We can hardly be called citizens anymore. Rather, an audience, spectators of an accelerating rhythm of change over which we have no control. The political lens we inherited, socialism and capitalism, the state and the corporation, left and right, gives us a distorted and shaky view. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, J.M. Keynes? A powerful new generation of creative economists is certainly giving us updated pictures, but the common denominator is that the slow-motion catastrophe is not slow anymore, even if the orchestra is still playing.

Allow me an overview. First of all, the world population is about to stabilize around 9-10 billion inhabitants in the 2050s, and this is what we have to organize our planet for, looking at the long term, with reasonable and sustainable living conditions for all. It certainly is possible. But we still are in an absurd free-for-all rush, fighting for privileges, getting to the top over others, grabbing and destroying non-renewable resources, polluting everything on the planet, and filling our heads with attention-grabbing idiocies. Our problem is not in the problems, but in our persistence in creating them even as we see the consequences, and our impotence to reverse their deepening. Welcome to the 21st-century rich, high-tech, self-destroying world. And I am an optimist.

Rich? Take the basic fact that the world GDP reached US$115 trillion in 2025, which means that what we produce in goods and services is equivalent to roughly US$5,000 a month per four-member family. I bring the huge trillions down to family level, because it brings us down to earth: we produce enough for everybody. You can play with this figure, present net national income instead of gross domestic product, and also add the huge accumulated capital that is not accounted for in the GDP figures, but the basic, huge fact is that we produce enough for all of us to have a comfortable and flourishing life, as Tom Malleson likes to call it. I know I am repeating myself with these numbers, but it is a point of reference for any reasoning on our structural challenges: we have to place them here as the starting point.

So the question is not in producing more, and glorifying the percentages of growth, but in slowing down, catching our breath, and having a deeper look at what we are producing, for whom, and with what environmental consequences. Well, the food we produce is sufficient for 12 to 14 billion people, according to FAO, yet we have 750 million going hungry, 2.3 billion in food insecurity, 150 million under-five children suffering from stunting, as well as 42.8 million suffering from wasting1. Around 6 million die from these conditions every year. This is not a sudden crisis, it is a permanent long-term trend, a structural fault. Turning a blind eye on this tragedy does not necessarily mean we are barbarians, as individuals, but it certainly means we are still in barbarian times as a society. MAGA, anyone?

This paper is not about raising flags on our dramas; we have the climate change catastrophe, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, chemicals in every waterway, rainforest destruction, and we have the evening news showing the fires, the floods, the violence. And endless meetings on all these issues. This paper is about how we are disorganized and how we can get organized. I actively participated in the 1992 World Summit on Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, organizing the sustainable technologies exhibit in São Paulo, a parallel event. That’s 33 years ago, we already knew what had to be done, and had the technological means. I am still battling these issues, hoping we reach 20% of the 2030 Agenda sustainable development goals. This is a measure of our attainments, hoping for 20% of the goals. With over 30 COPs, we discuss every year how deep in trouble we are getting. This is a measure of how helpless we are. Davos, anyone?

So, we have the financial means, we know what should be done, and we have the meetings. And in 2025, we have a powerful president of a rich country proclaiming Drill, baby, Drill, and taking the United States out of the Paris Conference goals again, in some kind of yo-yo game. The problem here is not Donald Trump; we have demagogues by the dozen for every election in every country. It is that, notwithstanding the obvious challenges we are facing, and the fact that we have the resources, as well as the step-by-step measures that have to be taken, we are electing this kind of politician. With an elected president with 13 billionaires beaming behind him on the inauguration ceremony, the problem is with the demagogue. It means that money at the top is divorced from contributing to the common good. It also means that the key narrative, that profit maximizing is legitimate, whatever the consequences for society and for the environment, has taken over both the economic and the political decision process.

It is a destructive trend, yet people voted for it, the congressmen vote for it, Wall Street is enthusiastic, we have a bull market, which means that the system of rewards and positive feedback pushes us down the rapids. It is not a social mistake; it is a social, political, and economic blunder. The issue is that this kind of systemic deformation demands structural change, and we do not have the political corresponding counter-power. If it were just the US, but it is strengthening in so many countries. This is not about waiting for the next election, it is about what happened with the election, with democracy in general, and how deep the structural change is. It is essential to get to the key moving gears of this transformation.

We have all the data we need on the dramatic inequality progressing in the world. The gears are simple: most people in the world have trouble reaching the end of the month, or indebted, while rich people, once satisfied their ample basic needs, have money to “invest”. And the more spare money you have to invest, the richer you get: this is the financial snowball effect, the more money you have, the more money you make. And it is not a productive investment, but a financial investment. Forbes gives us the figures: 3028 billionaires have a fortune of US$16 trillion, while the bottom half of the population, 4.1 billion people, have a total wealth of US$5 trillion. There was no avoiding that this level of economic power at the top would generate the corresponding political power.

The curiously named Citizens United change in the American Constitution, in 2010, allowing corporate money to fund elections, is a structural deformation of what we still call democracy. It is not simply a problem; it is a structural fault in our problem-solving capacity. This is much more than the power of the rich, plutocracy. It is a deformation of the decision process at the top. The biggest asset management corporations wield US$50 trillion in 2022, roughly half the world's GDP. BlackRock alone, in 2025, manages US$12 trillion. Just as a reminder, the federal budget of the US is US$6 trillion. These huge platforms capture money from around the world, in a network of virtual money, and Larry Fink has no choice but to maximize the returns on these financial investments. And this goes for UBS, JP Morgan, State Street, Vanguard, Fidelity, and the like.

So many fortunes around the world depend on this extractive system, extractive capitalism as it has been called, that it has become too powerful to move. The giant world-scale financial speculation system wields roughly six times the value of the world GDP, over US$600 trillion, in derivatives alone. Too much money and too many interests are meshed into this web of interests for the system to move. The over-sweetened yearly messages from Larry Fink, to “investors” around the world are the financial equivalent of the drill, baby, drill message for oil and gas corporations. The managers are not stupid; they are perfectly aware of the consequences, they even claim adherence to ESG principles, but they are caught in the web, and the fact that they also get so rich does not help. We are facing a structural fault.

This is much beyond what we called capitalism, when getting rich also meant you produced something useful. And with virtual money, just a number on computers, roaming the world in fractions of seconds, we completely lose control: the central banks are basically national institutions, while the money is global. And we have no international regulation, the Bretton Woods institutions date from 80 years ago and are helpless, the BIS just gives some advice and information on outstanding derivatives. The ease with which the financial platforms – I think this is the appropriate name for these institutions, since they are essentially a network of cloud-money management – transfer giant resources in the global space has created a systemic flaw in what once was finance serving productive investment, transforming our savings into production, goods and services.

An essential issue is that the financial maximization world-scale system of virtual money – cloud-money is an apt name in Yanis Varoufakis’ writings – naturally transforms the logic of the most different areas of economic activity2. Peter Phillips brings us an exceptionally well-organized presentation of the new global economic power structure that results from this overall financialization, in his study Titans of Capital3. The financial interests of the 10 major global asset management platforms allow them to exert control over the major social media platforms (Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and high-tech groups in general), but also the major tobacco firms, oil and gas corporations, military industry, and even private prison networks.

A similar control by the Titans is exerted over major companies in Brazil, for example, with banks like Itaú or Bradesco, energy companies, health insurance companies, and so on. This absentee-owner economy, with international drains over productive or financial activities throughout the world, is structurally different from the industrial capitalism we knew, even if the World Economic Forum in Davos likes to call it Industry 4.0, meaning the same system with a technological one-step up. There is no “invisible hand” to regulate activities on this scale, and Phillips’ book shows that managers of the major financial giants simultaneously participate in the decision process of the most different corporations, generating converging global policies.

How shaky has the world become, with all these riches and all these technologies? How fragile our lives and nature itself are on this little planet. There is no escaping that we need a new Bretton Woods, a Global Green New Deal as it has been called, but it seems we have to wait until the catastrophe reaches much deeper for the world to create the corresponding political and cultural surge for it to happen. Nobel-winning Demis Hassabis considers this digital revolution we are living in “is going to be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and maybe 10 times faster.” But politics is firmly stuck in the last century. The fracture between technological rhythm and stalled politics is deepening.

The basic issue is that we are living in this accelerating process of systemic change, while our governance capacity remains stuck in the last-century analogic world, national rivalries, and destructive competition. the challenge is to mobilize our huge financial, technological, and networking capacities to get us back on track. 2050, in historical terms, is a blink in the eye4.

Notes

1 Joint Malnutrition Estimates 2025 edition on UNICEF.
2 Yanis Varoufakis – Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism – The Bodley Head 2023.
3 Titans of Capital: how concentrated wealth threatens humanity on Dowbor.
4 The new economic and political gears on Dowbor.