Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

But Paul stuck to his guns, later joking that he took the plunge because “they couldn’t fire me on my first day.” When Neath raised the question of sustainable palm oil with him, his immediate response was “We have to do it and we can’t do it alone: let’s socialize the problem.”

A second option is to rely on impact investors—or on one’s employees or customers—for funding. This is a solution with many strengths, but it may be challenging to take it to scale. The third is to change the rules that govern corporations to shelter managers from investor pressure.

More broadly, the right kind of ESG metrics could provide a richer language for talking about how doing the right thing can generate financial returns. They might lengthen time horizons and help both managers and investors unpack the dynamics of the relationship between doing good and doing well. When does it make sense to invest in human capital?

I’d require every publicly traded firm to change its governance structures such that it is no longer under constant threat of having to sell the firm for the highest possible figure—but that simply changing the rules is not an automatic or a costless solution to the problem of short-termism.

The world’s two biggest traders in agricultural commodities, for example, have more revenue between them than all four thousand agricultural cooperatives.62 The two largest American banks have more revenue between them than all fifty thousand financial cooperatives.63 But their existence suggests that customer ownership might be a crucial piece of

About $68 trillion of wealth is expected to change hands in the next twenty-five years as the baby boomers die, and much of this wealth will be given to a younger generation that is much more interested in impact investing than their parents were.56

find the entrepreneurs, who want to take the next step with us? We’re trying to initiate a virtuous circle, where the loans we make act as demonstration projects and there are spillover effects—so other people come into the space. We’re looking for trust—so we try not

That’s a very important notion and if you do that you need to think about big trends in society. Where are we going? Where is mankind going? What is essential for people? Then you want to be able to look back after ten to fifty years and see what has worked out. That’s the sort of approach where you learn from the future, going back to where we are

Three things are important for society. Preserving the Earth—that’s why we’re active in all kinds of environmental projects. Then, how people cope with each other on the Earth—that’s why we’re active in fair trade, in microfinance. And finally the development of each individual—that’s why we’re active in culture. This also makes us different from o