The one-sentence summary

The economic operating system keeps crashing so it’s time to update to a new one.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • This is a survival guide for humanity written by six authors as a report to the Club of Rome. It asserts that earth has crossed multiple planetary boundaries and is now at the cliff edge. On top of that, widespread inequality is causing deep social instabilities, making it even more difficult to resolve our crises.
  • The book outlines for the first time what system change really means for civilization – an antidote to despair and a roadmap to a better future. It uses computer modelling to show how five turnarounds are needed urgently to achieve prosperity for all within planetary limits within a single generation. These cover poverty, inequality, empowerment, food and energy, and are interlinked so that together they create a whole system transformation called Earth4All.
  • It maps out two alternative pathways this century – Too-Little-Too-Late vs The Giant Leap. These represent breakdown or breakthrough and are underpinned by the Social Tension Index and the Average Wellbeing Index. The assumptions in the model are drawn from real world data from 1980 to 2020.
  • GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was never intended to measure a society’s overall health, and over the last few decades the dire consequences of treating GDP growth as a singular goal have become apparent. Human wellbeing requires a broader conception than merely maximizing income and corruption. In the Giant Leap scenario, for example, economic inequality becomes widely acknowledged as deeply polarizing and a threat to political stability and human progress.
  • The poverty turnaround involves dramatic expansion in the policy space along with trade re-regionalization and a new economic model that allows the growth in low-income nations to reduce poverty rapidly in a green and fair way.
  • The inequality turnaround uses progressive taxation to distribute income more fairly, re-unionization to empower workers, and a Citizen Fund to provide universal basic dividends so that citizens can benefit from shared resources.
  • The empowerment turnaround brings gender equity to the fore with education for all, female leadership and jobs, and a new pension system for old age.
  • The food turnaround uses regenerative agriculture and sustainable intensification to create healthier soils and ecosystems, new farming techniques and food-system efficiency to shift from grain-fed red meat to nourishing healthier diets.
  • The energy turnaround creates new energy system efficiency to transform consumption in heat, industrial processes and transport by moving to abundant renewables.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • This is an aspirational, stubbornly optimistic outlook on the future and offers ideas that could have the most effect in the shortest time.
  • Footloose finance refers to those investors only out to make a quick return.
  • High income countries exploit cross-border trade to effectively export emissions to producing countries, thereby abdicating their sustainability responsibilities.
  • Debt is like deep snow on a steep mountainside. The smallest movement can trigger an avalanche. Because low-income nations rely on foreign capital for reserves or liquidity in the international economy, capital flight is most damaging to them. When money rapidly flows out, they run out of options and cannot afford crucial imports.
  • The poorest 50% of people take less than 9% in total earnings, while the richest 10% take well more than 50%. In many regions, it is closer to 60%.
  • Between 1990 and 2017, material footprints (that’s consumption per person in metric tonnes per year) grew dramatically for upper- and high-income groups while shrinking slightly among low-income consumers.
  • Enclosure of common land has had a huge effect on inequality. Governments, colonial powers and other so-called authorities hold these resources privately for their sole benefit.
  • Executive to-worker pay disparity has skyrocketed in recent decades. A 2021 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that America’s largest public firms paid CEOs 352 times that of the average worker, up from 21-to-1 in 1965.
  • In just under 50 years the global population doubled from 2 billion to 4 billion up to 1975. Then it did it again up to 2022, hitting nearly 8 billion. The good news however is that this population bomb has been defused because the growth rate peaked in the sixties.
  • Here are 5 myths to offset our reliance on fossil fuels.
    1. Energy transitions are slow.
    2. Many sectors are hard to electrify.
    3. It is difficult to change people’s behaviour.
    4. Electric vehicles are not as good as internal combustion engines.
    5. Intermittency means clean energy is unreliable. None of these are true.
  • The authors claim that implementing their suggestions will cause an end to poverty in one generation, greater equality among people and nations, healthy people on a healthy planet, abundant clean and cheap energy, fresh air, gender equity, economic resilience and security, population stabilization, a livable planet, and regaining of our future.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Not much. This is comprehensively and calmly argued with probably the most robust and comprehensive data that can be found anywhere.