Will the 2020’s be a decade of rage? - Alec Ross

Oct 1, 2021

Ep 367 - Will the 2020s be a decade of rage?

Guest: Alec Ross

 

Are we on the cusp of a paradigm shift? “Hopefully,'' says Alec Ross. “If we don’t, the 2020s and beyond may well be known as the decade of rage.” The source of that rage is a symmetrical distribution of wealth to the rich and the rest of us.  In his book, “The Raging 2020s,” Ross points out that “over the past 30 years, the top 1 percent have grown $21 trillion richer while the bottom 50 percent have grown $900 billion poorer, and the middle class has stagnated.”

 

The source of this inequality, says Ross, is rooted in a philosophy espoused by Milton Friedman – that being “shareholder capitalism” versus “stakeholder capitalism.” According to Friedman, any company that was not maximizing profits was poorly managed. That philosophy led to wave after wave of assault on legislators in the US to loosen laws that hampered unrestricted corporate growth. 

 

As Ross points out, “Shareholder primacy melded perfectly with the Reagan and Thatcher eras, providing an intellectual cornerstone for deregulation and trickle down economics” – an economic approach that was crystallized in a line from the movie Wall Street, where the character Gordon Gekko says, “Greed is good.”

 

Fast forward to today and the power and influence of multinational corporations goes beyond the power of the state to control them. Ross says that “the social contract has been broken” and that greed is not good – in fact, it has taken us to the brink of rage.

 

We invited Alec Ross to join us for a Conversation That Matters about rewriting the social contract between business, governments and we, the people.

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