You can often hear the world of nature and the world of business described with the same clichés: "dog eat dog", "survival of the fittest", etc. These clichés are simplifications of the theory* of evolution, so it follows that perhaps evolution could be applied to business, and not just nature.
Evolution can most simply be described as the tendency for more fit individuals to be more likely to reproduce, thus increasing the density of their genes in the gene pool. In the business-nature analogy, each business is a species, with its habits reinforced or eliminated based on the effects on profits.
Have you ever wondered why websites love to display articles on multiple pages or slides? It's because doing so gives them more page views, which makes them more appealing for advertisers, thus providing them with more funding to keep producing content. A website that keeps things on one page loses this advantage and is thus less likely to survive, and we end up with an internet full of poorly designed websites. As another example, there is a tendency for new companies to follow the lead of existing successful companies since they have a proven business model ("It's like Uber, but for..."). This is similar to, for example, the ability to fly appearing in a wide range of animals, across mammals, birds and insects. Of course that isn't intentional as with the businesses, but they both show a tendency for traits with clear advantages to manifest themselves in more than just one instance.
While it's fun to rattle off examples of parity, this analogy is more than just an interesting thought. It can also give insights that are valuable to creating a better world. The most fundamental is the fact that all species and businesses are formed in an environment, by that environment, to thrive in that environment. If you want to change the businesses, you have to first change the environment that they operate in.
One example of a bad tendency in businesses that most people recognize needs to change is their emissions. I mainly focus on that issue here, but there are, of course, plenty of other widespread issues. You can wish all you want that businesses would stop polluting the air so much, but the fact still remains that, in their current environment, doing so would cost them money and make them less profitable. A less profitable company is more likely to fail, and those darn pollution-heavy companies will remain on top. If we want to stop companies from polluting, we have to create an environment that makes them evolve to do so. Trusting them to "do the right thing" is somewhere between naïve and ignorant.
If we are able to force the evolution of businesses to meet our needs, that would be analogous to artificial selection - one means of driving evolution. Doing so is actually quite simple. All we need to do is create an environment that provides economic incentive to behave in whatever manner we are aiming for. There are two clear ways of doing so. The first mirrors the creation of what may be the world’s favorite artificially selected organisms: the dog.
Dogs evolved from an ancestor shared with today’s grey wolf through human intervention. For that species, individuals that were less fierce than the rest would normally die off because they would struggle to acquire food. When around humans, however, those individuals would be less likely to be fought off, and eventually fed by the humans in order to keep them as protection. Without humans consciously favoring and supporting them, the friendlier individuals never would have been able to thrive and evolve into dogs. The same principle can be applied to a specific subset of business.
Companies like Patagonia and TOMS strive to be friendlier to society as a whole, but their profitability is decreased because of it. They rely on the goodwill of consumers to stay alive, rather than exclusively excelling financially. It is valuable for consumers who can afford it to favor these kinds of companies, and thus “feed the wolves” that will evolve to be dogs.
The second way to create an environment for socially conscious businesses to form is to offer formal incentives for doing so. For example, the tax code could be changed so the rate a company pays depends heavily on their emissions. Free market fans may be hesitant about this idea, but it really isn’t radical. It in no way obstructs a company's ability to make its own decisions, it just makes them more likely to choose the option that won't ruin a bunch of peoples' homes and lives. Sure, full-on, unrestrained capitalism is good at fostering economically effective companies, but what people often fail to acknowledge is that economically effective companies aren’t necessarily what are best for society. And by creating an environment able to produce responsible companies rather than actually controlling the companies, capitalism can still be maintained while improving the overall state of society.
So, for those of us that can afford it, it's a good idea to feed the wolves, but believing consumers can drive this change purely with their wallets is only slightly less naïve & ignorant than trusting companies to "do the right thing" in the first place. The amount of wealth inequality in the United States today means many people are living in poverty, or at the very least paycheck-to-paycheck. Those people will not have the luxury of buying more expensive goods just because they're produced sustainably. They'll instead buy whatever is cheapest, which, absent government intervention, is going to be the unsustainably-produced good, meaning there will always be demand that props up unsustainable companies. The only way to change this would be to eliminate poverty, which would require progressive, big-government initiatives. Regardless of whether or not those initiatives would be beneficial, the only politicians who would deliver such changes would almost certainly also add incentives for businesses to become sustainable. So ultimately, consumers will never drive widespread change in industry through their purchasing habits alone. Thus, we also need to use our government to create an economic ecosystem where it's more profitable to operate in a way that benefits society, rather than harming society to benefit the shareholders.
* - The term "theory" in a scientific context means nearly the opposite of "theory" in common speech. In science, a theory is something that you can demonstrate repeatedly, and has withstood scrutiny from others to become commonly held knowledge. It is most certainly not just a guess.
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