Toward a Responsible Capitalism: A Need for Financial Education and Social Finance

Abstract

Ralf Dahrendorf, in his paper After the Crisis: Back to the Protestant Ethic ? sought to find the causes that made the society decide to adopt debt-based capitalism while dropping the savings capitalism. He used Max Weber’s pieces to explain how thinking among the members of the society had transformed and how this contributed to the type of capitalism that had dominated the modern world. It is unquestionable that we cannot get into debt indefinitely— says Dahrendorf—but it’s certainly not possible a return to the Protestant ethics. So the key point is in what he calls responsible capitalism that includes the concepts of responsibility and trust and requires that the satisfaction of individual needs falls under a sustainable economic development model. The thesis presented in this paper is that, in order to facilitate the emergence of a new mentality based on responsibility, there should be more economic and social participation that can take place on the one hand, through processes of economic socialization and financial education and, on the other hand, through the selection of alternative financial instruments, particularly the ones which belong to the social finance. The latter includes in the broad sense socially responsible finance and micro-credit and, strictly speaking, the more recent phenomena of crowd funding and social impact investments.