ESG futures

https://medium.com/volans/where-will-the-esg-backlash-lead-3db42f0c7c63

The most egregious example of the ESG industry’s self-serving vagueness — its ‘cloudy linguistics’ and ‘marketing gobbledegook’, in Fancy’s words — is the blurring of the distinction between risk and impact. As Fancy writes, ‘protecting an investment portfolio from the disastrous effects of climate change is not the same thing as preventing those disastrous effects from occurring in the first place.’One salutary effect of the ESG backlash will be to make it much harder to dress up ESG risk management as being about making the world a better place.


Serendipity Mindset

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-open-up-to-serendipity-and-create-your-own-luck

In my research into what makes individuals and organisations fit for the future, one insight has come up again and again: many of the world’s leading minds have developed a capacity, often unconscious, to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes. Developing this ‘serendipity mindset’, as I call it, is both a philosophy of life and a capability that you can shape and nurture in yourself. (Note, while this approach has been successful across many settings, it does need to go hand in hand with tackling the structural inequality related to factors such as race, gender and income.)


Climate change and capitalism

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/capitalism-climate-crisis-global-green-new-deal-clean-energy-fossil-fuel-industry

But whether we deal with climate change or not can’t be held hostage to executives’ ability to turn a profit. To handle this crisis, capitalism will have to be replaced as society’s operating system, setting out goals other than the boundless accumulation of private wealth.

American CEOs make 351 times more than workers.

“Today in the US, the CEO-to-worker pay gap stands at a staggering 351 to one, an unacceptable increase from 15 to one in 1965. In other words, the average CEO makes nearly nine times what the average person will earn over a lifetime in just one year.”

American CEOs make 351 times more than workers. In 1965 it was 15 to one | Indigo Olivier http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/17/american-chief-executive-pay-wages-workers via Instapaper

What if Humans Just Can’t Get Along Anymore?

Opinion | What if Humans Just Can’t Get Along Anymore?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/opinion/technology-internet-cooperation.html


The population bomb never went off. The world’s birthrate declined as the poorest people were lifted out of poverty. And as the pioneering political economist Elinor Ostrom showed over a lifetime of research, there are countless examples of people coming together to create rules and institutions to manage common resources. People aren’t profit-maximizing automatons; time and again, she found, we can make individual sacrifices in the interest of collective good.

Moral attention

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22585287/technology-smartphones-gmail-attention-morality


The idea of moral attention goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the Stoics wrote about the practice of attention (prosoché) as the cornerstone of a good spiritual life. In modern Western thought, though, ethicists didn’t focus too much on attention until a band of female philosophers came along, starting with Simone Weil.


Weil, an early 20th-century French philosopher and Christian mystic, wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else — to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity — you need to first get your own self out of the way. She called this process “decreation,” and explained: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty ... ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”


Weil argued that plain old attention — the kind you use when reading novels, say, or birdwatching — is a precondition for moral attention, which is a precondition for empathy, which is a precondition for ethical action.



Beyond GDP: 20 US states have adopted genuine progress indicators

Systems thinker Donella Meadows, the founder of the Vermont-based organisation that I now direct, cut to the heart of GDP’s limitations when she wrote: “If you define the goal of society as GDP, that society will do its best to produce GDP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.”