3 comments

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  Dan Graham

  1 year ago

  I think you make a good point about sustainability and the difficulty for business leaders when they are stuck between the duty to shareholders and the personal desire to work toward sustainability.
  
  Certainly government regulation is one way of approaching the issue, but I wonder if maybe there's also hope through businesses who have the money and the market presence to create a value out of sustainability for customers.
  
  So, perhaps today it is more profitable to make a widget without regard to sustainability, but if a company like Google, who doesn't sell widgets, can use their market presence and influence to instill the value of sustainability in the purchasers of widgets, then the competitive advantage of widget making might change for the better.
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  Matt

  1 year ago

  This post was long, but i believe that i have to disagree with the block, "The world is getting phenomenally richer – but the costs of that wealth seem to be endemic poverty for vast swathes of the world’s population, the poisoning of the water we drink, the pollution of the air we breathe, and the fraying of the social and cultural fabric that binds us together."
  
  I do not believe this is the case. Beside the, i believe, unique case of climate change, the world would have an essentially constant amount of these negative elements regardless of technology if one takes into account the consistent increase of population density worldwide, and the consistent increase of communication
  
  i.e. the world is more televised, and history was written by the people who didn't catch cholera from their well...
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  blakeborgeson

  1 year ago

  @Dan, thanks, and I think your suggestion for another way of moving sustainability forward is definitely a good one.
  
  If pressed, I'd probably lump Google's backing of those sustainable widgets partially into the philanthropy/morality view of business sustainability, and partially into Google looking out for its own long-term interests, as part of what makes it Google in consumers' minds is taking a lead on sustainability issues.
  
  @Matt, yeah, I don't agree with that first quote exactly as Umair worded it either, which I didn't talk much about. Rather than wealth generation necessarily having all those bad things listed as a by-product, I think the issue is more that certain costs are not being allocated correctly, allowing businesses to sometimes profit from something like loopholes, profiting while contributing negative long term value.
  
  I think you're very right about communication increasing the SENSE that there's a lot wrong with the world. And yeah, from the studies I've read about, it sounds like we're actually making pretty incredible progress on a lot of the big problems in the world. Enough so that it's tempting to say that all economic growth definitely increases living standards for everyone across the board--but that's where I think you'll make a mistake unless you look closely: I think there are still loopholes we need to work on closing up.
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