And the more we grow, the more we eat away at the web of life on which we all depend.

We have known about this problem for decades now, but we’ve been told not to worry: As technology improves and becomes more efficient, we’ll be able to keep growing the economy while nonetheless reducing our impact on the natural world. The technical term for this is “green growth,” which requires absolute decoupling of GDP from material use. According to the theory, we can speed this process along by incentivizing innovation; if we tax carbon emissions and material extraction, we can spur companies to invest in more efficient tech.

It sounds great, it’s promoted at the highest levels by tech billionaires like Elon Musk and international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations, and it sits right at the center of big global plans like the Paris Climate Accord and the Sustainable Development Goals. We’re all hanging our collective future on this hope. But is it really possible?

Here’s the magic number: 50 billion tons. That’s how much of the Earth’s materials and life forms we can safely use each year. That includes everything from wood to plastic, fish to livestock, minerals to metals: all the physical stuff that we consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year–way over the limit. So for growth to be green, we need to somehow get back down to 50 billion tons despite expanding the GDP.

When green growth theory was first proposed, there was no evidence on whether it would actually work–it was purely speculative. But over the past few years, three major studies have set out to examine this question. All have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under best-case scenario conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP growth from material use is not possible on a global scale.

It was a team of scientists led by Monika Dittrich that first pointed this out. They ran a model showing that under business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. At more than three times the safe limit, that means game over for human civilization as we know it.

Then the team ran the model with the optimistic assumption that every nation on Earth immediately adopts best practice in efficiency, with all the best available technology. The results were a bit better: We would end up hitting 93 billion tons per year by 2050. But that’s not absolute decoupling, and it’s a far cry from anything approaching green growth.

A second team of scientists tested the same question again in 2016, and found that even aggressive measures like a carbon price as high as $250 per ton and a doubling of technological efficiency don’t do the trick. If we keep growing the global economy by 3% each year, they found, we’ll still hit about 95 billion tons by 2050. No absolute decoupling. No green growth.

Finally, last year the United Nations itself weighed in on the debate, hoping to settle the matter once and for all. It modelled a carbon price rising to a whopping $573 per ton, added a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid tech innovation spurred by strong government policy. The results? We hit 132 billion tons by 2050–even worse than the two previous studies found. Worse because this time the scientists included the “rebound effect”in their model. As gains in efficiency reduce the cost of commodities, demand for those commodities goes up, cancelling out some of the reductions in material use.

And let’s not forget: All three of these models use radically optimistic assumptions. We’re a long way from even testing a global carbon tax, much less a tax of $573 per ton; and we’re not on track to double our efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite: Right now our efficiency is getting worse, not better.Why the bad news? The main reason is that tech innovation just doesn’t work the way most of us assume. We know that Moore’s law says that chip performance doubles about every two years–but this doesn’t apply to material use. There are physical limits to material efficiency, and once we start to reach them then the scale effect of growth drives material use back up in the long run. For instance you might be able to produce a wooden table more efficiently, but you can’t produce a table out of nothing. In the end you’ll need a minimum amount of wood, and once you reach that limit, then any growth in table production is going to come along with a corresponding growth in wood use.

It would be hard to overstate the impact of these results. Right now, our only plan for dealing with the ecological emergency that’s staring us in the face is to hope that tech innovation and green growth will mitigate the coming disaster. Yes, we’re going to need all the wizardry we can get–but that alone is not going to be enough. The only real option is in fact much simpler and more obvious: We need to start consuming less.

The tricky bit is that our existing economic operating system–capitalism–has a design flaw at its core. It requires that we produce and consume more and more stuff each year. If we don’t, then firms collapse and people lose their jobs and livelihoods. So it’s time to make room for new systems to emerge–systems that don’t require endless exponential growth just to stay afloat. This is where we need to focus our creative energy, rather than clinging to the false hope of “green growth” fantasies.

There are lots of ways to get there. We could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of a more balanced measure like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which accounts for negative “externalities” like pollution and material depletion. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t pump our system full of interest-bearing debt. And we could start thinking about putting caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the Earth can regenerate.

The old generation of innovators believed that tech would allow us to subdue nature and bend it to our will. Our generation is waking up to a more hopeful truth: that our survival depends not on domination, but on harmony.

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the University of London who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa. He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, is available now.

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In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity of the global economy by about 1.9% per year, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology. That’s a lot. But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise. Right now we’re ratcheting up global GDP by 3% per year, which means we’re headed for trouble.

If we want to have any hope of averting catastrophe, we’re going to have to do something about our addiction to growth. This is tricky, because GDP growth is the main policy objective of virtually every government on the planet. It lies at the heart of everything we’ve been told to believe about how the economy should work: that GDP growth is good, that it’s essential to progress, and that if we want to improve human wellbeing and eradicate poverty around the world, we need more of it. It’s a powerful narrative. But is it true?

Maybe not. Take Costa Rica. A beautiful Central American country known for its lush rainforests and stunning beaches, Costa Rica proves that achieving high levels of human wellbeing has very little to do with GDP and almost everything to do with something very different.

Every few years the New Economics Foundation publishes the Happy Planet Index – a measure of progress that looks at life expectancy, wellbeing and equality rather than the narrow metric of GDP, and plots these measures against ecological impact. Costa Rica tops the list of countries every time. With a life expectancy of 79.1 years and levels of wellbeing in the top 7% of the world, Costa Rica matches many Scandinavian nations in these areas and neatly outperforms the United States. And it manages all of this with a GDP per capita of only $10,000 (£7,640), less than one fifth that of the US.

In this sense, Costa Rica is the most efficient economy on earth: it produces high standards of living with low GDP and minimal pressure on the environment.

How do they do it? Professors Martínez-Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea argue that it’s all down to Costa Rica’s commitment to universalism: the principle that everyone – regardless of income – should have equal access to generous, high-quality social services as a basic right. A series of progressive governments started rolling out healthcare, education and social security in the 1940s and expanded these to the whole population from the 50s onward, after abolishing the military and freeing up more resources for social spending.

Costa Rica wasn’t alone in this effort, of course. Progressive governments elsewhere in Latin America made similar moves, but in nearly every case the US violently intervened to stop them for fear that “communist” ideas might scupper American interests in the region. Costa Rica escaped this fate by outwardly claiming to be anti-communist and – horribly – allowing US-backed forces to use the country as a base in the contra war against Nicaragua.

The upshot is that Costa Rica is one of only a few countries in the global south that enjoys robust universalism. It’s not perfect, however. Relatively high levels of income inequality make the economy less efficient than it otherwise might be. But the country’s achievements are still impressive. On the back of universal social policy, Costa Rica surpassed the US in life expectancy in the late 80s, when its GDP per capita was a mere tenth of America’s.

Today, Costa Rica is a thorn in the side of orthodox economics. The conventional wisdom holds that high GDP is essential for longevity: “wealthier is healthier”, as former World Bank chief economist Larry Summers put it in a famous paper. But Costa Rica shows that we can achieve human progress without much GDP at all, and therefore without triggering ecological collapse. In fact, the part of Costa Rica where people live the longest, happiest lives – the Nicoya Peninsula – is also the poorest, in terms of GDP per capita. Researchers have concluded that Nicoyans do so well not in spite of their “poverty”, but because of it – because their communities, environment and relationships haven’t been ploughed over by industrial expansion.

All of this turns the usual growth narrative on its head. Henry Wallich, a former member of the US Federal Reserve Board, once pointed out that “growth is a substitute for redistribution”. And it’s true: most politicians would rather try to rev up the GDP and hope it trickles down than raise taxes on the rich and redistribute income into social goods. But a new generation of thinkers is ready to flip Wallich’s quip around: if growth is a substitute for redistribution, then redistribution can be a substitute for growth.

Costa Rica provides a hopeful model for any country that wants to chart its way out of poverty. But it also holds an important lesson for rich countries. Scientists tell us that if we want to avert dangerous climate change, high-consuming nations – like Britain and the US – are going to have to scale down their bloated economies to get back in sync with the planet’s ecology, and fast. A widely-cited paper by scientists at the University of Manchester estimates it’s going to require downscaling of 4-6% per year.

This is what ecologists call “de-growth”. This calls for redistributing existing resources and investing in social goods in order to render growth unnecessary. Decommoditising and universalising healthcare, education and even housing would be a step in the right direction. Another would be a universal basic income – perhaps funded by taxes on carbon, land, resource extraction and financial transactions.

The opposite of growth isn’t austerity, or depression, or voluntary poverty. It is sharing what we already have, so we won’t need to plunder the earth for more.

Costa Rica proves that rich countries could theoretically ease their consumption by half or more while maintaining or even increasing their human development indicators. Of course, getting there would require that we devise a new economic system that doesn’t require endless growth just to stay afloat. That’s a challenge, to be sure, but it’s possible.

After all, once we have excellent healthcare, education, and affordable housing, what will endlessly more income growth gain us? Maybe bigger TVs, flashier cars, and expensive holidays. But not more happiness, or stronger communities, or more time with our families and friends. Not more peace or more stability, fresher air or cleaner rivers. Past a certain point, GDP gains us nothing when it comes to what really matters. In an age of climate change, where the pursuit of ever more GDP is actively dangerous, we need a different approach.

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What’s most disturbing about this litany of pain is that it’s only going to get worse. A recent paper in the journal Nature estimates that our chances of keeping global warming below the danger threshold of 2 degrees is now vanishingly small: only about 5 per cent. It’s more likely that we’re headed for around 3.2 degrees of warming, and possibly as much as 4.9 degrees. If scientists are clear about anything, it’s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic. Indeed, there’s a good chance that it would render large-scale civilization impossible.

If scientists are clear about anything, it’s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic

Why are our prospects so bleak? According to the paper’s authors, it’s because the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being more than cancelled out by economic growth. In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity (CO2 per unit of GDP) of the global economy by about 1.9 per cent per year, they say, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology. That’s a lot. But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise. Right now we’re ratcheting up global GDP by 3 per cent per year. At that rate, the maths is not in our favour; on the contrary, it’s slapping us in the face.

In fact, according to new models published last year, with a background rate of 3 per cent GDP growth it’s not possible to achieve any level of emissions reductions at all, even under best-case-scenario conditions. Study after study shows the same thing: keeping global warming below 2 degrees is simply not compatible with continued economic growth.

This is a tough pill to swallow. After all, right now GDP growth is the primary policy objective of virtually every government on Earth. Over in Silicon Valley, tech-optimists are hoping that a miracle of artificial intelligence might allow us to decarbonise the economy by 3 per cent or more per year, so we can continue growing the GDP while reducing emissions. It sounds wonderful. But remember, the goal is not just to reduce carbon emissions – the goal is to reduce them dramatically, and fast. How fast, exactly? Climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows say that if we want to have even a mere 50 per cent chance of staying under 2 degrees, rich nations are going to have to cut emissions by 8-10 per cent per year, beginning in 2015.  Keep in mind we’re already two years in, and so far our emissions reductions have been zero.

Keeping global warming below 2 degrees is simply not compatible with continued economic growth

Here’s the hard bit. It’s just not possible to achieve emissions reductions of 8-10 per cent per year by decarbonising the economy. In fact, there is a strong scientific consensus that emissions reductions of this rate are only feasible if we stop our mad pursuit of economic growth and do something totally unprecedented: begin to scale down our annual production and consumption. This is what ecologists call ‘planned de-growth’

It sounds horrible, at first glance. It sounds like austerity, or voluntary poverty. After all, for decades we’ve been told that GDP growth is good, that it’s essential to progress, and that if we want to eradicate poverty around the world, we need more of it. The only reason we’re all chasing GDP growth is because we’ve been made to believe that it’s the only way to improve the incomes and lives of ordinary people. But it’s not.

Politicians and economists rally around GDP growth because they see it as preferable to redistribution. They would rather grow the pie than go about the messy business of sharing what we already have more equally, since the latter tends to upset rich people. Henry Wallich, a former member of the US Federal Reserve Board, made this clear when he pointed out that ‘Growth is a substitute for equality’. But we can flip Wallich’s greedy little quip on its head: if growth is a substitute for equality, then equality can be a substitute for growth. By sharing what we already have more fairly, we can render additional economic growth unnecessary.

The only reason we’re all chasing GDP growth is because we’ve been made to believe that it’s the only way to improve the incomes and lives of ordinary people. But it’s not.

In this sense, de-growth is nothing at all like austerity. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Austerity means cutting social spending and slashing taxes on the rich in order to – supposedly – keep the economy growing. This has crushing consequences for ordinary people’s lives. De-growth, by contrast, calls for cutting the excesses of the richest while redistributing existing resources and investing in social goods – universal healthcare, education, affordable housing etc. The whole point is to sustain and even improve human wellbeing without the need for endless economic expansion. De-growth is a philosophy that insists that our economy is already more than abundant enough for all of us – if only we learn how to share it.

One easy way to do this would be to roll out a universal basic income and fund it through new progressive taxes – taxes on carbon, on land, on resource use, on financial transactions, and so on. This is the most sensible and elegant way to share our abundance, and it comes with an added benefit: if the basic income is high enough, it will free people to walk away from unnecessary jobs that produce unnecessary stuff, releasing some of the pressure on our planet.

Crucially, de-growth does not mean we have to get rid of the stock of stuff that we already have, as a nation: houses, furniture, shoes, museums, railways, whatever. In fact, it doesn’t even mean that we have to stop producing and consuming new stuff. It just means we have to reduce the amount of new stuff that we produce and consume each year. When you see it this way, it’s really not so threatening. If we degrow by 5 per cent per year (which is what scientists say is necessary), that means we have to cut our consumption of new stuff by 5 per cent. It’s easy to make up for that by just repairing and reusing stuff we already have. And we can encourage this more creative approach to stuff by curbing advertising, like Sao Paulo, Chennai and other cities have done.

Of course, there are deeper, more structural dimensions of our economy that we will have to change. One of the reasons we need growth is to pay off all the debt that’s sloshing around in our economy. In fact, our entire money system is based on debt: more than 90 per cent of the currency circulating in our economy is loans created out of thin air by commercial banks. The problem with debt is that it comes with interest, and to pay off interest at a compound rate we have to work, earn, and sell more and more each year. In this sense, every dollar of new money we create heats up the planet. But cancel the debt and shift to a debt-free currency, and suddenly we don’t have to labour under this relentless pressure. There are already plenty of ideas out there for how to do this.

Still, we have to be honest with ourselves: : the Stern Review projects that climate change is set to cost us 5-20 per cent of global GDP per year, which is going to violently change our economy beyond all recognition, and cause enormous human suffering in the process. The storms that churned across the Atlantic this summer are only a small taste of what is to come. The choice is clear: either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

Jason Hickel

Dr Jason Hickel is an anthropologist who works on political economy and global justice. He is the author of a number of books, including most recently The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions(Penguin 2017). In addition to his academic work, he writes a column on global issues for The Guardian. Jason is a founding member of The Rules collective and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

He tweets at @jasonhickel.

Reposted from IPS Journal

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But question capitalism in public and you’re likely to get some angry responses. People immediately assume that you want to see socialism or communism instead. They tell you to go and live in Venezuela, the current flogging-horse for socialism, or they hit you with dreary images of Soviet Russia with all its violence, dysfunction, and gray conformity. They don’t consider that you might want something beyond caricatures and old dogmas.

These old “isms” lurk in the shadows of any discussion on capitalism. The cyber-punk author William Gibson has a term for this effect: “semiotic ghosts”–one concept that haunts another, regardless of any useful or intended connection.

There’s no good reason to remain captive to these old ghosts. All they do is stop us having a clearheaded conversation about the future. Soviet Russia was an unmitigated social and economic disaster; that’s easy to dispel. But, of course, not all experiments with socialist principles have gone so horribly wrong. Take the social democracies of Sweden and Finland, for example, or even postwar Britain and the New Deal in the U.S. There are many systems that have effectively harnessed the economy to deliver shared prosperity.But here’s the thing. While these systems clearly produce more positive social outcomes than laissez-faire systems do (think about the record-high levels of health, education, and well-being in Scandinavian countries, for example), even the best of them don’t offer the solutions we so urgently need right now, in an era of climate change and ecological collapse. Right now we are overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity by a crushing 64% each year, in terms of our resource use and greenhouse gas emissions.

The socialism that exists in the world today, on its own, has nothing much to say about this. Just like capitalism, it relies on endless exponential GDP growth, ever-increasing levels of extraction and production and consumption. The two systems may disagree about how best to distribute the yields of a plundered Earth, but they do not question the process of plunder itself.

Fortunately, there is already a wealth of language and ideas out there that stretch well beyond these dusty old binaries. They are driven by a hugely diverse community of thinkers, innovators, and practitioners. There are organizations like the P2P (Peer to Peer) Foundation, Evonomics, the Next System Project, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking reimagining the global economy. The proposed models are even more varied: from complexity, to post-growth, de-growth, land-based, regenerative, circular, and even the deliciously named doughnut economics.

Then, there are the many communities of practice, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the barter economies of Detroit, from the global Transition Network, to Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness index. There are even serious economists and writers, from Jeremy Rifkin to David Flemming to Paul Mason, making a spirited case that the evolution beyond capitalism is well underway and unstoppable, thanks to already active ecological feedback loops and/or the arrival of the near zero-marginal cost products and services. This list barely scratches the surface.

The thinking is rich and varied, but all of these approaches share the virtue of being informed by up-to-date science and the reality of today’s big problems. They move beyond the reductionist dogmas of orthodox economics and embrace complexity; they focus on regenerating rather than simply using up our planet’s resources; they think more holistically about how to live well within ecological boundaries. Some of them draw on indigenous knowledge and lore about how to stay in balance with nature; others confront the contradictions of endless growth head on.

Not all would necessarily describe themselves as anti- or even post-capitalist, but they are all, in one way or another, breaking through the dry seals of neoclassical economic theory upon which capitalism rests.
Still, resistance to innovation is strong. One reason is surely that our culture has been stewed in capitalist logic for so long that it feels impregnable. Our instinct is now to see it as natural; some even go so far as to deem it divine. The notion that we should prioritize the production of capital over all other things has become a kind of common sense; the way humans must organize.

Another reason, clearly linked, is the blindness of much of the academic world. Take, for example, the University of Manchester, where a group of economics students asked for their syllabus to be upgraded to account for the realities of a post-crash world. Joe Earle, one of the organizers of what the Guardian described as a “quiet revolution against orthodox free-market teaching” told the newspaper: “[Neoclassical economics] is given such a dominant position in our modules that many students aren’t even aware that there are other distinct theories out there that question the assumptions, methodologies, and conclusions of the economics we are taught.”In much the same way as House minority leader Nancy Pelosi rebuffed college student Trevor Hill when he asked whether the Democratic Party would consider any alternatives to capitalism, Manchester University’s response was a flat no. Their economics course, they said, “focuses on mainstream approaches, reflecting the current state of the discipline.” Mainstream, current, anything but fresh. Such attitudes have spawned a global student movement, Rethinking Economics, with chapters as far afield as Ecuador, Uganda, and China.

Capitalism has become a dogma, and dogmas die very slowly and very reluctantly. It is a system that has co-evolved with modernity, so it has the full force of social and institutional norms behind it. Its essential logic is even woven into most of our worldviews, which is to say, our brains. To question it can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities.

But even if you believe it was once the best system ever, you can still see that today it has become necrotic and dangerous. This is demonstrated most starkly by two facts: The first is that the system is doing little now to improve the lives of the majority of humans: by some estimates, 4.3 billion of us are living in poverty, and that number has risen significantly over the past few decades. The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism. Let it loose with more deregulation, or give it time and it will raise their incomes too.”

One of the many problems with this last argument is the second fact: With just half of us living above the poverty line, capitalism’s endless need for resources is already driving us over the cliff-edge of climate change and ecological collapse. This ranges from those that are both finite and dangerous to use, like fossil fuels, to those that are being used so fast that they don’t have time to regenerate, like fish stocks and the soil in which we grow our food. Those 4.3 billion more people living “successful” hyper-consumption lifestyles? The laws of physics would need to change. Even Elon Musk can’t do that.

It would be a sad and defeated world that simply accepted the prebaked assumption that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) represents the last stage of human thought; our ingenuity exhausted. Capitalism’s fundamental rules–like the necessity for endless GDP growth, which requires treating our planet as an infinite pit of value and damage to it as an “externality”–can be upgraded. Of course they can. There are plenty of options on the table. When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past?Of course, transcending capitalism might feel impossible right now. The political mainstream has its feet firmly planted and deeply rooted in that soil. But with the pace of events today, the unimaginable can become the possible, and even the inevitable with remarkable speed. The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments, and look at the world with fresh eyes.

We can let the ghosts go. We can allow ourselves the freedom to do what humans do best: innovate.

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Jason Hickel: Every student learns about Magna Carta, the ancient scroll that enshrined the rights of barons against the arbitrary authority of England’s monarchs. But most have never heard of its arguably more important twin, the Charter of the Forest, issued two years later in 1217. This short but powerful document guaranteed the rights of commoners to common lands, which they could use for farming, grazing, water and wood. It gave official recognition to a right that humans nearly everywhere had long just presupposed: that no one should be debarred from the resources necessary for livelihood.

But this right – the right of habitation – came under brutal attack beginning in the 15^th century, when wealthy nobles began fencing off common lands for their own profit. Over the next few centuries, the enclosure movement, as it came to be known, shifted tens of millions of acres into private hands, displacing much of the country’s population. Excluded from the basic means of survival, most were left with no choice but to sell themselves for wages for the first time.

And it wasn’t only England. The same process unfolded across Asia and Africa and most of the global south as European colonisers staked private claim to lands and forests and waterways that were previously held in common, leaving millions dispossessed. In much of the colonial world the goal, or at least the effect, was to drive people into the capitalist labour market, where, in exchange for low wages and poor conditions, they and their descendants would power the mines, plantations and sweatshops for export to the west.

As the era of colonialism came to an end, the governments of many newly independent nations sought to reverse these patterns of historical dispossession with land reform programmes. But they were quickly forced to abandon this approach by big foreign landowners and international creditors. Instead, the new plan for eradicating poverty – the dream of development – came to hinge on drawing people ever deeper into the labour market. Jobs came to be hailed as the salvation of the poor: as the World Bank puts it, “jobs are the surest pathway out of poverty”.

But now this promise is beginning to look hollow. With the rise of robots, robust employment is no longer a realistic hope. We know that automation is a real threat to jobs in the global north, but the threat is much worse in the south. The main industries there, such as small electronics and textile manufacturing, are some of the easiest to automate. According to a United Nations report, up to two-thirds of jobs in developing countries could disappear in the near future.

This is all bitterly painful, particularly for the postcolonial world. First they were dispossessed of their land and promised jobs instead. Now they will be dispossessed of their jobs, and many will be left with literally no way to survive. Their dispossession will be absolute. Technological unemployment will almost certainly reverse the modest gains against poverty that have been made over the past few decades, and hunger will likely rise.

Governments are scrambling to respond, and they don’t have many options. But one stands out as by far the most promising: a universal basic income.

Once a fringe idea, basic income is now speeding its way into the public imagination. Finland is running a two-year experiment in basic income. Utrecht in the Netherlands is conducting a trial, too. Y Combinator is trying it out in Oakland in the US. Scotland looks likely to follow suit. And cash transfer programmes have already proven to be successful in Namibia, India and dozens of other developing countries, sparking what some scholars have billed as “a development revolution from the global south”. In Brazil, to cite just one example, cash transfers helped to cut poverty rates in half in less than a decade.

But the success of basic income – in both the north and the south – all depends on how we frame it. Will it be cast as a form of charity by the rich? Or will it be cast as a right for all?

Thomas Paine was among the first to argue that a basic income should be introduced as a kind of compensation for dispossession. In his brilliant 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, he pointed out that “the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race”. It was unfair that a few should enclose it for their own benefit, leaving the vast majority without their rightful inheritance. As far as Paine was concerned, this violated the most basic principles of justice.

Knowing that land reform would be politically impossible (for it would “derange any present possessors”), Paine proposed that those with property should pay a “ground rent” – a small tax on the yields of their land – into a fund that would then be distributed to everyone as unconditional basic income. For Paine, this would be a right: “justice, not charity”. It was a powerful idea, and it gained traction in the 19^th century when American philosopher Henry George proposed a “land value tax” that would fund an annual dividend for every citizen.

The beauty of this approach is that it functions as a kind of de-enclosure. It’s like bringing back the ancient Charter of the Forest and the right of access to the commons. It restores the right to livelihood – the right of habitation.

Critics of basic income often get hung up on how to fund it. But once we come to see it as linked to the commons, that problem becomes more tractable. In the US state of Alaska natural resources are considered a commons, owned collectively by the people, so every resident receives an annual dividend from the state’s oil revenues.

The Alaska model is popular and effective, and scholars have pointed out that the same approach could be applied to other natural resources, such as forests and fisheries. It could even be applied to the air, with a carbon tax whose yields would be distributed as a dividend to all. And the upshot is that this approach helps protect commons against overuse, giving our planet some room to regenerate.

Implementing this idea will require political will – but it is far from impossible. In fact, some research indicates that it might be politically easier to implement than other social policies. Even in the US, leading policymakers – including former treasury secretary Henry Paulson and two former Republican secretaries of state – have just put forward a carbon tax and dividend proposal. The idea of a basic income also has broad and growing support from high-profile figures including Elon Musk and Bernie Sanders.

There are risks, of course. Some worry that a basic income will only increase the nativism that is spreading across the world right now. Who will qualify for the transfers? People won’t want to share with immigrants.

It’s a valid concern. But one way to address it is to think in more universal terms. The earth’s natural bounty belongs to all, as Paine pointed out. If the commons know no borders, why should a commons-linked income? Indeed, why should people in resource-rich nations get more than their neighbours in resource-poor ones? A tax on resources and carbon around the world could go into a global fund, in trust for every human. Dividends could be set at $5 per day – the minimum necessary for basic nutrition – corrected for each nation’s purchasing power. Or we could set it at each nation’s poverty line, or some ratio thereof. Scholars are already thinking about how such a system could be designed.

We already know, from existing experiments, that a basic income can yield impressive results – reducing extreme poverty and inequality, stimulating local economies, and freeing people from having to accept slave-like working conditions simply in order to stay alive. If implemented more broadly, it might help eliminate “bullshit jobs” and slash unnecessary production, granting much-needed relief to the planet. We would still work, of course, but our work would be more likely to be useful and meaningful, while any miserable but necessary jobs, like cleaning the streets, would pay more to attract willing workers, making menial work more dignified.

But perhaps most importantly of all, a basic income might defeat the scarcity mindset that has seeped so deep into our culture, freeing us from the imperatives of competition and allowing us to be more open and generous people. If extended universally, across borders, it might help instil a sense of solidarity – that we’re all in this together, and all have an equal right to the planet. It might ease the anxieties that gave us Brexit and Trump, and take the wind out of the fascist tendencies rising elsewhere in nativism that is spreading across much of the world.

We’ll never know until we try. And try we must, or brace ourselves for a 21^st century of almost certain misery.

Cross-posted from the Guardian.

Click here for more Basic Income stories on the P2PF blog.

Additional image by Mr Higgs

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If we want to stay below the upper ceiling of 2 degrees, though, we still have a shot. But it’s going to take a monumental effort. Anderson and his colleagues estimate that in order to keep within this threshold, we need to start reducing emissions by a sobering 8%–10% per year, from now until we reach “net zero” in 2050. If that doesn’t sound difficult enough, here’s the clincher: efficiency improvements and clean energy technologies will only win us reductions of about 4% per year at most.

How to make up the difference is one of the biggest questions of the 21^st century. There are a number of proposals out there. One is to capture the CO₂ that pours out of our power stations, liquefy it, and store it in chambers deep under the ground. Another is to seed the oceans with iron to trigger huge algae blooms that will absorb CO₂. Others take a different approach, such as putting giant mirrors in space to deflect some of the sun’s rays, or pumping aerosols into the stratosphere to create man-made clouds. Unfortunately, in all of these cases either the risks are too dangerous, or we don’t have the technology yet.

This leaves us in a bit of a bind. But while engineers are scrambling to come up with grand geo-engineering schemes, they may be overlooking a simpler, less glamorous solution. It has to do with soil.

Soil is the second biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. It holds four times more carbon than all the plants and trees in the world. But human activity like deforestation and industrial farming – with its intensive ploughing, monoculture and heavy use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides – is ruining our soils at breakneck speed, killing the organic materials that they contain. Now 40% of agricultural soil is classed as “degraded” or “seriously degraded”. In fact, industrial farming has so damaged our soils that a third of the world’s farmland has been destroyed in the past four decades.

As our soils degrade, they are losing their ability to hold carbon, releasing enormous plumes of CO₂ [pdf] into the atmosphere.

There is, however, a solution. Scientists and farmers around the world are pointing out that we can regenerate degraded soils by switching from intensive industrial farming to more ecological methods – not just organic fertiliser, but also no-tillage, composting, and crop rotation. Here’s the brilliant part: as the soils recover, they not only regain their capacity to hold CO₂, they begin to actively pull additional CO₂ out of the atmosphere.

The science on this is quite exciting. A study published recently by the US National Academy of Sciences claims that regenerative farming can sequester 3% of our global carbon emissions. An article in Science suggests it could be up to 15%. And new research from the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, although not yet peer-reviewed, says sequestration rates could be as high as 40%. The same report argues that if we apply regenerative techniques to the world’s pastureland as well, we could capture more than 100% of global emissions. In other words, regenerative farming may be our best shot at actually cooling the planet.

Yet despite having the evidence on their side, proponents of regenerative farming – like the international farmers’ association La Via Campesina – are fighting an uphill battle. The multinational corporations that run the industrial food system seem to be dead set against it because it threatens their monopoly power – power that relies on seeds linked to patented chemical fertilisers and pesticides. They are well aware that their methods are causing climate change, but they insist that it’s a necessary evil: if we want to feed the world’s growing population, we don’t have a choice – it’s the only way to secure high yields.

Scientists are calling their bluff. First of all, feeding the world isn’t about higher yields; it’s about fairer distribution. We already grow enough food for 10 billion people. In any case, it can be argued that regenerative farming actually increases crop yields over the long term by enhancing soil fertility and improving resilience against drought and flooding. So as climate change makes farming more difficult, this may be our best bet for food security, too.

The battle here is not just between two different methods. It is between two different ways of relating to the land: one that sees the soil as an object from which profit must be extracted at all costs, and one that recognizes the interdependence of living systems and honours the principles of balance and harmony.

Ultimately, this is about more than just soil. It is about something much larger. As Pope Francis put it in his much-celebrated encyclical last year, our present ecological crisis is the sign of a cultural pathology. “We have come to see ourselves as the lords and masters of the Earth, entitled to plunder her at will. The sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life are symptoms that reflect the violence present in our hearts. We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the Earth; that we breathe her air and receive life from her waters.”

Maybe our engineers are missing the point. The problem with geo-engineering is that it proceeds from the very same logic that got us into this mess in the first place: one that treats the land as something to be subdued, dominated and consumed. But the solution to climate change won’t be found in the latest schemes to bend our living planet to the will of man. Perhaps instead it lies in something much more down to earth – an ethic of care and healing, starting with the soils on which our existence depends.

Of course, regenerative farming doesn’t offer a permanent solution to the climate crisis; soils can only hold a finite amount of carbon. We still need to get off fossil fuels, and – most importantly – we have to kick our obsession with endless exponential growth and downsize our material economy to bring it back in tune with ecological cycles. But it might buy us some time to get our act together.

Reposted from the Guardian

Photo by jacilluch

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With such extreme events becoming more commonplace, few deny climate change any longer. Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-important fact: fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and fast.

This growing awareness about the dangers of fossil fuels represents a crucial shift in our consciousness. But I can’t help but fear we’ve missed the point. As important as clean energy might be, the science is clear: it won’t save us from climate change.

Let’s imagine, just for argument’s sake, that we are able to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% clean energy. There is no question this would be a vital step in the right direction, but even this best-case scenario wouldn’t be enough to avert climate catastrophe.

Why? Because the burning of fossil fuels only accounts for about 70% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The remaining 30% comes from a number of causes. Deforestation is a big one. So is industrial agriculture, which degrades the soils to the point where they leach CO2. Then there’s industrial livestock farming which produces 90m tonnes of methane per year and most of the world’s anthropogenic nitrous oxide. Both of these gases are vastly more potent than CO2 when it comes to global warming. Livestock farming alone contributes more to global warming than all the cars, trains, planes and ships in the world. Industrial production of cement, steel, and plastic forms another major source of greenhouse gases, and then there are our landfills, which pump out huge amounts of methane – 16% of the world’s total.

When it comes to climate change, the problem is not just the type of energy we are using, it’s what we’re doing with it. What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce more cement, and fill more landfill sites, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless compound growth, and for some reason we have not thought to question this.

Think of it this way. That 30% chunk of greenhouse gases that comes from non-fossil fuel sources isn’t static. It is adding more to the atmosphere each year. Scientists project that our tropical forests will be completely destroyed by 2050, releasing a 200bn tonne carbon bomb into the air. The world’s topsoils could be depleted within just 60 years, releasing more still. Emissions from the cement industry are growing at more than 9% per year. And our landfills are multiplying at an eye-watering pace: by 2100 we will be producing 11m tonnes of solid waste per day, three times more than we do now. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down.

The climate movement made an enormous mistake. We focused all our attention on fossil fuels, when we should have been pointing to something much deeper: the basic logic of our economic operating system. After all, we’re only using fossil fuels in the first place to fuel the broader imperative of GDP growth.

The root problem is the fact that our economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. Our politicians tell us that we need to keep the global economy growing at more than 3% each year – the minimum necessary for large firms to make aggregate profits. That means every 20 years we need to double the size of the global economy – double the cars, double the fishing, double the mining, double the McFlurries and double the iPads. And then double them again over the next 20 years from their already doubled state.

Our more optimistic pundits claim that technological innovations will help us to de-couple economic growth from material throughput. But sadly there is no evidence that this is happening. Global material extraction and consumption has grown by 94% since 1980, and is still going up. Current projections show that by 2040 we will more than double the world’s shipping miles, air miles, and trucking miles – along with all the material stuff that those vehicles transport – almost exactly in keeping with the rate of GDP growth.

Clean energy, important as it is, won’t save us from this nightmare. But rethinking our economic system might. GDP growth has been sold to us as the only way to create a better world. But we now have robust evidence that it doesn’t make us any happier, it doesn’t reduce poverty, and its “externalities” produce all sorts of social ills: debt, overwork, inequality, and climate change. We need to abandon GDP growth as our primary measure of progress, and we need to do this immediately – as part and parcel of the climate agreement that will be ratified in Morocco later this year.

It’s time to pour our creative power into imagining a new global economy – one that maximises human wellbeing while actively shrinking our ecological footprint. This is not an impossible task. A number of countries have already managed to achieve high levels of human development with very low levels of consumption. In fact Daniel O’Neill, an economist at the University of Leeds, has demonstrated that even material de-growth is not incompatible with high levels of human well-being.

Our focus on fossil fuels has lulled us into thinking we can continue with the status quo so long as we switch to clean energy, but this is a dangerously simplistic assumption. If we want to stave off the coming crisis, we need to confront its underlying cause.

Cross-posted from the Guardian

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In this light, the editorial below illustrates some of the many and diverse ways in which a call for sharing is being expressed, whether it’s by politicians, economists, activists, academics, campaign groups, or anyone else. To learn more about STWR’s campaign, please visit: www.sharing.org/global-call

The people’s voice has taken centre stage once again in recent months, in which a call for sharing is palpable in the many agendas for social justice and true democracy. To recall just some examples, mass demonstrations in Iceland forced the Prime Minister to resign following the Panama leaks; thousands marched for an end to austerity policies in the UK and other European countries; public sector workers in Costa Rica called national strikes for such demands as tax justice and the defense of public healthcare; and ordinary citizens joined migrants and asylum-seekers in the streets of Athens to march in protest against closed borders and the EU-Turkey deal.

Many are asking if we are in the midst of a new cycle of popular uprisings that are reminiscent of the movements that began in 2011, especially in light of the ongoing ‘Nuit Debout’ meetings across over 30 cities in France. Although these vast nightly assemblies arose out of opposition to labour reforms proposed by President Hollande, they have soon expanded to include major sharing-related themes on everything from tax evasion and unjust trade treaties to housing inequality. The call has now rung out for an international day of action on May 15th, a so-called #GlobalDebout, that will invoke the spirit of the Occupy and 15M movements through a worldwide ‘convergence of struggles’.

Last month also saw an unprecedented mobilisation of campaign groups and activists across the U.S. in a concerted call for getting big money out of politics. The ‘Democracy Spring’ began with a walk of 140 miles from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to the nation’s capital, where hundreds of people participated in six-straight days of non-violent civil disobedience, leading to over 1,400 arrests. Despite a distinct lack of coverage in the mainstream media, the week of rallies and teach-ins may have been the largest democracy-focused protest actions in a generation, and they signalled the beginning of a renewed push for nationwide reforms to campaign financing and voting rights, including a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. As the campaign materials emphasise, there cannot be a fairer sharing of wealth and power in American society – nor a just solution to the most pressing crises of our times – as long as many ordinary citizens are shut out of the political process, and while the campaign finance landscape allows big money to increasingly shape elections and the policymaking process.

For an altogether different take on the next stage for global activism, a book by STWR’s founder Mohammed Mesbahi will be published this month that proposes a far-reaching vision of peaceful protest that can unite the populations of all countries through enormous and continuous demonstrations. In a unique and provocative analysis, Mesbahi proposes that men and women of goodwill adopt Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an overriding cause in the immediate time ahead, which he argues has profound implications for the future direction of international politics and global development. Yet such a simple cause is still far from the thinking of most activists who remain preoccupied with national issues of inequality and injustice, while there is scant public attention paid to the millions of needless deaths that occur due to hunger and poverty each year.

Part of the problem is a paucity of reliable global data about the true extent of the crisis of poverty, which has been addressed in some important work by Dr Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics. We’ve previously highlighted some of Hickel’s research that contradicts the “good news narrative” touted by the mainstream media that poverty levels have been dramatically reduced in recent decades, and that we are on course to end poverty altogether by 2030. On the contrary, Hickel shows that there are more people living in poverty today than ever before in history – more than 60% of humanity, and the situation is getting worse rather than improving.

In his latest research, Hickel extends his analysis to the question of whether or not the world is becoming more equal over time, which is the received wisdom from most economists, governments and United Nations agencies. By again citing some incisive data on this issue, he reveals that “inequality between countries has been increasing by orders of magnitude over the past two hundred years, and shows no signs of abating”. This assessment further underlines how unfairly the world’s resources are distributed, and the need for dramatic changes in the balance of political power in the global economy. Hickel writes: “As long as a few rich countries have the power to set the rules to their own advantage, inequality will continue to worsen. The debt system, structural adjustment, free trade agreements, tax evasion, and power asymmetries in the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO are all major reasons that inequality is getting worse instead of better.”

Over recent months there has been plenty of other analysis of the growing inequalities in our societies, including a new campaign by Caritas Europa that advocates for an end to austerity policies and a major upscaling of social protection systems across the European Union. As a short animation accompanying the campaign narrates:

“Dear Europe, what is happening to you? People are losing their jobs, their homes. Losing control of their lives. Your Europe 2020 Strategy was supposed to help them, since things have only gotten worse. Now, around 123 million people live in poverty. And yet luxury goods consumption has never been so high. In all your history, the gap between rich and poor has never been so dramatic. So why do you keep undermining your protection systems? When did you become so focused with finance, with growth? Excluding people, leaving them behind? Isn’t it time to make people your priority again? Please, abandon your obsession with austerity, and focus on what really matters…”

In the U.S., leading analysts from the Institute of Policy Studies have also published a series of articles with the Nation magazine that propose eight bold solutions that can rewrite the rules that protect the richest Americans, thereby closing the wealth gap and ensuring a future of shared prosperity. Recognising that the unprecedented focus on inequality among politicians has not yet translated into any significant policy changes, the authors propose concrete measures that can “challenge entrenched wealth and power with policies that reduce the share of treasure at the top.”

Most of these proposals focus on reforms to the U.S. financial and tax systems, such as ending preferential tax treatment for capital-gains income; steep taxes on luxury consumption to help underwrite a just transition to a clean-energy economy; funding tuition-free public higher education through a modest wealth tax; and a serious crack-down on tax havens through a new worldwide register of financial wealth, among other reforms. But the authors recognise that we can’t address structural and cultural unfairness through redistributive tax policy alone; we also need to challenge the powerful narratives that justify extreme inequality, and forge campaigns that empower large constituencies to fight for game-changing solutions.

Excellent article on #inequality and how to address it: https://t.co/iGqxHIG4W7 @IPS_DC Ultimately, it's about creating a #sharingsociety

— sharing.org (@global_sharing) February 19, 2016

Another valuable contribution to the inequality debate comes from a newly released report by ActionAid called The Price of Privilege, which provides an accessible overview of current civil society thinking on the various forms of inequality that mar the global community. As the report emphasises, we already know what it takes to reduce inequality within countries, as history shows how a combination of strong social protections, industrial policy and progressive taxation lead to economically more equal societies.

However, considering the alarming scale of inequality within most nations – particularly inequality in the distribution of wealth, which underlies many other injustices – the report recommends a number of measures to “rebalance power” in our political systems and “change the mindset” that sees no alternative to the status quo. See in this regard the second chapter on how to challenge the dominant economic narrative by exposing its 7 key lies, such as “Inequality is necessary to generate economic growth”, or “If people can’t get as rich as they like, economies will grind to a halt as wealth creators ‘go elsewhere’.” Citing the hopeful signs from the past that a shift towards greater equality is ever viable despite current trends, the report concludes on an optimistic note that a fairer sharing of the world’s resources is not only possible, but on its way. To paraphrase from an article by one of the report’s contributors, it’s not enough to ask global leaders to agree that inequality is a problem; we need to build people’s power from below to pressure leaders to act, which is the only path to achieving transformative social change.

In this brief and very selective round-up of recent highlights on the inequality debate from within the progressive community, we should also mention the much-anticipated documentary, The Divide, that was recently released across the UK (in the same week that the revelations from the Panama Papers were being pored over internationally). Based on the bestselling book The Spirit Level, the film does an estimable job of bringing to life the basic arguments made by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – that income inequality is the underlying cause of most modern social ills, from violence and depression to drug abuse and ill health. Although the narrative of the documentary (like the book) is not positively framed around the need for a renewed culture of genuine economic sharing and cooperation within our societies, the message is implicit throughout its sweeping portrayal of how the past 35 years of divisive economic policies have led to greater unhappiness, disaffection and hardship for the majority.

Amidst these many discussions on inequality that are inherently related to the case for sharing, there’s one subject that has seemed almost impossible to avoid so far this year, which is the enormously popular idea of a universal basic income (UBI). Long supported by all manner of thinkers from both the left and right of the political spectrum, this previously fringe policy idea is now being seriously considered by some governments as a solution to precarious employment models, inadequate social protection systems, and a future low-work society due to technological unemployment. Switzerland will be the first country in the world to vote on a launch of the idea in June, while Finland, Holland, Canada, New Zealand, Namibia and other countries are discussing or testing out the policy.

So could state-administered UBI schemes help or hinder the creation of truly sharing societies, and can such policies benefit citizens in developing countries and ultimately help to end poverty or protect the global commons? While there isn’t space here to go into these questions (although see here for a big picture vision from STWR on funding basic income schemes by sharing the value from common pool resources), a number of public events this month are debating the implementation of a UBI with various prominent speakers. For example, the Future of Work conference in Zurich this week was attended by Yanis Varoufakis, Robert Reich and other well-known progressive academics; Caroline Lucas in the UK, who tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI, is headlining an event in Westminster later this month to discuss the prospect of implementing a scheme within Britain; and a UBI conference in Hamburg, Germany on 21st May aims to create a dialogue between the movements for degrowth and basic income within Europe. There is even a proposal from Scott Santens that May 1st, known as International Workers Day in celebration of the historic achievements of labour unions, should also be championed worldwide as Basic Income Day.

The Panama Papers may have underlined how there is no justification for the argument that governments cannot afford a basic income scheme, considering the huge amount of untaxed assets that are hidden by the global elite in overseas jurisdictions. However, there is another area of the debate on a UBI that is less prominent in most discussions, yet of critical relevance to the growing call for sharing – which is the question of the unsustainability of an employment and taxation system that is predicated on endless economic growth. To quote from a recent article by Ralph Callebert in The Conversation;

“Furthermore, as the Club of Rome already realized in 1972, the productivist bias of our usual answers to inequality – grow more, produce more and grow the economy so that people can consume more – is ultimately unsustainable. Surely, in a world already characterized by overproduction and overconsumption, producing and consuming more cannot be the answer. Yet, these seem to be the answers with which we are stuck: grow, grow, grow.

“…The problem of global inequality is not that we do not produce enough to provide for the world’s population. It is about the distribution of resources. This is why the idea of a basic income is so important: it discards the assumption that in order to get the income you need to survive, you should be employed or at least engaged in productive labor. Assumptions of this kind are untenable when for so many there are no realistic prospects for employment.”

This leads on to a final issue that is worthwhile to mention in this short roundup of sharing-related news and developments, which is the limits to growth debate that has recently been given a high profile in both policy and campaigning circles. In the UK, an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) was launched in the House of Commons in April to review the scientific merits of the controversial report by the Club of Rome that was published over 40 years ago. The aim of the APPG is to stimulate a cross-party dialogue on “prosperity within limits”, exploring the economic risks associated with resource constraints and planetary boundaries. A short review of the limits debate was compiled by Tim Jackson and Robin Webster, two academic specialists on the issue, who found unsettling evidence that society is still following the “standard run” of the original study, in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards.

In other words, the limits to growth arguments are more relevant today than ever, and present a stark challenge to the prevailing assumption that the only way to bring about widespread affluence, as well as greater equality, is through the perpetual growth of GDP. The APPG report’s analysis makes clear that new impetus must be given to efforts to redefine prosperity in a way that is more in tune with human nature, the natural environment, and their interrelationships. And the relevance of sharing in all its forms could not be more pertinent to these new visions of a better world that “provide the capabilities for everyone to flourish, while society as a whole remains within the safe operating space of the planet”.

There are plenty of resources available that give an inspiring insight into what it means to embrace this new ethic of sharing and sufficiency, among which is a recent paper by Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Institute that explores the government policies that could facilitate a planned transition beyond growth. The latest campaign from The Rules team also makes a compelling case to “connect the dots” between the great converging crises of our time, beginning with a realisation that the logic of “growth at all costs” is at the root of our problems, the “one sacred rule” that we will eventually have to break.

As always, the summary above is merely an overview of some of the debates, events, campaigns and activism that relate to the growing call for sharing, and there are invariably many other issues that could be highlighted. This would include progress on trade justice campaigns in light of the TTIP leaks from Greenpeace; the shameful politics of the refugee crisis within the European Union; the state of play with overseas aid as we approach the World Humanitarian Summit (tweeting under the hashtag #ShareHumanity); or the fading vision of ‘fair shares’ in tackling climate change now that nations have signed the COP21 agreement. We’ll continue to highlight and frame some of these issues in terms of sharing in future blogs and editorials, and you can keep abreast of what we’re reading at STWR by following our Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well our Scoop.It! page that is regularly updated.

The post The renewed debates on sharing, inequality and the limits to growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Few issues highlight the imperative for a more just distribution of the world’s wealth than the widening gap between those who are considered financially rich and poor. In recent years, public concerns over escalating levels of inequality have reached new heights, partly fuelled by the yearly publication of Oxfam’s shocking inequality statistics that demonstrate the degree to which the global economy is structurally unjust and failing the majority of citizens. Given that the richest 1% of the world’s population reportedly own as much wealth as the rest of us combined, there is a general consensus that inequality has reached obscene levels and must urgently be addressed.

But a recent analysis by Jason Hickel suggests that there is a lot more to the problem of inequality than Oxfam’s research reveals, and he suggests that the world is far more unequal than policymakers and economists generally acknowledge. For a start, a huge quantity of wealth is currently hidden away in tax havens and has therefore not been taken into account in Oxfam’s global wealth calculations. Recent estimates suggest that some $7.6tn worth of assets are held in off shore accounts – 25% more than five years ago and equivalent to 8% of the world’s total financial assets. If this money was included in inequality statistics, they would undoubtedly reveal even greater inequality in global wealth ownership.

Hickel also dispels the widely held belief that income inequality is not as problematic as Oxfam’s figures on wealth inequality suggest. According to experts like the economist Branco Milanovic, although income inequality is getting worse within countries, it is actually improving when measured on a global scale. The standard metric used to make such claims is the Gini index, which shows that global income inequality has decreased slightly from 0.72 in 1988 to 0.71 in 2008 (on a scale where 0 indicates complete equality and 1 indicates extreme inequality).

However, drawing on the work of Professor Robert Wade, Hickel points out that the Gini coefficient is a problematic gauge of income distribution as it is a relative measure that doesn’t take into account the absolute difference between people’s incomes. It only highlights differences in the rate of inequality. For example, the Gini measure of inequality would remain constant between two countries (or individuals) if they both doubled their income over a period of time (e.g. country X doubles it’s income from 10 to 20 and country Y from 40 to 80) even though the absolute gap in their income grows considerably (from 30 to 60).

As Wade suggests, using the ‘Absolute Gini’ index instead would be a far better indicator of how inclusively economic growth is distributed, as it would show greater inequality when one country (or person) experienced bigger absolute additions to their incomes than another. Using the Absolute Gini coefficient, Hickel calculates that global inequality (in terms of the global distribution of income) has actually “exploded” in recent decades, rising from 0.57 in 1988 to 0.72 in 2005.

Inequality between countries has also increased exorbitantly. In 1960 people living in the world’s richest country were 33 times richer than people in the poorest country; by 2000 they were 134 times richer. According to Hickel, the absolute gap between the average incomes of people in the richest and poorest countries has grown by 135% over the same period.

In addition, Hickel presents calculations for the growing gap between per capita income in the United States comparted to various regions in the Global South. According to his analysis, the income gap between the US and three major regions of the developing world (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia) has in each case grown by approximately 200% since 1960. The global inequality gap, he argues, has roughly tripled in size.

These latest revelations build on Hickel’s previous examination of how the statistics commonly used by UN agencies and the mainstream media substantially underestimate the reality of global poverty and hunger, as outlined in STWR’s report on the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite the pervasive rhetoric and received wisdom from governments and UN agencies that we are winning the fight against poverty and the world is therefore becoming less unequal, it’s increasingly apparent that very little is being done to promote social and economic justice on an international basis.

Like hunger and poverty, global inequality is clearly a far more serious and systemic problem than policymakers are willing to admit – and it’s one that requires robust mechanisms for sharing wealth and power more equitably between nations, not just within them. But as long as governments fail to enact the redistributive measures and structural reforms that are now so urgently needed, the responsibility to hold policymakers to account will continue to fall squarely on the shoulders of progressive analysists, engaged citizens and civil society organisations.

Photo credit: Shashwat Nagpal, Flickr creative commons

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