Is Ethical Capitalism a Myth?

When you think of ethical capitalism, what comes to your mind? Is it wishful thinking, or a real opportunity to progress and learn from one another?

In this week’s philosophical episode of Solve for X, Peace pioneers Margarita Quihuis and Mark Nelson discuss all things data and how data can be used to promote ethical business and financial practices. 

Both Margarita and Mark have worked with big data and data analytics since the beginning of their inauguration into the tech world in the early 2010s. Prior to the mainstream use of data analytics, corporations overlooked important issues such as customer lifetime value, while some businesses simply lacked the resources to uncover their ‘data insides’.. In this episode, Mark refers back to the beginnings of BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Essentially, Fogg discovered that in order to build persuasive tech, it must thrive on data – more specifically, behavior data.  Fogg focused on how technology augments our ability to become more of the people we want to be. 

Fast-forward to the present day, we see countless ethical dilemmas becoming more and more uprooted due to capitalism and its discontents. How can we use all of the available data in the world with the intention of collectively bettering the public? With the Data Revolution picking up, it is exciting to see how data can be used to promote positive peace and ethical capitalism around the world. 

Margarita and Mark also mention how ethics should no longer be bound to just a college course, but rather taken as an opportunity that should be operationalized. Using peace data, we can conduct various ethical ‘experiments’ to see what works best for whom, what, when, and where. As we become increasingly human-centered with our design thinking, we allow ourselves to create value for each individual, which ultimately creates compassion towards one another. In the end, this compassion creates and promotes peaceful and ethical interactions all over the world. 

Here’s more of what you can expect in this episode:

  • The power of data and analytics in all things business
  • How peace data can be used to create ethical capitalism in our society
  • Augmenting technologies in the process of creating ethical capitalism
  • Breaking out of our “silos” to collectively find solutions
  • AirBnb’s use of ethical capitalism within its own system

And much more! 

Resources:

Sponsored by Game Design Thinking

Margarita Quihuis’s LinkedIn

Mark Nelson’s LinkedIn

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