Christian Felber is an Austrian activist, book writer, university lecturer, international speaker and contemporary dancer. He initiated the Economy for the Common Good movement and the project Bank for the Common Good. The Economy for the Common Good is a young social movement and a concrete model for a new economy that started five years ago in Austria. It is applied by 1,400 companies from 20 nations and more than 150 local groups on all continents, with a focus on Europe and South America so far. The ECG collaborates with economic, political and cultural pioneers such as companies, municipalities and universities (e. g. the international outdoor company VAUDE, Sparda Bank Munich, organic tea producer Sonnentor, the Technical University of Applied Sciences of Nuremberg or the region of Marburg-Biedenkopf in Hesse/Germany). The English edition of the Economy for the Common Good was published in June 2015 under the title “Change Everything. Creating an Economy for the Common Good” (revised edition upcoming in 2026 at Bloomsbury). Felber has written 17 books and gives inspiring speeches – so far in 35 countries in Europe and other continents, including at the European Parliament, the Chilean government, and TEDx.
What problem in the current economic system motivated you to create the Economy for the Common Good? Has that motivation changed over time?
The core motivation was the realization that our economic system is not only solving problems; it is also creating many of them. The most obvious one for me was ecological destruction. I was working on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and kept asking: what is the root cause behind this?
Following that question led me to the economic system itself. When I looked more deeply, I saw that our current economy is built on principles that are not only different from, but actually opposed to, the fundamental values of our liberal democracies.
Corporate capitalism, especially the US model, is based on principles like:
- utility maximization and egoism
- competition orientation
- financial goals above all else
- consumerism, materialism, and endless growth
I call these pseudo-values. None of them appears in democratic constitutions. If you read constitutions, you find values like:
- human dignity
- solidarity
- social justice
- sustainability
- democracy
These are the values we use in the Common Good Balance Sheet. And they are not just different from egoism, competition and endless growth — they are opposed to them. Egoism clashes with human dignity, competition clashes with solidarity, and endless growth clashes with sustainability.
In that sense, our mainstream economics is almost anti-constitutional: it is based on a value system that has never been democratically legitimized. Economists often claim their science is “value-free,” but that is simply untrue. It is a kind of self-deception and a betrayal of the audience.
So, I asked: What would an economy look like if it were aligned with the values actually enshrined in constitutions and human rights charters? From there, I began to redesign the familiar elements — markets, companies, money, credit, even private property — so that they serve those constitutional values and are limited by them.
I have nothing against markets, companies, money or property as such. But they must be designed and regulated in a way that serves the common good. With one restriction: Markets should not be the only stage of the economy; we also need commons, households, and public goods. All of these should pursue the same overarching goal: the common good.
The second pillar of my analysis is historical. Aristotle had already defined the true economy as striving for the well-being of all household members — the common good — with money as a mere means. When the means becomes the goal, Aristotle says, it is no longer economy; it is chrematistics, the art of making money and enriching oneself. Today we call this capitalism.
So, capitalism has put the economy on its head: accumulating capital is treated as the goal of “the economy,” while the original meaning — serving the common good — is forgotten or obscured in textbooks. Our project is simply to restore the original meaning: an economy that serves the common good.
Once you re-center the common good as the goal, everything follows quite organically:
- a Common Good Product for national accounting,
- a Common Good Balance Sheet for companies,
- and a Common Good test for investments.
Only investments and business practices that do not harm human dignity, the environment, the social fabric or democracy should receive financing. If they pass this “common-good exam,” the outcome is sustainable by definition.
Sometimes I’m almost embarrassed by how simple this is. But the job of an ideology is to hide the obvious. And because I was not trained as an economist, I had a wider horizon and could more easily see through the ideology / ideological fog.
The Common Good Balance Sheet evaluates companies beyond financial profit. Which indicators or dimensions do you see as most transformative?
We work with several levels:
- Values – for example, human dignity, solidarity, justice, sustainability, democracy.
- Goals – these translate values into something operational, like “decent working conditions.”
- Aspects / Sub-goals – more focused components of those goals that are described qualitatively
- Indicators – precise, measurable metrics that help determine us to what degree those sub-goals are achieved.
For instance, under the goal of decent working conditions, sub-goals could include:
- safe and healthy workplaces
- employee participation and co-determination
- flexible, family-friendly time arrangements
- meaningful work
Indicators for these might include:
- number of work accidents
- days of illness
- employee turnover
- participation rates in decision-making
However, I think the sub-goals themselves are more transformative than the individual indicators. Let me give three key examples.
- The meaning of the product
Products and services should be meaningful: means that they should satisfy basic human needs, not just any desire. To ground this scientifically, we use Manfred Max-Neef’s taxonomy of basic human needs, which is closely related to Maslow, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, but more up-to-date and better elaborated.
A product is then evaluated on:
- how strongly it contributes to satisfying a real basic need,
- how low its ecological impact is in doing so,
- and how socially harmonious its production and use are.
Take mobility: the basic need is not “car ownership” but being able to reach three key daily destinations (work, social ties, leisure & Nature) in a simple, low-resource, low-time way. Research suggests humans have historically had about three trips per day, around 20–30 minutes each. The most efficient way of satisfaction of this need is walking, followed by biking and good public transport.
A company selling SUVs and claiming to satisfy “mobility” may actually be creating traffic whose infrastructure and infrastructure-related settlement structures reduce mobility. Consequently, in our framework, a car manufacturer might well score negatively on the meaningfulness of products.
- Ecological design of products
The benchmark is nature: ecosystems produce no waste and no harmful emissions — not solid, not liquid, not gaseous. That is the standard against which man-made products should be evaluated. The closer a product comes to that, the higher it scores. - Distribution of property
This is an aspect almost no other tool measures. If you take social justice and equal opportunity seriously, you must ask how ownership is distributed. Our tool explicitly evaluates this. It’s a very powerful and underused lever.
So the transformative power lies in evaluating not just how a company operates, but what it produces, how it designs its products ecologically, and how it distributes ownership and power, to address but a few ethical key features.
Over 1400 organizations have used the Common Good Balance Sheet. What have been some of the most significant outcomes — expected or unexpected?
One unexpected pattern was that some of the pioneers in organic food and ecology — companies with excellent environmental performance — had surprisingly autocratic internal cultures and very low scores on democracy.
The good news is that many of them were open to this finding and started changing:
- involving employees more,
- discussing new ownership structures,
- even considering moving towards steward-ownership or cooperatives.
Another example: one company believed they “never fly” and were very climate-conscious. When they actually measured their flights, they discovered they were flying the equivalent of twice around the globe. They were shocked and quickly reduced their flight budget to zero, shifting to video conferencing.
There are also more subtle cultural changes:
- Logistics and consumer sufficiency
Some companies now actively ask customers whether they really need a product, and whether they need it now. This leads to options like:- “I need it now.”
- “I need it, but later.”
- “I need something different you can sell me.”
- “I need something you cannot sell me.”
Sometimes the real need is not a product at all but connection, care or experiences of aliveness. Companies that send customers to competitors sometimes receive customers back from those competitors — this is structural cooperation instead of structural competition.
- Employee-designed fairness
A hotel in Italy used the process to tackle a “small” but symbolic question: how to fairly distribute tips between staff who interact with guests and those who don’t. Management simply mandated that employees design their own fair system. They did, it was implemented, and it works. - Pay transparency and pay ratios
Some companies introduced salary transparency and started reducing the ratio between highest and lowest pay. We encourage ratios like 3:1, 5:1, or 7:1, and find it very hard to justify anything above 10:1. Compared to CEOs earning 800–900 times the lowest wage, this is a radical cultural shift, and a major contribution to stronger social cohesion and deeper trust.
Even though not every company becomes a non-profit overnight, almost all who use the Balance Sheet start changing something fundamental — governance, ownership, ecological practices, internal justice, or external communication.
Are governments starting to adopt the Common Good Balance Sheet or similar principles?
Yes, but the movement starts locally and moves upward. Our main proposal is that governments align all economic policy instruments with the common good. That includes:
- Public procurement – giving preference to companies with high Common Good scores.
- Economic promotion – subsidies and support tied to common-good performance.
- Taxation and tariffs – not like Trump’s tariffs, but ethical tariffs that incentivize sustainable and fair practices.
- Finance conditions – ethical banks already practice this to some degree, giving the best loan conditions to the most responsible companies.
In a truly common-good–oriented economy, as soon as a company demonstrably harms human dignity, the environment or democracy, it should not receive any public or private financing. It’s simply not sustainable business, and strictly speaking, it’s no longer “economy” in Aristotle’s sense.
This is where the Common Good Balance Sheet becomes a practical tool for public policy: it offers a coherent, value-based metric for steering the whole economy.
Some argue that the “Common Good” is too subjective or culturally dependent. How do you respond?
Every economic model is value-based and therefore “subjective.” There is no value-free economics. The only real question is: Which values do we choose?
The current model, despite claiming to be positivistic and value-free, is built on a very specific value system — utility maximization, competition, materialism, endless growth. That is one subjectively chosen system of values.
The difference with the Economy for the Common Good is that our values — human dignity, solidarity, justice, sustainability, democracy — have been collectively agreed upon and enshrined in:
- national constitutions,
- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
- the Earth Charter, and other international documents.
So yes, they are “subjective” in a philosophical sense, but they are democratically legitimized and objectivized through law.
There is no “natural” definition of the common good. It must always be defined by a community, in a specific place and time, through a democratic process. That is exactly what we support.
Can large multinational corporations authentically transform towards the common good, or do we need entirely new forms of enterprise?
Multinationals and all legal forms of companies are entirely human creations. Private property and corporate law are 100% man-made and culturally defined. That means we can change them 99.9% and end up with something completely different.
So yes, multinationals can be transformed. A shareholder company, for example, is not doomed by nature to maximize shareholder profit. The “design error” is the legal stipulation that its purpose is to fulfill the financial interests of shareholders. Change that, and you change everything.
You could, for instance:
- redefine the purpose of a shareholder company as serving the common good,
- change voting rights so that one shareholder equals one vote, not one dollar equals one vote,
- introduce strong limits on size and power concentration.
At some point, such a transformed shareholder company might look very similar to a cooperative. But the key point is: we can redesign all legal forms to be common good–oriented.
What about profit itself, especially profits built on human suffering? Should there be a line beyond which profit is not allowed?
The Common Good Balance Sheet is designed to prevent companies from generating profits in immoral ways — by causing suffering or violating fundamental values. If they do, they receive low or negative scores and, in a mature system, would lose access to finance, subsidies, public contracts, and so on.
But even ethically earned profits raise a second question: What are they used for?
In my work I propose distinguishing between:
- allowed uses of financial profits and
- not allowed uses of financial profits
This should apply to all legal forms — cooperatives, shareholder companies, limited companies, etc.
For example, it could be legitimate to use profits for:
- reinvestment in meaningful, sustainable activities,
- fair wages and social protection,
- innovation that serves basic needs.
And illegitimate to use profits for:
- speculation and purely financial games and gains,
- political capture and lobbying against democracy,
- extreme personal enrichment disconnected from real value creation.
So, the transformation requires both:
- stopping unethical profit-making, and
- regulating the uses of profit in line with the common good.
Finally, what is the most critical job of leadership today, and what is blocking us from the transformation you’re describing?
The biggest obstacle is economic education — in schools, business schools and university faculties of economics and business administration.
Students are still taught an image of the human being as homo economicus — isolated, egoistic, utility-maximizing — and an understanding of “the economy” whose ultimate goals are GDP growth, profit and financial return on investment.
From an Aristotelian perspective, most of what we call “economics” today is actually chrematistics — the art of making money. If these are public universities, then chairs that teach GDP, profit maximization and financial ROI as final goals should honestly label themselves “Chairs of Capitalism” or “Chrematistics,” not “Economics.” Only those who teach the economy as serving the common good are really teaching economics in the classical sense.
A good leader, in my view, should be:
- a kind of moral philosopher,
- with basic understanding of ecosystems and life sciences,
- literate in democracy and gender equality,
- and capable of decolonial thinking.
Such a leader would start by asking:
- Which values do we stand for?
- Which goals follow from these values?
And they would refuse to treat means — money, capital, financial returns — as the primary goals. The primary goal must be a true value like dignity or the common good.
We are simply not trained to think this way. We’re not taught to define the common good, to talk about it, or to strive for it in business and economics. Changing that — especially through education and leadership development — is, I believe, one of the most powerful levers we have.
Thanks so much for your time, and for what you do!
INTERVIEW by Christian Sarkar