‘Clean Rich’ vs. ‘Dirty Rich’

John Elkington

August 31, 2010

While preparing for a speech I have to do in a couple of weeks in Buenos Aires, to an audience of younger members of multi-generational family businesses from across Latin America, I received a tweet from Vinod Khosla. He spotlighted the growing clash between the ‘Clean Rich’ and the ‘Dirty Rich’, who are under growing pressure as the Green Economy builds momentum. He referred out to this article in the Washington Post, written by David Callahan of the US think-tank Demos.

The dirty-rich tend to be older – and are fading from the Forbes 400 and lists of the seriously wealthy, as economic transformation proceeds. And one of the implications that is most interesting to Volans is that this seismic shift in how wealth is created is  undermining the lobbying efforts of older, less sustainable industries, among them the auto, steel and mining sectors.

This trend promises (or threatens if you are dirty rich) to fuel some of the great transitions outlined in three recent Volans reports: The Phoenix Economy, The Transparent Economy and The Biosphere Economy.