The Futures Foundation

In the following article, published in the Sydney Morning Herald today, Cheryl Kernot clearly describes one of the core platforms of a successful future -- as the Futures Foundation has been arguing for the past twelve years.  It should have happened earlier, but it is still  encouraging to find the argument in the pages of a major daily newspaper. And as Hazel Henderson has pointed out, the current financial crisis also offers an opportunity for this kind of change.

Capitalism is more than just bruised, as some suggest. It is battered, almost down for the count. It has sustained serious brand damage after suffering the indignity of state intervention to save banks, car manufacturers and commercial child-care providers.

Capitalism helped deliver the prosperity and freedoms taken for granted in developed economies but it also delivered an escalating inequity in how the planet's resources and opportunities are shared.

We now have an opportunity to take stock of its excesses and failures and to redesign its boundaries. We can move beyond the dichotomies of free or regulated, private or public, and demand a more creative and fair capitalism; one that includes social value and impact when assessing prosperity and freedoms. Most of us instinctively reject the one-dimensional primacy of financial value.