Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

by Douglas Rushkoff

  39. Mario Preve, quoted in Ernst & Young and Family Business Network International, “Built to Last: Family Businesses Lead the Way to Sustainable Growth” (n.p.: Ernst & Young Global Limited, 2012), www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY-Built-to-last-family-businesses-lead-the-way-to-sustainable-growth/$FILE/EY-Built-to-last-family-businesses-lead-the-way-to-sustainable-growth.pdf.

  40. Nicolas Kachaner, George Stalk, and Alain Bloch, “What You Can Learn from Family Business,” Harvard Business Review, November 2012.

  41. Yoko Kubota and Maki Shiraki, “After Two Bumper Years, Toyota Braces for Shift to Slower Growth,” reuters.com, April 15, 2014.

  42. Ibid.

  43. pgconnectdevelop.com.

  44. Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab, “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, March 2006.

  45. “Connect + Develop History,” ConnectDevelop, YouTube, August 16, 2012.

  46. Huston and Sakkab, “Connect and Develop.”

  47. “Procter & Gamble Re-ignites Growth—XBD & Open Innovation Make It Happen,” federicibusiness.com, 2008.

  48. “Febreze Embracing C+D to Become a Billion $ Brand,” pgconnectdevelop.com, January 1, 2013.

  49. Clark Gilbert, Matthew Eyring, and Richard N. Foster, “Two Routes to Resilience,” Harvard Business Review, December 2012.

  50. Field Maloney, “Is Whole Foods Wholesome?” slate.com, March 17, 2006.

  51. Lynn Forester de Rothschild, “Capitalists for Inclusive Growth,” project-syndicate.org, April 17, 2013.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Steven Pearlstein, “How the Cult of Shareholder Value Wrecked American Business,” washingtonpost.com, September 9, 2013.

  55. Oliver Staley and Hui-Yong Yu, “Hilton Sells Itself to Blackstone for $20 Billion,” bloomberg.com, July 4, 2007.

  56. Henry Sender, “How Blackstone Revived Hilton Brand,” ft.com, August 19, 2013.

  57. David Gelles, “A Surprise from Hilton: Big Profit for Blackstone,” nytimes.com, December 12, 2013.

  58. Nanette Byrnes and Peter Burrows, “Where Dell Went Wrong,” businessweek.com, February 18, 2007.

  59. Ashlee Vance, “Why Michael Dell Really Had to Take Dell Private,” businessweek.com, February 5, 2013.

  60. Mary Ellen Biery, “Why Michael Dell’s Fight Makes Sense,” forbes.com, August 11, 2013.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Connie Guglielmo, “Dell Officially Goes Private: Inside the Nastiest Tech Buyout Ever,” forbes.com, October 30, 2013.

  63. Lindsey Rupp, Carol Hymowitz, and David Carey, “Drexler Amasses $350 Million as J. Crew Struggles,” businessweek.com, June 13, 2014.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Lindsey Rupp, “J. Crew Profits Fall as Company Considers Going Public Again,” bloomberg.com, March 25, 2014.

  66. Paula Kepos, International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 7 (Farmington Hills, Mich.: St. James Press, 1993), per “Amsted Industries Incorporated History” entry on fundinguniverse.com.

  67. “The Employee Ownership 100: America’s Largest Majority Employee-Owned Companies,” National Center for Employee Ownership, nceo.org, June 2014.

  68. Brian Solomon, “The Wal-Mart Slayer: How Publix’s People-First Culture Is Winning the Grocer War,” forbes.com, July 24, 2013.

  69. Sabri Ben-Achour, “Groceries: A Low Margin Business, but Still Highly Desirable,” marketplace.org, September 12, 2013.

  70. Derek Ridgway, “Flexible Purpose Corporation vs. Benefit Corporation,” hansonbridgett.com, September 4, 2012.

  71. “Inc. 5000,” inc.com, September 6, 2013.

  72. Ariel Schwartz, “Inside Plum Organics, the First Benefit Corporation Owned by a Public Company,” fastcoexist.com, January 22, 2014.

  73. Marc Gunther, “Checking In with Plum Organics, the Only B Corp Inside a Publicly Traded Company,” theguardian.com, August 6, 2014.

  74. Ridgway, “Flexible Purpose Corporation vs. Benefit Corporation.”

  75. Kyle Westaway, “PROFIT + PURPOSE—Structuring Social Enterprise for Impact,” slideshare.net, March 6, 2012.

  76. Cameron Scott, “Tiny AI Startup Vicarious Says It’s Solved CAPTCHA,” singularityhub.com, October 29, 2013.

  77. vicarious.com/about.html.

  78. Westaway, “PROFIT + PURPOSE.”

  79. Citizen Media Law Project, “Primer on Low-Profit Limited Liability Companies (L3Cs),” Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, October 2010.

  80. homeportneworleans.org.

  81. battle-bro.com/.

  82. Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton, “Beyond Capitalism: Not-for-Profit Business Ethos Motivates Sustainable Behaviour,” theguardian.com, October 1, 2014.

  83. “Exemption Requirements—501(c)(3) Organizations,” irs.gov, January 8, 2015.

  84. John Tozzi, “Turning Nonprofits into For-Profits,” businessweek.com, June 15, 2009.

  85. “Mozilla Foundation Announces Creation of Mozilla Corporation,” mozillazine.org, August 3, 2005, per Wayback Machine at archive.org/web/.

  86. “Articles of Incorporation of M. F. Technologies,” static.mozilla.com, July 14, 2003.

  87. www.linkedin.com/company/mozilla-corporation, 2015.

  Chapter Three: The Speed of Money

  1. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “History of ‘In God We Trust,’” treasury.gov, March 8, 2011.

  2. Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare 1945–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  3. Luca Fantacci, “The Dual Currency System of Renaissance Europe,” Financial History Review 15, no. 1 (2008).

  4. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How Corporations Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2009), 164.

  8. Ibid., 8–10.

  9. Ibid., 167–70.

  10. Bernard A. Lietaer and Stephen M. Belgin, Of Human Wealth: Beyond Greed & Scarcity (Boulder, Colo.: Human Wealth Books and Talks, 2001), 111.

  11. For a more detailed discussion of this basic principle, see Thomas H. Greco, Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2001).

  12. Rushkoff, Life Inc., 170–71.

  13. Michael Konczal, “Frenzied Financialization,” washingtonmonthly.com, November/December 2014.

  14. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014).

  15. Robert Slater, Jack Welch and the GE Way (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998).

  16. Ben Steverman, “Manipulate Me: The Booming Business in Behavioral Finance,” bloomberg.com, April 7, 2014.

  17. Morgan House, “5 Alan Greenspan Quotes That Make You Wonder,” fool.com, October 15, 2008.

  18. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2011).

  19. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

  20. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), IV.6.2.

  21. Ibid., IV.6.7.

  22. David Dayen, “America’s Ugly Economic Truth: Why Austerity Is Generating Another Slowdown,” salon.com, October 21, 2014.

  23. David Wessel, “Lousy Economic Growth Is a Choice, Not an Inevitability,” brookings.edu, October 13, 2014.

  24. Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne, Rethinking Money: How Ne
w Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013).

  25. Joanna Glasner, “PayPal’s IPO Woes Continue,” Wired, February 12, 2002.

  26. In most of the world, that would be SWIFT.

  27. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” bitcoin.org, October 31, 2008.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Pedro Franco, Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering and Economics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014).

  30. Ibid.

  31. Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2014).

  32. Franco, Understanding Bitcoin.

  33. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin.

  34. Rob Wile, “The Chinese Are in Love with Bitcoin and It’s Driving the Digital Currency’s Prices into the Stratosphere,” businessinsider.com, October 29, 2013.

  35. Rebecca Grant, “A Single Bitcoin Was Worth $10 a Year Ago—Today It’s Worth $1,000,” venturebeat.com, November 27, 2013.

  36. Robert McMillan, “The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin’s $460 Million Disaster,” wired.com, March 3, 2014.

  37. Ryan Lawler, “Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 a Day in Power Consumption Alone,” techcrunch.com, April 13, 2013.

  38. Mark Gimein, “Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster,” bloomberg.com, April 12, 2013.

  39. Michael Carney, “Bitcoin Has a Dark Side: Its Carbon Footprint,” pando.com, December 16, 2013.

  40. Lawler, “Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 a Day.”

  41. Jon Evans, “Enter the Blockchain: How Bitcoin Can Turn the Cloud Inside Out,” techcrunch.com, March 22, 2014.

  42. Vitalik Buterin, “DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide,” blog.ethereum.org, May 6, 2014.

  43. David Johnston, Sam Onat Yilmaz, Jeremy Kandah, Nikos Bentenitis, Farzad Hashemi, Ron Gross, Shawn Wilkinson, and Steven Mason, “The General Theory of Decentralized Applications, Dapps,” github.com, June 9, 2014.

  44. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

  45. National Patient Advocate Foundation, “Issue Brief: Medical Debt, Medical Bankruptcy and the Impact on Patients,” npaf.org, September 2012.

  46. Dan Mangan, “Medical Bills Are the Biggest Cause of US Bankruptcies: Study,” cnbc.com, June 25, 2013.

  47. National Patient Advocate Foundation, “Issue Brief: Medical Debt, Medical Bankruptcy and the Impact on Patients.”

  48. rollingjubilee.org.

  49. Interview with Astra Taylor, cofounder of Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee, conducted by e-mail, July 24, 2015.

  50. “A Look Back at the 2012 ABA Indie Impact Study Series,” localismbythe numbers.com, June 11, 2014.

  51. Justin Sacks, The Money Trail: Measuring Your Impact on the Local Economy Using LM3 (London: New Economics Foundation & the Countryside Agency, December 2002).

  52. “A Look Back at the 2012 ABA Indie Impact Study Series.”

  53. Bill McKibben, “A Day in the Life of a BerkShare,” yesmagazine.org, October 18, 2010.

  54. Katie Gilbert, “Why Local Currencies Could Be on the Rise in the U.S.—And Why It Matters,” forbes.com, September 22, 2014.

  55. “Group Hopes ‘Detroit Dollar’ Pays Off for Biz,” crainsdetroit.com, March 16, 2014.

  56. John Rogers, “Bristol Pound Is Just One Example of What Local Currencies Can Achieve,” theguardian.com, June 17, 2013.

  57. Lietaer and Dunne, Rethinking Money, 175–81.

  58. Lietaer and Dunne, Rethinking Money.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Irving Fisher, The Purchasing Power of Money (New York: Macmillan, 1920).

  61. Irving Fisher, Stamp Scrip (New York: Adelphi, 1933).

  62. Loren Gatch, “Local Money in the United States During the Great Depression,” Essays in Economics & Business History 26 (2008).

  63. Ibid.

  64. Lauren Frayer, “‘Time Banks’ Help Spaniards Weather Financial Crisis,” npr.org, September 22, 2012.

  65. See TimeBanks USA at timebanks.org for a new time dollars smartphone app, or p2pfoundation.net/Complementary_Currency_Software for a comprehensive list of complementary currency software.

  66. Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World (London: Random House, 2001).

  67. Mayumi Hayashi, “Japan’s Fureai Kippu Time-Banking in Elderly Care: Origins, Development, Challenges, and Impact,” International Journal of Community Currency Research 15 (2012).

  68. Ariana Eunjung Cha, “In Spain, Financial Crisis Feeds Expansion of a Parallel, Euro-Free Economy,” washingtonpost.com, August 27, 2012.

  69. Lietaer and Dunne, Rethinking Money, 143.

  70. Ibid., 142.

  71. Ibid., 143.

  Chapter Four: Investing Without Exiting

  1. Helaine Olen, Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry (New York: Penguin/Portfolio, 2012).

  2. OECD, Protecting Pensions: Policy Analysis and Examples from OECD Countries (Paris: OECD Publications, 2007), 268.

  3. Steve Wilhelm, “Why Boeing’s Fighting to Retire Pensions,” bizjournal.com, January 11, 2013.

  4. John W. Miller, “Steelmaker Presses for 36% Pay Cut,” wsj.com, July 20, 2012.

  5. James R. Hagerty and Alistair MacDonald, “As Unions Lose Their Grip, Indiana Lures Manufacturing Jobs,” wsj.com, March 18, 2012.

  6. Associated Press, “10 Years Later: What Happened to the Former Employees of Enron?,” businessinsider.com, December 1, 2011.

  7. Chris Gay, “The 401(k)’s ‘Father’ Wants to Hit Reset,” money.usnews.com, September 20, 2012.

  8. Olen, Pound Foolish, 81.

  9. Ibid., 85.

  10. Mitch Tuchman, “Pension Plans Beat 401(k) Savers Silly—Here’s Why,” forbes.com, June 4, 2013.

  11. Olen, Pound Foolish, 89.

  12. William E. Even and David A. Macpherson, “Why Did Male Pension Coverage Decline in the 1980s?,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 47, no. 3 (April 1993).

  13. Olen, Pound Foolish, 82.

  14. “Pensions Decline as 401(k) Plans Multiply,” bankrate.com, July 24, 2014.

  15. Olen, Pound Foolish, 85.

  16. Gretchen Morgenson, “The Curtain Opens on 401(k) Fees,” nytimes.com, June 2, 2012.

  17. Tuchman, 2013.

  18. Olen, Pound Foolish, 86.

  19. Ibid., 98.

  20. Michael Shuman, Local Dollars, Local Sense (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Co.), 2012.

  21. “Sell Your Stocks, MIT Sloan Professor Urges Small Investors Saving for Retirement,” mitsloan.mit.edu, March 12, 2009.

  22. Bob Wallace, “AT&T Service Helps Broker Shave Costs,” Network World 7, no. 31 (July 30, 1990).

  23. Martin LaMonica, “Bullish on the Net,” InfoWorld, April 26, 1999: 34–35.

  24. Riva D. Atlas, “Trading Slump Spurs Online Brokers’ Merger Talk,” nytimes.com, May 10, 2005.

  25. Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean, “The Internet and the Investor,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 15, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 41–54.

  26. Joe Light and Julie Steinberg, “Small Investors Jump Back into the Trading Game,” wsj.com, February 21, 2014.

  27. D. K. Peterson and G. F. Pitz, “Confidence, Uncertainty, and the Use of Information,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 14 (1988): 85–92, as cited in Barber and Odean, “The Internet and the Investor.”

  28. Barber and Odean, “The Internet and the Investor.”

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Richard Finger, “High Frequency Tr
ading: Is It a Dark Force Against Ordinary Human Traders and Investors?,” forbes.com, September 30, 2013.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Jerry Adler, “Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading,” wired.com, August 3, 2012.

  34. Simone Foxman, “How the ‘Navy SEALS’ of Trading Are Taking on Wall Street’s Predatory Robots,” qz.com, March 31, 2014.

  35. Alan Kohler, “$710 trillion: That’s a Lot of Exposure to Derivatives,” abc.net.au, June 11, 2014.

  36. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html.

  37. Kohler, “$710 trillion: That’s a Lot of Exposure to Derivatives.”

  38. Peter Cohan, “Big Risk: $1.2 Quadrillion Derivatives Market Dwarfs World GDP,” DailyFinance (AOL), June 9, 2010, www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/09/risk-quadrillion-derivatives-market-gdp/.

  39. Christopher Matthews, “Why the New York Stock Exchange Sold Out to an Upstart You’ve Never Heard Of,” business.time.com, December 21, 2012.

  40. Herman Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 37.

  41. GarageGames (huge gaming platform), Sierra Entertainment (makers of King’s Quest), Apple, and Dell, to name just a few.

  42. “Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years,” Tell Me More, NPR, October 10, 2011.

  43. Kathleen De Vere, “Draw Something Surpasses 50 Million Downloads, May Have as Many as 24 Million Daily Active Users,” adweek.com, April 4, 2012.

  44. Julianne Pepitone, “Zynga IPO Values Company at $7 Billion,” money.cnn.com, December 16, 2011.

  45. Josh Constine, “Zynga Shares Go on Wild Ride During Facebook IPO—Big Fall, Then Recovery,” techcrunch.com, May 18, 2012.

  46. Sarah McBride and Leana B. Baker, “Zynga Buys OMGPOP Games Company for $200 Million: Source,” reuters.com, March 21, 2012.

  47. Paul Tassi, “Draw Something Loses 5M Users a Month After Zynga Purchase,” forbes.com, May 4, 2012.

  48. Sam Biddle, “OMGPOP Is Dead,” valleywag.gawker.com, June 4, 2013.

  49. Ari Levy, “Google Shares Took Off, but the Auction Didn’t,” cnbc.com, August 19, 2014.

  50. “Google IPO Priced at $85 a Share,” edition.cnn.com, August 19, 2004.