Lucas Chancel: But what we’re trying to say is that if we want to have these broad coalitions, then we need to talk more about social classes, and we need to talk more about ecology from the perspective of social class and social conflict. And if we don’t do this, then it’s very likely that those talking about identity politics every day will be able to divide this big chunk of the population that could be materially winning in terms of incomes from this plan, and that would be winning, and maybe it’s even more important, winning from an environment that is livable, a planet on which we can survive. Because this really is the deep, bottom question here. Can we sustain a planet on which we can still survive as human beings?

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the Newscast, we speak with Lucas Chancel, a French economist and the co-director of the World Inequality Lab. He joins me to talk about the recently released Global Justice Report, which contends that a completely habitable world that stays within planetary boundaries is possible with high well-being for all people. It lays out a plan in which per capita monthly income would reach €5,000 in every country, and global warming would not exceed 1.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. Chancel joined me on the day after the hottest day ever recorded in France, when temperatures reached 40.3 degrees Celsius during the day. This is a fact that I think bears acknowledging, as he had his fan running during the interview to keep his apartment cool, and he had to take frequent breaks to sip water. The economic shifts outlined in the Global Justice Report are radical, as the authors themselves point out. So I questioned him on how these shifts could possibly happen, such as a global wealth tax and a world sovereign fund. If you’ve heard any of my conversations with previous guests about a fossil fuel phaseout, the process is strikingly similar. You build coalitions of nations that individually implement these measures. Some nations, like Spain, have already instituted a wealth tax, and France is currently debating whether to do the same. Chancel dispels the notion that the report is utopian, pointing to history as a guide. Humans used to work twice as many hours for far less pay. Building on this progress, however, has to come with a reduction in today’s production- and consumption-based economy toward one that functions primarily on what he describes as relational activities, such as education and healthcare. If done properly, 90% of the world would see their income double while working roughly half as many hours, that is, two and a half days a week, all while staying within the planetary boundaries needed to sustain human society. Hi, Lucas. Thank you for joining me. So first of all, can you explain to our listeners briefly what the Global Justice Report is and what it found?

Lucas: All right. So this is a collective research effort involving more than 40 researchers over 20 months. These are researchers from all over the world and from different disciplines, so economics, but also history and climate science. The key question we have is the following: Can we have socioeconomic equality between countries by 2100 without completely burning down planet Earth? So that’s the key question. And our main answer is that yes, it’s possible, but only under very strict conditions. There are three of them. The first one is a shift toward sufficiency. By this, we mean essentially working significantly less. The second condition is the energy transition. Everyone talks about that. It’s replacing fossil fuel energy systems with renewable energy. What we’re saying is that the energy transition is absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient. Conversely, if it’s just about sufficiency, consuming less stuff or working less, this is not going to work either. So you need both. Then there’s a third condition for all this to work, and this is inequality compression, within countries, not just between countries. Why is this important? It’s important in order to have the financial resources that are required to invest in the energy transition and to have political majorities, coalitions of people willing to support all these changes. So here are the three conditions we find.

Mike: Here, Lucas had to get up from his desk to grab his fan, and we had to tweak it before I was able to get the sound correct. I’m pointing this out because the heat wave in France is currently the hottest on record, and it’s a fact that I think needs to be acknowledged. It’s ironic that we’re having this discussion in the middle of the worst heat wave in Paris, I believe, that has happened. Those three pillars that you just described, I would love for you to explain how they are all interconnected for our audience because you outline in the report that they are. How are they exactly interconnected?

Lucas: When we think about the energy transition, we typically have in mind the need to replace our fossil fuel systems, which are 150 years old, with renewable energy. Now, what we’re arguing is that doing this is absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient. Why? Because, first, it’s taking time to do that. We’re not doing it fast enough. If you have a growing amount of stuff that we produce, more cars, more smartphones, more flat screens, and so forth, the pace of decarbonization, we know that within the next 10 or 20 years we won’t be fully decarbonized. So basically, the volume of stuff we make and produce also matters quite a bit. That’s the first thing. Energy transition is absolutely necessary. It is not sufficient. Another important thing is sufficiency, or some form of dematerialization of the economy. It’s not just that we need to reduce the carbon content of what we produce, but we also need to produce things very differently. We need to produce other kinds of things. What we’re arguing is that these other kinds of things that we need to produce are basically more healthcare and education and less material stuff. More relationships, more relational things, and fewer physical objects in rich countries. That’s starting to explain how sufficiency is actually connected with the energy transition. Now, the way we understand sufficiency, as I was saying at the beginning, is very much related to the overall amount of work we do. This is a very important thing because the overall amount of work we do is directly connected with how much stuff we produce as societies and economies. With the same productivity, whatever we’re able to produce in one hour, if we work half as much, if you have two societies with the same productivity but one of them works half the time of the other, it’s going to produce half as many things. Potentially half as many material things. If these two societies are equal in all respects apart from work hours, and if they are also not fully decarbonized, which will be the case for decades to come because we won’t be able to reach full decarbonization, at least before 2050, and in fact we’ll most likely have to wait a little longer, then it’s better to work less from an environmental perspective. It’s also much better to work less from an emancipation and social progress perspective. Now, this may sound completely utopian, idealistic, and unrealistic, but that’s where our economic history work really helps. Let me give you just one number. In the high-income nations of Western Europe and North America at the beginning of the 20th century, about 120 years ago, people used to work six days out of seven, about 10 hours per day, and 52 weeks per year, basically all year. This amounted to about 3,200 hours worked per year per person. That’s about 100 years ago. In Western Europe, this value had dropped to about 1,600 work hours per year per person by the 1980s, to about five days out of seven, about eight hours per day, and, in some countries, five weeks of paid holidays per year. So that’s a huge reduction in work hours per year. They were halved in most Western European countries, and this was actually compatible with huge economic prosperity. So those who say, “Hey, if we work less, we won’t be able to have flourishing economies. The economy will collapse,” actually, historically, this is precisely what happened, and it worked very well. Basically, what we foresee in the future is a continuation of this trend. So basically, we’re very much into the historical continuity here when we talk about work hours and the reduction we envisage by 2100. To make it clear, in rich countries today, about 1,600 hours are worked per year. It’s a little bit more in the U.S., but in Western European countries, this would go down to about 1,000 hours per year per person. So basically, most of the reduction already happened between 1900 and today, but we would still do a little bit more to move from 1,600 to 1,000, on average, per person and per year. So yeah, that’s a key element of sufficiency we’re talking about, and it’s really grounded in this historical movement toward working less. Now, I want to say that over the 20th century, this movement didn’t just happen by itself. It was conflictual. It was a series of labor mobilizations, of legislation, first to prevent kids from working in factories. In a country like France, for instance, up to 1936, kids at the age of 12 could actually work in factories, and this was the case in many other very rich countries. It was not easy to move forward. It was the movement toward paid holidays, et cetera, et cetera. This is a political, conflictual topic, and it will continue to be the case in the decades to come. But what we really argue is that working less has been compatible with flourishing, innovative, prosperous economies, and there’s no reason why it would not be the case again in the future.

Mike: Hello, listeners, and thank you for tuning in. As I always like to mention, Mongabay is a nonprofit news organization, and we rely on funding from listeners like you. So if you would like to support the podcast, go to patreon.com/mongabay to become a monthly sponsor of the show. If you want more information on the Global Justice Report from the World Inequality Lab, please see the link in the show notes.

But the critical shift you’re saying here is that we need to shift from a production- and consumption-based economy more toward these essential services that you’re pointing out, like healthcare and education. Do I have that correct?

Lucas: Correct.

Mike: So that’s a lot. That’s a lot to accomplish. I’m not saying it’s not doable, I’m just saying that is a massive, radical transformation, as you say in the report. So this is the part that I find quite astonishing. You say that nearly 90% of the world’s population would double their income while working roughly half as many hours, and that is quite incredible, all while staying within planetary boundaries. Can you explain to the audience how that is achieved?

Lucas: Again, let’s start with the history. In Western Europe, if we compare today’s situation, so per capita incomes as compared to per capita incomes 100 years ago, they were multiplied by six, seven, or eight, depending on the country, right? Multiplication by seven. And we work half the time. So there’s no incompatibility at all between multiplication of incomes and working less. And the solution, what is it? It’s productivity gains, basically. It’s being able to do what we do now much faster than 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. Now, what was possible in the 20th century was, in part, and in fact, largely done at the expense of the environment,

Mike: Right.

Lucas: of our shared planet. So basically, a lot of growth in rich countries, but at the expense of the habitability of our planet, at the expense of CO2 emissions, et cetera, et cetera. So now, what we argue is that from a technical perspective, we know the solutions to fossil fuels, and this is wind farms. This is hydropower. This is solar power. This is battery storage. This is reorganizing our urban spaces in order to basically require less individual transportation and being able to rely more on public transportation, for instance. What we’re saying is that there is no technical incompatibility here, and we can indeed, as you were quoting, have income growth, in particular in the Global South, while working less and while staying within planetary boundaries because we’re basically transforming our energy systems. And so what we’re trying to see is the conditions under which this is possible. And this is really possible under the condition that we compress inequality within countries. Why? Because to do all these transformations of our economy, of how we produce stuff and how we consume things, we need to invest a lot. We need to invest massively. That is to build new power plants, to build new types of factories that are resistant to heat waves, and homes that are resistant to heat waves. To build new systems, in wintertime, for instance, heating networks that are decarbonized. And instead of using fossil fuels, they could use recycled biomass, for instance. All this requires a lot of investments, some construction work, a lot of investments to refurbish homes, et cetera, et cetera. And what we argue is that in the current context of huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, it’s very hard for our societies to do these investments because basically wealth is not in the right hands. Wealth is in the hands of actors that don’t really see an interest in doing these investments because these investments pay for everybody as a whole, but they don’t necessarily pay for a few individuals in particular. This is why we want, in this plan, to compress inequality, to reduce it in order to be able to basically, through taxation in particular, tax and use this money to invest massively in the solutions.

Mike: This is a great point for us to talk about the tools to achieve this. So one of them that I’d like to focus on for just a minute is the global wealth tax. Can you explain how this would work?

Lucas: All right. So the global wealth tax is basically a tool that targets the wealth of billionaires and centimillionaires and those who own over 10 million euros of assets. So what are assets? It’s what people own. It’s going to be shares of companies. It can be expensive real estate. It can be bonds. And the idea is that governments need resources to invest in the transition that the private sector currently is not delivering, right? If the private sector was delivering these things, was delivering the required amount of money that needs to be invested in the transition, it would be a very different story. You might want to have a wealth tax for other reasons. Maybe you want to reduce inequalities in itself and for itself. But the argument is actually double. The argument is that actually it’s good to reduce inequality in itself and for itself. It has many co-benefits for democracies, for how our public lives function, because societies that are too unequal are dysfunctional. So that’s inequality reduction being good for other things than the environment. But our other argument is that compressing inequality is also going to be good for the environment because it is one way to get these resources we need to invest in the transition. And so one of the tools here is the wealth tax. Basically, you tax wealth of very wealthy individuals, and this wealth basically is then channeled through two things. One thing is a sovereign fund. So basically that is a portfolio of strategic assets on which societies have something to say over how these firms are run, whether or not they are doing enough things to reduce their emissions, whether or not they are respecting enough human rights, and so forth and so on. This is what the Norwegians are actually doing with their sovereign wealth fund. They use the revenues of oil and gas, and with this, they invest in many stocks around the world, and they try in these firms to basically direct the strategies of these firms. I think they could go much further in what they do when they sit at the board of these firms. But the general idea is the same, except that the money, instead of coming from the sale of oil and gas, as is the case in Norway, which is this big hydrocarbon producer, the revenues come from the taxation of billionaires and centimillionaires.

Mike: And that’s great. I guess I would just love to know the nuts and bolts of how that works. Because I noticed that you also are planning to implement an international currency, which I think would be part of that, obviously, and then an international clearing union. But just go ahead and explain how, because we’re talking about taxation across borders and taxing tax shelters, basically, the Cayman Islands or places where wealthy individuals hide their cash so that it can’t be taxed. How do we actually combat that?

Lucas: No, that’s spot on, and it’s a key point here. We have a plan for 2100, and what we’re trying to describe here is how we move from point A to point B using the tools of point A. So it’s a radical change in the economic system, but we’re trying to lay out the step-by-step path to move from the actual situation. And when I tell you global wealth tax today, you may be like, “But okay, how can we do this? We have 192 jurisdictions. They all have different tax rights, tax sets of rules.” And it’s been extremely complicated to move forward with this base erosion and profit-shifting legislation, constraining multinationals to pay a minimum tax on their corporate profits of 15%. This is the BEPS process, spearheaded by the OECD, which is more or less in limbo today because when Trump came back to power, he decided to really not follow that, and it’s complicated. So that’s very important. Basically, our plan is thought of in a way that it can work with an incomplete coalition of actors. That is, you can start to implement it even though you don’t have a global wealth tax. But our argument is that progressively, more and more countries are doing exactly these things, that is, implementing a wealth tax, and we actually see that discussions, debates, parliamentary proposals, and votes are happening in several countries on this specific issue, on the wealth tax. Strong heated debate in France. There is a wealth tax in Norway. There’s a wealth tax in Spain, and there are discussions to increase them. We’ve seen this vacant property tax in New York City. Probably the wealth tax discussion will be very strong in the U.S. in the next presidential elections. And in any case, there is this proposal to have a wealth tax in California with a vote in November. So this discussion is growing very much at the level of countries, and the question is not whether a country will adopt a wealth tax, a new wealth tax, it’s when. Now, what we’re arguing is that it’s indeed always much better when different countries get together and adopt the wealth tax together. And the way we see this happen is potentially through regional unions first, before the global level. So for instance, the European Union is currently discussing it. It’s also a place, a region, where countries are looking for new resources, and the European Union could, in the future, adopt a wealth tax, not just in one country, but at the level of the bloc. Brazil has been quite strong in pushing for a wealth tax. It could potentially do so with some of its neighbors. So what we’re saying is that you can have some regional adoption of wealth taxes or an incomplete coalition of countries implementing a wealth tax. It’s always better to do this with your neighbors so that this limits, reduces the possibility for capital flight, but I’ll say a few words on this in a second. At this stage, I’m just saying that it’s better to go step by step rather than saying it’s either no wealth tax or global wealth tax, and there are many intermediary steps possible. Now, on capital flight: in many debates when we’ve seen wealth tax discussions over the past months and few years, one of the key elements of discussion is, “Hey, but if we tax wealth, it will fly away. It will move around.” Now, two things on this. First, again, back to history. In the 1900s and early 1910s, there was no income tax in rich countries. There was no progressive income tax, to be more precise. If you look at the public discussions at the time, there were a lot of people saying, “Hey, if we introduce a progressive income tax,” that is, a tax that hits harder the richer you are, “if we do that, our economies will collapse, and this will be communism, and this will be so bad for the economy and for everything.” And it’s quite interesting, in fact, to read these debates 100 years after and to see that it’s more or less the same arguments that are put forward today against wealth taxes. If we do this, the economy will collapse. In fact, the sky will fall on our heads if we do that. In fact, the economy didn’t collapse when countries started to not only implement progressive income taxation, but remember what Roosevelt did. The top marginal income tax rate in the United States under Roosevelt was over 90%. And in the U.K., values were very similar as well, close to 90%. And in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, but also up to the 1960s and ’70s, you have very high progressive income tax rates. And then they start to fall dramatically after the 1980s. What I’m trying to say here is that what may seem radical today, like taxing wealth, is actually less so when you look at history and at discussions of something that is very common, very normal today, which is the income tax. And so what we say is that we need to move from only income taxation to wealth taxation, basically because there’s a lot of resources in wealth that is untaxed, and we need these resources to do the investments that are required for our planet to basically just be habitable. And so how to innovate in terms of access to transportation, how to innovate in terms of the type of solar panels that we have, how to innovate in terms of the insulation of our homes, et cetera, et cetera. This is a massive innovation boost. So clearly, if the argument is you’re gonna stifle innovation, basically this is a very wrong argument. Now, you could say that, “Hey, by doing this, you will reduce the power and the wealth of billionaires.” This is a very good argument because this is precisely what would happen. What I’m trying to say is that these arguments on innovation are very often used to hide the deep-down political motivations of those who put forward these arguments, and often the motivation is simply status quo. It’s simply to not reduce extreme inequality. And again, at all points of history, in the history of taxation, those who do not want to be taxed say, “If you tax me, the economy will collapse. Innovation will collapse.” This is precisely what happened when income tax was introduced, progressive income tax, and innovation, guess what? In the course of the 20th century, when these income tax rates were 90% in the U.S., innovation was extremely high. This was in the heart of these capitalist economies that were highly innovative.

Mike: There’s something I want to tease out here for the degrowth crowd because I can understand that people might hear what you’re saying and they might think, “That sounds like a lot of production of more stuff.” So can you explain how the production of all this, updated insulation, a rising of quality of life in Global South nations, how that’s not going to exacerbate our already strained material footprint that the Earth is taking on? Because mining for minerals is a thing that needs to be done, but I would love to hear you tease that out for the audience. How do we make that shift without exacerbating the material footprint that we’ve already imprinted on the Earth?

Lucas: There’s a lot of degrowth in our plan. It’s degrowth in the wealth of billionaires, degrowth in inequality. It’s radical degrowth in some sectors of the economy, oil, gas. The material sectors actually are shrinking a little bit in rich countries, and there’s also growth in the Global South. And frankly speaking, it’s pretty clear that in a country where you basically lack basic hospitals, basic education, and basic transportation systems, these systems will be built whether we in the Global North want it or not. These systems will be built. There is a legitimate demand for accessing these basic services in many countries around the world. And so this is, yes, construction of stuff. Construction of infrastructure in particular. Now, what we’re arguing is that first, material goods will be reduced in the Global North if we want to create this space for the Global South. Now, material goods are reduced a bit, but everybody, and this is the heart also of the degrowth argument, sees and understands that first there’s a lot of planned obsolescence. So we don’t need to buy every two years a new phone, and we can be just as good when we are going to keep these devices for many years. That’s the first point. There’s a lot of waste, in particular in the food sector. And so there are many things where you can basically reduce your material consumption without changing much in your actual experience of when you use these things.Now, there’s actually also a good argument to say that, in rich countries, we have too many objects, and these objects just don’t make us happy. So that’s the other argument, that we can actually be better off maybe having a little less plastic objects that we buy maybe on an internet website. And I won’t do any advertisement for one of the brands of one of the famous billionaires of this planet, on which a lot of people are buying weird objects quite often. So that’s for rich countries. Now, for low-income countries, there is an increase in access to material goods. Some people do not have some basic things, or some of the material things, cars, for instance, in particular. Now, how do we make this fit within planetary boundaries? Here again, what we’re saying is that we need the three things that I was saying at the beginning. We need the energy transition, but we also need sufficiency. And sufficiency in work hours is also going to be important in low-income countries. So basically, at the level of the world on average, people work 2,000 hours per year. Remember, in rich countries today, it’s 1,600 hours, right? So in low-income countries, people work more on average. They have fewer holidays and they work more every day. Now, if low-income countries increase their productivity and continue to work the same amount of work hours per year, this is going to be a serious problem for the mineral constraints you’re talking about, for the climate constraints that we’ve been talking about, for water resources, for all material constraints that we might have in mind. So that’s why it’s growth of certain sectors, but also degrowth of other sectors within an overall reduction of work hours for everybody. And we think that this is very important.

Mike: What have we not discussed that you think people truly need to understand about this report, that you kind of want them to take away?

Lucas: Through inequality compression, as you were quoting, 90% of the world population sees their income double, but actually over 98% of the population sees their income increase by 2100. Some will see their income increase by less than a factor of two, but they do see a little increase. Now, there’s a big part, the very, very wealthy, they see a very strong reduction in their wealth and in their incomes. It’s quite important to have this in mind because, on the politics of the problem, how do you make it possible to go through this transformation in what we eat? We haven’t talked about food, but this is something we could spend more time discussing. We also need to reduce our meat consumption. But how do you make possible these important changes in our lifestyles if there is no reduction of inequality, if there’s no reduction of the wealth of these super wealthy individuals? It’s going to be very hard to do that. So that’s why inequality compression is quite important in this plan. Basically, on average, that’s very important. On average, incomes in the Global North grow very little. There’s almost zero growth rate on average in the U.S. between now and 2100 in this plan. But the majority of the population grows. Why? Because it’s a redistribution from very rich to the rest of the population within an average income that’s close to zero percent growth per year in the U.S.

Mike: So you’re saying there’s a large chunk of the population of, say, the United States who do see an income jump.

Lucas: They would see income growth, which is compensated by the degrowth of billionaires, to put it simply.

Mike: I think I remember, I can’t remember the exact statistic, but I think I read that there was 14% of the U.S. population that would see a reduction in their income, which is, when you think about it, the upper echelon of the income of the country. 85% essentially would see either no change or an increase, is what you’re saying?

Lucas: Absolutely. At the global level, close to 98% are winning, 2% are losing. And among these 2%, a disproportionate share is in the U.S., a wealthy country with very wealthy individuals. And these are the 15% you’re referring to, 15% losing, 84%, 85% winning or not losing basically in this plan in the U.S. So we think it’s quite important also to have this in mind because then you see how you can have a party, a coalition that says, “Hey, yeah. Wow, this plan is quite… I can win a majority on this.” Of course, this is not a naive plan. We know that there are other factors that politics talk about, and sometimes that are going to divide these 85% of the population that would be winning across lines that are not about social class, but that could be, for instance, related to identity politics or things like that. But what we’re trying to say is that if we want to have these broad coalitions, then we need to talk more about social classes, and we need to talk more about ecology from the perspective of social class and social conflict. And if we don’t do this, then it’s very likely that it’s those talking about identity politics every day that will be able to divide this big chunk of the population that could be materially winning in terms of incomes from this plan, and that would be winning, and maybe it’s even more important, winning from an environment that is livable, a planet on which we can survive. Because this really is the deep-down bottom question here. Can we sustain a planet in which we can still survive as human beings?

Mike: The last thing I want to ask you about in the few minutes that we have remaining, and I didn’t touch upon this earlier because I wanted to flesh out the nuts and bolts of all the fiscal aspects of this, but gender equity is a huge part of this plan. And I guess achieving that is tantamount. What does this plan say about gender equity and how we can move the ball forward on that?

Lucas: I think it’s very much… We haven’t touched on it, and thank you so much for bringing this on. It’s actually very much related to the work hours discussion. There’s a reduction in the total amount of work hours, but it’s really important to understand that women and men are not equal in the amount of work hours they do because there’s a lot of work that women do that is actually not paid, but which is essential domestic work. And so in this plan, there is an equalization of domestic work, to start with. So basically, males and females, there’s an equal split in terms of domestic work and how you care for your relatives, and in any other domestic activities. And there’s also a reduction in the inequality pay gap between males and females. And we know that there is still a very strong pay gap. Basically, in rich countries today, women represent 50% of the population, but just earn 40% of all labor incomes. So basically, men capture 60% of all labor incomes, meaning that they make 50% more. And this is in countries that proclaim equality between men and women. And there is also very little progress over the past few decades in rich countries on the matter. So basically, yes, at the heart of this plan, this basic structural inequality between men and women is reduced and actually compressed to zero. So that’s also extremely important to have in mind because we’re still quite far today from basic gender equality, which in principle many countries agree on, but are just not implementing the tools to get there.

Mike: And so I guess, like with many of the measures that you outline in this plan, I’m guessing that requires a coalition-building effort for nations to get on board with actually implementing systemic reform to achieve gender equity. Is that kind of the train of thought that you and your team had in mind?

Lucas: At the level of countries, yes. And within countries as well. In the U.S., the New Deal coalition of Roosevelt was an alliance of women’s rights activists of the time with low-income workers, with African American communities working together to promote an agenda centered on the improvement of living conditions of the working class and of a diverse working class, and of a working class composed of different genders. And at the level of countries, these broad coalitions are essential to push the national-level governments to get together with their peers, with other countries, and support and defend these evolutions. Now, what’s quite interesting to see is that you see some of these evolutions at the level of countries already. For instance, Brazil pushing for wealth taxation at the G20. South Africa is spearheading an international panel on inequality that is an international body to track and make recommendations on how to reduce extreme wealth inequality. You have calls of G77 countries, and in fact, a lot of low- and middle-income countries, for a reform of the UN tax system. Sorry, it’s a call to implement a UN tax convention to reform the international tax system. This is supported by the majority of countries on Earth, but not by European, North American, and most OECD countries, who oppose that. And so that’s why I’m trying to connect the international level with the local level politics here, because I think it’s very important, in particular in rich countries, that citizens understand that change is going to happen. We don’t know the direction yet, but emerging countries and low-income countries are not happy with the current state of the economic system, whether it be on taxation, on finance, on money, et cetera, et cetera. So things will change. Now, are we just sitting by and are we watching the train of change passing by in front of us, or do we organize collectively to push some reform ideas to our governments and reform ideas that align with the interests of the working and the middle class of our countries, and that also align with the interests of the majority of the population in the Global South? This is precisely what this plan is about.

Mike: Lucas Chancel, I think that is all the time we have for. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for joining me.

Lucas: Thank you so much.

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