explicit and hidden curriculums sing the same song. The things taught and the way that they are taught generally mean that the virtues of capitalist market managerialism are told and sold as if there were no other ways of seeing the world. […] This combination of ideology and technocracy is what has made the business school into such an … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Martin Parker | Source: The Guardian | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, MBA Related

Professor emeritus Bruce Scott was a pioneer at the Harvard Business School, where he insisted that management training had to include the big picture, and helped craft the school’s now-mandatory MBA course, Business and Government in the International Economy (known colloquially as BGIE or “Biggie”) back in the 1970s.
 
Harvard Business School is the subject of journalist Duff McDonald’s new book, The Golden Passport, which examines … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Bruce Scott | Source: PBS | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, MBA Related, Social Responsibility (ESG)

The 18th-century economic philosopher Adam Smith, best known for his foundational book The Wealth of Nations, spent his last two decades considering the problem of virtue in capitalism. The vitality of the industrializing world was based on the good faith of energetic, creative people, acting individually. But no human society had ever resisted the temptations of corruption and exploitation. How would capitalism survive? Smith said … [ Read more ]

Authors: Adam Smith, Art Kleiner, Jeffrey Schwartz, Josie Thomson | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Shareholder capitalism has been an intellectual swindle, on a par with the trickle-down economics of the Reagan era.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bruce Scott | Source: PBS | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Completely free markets are not a recipe for prosperity; they are a recipe for plutocracy and corruption, as we are increasingly aware of every day.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bruce Scott | Source: PBS | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

U.S. capitalism was and mostly still is understood as a natural system and not one that was and is socially constructed by government policy.

[…]

“Free markets” must be one of the most overused expressions in the English language. Stated bluntly, there are no free markets in organized capitalism. All of the so-called freedoms in capitalism are conditional freedoms, and that conditionality is established by, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bruce Scott | Source: PBS | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Today’s economic and political upheavals reflect an ongoing misalignment between business and economies (on the one hand) and acceptable societal outcomes (on the other). There is still time to adjust, if we are willing to reexamine some long-held assumptions.

Content: Article | Authors: Blair Sheppard, Colm Kelly | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, History

Whichever company’s vision wins out will shape the future of the economy.

Content: Article | Author: Mihir A. Desai | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

The sociologist Daniel Bell once argued that capitalism would undermine itself because it encouraged hedonistic short-term values for consumers while requiring self-disciplined long-term values in its workers.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Dynamism is the drive to work, create, and innovate. It’s the desire to solve problems and do big things. Free market societies bring out dynamism like no other kind of society. But we also know creative destruction can hurt people. That feels wrong. We turn to government to tame capitalism, to make it more decent.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonathan Haidt | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

The great genius of capitalism—solving people’s problems—has, by necessity, a dark side: the solution to one person’s problem can create problems for someone else.

This is the age-old puzzle of political economy: how does an economic system resolve conflicts and distribute benefits? A fancy derivative product may help corporate treasurers solve their problem of managing corporate risk, and it might make bankers rich, but it might … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Elevating the creation of shareholder value to the status of primary objective is based on a faulty assumption—that capital is the scarcest resource in an economy, when in reality it’s knowledge that’s the scarce, critical ingredient in solving problems. […] This is not to say that shareholders or other owners are unimportant. But providing them with a return that is competitive compared with the alternatives … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, Knowledge

The orthodox economic view holds that capitalism works because it is efficient. But in reality, capitalism’s great strength is its problem-solving creativity and effectiveness. It is this creative effectiveness that by necessity makes it hugely inefficient and, like all evolutionary processes, inherently wasteful. Proof of this can be found in the large numbers of product lines, investments, and business ventures that fail every year. Successful … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

If prosperity is created by solving human problems, a key question for society is what kind of economic system will solve the most problems for the most people most quickly. This is the genius of capitalism: it is an unmatched evolutionary system for finding solutions. […] Human creativity develops a variety of ways to solve such problems, but some inevitably work better than others, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

We typically talk about growth in terms of GDP, though it has been much criticized recently as a measure of progress. There have been a variety of attempts to make GDP account for things such as environmental damage, unpaid work, the progress of technology, or the development of human capital. In our view, the biggest problem with GDP is that it doesn’t necessarily reflect how … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Prosperity in human societies can’t be properly understood by looking just at monetary measures, such as income or wealth. Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems. These solutions run from the prosaic (crunchier potato chips) to the profound (cures for deadly diseases). Ultimately, the measure of the wealth of a society is the range of human problems it has solved … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics