A Moral Blueprint For Reimagining Capitalism: Manish Bhardwaj (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of social entrepreneur Manish Bhardwaj’s talk titled “A Moral Blueprint For Reimagining Capitalism” at TED 2022 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Folks, in 2022, we know capitalism has a problem. The system that undergirds much of our way of life in the West is exacerbating injustice and inequality. We know that women still get paid less than men. This is 2022.

And the share of the bottom half of the world’s population and wealth is just two percent. We know that the playing field is not level. And yet, even as we are awash in new ideas and thinking and approaches, technologies and gadgets, we somehow do not seem to know how to address the fundamental problems at the heart of it all.

Now I can’t claim to have all the answers, but today I want to talk to you about a tool that can help us design more just systems. And that tool is moral clarity.

Moral Clarity

Now, moral clarity is not an ideology. It’s not righteousness. Moral clarity is doing the right thing because it is right and not from fear of sanction or an expectation of reward. It is clarity of the demands that we are allowed to make of others.

It is to never confuse what we ought to do with what we can do. No one ought to starve. No one ought to be discriminated against. No one ought to profit from suffering. These are not personal preferences. These are moral imperatives that most people believe in, whatever their politics or culture.

And this is what gives us the basis to build more just organizations, communities and, ultimately, a more just world. So, folks, how do we do it? First, if we want justice, let’s use the language of justice, the language of right and wrong.

Stakeholder Capitalism

Take stakeholder capitalism, this notion that a company is responsible to all its stakeholders and to the environment, and not just its shareholders. How well has it done? Well, we have data that shows that as a group, companies that subscribe to stakeholder capitalism did no better supporting their employees in the pandemic than companies that made no such pledge.

Why? It’s not because stakeholder capitalism is a charade or its ends are not noble or its metrics broken or incentives misaligned. It’s because we have been selling stakeholder capitalism as a way to reduce risk and ensure long-term growth and profits.

Take, for instance: Why should a workplace be diverse? And this is what I hear all the time: “So it better reflects our customers, allowing us to build better products, so we can improve retention, so we can increase innovation and profit.” Alright. But what if you already have record-setting profits?

What if your products are already all the rage? What [about] when there are far easier alternatives to increasing profits than the difficult work of organizational change? What then? What then will motivate us to stay the course?

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Call to Action

So, folks, I need you. Let’s come together and set the narrative straight. Here, let’s say this loud and clear.

We want every workplace to affirm women, minorities and every group that is underrepresented, not in expectation of more innovation or profit or retention, but because it is the right thing to do. It is the just thing to do, because that is what we ought to do.

Now, I’m not minimizing the difficulty of organizational change. I run an organization. I understand the competing demands and priorities. Reconciling what we ought to do with what we can do is necessarily imperfect. Moral clarity is not moral perfection. It is moral alertness.

I’m also not minimizing or saying that innovation or better products or retention are not worthy goals. My point is, let’s start making space in our organizations for moral language and clear moral arguments.

The Problem of Outsourcing

There was a time in America when you could start as a custodian or in the mail room and rise through the ranks, even to the top job. Now that doesn’t happen anymore. We have outsourced those jobs.

We have turned them into gig work. And the problem is not just the low wages or poor benefits or the unpredictable working hours. The problem is we know nothing, nothing about the lives of so many who make our own possible.

We don’t know that the worker in our cafeteria is sleeping in her car so she can work three jobs to send her kids to college. We don’t know that the worker in our warehouse has uncontrolled diabetes, even though he has health insurance. But he doesn’t have the time to manage this chronic condition.

Folks, how can we be just if these indignities are hidden from us, if they don’t show up in our accounting? How can lives matter, truly matter to us, if you only read about them? If you don’t encounter them? If you don’t share in their humanity? So, it shouldn’t take a hot labor market for us to invest in our entry-level employees. And let’s not stop at tuition subsidies and training.

Accompaniment

Let’s do the harder work of mentoring those who do not show up on our organizational charts. Let’s understand their aspirations and connect them to opportunities, even if those are outside our firms. Next. Let’s get rid of the idea that a smart app or gadget or technology or business model will fix injustice. It will not!

Justice requires accompaniment, staying by a person’s side until right is done. I started a nonprofit that provides health care to the rural poor in India, and we realized very early on that we could have all the therapeutics and health care workers and facilities, but we would not transform outcomes until we accompanied literally our patients.

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So, in our maternal and neonatal health program, expectant mothers have us on speed dial. They call us as soon as they go into labor, and we stay beside them, literally, till they make it to the delivery room in time.

Why?

Because the barriers are too numerous to predict. Flooded roads, an unwilling patriarch, a labor nurse who will not assist a woman of another caste. And that is why we journey to distant cities if we have to, and we find a neonatal ICU and stay by the side of an anxious mother and her newborn until they are both well. And that is how we have cut mortality rates in half in our program when everyone around us told us that it was impossible.

Accompaniment in Education

Accompaniment is not just about health care. In the United States, low-income students drop out of community colleges at record rates because of the barriers they face. They may not have the fare for public transport to attend classes.

They may not have the child care to make it to a job interview. They may be struggling with homelessness or hunger. Now, financial assistance is crucial, and we need more of it.

But it will not by itself transform outcomes. What we also need are seasoned advisors who can accompany our students, who can help them pick majors and classes, teach them study techniques, provide career counseling and help them juggle home, work and college. And now we have rigorous evidence that these accompaniment-centered interventions that address a whole array of barriers can double graduation rates.

This is from the City University of New York’s ASAP initiative. Accompaniment is not just for nonprofits. As we try to reimagine and reconfigure work and inclusion in the wake of the pandemic, accompaniment is that principled approach that can get us there.

Moral Clarity in Education

Now, for all of these ideas to take root and endure, we need to make moral clarity foundational to our educational system. A recent college poll showed that graduating college students consider working for social change less likely than they did as freshmen. Our students spend all their time becoming skilled specialists.

They accrue credentials for everything, everything except for the difficult work of making the world just. I teach a course, Entrepreneurship for the Idealist, at Princeton University, which trains students in moral clarity so they can go out and make the world just.

We can teach our students the language of right and wrong and give them the courage to use it. We can teach them the nature of injustice so they have a fighting chance at dismantling it. And we can train them in accompaniment. We don’t expect families to train humanists or scientists or engineers. So let’s stop making moral clarity the sole responsibility of families or of religion.

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Doing the Hardest Thing

Now, some of you may be thinking that all of this is too hard. That this is unrealistic. And I can understand that. I’ve been doing this a long time. Let’s stop worrying about being realistic.

Last year, folks, we invested 621 billion dollars globally in startups, in dreams, in visions, in visions of worlds transformed by new technologies, in visions of planets colonized and of alternate universes. Now, many of those dreams will fail. Many of those dreams will take decades to materialize. But will we flinch? No, we’ll double down. Such is our faith in those visions.

Folks, if we are trying to do something truly hard, I want us to come together to do the hardest thing there is: envision and then build a just world. Not a prosperous world. Not a frictionless world.

Not a resilient world, but a just world.

Conclusion

Now in our time, the call to do the right thing because it is right, because it is just, evokes a certain wistfulness. It has that quality of a once-beloved melody whose notes now elude us.

We are worried that if we sing the tune, it’s going to land just a bit flat in our time. And the reason is the foundational myth of our political and economic systems that people will do only that which is advantageous to them.

So while we never shun our idealism, it’s a stubborn thing we learn early on to wear it lightly. Folks, let’s stop selling ourselves short. We are capable of being small, but we are not small beings. We help strangers whom we know we will never see again. We grieve. We grieve for strangers who are oceans away.

In the expectation of what reward are Polish mothers leaving their strollers on train stations so Ukrainian mothers fleeing, dispossessed and broken, will find some respite? Yes, we are driven by incentives. But we are also driven by love, mercy, kindness, justice, solidarity.

Folks, I have an abiding faith in our idealism, in mine and in yours. And here’s why. Our pursuits may be different, our politics may be different, our motivations will always be many. But our deepest longing has always been the same: to find our humanity, to fathom that magnificent vastness within each of us. Thank you.