There is nothing intrinsic in the system that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state." 275 Unfortunately, this is simply not true. In order for capitalists to amass more and more wealth, economic activity must continuously expand. The economy must grow in order to simply generate more of a surplus each year (as a result of firms maximizing profit). But the forprofit system also requires economic growth in order to compensate for the surplus taken out of the real economy. The only way that a business and an economy can continue to compensate for the privatization and extraction of wealth is by expanding. Some might argue that the for-profit system does not require growth because businesses can compensate for their profits being privately distributed by reducing costs. In essence, they lower their expenditures, rather than expand, to maintain or increase their profit margins while staying the same size. Aside from the ethical issues that are often part and parcel of strategies to reduce costs (like moving factories abroad in order to exploit cheap labor and take advantage of lax environmental and labor laws), costs can only come down so far; it's not a viable strategy in the long-term. The for-profit system requires growth. And this brings us to another crisis of capitalism: growth at all costs. Another symptom of this economic system's self-destructive tendencies that is closely tied to inequality and concentration of wealth and power is debt. Growing inequality is driving more people to take out more debt, which puts poorer people in an even more difficult financial position and it puts the wealthy people who benefit from debt in an even more advantageous financial position. In essence, the modern banking system itself is built on debt, which, in the hands of for-profit banks, acts as a siphon that sucks wealth from the poorest to the richest people in society. Usury in the for-profit economy is leading this system to its own destruction. In the for-profit economy, fractional reserve banking means that banks can create money out of nothing and loan it out to people who don't have much money to create private profit for people who already do have a lot of money; the shareholders, owners and investors of forprofit banks. And, of course, the whole system promotes consumers to take on more debt for the sake of consumption, in the name of economic growth and profit maximization. In fact, debt is so ubiquitous, that it's estimated that 35-40% of the costs of any product are actually interest on debt. 276 Thanks to the exponential growth of compounding interest, world debt is at US $199 trillion, having risen by $57 trillion since 2007. 277 Fractional reserve banking refers to the common practice of banks only being required to keep a fraction of the loans they make in their reserves. So, as a hypothetical, if the fractional reserve rate in Australia is 5%, an Australian bank that loans out $100, only has to actually have 5 of those dollars in its reserves. It effectively creates the other 95 dollars when it makes the loan. Then when the $100 is paid back by the borrower, the slate is wiped clean and the 95 dollars ($100 minus the reserve amount of $5) that were created no longer exist. However, the interest that must be paid on the loan was also created. So, if the interest on the loan was 3%, compounding annually, and it takes the borrower two years to pay back the loan, then the total interest would be about $7. That extra $7 did not exist in the system before the loan was made and, thus, it was created as debt. Advocates for ending the fractional reserve system argue that more debt-based money must be loaned into the system in order for that extra $7 to be paid back to the bank because that extra money doesn't exist in the system278 . So, interest on debt requires more debt to be created, which requires more debt to be created in order to pay off that new debt, in an infinite spiral of growing debt and interest. This means that there will always be more debt in the system than there is money to pay back the debt, which puts pressure on banks and borrowers to continuously keep growing the money supply through creating more debt. So profit-maximization is the goal that drives the system of money creation through debt. The compound interest is piling up and must get paid down by borrowers. Banks that pay out dividends and give returns to owners and shareholders need that interest to be paid down in order to deliver it to the people at the top. This is largely motivated by the desire to make the bank owners and shareholders even richer, the sign of a successful for-profit company. However, the bank owners and shareholders gaining from the interest paid on loans contributes to worsening inequality in society, as the wealthy gain from the interest payments of people in the working class. The more inequality there is in society, the more people in the low-income bracket go into debt, sometimes in order to consume to compensate for their low financial standing, and sometimes just to scrape by. The more people go into debt, the more the wealthy stand to gain. Money creation by for-profit banks in the for-profit system creates a situation of scarcity, because much of the interest being repaid by borrowers is distributed to bank owners and shareholders and is, thus, siphoned up into the elite economy. This means there's less liquidity in the system (basically less money in the system), so there is a necessity to keep loaning more and more money into existence in order to keep the economy going and growing.
In fact, this debt-based money in the for-profit context is another form of pressure on the economy to grow, because all of the interest extracted must be compensated for somehow -it must be loaned into existence. For-profit companies employ many different strategies to try to meet their endless need for expansion. Over the years, companies have become more and more manipulative in their production and advertising methods, enticing consumers to constantly buy more products. This focus on consumption has not only taken over the economy, it's taken over our lives, lowering our levels of wellbeing. And it seems there are no limits to where companies will try to extract profit. In 2011, Australian journalist Stuart Washington wrote an article for the Sydney Morning Herald about an $8 pedestal fan. Why would a journalist at a top-knotch national newspaper write an article about a fan? In the article, cleverly titled 'Absurdly low prices fan the flames of a flawed economy', he shares the story of when he visited a friend's home and his friend pointed to a fan on the floor and asked him to guess how much it cost. Stuart guessed $80, maybe $90. His friendly proudly revealed that he had paid $8 for the item, because it was discounted from $12 at the shop. Stuart felt an instant sense of unease. How could a fully-functioning pedestal fan, that was doing a great job of cooling the room, cost $8? He felt that something wasn't right. How could $8 possibly cover the cost of the metals, plastic, labor, transportation, packaging, marketing and sales that went into getting that fan into the store from which his friend bought it?279

Mr. Washington's article goes on to blame bad pricing for short-term behavior, but if you zoom out, it's a bit more complex than that. What drives the bad pricing? When Homo economicus is guided by profit-maximization in the for-profit market, the ruthless competition inherent in the capitalist system brings about a race to the bottom. Producing a lot of something costs less per unit than it does to produce a little of that same something. For instance, it might cost a lot to manufacture just ten pedestal fans in your basement. But if you're manufacturing 100,000 fans per year, you can invest in a factory and it will cost a lot less to manufacture each fan, because you'll have assembly lines where workers or robots put the pieces together very efficiently in a continuous flow. An assembly line could put together dozens of fans in the same time it would take you to put one fan together at your house. If you produce 500,000 fans at your factory next year, each fan will cost even less to make. This is called economies of scale. Companies that make cheaper products generally outcompete their peers who sell the same products at higher prices, so economies of scale have enabled large companies to outcompete smaller producers in many industries. Mass production isn't the only way that companies have reduced costs, though. Survival of the fittest in the past few decades has meant that, in many sectors, only the producers who moved to countries where labor is cheap, safety standards are lax, and environmental damage doesn't cost anything can prosper or even survive. Manufacturers who don't move abroad have higher costs and can't compete. In the last decade or so, producers have also been lowering costs by cutting corners and using cheaper materials. 280 Prices have fallen, but so has quality. 281 Paul Midler, author of Poorly Made in China calls this phenomenon 'quality fade'. 282 The pedestal fan Stuart's friend bought for $8 is probably going to fall apart or stop working a lot quicker than a fan made ten years ago, which would fall apart quicker than a fan made 20 or 30 years ago. But that's not a concern for most manufacturers. Poor quality is a positive thing for them, because it means that people will have to buy a new fan sooner rather than later, which means that sales and profits will rise. The competition to produce the highest-quality products has given way to the competition to produce the cheapest products. Why? This comes back to the Homo economicus consumer, always looking to be clever and save a buck in the short-term. (Of course, in light of current levels of inequality, this also has to do with the fact that most consumers simply have less money to spend.) We can see the trend to produce cheaper, lower quality products in almost every manufacturing sector, from electronics and toys to clothes and shoes. It's even reached the point where food products, medical equipment, and construction materials -where we'd hope quality would always be the highest priority -increasingly come from unregulated factories overseas283 and are cause for serious health and safety concerns. This race to the bottom has co-evolved with a phenomenon called planned obsolescence. This is when companies intentionally design products to break or become obsolete before their time, in order to keep consumption up and boost profits. The 2010 documentary about planned obsolescence, The Light Bulb Conspiracy, features many examples of this phenomenon. It starts with a printer that stops working. The printer's owner, Marcos, takes it to a few different repair shops, but is told by each one that it wouldn't be worth fixing, and that it would be cheaper to buy a new one. The end of the film reveals that the printer was programmed to stop printing after 1000 prints and Marcos was able to get it started again by simply resetting the counter to 0. This story probably resonates with most of us very well. Living in the 21 st century, the line, "You might as well get a new (insert name of object here). Repairing it will cost more than buying a new one," has almost become a mantra. Communications technology is one sector that is basically designed for planned obsolescence.
Companies could give us the most current version of the mobile phone, tablet, or computer they've developed, but we won't see the latest version for several years. Instead, they offer us a slightly different version every year, in order to make last year's version seem obsolete and spur consumers to buy the latest adaptation. This doesn't only work on consumers who are concerned about keeping up with the latest trends and looking up-to-date. Technology companies create less-than-optimal software for their products on purpose, so that next year's edition can resolve the issues they intentionally created in this year's edition and the consumer can look forward to having a better experience each year… as long as they can afford to buy a new phone or tablet every year. 284 As economic commentator Umair Haque puts it, "Most businesses are still serving up the economic equivalent of fast food: negative-impact goods and services that fail to make people, communities, and society tangibly better off." 285 Immoral as it may seem, this is common practice and considered a perfectly legitimate strategy to maximize profits in the for-profit world. Many large companies generate a surplus by exploiting workers, destroying ecosystems, and selling low-quality products that breakdown soon after they're purchased, mostly in order to generate profits for owners and investors and to increase their share price. Large numbers of people are being taken advantage of in order to line a few individuals' pockets. In capitalism, markets are supposed to efficiently assign prices to goods and services through negotiations between buyers and sellers based on the information they have. However, in the for-profit world, it's often in the sellers' self-interest to manipulate or withhold information related to their products. This keeps costs low, but means consumers have imperfect information when it comes to their choices. Consequently, prices do not reflect the actual cost of goods and services, especially in terms of negative effects on ecosystems and human health. Many clothing companies in high-income countries produce their clothes in factories in lowincome countries with very unsafe, unfair and unhealthy working conditions. In some of these factories (also known as sweatshops), workers are essentially modern-day slaves. The companies do this so that they can sell clothes at cheap prices and make large profits. However, few consumers have access to information about how clothes are made and by whom, so their choices can't take that into account when comparing their purchasing options, even though it's an important human rights issue. The same goes for the environmental impact of products; it is nearly impossible for the average customer to find out what the environmental impact of a certain product is. In fact, just the opposite is often true: green marketing tactics ('greenwashing') are used to make customers think that products were produced in a more ethical, environmentally-friendly way than they really were. Incomplete or concealed information about how things are produced means that consumers can rarely make fully informed choices, as capitalism assumes. In places where the for-profit story has taken the strongest hold, we are witnessing a very steep decline in wellbeing. In the early 2000s, U.K. public health researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett collected and analyzed long-term data on a wide variety of social problems including homicide, drug use, crime, mental illness, suicide, infant mortality, obesity and life expectancy, in 20 'developed' countries. They compared the data to levels of socio-economic equality in those countries and found that there is a very strong correlation between inequality and social problems. The countries with more inequality, like the U.S. and the U.K., do far worse on all of the wellbeing indicators than countries with less inequality, like Japan and Sweden. Wilkinson and Pickett concluded that more equal countries have higher levels of wellbeing. 286 And this, of course, makes sense, but is inequality really the root-cause of all of this, or does it go even deeper? In the 1970s, cultural historian Riane Eisler described in her book, The Chalice and the Blade, the difference between what she identified as 'dominator cultures' and 'partnership cultures'. The latter are cultures that value cooperation and equality. They honor and uphold those who give and contribute to the wider community. In contrast, the dominator cultures uphold those who are most effective at conquering and controlling others. Accordingly, dominator cultures tend to be unequal and violent. Somebody has to be at the top and somebody has to be at the bottom. 287 Eisler argues that for at least 30,000 years of human existence, partnership cultures were the norm, but at around 5000 BCE, dominator cultures arose quite rapidly and conquered the partnership communities. And we have been living in a dominator world ever since. The worldview of 'only the strong survive' justifies and encourages the domination of enemies and the 'weak'. In the dominator mindset, the way we know when someone or something is weak is when we have been able to conquer it, just like the European conquerors who went all over the world, subjugating indigenous people in Australia, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas. Did the conquerors feel bad for the people they slaughtered or enslaved? According to the dominator worldview, the weak will inevitably be conquered because it is simply nature's way. This way of organizing society naturally leads to the concentration of power in the hands of the top dominators. Eisler illustrated that the same 'dominator model' of politics and the economy that encourages individuals, companies and countries to dominate each other also encourages the domination of women and minorities as well as the domination of nature. Indeed, the quest of the Scientific Revolution, which started in Europe in the 1400s, was to conquer nature. Many famous figures of the time, like Descartes, talked about taking nature apart in order to understand and manipulate it. Scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon, in an extreme example, even talked about torturing nature to make her reveal her secrets,288 and it's no coincidence that he used the word 'her'.
Eisler explains that anything seen as caring, giving or nurturing is seen as weak by the dominator mindset and so it has to be controlled. As women are the givers and nurturers of society, because they give birth, breastfeed and take care of small children, they have been identified as weak in dominator cultures and are thus oppressed. 289 However, the oppression is not limited to women. Men who are perceived as caring or nurturing or otherwise 'weak' are also oppressed. Part of the drive to dominate is based on the quest to be the all-powerful leader, but perhaps a more significant part of the dominator drive is based in fear of being dominated, which has translated into a fear of the 'other'; a fear of the unknown and of not having control. This manifests in sexism, racism, xenophobia, genocide, religious oppression, abuse, and bullying. One of the core principles of the for-profit world has been if you can dominate some 'other', then you should, or they might dominate you. This narrative has motivated much of the oppression we've witnessed in the for-profit era. It alienates us from nature, each other, and ourselves. The for-profit story is a manifestation of the dominator narrative, and capitalism is a dominator economic model. It encourages businesses and people to conquer each other and, as such, it naturally results in high levels of inequality, no matter how much we try to counteract its dominator tendencies with taxes, regulation and appeals for philanthropy. The for-profit culture values the act of taking over the act of giving. This is why it has led to an economy of fear and scarcity. In many ways, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Capitalism also puts high value on the parts of the economy that dominate, conquer and expand. It doesn't put much value on the parts of the economy that nurture and conserve. The 'caring economy' and 'women's work' are simply not valued in the for-profit world, not only in a cultural sense, but also in a financial sense. 290 Daycare workers, teachers and nurses are often undervalued for the services they provide in fulfilling basic social needs. People who work or invest in sectors that are based on extracting as much value as quickly as possible and then moving on to the next project (i.e., sectors like drilling, mining, construction, manufacturing, advertising, marketing, gambling, arms trading, finance and banking) are those who make the most money in the world. Understanding that our economy functions through domination helps us answer Stuart Washington's question about how a pedestal fan can cost $8. Raw materials needed for a fan, like metal, can be as cheap or expensive as the owner of the land where the steel is mined wants it to be. After all, the land isn't charging them any rent -they own it, they've conquered it. Mining and drilling companies can charge whatever it takes to outcompete the other mining and drilling companies and keep large orders coming in. Likewise, the enforcement of a minimum wage is questionable in China, where the fan was probably assembled, and workers' rights are sub-standard and often overlooked, making labor as cheap as factory owners want it to be. The managers dominate the workers and the owners dominate the managers. So, what really allows the fan to be produced and sold for $8? In short, the workers, the ecosystems and future generations are paying for unacknowledged costs in ways that can't be measured in dollar amounts. All because they found themselves at the losing end of a game of violent domination. Perhaps it is the capitalist impetus to dominate others in order to extract private profit that is responsible for inequality as well as the other social problems Wilkinson and Pickett studied. The for-profit story has served to make us feel ever more separate and isolated from each other. Not only is it a widely ingrained story that encourages greedy, selfish behavior, but it also pits us against one another in a dog-eat-dog economy, where the value of a person is determined by how much they take rather than how much they contribute. The competition, greed, selfishness, individualism, consumerism and workaholism that are inherently part of the for-profit system have, to a great extent, eroded our relationships, our communities and our self-esteem. They've left many of us feeling unworthy of love and support, and have encouraged us to perpetuate the for-profit myth in our social relations. All of this has an effect on our mental and physical health. One way in which the for-profit system has eroded our relationships with each other, as well as with nature, is that it seeks to commodify and marketize everything it possibly can. The growth imperative of the for-profit world fuels the idea that everything should be a commodity. After all, markets do get saturated and if there were a limit on the number and size of markets, growth would end as soon as everyone had all the houses, TVs, and cars they can handle, and capitalists would no longer be able to maximize their profits. However, as all good economic and business students know, all you have to do to expand the market is create a new niche. There are two ways of doing this: pursuade or force people to start paying for something they weren't previously paying for; or manufacture a new 'need'. In the case of the first strategy, Charles Eisenstein provides an excellent exposé of the many ways that the market has taken over more and more of our lives. He points out that we used to cook most meals at home, but more and more often we pay for our food to be prepared for us. (In fact, Americans now spend more money at restaurants than at grocery stores for the first time ever.) 291 We used to tell each other stories as a form of entertainment (think of families having story-time or each village having its own storytellers).
This has been replaced to a large extent by stories that we pay to read or watch in best-selling books and blockbuster movies. Childcare used to be done by parents, family members and neighbors, free of charge. Now we routinely drop our children off at daycares, where we pay strangers to care for them. This trend of paying for things that we wouldn't have imagined paying for just a generation or two ago might be fine in some areas of life, but it becomes absurd with the advent of 'professional cuddlers' and 'friends for hire' (both of which truly exist). 292 Looking back through history, we can see that this is the latest stage of an ongoing 'enclosure of the commons'. For most of history, the fields of England had been regarded as communal property and were left open for all to use, but in the 1400s the Parliament began to close the land off to the public with fences so that landlords could use them for private benefit. 293 The landlords wanted to be able to farm more efficiently rather than having to worry about the community's crop rotation schedule, and they wanted higher rent from people working the land (Ref: Ibid?). The ongoing enclosure of the commons, in all its forms, is necessary to fuel the growth required by the for-profit economy. The commodification of a range of goods and services is both a cause and effect of the forprofit world. We now have to pay for things that used to occur as transactions based on trust and friendship. Often these commodities -such as child care and fast food -are bought because people are time-pressed from working longer hours and have longer commutes to and from work. The more time we spend at work, or getting to and from work, the less time we have to satisfy a variety of needs and desires, like exercising, preparing healthy food, caring for friends and family members, participating in leisure activities, and even simply resting. The second strategy for market expansion is to create a 'need' where there isn't one, or even to create an entire market where there isn't one. How do you do this? In the movie The Wolf of Wallstreet, the protagonist, Jordan Belfort, is giving a seminar to teach people how to become better at sales. He hands a pen to a member of the audience and says, "Sell me this pen." The man starts to describe all of the wonderful features of the pen. Jordan takes the pen away, interrupting the man's sales pitch. He hands it to the next man in the row of chairs, "Sell me this pen." The man starts to describe what you can do with the pen, like writing down your life's memories. He takes the pen away, interrupting the second man's sales pitch. He hands it to yet another man, looking a bit frustrated. Earlier in the movie, he had asked one of his salesman friends to sell the pen to him and the friend responded, "You want me to sell you this pen? Do me a favor. Write your name down on that piece of paper." Jordan responds, "I don't have a pen." The friend sets the pen down and said, "Exactly. Supply and demand, my friend." He created a sense of urgency and need that the protagonist had not previously had. He manufactured a need. The Century of the Self documentary series, by BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis,shows how mass consumerism was a carefully planned, manufactured trend that emerged in the U.S. in the 1920s. The documentary describes the overproduction worries after the end of World War I. Mass production had been hugely successful during the war and continued to roll out products at an incredible pace, but there was the fear of a looming overproduction crisis. Until then, companies had advertised their goods based on their usefulness, like the men who described the virtues of the pen and how it could be used. Curtis explains, "Goods like shoes, stockings, even cars were promoted in functional terms, for their durability. The aim of the advertisements were simply to show people the products' practical virtues, nothing more… There was no American consumer. There was the American worker. And there was the American owner. This idea took hold strongly among economists and the business community. In 1955, economist Victor Lebow wrote along similar lines in the Journal of Retailing, "Our enormously productive economy…. demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals; that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate." 296 The results of this line of thought can be seen all around us in the ubiquitous advertisements that appear on walls, TV screens, bus stops, highways, as well as in buses, trains and airports. Unless you live in one of the few places that have banned advertising in public spaces, you can't avoid advertisements however hard you try. In 2011 alone, the advertising industry spent $464 billion marketing the consumer lifestyle worldwide. 297 We live in a world in which everything is a brand -even cities, cultures and people -and so we have become numb to ads, hardly even noticing them. Yet our subconscious recognizes certain brands and logos over others when we are shopping for food, clothes, and other everyday items. Marketing in the 20th century worked so well that it successfully created a culture of shopping. Shopping has become a pastime, a therapeutic hobby for many of us. If we're anxious, we go shopping. If we're bored, we go shopping. If we want to hang out with friends, we go shopping. When we travel, how do we experience a different place and culture? We go shopping.
In fact, it's become very rare in many parts of the world for people to socialize in ways that don't involve paying for goods or services. We shop in order to identify ourselves, we shop as a pastime and we shop to make ourselves feel better. All this shopping requires money. How do we get enough money to shop as a leisure activity? We must work even more. The Story of Stuff's Annie Leonard dissected this work-watch-shop treadmill. "…do you know what the two main activities are that we do with the scant leisure time we have? Watch TV and shop… So we are in this ridiculous situation where we go to work, maybe two jobs even, and we come home and we're exhausted so we plop down on our new couch and watch TV and the commercials tell us 'YOU SUCK' so we gotta go to the mall to buy something to feel better, then we gotta go to work more to pay for the stuff we just bought so we come home and we're more tired so you sit down and watch more T.V. and it tells you to go to the mall again and we're on this crazy workwatch-spend treadmill." 298 High levels of consumption not only require a lot of money (or debt), and nature's resources, but also a lot of time. No matter how wealthy we are, each of us has a budget of 24 hours in a day. We can spend most of that time playing, creating, connecting, resting, and enjoying life or we can spend it accumulating and managing money and material goods. In much of the 'developed' world, there is a tacit game of one-upmanship about how many hours we work -in many cases, this becomes a status symbol, a way we show how valuable and important we are. This is creating a work culture in which it's looked down on to leave the workplace at a reasonable hour, to take vacation time, and even to get a healthy amount of sleep xxiv . Research conducted by The Australia Institute found that each year Australians work almost 110 billion Australian dollars' worth of unpaid overtime. 299 It's gotten so bad in the land down under that there's even a reality TV show that encourages people to take their annual paid leave time from work. 300 To add injury to insult, the wealth extraction siphon is so efficient that when employees of for-profit firms work more paid or unpaid hours, they're putting themselves in a worse position, because the more they work, the more profits their employers make, the more money is siphoned out of the real economy, and the lower their real wages will be in the long-term. Perhaps most sadly of all, much work in the modern economy involves doing small, meaningless tasks (often paperwork) in order to maximize profits for a company that then gives those out as dividends to distant owners, who don't really need more money and didn't work to earn it. Turning a profit is the primary reason the companies that employ many of us even exist. In addition to working long hours, this feeling of meaninglessness in one's work can be exhausting and dispiriting. It prompted Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, David Graeber, to pen an article called 'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs', in which he explores the links between growing inequality and meaningless work. A Gallup poll in 2012 found that only 1 out of 8 people, globally, are engaged and feel motivated at their jobs.301

In this system, education is seen just as a means to getting a job (albeit a job one feels disengaged from). In his well-known 2006 TED Talk 'Do Schools Kill Creativity? ', Sir Ken Robinson pointed out that our education system is based on an industrial way of thinking. 302 Our schools were created in the image of mass industrial output. It's the carryover of the forprofit ideology; everything supports the single-bottom-line. Modern schools are structured like assembly lines. Each year in school is like another phase in the assembly line, where knowledge is put into our minds like new parts are put into a car. The entire goal of these industrial schools is for each student to come out into the 'real world' and start a career. Some might go on to be capitalists, some might try to work their way up the corporate ladder, and some might stay on the bottom rung. But the idea is that if you are successful in the assembly line schools, you will be successful in creating a career. And the whole point of having a career is to accumulate as much power and wealth as possible. There's very little sense of deeper meaning built into our economy. Most ecosystems have a lot more play and leisure than our economic system allows for. As social creatures who learn through play and who have a basic need for creativity, we are deprived of important opportunities to learn and express ourselves. Rest is an integral part of the equation too. That's why, when people work 50, 60, or even 80 hours per week (which has become quite common), they often experience 'burn-out' or a break-down, resulting in mental and physical illness xxv . 303 Yet the original promise of progress and technological advances was that we would all have more leisure time, as our basic needs could be met with less work and increased productivity via technology. However, in a for-profit system which necessitates incessant growth and in which the surplus is extracted to the elite economy, this can't happen for most of us. Instead, technological advances are used for, and actually geared toward, the encouragement of ever more consumption and work, such as the technology that goes into planned obsolescence. Another example is the amount of technological innovation that's geared towards marketing and advertising, like High Definition billboards.
Although it might appear that there is more abundance than ever, many people feel a sense of scarcity because there's such intense competition for jobs, money and status. Not everyone can make it to the top, and extreme inequality means there's a struggle to keep from falling to the bottom -because the bottom means not having enough to make ends meet. The constant threat of scarcity is built into the modern global economy. Most people have some sense of cognitive dissonance, a sense that something isn't quite right, in terms of the work-watch-shop treadmill, and many feel little or no sense of purpose in work. 304 Many people feel trapped and unable to live differently. The fear of poverty, shame and social exclusion is more than enough to keep them from hopping off the treadmill. It is no wonder that mental and physical health are declining. 305 Since the 1950s and 1960s, happiness hasn't increased in either the U.S. or Australia, despite large increases in the average financial wealth of citizens in both countries. 306 What's the answer to this in the for-profit world? It's another opportunity to turn a profit, by treating these symptoms of a much deeper, systemic problem. We throw anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications and a whole host of other psychotropic pharmaceuticals at it. Ironically, some of the most popular anti-depression medications, like Prosac and Paxil, list 'suicidal thoughts' as a side-effect. Psychotropic drugs might play an important role in helping individuals deal with depression, but what might happen if more of our efforts and ingenuity went towards resolving the major socio-economic drivers of feelings of isolation and emptiness? The for-profit system also encourages 'quick fix' thinking and compulsive behavior. 307 When we don't have time for ourselves, we don't address feelings of anxiety and stress in healthy ways. Instead we turn to things that make us feel better instantly, but only for the short-term. These increased levels of stress, anxiety and isolation also manifest in physical health crises. 309 People eat unhealthy foods, because they don't have enough time or energy to cook. Nor are most people given adequate information about healthy nutrition because most healthy foods (like fresh fruits and vegetables) aren't big brand names, so they aren't advertised nearly as much as unhealthy, processed, convenience foods. Nor do many people have enough time to be active and get exercise. Sedentary jobs have replaced work that we used to do to meet our basic needs at home, like care-giving, food production, and making things for the household -all of which involved physical movement. Many of us attempt to compensate for this by going to the gym and paying to satisfy our need for physical activity, when we should just be able to burn off calories by being naturally active in our free time. While people are focused on maximizing consumption and generating the income to sustain it, there is a corresponding retreat from involvement in civic and community life, and a weakening of social cohesion. Time poverty not only threatens our health and that of our connections with people we care about, it undermines the wider community fabric. Companies are continuously manufacturing 'needs' and expanding the markets into every area of our lives. This business behavior is socially and ecologically destructive in many ways, but the profit motive can be especially morally dubious when it comes to certain sectors, like healthcare. Imagine your last trip to the dentist. When you look around the room, you might notice a lot of different brand names. A brand name on the monitor where the dentist shows you what your back teeth look like, a brand name on the mouse she uses to control the camera and screen settings, a brand name on the powerful lamp she uses to light up mouths while she works, a brand name on the reclining chair you're sitting in, a brand name on the filling material she's about to apply to your teeth, and a brand name on the mouthwash she gives you for rinsing. Think about how much all of the equipment and supplies in the room must cost. Now think about what amount of those costs went into private pockets as profit dividends to owners and investors of all those companies. If those businesses were all oriented toward the mission of keeping people healthy and didn't let profit margins interfere with that mission, how much more affordable would healthcare be? We would argue that it is unacceptable that healthcare companies (including those that provide health insurance, medication, and medical equipment and supplies) are even allowed to be for-profit. In the U.S., the costs of healthcare and dentistry are such that many people simply can't afford to visit professionals for their health problems -even in one of the most 'developed' countries on Earth. In a for profit world, a healthy population is bad for the bottom line of the for-profit health industry for the very same reasons that durable products are less desirable than planned obsolescence -because the profit from perpetuating a market is needed . When people are less sick less often, healthcare CEOs are under pressure to find ways to generate more profits. For-profit healthcare companies have a clear incentive to keep people sick and that's probably why they focus on medication rather than prevention. In many countries around the world, universal healthcare systems are heavily subsidized by the government and offered to people at a much cheaper cost than in the U.S. However, even nations with universal healthcare have a version of a for-profit healthcare system, because the public hospitals and clinics buy the bulk of their medicine and equipment from for-profit companies. This means taxpayers' money in those countries is still going into the private pockets of wealthy business owners. Most people who have worked in the medical field are familiar with 'drug reps'. Pharmaceutical companies send representatives to clinics, hospitals, emergency rooms and even to intensive care units.
They give doctors pens, notepads, food, free medicine and even offer to send them to far-away conferences, expenses paid. This is done in order to gain the doctors' favor and persuade them to prescribe certain drugs more often, which leads to doctors sometimes (perhaps more often than we'd like to think or they'd like to admit) prescribing unnecessary medication. Why does this happen? It is a strategic business tactic that helps pharmaceutical companies increase their profit margins. And it works! Pharmaceutical companies are some of the most profitable businesses listed on the U.S. stock-exchange. 310 It's no wonder that the healthcare sector has consistently grown its profit margins: healthcare is a basic human need. Products that provide for basic needs will always be in high demand. Whether or not private business owners should be able to enlarge their bank accounts by exploiting basic needs is a different question. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal published a story on how there's a new kind of deal-making in the pharmaceutical sector, in which companies buy up drugs that they see as 'undervalued' and then dramatically raise the price. The price for one blood pressure drug rose over 500% to $806 per vial overnight, due to an ownership change. This is mostly happening with drugs that are deemed to be very valuable because they lack alternatives, so companies can charge as much as they want without impunity; at least in the U.S. where the Food and Drug Administration doesn't take pricing into account in its regulations. As a result, the prices of medicine have risen 120% there over the last several years. 311 Clearly, Homo economicus is at the helm of the pharmaceutical industry. Even people's personal lives are being turned into a way of maximizing profit. Some companies, like Facebook and Google, do this by selling their clients' personal information to other companies. There is also a growing market of companies that profit from bullying and humiliation. Gossip magazines and websites sell the humiliation of celebrities, as well as regular, everyday people. This trend has expanded greatly with the emergence of the Internet and social media. In a recent talk about this phenomenon, Monica Lewinsky, who was publicly humiliated for years after she was part of a U.S. Presidential scandal, said it very well, "A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars… all the while someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering." Perhaps one of the most concerning examples of the for-profitization of a sector is that of prisons. Private, for-profit prisons, commonplace in the U.S., are morally hazardous for many reasons. They have a financial incentive (and, not to mention, a fiduciary duty to their owners and investors) to keep their facilities as full as possible. This means it's in their interest to have a lot of crime and violence in society, and to encourage the criminalization of more and more acts. As a result, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world312 and the vast majority of prison inmates are serving time for drug offenses (a large portion of which are marijuana-related). 313 Many for-profit prisons have even tried to set up deals with local justice systems to create some sort of quota of arrests and prison sentences to keep the jails full. 314 As profit-oriented businesses, these prisons are constantly looking for ways to deliver higher profit margins. Like any other business, this means increasing sales, decreasing costs and expanding to stay competitive. In addition to taking tax-payer money in the form of government contracts, for-profit prisons often generate revenue by producing products like automobile license plates, clothing and furniture inside the prison and selling them on the outside market. Because incarcerated populations are considered not to have many rights, they can be paid as little as 12 cents per hour. 315 The prison owners are making money from slave labor. And, of course, this slave labor force is mostly made up of the most vulnerable people in society, 316 as the vast majority of prisoners and their families come from lowincome neighborhoods with inadequate school systems.317 Vulnerable people's lives are quite literally being destroyed in the name of profit. Following this for-profitization trend, a growing number of addiction treatment facilities are for-profit, a $35 billion industry in the U.S. 318 who are now profiting from another vulnerable group, those struggling with substance abuse. The for-profit market is already cashing in on the Syrian refugee crisis. G4S, the world's largest security firm notorious all over the world for running prisons, is expanding into the very lucrative business of providing shelter for asylum seekers. 319 And G4S isn't the only forprofit to move into this 'hot new market'. A for-profit Swiss company called ORS Services allegedly profited to the tune of $99 million in 2014, from taking care of migrants in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. 320 Unlike similar programs run by an NFP contractor, those profits would have ended up in private bank accounts. While these examples may sound like shocking outliers, or fringe conspiracy theories, they are more central to the current economy than many of us realize. In fact, the wealth extraction siphon also plays a central role in the debt crises of the world. Take the ongoing Eurozone debt crisis. In the mid-1990s, the Eurozone leaders put pressure on for-profit banks to be more competitive with banks in the U.S. and the U.K. When the Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek governments received bailout money from the European Union and the IMF in the 2010's, those for-profit banks got a large portion of the money. 323 And those countries' citizens have been enduring harsh austerity measures that have pushed many people into poverty and despair, in order for the bailout loans to be repaid to for-profit banks.
In effect, the Eurozone bailouts have contributed to enriching the wealthy owners and shareholders of for-profit banks and corporations at the great expense of everyday European citizens. Public funds are going to for-profit, private coffers. This can only make sense in light of the for-profit story and the corresponding ethic of 'never enough', which legitimize and encourage this kind of business behavior. Through that lens, these are great business strategies that will result in benefits for the wider community via the Invisible Hand. If only the Invisible Hand were a bit more visible. We are now in a precarious position in many ways. Our capitalist economy is not only undermining social relations and individual wellbeing; it is ravaging the planet's ecosystems. The life-sustaining systems of Earth are collapsing at an alarming rate. There are real ecological thresholds that we have passed and if we continue to disregard these thresholds in order to achieve an ever-growing economy, modern civilization will experience a very painful crash. In the late 1960s, a group of scientists convened in Rome to strategize about how to make the increasingly global economic system more long-sighted and sustainable and the Club of Rome was born. Shortly afterwards, the Club commissioned a group of systems scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to analyze the long-term impacts of human systems on the planet's ecosystems. In 1972, the Club of Rome published the group's findings in the Limits to Growth report. They had created a computer model of the global economy's interactions with the natural environment, using real data, in order to explore the impacts of a growing human population on the planet's biosphere. 324 Their investigation concluded that if we continued on the path of pursuing economic growth, and if we didn't do something to slow population growth, we would soon hit ecological limits. Ecosystems would go into rapid decline and human systems would begin to collapse as a result. This process of collapse would entail food shortages, fresh water shortages, disease and political instability (Ref: Ibid). At the time of its publishing, the Limits to Growth report was met with a mixed reception. A nascent environmental movement embraced its findings, while many economists and politicians dismissed them as ludicrous, stating that human ingenuity will always find ways around natural limits. However, since the study was published, scientists have been keeping a close eye on the various indicators that were used in the model and The Club of Rome's 'standard track' is right on the mark for the years 1970 -2000. 325 This scenario predicts a global collapse of ecosystems by 2050. The logic is simple. We live on a finite planet and we only have so many resources. If our economy outgrows our planet, if we outstrip the foundations for life, then we're in real trouble. In fact, we have already passed the ecological limits to growth. According to the Global Footprint Network, it was around 1980 that we started using more resources than the Earth can regenerate each year. We now use 1.5 planets' worth of resources every year, but we only have one planet. 326 If everyone in the world consumed like the average American, we would be consuming 5 planets' worth of resources each year (Ref: Ibid). If our ecosystems can't even keep up with current rates of consumption, how can we expect the Earth to go on supporting even more consumption year after year, especially as 'emerging economies' aspire to consumer lifestyles? If the economy grows at the generally accepted rate of 2% per year, it will be 40 times bigger at the end of the century, but Earth will be the same size it's always been. 327 We are entering a period that natural resource expert Richard Heinberg refers to as 'Peak Everything.' 328 Peak Everything is an extension of the idea of peak oil, which was developed by a geologist named Marion King Hubbert in the 1950s. Hubbert calculated that at some point in the early 21st century, we would reach the point at which half of the world's natural petroleum reserves had been used; it's called peak oil because it takes the shape of a mountain peak on the charts. 329 He looked at the examples of Ohio and Illinois to explain the principle of peak oil. Those states had both experienced a boom of steadily rising oil production until they peaked and then experienced a slow decline in production. At some point, the oil reserves were so small and so out-of-reach that it was no longer worth the effort and cost of drilling in those states. 330 Based on his observations of this general trend and the amount of known American petroleum reserves at the time, Hubbert correctly predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. 331 As a result of declining production in the U.S., a greater percentage of oil comes from unconventional sources each year, because the easy-toaccess oil is gone. 332 Given Hubbert's correct predictions in the past, we have great reason to believe that his prediction about the world's peak in oil is accurate as well. This might not sound too alarming at first glance, but oil is absolutely integral to keeping our modern society going. Over 400 gallons of oil are used to feed each American every year. 333 This is due to our globalized industrial food system in which agriculture has become highly mechanized and food is frequently imported from far away. All that transportation, not to mention the fuel required by the machines and fertilizers used to produce and process the food, requires a lot of oil. Some analysts believe that we have already reached the peak and that, in the coming decades, remaining oil will become so difficult to access that it will be prohibitively expensive.
334 World discoveries of new oil fields peaked in the 1960s and the discoveries since then have been smaller and further offshore, so it's easy to imagine a corresponding peak in production in the near future. 335 This is particularly scary, as based on current rates of consumption, it's estimated that in the next 20 years, we'll consume more fossil fuels than in all of previous history. 336 Peak Everything refers to a similar pattern with most of the basic resources we rely on to meet our needs, including fresh water, fertile soil, metals, and even fish, just to name a few. 337 We're also facing the potential of peak fresh water. 338 Underground aquifers of fresh water that took thousands of years to accumulate are being drained at phenomenal rates, fresh water is being polluted, and climate patterns are changing, all of which leaves a growing number of people (and other species) with less fresh water, a basic building block of life. Eighty percent of the world's current population lives in areas where water security is threatened. 339 Topsoil, needed to grow our food and keep ecosystems healthy, is also said to be peakingwe're using it faster than nature can replenish it. Much of the planet's topsoil has become degraded and eroded by intense farming practices and some of it has essentially died, losing the micro-organisms that make it fertile, due to drought and desertification of the land. 340 Ninety percent of the world's arable land is already exploited 341  while another 8 % is moderately degraded. 342 At the same time our ecological footprint is expanding, our biological capacity and ability to produce is declining. Additionally, we have been mining more copper, nickel, and gold than we've been finding and many researchers believe we might have already passed the halfway point in exploiting the Earth's reserves of these important metals or that we will reach Peak Metals. 343 Just as we're having to drill deeper and deeper to find oil, so are we having to look deeper and deeper to find fish. 344 This is because we're fishing faster than the fish can reproduce. Based on current trends, world fisheries are expected to collapse by 2050. 345 Many communities have already experienced fishery collapse, such as the collapse in North Atlantic cod stocks in 1992. 346 That fishery was closed indefinitely in 2003 (Ref: Ibid). Ongoing fishery collapses could be catastrophic for the 1/5 of the world's population that relies on fish as their primary source of protein and the 660 million people who depend directly or indirectly on fish for their income. 347 Fishery collapses could also have dire direct and indirect consequences for ecosystems all over the globe. 348 Our ever-growing economy is making global resource scarcity a very real possibility, yet we continue to extract 60 billion tons of resources annually -and growing. 349 That's 50% more than 30 years ago. 350 Humanity uses nature's services 50% faster than the Earth can renew them, 351 but the extractive nature of the for-profit market requires constant expansion, at all costs. The ecological impacts of the for-profit economy are not only about resource extraction and the inputs that we need for our activities, but also the pollution and waste we create and how it affects all of the other beings we share this planet with. Recycling is an after-thought, a 'damage control' strategy in our linear economy. This means that resources go into one end of the system, then they are processed, consumed, and the waste is thrown out of the other end of the system. What happens to the waste at the end of this linear productionconsumption process is critical, because rather than being reused in our economy or processed into something that ecosystems can use, most of it is dumped directly into the biosphere (i.e. air, water and land). Climate change might be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of our economy's effects on nature. All ten of the hottest years on record have been since 1998. 352 2015 is now the hottest on record and, based on trends, 2016 will likely pass that. 353  and unusually cold weather as well as stronger storms. In 2012, a town called Needles in California experienced the hottest rainstorm ever -115 degrees Fahrenheit, 46 degrees Celsius. 354 Rainfall and snowfall records in the Eastern U.S. over the last years have been off the charts, not to mention the numerous polar vortexes that are coming to be the norm in North American winters. 355 Australia has experienced increasing outbreaks of bushfires in record-hot summers. 356 The UK and Northern Europe have seen unprecedented heat waves and floods, as well as severe winter storms with hurricane-force winds. 357 Tropical storms, typhoons and hurricanes are also increasing in number and strength, affecting communities all over the world; especially island nations like the Philippines (Ref: Klein?). By narrowly focusing on climate change, many activists, organizations, governments and businesses have kept our attention on greenhouse gas emissions, or even just carbon dioxide emissions. This has allowed Homo economicus to find ways of monetizing carbon dioxide and in many cases financially profiting from climate change via trading schemes and carbon mitigation programs, while completely missing the point that climate change is a symptom of the growth imperative of the for-profit system. We must move beyond single issue, linear thinking and look at climate change in the context of much bigger, systemic issues in order to address the root causes. As our consumption grows, so does the amount of waste and pollution we produce. We have produced more plastic in the last 10 years than we did in the entire last century, which means we have also created more plastic waste than in the entire last century. 358 Plastics never fully biodegrade and are wreaking havoc on the planet. There are masses of plastic waste collecting in the oceans where currents meet. The biggest is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. As fish and birds eat these pieces of plastic and they are, in turn, eaten by their predators, the plastic spreads throughout the food chain.
Although many plastic-related deaths have been observed among marine and bird species, it is hard to say what the long-term consequences of plastic in the oceans will be. 359 Pollution isn't the only thing harming the planetary community of life. Forests all over the world are disappearing. What were once vibrant forests in much of northern China are now deserts, due to unsustainable logging. 360 As a result, places like Beijing increasingly experience sandstorms that would never have occurred fifty years ago. 361 Lush forests like the Amazon are also being cut down to make room for beef cattle ranches and to grow crops to feed the cattle, which is largely fueled by rising meat consumption and a profit-hungry meat industry. 362 In addition to people in high-income countries eating unsustainable amounts of meat, consumption of meat is increasing very fast in 'developing' countries as it is identified with wealth, prosperity and the lifestyle of the 'developed' world. 363 When forests are cut down, ecosystems are destroyed and habitats for entire species can be lost. All of this has contributed to the dying off of species at an incredible rate. It is estimated that we are now losing 150-200 species per day. 364 Most environmental scientists agree that human activity is causing the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the planet. 365 The last mass extinction was 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out. Aside from this being a very sad situation, it is also frightening because we don't know what the effects of this will be on human society, but scientists are certain that it puts us in a dangerous position, as meeting our basic needs for food and water requires functional, healthy ecosystems. 366 Despite resource shortages, ecological collapse and decreasing levels of wellbeing, we just keep trying to grow our economy to satisfy the growth imperative of the for-profit system. The inherent contradiction of capitalism is that the economy needs to grow, but overconsumption of resources threatens the human species' existence in the long-run and isn't even making us happy in the short-run. Furthermore, despite some shifts in mainstream business, the profit motive still encourages business managers to cut environmental corners in order to reduce costs and deliver high profit margins to shareholders and investors, as well and large bonuses to themselves. The growth of the human population only exacerbates ecological destruction, as the more resources that are used by humans, the fewer resources there are for other species. The more the human consumption expands, the more habitats it destroys in the process. Indeed, human population growth is an important contributing factor to the Sixth Mass Extinction and is causing us to use up the Earth's resources even faster. In 1800, before the Industrial Revolution, the world's human population was about 1 billion people. 367 By 1960, it had reached 3 billion. In the last 50 years, it has more than doubled to 7.3 billion people in 2016. 368

The global population is growing by just over 1%, each year. 369 This sounds harmless enough, but it's also exponential growth -most of us know how this works with compounding interest on loans or investments, but it works the same way with population. At the beginning of 2016, we started with 7.3 billion people on the planet, which means that the population will grow by roughly 73 million people this year. 370 But in 2025, we will have an estimated global population of 8.1 billion, 371 which means that, if the rate of growth is still 1%, the population will increase by 81 million people. That's ten million more people being added per year than in 2016, but it's still 1% of the population. One percent doesn't sound like much, and that's why it can be deceiving. In fact, Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado once said that humanity's greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function. Every year, we have more people to start with and so we grow by a greater number. A major study in 2014 found that there's a 70% chance that our population numbers will continue to rise to 11 billion in 2100. 372 What is driving this unsustainable population growth? It is a very complex issue that involves a wide variety of factors, including inequality, poverty, education levels, employment, access to healthcare and social norms. It's true that the highest rates of population growth are in the 'developing' world and so it is often framed as an issue that only 'developing' countries need to address. However, there are clear connections to the for-profit system. Extreme global inequality means that the people at the bottom have a lot less choice in how they live their lives. They have less access to education, employment opportunities and healthcare. This is especially true for women in low-income regions. The marginalization of women due to the dominator mentality plays an important role here. Women in many places do not even get to think about how many children they want (or if they want children) because they are expected to do what their husbands and fathers want them to do. This control of women's reproduction might seem limited to the 'developing' world, but it's not. Political debates rage on in the U.S. about women's reproductive healthcare rights. When 40 percent of all pregnancies in the world are unwanted or unintended, the importance of women's control over their own reproductivity cannot be understated, especially not in the context of overpopulation. 373 It must also be mentioned that an average child in the U.S. will cause 13 times as much environmental damage throughout their life as an average child in Brazil. 374 So, any serious discussion of overpopulation and resources must also take into consideration economic and political domination and the resulting inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunities. In the 21 st century, population growth is also often equated with economic power via economic growth.
More people mean more markets and more consumption, which is good for the bottom line (in the short-term at least). Population growth is one of the most reliable ways a country, city or region can grow its economy and show high GDP numbers. We can see this in political rhetoric today. High birth rates are encouraged by many governments as a driver of political and economic power. It's bad to be small when the name of the game is domination. The global population growth rate is declining due to increasing access to family planning, including methods of contraception, as well as more access to education and diverse employment opportunities (factors which do a lot to lower birth rates). However, high inequality is a looming threat to progress made on this front. Trying to tackle overpopulation in the for-profit world is like trying to swim against a riptide. A great number of people believe that capitalism's innovative potential can and will come to the rescue of our ecological crisis and allow us to keep growing the economy. The 'substitutability' assumption in the field of economics leads many to believe that we will be able to substitute scarce resources through innovation. However, a study led by Yale Professor of Chemical Engineering, Thomas Graedel, found that there is no known suitable substitution for 62 metals integral to current economic activity, many of which might become scarce in the relatively near future. 375 The substitutability assumption also begs the question: how do you substitute things like fresh water or complex marine ecosystems? Others believe that efficiency is the key. Innovators the world over are working hard to find ways to 'decouple' economic growth from ecological destruction -that is, to grow the economy while using fewer natural resources and causing less damage to ecosystems. Major advancements have been made, and resource efficiency is part of what we need to do. However, advances so far have only been in terms of relative decoupling, not absolute decoupling. This means that we have found ways to lower our ecological impact per unit of production, like lowering the amount of energy a car requires. But when the goal is to sell more and more cars, and our global population of 'consumers' is expanding, the overall -or absolute -amount of resources we're using still increases. The former leader of the U.K.'s Sustainable Development Commission and author of 'Prosperity Without Growth', Tim Jackson, makes it clear that the levels of innovation that would enable an absolute decoupling of economic growth from ecological destruction are totally unrealistic. 376 In the case of carbon dioxide emissions alone, Jackson calculated that we would need a decrease of carbon dioxide emissions by 11% per year to reach our reduction goals by 2050, which requires a rate of innovation 16 times faster than all of the innovation we've had since 1990 combined. 377 As economist Sir Nicholas Stern points out, "It is difficult to secure emission cuts faster than about 1% per year except in instances of recession." 378 And that's focusing on carbon emissions, without taking into account other forms of pollution and usage of nonrenewable resources. This argument has been proven true, as global GDP grew by 44% between 2004 and 2014, and the consumption of fossil fuels increased by 19%, resulting in a 22% increase in global carbon dioxide emissions, all while governments and businesses were trying harder than ever to decrease emissions through efficiency and the increased use of renewable energy sources. 379 Despite concerted and sustained efforts to become more eco-efficient, we only continue to increase our negative impact on the environment, because our profit-oriented economic system tends to use any efficiency gains to expand the overall scale of production -this phenomenon is known as 'Jevon's Paradox.' 380 Some people are still betting that the transition to an information economy or a service-based economy can decouple economic growth from ecological impacts. It is often claimed that the emerging service economy in the world's largest cities is resulting in de-carbonization. On the surface of things, this may seem true, but the service economy usually includes the financial sector, which is largely the elite economy, and the growth of the elite economy requires the growth of the real economy of goods and services, in order to compensate for the wealth siphoned away. Furthermore, the claim that electronic services are naturally more ecofriendly than paper-and-pen services is not as cut-and-clear as it may seem. The world's information-communications technology systems, for instance, use 10% of global electricity generation every year, so going online does not necessarily mean going 'green.' 381 In fact, the global IT industry contributes about the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions as the global aviation industry. 382 Similarly, we hear numbers about the decreasing carbon footprint of entire nations that continue to grow their GDP. However, these numbers are not 'trade corrected' -they don't account for the carbon emissions of the goods a country imports and consumes. Countries that claim they are lowering their ecological footprints while maintaining economic 376  growth are commonly 'outsourcing' their environmental impacts, as more production and waste streams are moved abroad. 383 In most high-income countries, the majority of goods are produced abroad. 384 In outsourcing the dirtiest aspects of production, the 'developed' countries have outsourced the carbon emissions on which their economies depend. Instead, the carbon emissions of countries like Vietnam, China and Bangladesh, where much of the production occurs, have risen significantly. 385 Although we can change the way we count each country's emissions, global emissions continue to increase. The total negative impact of human activity on the planet's natural systems continues to rise, and that affects us all. Greenhouse gas emissions increased twice as fast in the first decade of this century than they did in the three previous decades. 386 Furthermore, information and certain services are rapidly becoming 'zero marginal cost' items.
387 This means that, once the initial product has been created, the price of producing an additional unit of that product is close to zero. The music and publication industries are the most obvious examples of this. With dramatically increased accessibility to advanced technology and software, it might cost a few thousand dollars to produce a new music album or a new book, but the cost of producing additional units of the album or book in electronic format is almost nothing -so the marginal cost is effectively zero. The price to the consumer of accessing the product, often via the Internet, can be very low or even free, with producers making profits largely from advertising revenues, if any profits are made at all. In the internet and digital era, information and service economies can't support the kind of economic growth that the for-profit system requires. Often, efforts to become more eco-efficient fly in the face of a for-profit system that actually encourages massive inefficiency in the name of growth and profits. There are millions of examples of just how insanely inefficient global trade has become. Despite being an agriculturally fertile country, 78% of Australia's apple juice concentrate comes from China and 87% of its frozen orange juice comes from Brazil (Ref: Dick Smith). Apples grown in the U.K. are often shipped halfway around the world to be waxed, then returned to the U.K. to be sold. 388 Seventy-five percent of the apples in New York City come from the west coast of the U.S., even though the state of New York produces far more apples than the city's residents consume. 389 But it's not only apples and oranges. It's everything. England imports more than 100,000 tons of milk each year, then exports roughly the same amount. 390 Even in Mongolia, a country with 10 times as many milk-producing animals as people, shops carry more European dairy products than Mongolian ones. 391 Why all of this redundant trade? Because in the for-profit economy, the pricing mechanism includes costs and margins for sellers and buyers, but fails to include social and ecological costs. Companies increase profits by doing things as cheaply as possible, so if it's financially cheaper to ship apples around the world to be waxed than to pay a bit more for the apples to be waxed locally (due to cheaper labor), that's the 'rational' thing to do; it doesn't matter to that company if their actions create inefficiency in the wider system. Instead, the price for this ecological inefficiency is passed on to the environment, underpaid workers, local economies that are deprived of employment and business, and future generations that will have to try to repair the damage. Within the growth paradigm, gains in efficiency will never be enough. Growth and the drive to maximize profits will always cancel out whatever efficiency we have gained. But the more important question is: Why should we try so hard to maintain this growth-based economic system when it's not making us any happier, it's creating unacceptable levels of inequality and it's eroding the ecological stability of the planet? Ecological instability is intricately connected to the economic instability of the for-profit system. The story of palm oil illustrates these connections very well. Ancient forests in some of the world's most precious biodiversity hotspots in Indonesia are being cut down in order to cultivate palm oil, a very versatile oil that is increasingly added to a wide range of products including lipsticks, cookies, shampoos, instant noodles, and detergents. 392 Palm oil is even used as a biofuel. 393 In clearing the forests to plant trees for palm oil, a great many species' habitats are destroyed. This includes some of the most exotic, and even endangered, species in the world, like orangutans, rhinos, elephants and tigers. 394 But palm oil is not just an environmental problem. Indigenous people are often forced off the land where their families have flourished for many generations. 395 Palm oil producers are also notorious for violating the rights of their workers, exploiting the local people who work on their plantations. 396 Because so much profit is to be had from palm oil, it has been relatively easy for companies to bribe and lobby government officials at the local and national level in order to let them produce palm oil in the cheapest ways possible, paying no attention to environmental impacts and the rights of workers and indigenous peoples. In the end, the business owners and investors make a lot of money, workers are paid very little and indigenous populations are left landless, contributing to even more inequality. The story of palm oil is emblematic of the for-profit economy: business owners' mandate to maximize profit leads to species loss, exploitation, inequality, monocultures, oligopolies, corruption and political capture. This is completely unsustainable in ecological, economic and social terms. In fact, the concentration of wealth and power is one of the most unsustainable aspects of this for-profit economic system; it is economically unsustainable. In 2011, a group of complexity scientists in Switzerland published an article that explored the question 'Who Controls the World? '397 This article analyzed data on 43,000 transnational corporations. Interestingly, they discovered that there is a core in this network of corporations -36% of them make up 95% of the total operating revenue of the whole group. That alone is an incredible level of concentration, but even more astounding, their research showed that the top 737 shareholders of these 43,000 large transnational corporations have the potential to control 80% of total corporate value. That's 0.123% of the 600,000 shareholders in those 43,000 companies, controlling 80% of the value. And it's even more concentrated as you go deeper into the core of this cluster of companies. The 146 top players have the potential to control 40% of corporate value.
That's 0.024% of all shareholders in the network that have the potential to control 40% of the total value of those 43,000 corporations!398 This highly concentrated network translates to extreme amounts of wealth and power in the hands of very few, via shareholder voting rights. Part of the way this power of shareholders is magnified is by corporations either partially or wholly owning other corporations. This means the people with the largest stake in the largest companies are unbelievably powerful. In order to grow and remain competitive, big for-profit corporations often acquire successful smaller companies. Some well-known examples of this are Unilever buying up the wholesome Ben and Jerry's ice cream company, Coca Cola buying the humble Odwalla juice company, General Mills buying the organic Cascadian Farms cereal company, and Groupe Danone (the parent company of Dannon Yogurt) buying most of Stonyfield Farm's yogurt company. This way, huge corporations are able to market their products as different, smaller brands, even though it's all under the control of one large company. The market is becoming further concentrated all the time. Take 2015's mega-merger between Kraft and Heinz to create one of the world's biggest 'food empires. '399 Along the same lines, many people might be surprised to learn that Perrier bottled water, Gerber baby food and Friskies cat food are all owned by Nestle. Not only are such enormous companies able to market their products everywhere because they have such large marketing budgets, which helps them maintain high profit margins, but they can afford to lobby politicians to make policies that will allow them to profit even more. In the U.S., they can also financially support political campaigns that will be good for their bottom line, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United. All of these examples are big, publicly traded corporations. But what about Mom and Pop shops; family-owned, local, small-and medium-sized businesses? Surely it's fine to have a for-profit world composed of those benign players? There are a few reasons why the scenario of having only benign for-profit players is becoming less and less possible. One of them is the inevitability of a for-profit system to evolve into what we have now. Companies must dominate other players and they must grow. In order to do this, successful businesses purchase smaller companies and merge with other large, powerful businesses. This leads to enormous concentration of wealth and power, which if left unchecked, just keeps increasing at an almost exponential rate. As the biggest companies get bigger, they can afford to buy even more small companies, which makes them even bigger and more able to buy up other companies. Their larger size gives them an even greater advantage over small, local companies, as they can offer lower prices and advertise more extensively. The result is that more people buy from the large, transnational corporations, which gives them the ability to expand even more. This is precisely the trend that has led to the phenomenon we've seen over the last few decades of small, local businesses dying out at an increasing rate and large mega-corporations taking over the market. Many other analysts have pointed this out before, but it is essential to understand that this is the nature of the for-profit economy. Expansion and concentration are inevitable in this system. That's why the revenue of the largest 1000 publicly traded corporations represents 80% of global industrial output. 400 It is also important to note that Mom and Pop shops xxvi are not immune from the lures of the for-profit system. Many small companies operate according to the profit motive as well. Because many small businesses adhere to the Homo economicus rationality, they often sell out to larger companies in order to maximize their gain. Large companies give them an offer they can't refuse. For the few that do hold out and stick to purpose-driven values, they usually get outcompeted by the big players anyway, because they don't have the same budget for advertising, they can't offer the same level of consistency and convenience that the big companies offer and they can't offer the same low prices, because of the 'economies of scale' principle. For-profit economies naturally result in larger corporations, homogeneity of products and services, and highly concentrated wealth and power -and these are forces that locally-owned, purpose-driven shops can hardly reckon with in the for-profit context. What many small businesses do offer is a more personalized experience in both product and service, alongside the fact that your money is much more likely to stay in the local economy, benefitting the local community. 401 Yet, these benefits do not align with the values of forprofit consumers. It's just not seen as rational to pay more for products (even if it means purchasing from your neighbor), when you're supposed to focus on low prices, as mandated by Homo economicus. And, of course, the inequality created by the for-profit system also means that a lot of people simply can't afford to pay more for local, ethical products. It's not that these locally owned shops are part of the problem because they're for-profit, but rather they're (perhaps unknowingly or unintentionally) aligned with a story that doesn't support the values in society that would motivate consumers to choose them over a bigger competitor. 'For-profit' represents an ethic and underlying worldview, not just a business model. This tendency for concentration of ownership is particularly dangerous when it comes to the flow of information in society. In 2009, alternative news outlet Mother Jones published an infographic showing a timeline of the mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. media xxvii . In 1983, 26 different companies controlled most of the media in the U.S. By 2006, after many mergers and acquisitions, just 8 companies controlled most of the U.S.'s media, each with a market value of over $40 billion.
402 These media sources are all in business to maximize private profits for a relatively small number of individuals by creating TV shows, movies, news channels, newspapers, magazines and advertising for billions of people. This concentration of power in a few hands is very dangerous given that they are guided by the profit motive. Considering these companies are such an influential source of information for the general public, they have an enormous amount of power and control over human consciousness. Thus, they are able to manipulate what people think, how they feel and how they act. Remember the power of stories to create our reality? These companies are, in effect, reality-makers. This concentration of information outlets reveals another internal contradiction of capitalism. One of the main principles of the capitalist market is that people will make rational choices based on accurate information, which is a key element of the Invisible Hand making selfinterest work out for society's benefit. Yet, the expansion and concentration of the market leads the main players to skew information for their own benefit; 403 and this concentration of the market is an inevitable mechanism of the for-profit system. The accurate information that the for-profit system requires doesn't exist in the for-profit system. xxviii In 2014, Oxfam published a report entitled, 'Working for the Few: Political Capture and Economic Inequality.' 404 The paper described how inequality has led to the huge levels of undue influence that wealthy individuals and companies have on political processes, otherwise known as political capture. One vivid illustration of political capture is the revolving door phenomenon. This refers to when a person moves between professional positions in the public sector and the business or lobbying xxix sector, in a manner that resembles a revolving door. This can allow for-profit companies to have undue influence on policies and legislation through their 'revolving door' connections. One study found that 56% of the revenue generated by private lobbying firms in the U.S. between 1998 and 2008 can be attributed to individuals with some sort of federal government experience -meaning that they have good connections and personal relationships with policymakers in the federal government. 405 A study that ranked the top 50 lobbyists in Washington D.C. found that 34 had federal government experience. 406 Yet another report found that the revolving door is much more common and widespread in the U.S. than most experts realize because there are loopholes in legislation, allowing lobbyists to effectively hide some of their employment history. 407  Around 63% of the claims against Canada in these cases have involved challenges to environmental protection legislation and resource management programs that the corporations say interfered with their investor's profits. 412 As a result of these corporate tribunals, Canada had to loosen its national environmental regulations. 413 In this way, trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) give for-profit corporations much more power in the market and in politics, in many cases allowing them to side-step regulation. Politicians use the for-profit story to explain to their citizens that it's worth their while to incentivize for-profit business by means of setting up such trade agreements, export processing zones and tax havens. This concentration of power is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. Capitalism is a system based on the contribution of capitalists -those who have the capital to invest. By deciding where to invest their money, capitalists have the power to decide which sort of projects and businesses deserve to exist and which don't. And their investment decisions generally come down to which companies and entrepreneurs are seen as most likely to boost their return on investment. When all the investment power is in the hands of the few, the economy has a tendency to result in a very homogenous market, and this creates enormous systemic risk. Think of all of the chain shops and big box stores that have begun to dominate the global landscape and that almost everything you can buy in the average supermarket, almost anywhere in the world, is produced by just a handful of enormous companies. As any good biologist knows, the lack of diversity in a complex system means a lack of resilience. A shock that affects just one or two of those huge companies can have major ramifications for the entire system; as the world experienced in 2008. The current economy is rigid, centralized and hierarchical, when it needs to be flexible, distributed and networked. The speculation inherent in for-profit business can wreak havoc on the economy, too. When profit can be privately distributed, it creates a sense of excitement in the people who may receive that profit. If a company achieves high profits, then the owners or investors can receive more money. If the company doesn't generate any profits, they receive nothing. This attachment of personal gain to the profits of a business, in the greater context of the forprofit story, lays the perfect foundation for a casino economy. The stock market is one of the most common ways profit is privatized. People buy shares in a company listed on the stock market. These publicly listed companies often deliver a certain percentage of their profits to their shareholders at the end of the year in the form of a dividend. Although most of us have come to think of the stock market as a means of investing in a company, it's not really investment. As we mentioned earlier, only when new shares are sold for the first time, as in Initial Public Offerings or new share issuance, is money actually put into the bank accounts of companies. Most transactions on the stock market involve the trading of existing shares between traders on the secondary markets, not buying up new shares. This means most stock market activity doesn't directly touch companies at all -it occurs in, and is restricted to, the elite economy.
The trading of stocks is about the possibility of a gain for the investor, whether via dividends or capital gains (from selling the share for more than you bought it for). If a company raises its profit margins, it is seen as more valuable and can be traded for more money; this is known as shareholder value, which plays a major role in how companies are managed and is the primary and overriding concern of most companies' management and board. It doesn't matter much how shareholder value is increased; whether through producing a high-quality product, or by using sweatshops with child laborers in Vietnam and throwing toxins into their local drinking water supply cuts costs. We know this because we see it over and over in how many companies are operating right now. The only ethical guidance embedded in the stock market is that of helping shareholders make a personal gain from businesses xxx . This was bluntly stated by pharmaceutical CEO, Martin Shkreli, who came under fire for raising the price of a life-saving medicine by 5000%, making it much more expensive for patients. When asked by a journalist if he would choose to act differently if given the chance to go back in time, he replied that he would have raised the price even more because, as the CEO of a company traded on the stock market, his number one duty and obligation is to maximize shareholder value. He summed up the for-profit system beautifully when he said, "No one wants to say it. No one's proud of it. But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules and my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them or go half or 70%, but to go to 100% of the profit curve that we're all taught in MBA class." 414 Bonuses tied to share prices create a very strong incentive for managers to focus on the short-term expectations of the market, rather than creating long-term value in the real economy. This has paid off for them -while real wages for most American workers have increased little if at all since the early 1970s, wages for the top one percent of employees have risen 165% and wages for the top 0.1 percent have risen 362%! 415 In fact, the amount paid out in Wall Street bonuses in 2014 ($28.5 billion) was more than double the income of all 1 million Americans working full-time on minimum wage that same year ($14 billion). 416 Then there's the arcane world of even riskier business. It seems that traders in the elite economy just can't get enough financial gambling. More and more complicated financial instruments have been concocted and at a faster and faster pace since the first derivatives were created in the 1980s. 417 A derivative is part of a full share, which means two shareholders can split the amount of risk that one shareholder would normally take. Until the U.S. Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) of 2000, derivatives were mostly used to 'hedge' a company's financial risk (Ref: Ibid). This means that a derivative was just a way for a company to share the risk of either losing or gaining money in the future. For instance, an American company that does business in Europe might make a contract with a bank to lock in a certain exchange rate for Euros to U.S. dollars for a year. This means that the bank will gain or lose money if the exchange rate goes wild, rather than the company. The bank has effectively taken this risk of losing money due to a fluctuating exchange rate away from the company, but in the case of favorable exchange rate changes, the bank stands to gain money. This contract can then be traded or sold to another person or organization who would like to take on that risk. Until 2000, derivatives in the U.S. were regulated by government agents and lawmakers and were required to provide a form of safety, or 'hedging', to companies. No purely speculative derivatives were allowed. After the CFMA was passed in 2000, though, derivatives were deregulated and financial speculation became rampant. Why was the CFMA passed? Perhaps part of the answer lies in political capture. Each step in the evolution of financial instruments has taken this financial trading further away from real economic activity, allowing traders to gamble in the elite economy to their hearts' delight with higher risks -because the value of derivatives fluctuates wildly, they can win big or lose big. Because some financial instruments are so distant from real economic activity, it encourages traders to do irresponsible things that they probably wouldn't do if they had to deal with the actual people whose lives they're betting on -like the mortgage holders who lost their homes in 2008. All of this has created a financial economy that is vastly larger than the real economy of goods and services that most of people think of when they hear the word 'economy'. Analysts estimate that the combined face value of all derivatives is more than a quadrillion (1,000 trillion) dollars; greater than 14 times the entire world's annual GDP. 418 The total value of all the stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, for comparison, is roughly $15 trillion. 419 This growth of the financial sector, financial speculation and the number and complexity of financial instruments is often referred to as the financialization of the economy. This financialized sphere of the economy is now so detached from reality that in 2012, the New Scientist reported that a multi-billion dollar submarine fibre optic cable link extending 15,600km would be built between London and Tokyo via the Arctic Ocean, which is now conveniently accessible due to the retreat of sea ice.
420 This cable would cut the 'friction' between the two cities from 230 milliseconds to 168 milliseconds, and the article noted that 'reduced transmission time will be a boon for high-frequency traders who will gain crucial milliseconds on each automated trade'. One can imagine that this will facilitate more of the consumption that creates the greenhouse emissions that melts the sea ice. The financial takeover of the economy is dangerous because investments in financial assets are most often very short-sighted, so the flows of capital tend to fluctuate erratically, causing asset bubbles to inflate and burst. And when such a big bubble bursts, it can cause a lot of damage to the real economy, because companies and their owners that might have lost a lot of money in the crash will try to make up for their losses by cutting costs, which often entails lay-offs and wage cuts. If they can't pay for their losses, these companies will have to shut down, which also puts people out of work. The banks and financial institutions play a huge role. The total combined assets of the top six banks in the U.S. were equal in value to about 65% of the U.S.'s GDP in 2011 xxxi . 421 If these banks are selling more financial instruments than they can pay off in the case of a bubble bursting, they might face bankruptcy and, with so much of the economy's money dependent on them, that poses a serious systemic threat to the whole economy. When banks pull back, liquidity in the system dries up and the economy grinds to a halt, which can be really painful for the people in the real economy who don't have extra money laying around, but rather require steady wages from the companies that are now downsizing to pay off their loans that are being called in. The effect of this on ordinary people includes loss of livelihoods, inability to afford medical care, and loss of homes when they are foreclosed on. This is where the global economy is at now -an era in which we can expect to see bursting asset bubbles, credit crunches, and liquidity crises with increasing regularity, as trust in the system continues to erode, and as the social and environmental upheaval the system is generating feeds back in, causing further instability. The most common suggestions for addressing all of this dysfunction in the economy focus on the role of the market versus the role of the state. 422 From this perspective, the market and state are seen as being complementary forces that simultaneously constrain each other. The market is thought to be the optimal force for producing and exchanging goods and services, while the state forces self-interested players in the market to contribute resources necessary for maintaining the basic conditions for public health and wellbeing. 423 Thus, the state constrains the market's self-interest, while the market limits the state's centralized control. This binary way of looking at economics has restricted most economic thought to the market-state spectrum, with both sides assuming that the market must be for-profit. At one extreme of the spectrum is free market capitalism, with the government playing a minimal role, while at the other extreme is state socialism, with the government controlling most economic activity. 424 As with any spectrum, there are also a variety of mixes of state and market along the spectrum. The majority of critical economic decisions have traditionally revolved around what the optimal mix of market freedom and state control is, in terms of balancing productivity and efficiency with meeting the needs of the wider population. 425

The state-driven side of the economic spectrum advocates for a greater role of the government in regulating the market, and increasing taxation in order to address issues of inequality and environmental damage caused by a market that's a bit too free. For instance, after thoroughly analyzing the dynamics of wealth inequality and economic growth, Thomas Picketty's solutions focus on raising tax rates for the wealthiest slices of society. Whilst tax systems vary widely with regards to whom, how much, and what they tax, one of the main aims of taxation around the world is to fund governments' provision of essential services and safety nets for the most vulnerable people in society, and balance out wealth inequality. This is why taxation seems like a natural solution to inequality. Although taxation is an essential part of keeping any modern society functioning, even the most progressive taxation, functioning in the most philanthropic society, can't counteract the ever-increasing speed of the wealth extraction siphon. In order to do so, tax rates would have to be so high that there would no longer be an incentive to start or invest in a business and make money. Starting a business wouldn't be worth the risk, given the limitations placed on a potential return on investment, so the market would stall. High tax rates are fundamentally at odds with the profit motive that guides capitalists and for-profit corporations. Seeking to resolve inequality by means of taxation also belies an acceptance that the economy should inherently create such negative outcomes, as if they're a natural part of the economy and the best we can do is mitigate these unavoidable effects. Not only does taxation not get to the root of the problem, seeming to accept the idea that an economy has to be socially and ecologically destructive, but it also just can't happen in the current context. In fact, tax policy is moving in the exact opposite direction; the biggest corporations and wealthiest people are enjoying reduced taxes, thanks to tax havens and the ability to lobby their ideas into policy. Furthermore, higher tax rates don't necessarily lead to governments receiving more tax income. Data from the Internal Revenue Service of the U.S. government shows that when the top individual tax rate was 91% of income in the 1960s, total individual tax revenue accounted for about 8% of GDP.
Likewise, when the top individual tax rate was 70% of income, the total individual tax revenue was about 9% of GDP. Now that the top individual tax rate is almost 40% of income, the total individual tax revenue is about 8% of GDP. 426 It is also worth noting that, for a long time now, a great number of Fortune 500 companies and other global giants have managed to minimize, or entirely avoid, the taxes one often assumes they pay. Only 10% of Federal 2014 tax revenue in the U.S. came from corporations. 427 In the U.K., corporate taxes accounted for only 7.5% of total tax revenue in 2014. 428 And in Sweden, widely acknowledged as one of the most socialist countries in the world, corporate tax as a percentage of total tax revenue was actually less than in the U.S., at 6.1% that same year. 429 Yet another approach often cited to help resolve our crises is more regulation xxxii . More regulation of the financial sector, more environmental regulations, more employment regulations, more laws, more rules and more policies are seen as a way to reign in a destructive free market. 430 The main problem is that regulation is usually designed and operated for the benefit of the industries involved, as the for-profit story tells us that profit margins are an indication of the health of the economy. So it is very difficult, if not impossible, to pass regulations that would have a detrimental impact on corporations' bottom line. 431 As with taxation, regulation is a top-down approach that requires political will to enact new laws, rules and policies. And in the current context of political capture, the odds are stacked against regulations that favor the common wealth over the privatization of wealth. Corporate taxes and regulation can be seen as ideologically at odds with the maximization of private profit. Business owners and entrepreneurs receive conflicting messages that they should seek to maximize their financial gains via for-profit business, but that they should also give a large portion of their financial gains back to society or that they should forgo potential profits in order to operate in ways that benefit the broader community. The most powerful business people in the world are not going to allow themselves to be subjected to higher taxes and regulation for the sake of resolving the very social and environmental crises that they're creating in order to be in that position of wealth and power in the first place. The for-profiteers would be shooting themselves in the foot to encourage more taxation of themselves. So, through revolving door tactics, lobbying and financially supporting candidates that favor low tax rates for the rich, society's wealthiest few will make sure that their taxes won't go up. The 'more regulation' approach can easily lead to a bureaucratic nightmare and concentrate power in the hands of the bureaucrats and government officials. People on the more extreme end of the state-driven side of the spectrum believe that many of these problems can be resolved by the state having ownership of enterprises in the industries it seeks to regulate. The idea is that if the market is not adequately meeting society's needs, then the government is the only other actor that can provide essential goods and services, such as healthcare, education, infrastructure, and energy. Yet, while there are examples of some successes, especially at the municipal level and in countries that have focused on developing state-owned enterprises xxxiii ; in most countries the state has generally proven too large, centralized and bureaucratic to allocate resources more efficiently than the private sector, 432 and corruption within large bureaucracies remains an ever-present challenge xxxiv . Furthermore, even in countries where taxation is high and there are a large number of government-owned enterprises, inequality continues to rise. 433 As we illustrated at the beginning of the first chapter with the thought experiment about the shape of the economy, most of us have some sort of intuition that a healthy, sustainable economy has the circulation of wealth built into it, as part of how it naturally operates. Taxes, regulation and technology aren't enough to balance out the negative effects of the for-profit system because they are afterthoughts; they're meant to mitigate the symptoms of a disease that has grown from the very way we've organized our economy. This is why despite widespread calls to increase taxation and regulation, the crises of inequality and ecosystem collapse continue to worsen. A systemic problem requires a systemic solution and state-driven responses are just band-aids that the for-profit system bleeds through. Proponents of the market-driven side of the spectrum argue that the state concentrates power and is prone to inefficiency and bureaucracy, so state-driven responses create more problems than they solve. Instead, this side of the spectrum calls for market-driven responses to the ecological and inequality crises of the 21 st century. Such responses entail voluntary efforts on behalf of business owners and managers to take more than profit into account in their operations. Ideas such as 'corporate social responsibility', 'conscious capitalism', 'shared value capitalism' and 'triple bottom line' business put forth visions of a for-profit market that balances the focus on profit-maximization with concern for social and ecological wellbeing. 434 One of the first attempts to make for-profit business better aligned with social and environmental goals is known as corporate social responsibility (CSR). It was a very promising concept when it first gained popularity in the 1990s. It is the idea that corporations should take more responsibility for caring for society and the environment, rather than just focusing on profit. There aren't any strict rules in the realm of corporate social responsibility, but there are best practices and CSR experts can be hired to put together a program for your company. Planting trees, setting up playgrounds in disadvantaged neighborhoods, cleaning up a local park or beach and sponsoring charitable events are common CSR activities.
The idea is that such projects not only help the community, but they also give your company a reputation-boost. Today, a great number of companies around the world create CSR reports, quantifying the positive environmental and social impacts of their CSR programs. And they use these numbers to improve their public image. "We saved the environment 1000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions this year by planting 1000 trees", for example. Unfortunately, they don't measure how much their business activities cost the environment and society. As more companies use CSR as a ploy to enhance their marketing strategies, more observers become disappointed with the lack of deeper change in corporate behavior. 'Triple bottom line' is another popular idea and goes a step further than CSR. It is a business philosophy that seeks to incorporate social and environmental concerns into the mission of the business, thus the triple bottom line is often described in the catch phrase 'people, planet, profit' xxxv . Seeking to solidify the triple bottom line approach and make it tangible for businesses, various initiatives and frameworks have sprung forth, including B Corp certification, shared value, and conscious capitalism. These are voluntary initiatives that companies can engage with in an effort to incorporate the triple bottom line approach into their business operations. Governments have even created legal entities to encourage triple bottom line thinking. These include benefit corporations, flexible purpose corporations and low-profit limited liability companies (LC3's) in various U.S. states, C3 companies in Canada, for-profit social enterprises and social cooperatives in Europe, and Community Interest Companies limited by shares in the U.K., all of which are for-profit legal models that require companies to have a social mission in addition to their profit-maximization mandate. At first glance, the triple bottom line might seem like a really good idea. After all, why shouldn't the aims of businesses and their shareholders align with the health of the whole living community? But in light of the fact that businesses are embedded in society and society is embedded in ecosystems, it is misguided to treat profit as if it is on an equal footing with people and the planet. Without people, there's no profit. Without the planet, there are no people. There is an obvious hierarchy of priorities that is not acknowledged by the triple bottom line approach. And, again, profit for what or for whom? Profit is still seen as a goal in the triple bottom line philosophy. For-profit businesses are set up to financially benefit private owners and so have an inherent incentive to prioritize their owners' financial concerns over the concerns of other stakeholders (Ref: O'Toole & Vogel, 2011). This is the for-profit legal model. Environmental health and wellbeing are an afterthought in for-profit business, not woven into the fabric of the legal structure. These businesses take environmental and social concerns into account only if they are also able to generate high profits for their owners, because it is antithetical for them to sacrifice shareholder value for environmental or social concerns. 435 Attempts at triple bottom line business unfortunately still tend to result in single bottom line thinking when it comes to difficult decisions in which profit, people and planet do not all naturally align. At best, these models can only marginally rectify the negative social and environmental impacts that these businesses have. At worst, they can be misleading and destructive. As scholar John Erehnfeld put it, "What firms are doing is reducing unsustainability, but this is not the same as creating sustainability." 436 Disillusioned with these corporate attempts to resolve social and environmental issues, some observers have come to see cooperatives as the best and only alternative to business-as-usual, because they are democratically-owned and run by their members. Cooperatives do have a critical role to play in the evolution of a sustainable economy, yet we might be missing something very fundamental by grouping all cooperatives together by assuming they all treat profit in the same way. It's important to understand that cooperatives also fall along the for-profit to NFP spectrum. Not all co-ops are created equal. Some producer cooperatives are formed solely in order to maximize profit for their members. For instance, there are many agricultural cooperatives whose members are large for-profit farms. In these cases, the cooperative's goal is to negotiate the best prices for all of its members' products, in order to maximize their profits, which can then be distributed to private owners. Clearly, such cooperatives remain very much for-profit and their only point of distinction from their corporate counterparts is that they adopted the 8 cooperative principles, meaning their operations are likely more democratic than a conglomeration of for-profit corporations where the biggest generally wields the most power. Although there have been some attempts to describe the potential for a worker-led economy dominated by worker-owned co-ops, this is just another flavor of capitalism, as workerowned co-ops still operate according to the profit motive and private ownership of businesses. The distribution of profit to workers shows that this business model is still rooted in the forprofit story, albeit tempered by the democratic aspects of the cooperative model. So while it has many strands and variations, overall the worker-owned co-op might not be as radically different from business-as-usual as many people assume. The not-so-orthodox Marxist, Ellen Meiksins Wood, has pointed out that even workers who own the means of production will have to respond to the market's imperatives. They will have to compete and accumulate and to let uncompetitive enterprises and their workers go under. 437 They fall into the for-profit economy category and will face the same challenges. Many of these new business models and initiatives play an important role in accelerating the movement of the market in the not-for-profit direction, but they're not enough to address our crises on a systemic level. The focus on the market versus the state distracts us from seeing how the for-profit economy systematically creates poverty and inequality, regardless of how free or constrained the market is.
Instead of getting to the source of the disease, band-aids are applied and the symptoms medicated. Another band-aid used as a remedy for inequality and poverty is the realm of charities, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), international aid, and development loans. A great deal of development loans and aid are geared towards supporting the for-profit economy, and charities and NGOs serve to relieve for-profit guilt and maintain the guise that the Invisible Hand really does work, as long as we help it along. We've all heard the grim statistics about global poverty -22,000 children die each day due to poverty, 438 800 million people are undernourished, 439 and 2.5 billion don't have access to adequate sanitation. 440 There are thousands of good-hearted organizations and people all over the world trying to 'relieve poverty'. They work to get food, water, medicine and other basic goods to people living in poverty. There are programs that help people in poverty get microloans to start their own business. There are plenty of good intentions and tons of resources being poured into the problem of global poverty. However, most of these efforts are grounded firmly in the very system from which inequality stems in the first place. When aid and loans are given in the for-profit context, they are formed in accordance with the for-profit story. They often end up being a form of evangelizing, to bring the 'less developed' into the modern, consumerist, for-profit world. In many cases, aid can be 'tied', with the benefits flowing back to the donor nation. Despite all of the negative impacts of the for-profit economic system, many of the leaders in 'developing' countries have been convinced of the urgent need to participate in the global capitalist market. Their rush to become 'developed' is costing them their traditional cultures, family ties, community connection, and the stability of their ecosystems, all in the name of exports and economic growth. People in rural areas who previously lived off the land are encouraged to leave their communities in a quest to become workers and consumers in the modern economy. The for-profit world convinces people that they are poor and backwards and they are promised a future of prosperity, material wealth and dignity. In more violent cases, people are forced off of the land, when it is taken away from them by big businesses, as has happened recently in Ethiopia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Kenya. 441 The aid given to the 'developing' world will never be enough in light of the massive extent to which low-income countries are indebted, often as a result of colonialism and having a late start in the for-profit game, but also through lending from institutions, the interest payments on which dwarf the amount of aid received. In 2010, total external debt owed by 'developing' nations was $4 trillion, 442 while the total official development aid they received was $128 billion. 443 This means that for every $1 in aid a 'developing' country receives, more than $31 is owed on debt repayments. Clearly this debt maintains dependency. Many of these debts are 'odious' -that is, the funds were siphoned off by corrupt leaders, and never benefited the people who remain saddled with paying off the debt. social goods, funded by private money, rather than taxes. Because it's private money, the biggest donors and sponsors have a lot of control over the mission of the nonprofits they support and how that mission is carried out. In fact, most nonprofits can only exist because the for-profit system sees them as valuable. Nonprofit initiatives that don't complement the values and priorities of the for-profit system have a much harder time finding sources of funding in the for-profit world than initiatives that can make a clear link between their strategy and increased profits or economic growth. The relationship between for-profits and nonprofits is much like the relationship between an addict and an enabler. The addict wants ever more of their chosen drug and the enabler makes the addict feel okay about it and entitled to it, while cleaning up the messes that the addict makes. This is exactly what charity-dependent nonprofits do in the for-profit economy. For-profit businesses, focused on maximizing profit for a relatively few privileged individuals in a short amount of time, generate social and environmental crises, and charities receive funding, largely from for-profit businesses and business owners, to clean up the social and environmental crises that the for-profits themselves make. This creates an unhealthy co-dependent relationship between for-profits and nonprofits. Nonprofits can't exist without the will and generosity of for-profits (and often have to guilttrip the for-profits to get the resources they need). And for-profits feel okay about contributing to inequality and ecological distress because they are able to maintain the idea and image that they're doing more good than harm, by giving money to nonprofits to address those issues. Who better to comment on this phenomenon of the Nonprofit Enabler (also known as the 'charitable-industrial complex'), than Peter Buffett? His father, Warren, is the world's fourth richest person. As Peter, who has worked in the world of philanthropy for decades, and has never accepted a dollar of inheritance from his father, says, "The more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to 'give back.' It's what I would call 'conscience laundering' -feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity." 444 One of the most obvious examples of the Nonprofit Enabler phenomenon is the Gates Foundation. In 2016, Bill Gates is once again the richest person in the world, a title he's held for 17 of the last 21 years, according to Forbes Magazine. 445 His net worth is estimated at $87.4 billion and he guesses that he makes about 6% of his total wealth in income every year, so his wealth is growing exponentially xxxvi .
He and his wife are the directors of the Gates Foundation, whose website says, "From poverty to health, to education, our areas of focus offer the opportunity to dramatically improve the quality of life for billions of people." 446 A lot of the critiques of the Gates Foundation come in the form of, "Well, Mr. Gates, why don't you just put 86 of your 87 billion dollars into poverty relief and development aid?" This seems like a great solution, given that $30 billion per year could prevent 860 million people from being malnourished. 447 The for-profit story gives a clear answer to this question: a good capitalist would never do that -it would interfere with the mystical mechanism of the Invisible Hand. His role in our economy, as a capitalist, is to reinvest his money to make more money and to accumulate ever more wealth and it is up to his discretion as to how he will use it. He doesn't have to give a penny of it away. It's only out of the generosity of his heart that he gives as much as he does. His wealth will have positive effects through the businesses he invests in, regardless. We are not judging Bill Gates' character here. We are instead looking at the systemic roots of the Nonprofit Enabler phenomenon: the for-profit story and how it shapes and guides the forprofit system. Many people intuitionally sense that the Gates Foundation is something of a contradiction. They can feel that it's a problem that Gates is the richest person in the world and at the same time, is trying to alleviate global poverty. But this contradiction can only be articulated by stepping out of the capitalist paradigm. If you buy into the for-profit story and you live by it, you can't really argue that Bill Gates is too rich. What does 'too rich' mean when the goal of the game is to accumulate private wealth? After all, hasn't he created tens of thousands of jobs since he co-founded Microsoft? Anywhere you try to draw the line of 'too rich' would be arbitrary and would contradict the rules that govern the capitalist economy. If you think that growth can be sustained, then there's no problem with Gates having a higher annual income than the 40 poorest nations in the world combined, 448 because we can just grow the economic pie and they can have more and he can have more. No problem. In fact, from this worldview, he's an inspiration. The same can be said of all of the super-rich people who have signed up to the 'Giving Pledge', in which billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg pledge to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. According to the for-profit worldview, these people are to be looked up to as the world's top industrialists and it is only through their generosity that that the rest of the world should have any access to the incredible wealth they've amassed. But in order to truly address poverty and inequality, we have to bring into question the acceptability of for-profit business and economic growth in the first place. When we do this, we can see the addict-enabler relationship between for-profit businesses and charities for what it is. Another important aspect of this co-dependent relationship between nonprofits and for-profits is that it has led to a sense of desperation among many nonprofits to receive funding from whomever, however. This can easily lead to an organization drifting away from its mission. Charities often don't care which companies sponsor them; they just want money. This can result in bizarre situations like the World Wildlife Fund being sponsored by Coca Cola, a company whose plastic bottles are destroying ecosystems all over the world. A tragically ironic corporate sponsorship is that of Wells Fargo -a colossal American bank that illegally processed home foreclosures via a technique called robo-signing during the economic crisis, illegally kicking people out of their homes -supporting Habitat for Humanity, an American charity that builds houses for people who are in need. 449 Of course, these partnerships are great for improving the reputation of the for-profit sponsors, but they can also represent a dangerous form of mission drift for the nonprofits involved. Strategic but morally hazardous sponsorship is just a natural consequence of an economy that revolves around profit maximization. There are also plenty of nonprofit organizations that play an even more central role in the forprofit system by seeking to maximize the profits of their for-profit members. Examples of this include chambers of commerce, mutual funds, associations that lobby on behalf of for-profits, various professional associations, various sports associations, and global organizations like the World Economic Forum. One such association that increasingly suffers from the Nonprofit Enabler syndrome is the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the U.S. Some have noted that since the NRA has gotten more of its funding from for-profit weapon manufacturers' donations than from membership dues and program fees, it has become more oriented around the demands of large gun producers than the needs of hunters and individual gun owners (whom it was set up to serve). 450 The Nonprofit Enabler dynamic sees nonprofits playing the 'submissive caretaker' role in an economy that's largely geared towards domination. This is why NFP enterprise offers such an exciting path forward. It not only breaks with the for-profit story, but it also breaks the unhealthy enabling relationship between for-profit business and charities. Of course, not all nonprofits are enablers, and not all NFP enterprises avoid enabling behavior, but the Nonprofit Enabler effect plays such an important role in maintaining the for-profit system that it must be addressed in any discussion about going beyond capitalism. The paradigm of economic growth and for-profit business, which must expand at all costs, has become too expensive. Capitalism is failing to deliver higher levels of wellbeing for most people, and in fact we see just the opposite happening.
The for-profit system is decimating the Earth's ecosystems too quickly for them to recover, sending us into the Sixth Mass Extinction, which represents a threat to the very survival of humanity. And the inequality and concentration of power created by the wealth extraction siphon have reached unbearable levels, even in the 'rich' world. It is painfully clear that we can't grow on like this. All of the inherent contradictions of the for-profit system are coming to a head and we are reaching the end of the capitalist paradigm. It's time to take the next step in our economic and social evolution. The seeds for a not-for-profit economy are being sown Over 1,000 local families used the health center, which had sporting facilities as well as a cafeteria that served organic food from a local farm. 452 In the registration process, participants agreed to let researchers evaluate and monitor their activities and health over time. Aside from the researchers noting the activities of the participants, the center provided minimal rules and supervision. Researchers noticed that the first 6-18 months were quite chaotic, as participants learned to be more proactive and self-organize as a community. However, over the following 12 years, it was noted that there was a high level of cooperation and creative collaboration, there was no bullying, there was very little interest in competitive games, and there was a general increase in levels of health and wellbeing. Social ecologist Stuart Hill concludes that these successes were due to the supportive environment that the Pioneer Health Centre provided, as well as the freedom that participants had to be spontaneous and receive non-judgemental feedback. The Peckham Experiment offers a couple of very important lessons when it comes to laying the foundation for a more sustainable economy. First, that wellbeing is a dynamic process that is constantly being shaped by myriad factors within and around us. Secondly, under the right conditions, human nature can be extremely cooperative and altruistic. Renewed interest in the Peckham Experiment indicates a growing willingness to think about humans in more complex terms. All of this research is changing the story of human nature and opening up a whole new potential for understanding human societies and the role of the economy. Stories create the world in which we live. They are shared beliefs about the way the world works, why everything is the way it is, what humanity's role is, and what our shared goals should be. They are the mental maps by which we navigate the world around us. These shared narratives, worldviews and belief systems shape our values and influence our feelings and our actions. As a result, our collective stories have a profound effect on the conditions in which we all live. Stories are also the way we pass on our shared beliefs, values and social norms, through generations, and from one society to another. In essence, our shared stories are the blueprints for how we organize our communities, states, governments, businesses and organizations. Not only do they guide us in how to structure our communities and organizations, but they tell us why we should organize them in one way versus another. This is why any transition to a healthier economy must be rooted in a healthier collective story. 453 The for-profit story and way of seeing the world has become very destructive. The view of human nature as mostly greedy, individualistic, competitive and acquisitive has led us to build an economic system based on fear and scarcity. The profit motive and Homo economicus have wreaked havoc all over the globe. Luckily, very different stories have been emerging and re-emerging all over the world as more people realize that the for-profit story doesn't accurately explain their feelings, behavior and experiences and, worse yet, that it is harming collective wellbeing. These stories form an overarching narrative that paves the way for a profoundly different economy. The realization that the for-profit economic system is built on an outdated, incomplete narrative about what it is to be a human on this planet is creating space for a new story to flourish. The overarching new story is rooted in a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world; an understanding that everything is interconnected as part of a complex, dynamic planetary system. We call it the Story of Interconnectedness. Modern philosophers, scientists, researchers, religious leaders and artists have been exploring and trying to communicate a deeper understanding of the complexity of the world for millenia. Many believe that this more complex xxxvii worldview is the next big paradigm, which is starting to overtake the mechanistic worldview which has dominated for the last three centuries. 454 This new worldview begs us to go beyond seeing everything in black-and-white, binary terms. It's about moving from a mindset that sees the world as a machine, to seeing the world as an integrated, complex whole which is much more than the sum of its parts; a system that is self-organized; a system in which everything is interrelated and 'feedback loops' abound; a system that is constantly evolving in unpredictable ways because new patterns and trends are always emerging and interacting. Our complex planetary system is constantly evolving due to dynamic flows and relationships, and because of this constant change it cannot simply be managed or controlled. In fact, part of the reason this story is gaining popularity is because our efforts as a 'dominator' civilization trying to control and manage the complex systems of our world have failed. From our planet's ecosystems to our economic system, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the status quo approaches are failing both people and the planet. Renowned physicist Fritjof Capra has called this new worldview Ecological Consciousness. Environmental scientist Donella Meadows called it Systems Thinking. Philosopher Charles Eisenstein calls it the Story of Reunion. Philosopher Ken Wilber calls it the Integral Perspective.
However it is named, it is a story that is eager to dive into the depths and richness of complexity and the interconnectedness of all things on Earth. One of the assumptions on which the for-profit story is built is that evolution is based on the survival of the fittest. We're taught that the basic mechanism of biological evolution is ruthless competition and whoever survives gets to pass on their genes. This understanding of biological evolution emerged side-by-side with economic thinking in the 1700 and 1800s, and that explains to a large extent why our economic system is rooted in self-interest. However, in recent decades, biologists, sociologists, philosophers, and economists alike have increasingly questioned this story. And much research has proved that in most natural systems, competition happens within a greater framework of cooperation. Cooperation is particularly important for a hyper-social species like humans. 455 We can see this in today's global open-source movement. Open-source is a fundamentally different way of creating and designing technology, relying on the knowledge and skills of a large community instead of just a handful of specialists. The open-source community functions as a sort of 'gift economy', in which innovators contribute ideas, time and energy to the community freely and are rewarded by receiving feedback and help from community members. 456 If someone's contributions are deemed worthy, they will have a greater say in the decision-making process of designing a product or service, but work is largely done for the benefit of the community, not out of competitive, self-interest. 457 Open-source is an ethos of 'share and share alike'. It's based on the notion that we can maximize the potential benefit of our ideas by letting others use and build on them. In light of new findings, the for-profit story of a rational, self-interested, profit-maximizing Homo economicus is dissolving into a much more complex picture of human nature. The work of Professor of Economics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Joseph Henrich, and his colleagues has dispelled the myth of a static, rigid human nature. They have been looking into the WEIRD phenomenon, where most economic research and thus the bulk of economic and business policy is based on the assumption that everyone in the world behaves like WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Henrich and his colleagues argue that experiments about economic behavior and human nature have traditionally been conducted by researchers at rich, Western universities, where the subjects of the experiments are often the students at those universities. Henrich and his team took the same experiments (mostly games that engage people in economic-like choices) to populations all over the world, from communities in Siberia to small tribes in the Amazon. They found great diversity in the way people responded. Their robust cross-cultural research proves that there is no set human nature, but rather that human nature encompasses an extremely wide range of characteristics. 458 In addition to Henrich's exploration of economic behavior beyond WEIRD people, behavioral research tells us that our institutions and social environment play an extremely important role when it comes to which aspects of human nature we express in our actions. Extensive research in the field of behavioral economics tells us that humans are not the cold, calculating, rational actors that the for-profit story describes. 460 And a growing body of research shows that people are motivated more by purpose than profit. Dan Pink's analysis of research on motivation and work indicates that once we have enough money to not have to worry about meeting our basic needs, the majority of us are motivated by purpose, mastery and contributing to something larger than ourselves at work; not financial gain. 461 Economic analyst Jeremy Rifkin has gone so far as to suggest that Homo empathicus, the empathic human, is taking an ever larger role on the economic stage and Homo economicus, the Economic Man, is starting to bow out. 462 This new perspective of evolution and human nature allows us to acknowledge our interconnectedness. In addition to recognizing that human nature is much more complex than we had previously understood, we are simultaneously coming to understand that our planet is extremely complex as well and we are interconnected with all things on Earth. We are deeply embedded in our planet's ecosystems, so what happens to our ecosystems also happens to us. This understanding clearly indicates that we have a responsibility to ensure that human societies operate in ways that let ecosystems flourish; we have a duty to be ecological stewards. The story of interconnectedness reminds us that Earth is our one and only home. It is beautiful and full of wonder. We are not just objective observers of nature. We do not only participate in nature, we are part of nature. We must take care of the planet so that it is suitable for all of us, including other species and the future generations that will inherit it. We are not owners of this magnificent Earth, we are the care-takers. This story represents a planetary consciousness -an awareness that we all share this planet and so we must think of the planetary consequences of our actions. It is often said that this planetary consciousness began when the first astronauts went out to space and saw just how small and how isolated Earth really is. The astronauts brought back their photos, and people all over the world were shocked when it also occurred to them just how important it is for us to keep our unique little planet healthy. It was the first time that modern civilization comprehended in such a direct way the boundaries of our planet and that life on Earth is actually quite fragile, floating through an infinite amount of space that cannot support life. This is when the term 'Spaceship Earth' was coined. It was also around this time that former NASA scientist, John Lovelock, developed the Gaia Hypothesis, a theory that describes Earth as a self-regulating organism.
It's easy to see how this contrasts with the for-profit story, which is based on the notion that humans are so clever that we deserve to do with other species what we want and we can easily innovate our way out of any problem. The new story responds by saying that human beings are a very young species and we need to pay greater attention to the evolutionary scale of things, or risk extinction by hubris. Scientifically measurable phenomena like climate change and the sixth mass extinction are reinforcing this story, proving to more and more people that we're all in this together. The story of interconnectedness also manifests in very practical ways, like the rise of new policies. Mother Earth laws and ecocide laws, for instance, are aimed at making destruction or harm to ecosystems punishable by law, as a very serious criminal offense. Not only does this new legislation protect nature, but it is making more people aware of just how negative an impact we're having on the Earth, as well as the natural world's inherent rights to health and wellbeing. These frameworks are some of the first efforts to give nature a legal voice in the human economy and modern policy. The new story humbles us, as just one species of millions, and this humility allows us to learn from the intelligence of nature. One example of learning from nature is an approach to research and design, called 'biomimicry'. A whole new generation of designers, architects and engineers are modeling everything from household products to apartment buildings after organisms and ecosystems found in nature. It is a way of learning from the complexity and inherent wisdom of nature. A great example of biomimicry is a turbine designed in the shape of a shark's tails and fins in order to capture the power of tides for electricity generation. 463 This way of thinking has also lead to new approaches to economic activity, such as the 'circular economy' -designing the economy in a way that uses the waste of one process as the fuel for another process, like ecosystems do. A great example of the circular economy concept in action is the Baltic Biogas Bus project, which seeks to help cities in the Baltic region set up processing centers to convert municipal organic waste into biogas that they can then use as fuel for public transportation systems. 464 This helps cities deal with their organic waste in a more sustainable way, cut down on fossil fuel use, and provide healthier, more affordable public transportation to their citizens. These ideas are not as new as they may seem. They are grounded in timeless wisdom from ancient and indigenous cultures and are being re-born through lessons learned from modern, globalized civilization. One traditional example is Ubuntu, a philosophy of some southern African cultures, which refers to 'the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all of humanity.' 465 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Archbishop Desmond Tutu is dedicated to spreading Ubuntu around the world. He says, "You cannot be human on your own. You are human through relationship. You become human." 466 In fact, he says we are so interconnected that "whenever you de-humanize another, whether you like it or not, you yourself are dehumanized." 467 Another excellent example of this story is the concept of 'buen vivir' in Latin America. Buen vivir, directly translated to English, means 'good living', but the concept runs much deeper than that. Buen vivir is the Spanish translation of Sumak Kawsay, a phrase in the language of the native Quechua people of the Andes, which refers to 'living in harmony with ourselves, our communities and our natural environment'. These beliefs foster compassion and empathy. We are interconnected, so we must take care of each other and in order to do that, we need to understand how others feel. are 'soft-wired' for empathy. 468 We have 'mirror neurons' in our brains that make us feel the pain, joy, enthusiasm or disappointment of those around us. 469 This is an automatic, involuntary response that researchers believe has evolved in humans to allow for our very cooperation-based evolution. 470 Everything on Earth is interdependent, so what happens to one of us happens to us all, in a very real sense. Understanding our deep interconnectedness also means acknowledging that we're all affected by social issues like inequality. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's landmark book on the effects of inequality on public health, The Spirit Level, describes how levels of inequality are a major determining factor in whether a society thrives or not. Their data shows that even the richest people in highly unequal societies have lower levels of physical and mental health and encounter higher rates of social problems, like crime and violence, than the richest people in more equal societies xxxviii . 471 For instance, infant mortality rates among the rich are higher in unequal societies like the U.S., compared to more equal societies like Sweden. 472 This illustrates that if my community is not doing well, I'm not either, and vice versa. This idea is one that nearly all wisdom traditions embrace, and that more of us are coming to learn through our own experiences with modern consumerism. A growing number of people are living lifestyles that focus more on human connection and less on material accumulation xxxix -even some of the least likely people in the world. In 2007, Tom Shadyac, the director of many popular American comedy films, including Ace Ventura and Bruce Almighty, started making a documentary about something more existential, called I Am. The film takes viewers on two parallel journeys sparked by one life-changing event: Tom nearly died in a mountain biking accident. Facing his own death made him think about what really matters in life. The film tells the story of Tom's personal journey from a lifestyle of Hollywood glamour to one of material sufficiency.
Tom had achieved all the markers of success in modern society: fame, fortune, mansions, limousines, the nicest furnishings that money can buy, and he was sure that he would feel happiness beyond belief. But sitting in his mansion alone, he realized that rather than feeling overjoyed at all of his success and achievement, he felt a sense of emptiness. Realizing the living systems that we inhabit. This is why Tom's material success didn't make him happy: it only served to further separate him from others. The moral of Tom's story is that true wellbeing comes from the opposite of individual accumulation; true wellbeing comes from strengthening the community and sharing. This deeper understanding of human nature, motivation, and wellbeing, leads to a re-defining of prosperity and progress. Another documentary, Ancient Futures, tells this story by exploring how the Himalayan village of Ladakh has changed as outside influences have brought the culture of individualism, consumerism and materialism to it. The film shows how the community bonds that once kept everyone happy and healthy disintegrated when people started to believe they were poor and must compete in the modern economy to become richer. As a result, everyone in the community has become less happy, despite many individuals having more material wealth. Social ailments like homelessness, mistrust and crime emerged for the first time in this remote community. The film's director, Helena Norberg-Hodge, a Swedish researcher who experienced this transition in Ladakh first-hand over a period of twenty years, points out that this case study has a lot to tell us all about what development really is. Is development about having more material possessions, but at the cost of more homelessness and crime, and less trust in society? Is it about losing our sense of connection in order to produce more consumer goods and grow the GDP? As a result of the collective realization that the answer to these questions is 'no', different ways of measuring progress are being developed. On the national and global level, tools have emerged to help us measure wellbeing and true prosperity, rather than just the size of each country's economic output or income. Often described as Gross National Happiness metrics (as opposed to Gross National Product), these tools include the Human Development Index, Genuine Progress Indicator, Happy Planet Index, and the Social Progress Index xl . In 2011, the United Nations published the World Happiness Report, in which countries are ranked according to their wellbeing, across many different indicators. That same year, Canada developed the Canadian Index of Wellbeing. And in 2014, the United Kingdom launched its own national wellbeing statistics system. The story of interconnectedness tells us that progress is about having greater wellbeing and meeting our needs in healthy, balanced ways. Progress means increasing our quality of life, not the quantity of goods. This story redefines what it means to prosper and be well. It seems a lot of ancient wisdom is being revived by humanity's twentieth century journey of learning the hard way that money can't buy happiness. Highly-acclaimed author Malcolm Gadwell provides a thorough exploration of the ubiquity of what is known as the 'inverted U curve' in his book David and Goliath. He describes how, in most social phenomena, there is the tendency for more of a good thing to make us feel or do better, but only up to a point. After a certain point, more of that same thing actually makes us feel or do worse. So it's like an upside-down U. The curve goes up as we begin getting a bit of something we perceive as good, then, at a certain point, the line flattens out, once we've had enough of that good thing. After that, the line goes down when we start getting too much of a good thing. This is very easy to understand in terms of food. If we're starving, a bit of food can do a lot to improve our health, and more food will continue to do so until we have taken in sufficient nutrition. If we've eaten enough food, then more food actually starts to harm our health. This principle of enough applies to a whole host of things. For Gladwell, an interesting example is the effect of money on parenting. He cites research which found having too little money makes parenting difficult, because parents must spend so much time and effort just trying to put food on the table that it's difficult for them to find the time and energy to satisfy their children's other needs. Having more money can make parenting easier for a person with limited financial means. But after a certain income level, parenting actually starts to become more difficult again (Gladwell claims that the ideal income level is about $75,000 per year in the U.S.). This is because in higher income brackets, people often have so many business endeavors and social appointments that they don't have the time and energy to also satisfy their children's emotional needs. The art of living well is to find the happy medium. 473 This idea is aptly expressed in the old proverb, 'Everything in moderation'. You can have enough of a good thing. In Swedish, the idea is succinctly captured in one word -'lagom'which roughly translates to 'just the right amount'. In Chinese culture, 'xiaokang' is an ancient Confucian term that refers to a situation in which people live comfortably with modest means. The principle of enough has also been verified by longitudinal studies which have found that happiness is not correlated with higher income levels after a certain point. Known as the Easterlin Paradox, the phenomenon was discovered by economist Richard Easterlin in 1974. 474 Easterlin found that levels of self-reported happiness rise along with a country's income up to a point, after which there is no correlation between happiness levels and national income (Ref: Ibid). The Easterlin Paradox only seems paradoxical in the context of the for-profit story, which promises that more material wealth will always make you happier.
But Easterlin's findings make perfect sense in light of complexity and the story of interconnectedness. Happiness is more complex than just having more stuff. Easterlin's research is very closely related with important work that Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef did in the area of human needs in the 1990s. He conducted a ground-breaking, cross-cultural investigation into what people really need in order to thrive and be well. He sought to find out whether or not there are universal needs that all humans on the planet have, regardless of background, economic standing or culture. This contrasts greatly with the well-known hierarchy of needs that psychologist Abraham Maslow developed in the 1940s, which insinuates that high-income people have different needs than low-income people and that there is a linear progression up through different levels of needs. 475 Through his findings, Max-Neef identified nine universal human needs: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom. Max-Neef went on to create a very useful way of thinking about these needs and how we satisfy them. He envisioned our needs as a system, in which all needs are interdependent and interactive. For example, food and exercise are not really needs in themselves, but are better thought of as satisfiers of the needs for subsistence, participation, and leisure -they can satisfy many needs at once. Max-Neef categorized the ways in which we satisfy our needs into five different types: singular, synergistic, pseudo, inhibiting and violators. Singular satisfiers satisfy one need at a time. For example, eating a meal alone meets the need for subsistence. Synergistic satisfiers satisfy more than one need at a time. For example, a community cook-out might satisfy the needs for subsistence, participation and leisure. Pseudo-satisfiers give us the false sensation that they are satisfying our needs, when they really aren't. For example, drinking a caffeinated beverage might satisfy your thirst temporarily, but caffeine can actually contribute to dehydration. Inhibiting satisfiers, which actually inhibit meeting other needs, by oversatisfying one need. For example, watching television can satisfy your need for leisure, but it might actually keep you from meeting your need for creativity, understanding, identity, and participation. And violators, under the pretext of satisfying a need, actually make it harder to satisfy that need and often also violate our ability to meet other needs. For example, censorship, which is meant to meet our need for protection, actually violates our ability to meet the need for understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom, which in turn makes us feel unprotected. The optimal situation is obviously to meet most, if not all of our needs through synergistic satisfiers, and to avoid pseudo-satisfiers, inhibitors and violators. 476 Due to the tendency for market expansion in the name of maximizing profits, advertising in our current consumer-driven, growth-based economy, leads us to believe that most or all of our needs can and should be met through the market. This has led many of us to use pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers and violators on a regular basis (like buying stuff we don't need and can't afford via 'retail therapy') and unsurprisingly we are left feeling unsatisfied, which leads us to buy more stuff in a desparate effort to fulfill our needs. And so the work-watchshop treadmill goes on and on, in a vicious cycle. The story of interconnectedness tells us that not all needs can or should be met by buying goods and services. In fact, most of our needs can be better met outside of the market, by things that can't be paid for, like strong personal relationships, a sense of community, connection to nature, free time, self-reflection, and open spaces to explore. Initiatives like Transition Towns and the Slow Movement are helping people meet their needs through creating stronger communities and local networks of collaboration. Places such as community gardens and tool libraries enable us to connect with others in our community and share resources, meeting our needs outside of the market. The new story replaces the elusive Invisible Hand with a much more visible mechanism of social benefit. Rather than the vague idea that society will benefit as a result of everyone seeking to maximize their own immediate self-interest, society benefits from everybody trying to fulfill their needs in the healthiest, most synergistic ways possible. When people have a clearer understanding of wellbeing, universal needs and our deep interconnectedness, society benefits. Environmentalist Paul Hawken believes that we have entered an era of 'blessed unrest.' 477 The negative conditions of inequality and the destruction of our planet's biosphere have given way to a collective sense of frustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and an unrelenting urge for a deeper sense of purpose in work and life. A growing number of people feel a deep desire to align their actions with their visions of how the world could be; a more beautiful world. This feeling of unrest creates an openness to new ways of thinking and doing things. When people are no longer comfortable, change doesn't seem to be as difficult. This is why it's a blessed unrest; it is from this unease that great creativity, innovation and collaboration are springing forth, creating a whole new economy in the process. An increasing number of people are orienting their lives more towards meaning and purpose, away from money and materialism. Dan Pink has been tracking this trend for decades. He points out that the best selling non-fiction book in the U.S. for the first decade of the 21 st century was The Purpose-Driven Life, a book about how to live a life of greater purpose and meaning. He also points out that this parallels the trend of a growing number of people meditating and doing yoga in the U.S. in recent decades. Pink says, "We have been liberated by (financial) prosperity, but not fulfilled by it, and so you have this wide-spread democratization of the search for meaning, this wide-spread democratization of self-realization, self-actualization… It's unprecedented and it's not going away."
478 People all around the globe are making changes in their personal lifestyles in order to align with the values and story of interconnectedness 479 and one of the ways this impacts the economy is through more conscious consumption. Everyday people are increasingly thinking about the impact of their shopping patterns on ecosystems and people around the world. 480 The data clearly shows that we want to buy products from companies that have a low ecological footprint and don't use sweatshops or slave labor. For instance:

• 77% of U.K. consumers refuse to buy products or services from a distrusted company , while 91% choose to buy from trusted companies. 481 • 2/3 of UK adults believe it is unacceptable for shareholders to profit from running health services, children's homes, police services, and care homes for the elderly and disabled people. 482 • 81% of consumers worldwide believe that businesses have a responsibility to address social and environmental issues, 483 and 72% say business is failing at it. 484 • 2/3 of global consumers prefer to purchase products and services from businesses that 'give back to society' and 55% are willing to pay more for products and services from such companies (interestingly, this number grows to 63% or more in Latin America, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region). 485 • When consumers were asked to name the most important trait a company could have, the answer "kindness and empathy" rose by 391% between 2008 and 2012. 486 • Between 2005 and 2011, the brand attributes 'mysterious', 'confident', 'sensuous', 'trendy', and 'glamourous' became less important to consumers, while the attributes of 'kind', 'high quality', 'friendly', 'socially responsible', and 'leader' became more important. 487 The Millennial Generation xli is part of the driving force behind this transition. The Brookings Institution found that the Millennial Generation is composed of people "who collectively favor companies that embrace the values of good citizenship". In the U.S., Millennials vest overwhelming levels of trust and loyalty in companies that support solutions to social issues and are 89% more likely to buy from those companies. 488 Another study found that 75% of Millennials around the world are willing to pay more for sustainability-oriented products and services. 489 It is glaringly obvious that 21st century consumers are craving a whole new baseline for the businesses that provide their goods and services. Our needs, desires and expectations are also shifting when it comes to work. Decisions of what kind of work to do and for whom are moving in the direction of having more purpose, more self-direction, and more mastery. 490 This is especially evident in the Millennial Generation who are, more than previous generations, drawn to jobs that allow them to feel that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves, something positive for the larger community. 491 This makes sense because a large proportion of these young people have grown up painfully aware of the environmental, social and economic crises that the world faces, and often don't see any advantage in following the same sort of life path as their parents. A study by the Brookings Institution called 'How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street and Corporate America' found that sixty four percent of millennials would rather make $40,000 a year at a job they love than $100,000 a year at a job they think is boring. 492 Even very for-profit-minded magazines like Forbes and Fortune are catching onto this, with article titles like 'Millennials Work for Purpose, Not Paycheck' and '3 things Millennials want in a career (hint: it's not more money).' 493 And this is not just limited to American Millennials. A 2009 survey of 100,000 people in 34 countries all over the world found that 88% of respondents are more likely to want to work for a company that is considered ethically responsible. 494 The survey concluded that social responsibility is key to attracting top talent. In addition to the desire for more purposeful work, there is a growing interest in more democratic and decentralized workplaces. In general, workers flourish when they have more self-direction and they can participate in decision-making at the job. 495 As such, it seems that networks are to the twenty-first century, what hierarchy was to previous centuries. The Internet and digital technology like computers, tablets and smartphones have enabled people to work together in all kinds of new ways. This trend manifests in interlinked blogs, wikis, social media, creative commons licensing, online sharing networks, peer-to-peer lending, citizens' journalism, freely available videos and presentations, 'good news' magazines, and big data. Complementing the networks enabled by digital technology are physical spaces that allow people to do valuable work together, such as co-working spaces and makerspaces, where people who usually work alone can share a physical space as well as equipment. This enables them to share resources, cut costs and do their work in an environment that can help them develop their ideas and strategies through interactions with others. As self-organized, self-managed networks become more common, the whole economy starts to take a different shape. The business world has also been co-evolving with the changes in our shared story. For example, many mainstream companies have seen an advantage in moving into the 'ethical', 'social' and 'green' business spheres in response to more conscientious consumers and, in some cases, as a result of a generation of genuinely concerned business leaders. Today's global market includes a wide range of business responses. Some companies distribute a portion of profits to charities. Ben & Jerry's ice cream company donates 7.5% of pretax profits to its charitable foundation 496 and Clif Bar, a company that makes energy-dense snacks, is proud to tell its customers about its commitment to environmental and social causes and that it gives 1% of its revenue to. 497 There are also examples of companies that are legally registered as for-profit and have private owners, but they voluntarily give 100% of their profits to a sister charity or foundation.
Examples include the Belu bottled water company in the U.K., Quartiermeister beer brewery in Germany, and Dick Smith Foods in Australia. 498 This is part of a much larger trend in business leadership and investment. One global survey found 77% of business leaders agree that "the greatest innovations of the 21st century will be those that have helped to address human needs more than those that have created the most profit." 499 And investors increasingly see a connection between community wellbeing and corporate wellbeing, which is why social and sustainable investing has been on the rise since the mid-1990s. 500 The early 2000s saw the emergence of new triple bottom line business models designed to incorporate social responsibility and eco-friendliness into companies' missions. These include many social enterprises, social cooperatives, and community-oriented companies. Social cooperatives in Europe have a social mission and are limited in the percentage of profits that can be privately distributed (between 20% and 35%). 501 Similarly, community contribution companies in Canada, also known as C3 companies, have a 40% cap on distribution, 502  community interest companies limited by shares, in the United Kingdom, can privately distribute up to 30% of their profits. 503 Indeed, the business landscape is changing rapidly. Research in the early 2000s found that 1 in 3 of all businesses in development in the United Kingdom aimed to be social enterprises, 1 in 3 entrepreneurs had primarily social motives, and 1 in 3 MBA students xlii did not see profit as a top priority. 504 In 2011, almost 60% of all new higher education and training opportunities globally, concentrated on 'green careers.' 505 This phenomenon is truly international. A new focus on social entrepreneurship is taking hold in Asia, Africa and Latin America. 506 Business schools in India are increasingly incorporating social goals into the curriculum 507 and younger generations in China are entering the world of social enterprise at a growing rate because they believe that there should be innovative approaches to solving social problems and are eager to act on that belief. 508 Echoing Green, a global social enterprise incubator, reports that about one-third of the applications that it receives come from Africa; after the U.S. and India, the three top countries for applications are Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. 509 And social cooperatives in Latin America are helping more communities meet their needs for employment, social services and environmental protection. 510

Much of this is clearly driven by the younger generations' desire for more purposeful work and their urge to use business as a means of addressing global issues, however more than 12 million Americans aged 44-70 also want to start a business or nonprofit that has a positive social impact. 511 This shift includes the rise of certification schemes, as evidenced by the rapid emergence of schemes such as the Fairtrade certification for fairly traded products; the Marine Stewardship Council certification for sustainable seafood; the Forest Stewardship Council certification for sustainable wood and paper products; the plethora of national organic certifications for organic agriculture; and the myriad sustainable business certifications all over the world. The B Corporation is one of the most well-known certification schemes for socially-oriented forprofit businesses. There are currently over 1600 certified B Corps in 47 different countries 512 and this number has grown very quickly since 2011, when there were just 500. 513 More recently, new ways of measuring business success that relate even more directly to a company's social impact and ecological footprint have emerged, such as The Balance Sheet for the Common Good. This means of evaluating business goes well beyond a singular focus on profit and that's why it's been growing in popularity since it was first developed in 2011. 514  which assesses businesses across 17 indicators, including human dignity, cooperation and solidarity, ecological sustainability, social justice, and transparency. 515 Aligned with the ecological stewardship embedded in the story of interconnectedness, more businesses are organizing around zero waste principles and using cradle-to-cradle design and closed loop production, which helps them reuse as many resources as possible and avoid creating waste. 516 At eco-industrial parks, such as Kalundborg in Denmark, manufacturing plants, such as a pharmaceutical producer and a plasterboard manufacturer, use each others' waste as inputs to make new products. 517 A growing number of companies, including big names like The Dow Chemical Company and Ford, are also using life cycle analysis to understand and improve the environmental impact of their products. 518 Companies like Seventh Generation in the U.S., which sells a range of household products from disposable diapers to dishsoap, use the Iroquois Native American concept of planning for seven generations ahead to design their products. 519 A great number of businesses, including the major home improvement supply company B&Q in the U.K., use the concept of bioregionalism -which proposes that we meet most of our needs from local, renewable and waste resources -to guide their social and ecological efforts. 520 Similarly, the Global Footprint Network has helped businesses, investors, credit-rating agencies and risk analysts use the ecological footprint as a tool to measure environmental impact and risks. 521 In response to the increasing desire for purpose, participation and more equality, we are also witnessing the rapid emergence of cooperatives around the world. More than 1 billion people worldwide are members of cooperatives and it is estimated that the cooperative sector employs over 250 million people. 522 While the four countries with the most co-op members are the U.S., India, Japan and Iran, countries with smaller populations also have impressive numbers. 523 For instance, about 70% of Quebec's population is a co-op member. In New Zealand co-ops account for 95% of the dairy market, and in Denmark co-ops account for more than 35% of the consumer retail market. Co-ops generate 3% of Uruguay's GDP and 63% of Kenya's population derives its livelihood from cooperatives. 524 All over Africa, cooperatives are on the rise in finance, education, housing, and consumer retail, as well as cottage industries.
525 Ethiopia has 3,400 housing co-ops and Egypt has over 4,300 consumer co-ops. 526 Credit unions in the U.S. are currently growing at two times the rate of population growth. 527 There is also the resurgence of worker co-ops, which is perhaps the clearest way we see the business world changing in response to the growing desire for democracy and flexibility at the workplace. Mondragon in Spain has become known world-wide because it is such a successful worker co-op, inspiring many others to start their own worker-owned cooperative businesses. There's also a widespread a resurgence of support for local businesses. This is especially evident when it comes to food. The number of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms has also grown rapidly, especially in the U.S. CSAs are arrangements in which consumers buy fresh produce directly from local farmers, which has many different kinds of benefits for both the consumers and the farmers. The first two CSAs there appeared in 1986 and by 1990 the number had grown to about 90. It is estimated that today there are about 6,000, which means there's been exponential growth of nearly 25 percent annually since 1990. 528 Farmers' markets In the U.S. have also experienced a revival. Their numbers have increased five-fold since 1994. 529 All of these types of initiatives are collaborating and co-creating more often all the time, spreading their influence even further, for example the World Council of Credit Unions, the International Cooperative Alliance, and Fairmarket, an online marketplace created by worker co-operatives in the UK and Germany. 530

It would be a great underestimation to view these trends as just some small, temporary bubble of 'feel-good' business practices. Evidence shows that there's an increasing advantage for local, ethical, green and democratically-run businesses in the market. 531 As more people seek to lead eco-friendly, ethical, purpose-filled lifestyles, the companies that flourish will be those that are mindful of how they carry out their business. 532 In essence, businesses that can show that they treat their employees well, obtain their materials from ethical sources, and use their profits for social good will have stronger advantages. In the 1990s, as the ecological crises and global inequality started becoming clearer to people, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and socially responsible investing emerged to deal with concerns that traditional ways of doing business were not addressing. 533 These trends gained a lot of traction and many companies with CSR strategies outperformed their peers who were not participating in the CSR movement. 534 Today, social enterprises in the U.K. are outperforming regular businesses in terms of growth and impact. 535 During the 2009 economic crisis in the UK, social ventures increased by 50%, proving more successful than small business start-ups. 536 In Canada, co-ops are creating jobs at nearly five times the rate of the overall economy and are generating 11% more income for their employees. 537 Similarly, in India's dairy industry, research shows that cooperative members enjoy higher and more secure incomes than nonmembers. 538 And in Ethiopia, agricultural producer cooperatives have better incomes, more savings and reduced business costs, compared to non-cooperative producers. 539 In fact, it's been found that worker-owned co-ops are simply more productive than conventional companies. 540 In the global financial sector,, social banks, including microfinance, development banks, credit unions, consumer coops, mutual banks and B Corp banks, achieved a growth in net income of 15.7% between 2007 and 2012, while conventional banks suffered a net income decrease. 541 Sustained economic success isn't as simple as capturing market share, though. Attracting talented employees who add value to the company plays a key role. Studies have found that workplaces that provide a high level of engagement for employees have an important advantage in harnessing the talents and energy of their employees. 542 This gives most co-ops an automatic advantage. John Lewis Cooperative in the U.K. is an excellent example of a competitive worker co-op. It has an inter-equity model for salaries that ensures that the CEO will never make more than 70 times as much as the lowest paid employee. Each of the 76,500 permanent staff is a partner in the business. The business enjoys annual revenues of over £8.2 billion and its mission is to keep its employees happy. 543 This concern for employees is why worker co-ops are gaining popularity, and a competitive advantage, very quickly. 544 The increasing advantages of ethical, social, local, green and democratic businesses might indicate that we are in a time of transition between economic paradigms. Traditional for-profit business is no longer adequate and is causing more problems than it is resolving. Different business models are emerging as part of an effort to better meet the challenges and needs of society in the 21 st century. The rapid rise of participation in ethical business, green companies, social enterprise, and co-ops is a sign that consumers, workers, business leaders and policy-makers no longer see profiteering as the business world's only objective. Where is this evolution of business leading? We hypothesize that businesses that prioritize purpose over profit will increasingly outperform those that don't. Each step in this evolution is a step away from the for-profit ethic in business and a step towards the not-for-profit ethic. Each step is a step away from the profit-motive and a step towards the purpose-motive; a step away from maximizing private self-interest and a step towards maximizing collective wellbeing. For-profit companies embodying more of an NFP ethic are already outcompeting traditional companies 545 (Forbes magazine is even advising for-profits to operate more like NFPs 546 ). So it is not a very big stretch of the imagination to postulate that NFP enterprise, as a business model, might very well outperform other business models in this time of metamorphosis and usher in a not-for-profit economic era. We predict a shift in the primary business model of the economy from the for-profit firm to the NFP firm in the 21 st century.
We see this as the next natural step in the evolution of the economy that is occurring through market dynamics, based on social and cultural changes in response to changing economic and environmental conditions. We call this the Spiral of Business Evolution xliii . This idea suggests that different business models have been dominant at different points in history because they are deemed the most appropriate for meeting society's needs. But as society's needs and challenges change, they might become obsolete or even destructive. When this happens, they lose support and more relevant business models, which adapt the best aspects of the previous business models in order to more effectively meet the new needs, gain support. Business model preference rested with the for-profit firm up until the 2000s largely because capital-raising mattered so much in the pre-Internet era. Companies that held proprietary knowledge and were organized in hierarchical, centralized ways had the upper hand. It was an era in which externalizing social and environmental costs was either unknown or just accepted as a necessary evil; and where worker rights were commonly traded for the promise of a higher salary or financial returns in the future. But we live in a very different world now. Negative social and environmental impacts of business are becoming less and less tolerated. And the digital era has lowered the costs of starting up and running a business, allowing for new ways of offering goods and services, marketing them, and raising capital. In other words, the for-profit firm no longer has the upper hand. Up to now, most new business models, like social business, social enterprise and the community interest company, have placed little or no importance on distinguishing whether companies are for-profit or NFP. An increasing awareness of this important distinction is the next step; the next turn in the spiral. In addition to being socially responsible, environmentally-friendly, democratically-run and locally-based, another major advantage exists for a business to have in the twenty-first century market: being not-for-profit. It's easy to take for granted that the global economy will always revolve around for-profit business, as that's how it has been throughout our lifetime, and because NFP business is so nascent. But it's also important to remember that it has only been that way for about 200 years, which is not a long time in the larger scheme of things. The economy has never stopped evolving and now the crises of the for-profit, capitalist economy are birthing a new postcapitalist era. We are currently seeing signs that the NFP firm is starting to outperform the for-profit firm and many NFP enterprises already regularly out-compete for-profit counterparts. 547 The nonprofit sector in the U.S. has generated more employment and higher wages in recent years, while the for-profit sector has been shedding jobs and decreasing wages. 548 During the recession, from 2007-2009, NFP employment grew in 45 of 46 U.S. states, while for-profit employment declined in 45. 549 From 2000 to 2010, nonprofit revenue in the U.S. grew at a rate of 41% xliv , which more than doubled the growth of GDP during that same period. 550 At roughly the same time, the growth of nonprofits (including NFP businesses) greatly outpaced the growth of for-profit businesses, at 25% compared to 0.5%. 551 Globally, from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, the nonprofit sector's contribution to GDP grew at an average rate of nearly 6% per year. 552 In the 16 countries that have registered national accounts of their nonprofit sectors with the UN xlv , which are located in all regions of the world, the following was found:

• the nonprofit sector employs 7.4% of the workforce on average;

• in 6 of the countries, nonprofits account for 10% or more of the workforce;

• nonprofits account for 4.5% of GDP on average;

• the nonprofit sector is growing as a proportion of the global economy xlvi ; and

• fees and charges, not philanthropy are the major source of income for nonprofits. 553 In Kyrgyzstan, 85% of the nonprofit sector's income comes from fees for service and that number is 67% in New Zealand and 59% in Japan. 554 Importantly, employee compensation makes up a much higher percentage of nonprofits' GDP contribution compared to compensation in the for-profit sector. 555 This is part of how the nonprofit sector keeps the wealth circulation pump going: rather than a large percentage of an organization's revenue going to owners and investors who put most of it into the elite economy, the money goes to employees who are much more likely to spend it back into the real economy. The NFP advantage is even clearer when one looks at data about specific segments of the economy, such as community-owned businesses that are outperforming their peers. Community cooperative expert in the UK, Peter Couchman says "In a climate that has seen commercial village shops close at a rate of around 400 per year, and the stalling growth for the major retailers, community-owned shops are reporting not only an increase in sales, but are continuing to open in a challenging climate… Community-owned shops succeed where commercial ventures have failed because they engage with the whole community. When the owners are the customers, the business can directly respond to consumers' needs in a way that larger retailers just aren't able to." 556 In fact, a study of community-owned shops in the United Kingdom in 2011 found that they have a 95% survival rate, more than double the average business survival rate of 46.8% in the UK. 557 Credit unions in the U.S. provide another powerful example. A survey of the top ten banks (by total deposit size) and the top ten credit unions (by total membership) found that the credit unions outperform their for-profit counterparts in many different ways.
The credit unions scored significantly better than the for-profit banks in terms of offering: free checking accounts, discount student accounts, free or discounted senior checking accounts, free business checking accounts, saving rates above the inflation rate, free ATMs, and more ATM machines. 558 Studies show that credit unions are taking a bigger market share of mortgage and car loans, specifically. 559 And while trust levels in U.S. banks at the end of 2013 were at 35%, credit unions received trust ratings of 58%. 560 Perhaps that is why the Bank Transfer Day initiative has been able to persuade about 400,000 people in the U.S. to move their money from big banks to credit unions. 561 Of course, NFPs are outperforming their for-profit counterparts sooner and faster in some sectors than others. Because NFPs have greater advantages in social sectors, like education and healthcare, NFPs are expanding their market share in these sectors first. 562 For instance, they are taking up an ever-larger share of the market in health care, education, social assistance, arts and entertainment. 563 In the U.S., NFP hospitals are even more profitable than for-profit equivalents. 564 Not-for-profit leisure centers in the U.K. are significantly outperforming for-profit health and fitness chains. 565 And mutual and cooperative insurers have been significantly outperforming the rest of the market on the global stage since the financial crisis began. 566 However NFP enterprises are also emerging in more diverse industries, where they haven't traditionally had any market share, like manufacturing, software and natural resource management. This is because the NFP way of doing business actually has significant advantages in the market of the 21st century in terms of business ethics, finances, employment, and innovation xlvii . Not-for-profit companies all over the world are increasingly recognizing their advantageous position as NFPs. Take HealthPartners, the largest consumer-governed NFP healthcare provider in the U.S. In 2011, its revenue was just under $3.9 billion. At the White House Community Leaders Briefing, they touted the advantages of being NFP, saying, "Because of its non-profit status and cooperative roots, HealthPartners has a unique governance structure that allows it to re-invest in care and services that will improve members' health. The structure also helps to generate better ideas, and allows HealthPartners to be more agile than other organizations. Rather than answering to shareholders, HealthPartner's board is governed by members -meaning, for example, that during the recent economic downturn the organization could remain focused on high quality affordable health care and an exceptional experience, rather than profit margins. In fact, its goal is to maintain a two percent profit margin to cover reinvestment in facilities, programs and services. Most publicly traded organizations, in contrast, aim for profit margins of 15-20 percent." 567

Not-for-profit businesses are in an enviable position in the more ethical, eco-friendly, socially-responsible market place of the 21 st century. By law, they are mission-based and invest 100% of their profits back into their mission. Because of this, they are more likely to care about whether or not their supply chains are ethical, about their environmental impact, and about their employees' wellbeing. They are more likely to take into consideration the concerns of the local communities in which they operate and to give their employees the chance to express themselves. And they are not at all likely to sacrifice any of these concerns in the name of profit-maximization, like for-profit businesses are. For-profit companies that are trying to incorporate ethical business practices can easily drift from a social mission due to the pressure to maximize profits or generate financial value for owners and investors. It's not that for-profit companies can't do work that has a deeper purpose; rather it's that the profit motive often distracts them from that deeper purpose. NFPs don't have that built-in distraction. That's why, in many parts of the world, people tend to trust NFPs over for-profit organizational forms and the public generally has a high level of confidence in NFPs xlviii . 568 CBHS is an insurance fund in Australia that clearly sees its NFP status as an advantage in the market. On their website, they say, "In not-for-profit organisations, resources are geared toward goals other than the bottom line. In CBHS, the central goal is to service our members and improve members' satisfaction and offer greater benefits and thus value in the context of health insurance." 569 Similarly, Nationwide Insurance Company used its lack of private owners to appeal to customers in a 2013 commercial that featured the line, "Just another way we put members first, because we don't have shareholders." Marketers at that Fortune 500 not-for-profit company clearly believe that 'no shareholders' is a strong selling point xlix . Food Connect in Brisbane also recognizes this. Their website proudly proclaims:

"… All our profits go into doing more good. We differ from conventional, profit-driven businesses, in the following ways:

• we work to bring economic, social and environmental benefits to society In Japan, the Seiketsu Club Cooperative (a consumer co-op) also sees value in spending more in order to provide local organic produce, ethical products and recycling services. 572 They have also invested in measuring their environmental impact and conducting life-cycle assessments of their products and services, in order to learn how they can be more environmentally-friendly. 573 American consumer food cooperatives are outperforming for-profit grocery stores when it comes to a wide array of environmental and social indicators. They work with more local farmers and producers, carry three times as many locally-sourced products, donate more than three times as much income to charities, sell twenty-four times as many organic groceries, spend six percent more of their revenue on local wages and benefits, have significantly higher rates of recycling, and are more energy-efficient than their for-profit peers. 574 The German electronics company, Nager IT, provides another excellent example. They are in the business of trying to create ethical electronics; the electronics equivalent of fairtrade coffee.
In order to do this, they disclose their entire supply-chain on their website, 575 where you can see which parts of the supply-chain have passed their ethical standards and those that are still ethically problematic or unknown. As an NFP company that exists to create ethical products, it is natural for them to maintain this level of transparency, and their customers expect no less. With no mandate to maximize profit, they can focus on their mission. They even encourage people who look at their website not to buy the products if they're already happy with what they've got, as they don't want to promote unsustainable consumption. 576 Similarly, Eco-Home Centre, a home improvement supply store in Cardiff, says, "As a notfor-profit organisation there is less pressure on sales and more on providing great advice and getting you the correct product." 577 Not only is NFP business not fundamentally at odds with environmental concerns, but the NFP ethic also allows people to move on big issues like climate change with less skepticism of companies trying to make a quick buck. One of the reasons there are so many climate change deniers is because so many 'green ventures' and investors really have profited in a big way from carbon trading and carbon mitigation schemes while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Some of them had a positive impact, some did not. In any case, whenever private profit is involved, it's not long before suspicion of profiteering sets in. And for good reason: the profit motive is at the helm. Even for-profits with the best of intentions will face this scenario. Financially independent NFPs are much more able to avoid that suspicion, due to their explicit social mission, the fact that no one can privately profit from them, their high levels of accountability and transparency, and the fact that they're earning their own revenue -they're not just an extension of for-profit sponsors. Nebraska is the only state in the U.S. where all electricity is delivered by community-owned NFP institutions and so the residents of Nebraska have a direct say in their electricity infrastructure. A great number of NFP businesses in the retail sector are even based on repairing and refurbishing products, rather than selling new ones, in order to reuse materials and avoid waste. Pedal Revolution in San Francisco, for instance, is a full-service bicycle shop that reuses, repairs and refurbishes bikes, in addition to selling new ones. 579 The London Re-Use Network refurbishes and sells used furniture. 580 Goodwill Industries International employs people with disadvantages in the job market, to repair, refurbish and sell second-hand goods that are still in good working condition. 581 And there are lots of other NFP second-hand stores all over the world, keeping perfectly good products in circulation, saving people money and lowering demand for new products which require raw materials and energy-intensive manufacturing processes. Not to mention that a growing number of NFP enterprises, like Ocean Cleanup, have started up with the explicit mission of protecting and restoring the natural environment, precisely because the planet's ecosystems are deteriorating so fast. Of course, not all NFPs are perfectly ethical companies that help protect the environment. There's a big spectrum in the realm of 'not-for-profit'. However, an NFP is much more likely to act in alignment with higher ethical principles than an equivalent for-profit business, for the simple reason that they exist for a social purpose and nobody can financially gain from their activities. 582 Not-for-profit businesses have less pressure to prioritize quantity over quality, so the latter often prevails. A study of nursing homes in Minnesota revealed that NFP nursing homes do as well or better on quality measures than for-profit homes. According to resident surveys, notfor-profits had higher levels of food enjoyment, sense of safety, sense of adaptation to the living environment, general satisfaction and satisfaction with relationships than their forprofit counterparts. They also had lower levels of regulatory deficiency citations, and administration of antipsychotic drugs that were not prescribed. 583 There is a constant impetus with for-profits to try to maximize the quantity of patients and money coming in, even if that means sacrificing the quality of care. And, while for-profit businesses spend billions dollars on advertising to show how much they care about their customers, connecting with customers is often just part of fulfilling an NFP's mission. In addition to NFPs holding higher ethical standards for themselves, the public expects more ethical behavior from the NFP business community. In fact, we usually only trust NFPs and governmental agencies (which are also NFP) when it comes to the commons and public goods, because we don't trust the profit-motive to ensure basic public welfare. This is demonstrated every time there is uproar over the privatization of water. In the past decade, 180 cities and communities in 35 countries, including Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Paris, Accra, Berlin, La Paz, Maputo and Kuala Lumpur, have all 're-municipalized' their water systems after water privatization resulted in higher prices, environmental hazards and a lack of investment in infrastructure. 584 Not-for-profit entities are also often favored over for-profits by local government in the contracting process. This greater trust means that they can usually get more contracts, and contracts of longer duration than for-profit competitors. 585 For example, some research shows that in the UK, for-profit social enterprises have found it more difficult to gain public sector contracts and certain grant funding than their NFP peers. 586 Part of the reason governments favor NFPs over for-profits is because NFPs can often offer better prices, 587 but it's also due to an ethical alignment. It makes sense that citizens would be happier knowing that tax payer money won't go to lining the pockets of for-profit owners and investors. For-profit companies in social sectors are increasingly coming under fire, such as for-profit universities in the U.S that are benefitting from federal student funding.
On average, for-profit colleges in the U.S. receive 72% of their funding from federal programs, which means that public money is likely enriching the private owners of these universities. 588 An example of the trust issues involved with for-profits in education and public funds is the recent revelation involving the U.S. military. After the Department of Defense found that the for-profit University of Phoenix was using misleading advertising tactics, including the misuse of military symbols, it declared that it would no longer allow service members to use public defense funding to attend classes at the for-profit institution. This case shed light on the fact that the university, up to October 2015, had been receiving a larger portion of GI Bill money than any other college in the country, to the tune of $1.2 billion since 2009. 589 As of 2016, thousands of students have appealed to the U.S. government to forgive their federal student loans because they feel they have been defrauded by for-profit universities. 590 Not-for-profit universities in the U.S. do not get the same kind of bad press for using government funds because it's clear that there are no private owners to benefit from the money, and they have boards to hold them accountable for staying aligned with their mission. Many Americans are also angry about the Affordable Healthcare Act (also known as 'Obamacare') benefitting for-profit health insurance companies. It's easy to connect the dots: the private owners and investors of these for-profit businesses are profiting from government funds. Furthermore, it's been shown that NFP health insurance companies offer lower prices than for-profit counterparts in the U.S., 591  association and, as such, receives tax exemptions. And this is surely an obscene amount of money for anybody to make in one year, especially at a nonprofit, not least of all because we live in times of such extreme inequality. However, the critical piece of the story that was missing from most news coverage was that the NFL is not an NFP enterprise. The NFL is a professional association, supported and financed by the 32 football teams that make up the league, 31 of whom are for-profit companies l . It's the same with lobbying associations, which are usually nonprofits. Most lobbying associations are created solely to support the interests of for-profit companies. They are not enterprises that seek to be financially self-sufficient in order to achieve a social mission. Such lobbying and professional associations are more accurately seen as instruments of the for-profit world; appendages of the for-profit companies and industries they serve. They are the embodiment of the Nonprofit Enabler phenomenon. It would be impossible for such an obscene salary to be justified in an NFP enterprise. The NFL case clearly highlights the fact that NFPs are held to much higher standards in terms of having an ethic of enough, paying fair salaries, and being more transparent than their forprofit peers. That this even became a scandal, shocking millions of Americans, is precisely because the NFL is a nonprofit organization. If the NFL was a for-profit company, no one would have batted an eye. Commissioners and CEOs of big for-profit companies routinely make over $30 million per year. That's not shocking; rather it is something we've all gotten used to in the for-profit world, but it's not at all acceptable in the realm of NFPs. Many NFP managers see this increased scrutiny as a boon rather than a constraint. As Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva, an NFP online lending platform says, "People hold nonprofits to a high standard. They scrutinize how you spend every dollar. I'm glad because it makes us stronger." 593 There is even more confidence in democratically-managed NFPs, like credit unions, which are seen as more transparent than banks because they hold annual meetings that are open to all members. They also issue annual reports and post financial statements every month. 594 This kind of mission-driven, transparent business is just what conscious consumers are looking for. We want an economy with more integrity and NFP business is better designed to deliver it. NFP enterprises are in a better position than for-profit counterparts to fulfill our changing needs and desires not only as customers, but also as participants in the workforce. In the past, big for-profit companies were often seen as able to outperform smaller ones in part because they could hire the best talent, but with changes in what people are seeking from their work, NFPs are becoming competitive in terms of talent acquisition, due to a workforce increasingly driven by the purpose motive. A great example of this is the story of Doug Rauch, former president of the highly successful American grocery store chain, Trader Joe's. After leaving Trader Joe's, Rauch decided to start up the Daily Table, an NFP grocery store in a low-income neighborhood in Massachusetts. One of the most talented business managers in the U.S. went into NFP business, not because he could make more money that way, but because he had the desire to make a positive contribution to society. 595 And this is not an isolated incident. One study found that workers who voluntarily moved from the for-profit sector to the NFP sector in the U.S. reported higher job satisfaction, even when receiving lower pay. 596 Another study in 2015 found that 42 million workers in America see their work primarily as a source of personal fulfillment and as a way to help others. 597 It's no surprise that most of these purpose-driven people work in the NFP sector li . 598 Nor is it surprising that the study also found these purpose-driven workers have higher levels of wellbeing and are generally more reliable and effective at work than their peers. 599 This means there's a double advantage for NFPs: they more easily attract a growing number of purpose-driven workers, and the workers they attract are more likely to add value to the company.