When government fails, 'business has to step up'

Businesses like to devote part of their marketing and public relations budget to promote how they are  giving back to society. We are not just about profits, they try to say. And the message is arguably true, not just propaganda, as far as it goes.

Fink, from BlackRock.com

But we are starting to hear a different kind of message from business people, and it goes like this:

"Around the world, frustration with years of stagnant wages, the effect of technology on jobs, and uncertainty about the future have fueled popular anger, nationalism, and xenophobia. In response, some of the world’s leading democracies have descended into wrenching political dysfunction, which has exacerbated, rather than quelled, this public frustration. Trust in multilateralism and official institutions is crumbling." -- Larry Fink,
(emphasis mine)

Business people will have to fill the gap left by polarized and paralyzed national governments: this is the message of Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest mutual fund company. Businesses have to show that they have a higher purpose than just making money. And, by the way, it's in your own interest to do so, he says. BlackRock has used its position as a major shareholder of some companies to push for more socially conscious policies.

(More coverage of Fink's letter was in Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters, among others.)

What money can't buy in media

Money talks. Put your money where your mouth is. Show me the money.

We have lots of expressions that equate money with crebility and trust. How people get and spend their money is often the most credible expression of what they value and who they are.

We attribute so much value to money and to the way it expresses our true beliefs that historian Yuval Noah Harari declared in his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:

 "Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised."

By extension, this belief in money as the best measure of value of everything in modern society -- the loss of a loved one (insurance payouts), the salary of a teacher or a CEO, a barrel of oil -- has led us to trust markets too much.

In fact, many studies have shown that the media marketplace puts great value in misinformation, disinformation, sensationalism, gossip, and entertainment (Pew, Reuters Institute, Science Advances), as measured by revenue and profits generated from advertising. This is how social networks like Facebook and Instagram make their money.

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In putting so much faith in the Invisible Hand of markets, we have devalued the importance of ethics, credibility, trust, and community. (Among my other holiday reading on the topic were a recent column by David Brooks, Jeffrey D. Sachs's The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity and Joseph E. Stiglitz's The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe.)