The Divine Right of Capital

Why "wealth bias" is a holdover from a pre-democratic pastand how to restore a healthier balance of power: "Thought-provoking . . . well-documented and readable." Library Journal

Wealth inequality, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are symptomsthe fevers and chills of the economy. The underlying illness, says Business Ethics magazine founder Marjorie Kelly, is shareholder primacy: the corporate drive to make profits for shareholders no matter who pays the cost.

In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly argues that focusing on the interests of stockholders to the exclusion of everyone else's interests is a form of discrimination based on property or wealth. She shows how this bias is held by our institutional structures, much as they once held biases against African Americans and women. The Divine Right of Capital exposes six aristocratic principles that corporations are built on, principles that we would never accept in our modern democratic society but which we accept unquestioningly in our economy.

Wealth bias is a holdover from our pre-democratic past. It has enabled shareholders to become a kind of economic aristocracy. Kelly shows how to design more equitable alternativesnew property rights, new forms of corporate governance, new ways of looking at corporate performancethat build on both free-market and democratic principles. We think of shareholder primacy as the natural law of the free market, much as our forebears thought of monarchy as the most natural form of government. But in The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly brilliantly demonstrates that it is no more "natural" than any other human creation. People designed this system and people can change it. We need a change of mind as profound as that of the American Revolutionand this book provides practical guidance to help employees and communities change corporate governance and unfetter the genius of the free market.

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