Ethical disconnection and re-connection – corporations as “people” and NGOs

In this chapter of Credo, Brian Davey describes the mechanisms that allow corporate actors to distance themselves from responsibility from their anti-social and anti-environmental choices – for example the role of corporate personhood and evasions of regulation, taxation and control. NGOs and Civil Society Organisations have evolved to counter unethical corporate choices. Unfortunately they are often co-opted and neutralised.

How destructive is the middle class?

Patrick Noble proposes that the gathering of rent for status - 'status enclosure' - is the central process by which we become middle class, and a major cause of the global crises we're facing. "If we remove that fixed, defensive gaze on our land and status properties, and then look up, and then, out and about, we’ll see the world expand."

Limits to Economic Growth?

"Mainstream economists typically concentrate on science, technology and innovation to explain economic growth – but virtually all these new innovations are new ways to use energy and it is the energy of coal, oil and gas that does the work," writes Brian Davey.