Increasing economic inequality and accelerating ecological decline are the two great political challenges facing nations today. In recent decades, many complicated efforts to address these problems have been proposed or tried, but the problems have continued to worsen. Perhaps it is time to address them more directly.
by Philip Cafaro
I came of age politically forty years ago, eligible to vote for the first time in the United States in 1980. That was the election that put Ronald Reagan in the White House and, along with contemporary results in Germany, Great Britain and elsewhere ushered in a long period of neo-liberal economic policy in the developed world. The kind of “command and control” regulations that had begun to clean up the air and waterways in the developed world were out, “market-based” environmental solutions were in. High taxes on the wealthy were out, but that was OK: increased wealth among the wealthy would trickle down to poor people, making us all better off.
As these efforts proved themselves failures, conservative governments around the world simply redoubled efforts along the same lines: deeper tax cuts, more regulatory “relief” and voluntary environmental programs for corporations, more market discipline for the “unproductive” poor. When liberals took their turns in office, they offered slightly different versions on the same themes: business-friendly policies and low taxes for the rich, welfare reform and “tough love” for the powerless.
Today the fruits of forty years of neo-liberalism are plain to see. We have the greatest economic inequality in the history of modern democracies. In 2020, the three richest Americans commanded as much wealth as the poorest 150 million. We see a rapidly degrading biosphere, with humanity’s grossly unsustainable ecological footprint swiftly increasing. Normally staid scientists use words like ‘ghastly’ and ‘catastrophic’ to describe the environmental future humanity is inflicting on our descendants. Meanwhile, the democracies of the developed world creak and groan, providing little evidence that leaders or citizens are up to the task of creating more just and sustainable societies.
I’m not ready to give up working for a better future. But I think we need to consider more direct means for getting there, now that the complicated and indirect means we have been pursuing for the past half century have proven insufficient. The two policies I propose are first, taking substantial wealth directly from the rich and giving it directly to the poor, and second, creating significantly smaller national populations, on purpose, by incentivizing small families and providing free, universal access to effective modern contraception.
Share the wealth
To some degree, my first proposal has been a policy goal of progressive political parties for many years. Government programs providing universal health care, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, government-financed child-care and the like, often have a substantial redistributive element. They have helped limit economic inequality throughout the developed world, while improving common people’s lives. But precisely because they can be effectively redistributive, rich people generally resist them, particularly strenuously in the United States. And because they have other goals besides redistribution, these policies can be (and sometimes should be) limited or reversed when they prove themselves inefficient in achieving these other goals.

In response to this, liberal policymakers often devise more targeted policies with more modest goals. Such policies in the U.S. have become more complex in their criteria for access, yet more obscure in their criteria for success. The upshot has been policymaking too timid to achieve substantial economic redistribution and too complicated to develop a constituency among the people who might benefit from it. In addition, many progressive policymakers have become so convinced of their own cleverness and so divorced from the problems of their poorer fellow citizens that they are comfortable with continued failure. The bottom line is that economic inequality continues to grow throughout the developed world.
The first step to addressing this problem is to recognize excessive economic inequality itself as a fundamental problem. The problem isn’t (just) that poor people cannot provide themselves with A, B or C, or (just) that middle-class economic precariousness undermines people’s sense of well-being, or (just) that rich people use their wealth to undermine the democratic political process. All these particular problems can legitimately be addressed in various targeted ways. But for all these reasons and many more, excessive economic inequality is itself an evil. Arguably that evil can best be addressed directly, by transferring wealth from the rich to the poor. In doing so, all the other problems that wealth inequality leads to will be ameliorated, since there will be less of it.
Consider an annual wealth tax of 2% levied in perpetuity on all citizens with total assets over $5 million, increasing to 5% on all assets above $20 million. And then imagine that wealth not used to fund the latest government programs dreamed up by clever liberal policymakers (such as those now proposed by the Biden administration). Instead, imagine this wealth—a substantial sum in any developed country—liquidated and refunded in equal shares to the poorest 20% to 50% of a nation’s population to spend or save as they see fit. Such a program will ameliorate at least some of the problems of poverty and middle-class precariousness. It will reduce the power that vast wealth commands in our democracies, directly, by reducing concentrated wealth. Most importantly, it will create a large and powerful constituency for continued wealth redistribution.
The best thing about this “Robin Hood” proposal, or others like it, is that it recognizes the limits of human intelligence. Rather than assume policymakers can design and implement a thousand and one clever policies to solve a thousand and one difficult problems, it accepts that this asks too much of them. Politicians aren’t that smart—and neither is the general public. We can’t follow the details of tax policy, health care policy, industrial policy, etc., and tease out all the interests at stake. We can’t hold politicians accountable for their decisions in these areas, even when they affect us. Hence common people repeatedly lose out to the wealthy, whose accountants and lobbyists can keep track of these matters. But the average Joe or Jane could understand a simple tax and redistribution scheme of the kind I advocate—particularly with the annual reminder of a nice fat check.
In a capitalist system, wealth tends to concentrate and economic inequality tends to increase. If we want just societies with some measure of economic fairness, we will have to put in place effective measures to limit this concentration of wealth through its perpetual redistribution. These must include simple and effective measures that the public can understand and that the wealthy and powerful cannot avoid. If these are less efficient than the complex proposals of smarty-pants economists and policy-makers, so be it (although we should not take their word for this, since this greater efficiency is often illusory). Taxing the wealthy and giving the proceeds directly to the poor or middle class would preserve sufficient economic equality to uphold the moral and political equality to which modern democracies currently pay lip service. It would be an effective counter to the noxious power of concentrated wealth, strengthening the polities on which our descendants’ happiness will depend.
Shrink human numbers
As I reached adulthood in 1980, American environmentalism was coming off a decade of spectacular success. Many of the United States’ fundamental environmental laws were enacted during the 1970s, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). While not perfect, these laws went a long way toward achieving their goals of reducing pollution, preserving species on the brink of extinction, and alerting citizens to the environmental costs of development. Yet since 1980, environmental progress has stalled and even reversed, at least in the US. As we are regularly reminded, the big environmental trends are uniformly negative. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, along with global temperatures and extreme weather events. Biological knowledge increases by leaps and bounds, but biodiversity itself is declining rapidly. The pollution and toxification of our lands and waters generally continues to worsen, although individual nations have beaten this trend in some areas.
No doubt the causes of these failures are complex. Part of the explanation is that once environmentalists faced problems that could only be solved by limiting economic or demographic growth, we lost our nerve and scaled back our commitments. As we shrank our goals, environmentalists embraced ever more complex and doubtful solutions. Both trends are well exemplified by today’s signature environmental problem: climate disruption. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the two main drivers of increased greenhouse gas emissions over the past half century have been population growth and increased wealth. But neither scientists, politicians, nor environmentalists have made limiting human numbers or the pursuit of wealth part of the fight against climate change. So the IPCC’s reports, nations’ climate action plans, and corporations’ sustainability initiatives discuss clever technological or managerial changes designed to reduce the emissions caused by growth, while never questioning growth itself.
Not surprisingly, little progress has occurred so far. Now, in response, corporate-sponsored scientists urge us to consider dangerous geoengineering schemes to radically change the composition of the atmosphere or the oceans. In other words: double down on human cleverness and on managing nature rather than ourselves. Anything but consider limits to growth. Proponents ignore the fact that such geoengineering projects, even if they worked, would worsen other environmental problems, such as ocean acidification, and would need to be continued in perpetuity. Defeated by the complexity of the “wicked problem” of climate change, they ask us to commit to much more complex and unlikely solutions, defending this approach as “realism” because it accepts the economic status quo.
The first step to successfully addressing our environmental problems is to realize that excessive human numbers are themselves a problem. It isn’t just that large and growing numbers lead to large and growing greenhouse gas emissions; that they lead to excessive habitat loss and degradation and hence fewer birds, mammals, insects, and other wild creatures; that more people leads to more plastic in the oceans, more fertilizers and pesticides on the land, more chemicals in the rivers. Excessive human numbers lead to all these problems and many more. Hence overpopulation is itself an environmental problem. Conversely, significantly fewer people would help decrease all humanity’s environmental demands on nature and make all our particular environmental problems easier to solve. Stabilizing and then decreasing national populations is thus necessary to create sustainable societies. Again, this can best be done by making substantially smaller populations an explicit policy goal and pursuing it directly.
The governments of developed countries should start by explaining to their citizens the many contributions smaller populations will make to achieving real sustainability. They should provide comprehensive sex education to all adolescents and ensure universal access to modern contraceptives for all their citizens. Since most developed nations already have fertility rates below replacement rate, in time such policies will lead to decreasing populations. These decreases could be accelerated by providing financial incentives to adults who forego childbearing or limit themselves to only one child. Nations could also reduce immigration, which currently prevents many developed nations from allowing their populations to decrease even though they have below-replacement fertility levels. At lower immigration levels, the US, Germany and France could all start to reduce their populations within a decade or two.
Like transferring wealth from the rich to the poor, reducing human numbers is a simple, direct solution that would help solve a myriad of problems. Fewer people is the environmental gift that keeps on giving. It helps with every environmental problem, from climate change to habitat loss to noise pollution to the spread of exotic species. Fewer people means less air and water pollution; more habitat and resources for other species. It opens up new opportunities for rewilding lands formerly devoted to agriculture and other human purposes. Importantly, it provides a greater margin for error when people make environmental mistakes.
Above all, this solution recognizes limits to human cleverness. Rather than assume policymakers can design and implement a thousand and one clever policies to solve a thousand and one difficult environmental problems (without creating new ones), it recognizes that this is beyond them. Instead, this approach pursues one key, achievable environmental goal—fewer people—that could help us achieve all the others. That wouldn’t mean ignoring clever techno-managerial efficiency efforts; instead, reducing our excessive populations could give such efforts a real chance to succeed. Such an approach would show true realism—not the false realism which pretends that people can re-engineer the world to accommodate our endless demands.
First things first
175 years ago, at the start of America’s industrialization, Henry David Thoreau wrote:
I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well or honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.
For a long time, the United States and other developed nations have been aiming primarily at increased wealth and rapid economic growth, and only secondarily at creating just and sustainable societies. This worked tolerably well for a while: developed nations did find ways to generate and share greatly increased wealth, although they sacrificed the health, well-being and even lives of many men and women in the process. But what made some sense in 1850, or even 1950, no longer makes any sense today. If we want to have just and sustainable societies, we will have to make that our primary goal and put economic aims in their proper, subordinate place. The two proposals I have discussed here would make a strong start toward doing so.
I completely agree with the binary approach Dr Camaro proposes! We need an organization that assists self-governing people to do just that, Please!
Go to my web site www,jgbrent,com , go to letters and essays and read the essay The Coming Collapse of Civilization
I see the points made here and mostly agree in principle.
However, just giving money to the poor will only result in an even higher degree of consumption and because of it, even higher ecological decline and less sustainability. At the same time, with more money, it will also be possible to support having even more children.
This is unfortunately just one reason/example why there are no obvious solutions that actually can be implemented in practice.
To get anywhere, you’d need a global system to pay (poor) people when/for not having children. But then that would go straight against people’s fantasy of continued eternal economic growth.
Steinar,
You make a good point that a more egalitarian distribution of wealth could incentivize more consumption and more procreation among those who benefit. And I think you also point toward the right answer to this, in governments’ incentivizing people to not have children. I would advocate for strong incentivizes aimed at all citizens, not just poorer ones.
Well, it’s hard to see any other way. Money usually talks.
But the problem is, like I said, that current governments still want increasing populations, and therefore incentivize people to have more children; in so-called privileged countries that is.
So, one would actually have to turn the current system completely on it’s head. I would call that a huge task; to put it mildly. But I can of course only agree that the only sustainable way forward are reduced populations in all countries of the world.
When we run out of fossil fuels, or the becomes mostly uninhabitable, whichever happens first, the population will decline fast. The beginnings if uninhabitability have already begun.
Philip,
I agree with Steiner in that I believe that simply giving money directly to the poor will boost undesirable consumption. To mitigate this reality, I recommend taking a substantial percentage of the sum “given” to the poor and putting it into an untouchable investment account for at least 10 years. This way, these citizens would have immediate cash to help them with their typical bills, without making them so flush that they would consume excessively. They would also have the educational experience of gaining financial literacy and seeing how investing really works, how saving and investing a portion of this windfall provides income, and how quickly compounding interest and dividends can build wealth.
Tax excessive wealth. Build wealth where it has been absent. Be honest with people about the problem with overpopulation and provide contraception free of charge.
Power corrupts! Money is simply one form of power. Politicians who decide who should have money have power. It gives them a level of corruption. The solution is not to battle money, but to battle all forms of excessive power.
Limiting yhe birth rate is a good idea, but it takes a while to show any result. I agree that we should implement it, but we beed solutions that will show results sooner. Cutting back fossil fuel use quickly appears to me to be what we have to do. That will be difficult and painful. I have not any plans yet proposed that sound like it will work. I see major collapse and disruption ahead. Taking assets from the top two per cent and spreading them around would slow the rate of fossil fuel use but would not be enough even when combined with birth rate control. Limiting the use of planes, boats, cars, air conditioning etc would be better than just taking some excess funds away.
Most policies take a while to show real results. In practice, “cutting back fossil fuel use” means specific policies to replace fossil fuels with other fuels. For example, subsidizing or mandating more solar and wind power has helped hasten the replacement of coal burning electricity plants in the US. This is a multi-year effort, showing some good results but not “solving” excessive US greenhouse gas emissions all by itself. It needs to be ratcheted way up, but even then, it will take time to do what needs to be done.
Addressing population may sometimes take longer to “show big results” than other steps. However, as compensation, lower populations help with the full range of environmental problems, and its benefits cumulate over time. As I say in the blog, “fewer people is the environmental gift that keeps on giving.”
Limiting the number of children or even advocating for smaller families (which will be perceived as coercion) will create a strong resistance especially here in the U.S. Iran reduced its fertility rate with a noncoercive program focusing on education and availability of contraceptives. They reduced their fertility rate more quickly than China did with their heavy handed one child program. If you want real progress in reducing the population growth rate, let’s focus on helping families have the number of children they want and reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies. This can be done. This is being done on a statewide basis in a number of states by UpstreamUSA.
https://upstream.org/ (Other than being a donor and admirer, I am not associated with the organization.)
Dane, thanks for educating our readers (and me) about the good work UpstreamUSA is doing to bring the full range of contraception options to health care facilities. But I don’t see any conflict between those kinds of efforts, which I support, and advocating for smaller families.
Nor do I see advocating for smaller families as coercive. At 330 million people, America is grossly overpopulated. It’s time Americans started debating what to do about that, while we still have time to correct things through non-coercive measures.
I note that there is a growing debate in the US about what to do about our “too slow” population growth, with people on the Right and the Left advocating all sorts of measures to increase our numbers more quickly. If environmentalists want to remain silent during that debate, then our interests will be ignored. Is that what we want?
I used to campaign on population (after wasting half a lifetime on environment and planning campaigns that proved pointless), but it still falls as a secondary problem that connot be tackled without tackling the tribalism of compettitive politics. While there are political parties in parliamentary systems, nothing will ever be achieved: they rapidly become self serving and fundamentally antidemocratic, and lead to failed states that eventually become dictatorships and kleptocracies. We’ve seen this happen in Russia, already, and are witnessing its spread through the UK and USA at the moment.
It’s particularly tragic to witness this happening in the USA, when they were warned precicely what would happen if they allowed parties to take over, by their own Founder–George Washington–, yet they went right ahead and let it happen anyway:
A fairly short letter but I’ve taken the main part of the warning not to let the power of parties and factionalism overcome the power of the whole people as vested in the Constitution, and inevitably lead to dictatorship.
It’s very reminiscent of Adam Smith’s warning at the end of the first volume of ‘Wealth of Nations’, not to trust what we would now call ‘businessmen’, because they will deceive and oppress in order to further their own ends, rather than the national interest.
Both ought to have served as ample warning for us not to be in the dreadful state of political affairs we are in now:
“…The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.
All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.
They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. …
… I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume. …
… Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests. …
… In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism; this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated. …
George Washington
Extracts from his Farewell Address 1796
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
An article in the New York Times for June 2, 2021 provides more support for the ideas in this blog. Titled “Stimulus Checks Substantially Reduced Hardship, Study Shows,” it provides evidence that simply giving poor people money to spend on what they choose is an effective way to alleviate poverty:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/politics/stimulus-checks-economic-hardship.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
This spread the wealth Socialist claptrap is absurd.