The Great Transition

Humanity appears caught in a trap with no way out. ‘Business as usual’ is no longer an option. However, halting and reversing our consumption of more and more ‘stuff’ appears likely to trigger a massive depression with serious unemployment and poverty. This is certainly true if all we do is ‘apply the brakes’ without fundamentally redesigning the whole economic system. We are facing a series of interlinked systemic problems – consuming beyond our planetary limits; untenable inequality; growing economic instability and a breakdown in the relationship between ‘more’ and ‘better’. The only way to overcome these systemic problems is through a set of solutions which themselves address the whole.

In this report we have sketched out how, in the light of these challenges we face as a country and as a world, things could ‘turn out right’ by 2050. We have focused particularly on the UK, but many of the solutions we outline apply globally. We have called the process by which this could happen the Great Transition as a deliberate echo of The Great Transformation, written by Karl Polanyi in the 1940s. While in a relatively short report such as this we could not hope to achieve anything remotely comparable to Polanyi’s great work, the scale of the change we need to see is at least the equal of the changes he described.

Document source: the new economics foundation

Image source: Matt from London