Economic Futures

In September 2019 I was at the International Conference on Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs — one of the most accomplished development economists alive — asked, in a session with David Lipton of the IMF, what a sustainable post-capitalist global economy would actually look like. Nobody had a good answer. Including Sachs. I've been thinking about that moment ever since. Because the conditions that made the question theoretical in 2019 are becoming urgent in 2025. Capitalism in its current form requires infinite resources and perpetual demand growth. Both assumptions are breaking down simultaneously. Finite planetary resources are an obvious constraint. Less discussed is the demand side — population growth is slowing in wealthy countries, wealth concentration has removed spending power from the majority and accumulated it in very few hands, and the broad improvements in living standards that gave capitalism its legitimacy are stalling or reversing for large parts of the global population. Meanwhile the architecture of the post-war economic order is visibly fracturing. Mark Carney said at Davos this year what most economists have known privately for some time — that the US-led world order was always by design, always unequal in its distribution of benefits, and that the countries that tolerated American hegemony did so because it delivered stability. That stability is no longer being reliably delivered. The current Middle East conflict — with the US, Israel, Iran, and the shadow presence of China and Russia — is adding pressure to the petrodollar system and the reserve currency status of the US dollar. The G7 central banks have every incentive to delay any transition; they hold too much US debt to want instability. But China has clear incentives to accelerate it, and China can no longer treat the United States as a stable partner. What replaces the dollar as the primary reserve currency — the yuan, the euro, a basket — matters enormously for global economic stability and equity. None of these options are straightforward. Yanis Varoufakis has written seriously about post-capitalist alternatives. A handful of other heterodox economists are doing the same. They are largely sidelined — partly because their ideas are genuinely difficult, partly because the people who benefit most from the current system have significant influence over which ideas get amplified. Here is what concerns me most: an unplanned transition is not a theoretical risk. It is the default outcome if the question Sachs asked in 2019 remains unanswered when the transition begins. Unplanned economic transitions cause recessions. Sometimes depressions. Wars have been fought over less than resource scarcity, and resource scarcity is structurally baked into where we are heading. I don't have an answer. I'm not sure the answer exists yet. But I think the absence of serious public deliberation about this — outside a few academic conferences and heterodox economics blogs — is itself a kind of civilisational negligence. What does a stable, sustainable, post-capitalist global economy look like? And who is actually working on that question seriously?