{"id":34972,"date":"2018-10-31T14:37:22","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T09:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=34972"},"modified":"2018-10-31T14:37:22","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T09:07:22","slug":"turn-the-economic-ship-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/turn-the-economic-ship-around\/","title":{"rendered":"Turn the economic ship around:\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/todays-paper\/tp-opinion\/turn-the-economic-ship-around\/article19749529.ece\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Turn the economic ship around<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b> Brief Overview of the article<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The article talks about the problems faced by humanity in the form of poverty, unemployment and inequality and the failure of the current economic system to find a solution to them.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The article puts forward the idea of a new economic system known as <\/span>\u2018social business\u2019<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to achieve a more just and equitable society. The idea is invented by Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>The problems<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Low-income people in the world&#8217;s richest nations suffer from the same problems the poor faced in poorer nations:<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">lack of institutional services<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">health care<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">inadequate education<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">substandard housing, and so forth.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Failure of the current economic system to tackle these problems; Crisis of Capitalism<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The present period of unparalleled prosperity has failed to solve the crisis of billions who suffer from poverty, hunger and disease.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The establishment of the MDGs led to significant progress on several fronts in the battle against poverty, however it fell short of achieving the desired goals.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The year 2008 will go down in history as the year of a rude awakening about the gross weaknesses in our capitalist system.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was the year of the food price crisis, the oil price crisis, the financial crisis, and the ever-worsening environmental crisis.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The continuing high food prices have created tremendous pressure in the lives of poor people, for whom basic food can consume as much as two-thirds of their income.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The central problem with capitalism as it is now practised is that the system recognises only one goal \u2014 the selfish pursuit of individual profit.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>What is social business?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Social business was defined by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Social business is a cause-driven business.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In a social business, the investors\/owners can gradually recoup the money invested, but cannot take any dividend beyond that point.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Purpose of the investment is purely to achieve one or more social objectives through the operation of the company, no personal gain is desired by the investors.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The impact<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">of the business on people or environment, rather the amount of profit made in a given period measures the success of social business.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Economics of Social business<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Millions of people around the world are eager to pursue social goals, including the elimination of poverty, unemployment, and environmental degradation.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All three can be dramatically reduced if we simply begin designing businesses with these goals in mind. And that is where social business plays a crucial role.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Social business offers advantages that are available neither to profit-maximising companies nor to traditional charities.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The freedom from profit pressures and from the demands of profit-seeking investors helps make social businesses viable even in circumstances where current capitalist markets fail.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And because a social business is designed to generate revenues and thereby become self-sustaining, it is free from the need to constantly attract new streams of donor funding.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thus, the economics of social business can be simple and sustainable.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s time to apply the potential of social business to solving the problems of inequality, unemployment and environmental decay.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Conclusion<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We owe it to future generations to begin moving towards a world of three zeros: zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions. A new economic system in which social business plays an essential role can enable us to achieve this goal.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Turn the economic ship around:\u00a0 Brief Overview of the article The article talks about the problems faced by humanity in the form of poverty, unemployment and inequality and the failure of the current economic system to find a solution to them. The article puts forward the idea of a new economic system known as \u2018social&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/turn-the-economic-ship-around\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Turn the economic ship around:\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704817215},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}