Recently I attended #LSE’s “Fixing the Future” lecture—delivered, with exquisite irony in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre—and witnessed a business school rehearse its own innocence. The event promised revolution; it delivered the polished catechism of a so-called “Impact Economy”: market-based governance masquerading as moral ambition, and a mindless, ritualistic invocation of “risk, return and impact” as if social life were a solvable trigonometry.
Beneath the rhetoric lay an unmistakable ontology: impact accounting as a pseudo-moral technology; the conceit that plural, incommensurable goods—justice, dignity, ecosystems, life—can be flattened into a single metric for capital’s benevolent optimisation. It was the old and failed felicific calculus reborn as consultancy science: numerically elegant, normatively perverse; political economy dissolved into epistemic technocracy. An endless litany of “social investment bonds” and “better metrics” crowded out any serious talk of taxes, labour power, wealth distribution, or global extraction regimes structuring the global South. ESG—devised by banks to protect portfolios—was paraded as planetary repair. System thinking, throughput, circularity, or degrowth never surfaced; they do not nicely fit into a dashboard.
The intellectual evasions were all too familiar. A crude utilitarianism, blithely oblivious to its own philosophical bankruptcy. The obligatory, tone-deaf Anglo-Saxon misuse of Adam Smith. And above all, the messianism of private capital: the delusion that social problems are merely under-developed asset classes awaiting financial innovation. Every suffering reimagined as eschatological revenue streams; every harm, a speculative investment opportunity. The ontology of accumulation remains sacred—progressive neoliberalism never to be questioned.
For a fleeting Lacanian instant, the sermon faltered—someone confessed “billionaires are a budget failure”—only for the truth to be instantly disowned. Honest insights are intolerable in the sanctuaries of philanthropic capitalism; they threaten to expose that the system’s contradictions are structural and moral, not merely mismeasured.
And here the indictment is inescapable. Sumantra Ghoshal warned that business schools manufacture theories that degrade practice: value-free, opportunistic, self-fulfilling models that turn organisations into parodies of the human condition. LSE illustrated this with textbook precision. The #ImpactEconomy is a dumb and dangerous greenwashing of capitalism. By moralising capital while refusing to confront power, by replacing politics with asset pricing, by preaching elite financialisation as if it was system change, LSE is not leading—it is laundering. A university that cannot distinguish ethics from accounting doesn't educate its students; it fabricates moral blindness to perpetuate the status quo.
The future doesn’t need "fixing". Our business schools do.
#ImpactEconomy #PoliticalEconomy #BusinessEducation #EthicsInFinance #Leadership