Mastodawn

Kent Pitman Feb 20, 2023

Yikes. It is getting twisty.

I'm not a fan of the B-corp idea anyway bevause it accepts unfair fights. All companies should be accountable to stakeholders, including the environment, not just to shareholders. If only certain companies do this, their competitors have a market advantage so the odds of B-corp survival are poor. If it's a successful market strategy to care about the environment you don't need to be a B-corp to do it.

As I read it, a B-corp is authorization to spend, even lose, shareholder money doing good for the world and not have your stockholders sue you for breach of fiduciary duty. Indeed I'd think they should be able to sue you for not doing well by the social benefit promises you've made.

However here I see FT characterizing it as a "movement" as including "thousands of companies around the world who are certified as 'a force for good'.' This does not mesh with my understanding of their role.

Wikipefia says of B-corps that they
Include "positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as its legally defined goals, in that the definition of "best interest of the corporation" is specified to include those impacts".

My reading of them is that they aren't, or shouldn't be,, "blessed as good" but rather that they open themselves to criticism-with-teeth if they fail to make good on their promises of good.

People differ on what ethics is, but my personal definition of ethics isn't that there is a specific set of rules you comply with. That's just law and compliance is not ethics at all in my book. Ethics, to me, is a living process of continually asking hard questions of yourself, starting with "am I today right now ethical, and what makes me sure I've not drifted?" The answer to that can never be "I was blessed at birth as ethical."

To me, any notion that B-corps are blessed as ethical or that any one agency can certify unambiguously that someone is ethical is suspect. Organizations can perform independent audits and offer opinions, but that ought not end all discussion. Anyone founding a B-corp has asked for any stakeholder to challenge them.

We should be asking hard questions of the auditors as well.

#BCorps #capitalism #corporations
#StakeholderTheory #StakeholderCapitalism
#ShareholderTheory #ShareholderCapitalism
#ethics #compliance #law #FiduciaryDuty
#environment #labor

Show thread

Kent Pitman Nov 20, 2022

@Pampa
I doubt you could find a workable wholesale replacement for capitalism, at least on the necessary timescale.

But I think there are things that can usefully be done to make a dent in that space.

1. Regulate the ill effects. As long as the regulations apply uniformly, they still make for fair markets. Environmental and safety regulations, for example. But it wouldn't hurt in health care to outlaw "pooling", since each attempt to subdivide the market gives individuals worse bargaining leverage and Big Pharma more.

2. Socialize markets (i.e., convert to things like universal single payer) where fair prices are not achievable and/or where the public is better served by aggregate bargaining. Health care is an example. People cannot fairly walk away from extractive pricing if their life depends on a solution at any price. They have to take what's offered. So market pricing cannot be expected to converge on fair prices. Also, the timelines and levels of volume individual buyers have is not enough to bargain fairly, where collective bargaining would be.

3. Get rid of pressures in capitalism to only respond to shareholders. Here's a summary of why reverting to stakeholder theory instead of shareholder theory would improve things. (Bernie and Warren both had plans to do things like this in the US 2020 election. Their ideas could be used elsewhere.)

4. Get big money out of politics, so that those with large economic interest cannot purchase regulatory favor.

http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/01/losing-war-in-quiet-room.html

#Capitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #ShareholderTheory #StakeholderTheory #RegulatoryCapture #SinglePayer #EnvironmentalRegulation

Losing the War in a Quiet Room

Kent Pitman's blog. Independent, progressive views on Society, Technology, Social Justice and Climate, or sometimes poetry, philosophy, or history.