Accountable: How we Can Save Capitalism, Warren Valdmanis and Michael O’Leary, reviewed

Review of Accountable, How we Can Save Capitalism by Warren Valdmanis and Michael O’Leary. Available from Penguin Business UK here. 

Capitalism is failing, and the tools we are relying on to fix it – corporate social responsibility, divestment, impact investing and government control – are only making things worse.

Chevron boasts about the $50 million per year it spends on renewable energy whilst it spends 200 times that on oil exploration
Goldman Sachs touts its 10,000 Women initiative, but its board ranks 358th out of the Fortune 500 for gender diversity and women earn 55 percent less than men do on average  
By focusing on corporations rather than people, we’ve put our faith in empty trends and brand-focused window dressing. Why should those responsible for our current crisis be trusted to fix it?   

In Accountable, authors Michael O’Leary and Warren Valdmanis offer a blueprint for everyone to take responsibility for using their economic power as consumers, as investors, as employees and as voters to trigger a fundamental shift away from an economy that is unethical, unfair and destructive to our environment and institutions. 

Their investigation cuts through the tired dogma of current economic thinking to reveal a hopeful truth: if we can make our corporations accountable to a deeper purpose, we can make capitalism both prosperous and good.   

Accountable How we Can Save Capitalism Warren Valdmanis Michael O’Leary, reviewed

As you may have noticed there are more and more books looking at these issues and attempting to accurately capture what the issue is and to try and articulate what possible solutions there may be. The authors have a solid grasp of the material and cover issues well and clearly. We have read other books where the reader tends to get lost in a haze of economic jargon, thankfully this is not the case with this book.

At the same time they are clear cognisant of the fact that this is a complex and challenging problem, and one that needs to be adressed as soon as possible. The chapter on the attempted divestments of college endowment funds, like Harvard and Yale in particular, clearly illustrate both how hard it can be to get these entities to engage. Even then it can be hard to get completely satisfying or effective results. Similarly the analysis of impact investment is well worth reading as it explains that the jury is perhaps still out on the effectiveness of these strategies. We hope that it works, but results have not always been as expected, and often with unexpected outcomes.

These two topics in particular help to illustrate that this is a good book and is well worth reading, even if there is not yet a completely obvious road map towards what ‘good’ could and should look like if we are going to be able to turn around the impacts of climate change before the effects are irreversible.

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