There was much soul-searching at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. Matthew, who was there covering the event for the Economist, was struck by the mixture of gloom and optimism: gloom, because the recovery of the world economy is still fragile at best; optimism, because there is a will to build a better economic system. One of the big opportunities, said WEF founder Klaus Schwab in his closing remarks, is putting values back into capitalism.

This is one of the central themes in our new book The Road from Ruin, which has just been published in America. In it we set out an agenda to build a more stable and sustainable capitalism than the one that collapsed so spectacularly in September 2008. As well as reform of the financial system and the architecture of global governance, we argue that building a better capitalism demands more fundamental changes in how we run businesses. (You can read the introduction to the book here.)

Before the crisis, there was a widely-held assumption that chasing ever-increasing quarterly profits was the best way for business to serve shareholders and society as a whole. The crisis proved this to be false. Business leaders need to think more about the long term. They need to recognise that capitalism does not exist in a vacuum – it cannot survive if our societies are unhealthy and our environment is unsustainable.

In one chapter, ‘The Age of Philanthrocapitalism’, we look at reforms to corporate governance, executive values, pension fund strategies, and even the way we measure success, that would together help build a better capitalism. ”Today it is easy to be cynical about capitalism”, we write. “Nevertheless, over the past decade, for every blinkered banker chasing short-term profit, there has probably been a social entrepreneur, an ethical investor, or a philanthropist trying to find a more sustainable way of making money. If business leaders, shareholders, and consumers want a better capitalism, now may be the best time to remake the system.”