A recent study found that the wealthiest 0.01% – those with more than $45 million in net wealth – evade 25% of all taxes they owe, compared to an average evasion across all income brackets of 2.8%.44 This may sound like data from a notoriously unequal country like the US, but these data are in fact from Scandinavia. In the US, researchers found

The truly hopeful (realizable) vision is of a world with such cheap and plentiful renewables that we can manage other ailments by treating them with this energy. This includes drawing down carbon with machines, recycling, producing energy-intensive ‘printed meat’ where meat cells are grown in a lab instead of rearing cows, and building large-scale

Economist Mariana Mazzucato provides another good example in Apple’s iPhone, a product that almost entirely depends on technologies that were initially developed by the public sector (including GPS, touchscreens, the internet, etc.).94 The US government also shelters Apple from competition nationally and overseas. After all this, Apple is able to

Even in the grip of collapse, there is a very real race between natural and social tipping points.

Just think of the organized chaos of a children’s playground. There are no laws or institutions governing the use of resources (which child gets to use which slide, and for how long), but somehow, even though the number of slides are limited, everyone gets a go. Unfortunately, as human populations grow and impacts become more global, the informal

Disagreement arises when we begin to discuss the balance, reach and depth of the policies, and who pays for them: who wins and who loses. Often, those on the left worry that the UBI could be used to do away with the other parts of the social safety net.35 Those on the right worry that, if funded through progressive taxation (as they would have to

There is no escaping it: we have to create a new definition of value, one not based on endless consumption or described by flawed statistics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – a statistic that omits many of the most important things in life like environmental and social health. Lest you think this is some tree-hugging ideology whose ulterior

On balance, this amounts to swapping indigenous, rich and biodiverse forests for fast-growing commodity forests with much lower biodiversity, more exposure to disease and pests, and reduced potential for carbon storage. It’s like taking away your child’s beloved, timeworn, knitted-by-grandad stuffed bunny friend and giving her instead a plastic

Modern inequality is at record highs and, in some cases, even eclipses the extreme inequality of the ancient past. The Roman Empire, notorious for its unabashed plutocracy, doesn’t hold a candle to modern imbalances. In 2012, the economist Branko Milanovic estimated that the businessman Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire, had an annual income that