Transforming Economics Into True Wealth

 

November 2012

 The statement on TRANSFORMING ECONOMIES INTO TRUE WEALTH is an invitation to fully engage in the planetary whole-system shift now under way.  Many SRI investment professionals recognize our human responsibility for the many breakdowns in our societies and enfolding ecosystems resulting from our limited consciousness: climate change, hunger, poverty, conflicts, financial crises and ecological destruction. These systemic breakdowns are accelerating due to global interconnectedness and now driving the breakthroughs worldwide occurring below the radar of the mainstream mass media. The 193 country members of the United Nations have recognized human interdependence and that no nation acting alone can solve these global systemic crises.  Thus, they have pooled their sovereignty, however imperfectly, seeking solutions through treaties, agreements, protocols, institutions and agencies to promote the common good for all life on planet Earth.  Likewise, many public, private and civic sector organizations, professional and academic groups are also coalescing to take broader responsibility.

Full statement and see signatories

Transforming Finance 4.0, November 2012
TRANSFORMING ECONOMIES INTO TRUE WEALTH
Invitation To Fully Engage In The Planetary Whole-System Shift Now Under Way
We undersigned investment professionals recognize our human responsibility for the many breakdowns in our societies and enfolding ecosystems resulting from our limited consciousness: climate change, hunger, poverty, conflicts, financial crises and ecological destruction. These systemic breakdowns are accelerating due to global interconnectedness and now driving the breakthroughs worldwide occurring below the radar of the mainstream mass media. The 193 country members of the United Nations have recognized human interdependence and that no nation acting alone can solve these global systemic crises.  Thus, they have pooled their sovereignty, however imperfectly,seeking solutions through treaties, agreements, protocols, institutions and agencies to promote the common good and all life on planet Earth.  Likewise, many public, private and civic sector organizations, professional and academic groups are also coalescing to take broader responsibility.
We humans are leaving the 300-year fossil-fueled Industrial Era based on digging resources from the Earth and are now looking up to our Mother Star, the Sun, increasingly harvesting its daily photon shower just as plants have learned to do – providing sustenance for all species in our biosphere.
Finance has lost its way, strayed from its stewardship role, and become a global casino, a bubble exacerbating many global problems. We, along with so many friends, have addressed reforming financial markets and have been investing in many creative activities and successful models.  Deeper collaboration and broader engagement are now needed at all political levels, from global to local, to better coordinate our efforts to build equitable societies based on Life’s Principles and the successful evolution of Earth’s 30 million species over 3.8 billion years.
Our socially responsible, ethical, ESG, triple bottom line, impact investment communities have long championed innovative investment practices to support well-governed businesses and communitieswith positive social and environmental outcomes. Our industry has led the way in directing resources toward solutions-based socio-economies. After more than twenty-five years of growth and success inour investment industry, social inequality and environmental degradation have reached unsustainable levels, and underlying economies are still:

•Unsustainable: They over-consume and degrade the resources upon which their long-term prosperity depends.

•Unfair: They multiply financial advantages to those already advantaged at the expense of those most in need.

•Unstable: They lack resilience in a time of growing volatility and rapid social, political, technological and ecological change.

•Undemocratic: They operate with inadequate democratic controls and accountability on the part of their most powerful organizations – corporations, financial institutions and governments.

The health of our industry is ultimately conditioned upon the health of our planet and its peoples. Toensure that there will be economies worth investing in, we call on our colleagues to support cross-sector efforts to transform our failing political economic system. Specifically, we ask for greater support for the following key system changes that can accelerate the transition to a political economy that sustains people and the planet.

1.Restoring trust and integrity to currencies and monetary systems.

2.Transforming the global financial services industry from extractive to creative of community health and wealth by:

 •Supporting a financial transaction tax, as approved or implemented in many countries.

 •Protecting the commons and public infrastructure from privatization.

3.Building a new financial system that includes, but is not limited to:

 •Restoring a public banking system.

 •Directing investments to undercapitalized communities through Community Development Financial Institutions and microfinance.

 •Creating the enabling conditions to support flourishing local living economies.

 •Investing democratically through crowdfunding.

 •Continuing to involve mainstream financial institutions which demonstrably share our goals, values and ethics.

4.Restoring democracy and our collective capacity to regulate, tax and invest in public priorities by limiting money in politics, amending “corporate  personhood” and the “money isspeech” doctrine, and promoting public financing of elections.

We celebrate the growth and success of our industry, but the time for a narrow focus oncompetitively developing the market for our own products, brands and services is past. We honor and acknowledge those of us already engaged in system change.  Let us challenge ourselves to go further and exercise ethical leadership by engaging our energy and resources in collaborative networking to manifest the integrated system change we all believe will lead to a more positive future for all life on this planet.
Co-conveners and Initial Co-signers, November 2012
Co-conveners:
Hazel Henderson, president, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil)
Susan Davis, president, Capital Missions Company (USA and Ecuador)
Co-signers
Mariana Bozesan, Ph.D., president & founder, AQAL Investing, Munich, Germany
Katherine Collins, founder and CEO, Honeybee Capital, Boston, MA
Leslie Danziger, Co-founder and former Chairman of Solaria Corporation; Co-founder and former Chairman/CEO of Lightpath Technologies, TX, USA
Mary Houghton, co-founder, Shorebank, Chicago, IL
Alan F. Kay, founder, AutEx and Public Interest Polling, St. Augustine, FL
Kathleen Paylor, Chief Spiritual Officer, Conscious Capital, San Francisco, CA
Helen Rake, principal, Collins Capital Management, Jacksonville, FL
Rosalinda Sanquiche, executive director, Ethical Markets Media, St. Augustine, FL
Sarah Stranahan, New Economy Network, New York, NY
Stuart Valentine, CenterPoint Investment Management, Fairfield, IA
Michaela Walsh, founder, Women’s World Banking, New York, NY
Gregory Wendt, CFP, Stakeholders Capital; founder, Green Economy Think Tank, Santa Monica, CA

Additional signatories
Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation
Terry Link, Starting Now, LLC
Monika Mitchell Founder/CEO Good Business New York
John Rogers, Value for People, Germany
Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD, Evolution Biologist, Futurist, Professor, Speaker, Consultant
Stephen Viederman, Board, Network for Sustainable Financial Markets

The Third Millennium Economy (3ME)

• 3ME
• Armon Rezai
• Ashok Khosla
• Bill Rees
• Frank Ackerman
• Gus Speth
• John Fullerton
• Juliet Schor
• Limits to Growth
• Maja Gopel
• Maria Fischer-Kowalski
• New Economy
• Paul Raskin
• Peter Brown
• Peter Victor
• Robert Constanza
• Sigrid Stagl
• Throughput
• Tim Jackson
• Triple Bottom Line

Third Millennium Economy

Click here to download the paper.

Economics, Finance, Governance, and Ethics for the Anthropocene

We are pleased to present this working paper of the Third Millennium Economy Project: Economics, Finance, Governance, and Ethics for the Anthropocene. Released in advance of the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, the paper is an effort to build consenus around an alternative to the green economy thinking pervasive in the global negotiations around our ecological crises. The authors of the report make the case for a new economics, finance, governance, and ethics that are grounded in a respect for all life and based on the findings of modern planetary science.

Also, importantly, the report is intended to be a living document and only the first step in a process that brings together scholars from around the world to engage in assessing our current situation and envisioning the path to a flourishing future for life on Earth. We want to hear your thoughts. (Submit all comments to Peter Brown at 3ME@capitalinstitute.org.)

The Third Millennium Economy Project:

The Third Millennium Economy project is an initiative of the Capital Lab. It is intended to construct a roadmap of where we are and where we need to get to in order to transition to a truly sustainable economic system. Unlike many conversations about sustainable economics, this initiative is grounded in the scientific understanding of the world's leading ecologists about the planetary boundaries that a sustainable economy needs to respect. Capital Institute is honored to be a contributor to and sponsor of this important work.

A profound cognitive transition is taking place as we come to grips with the implications of the ecological boundaries of our finite planet. We must shift from the reductionist world view of the Enlightenment to a new systemic world view that understands reality as complex, interdependent systems in which the whole cannot be understood as the sum of the parts. The implications for the human economy, its institutions, the financial system that fuels it, our systems of governance, and indeed our sense of what it means to live a good life are all on the table for examination.

The Third Millennium Economy Steering Committee includes: Peter Brown, Graciela Chichilnisky, John Fullerton, Tim Jackson, William Rees, Juliet Schor, Gus Speth, and Peter Victor.

This project is funded by generous grant from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation

 

 

 

 

 

Some comment by Hazel Henderson

 

Hazel Henderson

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Great to read this draft and see so many of our Canadian friends riding to the rescue !
I remember while I was a full time science policy wonk in Washington ( NSF , OTA and Nat. Academy of engineering from 1974-1980 ) I was able to bring the great reports of Canada's Science Council, particularly those on The Conserver Society to the attention of members of the US Congress .
Today, sadly the US is still struggling to overcome the defunct ideologies of economics and the theory-induced blindness promoted by the Chicago School. My later work with the Canadian National Roundtable on the Economy and Environment enabled me to present our Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators there in Toronto in 2000,( the first systems approach to measuring national " progress' beyond macroeconomics , using the now familiar web-based " dashboard " with multi-disciplinary indicators unbundled for public understanding). I am currently on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing , which might be mentioned, as it is a far more rigorous approach than the rash of fashionable but culturally-biased" happiness " approaches . So I still worry that trying to adapt macroeconomic modelling to the whole systems transition we are undergoing, will continue to be a waste of time and money.
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The chapter by John Fullerton on Finance is welcome , since economics has managed to ignore the role of finance for too long. I would like more discussion of the fatal flaws of compound interest , which I discussed in my Politics of the Solar Age ( 1981, 1986) as a dangerous mathematical abstraction counter to the Second Law of Thermodynamics , with hugely -destructive effects on ecosystems, beyond the issue of discount rates. Also, the issue of the politics of money-creation and credit allocation as the flywheel of the inequality and ecological devastation today needs to be covered. Nor did I find any solid policy proposals already gaining traction, , e.g. financial transaction taxes , such as we of the WorldShift Council proposed to the G-20 in Mexico June 19th. However , I'm happy John has taken up this reform , as well as that of public banking ( see the Public Banking Institute on whose advisory Board I serve www.publicbankinginstitute.org ). I also hope you can add a reference to the Ethical Markets- Capital Institute Statement crafted here in 2010 on TRANSFORMING FINANCE , and join me, John, Graciela Chichilnisky and all the other global experts who joined us in signing it at www.transformingfinance.net
Other issues , such as the proposals for countries to use Chapter 9 for declaring bankruptcy , and other reforms of the international agencies , the UN , the IFIs which I discussed in my Beyond Globalization ,
( 1999) and offered by many others since then , including those of my erstwhile currency trader friend T. Ross Jackson ( another Canadian ! ) in his OCCUPY WORLD STREET ( 2012) , to which I wrote the Foreword , might also be referenced .
And references to the work of Kenneth Boulding , Nicholas Georgescu -Roegen , Barbara Ward and E.F. Schumacher , all my dear departed friends , as well as Joan Robinson , who won the debate of the Two Cambridges by pointing out that those at Harvard could not define " capital " ! This would be a nice gesture acknowledging that we all stand on the shoulders of these earlier pioneers