When less than 5 percent of the world’s population live in the United States and consume more than 25 percent of the world’s resources, while roughly half the world is either starving or on the verge of starvation — the only way you can define that system is as a failure.
It’s not a model that we can sell to Africa or Latin America or India. It’s not something we want to pass onto our children. And an awful lot of business people are beginning to understand this. Those young MBA students who are going to be running our companies in the future years are waking up to these facts.
We’re moving into a time when people are really getting the point that we have to be sustainable, that that has to be the driving force. And sustainability includes social justice.
So we can’t be sustainable if people in the world are starving and being exploited. That’s not working. It seeds the roots of turmoil, even terrorism, and it creates tremendous problems for our children. We’re now finally beginning to understand these new facts of life, and our young people are waking up the fastest.
And corporate executives who understand these new trends and steer their companies in directions that recognize that they are not just about making profits regardless of the social and environmental costs will thrive.
[Excerpts of an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man]
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