As our global converging crises – inequality, environmental challenges, violence, financial chaos – reach a catastrophic dimension, beyond presenting the statistics on the dramas, we must reconsider the decision process that generates them and prevents us from facing them. The overall governance issue must be brought down to practical solutions.

(Ladislau Dowbor)

April 18, 2026

Billionaires answer to nobody

(Sebastian Mallaby – The Infinity Machine)1

When thinking about the economic gears, it is useful to understand how fitting them together generates overall productivity. It is a question of organized complementarity and resulting synergy. Manufacturing, for example, belongs to directly productive activities, basically private companies in private hands and regulated dominantly through markets. But this productive area depends heavily on another area, infrastructures: having good roads and railways, dependable energy systems, digital communication infrastructures, as well as solid water and sanitation networks – they make all activities more productive. Infrastructures are best organized as public support, depending on long-term structural planning and network building. Expanding railways, identifying how to connect regions in a country and beyond, does not depend on price fluctuations and should not depend on private opportunism. Shanghai has one thousand kilometers of underground, China has 50 thousand kilometers of high-speed railways: it is cheaper and more effective for everyone. Systemic productivity.

We can use the same approach for social policies. As seen in other papers, this area, involving health, education, security, and other basic services of collective consumption, works best when organized not as private corporations seeking profit maximization, but as public policies ensuring inclusion for everyone. This is not like purchasing your favorite soap in the supermarket: these are policies everyone should have access to, and they represent investment, not expenditures. In Brazil, privatization of education, health, and security has led to dramatic deformations. The US is presently an extreme negative example. Where they work, ensuring free universal access as public services, they have proved much more efficient when decentralized and flexibly adapted to local particularities. It is just more productive. And you cannot justify poor parents not having access to schools and medical care for their kids. Ethics is an essential part of economic decisions, however twisted the interpretations of “liberalism” may be.

But the areas of production, infrastructures, and social policies all depend on a fourth area, intermediation services. It involves the intermediation of money, a huge business nowadays; it is not in our pockets anymore, it is digital. It also involves the giant commercial digital oligopoly, the giant communication systems, and even the lawyers we must rely on, a huge business nowadays. All these middlemen, or middle businesses, charging all kinds of tollbooth payments, keep us in a whirlpool of tiny or bigger drains, permanently updating. Marketing, for example, once informing us about products, has become a giant manipulation area, based on our private information. Deeply transformed by the technological revolution, with direct access to our attention, this area demands new forms of regulation and institutional innovations. Chaos is a soft word for what we are facing.2

Finance

Money is presently only information on computers or cellphones; we seldom go to a bank, and it has no piles of paper money in giant safes. Banks have essentially become digital hubs, and belong to the huge and complex system of financial intermediation we all depend on. Nothing you can hide under your mattress. And the bank has no trouble with lending money it does not have. With limits, of course, in 2008, Lehman Brothers had lent 31 times more than the available cash, and the catastrophe was based on this general use of what they call “leverage”. Making money on money you do not have has become a general practice. Along with so many dark practices, it has been called financialization.

Financial services did once concentrate on financing productive activities and could be seen as useful services when they were reasonably regulated under the Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed during the Clinton administration. Presently, they represent a hugely confused system, with shadow banking, personal fortunes management institutions, tax heavens, all riding on the immaterial money that roams the world seeking rent maximization on other people’s money. With the so-called high-frequency trading, money transfers represent roughly 70 times the effective goods and services traded. Paying tollbooth tariffs on every exchange. Immaterial money allows for BlackRock, an asset management giant, to seek profit maximization throughout the world, using the power of algorithms to presently manage $14 trillion. The federal budget of the US government is around $7 trillion, just for comparison. Brazilian GDP is around $2.3tn. Financialization obeys global profit maximization, out of reach of any regulation.

It is not our aim here to describe the huge complexity of the global or national financial systems, but to stress the need for overall regulation mechanisms on this dimension of money intermediation. As just a notation on computers, and so much power at the top, what was supposed to fund productive investment and private needs has become a huge drain. Money flows are global, and we have no global central bank, even if Trump aims at imposing the dollar empire. The Bretton Woods institutions are 80 years old and toothless. National institutions can hardly face global finance. In the absence of regulatory capacity and with the overall power of the global concentration of financial assets, extending their grip on so many parts of the world, the results are catastrophic. The ten biggest asset management corporations have AUM (Assets-Under-Management) equivalent to roughly half the world GDP.3

A report on the situation of developing countries gives us the general idea: “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 (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) from 1996. Most importantly, debt 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.”4

These are countries that have desperate needs of investing in education, health, industry, and the like. Short-term profit maximization financial policies are what we can expect if financial flows are in private hands. We have important examples of money flows regulated so they stimulate development, particularly in China. The Chinese economy has outpaced the American one in 2014, it is presently in the order of 25% bigger. Ensuring money is productive certainly pays off. And it is our money, our savings in the banks, our taxes in the public debt service.

Information

Overall, communication systems have suffered a similar revolution, with accelerated technological transformations that have not been accompanied by the corresponding regulatory capacity. Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, and other giants have become global manipulators of our information, both extracting individual private details and feeding us with attention-maximizing content. Once known as marketing, it has become the attention industry, generating the top world fortunes. The digital revolution opened impressive new potentials through global connectivity in a knowledge society, but corporate power has taken over. Facebook reaches over 3 billion users. It looks free, but it charges its costs and profits on advertisers, which in turn include these as costs of the products we pay for. It is studied as profit-inflation.

Roughly 10% of the price we pay for so many of our purchases is to finance the advertising, presently called behavioral marketing, as it relies on the private information they extract from us. It is invasive, costly, and systemically negative, since it takes our time and generates artificial needs. I do not need marketing for the things I am not interested in, and for the things I do need, I will seek information. This means effective appropriation of AI and communications technology, AI helping me to reach what I want, not being invaded by what corporations want. Tim Berners-Lee, in his This is for Everyone book, details this basic challenge, between manipulative, costly AI in global corporate interest, and the opportunities for bottom-up access to the information and knowledge we seek.5

Just as with regulating the global financial flows, regulating information is a huge challenge. When Elon Musk buys Twitter, allowing him to propagate his opinions to hundreds of millions, or when we see how it pays to maximize attention through pornography, or even the stupidly repetitive messages that invade our lives and intimacy, it is obvious that this is not about “freedom”; it is about manipulation. And the fact that it earns the private corporations and their owners gigantic fortunes, money that results from monopoly - to communicate, we must use what others use, it is called demand-monopoly – it is clear that what we need is free public access, not invasive content. Public free access and regulation concerning content is the basic institutional structure we must aim for.

The overall approach I would suggest is that we must go beyond 19th-century ideological simplifications. In this complex and rapidly changing society, we must build different management systems in different areas of activity. Productive businesses and services, from cars to barbershops, can rely on markets in a context of social and environmental basic rules. The large infrastructures that link all activities must be in public hands and seek overall productivity and environmental balance. Social policies must be essentially public; some things, like access to education, health services, a roof over your head, and even basic income, must be granted to everyone. And the intermediation services must be strongly regulated, for the new technologies allow for a level of wealth concentration and ensuing political control that is pushing us down the drain, both in terms of inequality and environmental dramas.

I am not dreaming. I have worked in poor and rich countries, on different continents, and have seen how different things can work if you seek the basic overall result: a better life for everyone. We can just look at the positive experiences, and it is not just about money. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh shows the accomplishments that are possible if you put money in the right hands. We can look at the public management solutions in the Kerala state of India, the infrastructure policies in China, the decentralized financial solutions in the Nordic countries, and so many down-to-earth solutions.

But this means that overall, we start thinking that the economy must serve us, help us build a rich and flourishing life for everyone, and the fact is that thanks to so much technological progress, with what we presently produce, we can make sure nobody is left behind. If everyone can be sure of social support, we can build a collaborative and peaceful society, not the mess we are in. How to reorganize the decision processes for the common good, this is the challenge.6

Notes

1 Sebastian Mallaby – The infinity Machine – Penguin Press, 2026.
2 Ladislau Dowbor – The new economic and political gears – Revista Pesquisa e Debate, v. 37, n. 2(68) 2025 ISSN 1806-9029 Pontifical University of São Paulo.
3 Peter Phillips – Titans of Capital: how concentrated wealth threatens humanity – The Censored Press, 2024. Book review.
4 Matthew Martin and David Waddock – Debt Service International – 2024.
5 Tim Berners-Lee – This is for everyone: the unfinished story of the World Wide Web – Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2025. Book review.
6 Ladislau Dowbor – The Age of Unproductive Capital – Cambridge Scholars, Cambridge, 2021.