5.

Change Your Shape, Not Your Size

In 1961 US President John F. Kennedy decided he wanted to put a man on the moon. Eight years and 400,000 jobs later, the United States made that giant leap, showing that it is possible for a nation-state to do pretty much anything it puts its collective mind to.

However, after decades of being told that governments were inefficient and wasteful, when President George W. Bush announced in 2004 that the United States would put a person on Mars, no one cared and no one believed him. Cultures change. Tastes change. Goals change. And people, not markets, are responsible for those changes.

Rich countries can’t afford to do everything they want, but they can afford to do virtually anything they want. For the past few decades, people have been told that it is the market that determines the shape of the economy. Indeed, people in many countries have even been told that they must sacrifice some things they want the government to do – such as provide high-quality publicly funded education – in order to keep the markets happy and make the economy strong. But, as we saw in Chapter 2, market forces no more want your kids to have a poor education than gravitational forces want you to fall off your bike.

The question of how big we want our national economies to be has drowned out the far more important question of what shape we want them to be. Few would decide on the number of new pieces of clothing they need and have no view about the style or size. But political and business leaders often declare that they want to ‘grow the economy’ without making any reference whatsoever to which of its parts they would like to see expand.

In recent decades, far too much time has been wasted debating whether economic growth is good or bad. We might as well debate whether sunshine is better than rain. What we can say is that when the good bits of an economy are growing, that’s good. And when the bad bits are growing, that’s bad. The democratic challenge is to have a meaningful debate about what constitutes ‘good’ and what constitutes ‘bad’. And on that debate economists have surprisingly little to offer.

Voters are increasingly hostile to claims that the economy is growing strongly when their own experience is one of stagnating wages or rising local unemployment. They are right to be sceptical. Talking to people about the average rate of economic growth across their country is no more meaningful than telling them what the average rainfall across that country will be tomorrow. Even if the prediction is accurate, it won’t be very useful: knowing the average national rainfall won’t help anyone decide what to wear or whether to cancel their picnic.

Do you want your economy to have a big education sector or a big shopping mall sector? Do you want it to have a booming arts sector or a booming finance sector? These are choices that, over time and around the world, citizens have shaped. They are not choices made by ‘the market’ or ‘globalisation’. They are choices made by people.

So what shape do you want your country’s economy to be? What do you wish there was more of? What do you wish there was less of? What are your goals for your nation? As productivity grows and the capacity for the people in your economy to produce more output with fewer inputs rises, what do you want your kids or your grandkids to have that you didn’t have?

Not sure? Maybe you should ask an expert. But what kind of expert would you consult?

ECONOMICS IS ABOUT THE HOW, NOT THE WHAT

No one asks their accountant what they should buy the kids for Christmas, so why would a society ask its economists what kind of world we should build?

The ultimate irony of neoliberalism is that it has simultaneously trained people to believe that while the preferences and desires of the individual are paramount (hence the ‘need’ for ten different brands of margarine), if individuals want to be part of a collective solution to a problem, they must be wrong. How can that be? How can it be right to give consumers the choice of so many types of margarine, but wrong for voters to opt for a public health system over a private one? Likewise, free marketeers think it’s okay to let people decide whether or not to smoke in the presence of children, but apparently it’s not okay for people to choose longer holidays over higher incomes. We either trust people to know what they want or we don’t.

As we have seen, economics is primarily concerned with the efficient allocation of scarce resources. But it’s concerned with means, not ends; it considers how to produce things efficiently, not what things to produce.

Like an accountant looking at your family’s spending patterns, economists can help spell out the options we as a society face and the likely trade-offs for different courses of action. They can perhaps even give some broad advice about the kinds of spending that might deliver long-term benefits (such as preventive health) and those that will not (such as cigarette smoking).

But, like accountants, economists are unlikely to encourage you to spend up big on piano lessons for your child, or rounds of golf, or language classes, or any other of your kid’s passions or hobbies. Instead they might argue that a more sensible investment is to deposit the cost of such ‘luxuries’ into a bank account each week and then hand your child a nice cheque on their twenty-first birthday.

And why stop there? What if your family never took a holiday, and deposited the money you didn’t spend into a savings account as well? And what’s with spending weekends together? If you and your partner worked part-time jobs at the weekend, imagine how much money you could salt away over the years. Such decisions might be deemed sensible by your accountant or economist, but to what end? You can see why most people don’t rely on their accountant for advice beyond minimising their tax bill.

So to the all-important question: what is to be done? As a society, should we aim to spend more time with friends and family, or work longer hours and make more stuff? Should we provide free drinking water in all public spaces, or should we encourage people to buy bottled water? Should we require cars in our cities to be quiet and emit no air pollution, or should we let people drive anything they want?

All these questions have economic consequences, but none of them is an economic question. Yet we are often told that the right answer to such questions is to work longer hours, drink bottled water and drive cheap and polluting cars, because such choices are ‘good for the economy’.

The idea that we must make personal and community sacrifices to ‘help the economy’ is a bizarre inversion of the socialist dictum that the needs of the individual are secondary to the needs of society. While encouraging people to work long hours and take fewer holidays will inevitably lead to an increase in economic activity, the idea that individuals have a social obligation to spend less time with their family than they want, and in turn to spend more money on stuff than they want, is a strange approach to the ‘individualism’ typically favoured by the political Right.

The fact that working long hours and buying lots of stuff leads to an increase in economic activity makes such a goal no more economically efficient than digging lots of holes and filling them back in. It’s a task, not a goal. Put simply, the job of imagining the future is not for economists, but for scientists, engineers, artists, entrepreneurs and those who seek elected office. And the task of selecting the future options that we pursue in a functioning democracy is for every citizen, every day.

CULTURE CREATES JOBS

A lot of people want to know where the jobs of the future will be created. Kids want to know what training to undertake, investors and managers want to invest in industries before they boom, and politicians want to know who will be powerful in the future so they can start being nice to them in advance.

But, as we saw in Chapter 4, the simple fact is that no one knows what the future will look like. Not just because no one can predict what technologies will be invented, but also, and more fundamentally, because no one can predict how our culture will evolve over time. It is culture that plays the major role in determining what is fashionable, which fads will take off and whether a country spends hundreds of billions of dollars on bottled water or personal trainers; aircraft carriers or public transport.

Most fundamentally, the economy can’t decide what kind of jobs will be created for the simple reason that there is actually no such thing as ‘the economy’. You can touch a shop, you can talk to a shop owner, and you will probably notice if you drop a $100 note, but if you go looking for the economy, you will never find it.

While it’s obvious that individual shops, shop owners, currency, coalmines and other parts of the economy aren’t ‘planning the future’ or ‘creating the jobs of the future’, there has been so much talk about the ‘global economy’ that you can forgive yourself if you missed a subtle but important point: the global economy is simply a metaphor used to describe the interactions between all the customers and all the shops and factories in the world.

Like our national character, our national economy is an idea. While we can reach out and touch some of our economy’s composite parts, we can never see, or consult with, its collective whole. While you can see your neighbour’s pool in Google Maps, despite its enormous size you will never be able to spot the ‘national economy’, no matter how hard you look. Like the strength of a nation’s democracy or the state of national security, talk of the strength of an economy is an abstraction. While some of its parts are material, ‘the economy’ is not a material thing, it doesn’t have a consciousness and it certainly doesn’t make plans. This simple fact causes a lot of confusion about who is shaping our society, who is making decisions about the future and what the role of individual citizens in a democracy is.

Since World War II, economists and statisticians have worked hard to make their best estimate of the size of the economy, compiling the value added by billions of transactions each year. But despite the difficulty of the task, and the precision with which it is performed, an assertion like ‘the economy grew by 2.7 per cent’ is meaningless to a worker who has lost their job in a declining region, to a capitalist who has lost their investment in a declining industry, or to a politician who has lost their seat in a declining nation. And the fact that economic activity will grow as cities spend billions on sea walls to protect their citizens from rising oceans shows just how unrelated the measured size of the economy and the wellbeing of citizens can be.

When it comes to talking about the state of the economy averages can be unhelpful, to say the least. The average person has less than two legs, for instance. (There are far more people with no legs or one leg than there are people with three or four legs.) But it would be ridiculous to use this data to design trousers or staircases for the average citizen. Similarly, declaring that the economy grew by some particular amount last year conceals the fact that, in reality, millions of different citizens had millions of different experiences of the economy in that period. While there is some value in keeping track of national trends in the number and value of billions of transactions, there is no value in confusing the average growth rate of the economy with the lived experience of individuals.

Every time we spend a dollar, cast a vote, accept a job, donate to charity, quit a job, lobby a politician, switch banks, divest our retirement savings, plant some vegetables in the backyard or volunteer some time to a charity, we change the shape of the economy. Economic growth doesn’t ‘cause’ investment in new factories or ‘cause’ consumers to spend more money. It is the money consumers spend on things that causes the owner of a factory to invest in expansion, which causes the measured size of the economy to grow. What actually matters for workers, communities and the environment is which bits are growing and which bits shrinking.

A major reason why voters around the world are losing faith with traditional political parties and turning instead to populist alternatives is that they feel – quite correctly – that large parts of their national economy that they care about or rely on are going backwards, despite the official statistics suggesting that things are improving. Imagine if you had two kids and, having taken $20 from one of them and given $40 to the other, tried to argue that, on average, they were both $10 better off.

Knowing the average employment statistics or average wage growth across a country doesn’t tell us whether our job is safe or our mortgage payments are getting easier to make. What affects an individual’s job security and financial security is not some average of the ‘idea’ of the national economy but the circumstances in the places they actually live. Politicians who try to tell unemployed people in a declining region that ‘the economy is doing well’ will not only fail to persuade the unemployed to cheer up, they will likely enrage them.

Statistical indicators such as GDP and the national unemployment rate can provide useful information when used responsibly for the purpose for which they were designed. There is no doubt that a focus on national production helped the Allies win World War II and helped Europe to rapidly recover from that war. And there is no doubt that a surging national unemployment rate is a clear warning sign for a national government concerned about poverty and inequality. But history makes clear that it is possible to have jobless growth, and that economies can grow rapidly in ways that deliver all of the benefits to high-income earners and do nothing to improve those on low incomes. National economic indicators can act as an early warning system, or as a cover story for social and environmental harm. But it is not the indicators that are good or bad, it is the use to which they are put.

THE GREAT WALL IS MADE OF SMALL BRICKS

It’s hard to fathom the scale of something as big as the Great Wall of China. The average house contains thousands of bricks, but the Great Wall is made from nearly 4 billion of them. In fact, there’s nothing terribly special about these bricks – apart from their age. It’s the collective structure that is so impressive. The global economy is much the same: its composite parts might seem insignificant on their own, but together they create something astounding.

The size and complexity of the global economy can be used to silence and demotivate individuals and groups pushing for change: how can you possibly affect something so enormous? But when you understand that it is nothing more than the sum of millions of local economies, you realise that if these local economies can change in ways that other communities might want to copy, then changing the global economy could be easier than it sounds. It is true that the decisions of individual consumers and individual companies have a minuscule impact on the global economy, but that’s like saying being a good parent has a minuscule impact on global indicators of early childhood development, or that establishing a new farm will do nothing much to boost world food production. Such observations are true but meaningless.

The whole point of capitalism – and the whole reason that neoliberal economists claim to be so enthusiastic about capitalism – is that producers respond to changes in consumer tastes and preferences (often called ‘shifts in demand’). So while individual changes in consumption are unlikely to have any effect, good or bad, on the world economy, or even on the national economy, it is also true that the major determinant of what most companies do, and of which companies survive, is the collective decision-making of individual consumers.

Once people realise that the ‘national economy’ and the ‘global economy’ exist only in the accounts of statisticians, the idea that the economy will create jobs for us – or that we need to work longer than we want to, or buy things we don’t want in order to ‘make the economy strong’ – makes as much sense as sacrificing a goat to appease the gods.

If we want to stimulate (or curtail) the growth of a particular sector, there are only four things we can do:

•We can spend more (or less) of our disposable income on the goods produced by an industry.

•We can demand that the companies we buy things from buy more (or less) from an industry.

•We can demand that our elected representatives buy more (or less) from an industry.

•We can demand that our elected representatives make regulations that require more (or less) of an activity to occur.

That’s it. And the economy doesn’t make any of those decisions; it responds to them. Sometimes it responds quickly, sometimes it responds partially and sometimes it doesn’t appear to respond at all. But in the long run, when enough people change enough of their decisions, significant economic change inevitably occurs.

History shows us that change is inevitable – consider the whaling industry, the ice industry and, more recently, the renewable energy industry. But while history says you can’t stop progress, politics is increasingly perfecting the art of slowing it down.

CULTURE, CARS AND CHANGING THE ENERGY SYSTEM

Cars are one of the most expensive forms of transport imaginable. Expensive cars are, not surprisingly, an even more expensive mode of transport than cheap cars. (The most profitable segment of the car industry, in fact, is the production of the most expensive cars, with one estimate suggesting that the profit margin on a Porsche was 18 per cent compared with 2.9 per cent for Volkswagen.²⁹) Yet as anyone who commutes to work by car knows, the expense of car transport is no guarantee of convenience.

Most car owners take it for granted that their choice of car says something about them. Even those who deny that their car says anything about them are likely to believe that other people’s cars say something about them.

Twenty years ago, few city dwellers thought they needed a large four-wheel drive vehicle to navigate city streets. Why would anyone spend a lot more money than they needed to, in order to own a vehicle that costs more to run, is harder to park and significantly increases your chances of reversing over a child? But despite the obvious downsides, and financial cost, ‘sports utility vehicles’ are among the most common vehicles on the road today.

Why? ‘Sports cars’ can signal independence from the need to transport a family, or wealth, or simply that the owner is always in a hurry. (Of course, they have very little to do with sport.) Large four-wheel drive vehicles can signal a preparedness to head for the hills, a love of the great outdoors or perhaps just an attitude that other cars should get out of the driver’s way. In fact, you could probably argue that cars are much better at performing their symbolic function than they are at moving us quickly around a city.

Despite their high cost to buy, register and insure, on average a car is used for around 5 per cent of the day. The rest of the time it is parked. Some might say it is the parking of the car – outside a house, or out the front of a cafe, or out the front of the office – that is its primary function in many cases.

To be clear, there is no reason people shouldn’t use their cars as symbols. Doing so makes as much sense as using a watch, a jacket, a handbag or a tattoo to tell the world, or yourself, something about who you think you really are. But we can learn a lot from the willingness of people to spend large amounts of money on an expensive form of transport. For instance, we can learn about how the interaction between symbolism, cultural change and consumer choice drives not just the shape and size of the economy, but, quite literally, the shape and size of our towns and cities.

As the compact cars that were common in the 1970s were replaced by SUVs, which can weigh up to 3500 kilograms – that’s almost three and a half times the weight of the top-selling car in France, the Renault Clio – this drove demand for billions of tonnes of extra iron ore, coal, oil and other materials.³⁰

Electric cars are not light. The Tesla Model S weighs in at 2108 kilograms, 550 kilograms of which is in the lithium-ion batteries.³¹ While only 540,000 electric cars were sold in 2015, Tesla alone is planning to produce 500,000 cars per year by 2018 and the world market for electric cars is forecast to hit 8 per cent by 2020, and 35 per cent by 2040.³² Just as electric refrigerators destroyed demand for cut ice and boosted demand for coal-fired electricity, demand for electric cars will devastate the demand for oil in the coming decades and cause a massive increase in demand for the materials used to make batteries.

But Tesla doesn’t just make expensive electric cars; it also makes expensive electric batteries. And what is particularly interesting about the company is how differently economists, politicians and the public treat its two main products.

The Tesla S sells for more than twice the average price of a car, and far more again than most alternative forms of transport. But no one is surprised that people voluntarily elect to spend a lot more money on one kind of car than another. That’s what cars are for! If we really just wanted cars to provide cheap transport, then we would only need a few mass-produced models that, as Henry Ford famously said, would come in any colour you want as long as it’s black.

But while we can accept that the demand for Tesla cars is, in part at least, because they are so expensive and cool, when it comes to Tesla batteries for household electricity storage, economists, regulators and commentators are regularly surprised to learn that demand is growing rapidly, even though they don’t provide the cheapest source of electricity available.³³ Can you believe it – people spending more than is absolutely necessary on a household product! Where will it end?

Electricity grids in most developed countries have typically been designed by engineers and economists. In turn, the principles of economic theory and engineering are clearly visible in debates about how to achieve ‘least cost greenhouse-gas abatement’, how to select the ‘optimal energy mix’ and how to manage the trade-off between the cost of electricity and security of supply.³⁴ In turn, for decades we have been told that there is nothing we can do to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without ruining the economy, and it is a ridiculous idea that we would ever willingly pay a slightly higher price to get a product with perceived benefits. As anyone who has ever bought a bottle of water should understand, consumers do not always want the cheapest product on the market.

Few middle-class consumers choose to buy only the lowest-priced food, the cheapest clothes or the cheapest houses they can find. Yet many economists and politicians are surprised that a growing number of people are willing to spend more than the minimum possible amount to obtain a form of energy supply that they see as providing improved energy security and improved environmental outcomes. Possibly it also makes them feel cool, in the same way that their expensive cars, watches or tattoos do.

To be clear, there is a role for economists and engineers in helping to design our energy system, but while many economists and engineers have been very vocal in criticising what they see as excessive spending on renewable energy, those same ‘rational’ voices cautioning about undue haste in installing renewable energy are strangely silent about the undue haste, and financial waste, associated with mass adoption of enormous SUVs, huge houses and bottled water.

Visible acts with spill-over environmental benefits, such as driving electric vehicles and putting solar panels on domestic roofs, are sometimes mocked as ‘virtue signalling’ by some on the conservative side of politics, but those who express concern about such public displays of good citizenship seem unconcerned by people who engage in ‘wealth signalling’ via the purchase of luxury cars or other expensive consumer goods. As with the social pressure on people to work longer hours and buy more stuff, some on the Right seem keen to affirm personal displays of wealth and to demean personal displays of generosity. They know culture matters.

If hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers decided that installing solar panels on their houses was a better way to demonstrate their upward mobility than spending the same amount of money on luxury cars, granite kitchen benchtops or other discretionary displays of status, the world economy, and the global environment, would be radically transformed. No laws would have to be passed and no lobbyists overcome. Similarly, if millions of people painted the roofs of their houses white, their homes would be cooler in summer and use less energy; like the melting polar icecaps once did, they would reflect a significant amount of energy back into space. But everyone knows that no one paints their roof white . . . except in the Mediterranean, which is different, of course. In the Mediterranean, white roofs are ‘traditional’.

As every firm who has spent millions on advertising knows, it is neither easy to direct cultural change, nor possible to ensure it. But cultures do change, and the consequences of those changes are the predominant influence on the shape of the economy.

BUT MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES RUN THE WORLD...

While intellectually important, the main role of debates about whether free markets are good or bad is to conceal from the public that all governments, of all political stripes, intervene in markets all the time.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to enter World War II had an enormous influence on the size and shape of the economy in the United States in the 1940s, as well as on the outcome of the war itself. On a smaller scale, as we have seen, Eleanor Roosevelt’s decision to grow vegetables on the lawn of the White House also affected the shape of economic activity. When governments insist that seatbelts be installed in cars, they shape the demand for seatbelts; when they introduce tough air-quality standards, they shape demand for coal and oil; and when they ban activities such as whale hunting, the production of landmines or the digging of new coalmines, they have a significant influence on the production and consumption of whale meat, landmines and coal.

And when JFK decided that putting a man on the moon was to become a national priority, it wasn’t as if the nation had no other problems that needed solving. Indeed, the next president, Lyndon B. Johnson, declared war on poverty; presumably, JFK saw this as sitting lower on the to-do list than beating the Russians to the moon.

In hindsight, the US$24 billion cost of the Apollo 11 mission accounts for a trivial proportion of the current US federal government debt of $19 trillion. If the money spent on the mission had been saved instead of spent, and the interest avoided, the US debt today would be around $18.66 trillion. Put another way, the cost of the moon landing is little more than a rounding error.

Of course, while landing people on the moon looks expensive, when compared to the cost of buying vitamin supplements or bottled water it is small beer. And compared to defence spending, it’s a veritable bargain. When it comes to defence, it seems that democracies believe you can never have too much of a good thing. In 2016 the United States spent more on defence than the next eight largest spenders combined – that’s China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, Japan and Germany put together.³⁵

And in 2017 Donald Trump suggested that a 10 per cent increase was required. When political leaders really want to do something, they can always find the money.

There is no right answer to the question of how many scarce resources a country should dedicate to producing bottled water or buying military aircraft. But for most countries, it appears the answer is a lot more than zero. Economics might be all about the efficient allocation of scarce resources, but politics is all about the practice of allocating scarce resources in a way that facilitates re-election. While it’s possible there is overlap between what is efficient and what will ensure re-election, it’s far from certain. Much confusion about political decision-making flows from the determination of elected politicians to feign a concern about efficiency while really focusing on re-electability. When you appreciate that the least re-electable thing a politician can say is, ‘I’m only supporting this idea because it will help me get re-elected,’ it becomes obvious why so many politicians prefer to pretend that their decisions are made to help the economy. It’s much safer than telling the truth.

But in democracies at least, voters do have the final say on which politicians get elected – even if they don’t know with certainty how their representative will subsequently vote on key issues. And in a market economy, consumers have the final say on whether Beta defeats VHS, or whether electric cars outcompete petrol-powered cars – again, even if the choices they are offered are not fair or complete. In turn, individual citizens are able both directly (through their own spending choices) and indirectly (through democratic means) to influence the shape of economic activity in their town, state and country, and globally.

It is hardly radical to suggest that this power not only exists, but that it is widely used. Just as growing preferences for electric cars, espresso coffee and app-based games with ‘in-app purchases’ are resulting in significant shifts in employment and production, the election of Donald Trump will result in a significant increase in public-sector spending on defence equipment. Individual choices clearly do matter.

If the overwhelming majority of people in a country were determined to end their consumption of fossil fuels, then the combination of their market decisions and their democratic decisions would deliver such an outcome. One country in the world will be the first to be powered fully by renewable energy – we just don’t yet know which. Needless to say, there will be groups both inside and outside any country considering such a shift that will work hard to prevent it – the owners of petrol stations, for example – if only to stop a domino effect in other countries. But the potential for such a domino effect is perhaps one of the best reasons to try to achieve bold change at a small scale. In matters of democracy as well as in product design, imitation is often the sincerest form of flattery. And it is much harder to keep insisting that something is impossible when it is already happening somewhere else in the world.

As China has shown over the past decade, if a country wants to invest heavily in renewable energy and reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, the technology that will enable it to do so is readily available. China’s pursuit of rapid reductions in fossil-fuel use is delivering significant health and political benefits, as well as the expected economic benefits: the capacity to export low-emission technologies to the world.

The United States spent a small fortune to put a man on the moon because its leaders and people wanted to. The French have subsidised the production and distribution of locally produced food because they wanted to. The United Kingdom is about to spend £20 billion on subsidies to ensure the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is built . . . presumably because the population can think of no better use for the money.

WE CAN DO ANYTHING (BUT NOT EVERYTHING)

How can one individual reshape the global economy? It’s a fair question, but no one would ask if a single brick could reshape the Great Wall. Just as the more bricks you can place the more influence you will have on the shape of what is being built, the more people who share your goals the greater the impact you will collectively have on the shape of the economy.

As consumers, every time we spend a dollar we send a signal about the things we want more of and the things we want less of. As employees, every time we take a pay rise that is offered rather than request more holidays or a four-day week, we shift the distribution of work and income. And as citizens, every time we cast a vote we send a signal about what shape we want our economy to be – the things we want government to provide more of and the things we want them to provide less of. We can’t always get what we want, but if our preferences are widely held, we should have no trouble getting what we need.

That said, not all citizens have the same number of dollars with which to ‘vote’ for the things they want. A person who earns $1 million a year has fifty times the influence on what the market will or won’t produce than someone who earns $20,000 a year. Put simply, the distribution of income has a major impact on the ‘will of the market’ – which is why middle-class households throw out so much food while low-income earners often go hungry, and why some private schools have polo fields while some government schools can’t afford chemicals for chemistry experiments. In the democratic domain some people obviously have more influence than others. For example, while some may argue that the appointment of former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as the US Secretary of State does much to undermine the argument that all individuals are equal, in fact concern about how he might use his role is proof that individuals, and elections, can and do make a difference.

Similarly, when four-fifths of rich people (making more than $150,000) vote in US presidential elections but less than half of those making less than $10,000 do, it should not surprise us that governments focus on cutting the taxes paid by the rich rather than boosting the services on which low-income earners rely.³⁶ Like the shape of the global economy, the shape of a government’s legislative agenda is influenced by the net effect of the pressures placed on it. When low-income earners don’t vote, it is easier for politicians to deliver legislative outcomes for the high-income earners who do.

So what’s a girl to do if she is keen to change the world as fast as possible? Shift her consumption patterns? Nag her parents to do likewise? Lobby a politician? Shift her vote? Organise a protest? Get her friends to vote? Run for office?

Why not do all of these things? While being strategic means different things in different contexts, it would be dangerous to mistake being focused for being strategic. History suggests that changing the world involves quite a few moving parts. No matter how important one element of a strategy may seem, it is unlikely to be the only thing that needs to happen to ensure large, rapid and lasting change at multiple levels of government in multiple countries.

While being focused is an important part of getting things done, so too is broadening your agenda to allow you to work with unlikely allies. Focusing on the priorities of your supporters is important to keep a movement together, but focusing on things that are important to your opponents can help you to divide and conquer. Changing behaviour one person at a time can be effective, and slow. Changing the law to change everyone’s behaviour can be fast, but sometimes ineffective. So what is the right strategy? History also suggests that there is no such thing. Nokia’s market power was not enough to protect its market share from the arrival of smartphones, but the coal industry’s market power still protects it from the threat of renewables, in some countries at least. The public health lobby succeeded in removing lead from petrol in most countries, but it has been unable to prevent the sale of cars capable of driving at three times the legal maximum.

The ability to pick your battles, motivate your base, attract allies, communicate your message and drive the implementation of change that is actually effective is not evenly distributed across individuals, organisations and issues. Neither are the funds available to wage such campaigns. Given the wide range of factors that weigh on the political process it is impossible to predict which individuals, and which ideas, will drive change in the coming decades and which will try, and fail, despite their best efforts.

So if you want to reshape your local or national economy, would it be more strategic for you to focus on changing individual attitudes, cultural attitudes, government funding, legislative change or foreign policy? That is, what is the right way to go about changing the world? The point is that, as with the question that opened this book – Should we hurt the poor or hurt the environment? – this is not the right thing to ask.

More interesting questions for budding local organisers and global strategists are: What can I do at the personal or community level to help drive change at the national or global level? And what can we do at the national or global level to help drive change at the personal level?

NO ONE IS IN CHARGE OF THE FUTURE, BUT EVERYONE HAS A SAY IN HOW QUICKLY WE LEAVE THE PAST BEHIND

People, not ‘the economy’, will decide whether the new robots we invent will be used to clear landmines in Afghanistan or clear tables in your local restaurant.

The fear that robots will destroy human jobs is neither new nor ill-founded. They have in the past and they will in the future. The question is not whether labour-saving technologies will be developed and rolled out in the coming decades, but how the benefits of such change will be distributed.

Fear of the future and fear of unemployment make sense. But the belief that if we harm the environment enough, the economy will look after us in the future is irrational. The future will take shape in response to the largest pressures placed upon it. The first seventy years of the twentieth century showed that a motivated and demanding populace can drive major reforms in how work is organised, how income is distributed and how the environment is protected. The last forty years have shown that the course of history is not inevitable. No one can say what the next forty years hold, but history tells us that the coming decades, like all others, will be shaped by those who combine strategy with energy.

Kumi Naidoo

It is not easy to get to the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati; there is only one flight in and out each week. But my trip there in 2015 was worth it on so many levels. Not only are its people as good-humoured as they are generous, but the climate and the island landscape are, for me, near perfect.

But as the lowest-lying nation on earth, climate change does not just threaten to harm Kiribati, it threatens to submerge it completely. Unless we rapidly and dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the nation of Kiribati and its population of 116,000 may go down in history as the first country to be wiped from the map as a result of the actions of other countries. That’s why I went there.

In the lead-up to that year’s climate talks in Paris I went to talk to the then president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, about the need for bold leadership and the kind of campaign that simultaneously highlighted the enormity and the simplicity of the transition the world needs to make if countries like Kiribati are to have a future.

Soon after our meeting President Tong wrote a letter to all world leaders asking them to support his call for a global moratorium on building new coalmines. He did not call for all of the existing coalmines to shut down. He simply asked that other countries join him in agreeing that a world determined to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions was a world that needed fewer coalmines, not more.

The economist Sir Nicholas Stern was quick to support President Tong’s call, as were climate scientists such as James Hansen and groups such as Greenpeace International, which I then led. But to date only thirteen other national leaders have been brave enough to call on countries such as Australia to stop building more of the coalmines that will cause more of the climate change that nations have agreed to prevent.

It is one thing for national leaders to agree in principle that we need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. To turn words into deeds those same leaders need to start doing more of the things that will reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and stop doing the things that will increase those emissions.

If the world heeded President Tong’s call to stop building new coalmines there would still be much to do to make the climate, and Kiribati, safe. There will be a last coalmine built in the world. But the global community has not yet been able to agree whether that mine has already been built, or is yet to be built. But while new mines continue to be proposed, subsidised and built, people will keep standing against them. In tackling climate change and in shifting politics, actions speak louder than words.

Kumi Naidoo is the chair of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity and former executive director of Greenpeace International.