More of the Same

The 17th edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report was recently released and the results are about what you would expect. The research for Banking on Climate Chaos (BOCC) was led by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Reclaim Finance and the German environmental and human rights organization, Urgewald. Banktrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, OilChange International, The Sierra Club and CEED also contributed.

According to the report, global banks financed fossil fuels with $8.7 trillion since the Paris Agreement; $906 billion in 2025 alone; JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and MUFG (Japan’s largest bank) are the world’s three worst funders

The report points out that following the collapse of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), banks accelerated their policy rollbacks. Oil and gas financing was on the steady decline until 2023. Of the 15 North American banks analyzed in the report, 12 now have no meaningful fossil fuel commitments.

The report highlights that a decade after Paris, just twelve banks now drive more than a third of the world’s fossil fuel financing. A very small group of people are behind these choices.

The impact of this “dirty dozen” comes into focus when you consider that twenty-six of the world’s top 65 banks reduced their fossil fuel financing in 2025, yet financing for fossil fuels was up $64 billion, or an increase of nearly 8% from 2024.

Those twelve biggest banks control nearly 39% of all bank fossil deals in 2025, with the vast majority of almost 2,000 global banks (outside the top 65) providing only approximately 26%.

The report’s authors state that by concentrating debt in a small group of overleveraged firms, and by underfinancing the renewable alternatives that are now cheaper and more secure, the world’s largest banks are choosing to make our energy system more expensive, more fragile, and more unequal.

These are our demands…

The report ends with demands from the organizations authoring and endorsing the report. I can get behind a good manifesto, so here are their demands for the banks funding climate chaos.

Demands on Banks:

1. Exclude all finance for fossil fuel expansion immediately.

2. Adopt targets to steeply reduce volumes of finance through lending and capital markets issuances to oil, gas and coal supply companies.

3. Require robust, 1.5 degree C - aligned transition plans from all fossil fuel clients.

4. Respect human rights and protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

5. Scale up financing for a just and fair energy transition.

Demands on Governments:

1. Engage in macroprudential, monetary policy and financial regulatory reforms which incorporate true risks of fossil fuel dependency and prioritize clean energy stability.

2. Reduce public financial support and tax incentives for fossil fuels.

3. Align finance with just transition principles of human rights, ecological integrity and accountability.

What’s not there

The report doesn’t really talk about degrowth, post-growth, moving to an economy with less consumption or any other wellbeing economy type discussion. That this is a missed opportunity. Switching from fossil fuels to greener energy is a positive step, but that doesn’t get us where we need to be. More and more energy is used each year to feed the growth machine we are all trapped within.

I think the Banking on Climate Chaos report is great. I look forward to it every year and try to spread its message as wide as I can. But for 17 years now, its authors haven’t been talking about what needs to come next in transitioning away from a climate chaos they see coming.

Green energy is of course part of where we need to go. But less energy use - due to less production and consumption - needs to be at the heart of that conversation.

By never even bringing up the possibility of a post-growth economy, the report’s authors are tacitly endorsing an economy that needs to grow forever - which is a physical impossibility.

I would encourage the organizations behind this report to reach out and talk to organizations and individuals looking to move to a post-growth economy. I think they will find much common ground. The organizations behind this report have built a collective reputation as climate leaders. I encourage them to take the next logical step and start talking openly about not just shifting to green energy but shifting to less energy use in an economy that produces less, consumes less.

That is where we are headed by disaster or design. It may as well be design.

Photo by Emily Chek on Unsplash

Economic growth is our secular religion. Politicians need to promise growth if they want to get elected. CEOs who don’t deliver growth get fired. As a civilization we worship at the altar of growth. GDP growth is our reason for being, our reason for working, our reason for living. We can disagree, but then we risk being left behind by our neighbor who is working longer hours than us, and has more stuff than us, has a bigger house than us, and goes on nicer vacations than us.

We must run a little faster on the hamster wheel each year just to pay our mortgage, save for our kids’ education and save for our retirement. Our society is locked into a growth prison camp. Many of us don’t like it, we know it isn’t good for us but we don’t know any other way, and we need to operate in the system to live.

There have been a number of surveys in recent years showing that people like degrowth ideas, a well-being economy, or stepping off the growth treadmill. They know the current way we live is self destructive and want to get off the hamster wheel.

But they can’t. The leaders of the companies they work for and the politicians who represent them are stuck in the same hamster wheel. Forever growth isn’t possible. Everyone seems to know that, but no one can speak that truth.

But what if they could?

What if they were allowed to speak about reality?

The reality of the limits to growth are becoming clearer every day. At some point they will become too evident to ignore, and the whispers you hear now will grow to audible conversations, and those audible conversations will eventually grow to a roar.

A post-growth world is coming whether we speak about it or not. Why not lean into it?

The goldilocks economic zone is gone. It’s not coming back.

Post World War II, the global economy enjoyed a period of relative geopolitical calm, while the world invested a great deal of money in rebuilding Europe and Japan. No major wars broke out that involved the whole world. Economic competition largely replaced physical conflict as the favored sport of governments and elites. Regulation and law steadily increased the power of corporations, bending the playing field to favor the interests of capital over the interests of the environment or people. Populations boomed after the second world war, providing the physical labor and the brainpower to fuel the boom in economies and global markets.

That period is done.

Global economic growth is now weighed down by structural headwinds that are here to stay. Population growth is stagnant or declining in the developed world. Governments and companies are investing less in the future - with stock buybacks increasingly used to return money to shareholders in lieu of investing in long-term value creating projects. Crippling public debt is increasing (although this is less of a problem in countries that can borrow in their own currency). Global trade is stagnating, not only due to foolish tariffs and wars, but to many of the factors above. There will be less people with less disposable income in the future. That means there will be less profit.

These profound demographic and economic constraints will keep growth rates noticeably below the levels seen during the previous decade.

According to analyses by the World Bank and UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), these converging headwinds pose risks of a “lost decade” for many developing and climate-vulnerable economies unless there is stronger policy coordination and structural reform.

What a shame.

Lean into the post-growth world.

We were taught to worship growth over the past half-century. Those in charge will get the blame - and deservedly so. The coming decade is likely to be very bad economically. The bursting of the AI bubble - which is inevitably going to happen soon - could be the event that tips us into a long-term no growth environment. In 2025 the technology and communication services sectors together drove 63.1% of the index’s 17.9% return. AI and the companies that are propping it up are the only parts of the US economy that are growing. When that bubble bursts - look out below.

Many in this space might say “fine”. But the elites in our society want to stay elite, so they won’t say fine. They will say “if a post-growth world is coming, how do I stay on top?”

Smart leaders should get ahead of this trend and move from selling growth to selling wellbeing. It would be nice if they meant it, but that doesn’t really matter. We are moving to a post-growth world by disaster or design. If politicians and our leaders realize this and start taking credit for the ideas of an economy focused on well-being I don’t care.

It’s amazing what you can get done when you don’t care who gets the credit.

Here’s how to get there:

A six-step program for our leaders to sell a post-growth economy

1. Stop suppressing talk of a wellbeing economy. I don’t expect our actual leaders to do this tomorrow, but they could influence these things. The largest parts of our media are now owned by a few families who fully drink the growth Kool-aid - and their media properties reflect that. They will need to climb up the learning curve on what a post-growth world would look like. Currently most traditional media are quite hostile to a post-growth world. The first step would be to stop automatically defending neoclassical economics that got us in this mess and letting the ideas of degrowth, ecological economics, post-growth, well being economics, doughnut economics and others breathe.

2. Host conferences, sponsor thinktanks, actively talk about these ideas. I have to admit that this one is a bit self-serving as I helped start a thinktank that focuses on ecological economics and a post-growth world. But that is why we started Arketa Institute - because these ideas need to be out in the open. After stepping aside and letting these ideas get out there, our elites need to foster the spreading of these ideas, so that they can become normalized. This is what the salons of the Renaissance were all about. At the time, some wealthy folks started sponsoring the discussion of new ideas. Today, philanthropy is largely hyperfocused on small projects and a grant process that requires those in the not for profit world to jump through bureaucratic hoops and paperwork each year just to receive funding for a very specific and defined product. Big changes don’t come that way.

3. Give power back to local communities. Have citizen assemblies where people participate in this process. If you don’t want the blame when things get bad - and they are going to get bad - give up some power. As the system we have built collapses, something new that will be rebuilt will be rebuilt from the ground up. Communities can build what comes next best. Give them the power and the resources to do so. We will need more deliberative democracy with things like citizens assemblies and participatory budgeting which bring more people from a community into the decision-making process.

4. Bioregionalism. Bioregionalism is a philosophy that suggests that political, cultural, and economic systems are more sustainable and just if they are organized around naturally defined areas called bioregions. Bioregions are geographical areas defined by distinct ecological systems, plant and animal species, soils and landforms, human settlements and cultures, and topographic features such as watersheds. Bioregions can of course spill across political boundaries. If more people knew about and cared for their bioregions, those that spoil our rivers, lakes, mountains and oceans would have a harder time doing so.

5. Transition from a growth mandate to a resilience goal. As growth targets become impossible to achieve, elites should stop playing the game of trying to meet them. They need to encourage the normalization of ecological economics and the acceptance of a post-growth future as what we expect to build. This will set the stage for handing the reigns over to local groups through more participatory governance based on bioregionalism. Societal goals can then focus on resilience and sufficiency instead of chasing growth.

6. Take credit for a more resilient world. Economic growth is slowing. The headwinds to growth will only grow as the accumulated ecological debt from climate change and ecological overshoot comes due. People in positions of leadership today and those who will be in those positions tomorrow need to see that growth will no longer be possible or desirable in the near future.

Once a society has moved on from economic growth as its organizing principle we can focus on sufficiency and resilience. Leaders that do so might not get a bronze statue honoring their legacy, or even an elementary school named after them, but they will get to keep their heads.

Photo by June Gathercole on Unsplash

The Global Justice Project recently released The Global Justice Report - which aims to set an ambitious vision for what could be if humanity gets its collective act together. The report was published by the World Inequality Lab and was coauthored by a team of global economists including Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, and Emmanuel Saez.

The report imagines the conditions under which humanity might turn things around if we decided to address the polycrisis (climate change, overshoot, inequality, etc.). The paper starts at the status quo and imagines what is possible by 2100.

Warning, there is some wild-eyed optimism here.

The report concludes that it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all mankind. But there is a catch. To achieve this we would need to transform three systems (the report calls these pillars) simultaneously.

1. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems.

2. A shift toward sufficiency - a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint.

3. A drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power.

Simple.

More Detail

The authors of The Global Justice Report combine four dimensions of the changes needed - arguing that they need to happen at the same time to reinforce each other.

• redistribution at the world scale,

• a deep reform of the international financial and economic order,

• a radical transformation of energy systems

• substantial shifts in consumption patterns.

Simple.

The authors note that per capita monthly national incomes converges to €5,000 in every country in their model. The share of the bottom half of global wealth increases from 2% to 30%, while the share of the billionaire class decreases from 6% to 0.05%. Under this scenario, nearly 90% of the world’s population double their income while working roughly half as many hours as they do today.

Climate change is mitigated under this scenario as well. The report shows that if the actions suggested are taken, warming reaches 1.8°C by 2100, rather than over 4°C under business as usual.

The Global Justice Project aims to place these proposals within a quantified institutional framework, which models socioeconomic convergence, temperature change, and distributional trajectories through 2100 to show how we can actually save ourselves if we choose to do so.

Everyone Gets a Unicorn

The report is great in that it shows what is theoretically possible. But I think it is dangerous because it shows what is theoretically possible.

It is theoretically possible that everyone reading this will win the lottery today.

While I read through the report, I couldn’t help but wonder if they had enough cynics and pessimists in the room while it was being written. If the authors are interested, I know some of these people they might want to talk to.

Let’s look at the report’s claims that global wealth and income taxes can raise the resources needed by the Global Justice Fund and to curb the concentration of income, wealth, and power at the top of the world distribution. Country-level policies (progressive taxation, minimum wages, pay-scale regulations, labour market rules, workers’ representation on corporate boards) are expected to play the leading role in reshaping each country’s income distribution in the long run. Here is the graphic from the report that shows how this will work.

The graphic shows that we need to tax the 10% into oblivion starting tomorrow - across the whole planet in order to fund global wealth distribution.

I just don’t know a world where anything close to that will be possible, maybe ever - much less tomorrow.

The Global Justice Fund

The report proposes the creation of the Global Justice Fund (GJF), which is part of a broader transformation and democratization of the international economic and monetary system. The GJF would be a new international institution, with budgetary decisions taken under a double-majority rule: 55% of countries representing 60% of the world’s population.

This body is meant to replace institutions like the IMF and World Bank. The GDP-based voting at these institutions gives Europe & North America/Oceania roughly four times their share of the world population.

Would it be nice to replace the World Bank and IMF? Yes. These institutions are largely run by and for the developed world and do not serve - and are not meant to serve most of humanity.

But simply saying “we will have something better” without laying out how we get there is a bit of an everyone gets a unicorn scenario.

Let’s walk through why it is difficult to just toss away the IMF.

• The IMF is a lender of last resort for many countries, including many emerging markets. Without it, countries in crises would lack access to emergency financing, increasing the risk of debt defaults and financial instability.

• The IMF’s data is used by investors to assess creditworthiness. Removing it would erode trust in global financial markets

• The IMF works alongside the World Bank, the G20, and other institutions. Disbanding it would require dismantling these interconnected systems, which is politically and economically impractical.

You can say, F*&# the IMF, let’s blow up the system. That’s fine. But if you blow up the IMF on Monday, you have to know what to do on Tuesday when the world realizes the IMF is gone. Then you have to have a way for countries in the Global South to get the money they need in a crisis, for the global financial system to still work.

You may not want a global financial system, but you have one. Throwing it away would be very destructive. Again, you can do that. But that will not go smoothly, and you won’t have the nice smooth “transition” curves we see in this report.

I think the IMF, World Bank and other institutions can evolve into something like the Global Justice Fund. But it is more likely that the financial world goes through a catastrophic crash and something like the Global Justice Fund is built from the wreckage. That will not be as smooth and seamless as the report suggests.

The phrase “everyone gets a unicorn” is a way to say that everyone gets an extraordinary and magical thing, or more simply - a thing that does not and cannot exist. An example would be a world in which every world leader decides to do the right thing tomorrow, when they have been fighting like hell to not do that over the past fifty years.

This will not happen and to suggest it is within reach is dangerous.

In addition to some of the items I already mentioned, here is a list of some of the things the report says are possible:

Equality between countries: Average per capita monthly gross national income (PPP Euros 2025) rises to 5,000 Euros in all countries by 2100. Today, it ranges from 290 Euros in Sub-Saharan Africa to 4,590 Euros in North America/Oceania (a 16-fold gap).

Less work, more emancipation: Annual labour hours per employed person fall from about 2,100 hours today to about 1,000 hours by 2100, continuing the historical trend toward shorter working time.

Education and health for all: Per capita education spending rises to 8,400 Euros per year across all countries in 2100. Today, it ranges from 210 to 4,140 Euros. Health spending rises to 14,400 euros. Today it ranges from 110 Euros to 8,300 Euros. The share of global working hours devoted to education and health rises from 11% today to 43% in 2100.

Full gender equality: Women and men converge on equal amounts of economic and domestic labour and on equal average pay.

A world below 2 °C: Warming reaches 1.8°C under sustainable convergence and fast decarbonization, against over 4°C under persistent inequality and slow decarbonization (current policies).

Inequality compression: The income scale is compressed to 1 to 5, and the wealth scale to 1 to 10. This represents a major compression of global income inequality, on a scale similar to the reduction achieved in Western and Nordic Europe over the 20^th century.

Wealth redistribution: The bottom 50% global wealth share rises from 2% to 30% (×15), while the top 0.001% share (billionaire class) falls from 6% to 0.05 % (÷100) – a striking redistribution.

Global Justice Fund: Annual expenditures (including country dividends and investment flows) reach 10.3 % of world GDP per year on average over the 2026-2060 period. In comparison, current official development aid and the combined budgets of the UN, IMF, and World Bank account for less than 0.4% of world GDP. This is justified by the fact that new climate investments alone will represent 3-4% of world GDP per year in the coming decades and will need to be supplemented by a big push in education and health expenditures to foster global convergence.

World Sovereign Fund: An active portfolio of sustainable assets reaching 10% of the world capital stock (or equivalently, to 60% of the world GDP). Initial asset accumulation comes from reinvesting a large part of global wealth and income tax revenues over the 2026-2035 period.

Global wealth & income taxes: A global wealth tax (rising from 0% at 10 times the world average wealth to 20% per year on billionaires) and a global income tax (rising to 90% at the very top), both targeting around 1% of the world population.

Large majority benefit in every region: About 89% of the world will double their monetary income between 2026 and 2100; over 95% gain in the global South, and between 85–95% in the global North. Over 99% of the population is better off when the valuation of leisure and planetary habitability is included.

From global plutocracy to global democracy: All inhabitants of the world have equal political voice in the Global Justice Fund and the new international order. Currently, Europe & North America/Oceania have 4x as many votes at the IMF and World Bank as their population share, while Sub-Saharan Africa and South & South-East Asia have 4x fewer votes than their population share.

End of exorbitant privileges: The creation of an International Clearing Union and a new international currency to put an end to exorbitant privileges, i.e. the fact that rich countries benefit from higher returns on their foreign assets than what they pay on their foreign debt, thereby receiving a financial transfer from poor countries (0.6-0.8% of world GDP per year on average over 2000-2025 period, about twice as much as total development aid).

Come join us over here in reality when you are ready.

I think the authors of The Global Justice Report did good work. What they suggest is possible is a worthy aspiration. But it will not happen. I have seen people tripping over themselves to praise the report since it came out. But what is in the report will never happen.

Those things won’t happen through government action or altruism. If that was possible, those things would have already happened … somewhere. But they have not. An end of exorbitant privilege, a shift from plutocracy to democracy, inequality compression and gender parity don’t happen with the stroke of a pen. They happen after a collapse. They happen after a revolution.

What is coming is a collapse. It has already started.

There are no unicorns in our future. We shouldn’t pretend that there will be. People will want to believe in unicorns if you tell them that everyone gets a unicorn. When in reality, no one ends up getting a unicorn - people will give up.

Tell people that the future will be hard, but that if we build a strong community we can get through it together. Don’t sell them a fantasy.

In the past few weeks two very powerful men have spoken on the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Pope

A few weeks ago, Pope Leo XIV issued his encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in which he warned of the dangers of AI, comparing the technology to the biblical Tower of Babel.

The encyclical echoes Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 “Rerum Novarum,” which addressed the challenges of the Industrial Revolution. The modern Pope Leo sees AI as a similar society shaping force.

Leo IV emphasizes that AI must respect human dignity, protecting workers, children and other vulnerable populations. He calls on our leaders to put the right safeguards around AI, including regulation and oversight to ensure that society has a say in how the technology is used. He fears that as was the case in the industrial revolution, if profit is the only guide, human suffering will be too great to justify whatever is gained. That sounds a lot like what Leo XII would have been saying over 140 years ago.

The modern encyclical calls specifically for “disarming” of AI, which would mean not using it for military, economic, and cognitive competition, and preventing monopolistic control.

The pope acknowledges AI’s potential to help in medicine and education, but warns us to guard against believing that AI, or any technology can replace human consciousness or act in appropriately moral or empathetic ways.

The Master of Finance

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock simply looks at AI and sees money to be made.

At the end of May, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told a crowd at a speech at Texas State Technical College in Waco that he expects the pension savings of America will fund the trillions of dollars required for AI data centers.

Fink is bullish on AI and sees it as an investing opportunity that Americans need to get behind. He said as much in his speech:

He doesn’t think that this is a bad thing. He is only alerting people to what he sees necessary for Ai investment to continue.

The lesson from the Industrial Revolution

It is no accident that Pope Leo IV used the writing of Pope Leo XII to frame his own encyclical.

We are at an inflection point in the history of Earth. Great advancements can be made in the coming years. That work can be done faster by using more energy and resources, which is in aggregate bad for the human species - but it is still a technological advancement. A technological advancement that hastens your species demise, is still a technical advancement, even if it is unwise to advance in that direction.

Some voices warn against the dehumanizing impacts that technology can have, while some warn that other nations will take the lead in that technical advancement if we don’t - so we must do it.

How did that argument work out in the wake of the industrial revolution? It raised many people out of poverty, created fantastic wealth and ushered in an age of “advancement” in which some people on Earth could have more than generations had ever dreamed. But many did not have more, the biosphere has been badly damaged beyond repair in any kind of human lifetime, and the benefits of “advancement” are very concentrated among a relative few people.

The story we have been told is that those developments were good because they led to growth, they led to advancement.

But things were lost.

Self-determination was lost. As the resources of Earth became increasingly enclosed, we had to sell our labor to work with that steam engine so that we could have more of the more piling up around us. If we didn’t, we were left behind.

Our environment degraded, but it happened relatively slowly so we didn’t notice. When we didn’t notice, we had to earn a living to have more, so we had to keep working more, to produce more and consume more.

Decades later, advertising developed to convince us that our wants were really our needs.

Soon after that, GDP was invented to prove that producing more was virtuous.

Decades later, capitalism “won” as the wall came down and the only other system to choose from was vanquished.

So how come, nothing tastes good?

The knowledge we have now.

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, workers had little to no power to stop the dehumanization that was called “progress”. You may feel you have no power now, but you have infinitely more than your ancestors did 150 years ago.

You have the knowledge of the ages at your fingertips and you can organize with someone halfway around the world to change how things are run.

Those who control this system have to work very hard and spend a lot of money to keep you docile. In the end they will fail, they always do. It is just a matter of whether enough people are inspired by the words of Leo IV and act, or if they feel the words of Larry Fink are inevitable.

We can wait until things get so bad that those in power can’t fool people any more, or we can get a critical mass of people building a new system that those in charge will have less in charge of every day - until we can totally ignore them.

We might be able to do so sooner than you think.

Someone I follow on LinkedIn (Patrick Galey | LinkedIn) pointed this out:

Everyone please enjoy this graphic from a recent FT article on how AI isn’t generating any value.

It shows how everyone is using agentic AI to make apps that… no one is using.

Generative AI makes More Stuff, sure. It’s just Stuff no one can use or fix or give a toss about.

The era of abundance, then.

Those billions that Larry Fink says we need to take from your pensions to invest in AI are producing some useful things yes, but oftentimes - dreck that no one wants. Few if any of them are producing things worth paying for.

At some point, likely soon, the smart money will head for the exits on the AI bubble express. Technology companies currently make up a little over one-third of the US stock market valuation as measured by the S&P 500 - and they are only worth that much because the people holding those companies believe the hype that the AI revolution will make them rich.

Look at the chart. It will not.

That money has largely been made. AI companies are rushing to have initial public offerings so that they can cash in and leave the unsuspecting public holding the bag.

When that happens - and it will soon - more people will be listening to Leo than Larry.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

A new paper recently came out on the wellbeing economy that show that there is strong public support for the ideas behind the concept, but policymakers haven’t caught up with public sentiment. We have seen a similar story around degrowth, they like the ideas, but policy isn’t there yet. In a wellbeing economy, our economic systems prioritize human and ecological wellbeing, not GDP growth. You can read the paper here:

Policymakers’ perceptions of the wellbeing economy: emerging patterns and trade-offs in implementation – DOAJ

The study uses interviews with eight policymakers alongside data from the MERGE and SPES Sustainability Performances, Evidence & Scenarios Horizon projects. The analysis uses the SWOT framework (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) to analyse the idea of a wellbeing economy. If you haven’t taken a business class, you may not be familiar with the SWOT framework. No worries. It is pretty self-explanatory.

Using a SWOT framework, the researchers explored the strengths of, weaknesses of, opportunities from and threats to a wellbeing economy.

Researchers found that the main strengths of a wellbeing economy include the transformation of citizens’ roles into active participants in decision-making processes, the adoption of holistic frameworks that facilitate integrated and cross-sectoral policymaking, and the reframing of policy discourse by explicitly linking well-being with economic activity.

Weaknesses concern unclear wellbeing economy terminology, the most frequently cited category, which is prone to misunderstandings and misinterpretations, followed by the limited availability of shared and standardised technical infrastructure, including indicators, models and metrics. Both of these weaknesses constrain uptake among policymakers and the broader public.

Opportunities include enhancing public understanding of a wellbeing economy and leveraging strong leadership to implement eco-social investments independent from economic growth. Supported by robust economic evidence and demonstrable social returns, these investments can ensure local economic security. Sustained exchange between academia and policymakers, grounded in scientific research, can foster the emergence of such leadership.

The main threat to moving to a wellbeing economy are unsurprisingly the complexity of transforming a growth-dependent economic system, exacerbated by short-term political cycles and fiscal constraints.

Degrowth Education is the Answer

The research shows that like degrowth, people like wellbeing economic policies. But there is a misalignment between strong public demand for wellbeing-oriented policies and policymakers’ perceptions, who are steeped in a neoclassical economics focused culture of growth.

The answer seems to be education of your average citizen, but also policymakers. The SWOT analysis shows that the opportunity and threat to a wellbeing economy are essentially the same thing: knowledge of how it works / lack of knowledge of how it works.

These findings highlight the importance of identifying entry points for the wellbeing economy.

If our institutions are to move to a wellbeing economy, that would require both formal governance structures and alignment of all stakeholders’ interests. Unfortunately, we aren’t close to that yet. Like degrowth (which shares much with the concept of a wellbeing economy) people are just starting to get acquainted with the concept.

Photo by Anthony McKissic on Unsplash

About a month ago, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case Louisiana v. Callais effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, making race-conscious redistricting unconstitutional. The decision also weakened protections against racial vote dilution.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), enacted in 1965 and amended in 1982, prohibits voting practices that result in the denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on race or color. It has been a nationwide, permanent provision allowing voters to challenge electoral systems, including redistricting plans, that dilute minority voting power. The 1982 amendments established an “effects” test, enabling courts to require remedies when minority voters’ ability to elect candidates of choice is impaired.

The Case: Louisiana v. Callais

Following the 2020 Census, Louisiana redrew its congressional districts. Initially, only one of six districts was majority-Black, prompting a Section 2 challenge. Federal courts ordered the creation of a second majority-Black district, which Louisiana enacted in 2024. A group of white voters then challenged the new map, claiming it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Supreme Court Ruling

The majority opinion held that race-conscious redistricting to create majority-minority districts violates the Equal Protection Clause, even when intended to comply with Section 2. The Equal Protections Clause of the 14th amendment of the Constitution requires that no state deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The Court decided that Section 2 does not compel states to create additional majority-minority districts unless there is strong evidence of intentional racial discrimination.

Soon after the decision, Louisiana and Tennessee announced plans to redraw districts to take away minority districts in their states - which a reasonable person might argue is strong evidence of racial discrimination.

Some estimate up to 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus could be affected, and because minority communities often vote Democratic, the decision could enable Republican-controlled legislatures to redraw districts to their advantage.

Young black men have the power here. But do they know it? Will they use it?

After reading about the decision in the days after it came down, my mind jumped to a simple solution to this problem (if you assume disenfranchising black voters is a problem - which I do). This solution would not cost millions in lobbying. There would not need to be marches in the streets. No violence would be needed. All that would be needed would be for a small group of young black men to make a decision that is in their own best interest, and to just say in a matter of fact manner why they made that decision. It might take about a dozen black young men each year for the next few years to make this decision, state publicly why they made that decision, and then go on with their lives. Then the legislatures across the South who are currently looking to disenfranchise black voters might have to reverse course.

Young black men have a power today that they did not have in the Jim Crow days before the voting rights act. They didn’t have that power just a few short years ago. But they do now. They could very easily use that power, get paid handsomely for doing so, and maybe even solve gerrymandering in the South.

Does that sound crazy to you? Read on.

Politics follows culture. That is where the power is.

I grew up in the South. I spent the first 13 years of my life in Cleveland, Ohio, which is where my boring accent comes from. But I have always had family in Nashville, Tennessee where I spent my summers as a child. My family moved to Atlanta at 13 - which is where I lived (with a brief detour to college in the Midwest) for another 13 years. I still have lots of family and friends in Georgia and Tennessee and I head back to those places often. I also travelled extensively through the South when I lived there. I live in Virginia now, which used to be considered part of the conservative South, but has turned bluer in recent years as the more liberal Northern Virginia suburbs have grown and swung the political scales somewhat to the left here.

Following the Supreme Court decision, Republican legislatures across the South sought to consolidate power. That’s no surprise. But I don’t think they realize that they are very vulnerable to backlash over their efforts.

They are vulnerable to the whims of a few young black men.

They are vulnerable because the most important cultural institution across the South, from South Carolina through Texas, is college football.

About 53% of college football players at the highest level of college football are black. That number is about 40% when all levels of college football are considered.

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) - where the highest level of football is played in states across the South - is heavily dependent on elite black football players to keep their schools winning. Over the last twenty years (and before that as well) the SEC has dominated college football, with teams from that conference winning thirteen championships over those twenty years. The next most successful conference, the Big Ten, can only boast four championships during that time.

But the competitive winds are shifting. In recent years, paying college players has become legal. Players who had historically been paid with a free college education, are now making hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars per year. The most talented players able to hold out for the best deal. The last three national champions in college football have come from the Big Ten in the American MidWest, whose schools tend to have more money than many of those in the SES because the Big Ten just has a bigger and richer donor base with deeper pockets.

In 2016, the SEC launched a campaign with the slogan “It Just Means More” to emphasize the importance of college football in the South. This campaign ran at the height of the SEC’s dominance in college football as from 2006 to 2015, SEC schools had won 8 of 10 national championships.

Football does mean more in the South. That is the vulnerability that Republican legislatures are ignoring.

I went to the University of Notre Dame for my undergraduate degree. Notre Dame (in Northern Indiana) is arguably one of the most storied football programs in America. I have been to plenty of big games while at Notre Dame, and at other stadiums across the country, many of them in the South. I have been to many games across the SEC and the atmosphere is usually pretty great, if you are into gathering together with tens of thousands of screaming fans all with the same passion - usually wearing the same colors. Neyland Stadium, home of the Tennessee Volunteers in Knoxville, Tennessee holds nearly 102,000 people for each Tennessee home game. Watching a game there is intense, loud, and you can see that to most people in the stadium, it does “just mean more”. Other stadiums across the South have a similar atmosphere on game day, Neyland Stadium is just the biggest.

I attended a game between Auburn and Alabama soon after I graduated from college at the suggestion of two of my best friends - one an Alabama fan (Dave) and one an Auburn fan (Bobby). This game, the “Iron Bowl” is always held on the last Saturday of the regular season. Auburn and Alabama are far and away the two biggest schools in the state, and with no professional sports teams in Alabama, bragging rights for the whole year come down to that game. I attended that Iron Bowl and loved it. I made Dave and Bobby sit on either side of me during the game. They were both miserable because they had so much invested in the game, and I was just having fun, not caring about the outcome. The game was close, and Auburn prevailed in the end. After the game one of the Auburn fans was shot by an Alabama fan for being too enthusiastic about his team’s victory. It just means more.

Take your ball and go home.

SEC schools need to recruit elite black athletes to get back on top of the college football world. No other region of the country cares more about college football. That is the main weakness of this power grab by Republicans in the South. Your average Alabaman, Tennessean, Lousianan, or Texan doesn’t really care too much about who represents them in congress. Like most voters, they likely don’t know much about their representatives, or care to know much about them. They tend to vote Republican, but by and large, they care more about their football team than they do about politics.

If they had to choose between their team winning or a Republican winning, they would pick their team every time.

The success of their teams depends on black athletes, often coming from places outside the state. To compete at the highest levels, SEC schools need to recruit black athletes from the entire US, not just their own backyard.

The legislatures of those states are busy compromising the voting rights of the very 18 - 22 year old black men that they need to stay competitive in the most important cultural institution in their state.

It would only take a handful of young black men to say that they are going to schools outside the SEC to shift the conversation. These black athletes don’t need to hold a press conference, have a march, or make a big show of their decision. They could just say that in Ohio, Indiana, Oregon, or Michigan their rights are protected, and that in Louisiana, Texas and Tennessee those rights are not protected. If about a dozen of the top 100 recruits each year say this, the message will be sent. These athletes and their families might even recommend a non-partisan commission to draw congressional district lines in each state, and that once that is done, they will consider the schools of the SEC again.

Soon after I thought of this idea myself, the NAACP came out with a statement calling on young black athletes to boycott going to schools in states that are rolling back voting rights. I’m sure many other people had the same idea. Everyone throughout the South knows the cultural importance of college football. If that is threatened, many people in the South won’t be happy.

I don’t think that a formal boycott is necessary, but I’m not surprised the NAACP went there. They know just as I did that the people in the South won’t tolerate anyone messing with college football. If a top black quarterback from California decides to go to Michagan to play football instead of Texas and cites voting rights, people in Texas will complain for a day and then move on. If dozens of other top black football recruits do the same, the people of Texas will look to change the rules to make sure their team is not put at a disadvantage.

College football fans in Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama will not want to hear that their schools are being put at a disadvantage because of the whims of their state legislatures.

People in the South take pride in nearly always finishing first in college football. It just means more there..

The last time there was a roll-back of rights for black men and women in the South, black folks hardly had any power. They had to suffer while they were denied access to credit, denied housing, and denied the vote. Some Republican leaders are trying to go back to those times.

Times have changed.

Today, young black men in the United States have direct control over whether people in the South will be happy or whether they will not. That is a great deal of power. It is power that is very easy to use, requires very little sacrifice, and can do a great deal of good.

What do you think will happen?

Photo by little plant on Unsplash

Earlier this month, the state of Hawaii passed S.B. 2471, a first-of-its-kind state law aimed at neutering the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts on elections. The Hawaii bill bans corporations from spending on elections in the state. The law is set to go into effect on July 1, 2027.

A clever trick

The bill redefines the powers corporations and other “artificial persons” (including nonprofits, LLCs, and associations) are granted by state law. The law explicitly strips these artificial persons of the right to spend money or contribute anything of value to influence elections or ballot measures in Hawaii. For those who don’t remember, Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision that said corporate spending was the equivalent of speech and would be protected under the first amendment. This decision opened the floodgates to unlimited spending in elections.

The Hawaii law sidesteps Citizens United, by asking the question, “does a corporation have the power to spend money on elections”. The Hawaii legislature, which controls what powers corporations have in the state, has now said simply “no”. This leaves the question of first amendment rights from Citizens United largely moot. It doesn’t matter because Hawaii does not allow a corporation to spend money on elections in the state.

In their Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court said money was speech. Fine, Hawaii said, you simply don’t have the power to speak that way in Hawaii.

The Hawaii law means:

• No corporate political spending in Hawaii, whether the entity is based here or operates elsewhere.

• No dark money (spending by groups that are not required to disclose their donors) can fund political activity in the state.

• The law applies equally to for-profit and nonprofit corporations

Legal Basis

Corporate law in the United States is largely left up to the states. If you are unfortunate enough to read through the legal documents of a US corporation, you will see that they are incorporated in a state, not with the Federal Government. The state where most companies incorporate is Delaware because of its business-friendly law and regulatory environment. It is unlikely Delaware will follow Hawaii’s lead anytime soon because incorporation of US companies is their golden goose. But if Delaware did follow Hawaii - whooee - watch out. Corporations would throw a fit.

But Delaware doesn’t have to move. The more states that follow Hawaii’s lead, the harder it will be for corporations to influence elections through spending. If one state (Hawaii) does this, it isn’t a big deal. If a dozen states do what Hawaii has done and word gets out - which is happening - citizens may just unite to get rid of corporate spending all together. It won’t matter if Delaware (or some other state) doesn’t adopt the Hawaii standard. If a critical mass does adopt the Hawaii law, corporate money in elections could be severely hamstrung.

The law will of course be challenged and may make it all the way to the Supreme Court. I wonder what they are thinking. Yes, the Supreme Court can just ignore the will of the people, even if the majority of Americans want something. They have done so before. But would a Supreme Court decision that defended unlimited corporate spending bring people into the streets? I think maybe yes. Just look at the numbers.

But do Americans want money out of politics?

You bet your ass they do. A survey released in 2024 by American Promise found that 82% of registered voters view the influence of money in politics as a threat to American democracy, and 77% support a constitutional amendment to allow states and Congress to reasonably limit money in elections. As of this writing, 14 other states are working on similar legislation.

Maybe call up your representative and ask them nicely to work on a similar law in your state.

Then we can get on with degrowing.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Every fall, millions of monarch butterflies begin a muti-gernarational migration across North America. The key word in that sentence is “multi-generational”. The monarchs that start the trip won’t finish it. It will be multiple generations before the trip is completed. The monarchs that start the trip know (as much as a butterfly can know) that they won’t finish the job. But that’s okay. You don’t have to get to the destination to know that the trip needs to be taken.

The migration cycle

At the end of the Northern Hemisphere summer, monarchs born late in the season don’t reproduce. They can live about eight months - longer than summer monarchs - and travel thousands of miles from the US and Canada to the warmer weather of Southern California and Mexico.

In spring these butterflies fly north into the southern US. They lay their eggs and die.

In the summer, generations of monarchs live only 3 - 5 weeks. Successive generations of Monarchs slowly but surely get back to where this whole journey started, repopulating the places that their now somewhat distant ancestors left just a year ago.

No butterflies that start the journey make it back to the beginning, but the Monarch population does.

Have a little faith in the process

One of the critiques I often hear about degrowth, or moving to a post-growth economy is that no one can see around corners ahead of us to know what that world will be like at the end of this journey. People often see this as a reason to not act because the change needed is unknown and the status quo, although not what they want, is what they know.

Good lord! The monarch butterflies that start their journey south in a few months will not reach the end of the journey. It will take 4 to 5 generations for that to happen - and you are complaining that a hard journey may take a decade, or more! If we use the math of a human generation (about 25 years) you would be looking at a journey that won’t end at least 100 years from now.

The monarch butterfly starts its migratory journey with no chance of getting to the end of the journey. You do. And even if you don’t see a post-growth economy in your lifetime, you owe it to those generations that follow you to take that first step of the journey as soon as possible.

What are you waiting for?

She’s reading how to transition to a post-growth economy.

Photo by Nhel ian Jayme on Unsplash

I started this blog over two years ago because I thought more people need to know about degrowth - an intentional downsizing of production and consumption to eventually get humanity to a wellbeing economy within planetary boundaries.

I’ve been heartened to see more conversation around ecological economics and degrowth in that time. Case in point, the recent blog by Research and Degrowth International - here on Substack.

Don’t read this blog … read this one:

Towards a degrowth policy sequence addresses the question of just how do you move from where we are now to a post-growth economy. If you do things all at once, the shock to the system would be to much and the effort would likely fail. If you move too incrementally, it will be 100 years before we get to a proper post-growth economy, and much damage will have been done. So what is the “just right” approach.

I will be brief here and implore you to read the above blog by Emmanueal Damdeis.

The blog is a summary of an academic working-paper titled; Towards a post-growth green macro-financial regime? Implications for the Global South of imperfect technologies and sufficiency policies in the Global North. (May I politely suggest a more succinct title for the final paper?)

The authors are Emmanuel Bamdeis and Elena Hofferberth.

For those so inclined, please read the academic paper for more detail.

The blog summary

Bamdeis starts out stating that limited progress has been made in defining clear degrowth policy priorities and articulating them in a structured and dynamic manner that appears feasible from a material and technical as well as technocratic and democratic perspective.

The author concedes that to establish a post-growth economy we need to create institutions, especially macro-financial institutions and policy arrangements, whose stability and viability does not depend on continued growth.

Growth-dependent economies (the authors use the more specific term “Macro-financial regimes”) cannot sufficiently discipline private capital and support degrowth policies required in the Global North, because their stability and viability depend on continued growth.

The paper discusses the following policy sequence to move from an economy with a growth imperative to one without.

1. Financial markets - This would involve governments taking back the task of money creation - which currently is left to banks, with no guidance from the public sector. Governments should expand their fiscal spending and redistributive power to ecological and social purposes.

2. Labour markets - A phase out of fossil fuels and the growth it engenders, will leave the most vulnerable in society in a situation in which their jobs and the ability to get buy in society may be in jeopardy. The second phase of the plan then, should include policies such as a universal basic income, a jobs guarantee, a public services guarantee and other policies that take the sting out of an economy moving to a post-growth paradigm.

3. Energy markets - Only after such a “just transition” is in place can economies begin to more aggressively phase out fossil fuels. Doing so before the policies of a just transition are in place will leave too many in society vulnerable.

4. Intervention in other markets – A decline in production and consumption, no matter how orderly will require intervening in some markets. For example, price controls and rationing schemes to avoid profiteering and hoarding may be needed during the transition period.

I just paint a brief picture of the entire plan here, just to give you a taste of the great work my Bamdeis and Hofferberth. I encourage you to read the whole paper if you can, and to share it with others you know are degrowth curious. Papers like these that talk about the steps needed to transition to a post-growth economy should be more common in the coming months and years. The more people that know how this works, the quicker we can get there.

Please pass this paper around to help make that happen.

Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash

In the next few months my family will enjoy a very nice milestone. We won’t have a mortgage anymore. We will own our home outright and not have to pay thousands of dollars per month to have a place to live. It will be nice to have the home we live in as an asset, but for the purpose of this essay, I want to focus on the other part of the equation - not having to pay a mortgage anymore. That mortgage payment currently makes up about 30 - 40% of our monthly expenses.

• The average American household spends $78,535 per year, or approximately $6,545 per month on total expenses.

• Housing remains the largest expense category, consuming 33% of the average household budget.

What if we made a concerted effort as a society to make housing cheaper? That is very possible to do - but it would take a change in our society. We would need to see housing as more of a societal good that everyone should have - and less as an engine of an economy that needs to grow at all costs.

Our economy incentivizes the artificial scarcity of real estate

Artificial scarcity in residential real estate involves limiting the visibility of available units online, releasing them in small batches over time, or maintaining a percentage of vacant units to create a sense of urgency. This exploits the fear of missing out (FOMO), because we all need housing. This pressures tenants to accept higher offers quickly. Tactics include:

• Selective online listings (e.g., showing only 5 out of 20 available units)

• Waitlists for non-existent openings.

• Strategic timing of unit releases to sustain demand pressure.

Technology like yield management software (Yardi, RealPage) can automate these tactics, adjusting prices based on perceived low inventory and sometimes increasing rents more than would a market with artificial scarcity.

Reports from Leasey.AI and ProPublica document that companies such as Greystar and AvalonBay Communities have used these tactics, with studies showing perceived scarcity can raise willingness-to-pay by 5–10% (www.leasey.ai). The Urban Institute also links scarcity perceptions to higher rental premiums.

Natural vs. Artificial Scarcity

The U.S. housing market already faces a structural shortage:

• The National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) estimates about 1.2 million additional units are needed to restore vacancy rates to historical norms.

• Realtor.com puts the housing supply gap at nearly 4 million units in 2024.

A tight housing market along with artificial scarcity contributes to high rents and prices. Housing market supply will naturally wax and wane, but artificial scarcity is a deliberate, market-manipulative practice rather than a structural supply problem.

Share of U.S. Housing Owned by Investors

Corporate ownership of the housing supply isn’t helping. Institutional investors and private equity firms have increasingly bought up residential real estate in recent years, but they are not the primary reason there is less housing stock on the market. They are just exacerbating a problem that is already there.

A 2025 Lincoln Institute of Land Policy study found that about 8.9% of residential parcels in urban areas are owned by corporations, but this varies widely by location. In some cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, Miami, and Richmond, corporate ownership reaches 17–21%, and in Manhattan it exceeds 50%. The GAO found that in 2018–2024, institutional investors owned 1–3% of all single-family homes in six major metro areas, with the highest share (22%) in Jacksonville and the lowest (less than 1%) in Cincinnati and Seattle.

The closing off of the commons

The enclosure of real estate Commons - introducing artificial scarcity into the equation - began hundreds of years ago in Medieval England. In England, land enclosure was the process that ended traditional rights on common land formerly held in the open field system. Once enclosed, these land uses were restricted to the owner, and the land ceased to be for the use of commoners. The process of enclosure became a widespread feature of the English agricultural landscape during the 16th century. By the 19th century, unenclosed commons were few and far between. Today, they hardly exist at all.

My family lives out in the country a bit, about 20 - 30 minutes outside Charlottesville Virginia. Out where we live there are vast horse farms, cattle farms, wineries, and plenty of protected land that is set aside for conservation. There is plenty of land out there for the small college town nearby to be food independent and likely energy independent (wind and solar). But setting aside land for the community’s resilience would come at the expense of land prices and expose the lie of artificial scarcity.

There are plenty of spaces to live that are just empty.

We could use some of that rural land for housing, and local agriculture and local energy, but we don’t really need to touch that much of it. There is already an untapped housing resource staring us in the face - empty office buildings.

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) reports that over 20% of U.S. office space is vacant, equating to about 902 million square feet — roughly the size of 300 One World Trade Center buildings. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates over 1.5 million abandoned properties nationwide, including commercial and residential. Many of these are underutilized office buildings.

You can’t convert office buildings into millions of spaces for housing overnight, but you can do it. We just aren’t trying very hard. I’ve lived in cities where old hospitals, old churches, and other unlikely places have been turned into housing. You can even live in some converted malls now.

But those places are still anomalies.

Degrowth is the answer.

We could have more affordable housing if we prioritized that as a society - but there is no money in it, so it doesn’t happen.

What is nice about not having a mortgage anymore is that our monthly expenses will significantly drop. We won’t have to work as much and as long to make ends meet and to save for retirement and education. We will have more time to spend with our families and in our community. We were very fortunate to have the means to pay off our mortgage early, so that we could live a more relaxed pace of life. The house we bought years ago was probably more expensive than it needed to be due to artificial scarcity.

If there was no artificial scarcity in the real estate market, we could have been in this place much sooner. So can everyone else.

If as a society, we stop chasing growth for no good reason, we could admit that we don’t need to make a fundamental human need of a place to live artificially scarce just to grow the wealth of a small fraction of society.

So, ask your local representatives why they aren’t converting those empty office buildings and that empty mall into housing. They won’t have good answers.

Give them one.

Last week the UN released their eagerly anticipated “Beyond GDP Report”.

In May 2025, the Secretary-General of the UN appointed an independent High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP to develop recommendations for a limited set of country-owned, universally applicable indicators of sustainable development that complement and go beyond GDP. In January, the UN hosted a conference in Switzerland titled Beyond GDP which teed up the ideas in this report.

The report proposes a dashboard of 31 indicators meant to measure wellbeing - beyond just GDP.

Here they are as they appear in the report, broken down by the categories of:

1. Foundation Principles

2. Current Well-Being

3. Equity and Inclusion

4. Sustainability and Resilience

The report discusses what each out constituency should do to move to a place where these metrics are how we measure success. For governments that would mean establishing goals for these metrics and regularly publishing progress toward those goals. Achieving these goals would then make its way into policy, planning and budgeting. them in the core processes of policy, planning, budgeting, and accountability.

But policy follows culture, not the other way around.

I think what the UN did was a worthwhile exercise. But I have seen a lot of these “dashboards” of what needs to be measured. The execution is the same in most cases.

• There is a problem.

• Smart people get together and examine the problem.

• Those people suggest a new way to measure the data behind the problem.

• Those people publish a paper abou their new way to measure data.

• Those people declare the problem will be solved, or at least ameliorated if everyone will just start measuring data in the way they suggest.

Just one problem.

Culture doesn’t work that way.

Whether that culture is the way teenagers talk to each other, or how a complex economy works, how things are done gets negotiated through real world interactions. People respond to incentives. If you want to oversimplify things; people run from pain and towards pleasure. They do the things that are rewarded, either monetarily or culturally and don’t do things that have bad consequences.

New ways of measuring things are just new tools that no one is used to using, and usually has no incentive to start using.

The UN report will do some good. It will expose some people to these metrics for the first time, and get them thinking about these metrics, and maybe even using them.

But what we need is systems change, cultural change. I’d like to see the UN (and others of course) focus more on that. GDP became the dominant way we measure success as economies over many years and due to the influence (sometimes coordinated / sometimes not) of many actors

We need many actors coordinating to move beyond GDP. The UN is just one of them. A tip of the hat to them, but I would like them and others to use this paper as a first step to keep engaging on these issues. I’d like to see students, activists, companies, communities, governments, NGOs and many others all talking more openly about the limits to GDP and how to move our culture away from it.

That’s one of the things I hope we are doing in this space. Read the UN report for yourself. There is some good stuff in there. It won’t change the culture by itself. But it is a positive step.

Am I not negative enough for you?

If you are looking for a more strident takedown of the UN’s efforts. Look no further than Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov.

Kasper wrote the below over on LinkedIn last week. If you don’t already, I suggest following Kasper. He calls it like he sees it and is a great resource for anyone dipping their toe in a post-growth world. His thoughts on the UN paper are below:

The execution is where it falls apart.

1 - Power is invisible.

The report names inequality. It never names power. No indicator of corporate concentration. No measure of lobbying influence. No metric for media ownership. No tracking of revolving doors between regulators and the regulated.

Wealth is downstream of power. You cannot fix structural capture of public institutions with a Gini coefficient.

2 - Nobody voted on this.

13 experts, mostly from Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brookings, and the World Bank, decided what humanity should count.

No referendum. No participatory weighting. No country-owned process.

Bhutan’s GNH and Ecuador’s Buen Vivir grew out of their own societies. Counting What Counts grew out of a New York conference room.

3 - Planetary boundaries are not 1 indicator among 31.

The dashboard treats greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity as peers of 29 other metrics, including ICT skills.

There is no equity on a dead planet. No health, no education, no well-being, no GDP, on a planet that has crossed irreversible thresholds.

A Beyond GDP system should not merely measure sustainability. It should define hard limits for material consumption, land use, CO₂ emissions, biodiversity loss, and energy use, etc.

4 - Measurement is not transformation.

Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi: 2009. OECD Better Life Index: 2011. Bhutan: decades. SDGs: 231 indicators.

We are drowning in better metrics. Emissions are still rising, inequality is still widening, trust is still falling.

The bottleneck was never measurement. The bottleneck is the structural conditions that allow extractive growth to continue regardless of what we measure. Lobbying. Subsidies. Trade rules. Tax havens. Fossil contracts.

A dashboard touches none of these.

A serious Beyond GDP framework would do four things Counting What Counts refuses to do.

Set planetary boundaries as absolute outer limits.

Set a social floor below which no aggregate score counts as progress.

Hand the weighting to deliberative citizen assemblies, not expert panels.

Bind the framework to enforcement: budget rules, planning law, trade conditionality, central bank mandates.

Photo by Andrea Bertozzini on Unsplash

Mother’s day was yesterday here in the United States. It was also Mother’s Day Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Turkey and about 100 countries total. Other nations celebrate Mother’s Day at different times in April and May. So happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there.

You hold this world together and aren’t appreciated as much as you should be.

But I’ve got a plan for that.

A new rite of passage

We have a shortage of empathy in the world today. There have been many essays written about it, which offer a number of suggested solutions. Some aren’t bad ideas, and some are. But most simply ask us to use our imagination to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. That’s not bad. But, it’s not enough. It is better to actually physically walk in someone’s shoes, to experience their lives as much as you can, to feel their pain.

What I’m thinking of takes action. It asks men (or someone in that man’s life) to invest in a small device that you can buy for about $40, and will teach that man an empathy that he may never have thought necessary.

It can change the world.

What I’m talking about is hooking up most men to a “period sympathy device” to let them experience what women go through every month.

A period sympathy device is a portable, wearable device that uses electrical pulses to simulate, or provide relief from, menstrual cramps. They operate by sending small electrical impulses to abdominal muscles, causing contractions that mimic the pain of prostaglandins during menstruation.

While women are going through the pain and discomfort of their periods, our culture expects them to carry on with the everyday tasks of work, child care, housekeeping, community involvement and everything else they do in our day to day lives.

You generally don’t see women screaming in pain in the streets due to their periods, or curled up in a ball on the sidewalk, unable to function. That is because they have learned to deal with pain and discomfort and carry on. Men generally have no idea what is going on. They should.

What are these divices?

Many period simulation devices, such as those popularized by the company Somedays, are used to demonstrate menstrual pain to men, bringing awareness to the 80% of menstruating individuals who experience it.

A TENS machine, or Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation unit, is a device that uses low-voltage electrical currents to relieve pain by stimulating nerves.

TENS machines and simulators are available on Amazon.com, Target and other retailers. If you don’t want to get one from a big box store, just search online for one. There are many options.

Electrode pads are placed on the lower abdomen to simulate or alleviate pain. These devices allow users to adjust the intensity of the simulation or relief, mirroring the varying severity of menstrual cramps. Most of these types of machines are small, wearable, and designed for discreet use during daily activities. So a man can wear one all day, for a few days a month to simulate what his mother, wife, sister, girlfriend or female co-workers are going through.

See for yourself

Here’s an amusing video of three men using a TENS Muscle stimulation. It helps demonstrate how unprepared most men are for the average level of cramping that comes along with a woman’s monthly period.

Here’s a man trying to give a rock climbing demonstration, while hooked up to a TENS machine.

Here’s another one that’s a little more succinct - from CBS news.

These videos are a whole internet phenomena, so knock yourself out watching men writhe in what we hope turns out to be empathetic pain.

A modest proposal

I don’t think it is unreasonable to make any man that makes laws, lobbies for laws, or gives money to groups that look to make laws that disproportionally impact women’s reproductive health - should be required to wear a period cramp simulator turned up to average period cramp levels (a 5 on the TENS simulator) while on camera, and while lobbying for or writing these laws.

Young men in high school and college should be hooked up to these machines to show them what the other half of their schools go through each month. I’m sure some parents would object and not want their sons to participate. But if this was available when I was in high school, I can see my parents agreeing to it. They would likely have been amused by my plight.

On father’s day (or on mother’s day) - mother’s and daughters should give the fathers in their lives a cramp simulator (there are many out there and they are very affordable). Families can figure out a schedule for themselves, but asking dad to wear the simulator for a few days each month sounds reasonable.

Confession

I have never experienced the joy of a cramp simulator, but I’d be happy to if my daughters and wife want me to. I think my son’s should try it too (maybe not on the 9 year old just yet).

We are in a strange time in our history. There are many places today where hard won women’s rights are being compromised or rolled back. That would be much harder to do, if whole generations of men better understood what it was like to lose control of your body for a few days each month, while being expected to carry on as though nothing was happening.

Get back to how it used to be

The point of hooking up men to a period simulation device is to help build empathy. But there is another alternative that is more in keeping with a degrowth tradition.

Instead of requiring women to work through the pain in order to be productive during their periods, we could just surrender to mother nature, and not worry about productivity and economic growth at the expense of a woman’s comfort.

Throughout history, especially in indigenous cultures, menstruation was not a taboo, and was considered a sacred, spiritual, and natural part of life. A woman’s monthly cycle was often referred to as “moon time” and was seen as a time when women are in close connection with the earth, the moon, and the Creator.

Menstruating women were often regarded as possessing heightened spiritual energy and wisdom, and their cycles were linked to the natural rhythms of the earth and the moon. This reverence meant they were treated with great respect and given space to rest and reflect.

In traditions such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), women would retreat during their periods to honor their spiritual connection. This “moon time” period involved resting away from physical labor and community rituals, allowing them to heal, rejuvenate, and focus on inner reflection. Similar practices were seen among the Cree and Ojibwe, who might stay in a secluded “moon lodge” or “menstrual tent”.

Instead of expecting women to stay productive and pursue economic growth during their menstrual cycle, we could focus on supporting them as a community.

So let’s see male keynote speakers at conferences give their keynote speeches through gritted teeth while their TENS unit is turned up to 5. Let’s see a president give a state of the Union while getting waves of electric shocks delivered to his abdomen. Let’s see more men in power demonstrate their solidarity with the women in their lives by publicly submitting themselves to period simulation demonstrations.

Let’s make these demonstrations a more routine part of education for young men. Let’s normalize empathy again, and maybe just step back from the misguided illusion of forever growth, and realize that we are just part of a bigger cycle of life, death and regeneration.

Father’s Day is coming up in a month. I have a great gift idea.

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash

One of the main drivers of the growth engine that is rushing us headlong into collapse is the concept of “shareholder primacy”. This simply means that the job of corporations is to provide the greatest return to shareholders. As corporations have come to dominate our economic landscape and now heavily influence the politicians that run our lives, this concept of shareholder primacy touches all of us.

Putting shareholders first means making money comes first in order of importance, above human well-being, protection of the environment and every other quality of life metric.

Fiduciary duty, or the duty that asset managers and company executives owe shareholders just enmeshes shareholder primacy into law, making it difficult for our society to step away from this self-destructive concept.

There is a better way

Just a few months ago, an essay from Roos Walstock and Ernst Hobma at the Dutch bank Triodos, offered an outline of a better way to structure ownership of the businesses that dominate our lives.

Triodos offers “steward ownership” as an alternative to the shareholder primacy of today. The main changes Triodos suggests are the separation of economic rights and voting rights, and purpose driven - profit allocation.

Here are the main principles of their argument:

1. Separation of economic and voting rights

• Holding a financial stake does not grant control over strategy or operations.

• Control is held by designated “stewards” — people closely connected to the company’s mission and operations.

• Voting rights cannot be sold or inherited; they are passed on in trust to those aligned with the business

2. Purpose-driven profit allocation

   • Profit is a means, not an end.

   • Profits may be reinvested, donated to causes, or returned to investors, but not extracted solely for shareholder benefit

How It Works in Practice

The day-to-day operations of companies would not change. You would still have strategic planning, budgets, leadership structures defined through org charts, and whatever corporate culture a specific company currency has.

The key difference is the long-term strategic orientation toward a mission rather than short-term profit maximization. The stewards of the company could be employees, founders, or other stakeholders that share in their interests in keeping the company “on mission”.

Walstock and Hobma note that our current shareholder model arose at a time when capital was scarce and business risks were high. It therefore made sense to promise returns to investors willing to take on a high level of risks.

But now that corporations are the main form of business organization on the planet, the risks are different. Corporations set the rules, which means that shareholders don’t so much bear the risk, as they seek the rent from the rest of society. Corporations aren’t really gambling anymore, they are setting the rules of the global game. They can influence governments and dictate the rules of the game. This is great for them (while it lasts) but bad for society, which depends on the environment that corporations are plundering.

It makes sense to give power back to “stewards” who have the long-term viability of society in mind.

The Challenges.

The authors admit that there are not many legal forms of steward ownership. Companies that do practice steward ownership depend on current legal structures that tend to default to shareholder primacy. Currently both the European Parliament and the Dutch government are looking to develop a legal structure to support steward ownership.

Remember, in a steward ownership model economic rights are separated from voting rights, so shares and stock markets can still exist, but the board of directors would no longer have a duty of “growth at all costs” instead allowing a focus on mission, which would likely be more in line with human wellbeing within planetary boundaries.

Steward led companies would face more difficulty raising money. At this stage of a company’s life income is low and risk is high. Steward-owned companies could address this issue with instruments called profit-participating loans in which the entity or individual that granted the loan can receive a pre-determined share of the profits of an organization. Another option is emitting shares without voting rights. The Dutch technology company Sumthing has raised money from investors in this way. Half of the profit generated by the company is used to pay out dividends, until the dividend cap for a ‘shareholder’ is reached.

Cumulative preferred shares give investors a fixed annual entitlement to dividend without voting rights. Sprinklr used this option, including the possibility to ‘pay off’ the shares.

According to Triodos, The Purpose Foundation reports that over 250 million euros in investment capital has already been directed towards steward-owned companies. This is a small niche now, but it has provided proof of concept, and could be a model going forward.

If people in your world only understand bulleted lists, here you go:

Potential Benefits of Steward Ownership:

• Mission focus: Helps keep companies oriented toward their long-term purpose

• Applicability: Can be applied to any type of mission — social, environmental, cultural, etc.

• Market competition: Competitive markets can still influence steward-owned companies, but profit is not the sole driver

• Stakeholder alignment: Encourages alignment of interests between different stakeholders, creating win-win opportunities.

Why It Matters

The way we do business today is so ingrained in our economy that it is understandable to think that the current system is the only option.

It isn’t.

We can organize our businesses however we want. We can require them to have purposes that serve people before profit.

Part of the reason that the way we do things today seems impossible to change is that we haven’t imagined something better. We don’t know what that would look like.

Steward-ownership is a good way to solve that problem. Ask the businesses in your world why they can’t adopt this model (they can).

Spread the word.

Photo by Vicky Sim on Unsplash

Our current predicament can be traced to a cultural misunderstanding of insecurity and strength.

Insecurity is the natural state of our lives, yet we treat it as a shameful state of being that is short term in nature. Strength is a short term, often fleeting state of being that we try to convince ourselves is our natural state.

Life is precarious, our natural state of being is insecurity. We live in an illusion of security in most developed markets due to the systems that have accumulated over the centuries that have increasingly delivered more comfort and security. Try to count all the man-made systems that make your life secure. Indoor plumbing, clean and available water, shelter, easy access to food, food safety, convenient and safe transportation, the rule of law, markets, economies, local governance, respect for the rights of others, and dozens of others make our lives relatively comfortable. Most of these systems did not exist or existed in very rudimentary ways for most of human history.

We mistake the existence of these systems that mask our precarity as permanent strength. Strength is never permanent, insecurity is. We are just lying to ourselves if we believe the opposite.

We will be relearning this lesson much more in the coming years.

Our society is a strength illusion.

Insecurity is treated as a weakness, when it is simply our default setting, as both individuals and a society.

When we say we are strong and deny our insecurity we are lying to ourselves and our society and hope no one notices.

True strength is admitting our insecurity, living our lives with the understanding that what we have is precarious and we have to do what we can to manage our lives and our civilization in a way that protects those who we love and love us.

We mistake physical strength and the ability to dominate someone else as the strength we need. That isn’t strength, it is simply domination. It is fleeting, and it is resented by those it is imposed upon, and it is counterproductive to establishing the strength we want, in the long term, which is security and a good life. But that takes admitting your precarity and focusing on cooperation.

Whoops.

The misunderstood nature of strength

Strength, real strength, even though it is fleeting isn’t something that one person can carry. Yet we pretend that it is.

Be wary of those who offer to carry your strength for you. They cannot carry your strength, but they can take yours from you.

Strength can only be carried by many. The strength we want is keeping our collective insecurity at bay. That is a long-term project that requires cooperation and vigilance to make sure we understand that insecurity is our reality and strength is fleeting.

Whoops.

Our current moment

Our economics, our politics and our culture need to evolve to reflect reality. We don’t do that very well now.

Carrying strength is a responsibility you owe your society, and something you can only do with the help of others. No one’s shoulders are broad enough to carry the load. Early in your life, you couldn’t carry any of the load, but you were learning how. At some point you won’t be able to carry any of the load anymore. That’s okay. Others will pick up the slack. Carry what you can while you can. If you hand that strength over to someone else, you weaken your society, and by extension yourself.

Individual insecurity isn’t a weakness. It is just a fact.

Individually we are all insecure. With the wisdom of years, we should grow to understand that and accept it. But it takes a while. I have children of my own now and I see them dealing with the same insecurities I had when I was their age. I still have many of those insecurities, I just realize they don’t matter. I understand better what I can and cannot carry, and for the most part shrug those insecurities off. Sometimes they still get me, but not very often anymore, and when they do, I realize that is ok.

I’m better at asking for help now than I was when I was young.

Our societies can ask for help too.

On the societal level

A strong society is one that realizes that everyone is insecure and works together to minimize those insecurities.

The pursuit of personal strength over building societal strength is impossible, selfish and self-destructive.

We will learn that lesson again, but it sure can be painful to do so.

An insecure society is one that does all it can to deny those insecurities and project a false strength.

A strong society will last as long as it wants.

The insecure society is always collapsing and works harder to disguise this reality than to carry strength together.

A strong society doesn’t worry about growth and understands that pursuing growth will just exacerbate our innate insecurity.

The weak society holds growth up as a noble goal, sells this impossible fantasy as the only reality, and denies its insecurity … because it is insecure.

Which society do you live in?

Which do you want to?

Photo by Paul Jai on Unsplash

Two years ago, a paper came out of the UN Human Rights Council, that may have not lit the world on fire at the time, but it has proven quite influential. The paper, Eradicating poverty beyond growth challenges the traditional thinking that economic growth is the recipe for fighting poverty. I could cook up a nice summary of the paper, but I’ll just borrow the summary from the paper itself, which says things pretty clearly.

The dominant approach to the fight against poverty relies on increasing the aggregate output of the economy (measured as the gross domestic product), combined with post-market redistribution through taxes and transfers. The Special Rapporteur argues, however, that the current focus on increasing the gross domestic product is misguided. An increase in gross domestic product is not a precondition for the realization of human rights or for combating poverty and inequalities. The ideology of “growthism” should not become a distraction from the urgent need both to provide more of the goods and services that enhance well-being and to reduce the production of what is unnecessary or even toxic. As long as the economy is driven mainly by profit maximization, it will respond to the demand expressed by the richest groups of society, leading to extractive forms of production that worsen social exclusion in the name of creating more wealth, and it will fail to fulfil the rights of those in poverty. Moving from an economy driven by the search for maximizing profits to a human rights economy is possible and, to remain within planetary boundaries, necessary. In the present report, the Special Rapporteur explains why this shift is needed and what it could look like.

Last week, an update to the report was presented by its author, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Shutter. The paper was part of a larger conference last week in Geneva. The UN organized the conference: Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth: A Global Roadmap for a New Economy - New Economies for Eradicating Poverty to gather policymakers, academics, NGOs and members of civil society to discuss De Shutters work, and help find a way forward in efforts to eradicate poverty, but this time following a degrowth path.

The 2024 report focused on the why (why such a shift is needed) and the what (what such a shift entails). The 2026 version of the paper lays out more the how (how such a shift can take place).

That “how” includes a set of actions that can be taken to organize this shift. Its recommendations are structured around five pillars:

1. Transforming economic systems

2. Labour, care and economic democracy

3. Universal basic service and social protection

4. Ecological justice

5. Transforming the international economic order

Once finalized, the roadmap will offer a menu of policy measures that governments, international agencies, and other stakeholders can implement that place human rights, care, and well-being at the center of the economy. The idea is to get our economies back within planetary boundaries, not chase further growth.

For those not inclined to read the paper, you can check out the website that summarizes things, here: Roadmap - New Economies for Eradicating Poverty

What this means.

This is kind of a big deal. For years, the solution to the elimination of global poverty has always been. More. The idea was that if we just grew the global pie, that could benefit those in poverty as well.

But of course, that doesn’t work. That growing the pie just took the resources of the poor in order to benefit those already well off. Those in poverty may have had their lives improved marginally, but the main impact was the turbocharging of global inequality and the destruction of the natural world to facilitate that wealth transfer.

This report and the whole conference organized around it is one of the first times global organizations such as the UN, the European Commission, Earth 4 All, Partners for a New Economy, Oxfam, and other organizers have gathered with policymakers, academics and members of civil society to talk openly about degrowth being the answer.

Please read this material as you see fit, share it with those you think would benefit from it and keep pushing this narrative forward.

My colleague at Arketa Institute, Anastasia Linn, attended the event and provided this summary over on LinkedIn:

“Whatever progress is expected from higher GDP ‘can often be harmed by the ways it is generated’.” - Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, citing the Beyond Growth report at the launch of the Roadmap for Eliminating Poverty Beyond GDP in Geneva yesterday.

Arketa Institute co-founder Anastasia Linn was there alongside leading scholars like Jason Hickel, Bhumika Muchhala, PhD, Dr. Ndongo Samba Sylla, Kate Pickett, and Timothée Parrique; diplomats, policymakers, and UN officials like Katarina Ivanković Knežević and Astra Bonini, PhD; representatives of international organizations like the World Health Organization, the International Trade Union Confederation - ITUC and the International Organisation of Employers (IOE); and many colleagues from the degrowth and New Economy communities such as Wellbeing Economy Alliance - WEAll, Post Growth Institute and Partners for a New Economy.

As many of the speakers underlined, it’s high time for something better. We must realize an economy that enables human wellbeing and planetary thriving by design.

Our heartfelt congratulations to Olivier and team, as well as the 400+ reviewers and contributors, for their tremendous work realizing this Roadmap. Thanks as well to the many speakers below for their leadership, and to the International Labour Organization for making space for this crucial conversation.

There were a lot of very important organizations and very important people at that meeting. They are all trying to tell a better story about how we can live here and be happy with less. If you can, tell them that is what you want. They are primed to listen and starting to form the policy tools to tell a better story.

Photo by Itadaki on Unsplash

A data center is just a warehouse where supercomputers, servers, networks and other tech wizardry are housed. Their purpose is to drive the AI revolution.

What is the purpose of AI? The sanitized definition is something like: “To make life easier for humanity, by solving issues that help people work efficiently.”

The real definition is: “To profit by convincing people, companies and governments that AI can solve all problems.” Like other technologies, such as the Internet and social media, AI will help make some things easier, while further eroding the social fabric of our society. Like the Internet and social media (which I use) AI makes it easier to get through life without physical interactions with other people - they are the very things we were programmed over tens of thousands of years to do - to need to do. We are less happy when we don’t interact with our fellow humans. Our technologies are promising us that life is better without them.

The numbers.

The numbers behind the AI revolution are staggering.

As of March 2026, there are 4,011 data centers in the United States ahead of the UK (511), Germany (507), China (368), and France (344).

US data centers are responsible for about 4% of total US energy consumption and are projected to increase their energy needs by 133% by 2030.

US data centers use about 1.7 billion liters of water per day. That is about half of the current daily water use of New York City. By 2030, they will be using more water per day than New York City.

Image from The Visual Capitalist

Pushback.

It should come as no surprise then that communities are starting to question the wisdom of building more and more data centers.

You aren’t going to put a new mammoth data center in the middle of Chicago. Too many people would complain.

But you can build on in Memphis.

Elon Musk’s xAI “Colossus” data center in Memphis has highlighted the tradeoff from revenue brought in by a data center and the environmental damage it brings. The data center is powered by 35 methane gas turbines that produce 1,200 to 2,000 tons of nitrogen oxides each year, causing smog and respiratory issues.

When the data center was being built, Musk promised to cool it with recycled wastewater rather than drawing from the Memphis Sand Aquifer, which took millions of years to fill. The recycling water plan was scrapped, and now the aquifer is being used. The government in Memphis got a nice big check upfront, for poorer health outcomes now and in the future, inflated energy prices and the potential loss of their main water source in the future.

The data centers you see going up now require a lot of land, energy and water for cooling. That land is cheaper outside cities. The huge checks written by tech companies to build data centers are seen as a windfall for the primarily rural areas where populations are low, and even in decline.

But the tide has started to turn.

About 66% of residents in Port Washington, Wisconsin recently passed a referendum requiring the local government to get voter permission before signing up for any more data centers.

The State Senate in Virginia (where I live and which has the most data centers by far) has put forward a budget that would get rid of a sales tax exemption currently enjoyed by data centers.

In the past week, the governor of Main vetoed a bill that had passed the state legislature that would have put a moratorium on data centers above a certain size.

Expect more battles like these in the coming months and years.

The promise and the reality.

In theory, data centers exist to turbocharge growth through the increased use of AI that is promised to drive efficiencies and lower costs (mostly labor costs).

But the growth promised is not possible. The laws of thermodynamics, the eventual end of the AI stock crazze, and the simple fact that human beings need air to breath and water to drink will stop the current data center mania.

That means in reality, data centers exist to bring about their own destruction.

We are undoubtedly in an AI bubble. The revenues that would justify the unrealistically high valuations of companies related to AI, won’t materialize - if you still believe in reality. In stock market manias, like the tulip mania, the speculation that led to the great depression, the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, and now the Ai bubble, reality always takes a back seat. But eventually, reality will take back the wheel.

Degrowth is the answer.

That the AI mania and the overproduction of data centers have gotten this far is a testament to the power or greed and marketing. Greed pushes us to prop up manias again and again. That greed can buy a whole lot of advertising.

If you pay attention to corporate media, financial media, or any of the media that comes through the devices on your phone or computer that comes from a company that has its hands in data centers, you might think that the public support AI and data centers.

They do not.

A recent survey from Pew Research Center, shows that Americans have consistently been more wary about AI than they are excited.

Maybe that’s because they don’t have stock options in AI companies and are instead concerned about preserving things like creativity and human relationships.

A rightsizing of AI is coming by disaster or design. When the data center bubble bursts, expect to see lots of data center plans cancelled and for current data centers turn back into warehouses, with their servers removed. Maybe the good people of Memphis can have clean air and water again.

The data center build out will speed up the collapse to come, by taking energy and water from human beings that need it, so that machines can replace the brain work of those very human beings.

A society that didn’t feel compelled to grow at all costs would see this as a ridiculously dangerous bargain, and never go down the data center road, and be much more deliberate and cautious about AI.

We don’t live in that world.

One of the questions that always comes up when talking to people about a degrowth path to a “postgrowth” or “wellbeing” economy is exactly how to do that.

Whether I am speaking to students or seasoned financial professionals, they all want to know, “how” exactly we move from what we have to the aspiration that many people want, but feel is impossible to get to.

They want a blueprint.

It may not be a blueprint that works for absolutely everyone, but our friends at the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), have published Doughnut Economics for Policymakers so that your local or national government can work from such a blueprint.

I invite you to read the report yourself, and to share it with policymakers or regulators where you are to give them a better idea of how we might move to an economy that operates within planetary boundaries and focuses on meeting the needs of our citizens, not on simply growing the economy. The authors of the report go out of their way to say that the guide is not a “blueprint” but a series of ideas to start from.

Doughnut Economics

Before we get into the paper, here is a little refresher on Doughnut Economics.

Doughnut economics is a way to frame economics in a new way so that we understand the implicit limits they have – which we ignore at our peril.

Many of you have probably seen this graphic before, but if you haven’t, here is a picture of what I am talking about:

The inner blue circle is a space of human deprivations (lack of water, food, education, etc.). If any of these things are in shortfall, we can and should aim to find ways to move people up into the “safe and just space for humanity”. For example, a nation would be in an energy shortfall if a significant portion of its citizens don’t have safe access to electricity.

The overshoot areas outside the donut line up with the planetary boundaries, and when we are in overshoot, we are in the danger zone. If a system stays in overshoot (climate change, for example), we will expect to experience increasing deleterious effects for humanity. Better to get back into the safe zone.

Here’s what’s inside.

The report provides a brief overview of Doughnut Economics and its relevance for policymakers

The report than explores how the key concepts embedded in the seven ways of thinking in Doughnut Economics can help governments design and implement policies that enable humanity to thrive within planetary boundaries.

Those seven ways of thinking are:

• Change the goal - Move away from GDP as a measure of success.

• See the big picture - The economy is embedded in society, which is embedded in nature.

• Nurture human nature - We are more than just “economic man”.

• Think in systems - Everything is connected. Understand how.

• Be distributive by design - Move to economy where assets are more equally distributed.

• Be regenerative by design -From degenerative to regenerative by design.

• Avoid growth dependency - Break growth dependencies.

The paper introduces a deep design framework to examine the governance transformation required for governments to better practice the seven ways of thinking. The way we currently do economics is deeply ingrained in our culture, politics and economics. Those things don’t change quickly. This involves transforming:

• Public finance - The rules and processes governing public finance.

• Culture - How things are done in government needs to change.

• Operations - Reimagining how governments operate.

• Influence - Society influences government through elections, accountability mechanisms and participation in government.

How to use this?

Doughnut economics isn’t a cure all. It is just a different way to look at how our world can work in a way that focuses on wellbeing over the growth of capital (how we currently do things). But Doughnut economics is gaining momentum. See the below data from the report:

If you have the time, I recommend reading the report. Then share it with those in your community that can implement some of the recommendations in the report. They likely won’t do so right away but start the conversation. Don’t have the conversation just once. Start the conversation and keep it going.

Image courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Most people missed a recent cataclysmic story due to all the headline grabbing madness of today’s world.

This past week, research published by Science Advances showed that the Atlantica Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is projected to weaken by about 50% by the end of the century. The AMOC is the current that brings warm water and warm air from the Caribbean to the East Coast of the United States and Europe.

Here’s the mechanics of how it works, from The Guardian:

The Amoc is slowing because air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic because of global heating. That means the ocean cools more slowly there. Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking and forming an Amoc feedback loop.

The AMOC has shut down before, which has always caused havoc on the Earth’s systems. Of course there are no written records of this, we weren’t around to write things down when this happened last. But scientists can piece together the evidence of the last time the AMOC shut down. Here is what would happen. Temperatures throughout Europe would drop profoundly. Agriculture as we know it would cease. Tourism would cease. Construction would cease. Manufacturing would cease. Finance would cease. You get the picture

In some models, average winter temperatures drop by up to 5–10°C (that’s 9 - 18°F) within a few decades after a collapse.

To put that in perspective, the lowest temperature ever recorded in London was −17.4 °C (0.7 °F), measured at Northolt on 13 December 1981. If the AMOC shuts down, it is estimated that one-in-10 winters in London could see cold extremes approaching -20C. It is cold comfort (no pun intended) that at 50% weakening of AMOC by 2100 might not be as extreme as a full shutdown. If you do the math, a weakening of 50% is still catastrophic.

The Science Advances study warns of the following implications:

• Accelerated Decline: The study suggests that “pessimistic” models (those showing a strong slowdown) are the most accurate, meaning the AMOC is weakening faster than previously estimated by average climate models.

• Tipping Point Fears: Experts, including Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, expressed increased concern that the AMOC could pass a shutdown tipping point as early as the middle of this century.

• Catastrophic Consequences: A shutdown or major weakening of this “conveyor belt” of ocean currents would have severe, irreversible consequences, including intense cold in Europe, accelerated sea-level rise along the US East Coast, and a shift in tropical rainfall patterns.

• Underestimated Risks: The projections may be even worse because many models do not yet fully account for the increasing meltwater from Greenland, which further inhibits the current’s ability to sink.

The impacts would be catastrophic around the world.

In North America, sea levels would rise because the warming waters would expand, and stall along the coast instead of flowing northward with the current. Any ocean front property, recreation or resources of any value would be at increased risk. The Northeast of North America could experience cooling.

In Africa and South America, shifts in rainfall would impact agriculture and water security. Monsoons would shift, droughts would increase. The whole global food system would collapse (but it likely already would have by that time).

Why is no one paying attention?

Even though the year 2100 is a long way away, the shutdown of the AMOC might be locked in soon if we don’t act, which would lock in an ice ace of thousands of years.

Of course the AMOC shutting down is just one of many tipping points. All are plenty scary and looming over the horizon. A number of them will probably start to tip in your lifetime.

But they are abstract, and far away. Our lives are also very busy. Most of us have to work long hours to make sure we can put food on the table, pay the mortgage, keep our kids educated and safe. All of us are too busy chasing growth to pay much attention to impending doom. Our media has failed us. They can’t talk much about AMOC shutting down. That doesn’t pay the bills. It might scare people, making them less likely to buy the stuff sold during the commercials of cable news.

Degrowth is the Answer.

We would have the time to address the AMOC shutting down, and the other tipping points ahead of us, if we didn’t have to run so fast, so often just to keep from falling behind. In a world in which we didn’t have to work so much to just barely get by, more people would know about AMOC (and the other tipping points). In such a world, media could cover real problems without worrying whether it would hurt the bottom line. In that world, policymakers would have to address the AMOC - in fact, they would have done so decades ago.

But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world in which we have to chase growth just to keep this machine running. The machine is running to enrich a few of us for a short time, and doom all of us in the long-term.

Tell someone who doesn’t know about AMOC about AMOC shutting down and ask them what they plan to do when it does.

“If my clients don’t see me putting short-term profits over their very survival, I’m legally in the clear. Right?”

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

There is a great corporate governance blog out there, in case you have been looking for one. Now, don’t everyone rush there at once, but the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance has been around for decades posting thought leadership on the topic of corporate governance, and often on sustainability issues. I would say it is a prestigious place to write, but they have let me write there on occasion - so how good can it be, right?

An article published there last week caught my eye, and I thought it would be worth sharing. When Fiduciaries Collide: Foreshadowing a Looming Conflict in Corporate Governance explores the topic of fiduciary duty, which I recently wrote about.

The author, Paul Rissman of Rights CoLab imagines a not too distant future in which a retirement fund pushes a corporation to take actions to change the way it does business because that way of business ultimately harms the well-being of the fund’s beneficiaries. The corporation in this thought experiment generates negative externalities in the form of poverty wages, carbon pollution, contributing to macroeconomic risks that reduces income growth, damages productivity, and increases the likelihood of financial crises. The corporation of course disagrees and argues that the only fiduciary duty it owes is the appreciation of the company’s shares - and that the only duty it owes is to shareholders.

Rissman writes:

The issue of fiduciary duty, the duty that a fiduciary owes its clients has historically only been interpreted to mean - “to make money”. Fiduciary duty has not been interpreted - and there is plenty of case law to support this - to mean “the wellbeing of the client”.

So, the world that Rissman imagines is indeed a new one. This is exactly the type of world that the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance is trying to create in their paper “Sustainable Fiduciary Duty”, which I wrote about a few weeks back. Like Rissman and the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance, I see a new interpretation of fiduciary duty coming but arguing about what it will look like and how it will be implemented can be infuriating.

Don’t Call a Lawyer When Your House is On Fire.

The conversations that Rissman and the Net Zero Lawyers alliance are having are important, and they are trying to move the concept of fiduciary duty forward. However, collapse will move faster than corporate law.

I came up in the corporate governance world over 25 years ago, first working for a company that was trying to quantify corporate governance. The changes to how an issue is perceived, whether that be voting on executive pay, or majority voting for the board (which were two big issues historically) took over a decade to be resolved in the favor of shareholder’s rights but are still being fought over on the margins.

This issue of fiduciary duty seems like it can be resolved by common sense. But our political and economic worlds are on much slower timetables. There is a house that is on fire here, but before doing anything to put out the fire, a year’s long discussion needs to happen about whether we should address the issues that led to the fire (a broader interpretation of fiduciary duty) or whether we should focus on improvements to the house so that it can be made more productive (current interpretation of fiduciary duty).

The house is on @#**ing fire! By the time you settle this argument, the house will be ash.

As is always the case in these discussions, the author assumes the system will continue functioning, and this is just another in the ebb and flow cycle of companies and their shareholders quibbling about corporate governance.

But the system that supports these companies will collapse while these issues are being argued in court. Some companies arguing to not listen to their shareholders about a more expansive definition of fiduciary duty will indeed cease to be going concerns because they didn’t listen to their shareholders.

I guess in that case the problem will take care of itself. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

If there are lawyers or financial people reading this that know of ways to reform fiduciary duty before the house burns down, please reach out. We need to talk.