would donate nearly $900 million to a right-wing political action committee to win the next presidential election. If their candidate wins, one might reasonably ask who the next president is really working for and who will be making the decisions.
We are squandering the most important resource of every business: young people.
Americans endure unequal outcomes as long as the playing field is fair and everyone enjoys equal opportunity. The most damaging instances of social upheaval in U.S. history occurred when the people lost faith in their government. Social upheaval and commercial opportunity rarely go hand-in-hand.
• A disturbing side effect of economic inequality is an unfair allocation of medical and educational resources. There is no argument that the wealthy have access to better educational options and better medical care than the poor do. The unfair allocation of the basic building blocks of economic opportunity perpetuates the chasm separating the haves and the have-nots. It is hard for children to lift themselves out of poverty when we send them to underfunded schools.
The Alliance for Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania reports that, since 1970, the percentage of students completing college has increased from 6% to 9% for the lowest income families, and has increased from 44% to 77% for students from the highest income families. We are squandering the most important resource of every business: young people.
A concentration of economic and political power puts our governance and commercial structures in jeopardy.
• According to the U.S. Census, the business startup rate has been declining steadily since the 1970s. Even more disturbing, since 2008, businesses are dying faster than they are being born. The concentration of wealth is also a concentration of economic security: rich entrepreneurs can afford to fail, poor entrepreneurs cannot. Risk-taking is easier if you have a comfortable economic safety net. We will need middle-class entrepreneurs to help us grow through the rest of the 21st Century and, right now, we don’t have enough of them.
Healthy businesses thrive in healthy communities. America’s business leaders must recognize that a concentration of economic and political power puts our governance and commercial structures in jeopardy. Business does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a society of people and all the things that go along with people —concerns about life, family, governance, public policy, fairness, ambition, and hope.
Without a healthy society, commerce is a meaningless concept.
S. Andrew Starbird is dean of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University