Vivek Ramaswamy: Corporations owe an implicit debt to society
Author of 'Woke Inc.' joins 'Tucker Carlson Today' to discuss how corporate America is taking over thought
Entrepreneur and author of ‘Woke Inc.’ Vivek Ramaswamy discussed how he began questioning and criticizing the corporate system he came from, ultimately leading him to leave his successful biotech company write a book on corporate America going woke Wednesday on Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Today."
"So I studied molecular biology," Ramaswamy said of his early college career. "I was kind of the nerdy guy in the lab, spent most of my time neck-deep in the lab in college, and you know, that was part of why later I kind of had this itch that I had never really fully scratched in law and political philosophy and all that stuff."
So, after working in a biotech investing job for several years, Ramaswamy said he went back to law school and began reflecting on what he thought about both law and public policy. It was these reflections that led him to write "Woke Inc."
Ramaswamy also said he noticed a change in corporations' priorities - rather than focusing on making products for profit, they began taking into consideration the need to "represent the interests of all stakeholders."
Stakeholders, he noted, is a more expansive term than just financial investors, and can include entities like the Chinese government.
"Is it minorities? Is it people of color? Is it the Communist Party of China? Turns out I think the last one is actually a pretty darn important stakeholder that not a lot of people talk about when they talk about stakeholders, but I got curious about this," he said.
Ramaswamy's curiosity led to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal discussing how this new stakeholder-based model breaks away with old-school economists.
"What it's really saying is that people like me, CEOs, investors, people who control the dollars our economy, get to not only control the marketplace of products but also get to control the marketplace of ideas."
Ramaswamy continued, "So the moral questions about whether or not to prioritize carbon emissions versus the price paid for consumer products, or whether one conception of diversity of ideas is more or less important than the visible diversity that we have on a corporate board, those are questions that we all ought to have a stake in because they're questions about defining how our society works."
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