Business, Economics and Ethics: A Research and Action Agenda for the Future

Abstract

Even the most casual examination of the futurist literature and of economic forecasts for the Western World reveals that the vast major? ity of such speculations are extremely pessimistic. From the novels of Huxley and Orwell to the computer models of Meadows for the Club of Rome, most portraits of the future tend at best to be unpleasant, and at worst dismal. For example, the Global 2000 Report to the President, delivered to the White House in July, 1980 by a blue-ribbon panel of scholars, depicts an overcrowded globe filled with poverty, hunger and spiraling food and energy prices as it moves into the Twenty-first Cen? tury. In part, all of these visions of a somber and bleak future, whether scientific or fictional, may simply be the result of the propensity evident in members of each new generation to flatter themselves into believing that the problems facing them are always more complex than those which confronted their forefathers. This belief, furthermore, has prob? ably been compounded in recent decades by the fact that most modern prognosticators have had some training in economics, a discipline known since Smith and Mai thus for its ability to induce in its students a gloomy outlook on life. As a sometime economist detailed to propose a research and action agenda for the future, I am tempted to continue in the grand tradition: To begin, perhaps, by emphasizing the current immorality in business, and by mustering arguments to illustrate that managerial behavior is likely to become more, rather than less, unethical as enterprise moves into a Reaganesque future less inhibited by governmental control but more pressured by competition. I shall, however, resist my disciplinary inclinations to be pessimistic about the years to come and shall merely observe, with Paul Valery, the famous French poet, that... the future is not what is used to be.