Do elections bring about real change? 60% of voters don’t believe so.

In this environment – and one where capitalism is under criticism across the world – what’s the way forward?

Ngaire Woods, Dean, Blavatnik School of Government; Niall Ferguson, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Martin Wolf, Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times and Dambisa Moyo, Global Economist, Mildstorm Group debate what the future might hold.

For more on the future of capitalism, why not check out Professor Schwab’s piece on stakeholder capitalism and the new Davos manifesto?

The one thing you would change?

Paul Polman says we need to change how we view financial markets.

For Niall Ferguson, we need to change how we teach our students about democracy and capitalism, which has gone disasterously wrong.

We need to end short-termism, says Dambisa Moyo.

It’s provocative, but credible control of our borders is vital for democratic capitalism, says Martin Wolf.

Border control

I’m a passionate believer in democracy and capitalism, Wolf makes clear, and I’ve been thinking about their relationship.

There is a tension, the democractic system relates to a territory in which people are citizens, which inspires loyalty. Capitalism, by its nature, is global. The core of this tension, increasingly, comes from the question of who can live in your country.

So, without credible control of borders – movement of people – a vast numer of people will feel their citizenship, a key part of people’s identity, is out of their control.

This doesn’t mean no immigration. It means credible control.

But the question is, how do you do control? What should the policy be? That’s the challenge.

Mayo asks Wolf – does it matter the reason why these people turn up on their doorstep? She also reminds the audience that many people don’t want to leave their own countries, but they have no choice. She urges us not to view the situation in a snapshot, but over the longer term.

Wolf reminds us that he’s the child of refugees, and that he believes very strongly in the principles of refugee and asylum

The logical consequence is that there should be a massive effort to solve the problems that cause these refugee flows and correcting the policy mistakes that led to them, he says.

His view is that if we don’t establish the principle that we can control our borders, we’re going to end up with a serious danger of neo-fascist governments.

Abdication of responsibility

Dambisa Moyo believes that governments have abdicated responsibility in a number of areas – from infrastructure to regulation.

We have a long-list of deep-seated structural problems – technology, population growth, natural resource scarcity, the threat of climate change. These are problem that require long-term thinking.

But we have a system where governments and politicians are rewarded for short-term behaviour.

In a nutshell, she believes corperations are unfairly being put under the spotlight to solve some of these issues.

We need accountability and long-term behaviours in government and public policies.

Woods argues that you need the private and public sector to work together – and Mayo agrees. But, regardless of conversations about what corporations need to do, governments need to create an environment in which corporations will behave – i.e. regulation or policy.

“Until you see government stepping up, until you see politicians taking the mantle and saying we absolutely will not stand for certain behaves and we actually stand for certain values and in terms of trying to address these many issues, I don’t think we will make much head way.”

Financial markets as a tipping point

We have a society with increasing inequality – driven by the economic system, focused on capital in its narrow definition, says Polman. Technology frightening the heck out of people, and climate change that can exaggerate poverty.

Many people felt that banks were too big to fail, but people too small to matter.

Therefore need to move beyond financial capital, to focus also on social and environmental capital. And businesses should care, because if society doesn’t function, neither will business.

We need to work in the system to change the system – and financial markets are the key drivers of change for business.

But progress is underway, explains Polman. We’re at the point now that the cost of not acting is starting to be higher than the cost of acting.

Financial markets should serve society – not the other way round. “We are all responsible for fixing the thing we have created.”

Time for an education

It’s not the repsonsibiity of corporations to address the wide-range of issues we’re concerned with, Ferguson says.

In a truly free society, you have the in-between, organisations that aren’t governed by markets or the states – the civil society.

If we want to address the issues that lie outside the realm of profit-maximising capitalism you have go to civil society.

We don’t live in a two-silo world – and people seem to have forgotten, or not been taught, that.

“Capitalism is the worst of all possible economic systems apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time,” he quips.

Education is therefore letting us down, and the problem is that we don’t understand what we’re talking about. And that’s because we haven’t been taught it properly – with the death of intellectual diversity the central issue.

“We as individual citizens need to recognise it is only through active participation and voluntary associations we can address the range of social problems and discussion here,” he believes.