It is widely accepted that the traditional neoliberal capitalist model is dying. It doesn’t have long to live.
It’s not that it’s failed, it’s just no longer fit for purpose in our new age. The rise of the information technology age has swept away traditional supply/demand models as the incremental cost of supply has fallen close to zero. We often now measure commodities supplied in a semi-Marxist fashion, that of value being equated to the effort to produce them, and not using a scarcity model.
The last recession underlined the inability of western society to fund growth through debt and together with the rise of fiat currencies, we now see much of the wealth of the world is imaginary and mostly unsustainable.
The challenges for governments then is to re-invent themselves in a world not dependent on growth. One that supports the population through social support & enterprise and better manages (aka break-up) private monopolies that often see the market and people as a resource to harvest.
At the individual level, avoiding extreme consumerism, removing the reliance on debt, being environmentally aware and accepting higher taxation is key to longer-term survival in a world that is on the brink of financial, population, and environmental collapse.
For organisations such as ours, it’s very much about providing a transition to this new economy, throwing away concepts of information ownership and collaboration via sharing. Moreover, it means reducing the resource burden on our people, clients, and suppliers.
We have already moved a long way towards the goal, folks don’t work more than 25hrs a week, we pay over-market rate (and promptly), and everything we do is open-sourced and can be freely shared and copied by anyone. We have also adopted a tax-fair regime and don’t use loopholes to avoid our tax burden. Finally, we are 99% carbon neutral, so our environmental footprint is tiny and sustainable for a hundred years or more.
