If ever a story deserved to be filed under the heading “irony” it is the one about a “caring capitalism” summit ending in a bitter legal dispute among the organisers over money. Thursday’s Evening Standard reports that Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild – the former financier, director of Estee Lauder and the Economist and member of one of the world’s wealthiest families – is suing the charity that helped stage the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism in May, the Henry Jackson Society, on a catalogue of issues, including intellectual property and residual funds and unpaid invoices totalling £187,000.

The world was abuzz in the 90s with conversations of whether capitalism could indeed be “caring”. Companies such as Ben & Jerry’s were leading the way with new corporate concepts and ethical structures. Some academic articles glumly concluded that such new concepts “will be prone to eventual failure and subsumption by fast capitalism”. Twenty years later, while inequality continues to grow and the world is becoming increasingly volatile, we are still having the same conversation. Meanwhile, Ben & Jerry’s has been bought by Unilever.

Capitalism, in its unadulterated form, is not caring. It is not inclusive, responsible or ethical. It is fast, callous, amoral, decisive, aggressive, self-interested and only cares about one thing: the bottom line.

This is not a criticism. It is just how it is built. Attempts to convert it, to make it look further than the short term, evoke the tale of a frog sinking in a river, with a scorpion on its back, asking “but why?”

In any case, genuine conversion was not what was discussed during the May conference. Looking down the list of speakers, which included Prince Charles, Bill Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Mark Carney and an assortment of business leaders, one may note the total absence of global charities, development organisations, environmental champions, radical economists, poverty campaigners or union representatives. This was the rich and powerful talking to the rich and powerful. The sole item on the agenda was to hand-wring about how the individualism, hard-wired into neoliberal economics, has run amok and is now threatening the very people who fostered it for decades.

Multimillionaire Nick Hanauer put it succinctly, if rather colourfully:

“If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out … There are no counterexamples. None.”

This is no purely theoretical argument, either. The most cursory analysis beyond the surface of the “Arab spring” uprisings will find food price volatility at its core, itself the result of rising energy prices, hoarding of stocks, trading of food securities and climate change, at least in large part. The Council on Foreign Relations concluded unequivocally that grain prices were a significant contributing factor to the riots of 2008 and 2011 in Egypt. The pitchforks are out now – just not yet in a high street near you.

The question is whether a shark can be taught moderation. Some have suggested that there are compelling economic reasons of self-interest why it must. That companies with a “conscience” actually do better in the long run when they stand together. Others, like Joseph Thorndike, are less optimistic: “Hanauer is right: Inequality is dangerous, and rich people should get serious about dealing with it. But that doesn’t mean they will. After all, they never have before.”

On the day we celebrate GDP getting to pre-crisis levels, while inflation continues to outstrip wage rises, we are on average getting poorer and poorer in real terms, it is clear that the system is broken for the many. Innovative solutions are needed and, if they are to be found, the remaining 99% would have to be included in the conversation. If a summit on “caring capitalism”, organised by the 1% for the 1%, can descend into legal farce over £187,000, the prospect of the rich somehow coming together voluntarily, consciously and collectively to decide to loosen their grip on the world’s wealth, seems very remote indeed.