Right Size Profits:
Instead of attempting to maximise and continually grow profits firms should aim to achieve “right-size profits”. A firm’s total revenue should be large enough to allow it to be financially viable (i.e. to meet capital costs) but not so large as to cause environmental damage. An individual firm would require two new pieces of information to determine whether it was achieving right-size profits: (1) a measure of
its total ecological impact and (2) an ecological allowance to compare this impact to.
A steady state economy will also require a shift towards alternative forms of business organisation such as co-operatives foundations and community interest companies.
These organisational forms are not pre-occupied by growth in the same way as profit-maximising shareholder corporations. The primary goal of community interest companies for example is to achieve a socially beneficial aim; financial profit is a
secondary motive. Policy makers should encourage these alternative forms of business by (1) making it simpler to set up (or change to) these forms and (2) by taxing away excess profits in shareholder corporations.