Capitalism with a conscience
Re The candid capitalist, Dec. 17 McKinsey and Co. are a bad influence because they are all about money.
First, it is preposterous for them to suggest that Canada should eventually settle 600,000 immigrants annually. This is just going to drive inflation, wealth inequality and environmental destruction. Are there no limits to growth?
Second, we all know that when we mix private and public money, the risks get socialized and the profits get privatized. Think SkyDome!
Third, consulting companies like McKinsey operate on the premise that people respond to incentives. This implies that employees are not intrinsically motivated to do a good job and that they need to be incentivized by extrinsic financial bonuses. This is pure demoralizing cynicism that leads to acrimony when employees compete with each other for limited resources.
Fourth, most people who make it in business are heartless. Are we supposed to believe that firms like McKinsey & Co. have a social conscience? For them, it’s an afterthought.
In the final analysis, consulting companies will not save the world. As the great journalist Chris Hedges notes, only real love saves people and makes the world better. Tobi Baumhard, King City No doubt Dominic Barton is a smart, ethical, kind and family-conscious man. He brings a wealth of life experience and a richness of professional acumen to any table.
But the tables he sits at are all in boardrooms. His firm, McKinsey & Co., has successfully perpetuated the profit ethic for big-money corporations the world over. McKinsey, however, has never made or created anything.
Sandro Contenta’s piece describes a thoughtful man who asks thoughtful questions but offers limited solutions that are all inside the capitalist box.
The root ecological, financial and social issue that the world is so grimly steeped in at the moment is the self-perpetuating generation and concentration of wealth in ever-fewer grasping hands.
Barton speaks with credible humanism but what he does keeps the game on that hugely skewed field. Peter Currier, Peterborough Dominic Barton claims that our capitalist system is sick and the evidence seems to prove him correct. Could he or any other expert in the field explain just how the system works?
Why is it always a strain to find enough money to feed and house the poor, sustain our health system, educate our kids, maintain our infrastructure, protect our environment and a myriad of other society-benefitting projects while billions are available to conquer space, build various devices to kill each other on both an individual and massive scale, entertain ourselves with blockbuster movies and countless video devices and squander our resources in so many ways? Tom Sullivan, Toronto
“(Barton is) a thoughtful man who asks thoughtful questions but offers limited solutions.” PETER CURRIER PETERBOROUGH