I began by
reading the launch article in The Guardian by some of the report’s authors.
It’s a real doomsday scenario article with a two-pronged poverty doom and
climate doom. The importance of economic growth for developed countries is
questioned. The authors, of which there are about 400, including many from the
UN as well as prominent economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas
Piketty, favor an economic system redesign, something that I would say would be
difficult to do in any case, as well as unwarranted in my opinion. Certainly,
we could tweak the system we have in several ways, but I don’t think system
redesign is plausible at all.
“…our economies must be redesigned around the fulfilment
of rights and collective wellbeing within planetary boundaries, rather than
maximising output at any cost.”
“We need to change the rules upstream. That means, for
instance, decent work and employment guarantees, living wages and fair
remuneration, stronger unions and workplace democracy, tackling discrimination
and valuing the paid and unpaid care work on which our societies depend. It
means investing in children, housing, health, education and transport through
universal public provisioning. It means public control of strategic assets,
credit guidance to steer investment towards social and ecological priorities, and
support for the development of the social and solidarity economy.”
It sounds too much like
control to me, and I’m a liberal. Adequate wages, less discrimination, and more
social welfare investments are fine, but the last part – public control of
strategic assets seems dubious. Certainly, private companies receiving public
money may have to meet certain requirements to get it, including requirements
about business practices. Economic priorities can sometimes be more important
than ecological and social priorities.
The authors suggest that
countries in the global south have been subjected to “centuries of colonial
dispossession.” This sounds like a typical oppressor/oppressed narrative
that one sees with Progressives and socialists.
Below is more Progressive
drivel. We all want equality, social well-being, environmental and climate
mitigation, ethnic inclusion, and fair labor practices. But many of us would
prefer not to be subjected to far-left ideologies guiding such things.
“Around the world, Indigenous struggles, feminist
organising, trade unions and climate justice movements are defending and
building alternative futures rooted in collective care and territorial rights.”
Dan Hannon wrote an article
in the Washington Examiner criticizing the so-called anti-poverty manifesto. He
called the plan, not economics, but eco-tyranny. He writes:
“Poverty is manufactured,” they declare, which is the
exact opposite of the truth. Poverty was mankind’s primordial condition, and
remained the lot of our species for a million years. It was wealth that was
manufactured, and, in the last two centuries, brought within the reach of more
than 9 in 10 people. The gloomsters pounce on this statistic, moaning that “in
a world richer than ever before, roughly one-10th of the world’s population
still lives in extreme destitution.” In fact, thanks to capitalism, the number
of people living in what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty has
fallen from 38% in 1990 to 8% today.”
Hannan, a former member of
the European Parliament, gives some pretty harsh words in response to the
report’s purveyors and their plans:
“Who gets to decide who the right people are? How,
indeed, could anyone enforce the kind of agenda that these former economists
want? What kind of coercive power is needed to prevent people from fulfilling
their most basic instinct: to get a better life for themselves and their
children?”
“We know the answer. We have seen it in every regime
that seeks to impose equality by preventing enrichment, from China to
Czechoslovakia, from Cuba to Cambodia. The only way to enforce equality is
through labor camps, torture chambers, and firing squads. A straight line runs
from teenage musings about excessive materialism to the gulag. Refusing to see
this doesn’t just disqualify you as a serious economist; it disqualifies you as
a responsible adult.”
The six policy pillars of the
roadmap are shown below. They include: 1) transforming economic systems; 2)
Labour, care and economic democracy; 3) Universal basic services and social
protection; 4) Ecological justice; 5) Transforming the international economic
order; and 6) Democratic planning and governance.
Two of the policy pillars
involve transformations of economic systems and of international economic
order, which would be immense, and both are impractical, implausible, and
likely to lead to conflict if attempts are made to implement them. Labour,
care, and economic democracy are important and should be addressed, though
perhaps not in the way they are designed here. I am not against universal basic
services, but the big question is who will pay for that. Ecological justice is
wrought with differing opinions of what that actually is and who gets to decide
what that is. If the current state of climate justice is any indication, it
would appear to put that under the control of radical climate activists, not
something any of us should want. Democratic planning and governance are, of
course, desirable.
The report seeks to define
poverty as a manufactured “process of exclusion.” I do not think that is the
case.
“…poverty is not a static condition that can be reduced
to a lack of income, but a multidimensional, relational and evolving process of
exclusion.”
They say that “inequality
breeds poverty.” However, many of us see the two as less related. We need to
address poverty, but not by punishing the wealthy. We can tax them more, of
course, and I am in favor of that. We should not, however, demonize the
wealthy.
They suggest that it is the
violation of human rights that produces poverty.
“…poverty is manufactured, produced and reproduced,
through institutional choices about how welfare systems are structured, how
labour is valued, how wealth is taxed, how care and support is organised and
remunerated, and how markets are regulated.”
Spoiler alert. There was
poverty before there was capitalism. In fact, there was massive poverty before
capitalism came and alleviated a lot of it. Below, they give a UN definition of
poverty:
“In 2001, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights defined poverty as “a human condition characterized by sustained or
chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power
necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil,
cultural, economic, political and social rights.”
I am a strong believer in
human rights, but I don’t think poverty, the bulk of which exists in places
like Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, is a result of wealthy governments
oppressing human rights by depriving the poor of resources and opportunities.
Poverty is likely multidimensional, as they say, but that does not mean that
the wealthy and government policies caused it.
The report goes on to trash
economic growth, referring to it as the hegemony of growth. That growth that
they criticize is precisely what has, along with related economic factors,
decreased global poverty steadily over the years and still does. That’s not to
say we don’t need more taxation for the wealthy, more social welfare for the
vulnerable, and more opportunities that allow people to escape poverty. They
say growth is mainly a benefit to the rich and counterproductive. How can
growing productivity be counterproductive? Yes, they do seem to espouse the
frankly dumb idea of planned degrowth. Now, being less productive is what is
counterproductive!
They go on to cite “planetary
boundaries,” an idea related to the old environmentalist and Malthusian idea of
exceeding the “carrying capacity” of the earth to provide resources and
materials. Availability of resources and materials is always in flux as new
ways to manufacture, higher efficiencies, and new technologies advance resource
extraction and materials availability. Human ingenuity, now aided by machine
learning, is what leads to better extraction and availability.
The report suggests that the
wealthier economies of the global north are exploiting the poorer economies of
the global south. Their answer is to move beyond the moniker ‘Beyond GDP’ to
Beyond Growth itself.
They call for a human
rights-based economy. While I am in favor of increasing societal fairness in
many ways, including increasing economic fairness and advancing human rights, I
don’t like their vision of implementing it via forced economic redistribution.
Of course, the question arises: Who gets to decide what is fair? A group of
climate activist-oriented Progressive economic advisors?
They favor wealth taxes and
maximum income limits. I don’t disagree, but I would want input from experts of
different political persuasions rather than a single group of ideologically
compatible partisans.
They mention stopping
corporate abuses in taxation and unfair corporate advantages. Some of these are
worth considering for reform. They are also gung-ho for carbon taxes and other
monetization of negative business externalities. That would clearly make energy
more expensive for all people. Making fossil fuel companies pay more will be
passed on to consumers, as will the higher costs of lower-carbon energy systems.
It’s hard to see how higher energy prices could address poverty.
Their “favouring {of}
public, municipal and cooperative ownership of strategic assets in the
low-carbon transition,” and their proposal to nationalize pension funds
smacks of socialism. The extensive use of the words ‘co-operative’ and
‘collective’ in these proposals also suggests socialism.
They favor what they call the
Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) and say it is “the only existing
economic system whose internal logic concretely prefigures a shift from
capital-centred to human-rights centred economic activity.”
Their proposals for a
post-growth ‘labour, care, and economic democracy’ are fine, but who will pay?
They seek to redistribute power, and some of that may be needed, but the
logistics of such policy proposals would not be easy.
Since lifting the poor, the
most vulnerable among us, is the goal of poverty reduction, I am not, in
principle, opposed to ideas like guaranteed jobs or universal basic income. How
such programs would be implemented and how they would be paid for are
challenges. Their idea of providing universal basic services is not a bad one.
It would guarantee:
“…unconditional access to life sustaining goods and
services—including food, housing, water and sanitation, healthcare, care,
education, energy, transport, internet access and communication — for every
person, without exception.”
I agree that we should do our
best as a society to provide such benefits for all people. I, and people I
know, right here in the U.S., have been without some of these temporarily, and
we should be able to provide them when they can’t be obtained by normal
methods. In developing countries, these challenges can lead to worse problems, which the UN’s sustainable development goals seek to address, although they are
behind schedule according to planned trajectories. Ideas like prioritizing
needs, such as economist Bjorn Lomborg addressed in his book, Best Things
First, can be useful for solving the most solvable and least expensive to solve
problems first. They mention an idea of universal access to clean energy. I
could agree to that for people who are directly affected by local pollution
from energy, but other than that, simple access to energy, in whatever form, is
more important.
The section on ecological
justice, which includes climate justice, is more partisan drivel to accelerate
the energy transition at all costs, through legislative caps on pollution,
carbon emissions, and resource use. That smacks of manufactured austerities.
They recommend affirming the rights of nature, which is often effectively
another subtle anti-fossil fuel barb.
They favor Democratic
governance of energy transition minerals. In that case, they need to address
their concerns to China, which leads very strongly in that department,
including enhanced environmental destruction, compared to Western countries,
which have better environmental records.
They advocate for limiting
the power of foreign investors to collect the debts from lending to poorer
countries. There may be things we can do here, but again, who's to say their
approach is best? Private investors won’t invest in the future if they don't
get adequate returns. It’s that simple.
“Eradicating poverty beyond the imperatives of growth is
not possible without enabling the peoples of the Global South to exercise
sovereign control over their productive capacities (land, labour, factories,
and resources), and utilise these productive capacities to serve local needs
instead of what is most profitable to foreign investors.”
Their idea to end
investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms, such as those put in place by the
World Trade Organization, does not seem wise. It is basic anti-corporate
ideology. They call for ending the use of unilateral sanctions. These are
currently levied at the world’s most aggressive, unfair, and human
rights-deficient countries, such as Iran and Russia. It is often the only
leverage we have against such despicable regimes. While such sanctions often do
have the unintended secondary effect of harming the economy of these nations,
they also harm their military buildups and increasing regional influence, which
is the desired effect. Thus, it is a dumb idea. Those regimes don’t care about
social and environmental well-being, and they certainly don’t take care of
their citizens.
Their proposals for
democratic planning and governance are fine except that they are oriented to a
post-growth society, which doesn’t exist and won’t likely exist for a long
time. Tracking multidimensional well-being indicators is fine as an addition to
economic indicators like GDP.
Their ideas of participatory
democracies. citizens’ assemblies, participatory social audits, and community
monitoring smacks of the dysfunctional ideas of direct democracy promoted by
the Occupy Wall Street protestors.
Their idea of reforming and
decolonizing economics education brings back the oppressor/oppressed narrative
that says the rich got rich by oppressing the poor in other countries and must
pay them back by submitting to our redistributive policies.
I do not think this group of
so-called experts has the best plan or even a functional plan to address
poverty through the force of regulations, strengthening the public sector, and
punishing the private sector. I ain’t buying what they are selling and neither
should you.
References:
Pure
equality requires labor camps and gulags. Dan Hannan, Washington Examiner. June
13, 2026. Pure equality requires labor camps
and gulags
A
Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. New Economies for Eradicating
Poverty. Special Procedures. United Nations Human Rights Council.
Presented under the
mandate of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier
De Schutter. June 11, 2026. Roadmap-for-Eradicating-Poverty-Beyond-Growth_final_11-June.pdf
The
Roadmap. (website). Roadmap - New Economies for
Eradicating Poverty
We
economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a
better way. Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty,
Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel. The Guardian. June 10, 2026. We economists have done the maths:
‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way | Olivier De Schutter,
Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel |
The Guardian
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