"Reimagining Capitalism" by Rebecca Henderson is an eye-opening book that outlines very clearly defined steps that would force corporations to take more social

"Reimagining Capitalism" by Rebecca Henderson is an eye-opening book that outlines very clearly defined steps that would force corporations to take more social responsibility. Here's my take on the book: Capitalism at its best works wonderfully, but the checks and balances that are needed for capitalism to work for the good of society are broken. Most countries across the world do not have a truly free press or even semi-functional democracy. We're hurtling towards a climate disaster, with no signs of slowing down, as well as facing massive global inequality. Corporations are succeeding at present, but the single-minded focus on pleasing shareholders above all else is not sustainable and _will_ come back to hurt everyone, not least corporations. It's a classic case of the prisoner's dilemma - each corporation individually does better by ignoring societal damage, but if all of them do so, the whole system will eventually collapse - whether due to climate disaster, a collapse of buying power from impoverished masses, or a global pandemic. Henderson argues that "only the relentless pressure of the free market can drive the kind of transformative innovation at scale [that we require]". The solution is to first fix democracy - get money out of politics, and fix the voting system. A representative government can agree on common goals and implement polices that harness the free market to work towards these agreed goals - eg. a carbon tax. Henderson also puts hope in "collective action" - corporations working together voluntarily, towards common stated goals. I'm a little sceptical of this last part. Azeem Azhar (Exponential View) did a great interview with Henderson - https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/reimagining-capitalism-for-a-broken-world https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/reimagining-capitalism-for-a...