Umair Haque thinks there is a Generation M Consensus — the growing consensus of a global movement dedicated to toppling the old order, by doing meaningful stuff that matters the most.

Here’s are the principles. The original article has links and a critique of the old order as well.

Of particular interest, his concept of forcorporations matches my argument about the ethical economy, published last week. At the bottom of this excerpt, I therefore add his earlier explanation of this concept.

1. The Generation M Consensus

* The Empty Vessel Rule.

“Government, Arthur Okun famously argued, is a leaky bucket — one which leaks money at every turn. Yet, though the government may be often a leaky bucket, the corporation is just as often an empty vessel: bereft of any purpose higher than profit. What the private sector offers in terms of efficiency, it subtracts in terms of virtue. So what we really need to do today isn’t merely to privatize what used to be public, or the reverse, nationalization. We need to meld the efficiency of the private sector with the virtues of the public sector — to pioneer the legal, financial, and contractual basis for new corporate forms, like forporations, that balance obligations to shareholders and the many kinds of stakeholders; that exist “for” a higher purpose than mere near-term profit.

* Shadow Tax Cuts.

Low taxes are the next item on the Washington Consensus’s agenda: nice, but not nearly good enough. Sure, sky-high taxes will kill prosperity dead. So what about the hidden taxes we all pay every second of every day? Consider. The fumes smogging up our skies are a tax. The junkfood lining the bleak exurban shelves is a tax. Most big-box stores are taxes sucking the life, heart, and soul out of town. Wall Street’s “innovations” turned out to be a tax. The hidden charges and unfair fees that constitute most “business models” are the epitome of a tax. Where the Washington Consensus ignores all these very real taxes just a little too conveniently, the M Consensus suggests it’s time to see them, face them, and eliminate them: steep enough shadow taxes will render all growth meaningless and illusory, because value has simply been extracted — not actually created.

* The Lessig Principle.

How? Here’s one way to counterbalance shadow taxes. Property rights, the next bullet point in the Washington Consensus’s agenda, are essential to growth — and so they’ve got to be enshrined, embraced, and extended. And have they ever been. The original term of copyright was, for example 14 years; today, it’s nearly ten times that: up to 120 years. Given that growth rate, by 2100, the copyright on this blog post will last for approximately 47 billion years. Yet, as Mike Masnick tirelessly points out , building on the work of scholars like Larry Lessig, draconian intellectual property rights regimes stifle innovation, entrepreneurship, and disruption, at the expense of protecting tired, lazy incumbents (here’s an eloquent explanation on why from Lewis Hyde). So where the Washington Consensus argues for a heavy, rigid approach to property rights, the M Consensus pushes for feather-light rights, knowing that the scarcer special privilege is, the more real value everyone’s likely to enjoy.

* The Porter Rule.

While IP rights, are of course, a form of regulation, the next item on the Washington Consensus’s agenda is deregulation in almost all other respects. A giant oil spill, an even more gigantic financial crisis, and an even more gigantic lost decade all evoke the dangers of a dogmatic devotion to deregulation. The M Consensus, instead, subscribes to Michael Porter’s path-breaking Porter Hypothesis: crudely put, that stricter regulation isn’t what stifles competitiveness — it can be exactly what induces it, by encouraging disruptive innovations to spark and catch fire.

* The People Principle.

Perhaps the biggest incentive we can give corporations to start getting serious about real innovation again, then, is what might be called humanization. The next item of the Washington Consensus’s moldy agenda is legally protecting the corporation. It’s been taken to an absurd extreme, with the doctrine that corporations must enjoy legal personhood. But (Earth to beancounters) corporations aren’t people — only people are people. The former face few of the obligations citizens do, can’t face the same kinds of punishments, are legally bound to maximize profit in ways that citizens aren’t, and tend to have thousands of times more cash, time, and power, which means they can afford to de facto buy rights almost no person on earth has (like hiring batteries of lawyers to fight cases for decades). Corporations, like hammers, are just tools. And for the same reason we don’t anthropomorphize hammers, nor should we empower corporations with the same rights and powers as people. Where the Washington Consensus humanizes corporations, and dehumanizes people, the M consensus suggests unhumanizing corporations, and rehumanizing people.

* The Uninterest Rate.

So where the last item in the Washington Consensus’s agenda is interest rates, set by markets, to knock governments, people, and communities into shape, the final item in the M Consensus’s agenda is what I call an uninterest rate: the rate at which income isn’t transformed into outcomes. It’s outcomes that count. Though we got a little bit richer, did we actually realize tangible, enduring benefits that mattered? Or did we just get more insecure, obese, unhappy, and disconnected? If the uninterest rate is high, it means income isn’t translating into outcomes; because our economy’s engines and engineers — corporations, CEOs, investors — are uninterested in making stuff that actually makes us better off; they’re just interested in making a quick buck. The higher the uninterest rate, the more corporations are likely to be knocked into shape — by fed-up people, communities, society, and investors alike. If it’s low, incomes equal better outcomes, and the mere paper wealth we may have earned actually matters in human terms.”

2. Towards Forcorporations

Umair Haque:

“Forporations. What, then, might amplify the signal of these new Detroits and Silicon Valleys? Let’s extend our historical analogy. Yesterday, Detroit, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street were powered by companies like…General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, and General Electric. Funny, isn’t it? But perhaps also telling: that’s “general” as in generic, commoditized, mass-made “product.” Today, we’re learning the hard way that “general” is, too often, the polar opposite of “meaningful.” So consider then, a radical idea: that the corporation as we know it just might be past its sell-by date, an obsolete tool that’s outlived its era.

Instead of creating new value, too many corporations merely transfer value from society to shareholders (consider, for a moment, the paradox of skyrocketing corporate profits versus record long-term joblessness, obesity, or carbon emissions). The problem isn’t, when you think about it, that corporations are dysfunctional. The problem is the very opposite: it’s that maximizing near-term profit, no matter what, is exactly what the modern corporation was made to do — and is bound to do.

Rebuilding our base of organizational capital means reinventing our most heavily utilized kind of organization, the corporation, to do bigger, better, more enduring things. How might we do it? By creating private-public partnerships to seed and invest new kinds of corporations. Consider the groundswell of states passing legislation for B corporations, a new kind of corporation which balances shareholder value and social returns, instead of prioritizing one over the other. Authentic prosperity depends on what I sometimes call “forporations”: more efficient, effective corporate forms “for” the pursuit of more meaningful, disruptive goals than just near-term financial gain; that exist “for” the benefit of more than just shareholders.”