The Hey there everyone is James Lindsay and you are listening to the new Discourses

podcast it's time to talk about the stakeholder model in ESG I really should

probably reflect this off of Klaus Schwab very specifically since he's credited with developing the so-called stakeholder model.

In fact, stakeholder capitalism is his claim to fame. Allegedly he actually cooked this idea up in the 70s.

There are reasons to believe that he didn't cook it up at all, but that he borrowed it from

his mentors at Harvard, the infamous Harvard, namely particularly

Henry Kissinger.

The stakeholder model is a model ultimately of oligarchical

control, which is a big fancy word to say that there are going to be certain

elites who have the secret knowledge of how society is supposed to work and how everything in society is supposed to work and they're going to run everything and they're doing it in the name of these things called

stakeholders. So you would think that you are a stakeholder because they

define stakeholders as everybody who has a stake in the thing.

So if a company produces a product,

whether you want to buy that product,

if you want to buy that product,

you have a stake in them producing the product well.

But if they, you know, say use water or electricity since you also depend on water and electricity and resources are in some sense finite

You're a stakeholder in how they run their corporation that way too if they produce pollution

near a stakeholder in their environmental damage.

So everybody's a stakeholder, but that means

that really nobody's a stakeholder

and what they actually are doing is selecting

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