We use so many ideological simplifications, and we are called upon to choose sides, progressive or conservative, and to join the political war. But as we go down the “slow-motion catastrophe”, we must get practical and look at what works best with what different forms of management, according to different areas of activity. Markets work best in some areas, public services in others. I suggest we look around and see what activities work best under what management solutions in different countries, according to the diversity of challenges. And yes, I am progressive, of course.

(Ladislau Dowbor)

Humanity’s infinite capacity to mess things up, to turn miraculous technology into living hell.

(Yannis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism)

Is regulation good or bad? It really depends on what you are thinking of regulating.

(Tim Berners-Lee)

It is time to move beyond rigid “isms” and recognize the deeper patterns of how transformation really happens.

(Mohammed Al-Murtadha, Organized Randomness)1

Overall simplifications and the definition of which side we are on, as well as whom to hate, seem to make life much easier. We need not worry about the reality. But reality keeps running ahead, not giving much heed to our simplifications. In fact, these ideological simplifications belong to another century, and it’s time to update our views. We are facing deep economic, social, and political transformations, which I qualify as the digital revolution, and the challenges are too ample and too diversified for us to think that it is enough to choose between free markets and state regulation. Time to bring down the high-pitched political pronunciations to practical solutions, ensuring efficient management, through different solutions according to the highly diversified areas of activity we are facing.

The aims are clear: we must reach a society that is economically viable, but also socially fair and ecologically sustainable, the so-called triple bottom-line. We have it all detailed in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and even the fortune hoarders discreetly mention ESG principles (Environment, Social, Governance). It is also essential to point to the obvious fact that what the world produces is sufficient for everyone: Tom Malleson reminds us that “we already have enough total wealth for everyone to be able to live good, flourishing lives.”2(108)

And yet, inequality is exploding. 2.3 billion suffer from hunger or food insecurity, almost 4 billion have difficulty accessing safe water, the richest 1% hoard wealth of $230 trillion while the bottom half of humanity has only $5 trillion, and the gap is widening. I will not go into the list of our dramas, climate change, the water bankruptcy, the plastic everywhere and in our bodies, ocean acidification, you name it. We have solid evidence and reports on all these issues, and they have been correctly summed up as “slow-motion catastrophe”. We can certainly discourse on who the culprits are, but what I bring here is about how to mend it.

The key issue is that we have become too complex a society to be run on ideological simplifications. Adam Smith’s baker example, that his self-interest will also serve social well-being, may be suitable for a barber shop or a bicycle producer, but not for the health systems or the global attention industry, not to speak of the global financial speculation corporate network. In particular, it would serve us well if we looked at where things run well, with what kind of management solutions. Canada is an excellent example of how health services should be run, Finland on education solutions, China on financial management, and so forth.

It is interesting to compare the US, where health costs per capita reached $11,500, and life expectancy is around 78 years, while in Canada, it is 82 years, with less than half the cost: free universal access and focus on prevention, rather than profit maximization through private health-insurance corporations, where sick people become clients, an expanding market. You can look at Denmark, too, and others. Solutions exist, and well experimented.

Let me suggest we work with four areas of activity: production, infrastructure, intermediation services, and social policies. To give an example, if we produce cars, we also need transportation infrastructure, roads and so forth, commercial and financial intermediaries to ensure the flows, and healthy, well-trained people through social policies, or nothing will work. The overall balance generates synergy, and frankly, you must be a moron if you expect the invisible hand of the market to ensure it. Let us bring it down to earth. In the present paper, I focus on the first two, material production and infrastructure, but the key issue is that we need diversified solutions. We are not facing a new situation; we are facing a dynamic process of change.

Production area of activities

In the production area, where our goods are produced, we find different sectors like agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, construction and the manufacturing industry. In this area, the organization units are companies, belonging dominantly to the private sector, and based on markets and competition. It works, but with limits: agriculture is based on land, which is a limited resource, subject to speculation (real estate), while abuses of chemicals may generate unhealthy products and water contamination. We can rely on dominantly private sector activities, but we need to control abusive behaviors through public regulation. Similar challenges go for forestry and fishing, where a lack of regulation simply leads to depletion and environmental catastrophes. Freedom demands rules.

Mining is also based on limited resources, which are a gift of nature, not a product in itself. Oil and gas, different ores, and rare earths are all extracted by global giant corporations, with enough clout to bring governments to serve them. They are inherited resources, belonging to nations, and should be used to fund public investment. The simple drain by private corporations leads to the decapitalization of countries’ resources. The Samarco catastrophe in Brazil is a typical outcome of irresponsible extraction. Some countries use the right approach, for example, keeping mining in the public sphere, and using the earned money to fund more modern sectors. For example, exporting crude oil to fund the post-petroleum economy, as in several countries, and as was attempted in Venezuela.

The construction industry is very diversified, and is commonly regulated through market mechanisms at a lower scale, like house building, but it becomes a huge problem when investments in infrastructure are concerned, in which case strong public regulation is fundamental. These are very large investments, like dams or railways, and the fight for the contracts is both economic and political. The corruption culture in this sector of activity is generalized, as it relies heavily on access to public money. John Perkins’ book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, brings us a solid report on how these contracts are managed.3

The manufacturing sector is certainly the area where market mechanisms still work, since there is still competition to respond to what we need, even if presently deformed by invasive behavioral marketing and disregard for the environment. The obesity dramas show how deep down the drain the raw profit maximization of the food industry can lead us. Big pharma is no better. But the key issue is that we are not living in an industrial capitalism phase anymore: manufacturing represents only 8% of GDP in the US, while the health services represent 18%. In Brazil, industry participation fell from 22% to 11% in the last few decades. The inter-sector composition of activities is changing.

However diversified, and in need of regulation, this area of directly productive activities is still based on private firms, dominantly dependent on market mechanisms, and frequently still belonging to identified capitalists, even if rapidly shifting to absentee owners’ control as the companies expand and generate wider networks. Small and medium-sized industries in particular can prosper in a free-market environment. Well, the corporation’s oligopolies like to call themselves “markets”, but they belong to a new global system. The key issue is that free competition has been reduced radically, and planning hardly exists: what dominates is algorithm-based profit maximization. China, actually, uses both markets and planning.

Infrastructures

The overall productivity of an economy relies heavily on infrastructure, essentially transportation, energy, water/sewage and telecommunications investments. These are not “units” like a bakery or a factory; they constitute huge networks that cover a country and nowadays the global connections in the world. You do not build more or fewer railways according to price-fluctuations. Infrastructure depends on long-term planning, with huge investments, seeking to make so many private and public activities more rational, generating what we call external economies: efficient infrastructures make production and daily life cheaper for everyone.

While Americans and Brazilians face high transportation costs with trucks and cars, China has built over 40,000 kilometers of high-speed railways, connecting all regions and making the economy more efficient. São Paulo has 104 kilometers of underground, New York has a little over 400, while Beijing and Shanghai have over one thousand each. It’s cheaper and quicker: in São Paulo, we spend an average of three hours a day in transportation, getting tired and irritated.

The inter-modality composition of the transportation infrastructures for people and for cargo, within and between cities, depends on long-term planning, a structural approach to the future needs of a country and its neighbors. Private lobbies generate fragmented systems and high costs. The costs of irrational infrastructure weigh heavily on all of us.

Energy faces similar challenges. Considering the climate change dramas, leaving overall energy policies in private hands, structurally centered on maximizing profits in the short term, and pushing environmental impacts aside as “externalities”, with tight-lipped comments on “ESG”, to which they would be faithful, is absurd.

Consider the Chinese particularly difficult situation, due to their dependence on coal: they did not create a giant state-owned company to produce solar panels, but they did create such a company to produce equipment and technological support, so that throughout China private companies can have access to the equipment, and produce solar panels according to local markets. It relies on an intelligent mix of state and private initiative, but following the necessary overall rationality: balancing the economic and environmental challenges.4

Water and sewer systems face similar dramas. The UN 2026 report calls what we are facing Water Bankruptcy: “Drought and water shortage are increasingly driven by human activities, over-allocation, groundwater depletion, land and soil degradation, deforestation, pollution, and climate change, rather than natural variability alone.”

The catastrophic water contamination in the UK shows the absurdity of privatizing a common good, vital for all activities. Selling water raises profits, and dumping sewage reduces costs. “About 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and about 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month per year. Nearly 75% of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure.”5 This sector of activities demands overall planning and coordination, and frequently international agreements. This is not like producing better-looking shoes; it demands systemic, long-term organization and planning.

Communications, the fourth major sector of the infrastructure area, is in total revolution. I spent most of my life with the traditional telephone and “dialing”. With the global net of optical cables, the near-earth satellites, the World Wide Web, the huge data-centers, connectivity reaching to every person and every company throughout the world, the cell-phone in every pocket – even if we still have digital inclusion challenges for the poorer populations – represents an essential dimension of the present digital revolution. Will the overall W3C standards help us out?

Tim Berners-Lee, a key person in these transformations, brings us an excellent overview in his 2025 book, This is for Everyone: the unfinished story of the World Wide Web.6 “The global war is on in the market for connectivity and the market for content.” (238). Connectivity has advanced at an astounding pace. Demis Hassabis considers that the digital revolution we are facing is at least ten times deeper than the industrial revolution, and much faster. This is not about “industry 4.0” as it is called in the Davos meeting; it is a different mode of production. Manuel Castells drew the main lines in his foresighting book on The rise of the network society7(2009). Regulating the corresponding infrastructure has become a huge challenge, as it supports the expanding attention industry.

As we advance in the knowledge society, where science and technology represent the main factor of production, making sure that it serves humanity and not just a few global corporations has become central. According to Berners-Lee, “we let social media companies manage data for us, surveilling us and turning us into bundled products or advertising” with the use of manipulative algorithms.(298) Digital money has also become a commodity, and we are losing control. Hoping “markets” will solve the strategic issue of how we regulate the communications infrastructure is childish. We need to ensure both digital sovereignty for countries and overall international deals.

What we have seen so far is that in this complex and extremely diversified transformation of the production sectors of activity, and the necessary corresponding infrastructures, the different simplifying ideologies are outdated. They are certainly useful in the political struggle, since it avoids having to understand what the real issues are, but they are misleading. As we dig deeper into the social and environmental catastrophes, we must face the complexity, understanding that we are too complex a society for simplification. Small and medium-sized producers can certainly rely on markets, bigger contractors need strong public regulation, while the global infrastructures we are building must rely basically on long-term systemic planning, both at the national and global level.

The direction is obvious. To repeat, we need a society that is economically viable, socially fair and sustainable in ecological terms. We are not the last generation (hopefully) on this planet. What we saw here is an overview of the challenges in the production and infrastructure areas. I will be following this paper with the two other main areas, intermediation services (finance, commerce, etc.), and the social policies area (health, education, security, etc.). What is the general approach here? It is that we are too complex societies to rely on ideological simplifications, that we need to diversify responses according to the diverse areas of activity. Finally, we had better just look at the diverse solutions that have proved their worth in different countries, and adopt what works best. Learning from each other is the best way ahead. Result-oriented management, I would call it. And time is pressing.

References

1 Mohammed Al-Murtadha, Rethinking Capital and Socialism through the Lens of Organized Randomness at Radical Ecological Democracy.
2 Tom Malleson, Against Inequality: the practical and ethical case for abolishing the superrich. Oxford University Press, New York, 2023.
3 John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Berret-Koehler, San Francisco, 2004 at Dowbor.org.
4 See my short paper on Innovative management in China at Meer.
5 Global Water Bankruptcy at UNU.
6 Tim Berners-Lee, This is for everyone: the unfinished story of the World Wide Web. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2025.
7 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: how information age created global network society. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.