🌿 Why is it so hard for fashion to be “sustainable”? 🤔 📝 SHORT ANSWER: incentives 📜 In 1928, Stalin launched his first “5-year plan”. The goal? Rapidly industrialise the USSR to catch up with the rest of the world and prevent a potential invasion. (SPOILER: It didn’t work. Germany invaded USSR in 1941.) 🌾 A key part of this industrialisation was boosting agricultural output and efficiency, especially grain. 🍞 Stalin needed surplus food to feed the urban workforce essential for industrialisation. He also planned to export excess grain to earn foreign currency for importing industrial machinery and technology. 🚜 The USSR largely failed to increase agricultural output and efficiency. The single biggest reason? Incentives—or the lack thereof. 👨‍🌾 Farmers knew that working harder didn’t lead to greater income or benefits. The “future survival” of the USSR wasn’t a powerful enough incentive for them to work harder and faster. The incentives were misaligned. 🛑 The lack of appropriate incentives in the Soviet-style economy was a common critique by free-market capitalists. 🤔 Ironically, when it comes to climate and sustainability, these same free-market capitalists seem to be borrowing a page from Stalin’s playbook. 📖 🌍 The incentive of the “future survival” of our planet isn’t powerful enough to get governments and corporations to work harder and faster to solve sustainability challenges (both climate and workers’ rights). 🗳️ Democratic governments think in terms of 4 to 5 years. Corporations, typically 3 to 12 months. Even our investment valuation methods (like NPV) often make long-term investments seem less attractive. 📉 💡 If we’re serious about tackling sustainability issues, we need to embed incentives measurable in the same units we use in a predominantly capitalist system—profit. 🎤 As Bono said, “Capitalism isn’t immoral—it’s amoral. It requires our instruction.”