EL Problema del Capitalismo

EL problema del Capitalismo : LOS CAPITALISTAS

Un título que da en el clavo a los cuestionamientos que actualmente se efectúan al modelo económico que gobierna el mundo, es cierto que es el que en lineas generales ha demostrado algún grado de de estabilidad económica a los países que la aplican, pero lastimosamente todo cuento de hadas tiene que terminar, hemos visto la ultima crisis mundial iniciada en USA el 2008, donde el principal detonante de esto fue la falta de ética, moral y principios profesionales de las personas que guían la economía mundial tanto en instituciones reguladoras del estado como los gigantes privados con sus gerentes de papel. 

Debido a esto John Paul Rollert profesor de ética en los negocios de Harvard, publica un post que debe ser la guía de los proximos lideres que deseen apostar por una economía capitalista, John Roller lo dice sin pelos en la lengua, el problema del campitalismo son los capitalistas que manejan el sistema, pero no desde un punto de vista socialista con el viejo cuento del imperialismo, sino con un análisis ético del problema. Un análisis para tomarlo en serio, porque sino sera el fin del modelo Capitalista y es lo que esta pasando en el mundo, muchos países están girando hacia la izquierda nuevamente, pero no a la izquierda maoísta, marxista de Hugo Chavez, sino a un nueva Izquierda, por decirlo metafóricamente la Izquierda Azul en busca de valores y respeto hacia la ciudadanía que el actual Capitalismo se ha encargado de irrespetar. Aquí un jalón de orejas a todos los MBA y postgrados en administración y carreras universitarias similares que están formando gente que solo sabe maximizar la función económica de utilidad sin importar muertos y heridos que dejen en el camino por lograr su objetivo. El artículo se cuestiona cual es la función del líder capitalista para con sus stakeholders, que responsabilidades trae consigo las externalidades que estos producen al manejar tal cantidad de recursos. 

Como ejemplo del capitalista que hoy necesitamos esta el empresario gatronómico peruano Gastón Acurio, del cual se ha escrito mucho sobre su cualidad del rey midas de la gastronomía, pero muy aparte del tema gastronómico y sus negocios lo que me parece digno de analizar en otro post es las características de nuevo líder que ha asumido, tiene real conciencia de las externalidades que el produce en la sociedad peruana y en vez de ser un capitalista acumulador de dinero y ocultarse en su burbuja de millones de dolares ha tomado otra dirección, digno de publicarlo como guía para los expertos en business y liderazgo en USA.

Adjunto Articulo del Capitalismo:

The Problem with Capitalism? Capitalists. (Harvard Business Review)

John Paul Rollert 

2:44 PM Wednesday September 22, 2010 

Two years after the financial crisis began, the business community and the broader public are still wrestling with two fundamental questions about capitalism that should help to orient and shape how we think about business ethics. Last week, I discussed the first of these questions: How much faith should we have in capitalism? This week, I want to discuss the second: How much faith we should have in capitalists?

William F. Buckley, Jr., an iconic figure for American conservatives, said that he occasionally felt the need to cite Austrian ex-communist Willi Schlamm, who said, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists." The adage, for Buckley, was a friendly warning to champions of capitalism. He quoted it both to signal his own faith in the fundamental strengths of the free market system and to chide those capitalists whose behavior gave it a bad name.

Buckley did not live long enough to see the financial crisis unfold, but I suspect he would have felt compelled to quote Schlamm at several points over the last two years, marking events such as the epic unraveling of Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme, the revelation that Merrill Lynch CEO Jon Thain bought an $87,000 rug for his office just months before his firm went belly up, or the incident in late 2009 when several Wall Street CEOs said they couldn't make their scheduled meeting with the President due to "inclement weather," this just a year after emergency action by the government saved them from joining the ranks of the unemployed.

Yet, of all these events, the one that I suspect would have stood out to Buckley most was the outcry over Goldman Sachs's 2009 bonus payout.

For those who may have forgotten, Goldman came under fire last fall when it seemed that the firm was on track to pay out huge bonuses for a year in which it made a record profit of $13.4 billion. (In the end, in response to the outcry, Goldman scaled back its bonus pool.) In the eyes of most people, the fortunes of Goldman and the American economy already looked a little too much like A Tale of Two Cities, but complicating matters further was the fact that the firm had enjoyed the upside of both the run up to the crisis and its aftermath, relying on unprecedented government assistance to tide it over in between.

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's CEO, had expressed "regret" that the firm "participated in the market euphoria" that helped to precipitate the crisis and had "failed to raise a responsible voice" when it became clear to them what was happening. Nevertheless, in an interview he soon came to regret, Blankfein strongly defended Goldman's decisions and said that the firm's success should be celebrated, for it was a sign that the financial world was getting back on its feet. "Everybody should be, frankly, happy," he said, going on to claim that, by helping to keep the gears of the financial system turning, he was just "doing God's work."

Putting aside any legal questions about Goldman's behavior, I suspect that what someone like Buckley would focus on is the tone-deaf quality of Blankfein's words. At a time when the poverty, unemployment, and mortgages foreclosure rates were all climbing because of a crisis that Goldman had contributed to and profited from, Blankfein was not only trying to vindicate the large bonuses, he was claiming the essential moral fitness of his firm's activities in addition to its central place in society. "The financial system led us into the crisis," he declared, "and it will lead us out."

Whatever the merits of these arguments, they need to be considered against the backdrop of an astonishing loss of faith by Americans in major financial institutions and the people who run them. Indeed, a Bloomberg poll in March found that only 2% of Americans had a "very favorable" impression of either "Wall Street" or "corporate executives," while a majority of those surveyed had either a "mostly unfavorable" or a "very unfavorable" impression of each.

For someone like Buckley, when the way capitalists view themselves diverges sharply from the views of the general public, it should be a cause for concern as it can lead to the sorts of actions that weaken people's faith in capitalism and undermine the social, political, and moral leadership of the business community. Buckley called such actions "institutional embarrassments," and he believed they ought to prompt leaders in the business community to ask hard questions of themselves. These questions include: What is the role of business in a free society? What about successful businesspeople? Do businesses have responsibilities to the public that go beyond the law? What do they include? What virtues does the practice of business instill? What vices? And what does it mean if the answers the general public gives to these questions diverge significantly from those given by the business elite?

For people like Buckley, wrestling with such questions helped to give businesspeople a broader appreciation of their role in society and to reinforce the kind of behavior that made people embrace the free market in business and beyond. As such, they complement the questions I raised in my last post about the strengths and weaknesses of a free market system, questions which, taken together, can shape how we teach business ethics in the classroom.

What might such a class look like? I will turn to that question in my final post.

John Paul Rollert teaches leadership and business ethics at Harvard Summer School. He is a doctoral student at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and will graduate from Yale Law School in the fall.

LINK:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/the_problem_with_capitalism_ca.html