economy
The Guardian view on climate equality: a richer life and real public abundance, not just more stuff
The Global Justice Report offers a hopeful bargain: tax extreme wealth and replace consumer excess with social and economic security for all
TL;DR
- Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality, and keep global heating within a 2C rise.
- The Global Justice Report, from Thomas Piketty's World Inequality Lab, proposes a new global fiscal and monetary architecture.
- Key aims include bringing every country to today's rich-country level of €5,000 per person per month in purchasing-power terms.
- Proposed solutions include taxes on the very rich, a Keynesian 'clearing union', and a new international currency.
- The desired standard of living focuses on secure public services, increased leisure, and climate stability, rather than endless private consumption.
- The report contrasts this with today's poverty-and-plenty divide, citing the example of resource extraction in Congo.
- A rich-world lifestyle of high private consumption is not sustainable for the rest of the planet within a 2C carbon budget.
- The report offers a bargain: rich-world public provision and downtime for all, without oligarchic excess.
- Critics may view the report as utopian, but its power lies in its vision for social abundance replacing private material abundance.
- The challenge is to overcome political resistance and sell this vision as less waste, less work, less rent extraction, more security, more leisure, and more public luxury.