Can virtuous capitalism be sustained? That is one of the questions that motivated James O’Toole and David Vogel in their discussion of the conscious capitalism. They are mostly positive — but being academics they have to have some reservations. New Lanark And The Challenge of Sustaining Virtuous Capitalism The authors discuss Robert Owen. Two hundred…
What Market Research Can Teach Politics
Polling and market research are twin disciplines. Polling is a crucial way of understanding what the public thinks. This is obviously central to developing any strategy to give the voters what they want. Yet, we all know that asking people questions can be tricky. We need to get questions right or else we risk supplying…
Using Rationality To Combat Nonsense
Steven Pinker is a well-known academic and public intellectual in the US. I appreciate much of Pinker’s writing. He seems relatively optimistic about what we have achieved and can achieve. He is a big promoter of rationality and using rationality to combat nonsense. You might think that was what all academics are doing, but that…
Can Any Single Country Make A Difference?
Can any single country make a difference to climate change? I could make this a short post by just saying, YES. That said, I will give a few more details. Bad Reasons To Do Nothing The other day I was hearing about someone who was relatively well-informed talk about how the US couldn’t really achieve…
Is Now A Good Time To Give Up?
David Suzuki, the famous Canadian environmentalist, just gave a pretty gloomy interview. According to Suzuki in respect of climate change, “it’s too late”. It led me to the question: Is now a good time to give up? It Is Too Late? I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. David Suzuki…
Lower Cost Is Not Always Better
One of the big challenges for sustainable business is that sometimes it costs more. Although higher costs driven by sustainable decision-making is not always the case, if you are providing higher quality, paying your workers or suppliers more, or reducing pollution from your products then sometimes this costs more. While it is beneficial to ensure…
Bad Businesses Can Get Better
A lot of businesses have done bad things in their past. Andre Hoffman, Roche’s Vicechair and heir to the founding family, has a book, written with Peter Vanham, on a better approach to business. Amongst other things he notes how bad businesses can get better. (I doubt he would say that Roche was at the…
Social Change Will Always Face Setbacks
It is hard to improve the world even when it should be obvious that the world needs to improve. When things look bad it may be helpful to look at history to observe people fighting injustices that most of us can, thankfully, only imagine. Campaigners in history saw plenty of occasions when it seemed like…
Understanding Money Really Does Matter
Jacob Soll’s The Reckoning looks the history of financial accountability. He starts from early accounting and makes the point that tracking how the finances works has been central to the success (and failure) of many nations. The key point is that understanding money really does matter. Various potentates have over the years decided that financial…
Intuition Can Be Good Or Bad
Gerd Gigerenzer has made some important contributions to the study of decision-making. As someone who has been educated in the US system (at least for my PhD) I find it interesting that he largely rejects that approach. He, often correctly, makes the point that a lot of tests of decision-making set those being tested up…
