Ben Gomes-Casseres:

Thank you very much, thank you.

This is what I get, right? This is the [chair]? That feels good, feels good!

The topic of today's class is called, Business and Society: Through the Looking Glass.

What I'd like to do is use three mirrors to look at the relationship between business and society.

The big problem: you all know what it is. You can imagine what would happen if we don't do anything.We do know that when you combine capital, labor and resources, you get more productivity. So, even from the point of view of global warming, we know that that combination has also caused the warming. But it can also be a cause for improving it.

So if you have a merger, if you have an alliance or a partnership, and they get together and they start fighting, this is so common because it cannot foresee the future. And so basically, in order to deal with that kind of broken contract, if you will, we have to create governance structures so that you can solve it.

This global warming, it's only the last maybe few years that it's kind of hit a lot of people. So this is an unexpected thing that we need to handle. and we don't have a governance system so far that has created a way to handle that. What worries me is that no part of the system seems to be naturally leading to a way out.

We have not just the global warming problem, but an inequality problem that then leads to political differences that make this governance of a progressive contract to improve things very, very difficult.

So, what do we do about that? Is there a new contract that can help with that?

I do know that Louis Brandeis would want us to have this conversation, and would want us to have this kind of discussion at Brandeis.