[Forgive me if this is a post that isn’t about the stuff I usually write about, but the idea was rumbling around, and here’s where I put ideas that rumble around. — Chris]

This post comes from thinking about the financial crisis of the past week (and next decade) and spending time with some old college friends of mine this weekend. Both are Wharton grads and both still are in the world of business. One is high ranking executive at a Fortune 50 company, and I always am intrigued to talk to them because their view on the world is very different than mine, even when our ethical values are often very similar.

This post comes at the intersection of two conversations we were having. On one level, I was listening to them discuss the financial realities of their businesses in the wake of everything going on. At another point, we were talking about the environment and issues of sustainability. What concerns me, and what I want to write about, is my creeping feeling that our current economic system is uniquely unsuitable to the need for a sustainable society.

The corporate structure — by definition — is designed for growth. That’s where the shareholder profit comes in. Because there is a need to always take money out of the system to reward investment, a zero growth sustainable corporation — by my definition, the ability to reach a stable presence in the market — is a losing proposition.

Now, on any micro-economic level, that’s fine. Companies come and go, but it strikes me that on the whole, we are reaching an end-game with a growth economy, as there is a limit how much markets can grow, and much of the growth we have seen of the past twenty years (the dot-com boom, the housing boom) has — it seems to me — been built on parlor games and mathematical tricks. We hope that new technologies, new innovations, will grow new markets. We hope that increased wealth of developing nations will mean growth for old corporations. But all of this also comes at a point where we are seeing a growing environmental crisis, as there are serious questions about the degree to which our planet can sustain our current environmental pace without serious repercussions.

Much of the current mainstream political debate deals with the need to tweak the current economic / environmental model. Do we regulate more? Do we bail out? Do we use market forces to encourage a reduced carbon footprint? It was fascinating for me to listen to two business executives agree that there should have been a massive gas tax years ago to a) change American behavior around gas consumption, b) raise necessary funds to fund alternative energy research and c) alter the market so that the the price of gasoline reflected the actual price of gas once the externality of pollution was factor in so that alternative energies became cheaper alternatives more quickly. Certainly, those are all important questions, and the need to question and alter the role of government in the coming years to deal with the realities of our changing world will be one of the fundamental question of the coming decade.

But at the root is the legal organism of the capitalist corporation. Has it outlived its usefulness? Have we, as a society – a world – reached a point in our evolution where the growth model of the market organism is more harmful than helpful? The sole proprietorship, the "mom and pop" did not have the need for growth that the corporation — by definition — has. I’m not suggesting that we can go back to an atomized capitalism – to the days of Adam Smith, nor am I arguing for a state-sponsored socialism (although is it just me or did we just nationalize a massive section of the banking industry last week?). Instead I am questioning our ability to imagine a new model of economics — one that harnesses the best notions of the marketplace while recognizing the limits of growth as the altar at which business must worship? Can we imagine a model of economics where sustainability is the goal of business? Where the idea of "enough" at the macro level was considered? Is there a model of a market economy that does not have to include macro-economic growth?

Because I am concerned that without a new model, the macro-level rapaciousness of a corporate capitalism as that legal organism is currently constructed will lead us into a need for more and more where we must hope that technological innovations stretch ever-dwindling resources and increase the efficiency with which humans interact with their environment outpace the need for the market to grow. And that is a frightening end-game that, to me, we are destined some day to lose.