Here’s a report called the GLOBAL JUSTICE REPORT: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. The big name on the report is Thomas Picketty. This is an academic report – despite their insistence that it is concrete and practical, it is definitely more of a vision along with a catalog of policies that could be pursued to support that vision. Part of it is about a global wealth tax funneling into a global sovereign wealth fund, and in fact I came to the report through a brutal take-down of the political achievability of that particular idea. Nonetheless, if there is a clear vision, countries that want to can start to review and try to align policies with the vision over time. And if a large enough group of countries agreed to band together to pursue the policies collectively, perhaps they could move the needle.

The idea I found most interesting was an idea they call “targeted sufficiency”, which goes like this:

Sufficiency includes a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, a large shift in consumption from material to immaterial sectors (education/health), and a substantial change in food habits, allowing for a strict deforestation ban and a gradual return of global forest cover to the 1900 level…global convergence of all countries to 60k Euros 2025 PPP in per capita GDP by 2100

So you implement income/wealth redistribution policies; reduce working hours, shift remaining working hours from transportation, food, manufacturing, and construction to health and education; reduce the environmental footprint of those high impact industries, which may require reducing their actual magnitude; and persuade (or force?) people to shift their increased leisure time to experiences and services rather than consumption of physical goods. I think it’s a nice vision, and just pointing policies in this direction and achieving some small fraction of it in the near term would be an achievement. That’s the thing about changing the course of a large vessel – if they had just given the steering wheel on the Titanic a little tweak early enough and stuck to the new course, it would not be at the bottom of the ocean.

To me, value added tax at the individual country level, a portion shifted into either individual accounts for citizens, baby bonds, or a sovereign wealth fund (these all amount to mathematically, economically, roughly the same thing, although vastly different politically); and another portion shifted into sustainable infrastructure and incentives for that shift in labor to education and health, could be an achievable way to steer toward this vision. You can tax (or cap and trade, which amounts to the same thing mathematically and economically…) carbon and/or other forms of pollution, both to raise revenue and provide incentives for sustainable choices. Because these are all real policies being successfully pursued by some countries in the world right now. If technology and market forces deliver large productivity gains at the same time, it might be more politically palatable to phase in these policies. I doubt it is politically feasible to ask wealthy and powerful interests to give up any of their absolute wealth and power. It may be possible to ask them to give up a portion of their relative share while the tide is rising, in exchange for some stability and predictability. This has been achieved in many societies, and even in the United States during the middle of the 20th century.