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#Timesup: People and Planet Must Matter as Much as Profit
I went to business school in the late 90’s. Many of the titans of modern business did. We learned a lot about supply and demand, market shares, and competition. Not so much about environmental degradation, stewardship, or fair wages. Many of our case studies involved companies who had moved production overseas to lands of cheap and/or free labor, or to countries who had lax environmental laws, and how such brilliant business decisions improved their ROI and shares. Rarely did we discuss the economies left behind. Why should we? The costs of closing up shop and leaving a town aren’t factored into the equation. Those costs are carried by the taxpayers, paying taxes being something savvy business owners have lobbyists make sure they can avoid.
Recently, my son and I traveled to upstate New York, along the Hudson River, to visit colleges. As we made our way from Albany to Burlington, VT, he noticed the dilapidated state of the towns. Homes boarded up, main streets empty, streetlights broken, a single gas station where all the action occurred. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen poverty, but it was the first time he’d seen economic abandonment. It terrified him.
What do I mean by economic abandonment? These were once steel and lumber towns, thriving places where the middle class owned homes, nice cars, and built churches…
