I’ll use ‘ethical’ here as a shorthand for ‘serve the public interest’ even if that is not exactly what ethical normally means. One approach is to work on two related sub problems:
1. How to make more companies more ethical
2. How to make the more ethical companies have more influence on politicians.
It’s not obvious how to make headway with either sub problem. Journalism about ethical companies might help. It would require something of a shift in journalism from the attention-grabbing kind to the exploring-explaining kind. Publicity about ethical companies could encourage more companies to be more ethical. That journalism could change in this way is not entirely folorn hope.
For ethical companies to have more influence politically, they need to be financially successful and generating significant numbers of jobs. Ethical and financially successful seem almost contradictory. Aligning those is a sub goal that could be explored more in its own right. Good places to start would be to look at education and at health care, and look to see what forces pull them away from either being ethical or being financially successful. Some work done in Africa by educational and health charities on very low budgets show how big leaps in service quality can be made economically. Perhaps some innovations there can be translated back to first world economies, and do good more profitably than the incumbents.
The political disconnect (or misconnect) is a huge problem. The situation has a tremendous amount of inertia to it, because making politics more ethical entails many changes throughout society. It’s not as it seems. One can’t simply make politics more ethical and then see society change for the better. It’s almost the other way round.
I’ll use ‘ethical’ here as a shorthand for ‘serve the public interest’ even if that is not exactly what ethical normally means. One approach is to work on two related sub problems:
1. How to make more companies more ethical
2. How to make the more ethical companies have more influence on politicians.
It’s not obvious how to make headway with either sub problem. Journalism about ethical companies might help. It would require something of a shift in journalism from the attention-grabbing kind to the exploring-explaining kind. Publicity about ethical companies could encourage more companies to be more ethical. That journalism could change in this way is not entirely folorn hope.
For ethical companies to have more influence politically, they need to be financially successful and generating significant numbers of jobs. Ethical and financially successful seem almost contradictory. Aligning those is a sub goal that could be explored more in its own right. Good places to start would be to look at education and at health care, and look to see what forces pull them away from either being ethical or being financially successful. Some work done in Africa by educational and health charities on very low budgets show how big leaps in service quality can be made economically. Perhaps some innovations there can be translated back to first world economies, and do good more profitably than the incumbents.
The political disconnect (or misconnect) is a huge problem. The situation has a tremendous amount of inertia to it, because making politics more ethical entails many changes throughout society. It’s not as it seems. One can’t simply make politics more ethical and then see society change for the better. It’s almost the other way round.