IImagine a future where everyone enjoys high levels of happiness. There, 90% of the world’s population is earning twice as much, but working half the hours they do today. A world that sees the bottom half of humanity’s share of global wealth rise from just 2% today to 30%. A world where we consume enough but no one overconsumes. And imagine being able to achieve this on a planet where the climate can comfortably sustain human life without collapsing.
Against the bleak techno-authoritarian future currently being sold to us, we feel that a radical new vision for global progress in the 21st century is urgently needed. The most reliable vision is the one in which the habitability of the Earth is a precondition for human development and equality.
Our new report examines the conditions needed for the world to move towards this goal on an economically and environmentally compatible path by the end of this century..
What is the conclusion? A global transformation that reconciles the habitability of the planet with high standards of well-being for all people is possible as long as all three conditions are met simultaneously. We need rapid decarbonization of our energy systems. However, we also need a major shift from overconsumption to sufficiency. This includes major changes in consumption patterns, diets, land use and forest cover, as well as significant reductions in labor hours and raw material usage. Financing and politically sustaining decarbonization and adequacy will require significant reductions in inequalities in income, wealth and power between and within countries. This reduction in global inequality is compatible with deep decarbonization. In fact, it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.
The Global Justice Report is the first attempt to propose a fully quantified plan for this transition. It combines four aspects that are often treated separately in today’s discussions. Thorough reform of the international financial and economic order. A fundamental transformation of the energy system. and significant changes in consumption patterns. Compared to most climate scenarios (including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the main novelty is that we model all four dimensions together, putting inequality and sufficiency at the center of the analysis.
What will this transition bring? At its core is fusion between nations. Average national income per capita, which currently has a 16-fold difference between the world’s poorest regions (290 euros per month in sub-Saharan Africa) and the richest (4,590 euros in North America/Oceania), will rise towards a level of around 5,000 euros per month common to all countries by 2100.
But this convergence is not just financial. Annual working hours per employee will fall from about 2,100 hours to about 1,000 hours, continuing a long-term shift to shorter working hours. Meanwhile, the share of global working time spent on education and health will increase from 11% to 43%. Women and men would come together under equal pay and an equal share of economic and domestic labor.
People on the island of Evia battle wildfires in August 2021 as Greece experiences its worst heatwave in decades Photo: Angelos Tsolzinis/AFP/Getty Images
All this will unfold in a habitable climate. Thanks to sustainable convergence and rapid decarbonization, global temperature rise will exceed 4°C and reach 1.8°C on current trends.
None of this is possible without significant reductions in inequality. The scale of income among individuals will shrink by a factor of 1:5 and the scale of wealth by a factor of 1:10, extending what Western and Northern Europe achieved in the 20th century. The share of the world’s wealth held by the poorest of humanity will rise from 2% to 30%, while the share of billionaires will fall from 6% to 0.05%.
Double quotes Women and men would converge on equal pay and an equal share of economic and domestic labor.
These changes will be funded and managed through a new agency. The Global Justice Fund would spend an average of 10% of global GDP annually on national dividends and investments from 2026 to 2060, compared to less than 0.4% of the current budget for aid and the combined budgets of the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank. It would be financed by the World Government Fund, which holds 10% of the world’s capital stock, an annual global wealth tax on billionaires of 20%, and a global income tax of up to 90%, each of which would affect about 1% of the world’s population.
The result is that almost everyone benefits, rather than a transfer from the many to the few. Nearly 90% of the world’s population will see their income double between 2026 and 2100, and more than 99% will do so when leisure and a habitable planet are taken into account. The plan also involves reallocation of electricity. Today, the richest regions hold four times as many votes at the IMF and World Bank as their share of the world’s population. Underpinned by an international payments union and a new global currency, the new order will give all residents an equal voice, end the exorbitant privileges of dominant powers, and address global trade imbalances.
Our report is part of a broader international agenda on planetary habitability, social justice and reforming global financial structures, including the Bridgetown Agenda launched by Barbados in 2022, the Seville Commitment on Development Finance, the UN Tax Treaty Process, and the G20 initiative led by Brazil and South Africa on global inequality. The main contribution of this report is to situate these proposals within a quantified institutional framework, modeling socio-economic convergence, temperature change and distribution trajectories to 2100.
A livable, equal, and prosperous 21st century is materially possible. Carbon budgets make this possible, and history has precedent on a comparable scale, including universal suffrage, universal health care and education, halving working hours, and sharply reducing inequality over the 20th century. It is not technological impossibilities that stand in the way, but rather the lack of a shared vision of concrete but fundamental social progress. What is needed instead is a political choice and a hard effort to build a coalition behind it.
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Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Co-Director of the Global Inequality Institute. Lucas Chancel is Professor of Economics at the Paris Institute of Sciences and Co-Director of the Institute of Global Inequality. Cornelia Moren is the Environment Coordinator at the Institute for Global Inequality. Rowaida Moshrif is co-director of the Global Inequality Institute. Moritz Odarsky is an economist at the World Inequality Institute. Anmol Somanchi is the Global Justice Coordinator at the World Inequality Institute.
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This article is based on the conclusions of the Global Justice Report.
