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Poverty and the Politics of Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2020

R. Edward Freeman
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Extract

1 Here’s a way to think about poverty. People who live in poverty do so because they have few opportunities to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In fact the gap between rich and poor has increased in recent times due to the more wholesale adoption of capitalist practices around the world. The institutions of business and government conspire to give the poor a Hobson’s choice of minimal wage McJobs or unemployment. Neglect of both urban ghettoes and the rural poor has been systematic, if not conscious. The very idea of capitalism reinforces the notion that some are meant to be poor and some are meant to be rich. Such a system must be overridden at times by government to help the poor cope with their lot. The only solution is a massive redistribution of income and a system of capitalism that is severely restrained. All of this is at best highly unlikely. Even if there were such a redistribution policy we could not count on government to execute it fairly.

Type
Section I
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue S1: The Ruffin Series Special Issue No.1 , 1998 , pp. 31 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Business Ethics Quarterly 1998

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References

Endnotes

1 The style is shamelessly borrowed from Richard Rorty's essay “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

2 I have tried to give a more careful analysis of this phenomenon of the role of ethics in capitalism in “The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions,” Business Ethics Quarterly. Volume 4 Number 4, pp. 409-421.

3 Cornell West, Race Matters (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993).

4 For more information on SEMCO see Semler, Ricardo, “Managing Without Managers,” Harvard Business Review, Volume 89, Number 5, 1989, pp. 76–84Google Scholar; and, Semler, Ricardo, “Why My Former Employees Still Work for Me,” Harvard Business Review, Volume 94, Number 1, 1994, pp. 61–72Google Scholar. For a version of these principles as applied in the United States see “Jack Stack (A) and (B)” a case study published by the Business Enterprise Trust, available from Harvard Business School.

5 I have tried to work out pieces of this new story in a number of places. See Freeman, R. Edward and Gilbert, Daniel R. Jr., Corporate Strategy and the Search for Ethics (Prentice Hall, 1988)Google Scholar; Freeman, and Liedtka, Jeanne, “Stakeholder Capitalism and the Value Chain,” European Management Journal, (1997), Vol 15, No. 3, 286–296CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freeman, , “The Politics of Stakeholder Theory,” Business Ethics Quarterly, (1996) Vol. 4 No. 4Google Scholar; and Freeman, “Understanding Stakeholder Capitalism,” Financial Times, July 26, 1996.

6 I have tried to understand some of the complexities here in an essay, “The Business Sucks Story,” The Darden School Working Papers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.