Working with many colleagues, over the last few years I have been struggling to take account theologically of the hyper-complex crisis that has overtaken us in the 2020s. Today my attention is caught by an initiative that is intentionally non-theological but that engages many of the issues with which we have been urgently concerned.
The World Inequality Lab has published the Global Justice Report as a landmark statement. The subtitle of the Report reveals its key emphases: A Plan for Equality and Prosperity within Planetary Boundaries. What is striking about the Report is that it attempts to address grave threats to the natural environment at the same time as finding ways to reverse growing inequality in the human community.
It builds on the work of French economist Thomas Piketty who, as a capitalist himself, has been highlighting a central problem inherent in the particular form of capitalism that we have allowed to dominate the world economy in our time. He points out that resources, wealth and power are becoming ever more concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while the great majority of the world’s population become ever more dispossessed.
The Global Justice Report proposes measures to reverse this great injustice at the same time as reducing our carbon footprint in such a way as to form a sustainable future. It builds on three pillars: fast decarbonization, an ethic of sufficiency, and a drastic reduction of inequality of income, wealth and power.
Eye-catching proposals include: “Per capita monthly national income converges to €5,000 in every country, closing a 16-fold gap. 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%. Nearly 90% of the world’s population double their income while working roughly half as many hours as they do today. Warming reaches 1.8°C by 2100, rather than over 4°C under baseline macroeconomic and policy trends.”
It is a Report that reminds us that “another world is possible.” It also goes further to propose the new international economic and financial architecture that can turn possibility into reality.
See https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/global-justice-report/
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