Our challenge is not to raise GDP, to go faster, but to reconsider where we are going, with what consequences. The world is ripe for a global green new deal, a change in the overall decision process, making the economy serve what society needs, not the other way around. However distant this may seem, it is a question of survival.

(Ladislau Dowbor)

February 16, 2026

We handed our government over to markets and handed our markets over to corporations.1

(Roosevelt Institute – New Rules for the 21st Century)

Too many things have changed for us to continue to study only the fragments, adding qualifiers such as “extractive capitalism”, “parasitic capitalism”, “financial capitalism” and so forth. The present paper takes a comprehensive approach, considering that the digital revolution goes as deep, or deeper, than the industrial revolution two and a half centuries ago. This means that we are facing a different mode of production, involving global instantaneous connectivity, the centrality of knowledge, the overall power of immaterial inputs, the dominance of virtual money, and unproductive rent extraction as the main form of appropriation of the social surplus. These are not new facets in the system, but a new system.

The resulting challenges, particularly the inequality and environmental dramas, are deepening. But the real drama is our impotence to face them, a question of overall governance. Let us get things straight from the beginning, the basic facts which, even if often repeated, are essential for comprehending where we stand.

We are destroying the world for the benefit of the very few. UBS (Union des Banques Suisses) gives us the basic figures on inequality. The wealthiest 1% owns around $230 tn, while the bottom half of humanity has only $5 tn. The top 1%¬ has lots of fat, after living expenditures, to invest in more financial rentierism, so their fortunes expand, while the bottom 50% barely reach the end of the month, and even gets indebted. So we are caught in an accelerating inequality mechanism, already at an absurd level.

If we look up at who should fix it, at the political top, we find the same 1%. It is self-perpetuating as a mechanism and expanding as a trend. The richer you are, the faster you get richer. Kindly look up. This is the first of our key challenges.

We are all tired of pointing to the second, sustainability: climate change, loss of biodiversity, water contamination throughout the world, loss of agricultural soil, overfishing, and plastic particles even in our brains. And we manage to react very consciously: tobacco is killing over 8 million a year, yet it is legal, and we promote it. The Amazon, Congo, and Indonesia original forests are melting, and the soy and beef giants like JBS fill our TVs with messages that they are feeding the world and protecting the environment.

You can turn to whatever superior being you like best, but the solutions must be found down here. Which means we will have to do things, not just comment on what should be done. We are on the brink of a global disaster.

There are no mysteries as to what should be done about inequality and the environmental collapse. The SDGs are glaring, 17 clear goals, detailed into 169 practical measures. So we know what is to be done. And we have all the necessary information for the procedures.

So many high-tech studies show us every detail of every drama in all corners of the world, published and updated by the UN reports, by top universities, by so many research centers. The necessary measures can be taken in a decentralized network management system; we have all the technologies we need, and the algorithms allow us to follow up on every detail. And most importantly, we have the necessary money.

These notations on computers, which we call virtual money, can be used for what we need, instead of serving the financial rentierism mentioned above. The financial derivatives, as informed by the BIS, manage over $600tn, almost 6 times the world GDP, in speculative activities. If we take world GDP as a reference, in purchasing power parity dollars (PPP), over $200 trillion, it means that the goods and services we produce annually are equivalent to roughly $8 thousand a month per four-member family.

What we presently produce is by far enough to ensure a good and flourishing life, as Tom Malleson calls it, for everybody. A ridiculously small tax at the top, for example, the 2% Zucman tax, would change the world, or at least start things moving.2

So we have the challenges – the catastrophic inequality and environmental dramas accelerating trends – we know what is to be done, we have the necessary information, the corresponding technologies, and an impressive amount of underutilized financial resources. Our main challenge is not in the problems, but in our stubbornness in deepening them, and our impotence in reversing the trend. And while going down the drain, we hear that an invisible hand will save us, through the natural gift of profit-maximizing logic in what we call “markets”. Michael Hudson rightly calls it Junk Economics. How far will we go down the drain, reaching what irreversible depth, until we manage to react?

The present note is not to describe more dramas, but rather aims at making clear the power structure that is preventing us from taking the necessary measures. At the top, there are such huge fortunes, and growing so fast, that these billionaires, with their partners, and their lawyers, and their high-tech magicians, manage to keep the rest of the world as helpless spectators.

We are an audience, not citizens. Looking at the smiling billionaires behind the back of Donald Trump at his inauguration, in 2025, and then seeing him comment in burning Los Angeles that Californians should not have voted for a democratic governor, while his drill, baby, drill motto is his political north, gives us a global picture of how far we can get into human stupidity while reaching technological heights.

Margaret Atwood is quite realistic: “The difference between stupid and ignorant is that the ignorant could learn.” Forgive my unscientific inelegance: I see them as high-tech assholes. I thought we were in the 21st century. We are stuck in the senseless egos of an absurdly rich minority.

They have not gone stupid all of a sudden. They are normal people caught in the same whirling pool, good or bad guys alike. Blaming Trump is one thing; another is understanding how such a moron gained such power. Hitler was elected in 1933, but only after being given the OK by the big konzerns of the Ruhr valley, from Krupp, Siemens, Farben, and the like. Kindly remember that IBM ensured the technical support with the perforated cards system for the selection and management of prisoners for concentration camps.3

There are 13 billionaires in Trump’s team. Well, one less, Musk got sore in a schoolboy brawl. Just business. The Godfather comes to mind. Is this a bad comparison? Well, Trump says many countries are “lining up to kiss his arse.” This is not a vulgar paper I am writing; I am describing a vulgar reality. And we are all paying for it. We need a wake-up call.

Six million children are dying of hunger every year, (forgive me for repeating it in different papers), with their parents helplessly looking on, while we have hugely more food than necessary to feed everybody.

The UN figures for hunger are 735 million in 2024, reaching 2.3 billion if you add populations in food insecurity. We produce enough food for 12 to 14 billion, in the face of the present 8.2 billion overall population, according to FAO. This leads us to our key question here: we are the same humans who ensured the New Deal was approved, who managed the welfare system in the Golden Thirties, the post-WWII decades. We can criticize the personalities, or choose sides, but overall, it means that the systemic decision process, the institutions we have, did not accompany the dramatic technological change we are facing. Friedrich Merz’s warning that the rules-based world order “no longer exists” is realistic.

Our political culture and our institutions change at a very slow pace in comparison with the dramatic acceleration of technological change. This is not “Industry-4.0” as the Davos people like to call it, it is the Digital Revolution, as deep or deeper than the Industrial Revolution two and a half centuries ago. Demis Hassabis estimates that it is at least ten times as deep and faster.

We live in a new world, in the 21st century, within the digital revolution, but institutions and the legal framework creep on at the rhythm of the sticky analogical political interests. It is not that all of a sudden bad guys have got to the political top, it is that the whole decision process has got out of touch with the new challenges, opening the way for different opportunisms. Our challenge is not just about electing the good guys; it is about updating the very institutions that govern us.

Just to make the systemic lack of governance issue clear, let me bring an example of David Boyd’s UN report: he denounces “a system that is absolutely based on the exploitation of people and nature. And unless we change that fundamental system, then we’re just re-shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. […] It has driven me crazy in the past six years that governments are just oblivious to history. We know that the tobacco industry lied through their teeth for decades. The lead industry did the same. The asbestos industry did the same. The plastics industry has done the same. The pesticide industry has done the same.”

In his final interview before handing over the special rapporteur mandate, Boyd said he struggles to make sense of the world’s collective indifference to the suffering being caused by preventable environmental harms. “I can’t get people to bat an eyelash. It’s like there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand just how grave this situation is.”4

It is not something wrong with our brains; it is something radically wrong with the system. Not something wrong in the system, a problem to fix, it is the system itself that is wrong, out of touch with the new technological world we live in. In the absence of adequate institutions, short-term interests and profit-maximizing have taken over, without any control. ESG, anyone?

There is an interesting global shift in economic theories and the proposed alternatives. Thomas Piketty opened the way with the powerful Capital in the XXI Century, and suggests “participatory socialism”, Joseph Stiglitz suggests “progressive capitalism”, Wolfgang Streeck “democratic capitalism”, while Robert Reich denounces “corporate capitalism”, Mariana Mazzucato “extractive capitalism”, Joel Kotkin “neofeudalism”, Zygmunt Bauman “parasite capitalism”, Shoshana Zuboff “surveillance capitalism”, Grzegorz Konat “realny kapitalizm”, Yanis Varoufakis “technofeudalism”, Raymond Baker “our broken system”, Brett Christophers “rentier capitalism”, Marjorie Kelly “wealth supremacy”, Nicholas Shaxson “the finance curse”. Bernie Sanders asks, “Where do we go from here?”, Noam Chomsky “Who rules the world?”, the Oxfam report at Davos-2023 is titled Survival of the Richest, a clear word-play on Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”, but the updated report in 2026, Resisting the Rules of the Rich, only shows how fast the dramas are deepening. Martin Wolf, chief economist at the Financial Times, simply states that the system has “lost its legitimacy.”

The very number of different stickers glued to this new system shows we are facing something radically new. Too many structural changes have occurred, too many dark clouds have gathered, for us to go on as usual, hoping things will take care of themselves.

A new systemic approach is gaining weight, an indirect result of the changes the authors mentioned above are bringing. But in the concrete decision process prevailing in the sphere of the global corporate giants, it is about who hits first, whatever the consequences for others, and anyhow, we always have he classic “in the long run we shall all be dead”. But the concrete issue is that this is not about “economics” and GDP; it is about survival. Quoting Ignacy Sachs: “A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.” This is real.

Notes

1 Roosevelt Institute – New Rules for the 21st Century (2019), p.8 at Roosevelt Institute.
2 Tom Malleson – Against Inequality: the practical and ethical case for abolishing the superrich – Oxford University Press, 2023 - See also Tax Justice Network (2025).
3 Joel Bakan - The Corporation documentary (2003) is still a basic source to understand the present corporate decision-process systems.
4 UN expert attacks ‘exploitative’ world economy in fight to save planet at The Guardian.