First, most countries around the world are not committed to supporting entrepreneurship[i]. Such support requires alignment between politics, law, the monetary system, economics, education, finance, and the whole national culture. The USA, historically one of the friendliest to entrepreneurs, is rapidly becoming frostier for them[ii].  In many countries, entrepreneurs are regarded as a threat to the governing elite, being dispatched to prison if they are “too successful”.  In other countries, such as China, any entrepreneur has to toe the line of the ruling party.  Even then, an entrepreneur’s success may be ephemeral.  This has been seen not only since China became a Communist country in 1949 but specifically over the last few years.

Second, in some cultures, the system supports certain groups or cliques but not the citizenry as a whole. An example of this is my own country of origin, India, where the culture historically supported entrepreneurialism only from one caste: every other caste was penalised for even thinking of any entrepreneurial activity. Officially, an interest rate of between 80% a month and 24% a year[iii] was allowed, depending on the caste of the person to whom money was loaned.  Unofficially, the culture endorsed unthinkable interest rates, within living memory rising as high as 3600% per year, leading to millions of people being reduced to virtual slavery or “bonded labour”.  Clearly, such a culture won’t allow the average citizen to flourish. No wonder limits were set on usury, and bonded labour abolished, after democracy was established in India – though the reach of the law there is neither wide nor consistent. By contrast, the country with the fairest and most extensive system of support for entrepreneurs is Israel[iv].

The two kinds of breaks mentioned above, and related varieties of “crony capitalism”, were quite common historically, but began to decline with the separation of entrepreneurs from the state, which started as a result of the 16^th century Protestant Reformation. This instituted “the rule of law” and popularised Judeo-Christian thinking on morality, creativity, hard work, honest trade, a modest lifestyle, public responsibility and societal good. It resulted in what we call the modern world, impacting not only countries in Northern Europe and North America but most countries round the world[v].  However, as the influence of the Reformation has declined since the 1980s, entrepreneurs and politicians seem to be increasingly arriving again at an entente cordiale to benefit themselves and to disadvantage most citizens.

The third break in the bond between entrepreneurs and society is when entrepreneurs don’t support their own country as much as they should.  Indeed, many entrepreneurs abandon their country of origin and move to countries which provide better opportunities or lower tax rates.  Economic migration is understandable where the entrepreneurs are poor, or are just starting.  But worldwide acceptability of entrepreneurship decreases if established or highly successful entrepreneurs are too greedy[vi].

Such overreach has at least four symptoms:

• Economic blackmail (threatening to move business out of an area if a particular political vote does not go their way – as Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, did recently);
• Lobbying to tilt the subsidy and tax systems in their own favour (as many significant companies have done for some decades, and as smaller entrepreneurs seem to be doing increasingly);
• Unwillingness to contribute a fair share of taxes for the common benefit (apparently, only a few months ago, HSBC threatened to move out of the U.K., while IKEA and other companies have actually moved out of their countries of origin for those reasons); and
• Reduced, negligible, or little commitment to philanthropy.

In such matters, Western countries had made enviable progress since the 16^th century but, even there, progress has reversed noticeably since the 1980s[vii].  The Netherlands, one of the main beneficiaries of the Reformation, now has over a hundred large companies which seem to pay hardly any tax[viii].

By contrast, the Dutch Societal Alliance (MA) and the Healthy-Life-Alliance (HLA) are examples of initiatives being taken by numerous people – including entrepreneurs – who are trying to repair the breaks in the relational circle between entrepreneurship and society.

Entrepreneurial drive toward mutually-beneficial goals is the only way of addressing today’s global “wicked problems”. Relational business models based on stakeholder[ix] value and impact arise from the circle between people, public bodies and private companies – that is, from coherence in society.

About the author:

Prabhu Guptara is Executive Director, Relational Analytics, Cambridge, UK; Member of the Board, Institute of Management, University of St Gallen, Switzerland; and Distinguished Professor of Global Business, Management and Public Policy, William Carey University, India.

[i] For one ranking regarding this, see the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business Index” http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

[ii]  See http://www.kauffman.org/microsites/kauffman-index/rankings/national?Report=StartupActivity;  see also http://www.inc.com/magazine/201505/leigh-buchanan/the-vanishing-startups-in-decline.html

[iii] Those rates are from one ancient religious text; other texts prescribe various other rates, in every case dependent on the caste of the borrower: The Manusmriti, translated by George Buhler, Chapter VII, verses 140-142, accessible e.g. at http://hinduwebsite.com/sacredscripts/hinduism/dharma/manusmriti_2.asp

[iv] For a brief discussion of this, see the text of my presentation in Israel on the 18^th of February 2016: “http://www.alphamedicus.com/documents/mHealth_Israel_Conference_2016%20_Text_of_Prof_Guptara’s_speech_18February2016.pdf   For a longer paper on Israel’s entrepreneur support system, see: http://www.alphamedicus.com/documents/Israel’s_Entrepreneurs_Support_System.pdf

[v] See my chapter, “Towards Creating the Right Kind of Globalisation – Why it does not happen, and what to do about it” in Joseph Straus (Ed.), The Role of Law and Ethics in the Globalized Economy, Max Planck Institute Studies on Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, Volume 10, 2009, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, pages  61-82.  For a different but very much fuller view, see Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World, Thomas Nelson, USA, 2011.

[vi] For the latest howl of rage, see http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1929324/study-reveals-awfulness-canadian-investor-immigration-income-tax

[vii] The evidence for this is exhaustively documented in Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014.

[viii] Tax avoidance is of course not limited to the Netherlands: http://www.corporateknights.com/voices/bernard-simon/12331-14592312

and http://www.corporateknights.com/channels/leadership/filing-deadline-14593140

[ix] See Michael Schluter et al, The Relational Lens: Understanding, Measuring and Managing Stakeholder Relationships, due out soon from Cambridge University Press.

But let’s start by reminding ourselves that robots are already found in every conceivable area of life – from what is domestic (mowing grass, cleaning swimming pools), through sports and entertainment (car racing, playing music, producing artistic material), to the care sector (medical operations, looking after the elderly) … all the way to the military (drones, robot soldiers, autonomous weapons).

Moreover, the exciting possibilities of a robot-driven future are equally clear: since the 1980s, Japan has had “dark factories” (fully automated, no humans on site) for electronic products. Since 2001, the Japanese company FANUC has been operating a dark factory where robots build other robots, now at a rate of about 300,000 each year. For most agricultural activities, we now have digitally-controlled farm implements. GPS, aerial survey maps and digital data guide tractor routes. So we can produce most things needed by humanity, whether industrial or agricultural, with minimal human intervention.

As super-abundance becomes possible, poverty could be entirely abolished, leaving us to tackle the remaining challenges around climate change and employment [ii].

The first still seems insuperable, though we do at least give some thought to it.

The second depends, in the short term, on whether humanity can counterbalance and outpace the introduction of robots by becoming ever more creative and productive. For that, humans need to have not merely computer skills but advanced digital literacy which will enable critical and creative human-computer interaction. But which government is doing anything substantial about providing that?

In the ultimate analysis, however, whether or not humanity flourishes as a result of robotics is a question of who will own the robots, and of whether these owners will focus on the flourishing of all of humanity, or only on self-indulgence.

That is a large question. Here are smaller questions we can focus on to enable robots to be an unprecedented blessing to humanity rather than a disaster[ii]:

• Could we pace the introduction of robots to prevent their creating so much unemployment at one time as to trigger social unrest?[iii]
• Could a Robotics Research Charge go to an independently-run global fund for formulating a new economics of super-abundance?
• Could a Robot Introduction Charge finance the retraining of each person whose job is lost?
• Could intellectual property in robotics be put in the public realm to encourage even stronger product competition, as well as to encourage social uses of robots?

The elites of our time promise utopia as a result of the latest advances of our time. Why is it then that we have the reality of much greater violence, from the USA to China?

Such questions are articulated far more powerfully by artists than by bloggers. Have you seen the TV series, Continuum, which starts in the year 2077 where everything is technologically controlled by corporations? A subversive group, Liber-8, are thrown back in time to 2012, and the series plays out alternative futures depending on whether certain technologies are developed or not. Interestingly, there is a “no robots” scenario which has freedom but no peace, while the “with robots” scenario has peace but no freedom.

So can we have freedom, peace and human flourishing? That is the challenge I am raising by the questions above.

About the author: 

Prabhu Guptara is a keynote speaker, independent Board Member, and strategy consultant who was, for 15 years, responsible for running Think Tanks for one of the largest banks in the world

[i] If agricultural production is robotised, what are we to offer the currently 5 billion out of the world’s 7 billion who are dependent on agricultural labour? Most jobs (doctors, nurses, teachers, street cleaners, gardeners, police) can be done more cheaply and efficiently by robots. Even robot-maintenance is now robotized. Given quantum computers, it is unclear whether we will need humans as therapists, family support workers, counselors, advisors, or mentors. In the past 30 years, two-thirds of all manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the UK; since 2001, half of all PA/ secretarial jobs, and 65% of librarians’ jobs, have disappeared. The impact of such massive job-losses has been meliorated by the UK’s national unemployment insurance system – whose future in uncertain, given a Deloitte report prediction that 10 million jobs will be taken by robots in the next few years. That’s one job in every three (the UK’s labour force is only 32.7 million, while the total population is 64 million – each job supports roughly two British citizens). So 33% of the current workforce will be made newly-dependent on a National Insurance System that is barely keeping up even with the currently-dependent, and these 33% more will have to be supported on a tax base reduced by income from 33% of current wage-earners! The USA will be even worse hit than the UK, because it has no national unemployment insurance, and because (according to research at Oxford University) one out of every two jobs there will be robotised. So how is half of the USA going to survive?

[ii] Originally raised in 2006 at: http://www.theglobalist.com/will-japanese-robots-rule-world-2020

[iii] Only the totalitarian government of China could organise, as it is now doing in Guangdong, a project to “replace humans with robots”. The excuse is that China (China!) doesn’t have enough skilled people – though it has 2.3 million people in its prisons who are put to unproductive labour. We live in a strange world where it is a Communist government (which is supposed to prioritise people over capital) that leads the first attempt in the world to uncompromisingly prioritise capital over people. “Cheap” Chinese labour has become more expensive each year, and now costs US$6000 a year – which is more than it costs to buy a replacement robot. Sophisticated robots will cost only US$20,000 by 2020 – a sixth of what it costs to have an average employee in an advanced country like Switzerland, and only half of what it costs to employ an illiterate temporary farm-hand.