Just Imagine: a law that stipulates you must drive as fast as you can at all times? Every journey to work must take a little less time that the day before. Your performance is posted on a notice board and compared with the times and speeds of all your colleagues. Shame on you if you start to slip behind. Jeremy Clarkson, no doubt, would be in his seventh heaven but the roads would become a worse nightmare than they are now. Anyone who has driven in Corsica or Crete will have an idea of what I mean!
And yet this is precisely how the corporate world is run. Companies have a legal obligation to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders. It is the primary focus of the board of directors. Each year a company must make more profit than the year before or it will be slated by the analysts and punished by the stock market. More, more, more.
Not only does this lead to narrow, short term thinking it is completely at odds with the way our planet works. We have finite resources and the only way one group of people can go on earning more and more is if others have less and less. I appreciate that this idea is not new - "Limits to Growth" and "Small is Beautiful" made precisely this point over 30 years old. But we just don't want to hear. We have our system and it works well for us. And now it has started working well for China and India too. But has it? There are more people in absolute poverty in India than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Some people are getting very rich while the majority get poorer.
It is not just the corporate world that operates by this paradigm, counties, too, must see their GDP increase year on year. But where does all this growth come from? Even a climate change skeptic cannot deny that the commodities which drive our economies are finite. We can argue about when we shall run out of water, land, oil, uranium and so on, but not if. I am sure that technology can go a long way to solving our problems but we need something more.
As a Christian I am interested in what the Bible has to say about the situation in which we find ourselves. There is no shortage of clear guidance from both old and new testament. In Leviticus we are given the concept of Jubilee, a time of release, forgiveness and a pause for breath. Throughout the Prophets, time and time again, the rich and powerful are chastised for their greed and disregard of the poor. When it comes to the New Testament, where do I start? From the Sermon on the Mount to the final conflict in Jerusalem, Jesus is clear that our need will be met, but enough for today is enough.
Because I am a media person I am always interested in the "box like' way our media deals with issues. An excellent environmental story explaining how some vital part of our ecosystem is under dire threat from human activity is followed by another equally well crafted story about the economy or business. But all the implications of the first item are completely ignored in the second where the presenter slips back into the same old assumptions about growth and pushing ever onwards in the quest for more profit. Never a question to the CEO of a FTSE 100 company about why they want more profit than last year. We never hear the question "how much profit is enough profit?"
In fact the very concept of enough profit is a nonsense to the corporate world. There was once a Mexican immigrant who managed to get a job in a gas station in a small town in California. He was a hard worker and the customers liked him and over the years he managed to put enough money by to purchase a franchise to run the station. His family worked with him and they all became much loved in the local community, returning a net profit of 10% each year to the oil company. This is the kind of story that warms the heart of freedom-loving capitalists. But the story doesn't end there. One day someone at corporate Headquarters realized that if they sold the garage and turned it into apartments they could achieve a return of 12% pa - 2% more than they were getting. The local community rallied around and huge protests were mounted, but all to no avail. The garage was pulled down and the family lost their livelihood - all for the sake of squeezing a little more profit out of a useful, viable business.
How much is enough? It's a question we all need to ask ourselves, whether a banker on a huge salary or a low paid worker wanting to earn more. It was Albert Einstein who said “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.” We need a complete rethink about where we are headed and we need it now.