The Global Justice Report by the World Inequality Lab (WIL) published this week tries to overcome the shortcomings of mainstream approaches to the planetary crisis, including the economic degrowth proposed by many ecologists. The authors define their  basic objective in terms of ‘equality and shared prosperity’, or full income convergence, that they calculate can be achieved by all countries by 2100. *

The Global Justice Fund would be the key institution for change. The fund would be responsible for raising sufficient revenues through global wealth and income taxation, distributing the fund on an equal per-capita basis and used to finance climate investment, education, and health expenditures. The global wealth and income taxes would target the very top of the world distribution, around 1% of the world’s population, drawing substantial payments from the world’s billionaires, centimillionaires and decamillionaires.

The ambition is astounding but supported with careful and detailed research. Some points stand out. The researchers aim to combine two key goals: socioeconomic equality and planetary habitability, and they distinguish between two sets of climate levers:

‘Sufficiency’ (not ‘sustainability’ which has become part of green-washing rhetoric) is defined as a major structural transformation of the economy.

‘Fast energy transition’ consists of climate investment and technological advances to decarbonize energy systems.

Changing energy systems alone is not enough. They call for:

• Fewer working hours **
• The reduction of the material sectors (EG food, construction, manufacturing, energy, transportation) and increase immaterial sectors (EG education and health)
• A substantial transformation of food patterns, land use, and forest cover.

They say:

For too long, environmental policies did not pay much attention to social inequalities. In many cases, the rhetoric of ‘classless ecology’ and ‘green growth’ (– i.e. the idea that it is possible to address environmental challenges by indefinitely increasing the size of the pie and without addressing explicitly the issues of sufficiency and inequality between social classes, neither in terms of unequal responsibilities nor unequal damages) has been routinely used to promote anti-redistributive and inequality-enhancing policies.

The report sets out proposals for new global democratic institutions with voting rights based on population rather than as at present GDP and wealth. They also say that nothing can be achieved without powerful global citizen movements. The report does acknowledge the massive  difficulties of achieving the goals but sees no alternative. They conclude that:

 … while direct political and electoral processes are central, success will ultimately depend on a broader cultural and intellectual battle about the meaning of sufficiency, equality and prosperity.

The report is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the planetary emergency. It is both concrete and practical in terms of economics, and socially, culturally and politically utopian (demanding the impossible). We can have debates about the meaning of ‘sufficiency, equality and prosperity’ but the ‘utopian’ quality requires other forms of inspiration which is where I place Michel Serres’ philosophy that stimulates:

• a common story that speaks for all nature (including ourselves)
• a global legal framework that recognises the more-than-human as legal subjects
• a redefinition of what it means to be human
• the galvanisation of ICTs, the internet, social media and AI for the common good
• universal education based on a common curriculum

*This means no less than a ‘global income convergence to 60,000 Euros (PPP 2025) per year (5,000 Euros per month). At the global level, about 89% of the population will see their annual monetary income more than double between 2025 and 2100, while less than 2% experience an income decline. At present , per capita monthly gross national income ranges from €290 in Sub-Saharan Africa to €4,590 in North America/Oceania (a 16-fold gap). The objective means no less than a ‘global income convergence to 60,000 Euros (PPP 2025) per year (5,000 Euros per month). ‘According to our simulations, about 1.3-1.5% of the world population is subject to the global wealth tax over the 2026-2050 period (mostly coming from the richest regions), and less than 0.5% of the world population after 2060 (with a more balanced regional distribution)’. The basic structure of the global wealth tax schedule = tax rates rise gradually from 0% at the level of 10 times average world per adult wealth (about 1.1million Euros in 2026) to 1% at 20 times average wealth (2.2 million), 3% at 50 times average wealth (5.5 million), 5% at 100 times average wealth (11 million), 10% at 500 times average wealth (55 million), 15% at 1000 times average wealth (110 million) and 20% at 5000 times average wealth (550 million).

**The report proposes a large reduction in working hours by about 50% between 2025 and 2100. In addition to reducing working hours, all countries would converge toward full gender equality in the labour market.