ABSTRACT
A working definition of sustainability is a continued and sustained effort to ensure that institutions central to our lives benefit not only us in the short or medium term but are in existence to benefit our grandchildren and our grandchildrens’ grandchildren. Rather than profit maximization or increasing shareholder wealth as the sole goal, the new teaching is that the corporation should balance risk-taking and profit-making goals with prudent risk management, leading, inter alia, to sustainability. An alternative, and perhaps fancier, exposition of the idea is that “[s]ustainability is defined as the persistence over an apparently indefinite future of certain necessary and desired characteristics of the socio-political system.”
