So you can have non-capitalist corporations and you can have capitalism without corporations. The two are arguably separate. So corporate capitalism is a particular kind of capitalism and the capitalist corporation is a particular kind of corporation.
R.K.: Are there specific countries that you can think of that have done the best job at minimizing the psychopathic aspects of corporations?
J.B.: I mean, I visited Norway on several occasions to talk about my work with Norwegians and the mentality there tends to be a lot different than it is in North America around these issues and they have much more robust regulatory norms. That would be true in Denmark as well, used to be true in Sweden. It's probably less true than it is now. I mean, so yeah, you can look at different countries, France and see differences in terms of the degree to which states are involved in trying to protect public interests through constraining what corporations can do. In a globalized environment, it's becoming increasingly difficult for states to do that and that's one of the challenges that we're facing politically is how do we continue to regulate corporations when they're operating on a trans-national basis.
R.K.: Well you bring up globalized. How about globalization. Is that a further level, a new level of psychopathic corporate monster really? Because globalization aims to serve the biggest corporations primarily.
J.B.: I mean, I think what globalization does when you have sort of international trade deals, you have the possibility of companies based in America supplying their labor in Indonesia, shopping the globe, scouring the globe for the cheapest labor at the lowest environmental standards. That creates the notorious "battle to the least" where those jurisdictions with the lowest standards for labor protections, human rights, environment will get the investment which then puts pressure on countries like the US in the developed world to lower their standards to get back that. So, yes, unquestionably globalization has done that. Now, does globalization have to do that? No.
We have a particular kind of globalization that is geared towards the interest of capital and of corporations. Globalization doesn't have to unfold in that way. We could still have international trade, cooperation, concerns about labor, human rights, and the environment on a globalized scale, pursue globalized conventions to deal with ocean pollution- you know, we can still have globalization, but we could have globalization that is geared more towards public interests than corporate interests.
So we pursued a particular kind of globalization. I think it's really important to keep that in mind. I mean, Joseph Stiglitz, an economist has written on this extensively, but globalization is not the problem. It's how we have created our globalized economy.
R.K.: Alright. Last question. There's a book that was written over thirty years ago, Small is Beautiful by Schumacher. Are you familiar with it?
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