‘Happiness is not just about GDP’: ambitious plan or utopia?

In our increasingly dystopian world, who wouldn’t want to at least be open to a utopian antidote? The World Justice Report, published on Thursday, outlines how to build a prosperous, equitable world within safe planetary boundaries. It’s a push from the modern eco-socialist left in a global battle for ideas that will shape the future.

Based on past social achievements and future energy transformation, it indicates that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet could, by the end of the century, work less and earn more while keeping temperatures down and avoiding much of the current destruction of nature. It is an ambitious, comprehensive and upbeat plan, and a stronger argument around which to build a political campaign than abstract goals of “net zero” or “decarbonisation”.

By incorporating important concepts of “sufficiency” and “planetary habitability”, it also addresses the fundamental question of how to reduce the material impact of economic activity – a topic long ignored by the traditional left.

While critics will question the feasibility of this vision because it relies on a radical reform of global financial institutions and massive wealth taxes – both of which have long been dismissed as unthinkable by rich nations – there can be no worthwhile assessment of its value without considering the far bleaker alternatives offered by the far right and the old left.

Chief among them is the far-right techno-extractivist vision currently being championed by the US president and his supporters in Silicon Valley, who are putting artificial intelligence ahead of renewable technology. In the quest for “energy dominance”, the US is now using tariffs and military power to widen markets for oil, gas and coal. This strategy of literally concentrating power in the hands of billionaires is driving the world towards catastrophic levels of global heating and inequality.

Thomas Piketty, one of the coordinators of the report, said the ambition of the mega-rich has become unrealistic and undesirable. “People realise this is simply not working. If the billionaires and the centimillionaires of the world were conducting our economy, investing the money in a way that brings us to a fantastic future with planetary habitability, rising wages and better housing conditions and health conditions for all, then everybody would be happy to give them the keys. But that’s not what we see.

Their new dream is to cover the entire planet with data centres. This is their economic project for the world. But everybody can see that this is just going to increase the material footprint of our economy, that this is going to make global warming even worse.”

The report also fills a hole that has existed since the inception of the global climate science infrastructure in the 1990s. One of the architects of that system, the British chemist Robert Watson, who is also a former chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me that if he could go back in time and change anything, it would be to add more social scientists. Initially, he said, the “pure scientists” from the fields of physics and chemistry naively believed the data alone would be enough to persuade governments to act, but they later came to wish they had taken more account of social dynamics, economics, politics and psychology.

This flaw has choked public support for climate action, said Piketty, who is a global authority on inequality and author of the bestselling 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: “There’s been this illusion of what we call a classless ecology, the sort of green growth illusion that everything is going to be solved by producing more and more and without worrying about the distribution, without worrying about sufficiency, without worrying about structural sectoral transformation. And this illusion has made green policy very unpopular for many lower income, middle income voters.”

The Global Justice Report goes further than any previous study in addressing that shortcoming.

It is also an exercise in human idealism and imagination, both of which are under ever more pressure from social media algorithms, AI and the transactional cynicism of far right politicians and business executives.

Although based on well-established metrics for GDP, inequality and climate science, it widens the definition of prosperity and heightens the importance of “sufficiency” to show that quality of life is more valuable than quantity of material goods. This echoes ancient philosophies of a “golden mean,” Indigenous beliefs in the inextricable connection between human and natural wellbeing, as well as experiments in Bhutan of an economy based on “gross national happiness”.

“We try to capture the reality that happiness is not just determined by economic metrics. Preserving a habitable earth does not just have a monetary benefit. You can make life better if you have more time to spend with family or in nature,” Cornelia Mohren, the Environmental Coordinator of the World Inequality Lab, said.

“Sufficiency does not mean degrowth,” she says. “It is about less working hours, a different composition of consumption, and more health and education.”

That will be challenged by the traditional left, which has long-tended to set goals of ever higher GDP, personal consumption and infrastructure spending, and the right, which baulks at any suggestion of planetary boundaries or lower material productivity.

The authors say they welcome the debate. The report will be open for suggestions and revisions.

“We don’t want to force people to change their lifestyle. It has to come with a cultural shift in the way we perceive the good life,” Mohren said. “There are majorities, even in the US that support some form of global justice, that don’t just care about themselves, but about the world.”

Piketty said past social mobilisations had shown how quickly improvements can be made. With pressure also likely to come from climate breakdown, he said it was important to initiate debates now so that alternatives are already in people’s minds and will become more palatable in the future.

“There will be crises. I think that’s for sure,” he said. “People need to get accustomed to the fact that big change will happen in any case…. We are not in a situation where things can just continue as they are forever.”