The Profiteers
How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An exposé of how society pays for corporations' "free lunch" and the cost of environmental damage, low wages, systemic discrimination, and cheap goods.
In an age when business leaders solemnly profess dedication to principles of environmental and social justice, Christopher Marquis’s provocative investigation into the real costs of doing business reveals the way that leaders of the corporate world gaslight to evade responsibilities by privatizing profits and socializing costs. “Who pays?” for the resulting climate and environmental damage, racism, low wages, and cheap goods: the average citizen and the taxpayer.
By bringing to light ideas that today are on the fringe but rapidly making their way into the mainstream, Marquis outlines a new regenerative paradigm for business in society. He tells of a group of pioneers trying to not just reform but transform the way business is conducted all over the world. By taking novel actions to reimagine business operations in responsible ways, minimize their negative impacts, and create new ways for business to properly absorb their hidden costs, these leaders provide blueprints to move the needle on vexing social and environmental issues.
What’s in it for leaders of the corporate world? The model of reform presented provides clear guidance on how to get ahead of the curve as an emerging economic order is formed. No business can lead from the front if it is morally-backward looking. History has shown time and again that those who get out in front of emerging changes in our social and environmental landscape protect themselves from inevitable eclipse.
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Big business is "exploiting the public commons while convincing us that repair is our individual responsibility," according to this impassioned exposé. Marquis (Mao and Markets), a professor at the Cambridge University Judge School of Business, points out that Amazon relies on public roads to deliver its packages, yet paid only 6% in federal corporate income taxes in 2021 despite record profits. Walmart, in turn, pays some employees so poorly that they qualify for food stamps, shifting the responsibility for supporting workers to government benefit systems. Examining how businesses shirk blame for environmental pollution, Marquis contends that plastic recycling allows companies to continue manufacturing wasteful single-use items while placing the onus for proper disposal on consumers, even though most plastic labeled as recyclable can't be reused and gets sent from recycling facilities to landfills. Marquis enrages readers with his accounts of corporate chicanery, but he injects some hope by highlighting individuals and organizations working to change flawed economic incentives. For instance, he discusses how in 2020 entrepreneur Eric Ries launched the Long-Term Stock Exchange, which seeks to curb the reckless pursuit of short-term profits by requiring listed companies to "measure success in years and decades." The result is a galvanizing call to rein in corporate malfeasance.
