Saturday, 3 December 2022

Surveillance Capitalism

 Surveillance capitalism is a term used to describe the profit-making incentives that drive corporations to capture and commodify personal data. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, though the two can reinforce each other. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.[1]

Increased data collection may have various advantages for individuals and society such as self-optimization (Quantified Self),[2] societal optimizations (such as by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing,[2] there may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy.

Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.[3] Consequently, the increasing price of data has limited accessibility to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in society.[4]

Background[edit]

Shoshana Zuboff writes that "analysing massive data sets began as a way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future patterns in the behavior of people and systems".[5] In 2014 Vincent Mosco referred to the marketing of information about customers and subscribers to advertisers as surveillance capitalism and makes note of the surveillance state alongside it.[6] Christian Fuchs found that the surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism.[7] Similarly, Zuboff informs that the issue is further complicated by highly invisible collaborative arrangements with state security apparatuses. According to Trebor Scholz, companies recruit people as informants for this type of capitalism.[8] Zuboff contrasts mass production of industrial capitalism with surveillance capitalism with the former being interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees and the latter preying on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and largely ignorant of its procedures.[9] Their research is demonstrating that the capitalist addition to analysing massive data sets has given its beginning purpose an unexpected turn.[1] Surveillance has been changing power structures in the information economy, potentially shifting the balance of power further from nation-states and towards large corporations employing the surveillance capitalist logic[10]

Zuboff notes that surveillance capitalism reaches beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm and accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital, but also rights and operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent.[9] In other words, analysing massive data sets was at some point not only executed by the state apparatuses but also companies. In Zuboff's research she claims that the two companies; Google and Facebook invented and transferred surveillance capitalism into "a new logic of accumulation".[1][11][12] This mutation entailed both companies gathering very large numbers of data points about their users, with the core purpose of making profit. By selling these data points to external users (particularly advertisers) it has become an economic mechanism. The combination of the analysis of massive data sets and using those data sets as a market mechanism, has shaped the concept of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism has been heralded the successor to neoliberalism.[13][14]

Oliver Stone, creator of the film Snowden, pointed to the location-based game Pokémon Go as the "latest sign of the emerging phenomenon and demonstration of surveillance capitalism". Stone criticised the game on the grounds that the location of its users was used not only for game purposes, but also to retrieve more information about its players. By tracking users' locations, the game collected far more information than just users' names and locations: "it can access the contents of your USB storage, your accounts, photographs, network connections, and phone activities, and can even activate your phone, when it is in standby mode". This data can then be analysed and commodified by companies such as Google (who significantly invested in the game's development) to improve the effectiveness of targeted advertisement.[15][16]

Another aspect of surveillance capitalism relates to the influence it has had on political campaigning. Personal data retrieved by data miners can enable various companies (most notoriously, Cambridge Analytica) to improve the targeting of political advertising, a step beyond the commercial ends of previous Surveillance Capitalist operations. In this way, it is possible that political parties will be able to produce far more finely targeted political advertising, to maximise its impact on the electorate. However, Cory Doctorow writes that misuse of these data sets "will lead us towards totalitarianism".[17][better source needed] This may resemble a corporatocracy, and Joseph Turow writes that "centrality of corporate power is a direct reality at the very heart of the digital age".[2][18]: 17 

Theory[edit]

Shoshana Zuboff[edit]

Main article: Shoshana Zuboff

In Zuboff's theory, surveillance capitalism is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation. In her 2014 essay A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism, she characterized it as a "radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism" based on the commodification of "reality" and its transformation into behavioral data for analysis and sales.[19][20][21][22]

In a subsequent 2015 article, Zuboff analyzed the societal implications of this mutation of capitalism. She differentiated "surveillance assets", "surveillance capital", and "surveillance capitalism" and their dependence on a global architecture of computer mediation that she calls "Big Other", a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power which constitutes hidden mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values such as freedom, democracy, and privacy.[23][2]

According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism was pioneered at Google and later Facebook, in much the same way that mass-production and managerial capitalism were pioneered at Ford and General Motors a century earlier, and has now become the dominant form of information capitalism.[9]

In her Oxford University lecture published in 2016, Zuboff identified surveillance capitalism's mechanisms and practices, including the manufacture of "prediction products" for sale in new "behavioral futures markets." She introduced the concept "dispossession by surveillance" and argued that it challenges the psychological and political bases of self-determination as it concentrates rights in the surveillance regime. This is described as a "coup from above."[24]

Key features[edit]

Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism[25] is a detailed examination of the unprecedented power of surveillance capitalism and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control human behavior.[25] Zuboff identifies four key features in the logic of surveillance capitalism and explicitly follows the four key features identified by Google's chief economist, Hal Varian:[26]

  1. The drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis.
  2. The development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring and automation.
  3. The desire to personalize and customize the services offered to users of digital platforms.
  4. The use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and consumers.

Analysis[edit]

Zuboff compares demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet to asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand and states that such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity's survival.[9]

Zuboff warns that principles of self-determination might be forfeited due to "ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift" and states that "we tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes," referring to the twentieth century's totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism, with countermeasures that have been developed to fight those earlier threats not being sufficient or even appropriate to meet the novel challenges.[9]

She also poses the question: "will we be the masters of information, or will we be its slaves?" and states that "if the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so".[27]

In her book, Zuboff discusses the differences between industrial capitalism and surveillance capitalism. Zuboff writes that as industrial capitalism exploited nature, surveillance capitalism exploits human nature.[28]

John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney[edit]

The term "surveillance capitalism" has also been used by political economists John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, although with a different meaning. In an article published in Monthly Review in 2014, they apply it to describe the manifestation of the "insatiable need for data" of financialization, which they explain is "the long-term growth speculation on financial assets relative to GDP" introduced in the United States by industry and government in the 1980s that evolved out of the military-industrial complex and the advertising industry.[29]

Response[edit]

Numerous organizations have been struggling for free speech and privacy rights in the new surveillance capitalism[30] and various national governments have enacted privacy laws. It is also conceivable that new capabilities and uses for mass-surveillance require structural changes towards a new system to prevent misuse.[citation needed] Government attention towards the dangers of surveillance capitalism especially increased after the exposure of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal that occurred in early 2018.[4] In response to the misuse of mass-surveillance multiple states have taken preventive measures. The European Union, for example, has reacted to these events and restricted its rules and regulations on misusing big data.[31] Surveillance-Capitalism has become a lot harder under these rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulations.[31] However, implementing preventative measures against misuse of mass-surveillance is hard for many countries as it requires structural change of the system.[32]

Bruce Sterling's 2014 lecture at Strelka Institute "The epic struggle of the internet of things"[33] explained how consumer products could become surveillance objects that track people's everyday life. In his talk, Sterling highlights the alliances between multinational corporations who develop Internet of Things-based surveillance systems which feeds surveillance capitalism.[33][34][35]

In 2015, Tega Brain and Surya Mattu's satirical artwork Unfit Bits encourages users to subvert fitness data collected by Fitbits. They suggested ways to fake datasets by attaching the device, for example to a metronome or on a bicycle wheel.[36][37] In 2018, Brain created a project with Sam Lavigne called New Organs which collect people's stories of being monitored online and offline.[38][39]

The 2019 documentary film The Great Hack tells the story of how a company named Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Extensive profiling of users and news feeds that are ordered by black box algorithms were presented as the main source of the problem, which is also mentioned in Zuboff's book.[40]

Persistence[edit]

Although there has been a large response since Zuboff's book, it will be difficult to end surveillance capitalism in the current digital and political sphere due to the power that large technology companies have politically and economically. Because of this, it is more likely that we will see governments adopting surveillance capitalism for their own benefit, creating deals with these large technology companies, in order to both monitor and gain advantage of its going on. As Fukuyama et al said, “No liberal democracy is content to entrust concentrated political power to individuals based on assumptions about their good intentions.”[41]

Another way in which it could be demonstrated that surveillance capitalism has become almost inevitably ingrained within most if not all forms of government and society is through the lens of China. China has “largest population of mobile phone, internet and social media users”[42] and yet Google and Meta have no hand in this. Despite their lack of influence, China's government is well known for tracking the digital footprint of its citizens. Even though this is due to them viewing the digital space as a "national resource"[42] it does not change the fact that it is still an extremely high-functioning form of surveillance capitalism, which ultimately shows the power in which governments could have should they choose to adopt a similar level of interest in the digital footprints of their citizens.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c Zuboff, Shoshana (January 2019). "Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action". New Labor Forum. 28(1): 10–29. doi:10.1177/1095796018819461. ISSN 1095-7960. S2CID 159380755.
  2. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Couldry, Nick (23 September 2016). "The price of connection: 'surveillance capitalism'". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 20 May 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  3. ^ John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1 June 2018), Data analytics and big data: chapter 5: Data analytics process:there's great work behind the scenes, pp. 77–99, doi:10.1002/9781119528043.ch5, ISBN 978-1-119-52804-3, S2CID 243896249
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b Cadwalladr, Carole (20 June 2019). "The Great Hack". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 4 February 2020. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  5. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana; Möllers, Norma; Murakami Wood, David; Lyon, David (2019-03-31). "Surveillance Capitalism: An Interview with Shoshana Zuboff". Surveillance & Society. 17 (1/2): 257–266. doi:10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13238. ISSN 1477-7487.
  6. ^ Mosco, Vincent (2015-11-17). To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. Routledge. ISBN 9781317250388. Archivedfrom the original on 2021-10-19. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  7. ^ Fuchs, Christian (2017-02-20). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. SAGE. ISBN 9781473987494. Archived from the original on 2021-10-19. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  8. ^ Scholz, Trebor (2016-12-27). Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781509508181. Archived from the original on 2021-10-19. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  9. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Zuboff, Shoshana (5 March 2016). "Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism". Faz.net. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Archived from the original on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  10. ^ Galič, Maša; Timan, Tjerk; Koops, Bert-Jaap (13 May 2016). "Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation". Philosophy & Technology. 30: 9–37. doi:10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1.
  11. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana. "Shoshana Zuboff: A Digital Declaration". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Archived from the original on 2020-06-22. Retrieved 2020-05-18.
  12. ^ "Shoshana Zuboff On surveillance capitalism". Contagious. Archived from the original on 2020-02-06. Retrieved 2020-05-18.
  13. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. p. 504-505, 519.
  14. ^ Sandberg, Roy (May 2020) https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/316996/Sandberg_Roy_Master%27s%20Thesis_2020.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y Archived 2020-07-01 at the Wayback Machine University of Helsinki. p. 33, 39, 87.
  15. ^ "Comic-Con 2016: Marvel turns focus away from the Avengers, 'Game of Thrones' cosplay proposals, and more". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  16. ^ "Oliver Stone Calls Pokémon Go "Totalitarian"". Fortune. 23 July 2016. Archived from the original on 14 February 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  17. ^ Doctorow, Cory (2017-05-05). "Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism | Opinion". International Business Times. Archived from the original on 2020-07-01. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  18. ^ Turow, Joseph (10 January 2012). The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. Yale University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0300165012. Archivedfrom the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  19. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (15 September 2014). "A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Archived from the original on 2020-06-22. Retrieved 2018-08-28.
  20. ^ Powles, Julia (2 May 2016). "Google and Microsoft have made a pact to protect surveillance capitalism". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 30 May 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  21. ^ Sterling, Bruce (March 2016). "Shoshanna Zuboff condemning Google "surveillance capitalism"". WIRED. Archived from the original on 2019-01-14. Retrieved 2017-02-09.
  22. ^ "The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won". New York Times. 14 August 2018. Archived from the original on 2020-06-07. Retrieved 2018-08-28.
  23. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (4 April 2015). "Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization". Journal of Information Technology. 30 (1): 75–89. doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5. ISSN 0268-3962. S2CID 15329793. SSRN 2594754.
  24. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (5 March 2016). "Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Retrieved 2018-08-28.
  25. ^ Jump up to:a b Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 9781610395694. OCLC 1049577294.
  26. ^ Varian, Hal (May 2010). "Computer Mediated Transactions". American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings. 100 (2): 1–10. doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.1.
  27. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (15 September 2014). "Shoshana Zuboff: A Digital Declaration". Faz.net. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Archived from the original on 21 December 2014. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  28. ^ "Shoshana Zuboff On surveillance capitalism". Contagious. Archived from the original on 2020-02-06. Retrieved 2020-02-06.
  29. ^ "Surveillance Capitalism | John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review". Monthly Review. 2014-07-01. Archived from the original on 2020-04-30. Retrieved 2018-02-12.
  30. ^ Foster, John Bellamy; McChesney, Robert W. (1 July 2014). "Surveillance Capitalism by John Bellamy Foster". Monthly Review. Archived from the original on 30 April 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  31. ^ Jump up to:a b Marelli, Luca; Testa, Giuseppe (2018-05-03). "Scrutinizing the EU General Data Protection Regulation". Science. 360 (6388): 496–498. Bibcode:2018Sci...360..496M. doi:10.1126/science.aar5419. hdl:2434/590000. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 29724945. S2CID 19118004.
  32. ^ Cadwalladr, Carole (2018-03-31). "AggregateIQ: the obscure Canadian tech firm and the Brexit data riddle". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2020-05-28. Retrieved 2020-05-18.
  33. ^ Jump up to:a b Bruce Sterling. (2018-10-29). Lecture "The epic struggle of the internet of things". Strelka Institute/Институт Стрелка. Retrieved 2019-03-13. (on Youtube)
  34. ^ "Bruce Sterling's "The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things"". Boing Boing. 2014-09-14. Archived from the original on 2019-03-31. Retrieved 2019-03-19.
  35. ^ Paul-Choudhury, Sumit (2019-03-18). "How the apocalypse could be a good thing". BBC. Archived from the original on 2019-03-31. Retrieved 2019-03-31.
  36. ^ Mattu, Tega Brain and Surya. "Unfit Bits". www.unfitbits.com. Archived from the original on 2019-01-24. Retrieved 2019-03-13.
  37. ^ Werner, Joel; Osborne, Tegan (2016-04-09). "Unfit Bits: How to hack your fitness data". ABC News. Archived from the original on 2018-10-06. Retrieved 2019-03-31.
  38. ^ Schwartz, Oscar (2018-07-13). "Digital ads are starting to feel psychic". The Outline. Archived from the original on 2018-12-19. Retrieved 2019-03-31.
  39. ^ "Brainwashing your wife to want sex? Here is adtech at its worst". The Drum. 2018-07-23. Archived from the original on 2019-03-31. Retrieved 2019-03-31.
  40. ^ Cadwalladr, Carole (2019-07-20). "The Great Hack: the film that goes behind the scenes of the Facebook data scandal". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Archived from the original on 2020-02-04. Retrieved 2020-02-06.
  41. ^ Lits, Levente (2021-03-08). "Hogyan mentsük meg a demokráciát a technológiától? Recenzió és kritika Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel: How to Save Democracy From Technology, Big Tech threatens democracy. Few have considered a practical solution: taking away the platforms' role as gatekeepers of content. Foreign Affairs, (2021. Január/Február) című cikkéről". Köz-gazdaság. 16 (1): 191–192. doi:10.14267/retp2021.01.17. ISSN 1788-0696.
  42. ^ Jump up to:a b ZENG, JINGHAN (November 2016). "China's date with big data: will it strengthen or threaten authoritarian rule?". International Affairs. 92 (6): 1443–1462. doi:10.1111/1468-2346.12750. ISSN 0020-5850.

Further reading[edit]

  • Zuboff, Shoshana (2018). Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus. Berlin: Campus Verlag. ISBN 9783593509303.

External links[edit]

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Friday, 2 December 2022

An Easier Way To Fight Inflation and Climate Change: Price Controls Jamaal Bowman's new bill hauls an old tool out of a closet the U.S. hasn't opened in decades.

 The only comprehensive legislation proposed to address inflation was introduced by Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman of New York in August 2022.

.

The bill, which would investigate price gouging and make recommendations to the president for targeted price controls, has just eighteen cosponsors.


Read the link but ofcourse it would receive short shrift from the Right (ie. the Republicans). In Transfinancial Economics a more advanced form of super flexible digital price controls could be used in the economy in real time. Transfinancial Economics




See below for article











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Friday, 25 November 2022

Degrowth? A Guardian Article..

 

The Basic Difference between Degrowth and Transfinancial Economics


Though the approach of Degrowth is highly ethical the reality is that capitalism is still King in this world. For one to change to something like this in record time is not going to happen to save us all from climate change devastation. Instead Transfinancial Economics claims that with the right financial incentives a colossal amount can be done. With TFE new money could be transmitted into the economy safely and successfully without leading to serious inflation or even hyperinflation because the entire economy is monitored en direct in real time. Thus, temporary digital or electronic price controls can be used to control money and its value in relation to certain goods and services.



Incidently, it is ofcourse true that there are limits to the amount of natural resources which can be used...but with ideas such as nanotechnology new forms of artifical resources could be continually created. This is a huge subject...However, it has been claimed that 70% of natural resources exist below the sea and could be exploited. This ofcourse is slowly being done


Google listings for Degrowth


News on Degrowth Like Modern Monetary Theory (a direct precursor to TFE) degrowth is receiving short shrift by critics notably those on the right ofcourse..



                          vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv




Kicking our growth addiction is the way out of the climate crisis. This is how to do it

/The Guardian
Larry Elliott

With the right global economic policies, we could fight poverty and global heating at the same time

A man tends to vegetables in front of a power station in Tongling, China.
‘What’s needed is a strategy that encourages poorer countries to meet their anti-poverty goals in a way that is least harmful to the environment.’ A man tends to vegetables in front of a power station in Tongling, China. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

For the best part of three centuries, there has been a consensus about the goal of economic policy. Since the dawn of the industrial age in the 18th century, the aim has been to achieve as rapid growth as possible.

It’s not hard to see why there has been this focus. Growth has raised living standards, increased life expectancy, improved medical care and resulted in better educated, better fed populations.

Indeed, it is a mark of how successful rich western countries have been in lifting people out of poverty that developing countries are keen to have what we’ve had. If faster growth means cleaner drinking water, more children in school and fewer mothers dying in childbirth then the world’s poorer nations want more of it.

Environmental cleanup crews after a major oil spill at Huntington Beach in California in October.
US and Europe behind majority of global ecological damage, says study
Read more

But there’s an obvious problem. If developing countries are to have the same – or even remotely the same – standards of living as developed countries, that means a lot higher use of resources and additional pressure on the planet. It means an increase in energy use and the risk of an irreversible global climate crisis.

Given the existential threat posed by global heating, the concept that growth is good is being seriously challenged by those who say policymakers should be aiming for zero growth or even degrowth economies, ones that are shrinking. Make no mistake, it is a good thing that the accepted wisdom is being questioned. The idea that faster growth is the solution to every problem is no longer tenable.

There is nothing new about the current debate. Thomas Malthus predicted eventual famine once population growth exceeded food supplies. John Stuart Mill’s comment, that the “increase in wealth is not boundless”, paved the way for what became known as steady-state economics. Herman Daly, who died last month, long championed the idea that the constraints of the natural world imposed limits to growth. Robert Kennedy famously said that gross domestic product measured everything except that which makes life worthwhile, and his words resonate now even more strongly than when he uttered them in 1968.

That said, achieving a steady-state economy or degrowth is not going to be easy. Far from it, it will be hellishly difficult.

For a start, it will mean changing the way we think about economic success. Political debate is conducted by parties that vie with each other to promise voters the best growth strategy. Language matters, so when GDP is rising, that’s good news, and when it is falling, it is bad news. Countries are judged by where they sit in international league tables of growth. It would be the hardest of sells for any politician to try to convince UK voters they should welcome the recession that is now only in its early stages.

Farmer Helio Lombardo Do Santos walks through the remains of a section of Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia state, Brazil.
Farmer Helio Lombardo Do Santos walks through the remains of a section of Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia state, Brazil. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

That’s because over many decades, people – especially the most vulnerable – have found that degrowth has not been good for them. Recessions are a form of degrowth, and they result in unemployment, bankruptcy, homelessness and hardship. Recessions also mean politicians tend to double down on growth, fearful of a backlash from voters if living standards are falling. Faced with the choice between higher use of fossil fuels or having the lights go out, governments have opted for the former.

The only way to make a steady-state economy achievable is to harness an anti-poverty strategy to a pro-planet strategy. It is just about possible to imagine western societies where – after some vigorous redistribution – everyone has the income, wealth and time to lead a good life. But even that’s not going to be enough. What’s needed is a global strategy that encourages poorer countries to meet their legitimate anti-poverty goals in a way that is least harmful to the environment.

Britain accounts for 1% of annual CO2 emissions, whereas China and India account between them for 36%. African countries have much smaller carbon footprints, but they are likely to grow as populations rise and demand for energy increases. The UK could speed its progress towards being a net zero economy, but unless that was accompanied by deep cuts in fossil fuel use by much bigger emitters of greenhouse gases, it would have no discernible impact on rising global temperatures. Western countries can – and should – set an example with speedier transition to cleaner energy, but it is naive to imagine poorer countries are going to go for degrowth any time soon.

That doesn’t mean the idea of a steady-state planet is a pipe dream. It does, though, suggest that the immediate priority should be to make developing country growth as clean as possible. And that needs more than warm words. It requires big money: $2tn each year between now and 2030, according to one estimate.

The aim should be a new version of the postwar Marshall plan, in which finance provided by governments and the international financial institutions acts as the catalyst for private investment. Avinash Persaud, the special climate envoy to Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, rightly says that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank could be doing more to provide developing countries – many of which are burdened with high debts and punitive borrowing costs – access to cheaper finance to fund climate mitigation and adaptation projects.

Failure to mobilise the necessary resources would be disastrous but, tragically, all too likely. Western governments are assuming that they have all the time in the world to make tweaks to their business as usual models. The brutal truth is that they don’t.

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