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The planet’s losing.
We’re in a hole. Climate, nature and social inequality crises. Story with a swerve gets us out. It’s the shape of all our lives. Up-down, down-up. And this shape of slantwise story, it creates hope and agency.
In this podcast, we hear from culture leaders and wanderers, the crossers of boundaries, the story-tellers. They share their ideas on how we get out of holes. Good story is not just a hiding place. It’s a finding place.
The podcast vibe is the warm-dark daguerreotype photograph, invented at the start of the industrialised era, before human-induced carbon pollution of the atmosphere.
My guests are writers and poets, artists and scientists, environmental and business leaders, farmers and landowners, local and national activists, festival directors, therapists, religious leaders. All are storytellers too.
The music clips at the start and end of episodes were recorded at public dances in Punakha and Thimphu (Bhutan).
My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027. It is called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformative Stories for Climate and Nature Recovery."
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22 Olivier De Schutter on the poverty of GDP-Growth, the Inequality Emergency, and the new UN Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty
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I’m chatting with author, academic and former double UN Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter at a street table in the heat of an Oxford summer. Olivier is professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, and says, “We have not made the economy inclusive by design; we have allowed it to operate in another way." The new Roadmap for Eradicating of Poverty Beyond Growth goes beyond 20 new metrics recently proposed as alternatives to GDP, and this Roadmap now contains 80 options for governments, businesses and civil society to take ever-lengthening steps towards a new inclusive and sustainable society.
Growth is still an orthodoxy that leads to extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the few, the growing fear of scarcity, and persistence of poverty and the breaching of planetary boundaries. Olivier calls this “the counter-productivity of growth.”
The Roadmap, he says, will help “broaden the imagination.” Combined with the declaration of an Inequality Emergency, and the launch of the International Panel on Inequality (IPI), he says, “We are at a turning point.”
Olivier’s heroes and heroines are the many low-income and neglected people: “if we listened to them, if we valued their knowing more, we’d make fewer mistakes.”
Olivier’s most recent book is called “Poverty Beyond Growth.”
He recommends Kate Pickett’s new book, “The Good Society”, and says read Hartmut Rosa too, especially his “Resonance.”
Olivier recommends, look people in their eyes, create special relationships, and learn from each other.
Website: https://www.srpoverty.org/
Roadmap: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-poverty/roadmap-eradicating-poverty-beyond-growth
My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."
How are you still reporter at the moment? Not anymore. I I ended up on the 30th of April after six years of dedication to the job.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah, exactly. And was that two different rapporteur roles or one?
SPEAKER_00I was special rapporteur on the right to food for 2008-2014. So these were two terms of three years, you can't do more. And then I took up the role of special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights in 2020.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So it's a little bit unusual to be two different special rapporteurs.
SPEAKER_00It is, but there's a continuity and they're related. And they're related, and I also brought into the discussion on extreme poverty issues about planetary boundaries, which were entirely absent. But I looked at poverty eradication, sustainable development goal number one, in relation to the other SDGs, including SDG 12 on responsible consumption and production, SDG 13 on climate action. And I think we should stop combating poverty without taking those dimensions into account. The equation is far more complex than just growing the economy and then trying to redistribute the wealth that we create. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's a real pleasure, Olivia, to have you on. Olivia De Shooter. So we're sitting, here we are sitting on a hot summer's afternoon in Oxford, in the middle of England. And you've been teaching a summer school here. And a real pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you. And as as you've just said, one of the things that we'll be talking about is your book, The Poverty of Growth, and the link between two terms there that have been problematic, troubling, not very kind of ready for change in terms of both concepts and also outcomes. So I think it would be nice to explore some of those things. And pleasure to have you here, a professor of law at the University of Louvain in Belgium. So great to have you here. So nice to capture you at the end of your day of teaching already here in Oxford. You've said that poverty is manufactured in your book. Tell us a little bit about what you meant by that, what you mean by that, because I think that's quite an important framing of poverty. You know, it's a way of saying this is what this is actually what happened.
SPEAKER_00I think our societies are built on a division of labor between the state and the market, with the market intended to be efficient and to improve productivity gains and to make a more efficient use of the scarce resources we have. And the state then redistributes the wealth that is created to compensate for the inequalities that are caused by the market mechanisms. And when I say that we manufacture poverty, I mean by this that we have not made the economy inclusive by design. We allowed it to operate based on the idea that we needed to use the resources in the most efficient way possible, that we need to improve competitiveness and productivity, and that the state would take care of the rest. And the argument here is that we should move beyond that understanding of the role of the state and that understanding of poverty. Poverty should be addressed not by simply growing the economy, taxing, and then redistributing this usual three-step sequence that is characteristic of most efforts to combat poverty in the welfare state. It should be also forcing us to rethink how the economy works. And that is what we mean by a human rights economy, one that is designed to include rather than to exclude and to increase inequalities. Yeah, yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_02And in that set of challenges that you've set out, there is this concept called growth, which is so taken for granted in so many different contexts, civil society, political views of the world, business views of the world, and yet relatively recent in its kind of manifestations as what we might say is late-stage capitalism. How have you seen us need to be able to address this term in a new way? Sorry now, think differently.
SPEAKER_00It has become the dominant metric by which we assess the quality of what governments do, and it is largely on GDP that uh elections are won or lost. Um, and that is because we put many hopes in the idea that uh increasing the total economic output will create jobs, will allow us to improve well-being, will basically allow for more consumption, and of course uh the assumption is that more is better. And um I I think it's uh a very widely shared orthodoxy. It is uh shared between the right and the left, the conservatives and the progressives in in politics. Uh they have different recipes as to how to create growth, they have different views as to how the benefits of growth should be redistributed, but they share the idea that no progress can be achieved without growth being created in the first place. And so they are ready to take all the policy measures it requires to create growth, even when that becomes counterproductive, uh which I tried to show in the book. Um so uh a very small but fast-growing number of economists are now saying we should think about the economy without assuming that growth is a passage obligé, a condition sine qua non for progress, and the economy should dedicate itself to improving well-being, not growth, not more uh total economic output. Um and the debate has now started, but uh politicians are still stuck in 20th century mentality in which uh the total uh wealth created by the economy was a starting point for social progress. And um even economists are behind earth scientists who have been warning us about the limits of growth since at least six years. And uh what we are now trying to do is to co-opt economists into thinking beyond growth and inventing a macroeconomic that that dispenses with growth, which which which I think we are now gradually achieving, uh, but uh it's still a battle to be fought very largely.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um and so from your perspective of the the two periods to two double periods of being the UN rapporteur on food and then on human rights and and on poverty? Was that part of it? And extreme poverty, yeah, exactly. Um from that perspective, how you you you're close to seeing how uh governments 200-ish, 200 plus, depending on how we define a nation-state, um, how they're responding to an orthodoxy like this that is uh so accepted that that people find it hard to challenge, but misses so many of the important negatives that are are stressing the planet overall, you know, whether it's climate or nature, inequality or so forth.
SPEAKER_00Indeed, so the the the there is one um myth uh that is uh convenient and that is entertained because it allows us not to make the hard choices, and that is a myth of green growth. And many governments and the UN agencies themselves, with whom I work, um uh continue to uh insist that with the right technologies, uh clean green technologies, we can increase total economic output without further um worsening the environmental crisis and without uh increasing our uh environmental footprint. Um they base this idea on the realization that some advanced economies did manage to grow whilst reducing their greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. But of course, what we should not omit is that there are not one but nine planetary boundaries, and that we have no example of a jurisdiction that has continued to grow whilst reducing its environmental footprint, taking into account all these boundaries, including the loss of biodiversity, the extraction of resources, waste and pollution beyond greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. So this myth of green growth still remains very present, and uh the idea um continues to dominate the development agenda that governments should prioritize growth and then um environmental issues and poverty will be easy to address thanks to the resources created.
SPEAKER_02Almost inevitably. Um, but they never do never have really.
SPEAKER_00No, indeed. But but there is this belief, um, and um there are some lock-ins that are very difficult for governments to overcome. I will cite only three. The first one is that many countries in all world regions face very high levels of public debt now as a result of the great financial crisis of 2009-2010, the COVID-19 pandemic, the high food and energy inflation uh of 2022, 2024, so that many governments have a high public debt to service, which requires them to grow the economy, otherwise the debt service is really unsustainable. The second lock-in is most of the economy relies on economic actors that want to maximize profit uh for the benefit of shareholders, investors that have to be rewarded for their investment. So at the microeconomic level, there's an incentive to grow in order to be able to pay investors back, uh, reward shareholders by increasing the market share of the company in which they invested. This is why we call for much more of the economy becoming, you know, social and solidarity economy, non-profit uh economy, rather than profit maximization being the goal. And the third lock-in is simply the representation of progress that people have. For most people, more is better. Um, happiness comes from more consumption, um, accumulation of wealth is uh uh a decent objective in one's life, and that is a representation of happiness of progress that is very difficult to get rid of. But I'm convinced that the cultural dimension, the fight for a different understanding of what human felicity means, of what what kind of life is worth living, I think is really part of the struggle we should be leading.
SPEAKER_02That's beautifully put, those three lock-ins. I think that last one is interesting because if I if I get up in the morning and I sit in the garden and I listen to the birds and I just kind of you know watch the sunrise, I haven't spent anything, I haven't contributed to the economy. Um, I may have created a small benefit by not doing those consumption things, but I'm certainly feeling a lot better by sitting and just being attentive to nature around me. Um and there's no place for that in GDP growth. It doesn't recognise that. Um and yet I think we probably all know that you might be sitting round a table having a cup of coffee with somebody with some friends or going for a walk or sitting on the beach. Why do people like sitting on the beach on a summer's day? You're not buying anything and you're not polluting anything, and you're just having a nice kind of time. I mean you might be able to do that. This is why.
SPEAKER_00This is why the gross domestic product is a very poor measure of what uh we should strive towards. And for a number of years there was a correlation, not perfect, but there was a correlation between GDP increase, uh the increase of uh the output of the economy on the one hand, and um subjective well-being on the other hand. In other terms, the happiness that people expressed about their the way their life was going. That relationship is now completely broken. And in fact, it's it's it it started uh uh crumbling in the 1970s when it became more and more clear that more growth did not make us happier. Instead, it made us more anxious about the future. It led to a much more competitive society in which people were under stress. It of course uh caused uh damage to the environment that is not only a source of uh depression and anxiety, but also has direct impacts on our physical health. And so since the 1970s in advanced economies, it is becoming um problematic to pursue growth at the expense of all uh the rest that that that makes uh for a good life as as you would express it yourself. Um so um we we we we are in this in this situation where we have to use different metrics to uh measure progress. And um in May of this year, a high-level expert group established by the UN Secretary General, the high high-level expert group on Beyond GDP, proposed a series of indicators, a dashboard of 20 indicators to measure inclusive and sustainable well-being, um, recommending that states measure that in addition to measuring GDP. Governments uh have been listening to this. I think this is a battle on metrics that has been won to a large extent. However, the problem is if you measure better what matters, um, but you don't change how we produce, how we consume, if you don't revisit um the taxation system, uh the way trade and investment are organized, for example, you will not improve um people's lives. And I'm fond of quoting this uh founder of uh ecological economics, Herman Daly, who was fond of saying that if you fall from an airplane, you don't need an altimeter to measure uh where you are, you need a parachute to slow down. And if governments contend themselves with new metrics of progress, well-being instead of GDP, but do not change the way this economic system operates, then uh we will lose the battle. And that is that is exactly what I'm trying now to achieve with this roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth that we are proposing, and that the Human Rights Council on 7th of July has um expressed support for, which I'm very glad it did. Um, but that means moving beyond the question of the metrics, beyond the altimeter, and moving to how we organize the economy to make it more inclusive, sustainable by design, and that is a parachute we need.
SPEAKER_02Well, let's come to that in a moment because I think I'd like to I think we'd like to hear more about that. If you I mean there is a sort of often a kind of moral panic associated with this thing called growth. I mean, if it's if it's up by 0.1%, that's a great that's for a moment for celebration, even though nobody's gonna notice it. I mean, no no citizens in the UK are gonna notice a 0.1% increase on the previous three-month period because their their signals are much larger and you know they're looking at other things.
SPEAKER_00But and that's not only Jews, because it's a very small increase, the one you described, that cannot be really detected, but also because the vast um majority of uh the the growth or the the the the the the most important uh components of growth have been captured by a very limited number of people. Um with the incredible inequalities we have, um uh growth is really um growing the wealth of a handful of extremely rich people, but the vast majority of people don't see the lot improve as a result. In fact, they see their condition as worsening because they compare themselves with those who do much better.
SPEAKER_02Let's take a couple of countries. I mean, Japan is a very large economy at the beginning of the 1990s, and by those measures of GDP growth, it hasn't grown for 30 years, um, and they haven't disappeared and the economy hasn't gone away. Um so they may still, I mean you still see people saying, oh, this is a problem for Japan, but actually, if you're in Japan, it doesn't seem like a large problem, actually. They've accommodated some sort of stability in in the thing called GDP growth. Um, and they're still building stuff and they're still doing things, um, but people seem content with the the current model. So that's one, and then the other one that is in my mind is is Bhutan, a small country in the eastern Himalaya that King comes up in the 1970s with this idea of gross national happiness. And when I was there last year, uh uh this is a term that everybody accepts. It's on buses, it's you know, it's kind of on taxis, it's just part of the kind of cultural background. Now that could be a slogan, but it's one of the few countries in the world where inequality has declined. In other words, equality has improved over the last period. Now it's a small country and it's relatively poor by other measures, um, but they are really proud of this thing called gross national happiness. They're not at all embarrassed by the idea that they're different, but it sort of seems to be working a little bit as well.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I think it's important at this point to recall that uh GDP um measures everything that we produce or or or consume and and usually the the the the two are are similar, so that various ways of measuring it uh but that's basically what it looks at. But if we have uh um a stationary economy, um it doesn't mean, as your example of Japan well illustrates, that uh everything falls apart. It simply means that we will not year after year um produce and consume more. And if society functions, then why should it necessarily continue infinitely to grow? Um just like um when you've reached you know the um adult uh height um um um you don't need to grow anymore as you may have to grow as a child or an adolescent. Um and and I think um what's also uh clear is that once the basic needs of the individual are met, once he or she can you know eat healthily, um has access to healthcare, to to adequate housing, uh can send the the children to school and and and can flourish in a job that that has meaning. Um it doesn't matter for the happiness of that individual that um he or she expands the possibilities of consumption. What matters is a sound work-life balance, uh quality of social relationships, uh the strength of the the partnerships that he has with others, and um um of course um uh uh the you know uh health and and and so on, but not um increasing possibilities of consumption. And the marginal utility uh that you you you you gain by increased consumption um is minimal and sometimes can even become negative, right? If you have um two bicycles, that's fine because if one has a punctured tire, then you can use the other. But uh if you have three, it becomes a bit strange. If you have four or believe you need five, it's uh frankly pathological. And the additional bike you will have will not add much to your happiness. On the contrary, it becomes a problem because your garage may be too small to accommodate all these bicycles. And so I think that's that's uh the kind of um narrative about progress we have to challenge. Your examples of Bhutan and Japan are, I think, useful. All the studies we have about what people say about their happiness, their subjective well-being, show that what matters to them is how they fare in comparison to others, how they compare to others around them, not simply um whether their situation has improved in comparison to the previous year.
SPEAKER_02So take us into the thinking about um uh the individual and the collective. So a lot of the of the neoliberal period brings in a uh an acute focus on individualism. You know, the the it's down to you to To find a job is down to you to make improvements. You have the agency, you do it. You know, it's not our fault that you're messing up your life, kind of thing. And yet at the same time, we all know that there are many kind of collective togethernesses that bring us kind of a sense of life well lived. Friends, family, communities, people that you work with, people that you play with, people that you live with. And on top of that, the commons that are around us, you know, the commons of a clean atmosphere, or the commons of a safe climate, or the commons of a place where you can sit and nobody's gonna tell you you've got to go away from here. And so that tension between the individual and the common and the capture of the values of the commons and taking that into individual space is part of what's happened over this period as well. So when we're thinking about the new uh um conceptualizations that you've been talking about here, is this kind of coming through the values of togetherness?
SPEAKER_00I think there are three things to be said about this. The first one is this is a very good example of what uh with great humility I call the counterproductivity of growth. In other terms, one of the ways in which growth was pursued um over the past um 50 years is by privatizing the commons. So once you privatize uh a forest, uh, for example, or you know, a pond, whatever, um you create wealth because what in the past was not monetized becomes a source of profit. But of course, many people who depended on access to the commons uh for you know um enjoying the scenery of of taking a walk in the uh in the woods um are deprived as a result. Uh so it doesn't improve their well-being at all. But the value of the economy has gained. Um so that's a good example of the counterproductivity of looking for growth at all costs. Um but more importantly, perhaps um uh Jules, what this um uh question leads us to is um the representation um people have about what makes you happy. And I think you are absolutely right that we've been raised to think that um what matters to be happy is our own personal condition rather than the relationships we build with others and and the environments that we inhabit. Um non-Western cultures that are less individualistic, I think, have much to teach us in this regard. And for example, the Ubuntu conception of the Bantu in in Central Africa is one good example of an alternative um cosmovision that we may sh we may wish to seek inspiration from in order to change our representation of of happiness. And then my my third remark on what you said is um that um um we we we are in African societies um led to believe that if people are poor, are marginalized, it's because of their own fault. They have not made the right choices, they have not perhaps uh put enough effort into finding a job or or having the right diplomas and so on, and they should be blamed for their condition. Um paradoxically, it's more difficult in rich societies uh to combat poverty because poverty is seen as a failure of the individual rather than a failure of society that has not created the right conditions for everyone to flourish. And I'm um uh challenging this view. I believe that uh the um the the the blaming of people in poverty for their condition is um um is is the mark of society not willing to um um uh re-examine how it operates and and whether or not it creates um fair chances for everyone. And I and I think this is why I I speak about a human rights economy or an inclusive economy, uh, because I think we have to rethink how the economy works rather than blame individuals for not fitting into the economy as it is.
SPEAKER_02Uh very nicely put. Uh the the the work on the metrics and the work on thinking beyond the SDGs, the sustainable development goals, um, and the presentation of a kind of new way of thinking, as you were saying there, uh which, as you've also said, we need to be rethinking the kind of the values and the concepts, the the paradigms, the worldviews, the Veltan Shawung that kind of frames all of this, you could say. So we need to do all of that, but we also, I guess, um want to be able to say when someone says, Well, how to do that? What what are the components of a of a policy? Someone says, Okay, I get it, what should we be doing? Um uh uh is it universal basic income? Is it universal basic services? Is it rethinking food? Is it access to land? I mean, my guess it's all these things. Um uh is it uh thinking about um enoughness, as we've described, uh not not five bicycles, but maybe two? Fine, you know. Uh where's the point? Having a conversation about what is enough, yeah um uh and uh not just saying that more is always better. I think we're you know we ought to be beyond that, but I can see that we're not. I mean, there's still the you know political classes and governments are still not there yet, and many commentators are still not there yet, because they are thinking, oh, we must have but if we have a conversation about enoughness, we might start to say, well, actually, what is enough for you? If you're a billionaire, have you got enough? You probably have. Um if you're uh in extreme poverty, you haven't got enough. Um that's absolutely clear. So, how do we close that? So, what's some of the kind of the ingredients that go together?
SPEAKER_00Well, first of all, I do think that um an ethics of sufficiency is really part of what we should be uh striving towards. Uh, but we've been wired really into thinking that we face uh scarcity and that we have to fear scarcity. Um we will only be able to be wise enough uh to um not strive towards infinite accumulation um once we will be reassured that in times of crisis we will be supported. So for me, um the welfare state, as you call it in Britain, um the social state is essential in order to reassure individuals that um no, they will not um fall in destitution if they face you know a crisis in their lives, if they lose their job, for example. And so uh once you provide that kind of sense of security thanks to uh a state that protects, um people will feel much uh less of an urge to accumulate uh in order to be protected in times of crisis. That that's a first remark. Now, the broader question, what do we do? I think the the we have to understand that um we cannot do everything at once, um, but that we have to inject in um the way we um uh steer society towards um uh this utopia of uh uh an inclusive and sustainable economy, um we have to take the small steps that gradually will bring us closer to that vision. And these small steps should be something else than reacting to the crisis or maintaining the system as it operates by entertaining the status quo. It should be um uh steps towards fulfilling that end vision by multi-year action plans, strategies that um um uh bring us closer to to music than architecture. I mean by this, it's not the end vision that matters, it's also every single small step we take, uh just like every note in a musical partition matters, um, to move us towards that vision. And what we did with the roadmap on eradicating poverty beyond growth was to say, well, there are a large number of measures that could be taken to improve society, to move us closer to the good society as described, for example, in the book by by Kate Pickett with that name. Um and and paradoxically, measures that look utopian if looking if if if taken or considered separately become realistic if um other measures are adopted that support it. Let me give just one example. The circular economy, right? Uh repairing, reusing, recycling, and so on to reduce our throughput in the economy. It's an important objective. It's easier to achieve a circular economy if you also have a job guarantee system that puts people to work if they are able and willing to work with public support in order to create the jobs that will populate that circular economy. So the job guarantee idea and the circular economy idea are two utopian ideas, but they are actually mutually supportive and easier to achieve together than separately. And in the road map we have a large number of policy proposals, 80 in total, developed in a very bottom-up fashion by unions, by NGOs, by experts, by UN agencies. And what what we try to do is identify how these measures are mutually supportive and can um allow what is now a utopian vision of the future to populate the development plans, the the national strategies that that countries are expected to adopt.
SPEAKER_02So that that lovely. I mean that thought of 80 ideas, and you've described a sort of um uh uh uh a multifunctionality, if we can put it that way, of you have one idea and it might benefit another idea, and the two together might produce a third idea, and some of them will be brand new ones that we hadn't even thought of. That there's interaction between the different ideas, and and and if two or three of those interactions are positive, then you're adding two and two and two and getting ten and not six. You know, there's there's some synergy happening in there, and that strikes me as one way that the the so-called productivity puzzle is is kind of solved because you are creating productivity because you're getting ten instead of six from three ideas. But if you've got the 80 there, are we envisaging the the ideas as being like the ingredients in the kitchen um and that you can pick from those in any given place and choose? Well, I have this one here and this one and this one, and somewhere else, somewhere else people may say, Oh, I no, I think for us it's this, this, and this. Um or or is it more of a you have to do A, B, C, D in a long line? I mean, my guess is a little bit of both because they're interacting. But the choice, the the idea of having lots of choices is could be quite enabling and creating agency.
SPEAKER_00I like your metaphor of the of the kitchen. One could also take the metaphor of the the the menu at at the restaurant, which allows you to choose from a uh from the the different options that are proposed. Um and clearly um it's not a blueprint that is valid across all contexts and and and uh countries. Um in particular because uh it has to be democratically owned to have a chance of succeeding. And uh what the roadmap uh proposes is a menu of policy measures that have for the vast majority of them been tested, experimented with, and we can learn some lessons from those experimentations. Um and government's uh policy toolbox if is expanded, if you wish, by by looking at those AT policy measures. But then they have to decide what uh is worth doing in the particular context of you know Indonesia or or or Zambia or Luxembourg. And of course, um Indonesia, Zambia, Luxembourg have very different needs and priorities. Um but if they organize um democratically a process uh of uh choosing those priorities and defining the sequence of measures they will take, um they they the roadmap is there to to help them and to broaden political imagination. I think that's that is how we should we should we should see things.
SPEAKER_02Um I love the idea of broadening the imagination because that's that that that is it strikes me as an essential part of this because we've got to change the world views that we have on all of this. But if people are are made to feel um uh allowed to feel stronger because they've got choice and they've got lots of choices, and they can pick the ones that they want. Um that is a different proposition to the the way that neoliberal late-stage capitalism flows out because that is a limited set of principles and operations that come to be applied in the same way everywhere. And and it that that becomes more undermined by saying, you know what, there are lots of lots of options here. And that's kind of like that's enriching it. Indeed.
SPEAKER_00Um for all its discourse about freedom, neoliberalism uh really um uh has as its premise that there's one script to be followed. And it's in part based uh on the idea that uh the economy is a is a system that operates according to its own laws, when actually we all know that it's an institution. Uh so these are laws, if you wish, but laws that we decide uh to establish and we can um make the economy very different than what it is and make it especially more democratic. Uh because think about it, uh Jules, we speak about democracy when we um ask how the state works, and we want obviously the state to be democratic, but we do not impose um the democratic requirement on how the economy operates. And the economy largely operates outside any form of accountability, participation, or democracy. And part of the roadmap's purpose is to say we need the economy itself to be responsive to people's expectations, to be democratic, to be designed in ways that um are the result of you know uh participation. And if we think of economy in that way, it it it indeed enlarges the toolbox, um, stimulates imagination, and forces us to think beyond the neoliberal script. Lovely.
SPEAKER_02And do we think that the I mean have established the I mean that's used to just saying that the roadmaps uh recently published and adopted in the sense that it's now a public in the public domain? Um now we need states and actors within states to start saying this this is useful, this is helpful, we should be doing this thing. Um uh and not everybody's gonna run at it, but do we where do we think this there may be some kind of hope that that I mean there are I know it's a kind of rather difficult question to answer, but the there's there's gonna be some who are more ready to say, yeah, okay, that you know, we got some big crises like the climate crisis. We're not gonna solve that without dealing with this.
SPEAKER_00I I think we are um at a turning point um and uh it's a it's a time of opportunity, and and there are three reasons for this. The first one is that the roadmap process allowed to bridge the differences uh between uh two uh branches of the progressive movement. Those who want uh social justice, um living wages, um uh who combat austerity because they believe that uh workers lose as a result of these austerity programs being imposed on the working class and so on. And on the other hand, those who are concerned about um the environmental crisis, uh the the breakdown of the ecosystems, and um and and who are you know invested in environmental NGOs and and so on. And I think these two branches of the progressive movement have been um at worst combating for attention and and and competing with one another, at best ignoring each other and working along parallel tracks. Our enterprise, building this roadmap, brought together unions, anti-poverty groups, um uh NGOs working for social justice on one hand, and environmental NGOs, earth scientists on the other hand, concerned about the environmental breakdown. And and what they discovered was that they had in common to challenge the narrative about growth first, that is so problematic and that um is actually um making their their fight so difficult. Workers being asked not to demand better working conditions because that is against competitiveness, and environmentalists uh told that uh once we will have growth, we'll have money to throw at you know environmental remediation and and investment in renewable energies. And now they discover that actually they have a common interest in challenging that dominant narrative. So that's one reason for hope. New alliances have been forged, which I I I'm I'm committed to to maintain and to strengthen. The the second reason why it's an interesting moment is that uh there is now a consensus across governments that GDP cannot anymore guide policy efforts of governance. Um on 6th of May, the high-level expert group established by the UN Secretary General delivered its final report, which we mentioned already, and um uh it was welcomed by by governments who now realize that they should strive towards something else. There's not yet a willingness to go beyond this question of indicators, but at least there is that willingness to look at things with a different lens, with a different metric. It's I think important. Thirdly and finally, um when South Africa uh chaired the G20 in 2025, they commissioned um a group of um economists led by Joe Stiglitz, uh the Nobel Prize uh uh in economics and Jayati Gosh, um, they commissioned a report on global inequality, and that extraordinary committee on global inequality delivered its uh findings on in November 2025 calling for the inequality emergency to be addressed. And as a result of their efforts, the International Panel on Inequality was established. Um I was at the first meeting in in April, and uh the the consensus is now emerging that inequalities have reached a tipping point such that now it's becoming a threat to democracy, the level of inequalities. Why? Because the ultra-rich, the oligarchs, are able to convert their wealth into political influence and to block change as a result, and to use their um political influence to strengthen further their rent position in the economy to make more money. Um and now there is a real concern across many governments um about this, and um and and I think this uh triple movement, the roadmap for uh eradicating poverty uh beyond growth, um, the new consensus on beyond GDP indicators, and the growing consensus that inequality is to be addressed as a matter of uh urgency. I think it it creates um an opportunity we could seize, particularly at a time when the new development goals have to be negotiated post-2030.
SPEAKER_02Hopeful for the future as we sit at the moment? I mean let's not say optimistic or pessimistic, but this sounds like a hopeful message. There's quite a lot of new things happening, tipping points in thinking happening, even if it's not yet translating into hard, harder, measurable indicators. Sounds like there's a quite a lot of hope that we should have in all of this. I I think or am I overstating things?
SPEAKER_00No, I I think um there are two discourses which we have to move beyond. The first one is um uh the the the the discourse about um uh you know doomsday arriving and and the the the environment collapsing and and the and the um in the tradition of Jared Diamond's uh work on on collapse uh in society. Societies and so on. And it has been a quite influential discourse in in recent years that I think has been counterproductive to a certain extent because it left no hope to people. It may have depoliticized people by not encouraging them to engage in in political struggles. And it may have caused lots of depression and anxiety, which is not particularly something that can mobilize us. However, an equally problematic discourse is one that says don't worry. Yeah, so it's going to be solved. We have these fantastic, you know, short food chains and and and agroecological farms developing. We have these electric cars that are now developed en masse and and the the costs of solar power is is is is being cut and so on. And that I think is equally problematic. We have to fight.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. A few quick ones just to finish. I know it's it's it's individualizing something that is much more.
SPEAKER_00No, and that indeed I don't want to do. What I want to say, however, is that in my mandate on extreme poverty and human rights, uh I've been meeting many people from a very uh you know low-income background and and marginalized uh people. And um if we listened more to them, if we valued their knowledge more, we would uh avoid making many mistakes, we would save lots of time because we would uh address much more effectively the obstacles they face, and um and and we would um uh especially um empower them by recognizing the contribution they have to make to finding solutions. And so my heroes and and heroines are uh are those communities.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, perfectly, well put. Um a book recommendation, in addition to poverty, to the poverty of growth. Um a book recommendation? Do you have have something at the front of your mind?
SPEAKER_00Well, I I think the power of utopias is not to be underestimated. Any social progress started with a utopia, and we should not uh be afraid of expressing those. Kate Pickett uh just published The Good Society, which uh is is um imagining a different world, and I I I that is uh the the book I would recommend uh today for the summer. Very good, very good.
SPEAKER_02And uh a recommendation for listeners and viewers, something that that people should and could do right away. What what what would you recommend? I know you've got 80 ideas on the roadmap. So read the roadmap, it would be number one perhaps. Uh think about enoughness or sufficiency.
SPEAKER_00Um there is a philosopher and sociologist called Hartmut Rosa, uh, a German, um, who speaks about resonance. Resonance is impossible to describe in this context, but it is the very opposite of treating nature as a resource to be exploited and treating people as instruments you want to use for your own purposes as means rather than ends. And I think if in our everyday lives we looked at people in the eyes and tried to relate to them, create a resonant relationship with them, which is based on the idea that we can learn from each other, we can be moved by each other, we can fall in love by looking someone in the eyes, and we should uh be ready to take that risk. I think life would be more beautiful. And I think one major problem uh is in um uh our mentality, our dominant mentality, that um resources uh the world is a resource to exploit and that people are instruments to pursue our own ends. So that would be my my recommendation uh uh to maybe read Hartmot Rosa in addition to Kate Pickett. Fantastic.
SPEAKER_01Olivier De Schuter, wonderful, fantastic conversation. Brilliant.
SPEAKER_00Um thank you so much for coming on the talk. And thank you, Julius, for the inspiration you have provided me personally in my life.