What we value - Episode 6: Can business profit and society thrive together?

I see it everywhere.

There's not one greatest, it's the entire system.

So I'd love to give you a framework for how I think about these things.

And that is the three horizon framework.

The first horizon is the world in which we are currently functioning in, is the current economic systems, regulatory systems, incentives, how our investments in financial systems work.

The third horizon is what we can...

I want to make it clear that in that first horizon world, the system is failing to achieve societal and environmental well-being, and it's only getting worse.

So we're seeing our negative impacts on the climate are only increasing.

Our negative impacts on biodiversity and the very basis of life are only increasing.

Income inequality is rising.

A sense of societal malaise and...

And in some cases, lack of purposefulness is increasing.

And we have a system that continues to be extraordinarily extractive.

And so there are solutions I'm going to talk about in this first horizon world.

that make it a little bit better.

But without changing the fundamental basis of that world, we're not going to solve those big problems.

The third horizon world is, can we imagine a world in which the very systems design itself leads to positive environmental and social outcomes? And that is not just the change in some regulations or change in some incentives or investment strategies.

It requires an entire rethinking of the whole basis.

So I just wanted that as a framework because, in my view, literally everything the way our system is structured now is that it's misaligned.

Now, and there are things we can do within this first horizon world.

There are ways that we can create regulations, that we can create investment incentives to do better.

To me, the prime misalignment is is that the boundaries between what are considered internalities and externalities are far too narrow.

And we need to dramatically expand those boundaries so that businesses can take advantage, economic advantage, of the positive impacts they're creating, which they may not be able to count, and also be held responsible for the negative impacts of what they're creating.