Ronald Reagan proclaimed that the government is not the solution, it is the problem. With Margaret Thatcher they opened the way to dismantling the well-fare state that had reasonably balanced public and private interests. With the Trump administration, it reached absurd dimensions. Reducing the complex issues of getting organized in a society that works, and particularly offering the population whom to blame, certainly works in political terms. But the issue is not whom to blame, but to organize synergy between the economic and political actors. There is no one-size-fit-all in the modern complex society.

(Ladislau Dowbor, April 5, 2026)

image host

The need for drastic change in the economics discipline has never been so urgent. Humanity faces existential crises, with planetary health and environmental challenges becoming major concerns.1

(Jayati Ghosh)

A practical approach is to look at how different areas of activity can support one another. I organized development initiatives in different countries, mostly poor ones, as a UN advisor, and found it practical to present how different areas of activities may work better if they reinforce each other. You can support agricultural production, but this also demands infrastructure. The production would be in the private sphere, each farmer owns his piece of land, and regulated by markets, but infrastructure, like roads or energy, would demand public planning and funding. Organizing synergy between the different areas, instead of finding who to blame, is clearly the road ahead.

Both the production and infrastructure areas depend heavily on social policies: health, education, information and culture, tourism and leisure, social housing, security – these policies are essential in that every area of activity needs them: productivity in any initiative depends on having well educated and healthy people, with a rich cultural life and decent living conditions: our jobs are not in the age of coal-mining 14-hour physical efforts anymore. Much less, anyhow. The key issue here is that social policies work best, in terms of overall efficiency, when everyone has access, when they are granted as a right, accessible to everyone free of charge. It is not about the “nanny-state” idiocy; it is about a productive society.

For many people, the idea of “free” may be shocking. But it is obvious. You can roam around in cities free of charge, even if paved streets represent a cost. It is just more efficient to have public initiatives ensure everyone has access. Just as it is natural that you pay in the supermarket according to your choices, things that must work for everyone may be granted as a public service. They are paid through taxes, obviously, but represent collective consumption goods and services, open to everyone, simply because it works better. Free parks in the city improve quality of life, and even reduce health expenditures, besides ensuring a richer life through conviviality. The New Economic Foundation in the UK is right in distinguishing the narrow profit-maximizing corporate goals, “return-on-investment”, ROI, and what we seek as a society, “social-return-on-investment”, SROI. Good economic common sense. Money must work for society, not the other way around. This is essential. As an order of magnitude, in reasonably balanced societies, some 60% of the economic well-being of families depends on access to income, money in your pocket to pay the rent, the car, and so forth.

The other 40% of our economic well-being results from free access to streets and parks, as mentioned (infrastructures), as well as free access to schools, health services, security, and the like, and often some basic income. This balance between what we have to buy and pay for, and what we have free access to, through public policies, is fundamental for overall social productivity. Curiously, people tend to see what the state provides as “expenditures”, while unproductive financial paperwork is presented as “investments”. A simple example: the Roosevelt Institute presents a paper that shows that 1 dollar invested in child welfare improvement results in 13 dollars in gains through better health and other benefits. In comparing different countries, “The data shows that while wealth matters, it isn’t the whole story. Trust, social support, and access to public services appear to play a major role in how satisfied people feel with their lives.”2 This is about the social productivity of our money.

Another essential issue is that we have the money. The global GDP for 2026 is on the order of 219 trillion dollars in purchasing power parity (PPP). Figures of this size do not fit in our mind, so we can just divide this number by the world population: it means that what we produce in goods and services is equivalent to $9 thousand per month per four-member family. What we presently produce is amply sufficient to ensure everyone has enough, that no children go hungry, that no person lacks health services support, and the like. A few percent reduction of fortunes would allow for a systemic change. As I have repeated, our problem is not economic, in the sense of lack of resources, but a question of social and political organization. And besides the GDP, we also have accumulated fixed capital – the housing, the roads, the hospitals, and so forth. We also have the technologies, the organized information on child mortality, and so many basics. And the SDGs give us clearly organized paths. Are we social morons?

image host Image 1

This is also about ethics: are we blind to stick to just profit-maximizing, at whatever cost? According to the UN on Levels and Trends in Child Mortality, “Most of the 4.9 million children who died in 2024 could have been saved, according to a new UN report that warns aid cuts could thwart the global goal of ending preventable child deaths. Progress towards ending the preventable deaths of children under five by 2030 has slowed 60% since 2015, the Report found, leading UN experts to call for sustained investment in health systems to reach the target.”3 We could add so many dramas, social and environmental, but the key issue here is governance: the decision process is just radically inefficient, in that it does not allow us to prioritize our key challenges, and rationally mix private and public initiatives.

Many people who studied in the past century still imagine that the solutions are in the family. But the family structure has changed. In 1960, US families with parents and children represented 44.2% of households, while in 2023 they represented only 17.9%. So many people live alone, so many mothers are alone with their children. What this means is that the intergenerational solidarity chain is broken: in the traditional large households with children, both parents, grandparents, and more, the non-working dependents were supported by those of working age and taken care of in the family. Presently, where social policies work, as in the Nordic countries, Canada, China, and others, public social policies provide the necessary support.

Health

Healthcare provides us with a good example. In the graph below, we see that higher life expectancy can be reached with radically different costs. In the US, where healthcare is basically privatized, with recent Trump policies cutting what little public support remains, life expectancy is 77.3 years at the cost of $10,921 a year per person, while Canada reaches 81.7 years with less than half the cost. The complete figures would include China, with a life expectancy of 77 years for $535.4

image host Image 2

The graph shows that similar results can be attained with radically different costs. When you ensure public health, you can create a systemic approach, including water quality control, better food in schools, and overall synergy of different preventive and curative approaches. Let us remember that 42% of Americans are obese, 28% of Brazilians, 8% in China, 6% in Japan.5 Solid public health policies can reduce the production of ultra-processed food and so many profit-maximizing absurdities. Lester Brown reminds us how much cheaper it is to ensure we have safe water in the tap, compared with purchasing it in plastic bottles. Free markets are useful if we keep them where they are useful.

Education

Education faces similar challenges. Henry Giroux wraps the privatization question up: “This neoliberal model not only undermines faculty autonomy but also views students as mere consumers, while saddling them with exorbitant tuition fees and a precarious future shaped by economic instability and ecological crisis. In abandoning its democratic mission, higher education fixates on narrow notions of job-readiness and cost-efficiency, forsaking its broader social and moral responsibilities. Stripped of any values beyond self-interest, institutions retreat from fostering critical citizenship and collective well-being. Pedagogy, in turn, is drained of its critical content and transformative potential.”6

We are in the digital revolution, and knowledge has become the key factor of production. Control of knowledge, education, research, and development, as well as of this new world opening up with AI, has become an essential issue. Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess presented the challenges in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (2007).7 It is a social construction, belonging to humanity. Once research costs are covered, it can be spread to all humanity without additional costs, unlike rice or bicycles. Jeremy Rifkin presents the opportunities in his The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2015). Lawrence Lessig, Manuel Castells, Eric Toussaint, Tim Berners-Lee, Mustafa Suleyman, and so many others are building the institutional toolkit we need, ensuring the control of education, communications, social media, and so many dimensions of the digital revolution. They should be organized for the common good, not just profit maximization. Berners-Lee’s title, This is for Everyone (2025) says it all.8

Access to knowledge has become a key class divider and a global challenge. Markets bring manipulation, not access; they are interested in pushing commercial or political marketing, and the huge fortunes of these hightech oligopoly prevent us from generating a collaborative and globally enriching society. UNESCO sets the goals: “This new social contract must be grounded in human rights and based on principles of non-discrimination, social justice, respect for life, human dignity, and cultural diversity. It must encompass an ethic of care, reciprocity, and solidarity. It must strengthen education as a public endeavor and a common good.”9 These are our kids and people, not commodities.

The growing gap

Money making has taken over, as we can see in the dramatic student debt in so many countries, or in this Debt Relief Report from Norway: “A new Debt Service Watch database prepared for this report, shows that when measured by the burden of debt service on budgets, this is the worst global debt crisis ever. In 2024, debt service is absorbing 41.5% of budget revenues, 41.6% of spending, and 8.4% of GDP on average across 144 developing countries: figures much higher than those before relief was provided to Latin America in the 1980s, and to HIPCs from 1996. Most importantly, service exceeds all social spending, and is 2.7 times education spending, 4.2 times health, 11 times social protection, and 54 times climate adaptation.”10

This generates deep social fractures, both between countries and within them. Canada has 64.7% of adults (25-64) with higher education, the US 50.7%, Brazil 21.5%, and South Africa 9.0%. It takes generations to cover such structural gaps. Where has all the money gone that could help us close the gaps, or at least stop them growing? Peter Phillips brought the figures together: the ten top asset management corporations, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, Fidelity, JPMorgan, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Allianz/PIMCO, and Capital Group were managing the equivalent of 49% of nominal world GDP in 2022.11 In 2026, BlackRock manages $14 trillion, while the Federal Budget of the United States is $7 trillion. Who’s in charge?

We are not just not doing what is necessary, we are losing control over what can be done. Overall, social policies belong to basic needs and represent an investment in the future of society. Where they work, be it health in Canada or education in Finland, they are based on public, universal, free access policies. In these areas – and we could add security and others - we must be seen as persons, not just clients.

Notes

Image 1 World Economic Outlook at International Monetary Fund.
Image 2 World bank global health expenditure database, 2019.
1 Jayati Ghosh, Finance and development, March 2024 – Why and how Economics must Change at IMF.
2 Rosevelt Institute – Making universal childcare is one of the highest-return investments governments can make - @rooseveltinstitute.org - 2025.
3 UNICEF. Report on the Levels and Trends in Child Mortality, March 2026.
4 Visual Capitalist – Health expenditure per capita vs life expectancy. For figures on Brazil, see L. Dowbor and Eduardo Magalhães, Saúde privada: captura, poder e rédea solta – 2024 at Dowbor.org.
5 Voronoi – Adult obesity around the world – 2022.
6 Truthout, Henri Giroux – Unmasking Fascism – 2024.
7 Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess – Understanding Knowledge as a Commons – MIT Press, 2007, at Dowbor.org.
8 Tim Berners-Lee – This is for everyone: the unfinished story of the World Wide Web – New York, 2025, at Dowbor.org.
9 Unesco – A new Social contract for Education – 2021.
10 Matthew Martin and David Waddock, Debt Relief International (dfi@dri.org.uk). January 2024.
11 Peter Phillips – Titans of Capital: how concentrated wealth threatens humanity – The Censored Press, Fair Oaks, Canada, 2024, p. 50 at Dowbor.org.