Date: 2025-07-02 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00027872
Understanding Society, the Environment and Economics
Peter Burgess LinkedIn Blogs
The Problem of More and More and More from 2014
Peter Burgess LinkedIn Blogs
The Problem of More and More and More from 2014
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I am making this comment in January 2025 ... a little more than 10 years since I wrote this LinkedIn post!
In some ways, I have failed quite spectacularly with a US President like Donald Trump gaining power in the United States, not once but twice! I thought Trump was unfit for a high position in American politics as far back as the mid-1990s when I observed the Trump organization's development debacle in Atlantic City. While many of the small sub-contractors were bankrupted by Trump business behavior, the Trump organization gained in value. This was obscene ... but it is typical of Trump's approach to everything!
I am writing this in January a few days before Trump will be sworn into office for a second term. I am not optimistic about the immediate future for America ... that is the USA ... nor for the role of the USA in the world at large under Trump.
I am appalled at the number of high profile people who have chosen to align themselves with Trump prior to his 'swearing in' because these people seem to value profit growth and their personal waelth growth over everything else ... people like Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg are in this group, but they are part of a very large community of others who want to stay on the right side of Trump ... perhaps for all the wrong reasons!
I got a very good education in the UK that included the Blundell's boys boarding school and then Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University where I studied engineering ... that is or was, Mechanical Sciences ... and Economics. I followed this with a shortish time involved with management training in heavy engineering industry in Sheffield and then training with Cooper Brothers & Co. (CB&Co) in London to get quallified as a Chartered Accountant! CB&Co became Coopers and Lybrand (C&L) at around the time I qualified in 1965 and eventually morphed into PriceWaterhousCoopers (PWC), a global professional firm, several years later.
I migrated to Canada and then the United States in the late 1960s. Initially I was employed in Canada by H.A.Simons (HAS) in Vancouver, a consulting firm involved with the design and constuction oversight of pulp and paper mills mainly in Canada and the United States. As a 'field accountant' I got to work on two major projects in Texas USA where the main general contractor was Broen & Root (B&R), one of the largest and most influential construction companies in the USA at the time. My most significant impact was related to a smallish study I did early on in the construction work that concluded that the contractor was employing ... and paying ... for more than twice the labor force that our consulting firm had projected for at the planning stage. Late on Thursday evening, the top HAS management discussed my study with the B&R project manager insisting that the project budget should be respected. On Friday the workforce was around 1,400 people. The following Monday, the workforce had reduced to around 700. When the project was completed about two years later, the actual cost was within 2% of the planned cost even though general inflation at the time was substantial.
I had a quite positive corporate career through the late '60s and the 1970s ... at which point I determined that I was well suited to independent consulting work. I expected to do most of my work within the US economy, but that is not what happened. My consulting opportunities were mainly overseas and with organizations like the World Bank and the UN rather than private US based corporate entities. Over a period of nearly 25 years I did assignments in more than 50 countries around the world. I am proud of some of the work that I did, but there was a lot of work that I did and was paid for that I remain aggravated about. While some of the people who work for the big organizations like the World Bank and the UN are truly impressive ... there are many who are not, and for most of the last 50+ years World Bank and UN performance has been far lower than it should have been.
Peter Burgess
June 16, 2014
Most of the measures we use equate winning with having more ... and in the end there is a race to have more and more and more.
This may not be the smartest thing we ever do. At some point more becomes a constraint and a negative rather than being a positive. For most of recent history it was a reasonable thing to equate quality of life and standard of living with having more. There is no question that having more food when you are hungry is a positive, having a house rather than not having, having a refrigerator rather than not having, and so on. But having too much does not add very much if anything, and having new when the existing one still works well my not be all good, if it is good at all.
Productivity ... making more things with less labor ... has been an important part of progress for ever. But this component of progress has become the Achilles heal of modern society because a system that uses profit optimization as the dominant business model is going to invest in productivity and disinvest in people ... and then people are going to get less income ... and then people are going to buy less ... and lose quality of life and standard of living ... and in the long run the society, the economy and the profit potential all suffer catastophically.
The benefits of productivity have to be shared in an optimum way between labor and money capital. Profit maximization is not the optimum way. Conventional accounting works well for money transactions and accounting for profit, but it does not have a way to handle impact on people and planet ... no way to account for externalities. Externalities are important but will remain outside the conversation as long as they are not measured and accounted for.
There are an increasing number of initiatives to improve the reporting of externalities, and this is very good news. My hope is that these initiatives will eventually incorporate all the externalities in a way that is both rigorous and easy to use. So far this has not happened, but in time, I think will emerge.
Perhaps my biggest concern is that much of the thinking is that business profit progress should be at the center of analysis and optimization. Rather, I think that progress should be based on the idea that people are at the center with their quality of life and standard of living is going up and the damage to the planet and the environment is going down. The business organization is an agent for this change ... and playing a big role, but not in itself the purpose of economic activity.
Exciting times ... change may be nearer than we think
Peter Burgess, TrueValueMetrics ... Multi Dimension Impact Accounting