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Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality and keep global heating within a 2C rise, according to a sweeping vision for planetary survival, the Guardian reported last week. In an age of ecological dread, that is a bracingly hopeful claim. The optimism came courtesy of the Global Justice Report, produced by Thomas Piketty’s World Inequality Lab.
It arrives against the grain of the times. Anti‑migrant demagoguery, fossil-fuel revivalism, attacks on multilateralism and billionaire capture all militate against the redistributive state capacity that the report requires. Yet Prof Piketty’s team insists that decarbonisation, “sufficiency” and equality can mean a good life for most people.
The report identifies the blocks to progress: plutocracy, US power and timid climate politics that leave elites largely untouched. Its strength is to name the forces capable of change – trade unions, citizen movements and coalitions of countries – and to insist that a green transition must be built through democratic means, not technocratic fiat. The challenge is to build a practical politics amid today’s billionaire‑backed nationalist backlash.
One of the report’s key aims is to bring every country to today’s rich-country level of €5,000 per person per month in purchasing-power terms. The figure for sub-Saharan Africa is €290. The report proposes a new global fiscal and monetary architecture: taxes on the very rich would build the public realm, while a Keynesian “clearing union” and new international currency would ease the external constraints that limit poorer countries’ state spending.
The standard of living at which the report wants the world to converge is not one of endless private consumption, but of secure public services, increased leisure and climate stability. The report imagines this as a very high standard of life – and potentially a happier one – better in many respects than that experienced by the majority in today’s developed nations.
That is a far cry from today’s poverty-and-plenty divide. This gap can be found in Congo’s cobalt and coltan mines: dangerous, ill-paid work at one end of the supply chain; electric vehicles and smartphones at the other. If Africa’s minerals are to power a green transition, they should do so on terms that build African industrial capacity equitably. Yet poor nations still struggle to control their own resources, while rich-world consumers get choice without control.
The report says a rich-world lifestyle of high private consumption – frequent flights, large homes, multiple cars, meat-heavy diets – cannot be adopted by the rest of the planet within a 2C carbon budget. What is on offer is a bargain: everyone gets a rich-world level of public provision and downtime; nobody gets oligarchic excess. Today’s private material abundance would be replaced by social abundance. That is a high standard of living. But it is not what the well-off have today.
Critics will say that the report is a utopian dream. But that is perhaps its power. The political resistance to the ideas would be enormous. Many people in rich countries see their consumption not as “excess” but as compensation for insecurity, long hours, unaffordable housing and alienation. So the report’s offer has to be understood not as “less for you”, but as less waste, less work, less rent extraction, more security, more leisure time and more public luxury. The question is why such an attractive bargain has become so difficult to sell.
