Completing Capitalism

Book excerpt: Two leading economists present a new model for sustainable capitalism based on the economics of mutuality. For decades, leaders in the business world have believed that their sole responsibility is to maximize profit for shareholders. But this obsessive focus was a major cause of the abuses that nearly sunk the global economy in 2008. While books like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century have exposed the shortcomings of financial capitalism, Completing Capitalism goes further by describing a well-developed, field-tested alternative. In this analytically rigorous and eminently practical book, Bruno Roche and Jay Jakub offer a more complete form of capitalism, one that delivers superior financial performance precisely because it mobilizes and generates human, social, and natural capital along with financial capital. Offering practical, real-world illustrations, Roche and Jakub describe how their model has been implemented in live business pilots in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.