A blueprint for a new ecological civilization built on cooperation and kindness.
Why I Wrote this Book
For all my adult life, I have been asking questions, inspired both by the astonishing nature of the world around us and the universe as a whole, and by the awful things we do to each other and to nature. For all of Earth’s myriad scientists, historians, thinkers, and explorers, there is still so much that we don’t understand.
Twenty-five years ago, full of self-confidence, I began a project with New Society Publishers to create a series of books, each of which would lay out 101 solutions to one of the world’s major troubles. When I came to ‘economy’, however, the project ground to a halt. It felt overwhelming. I realized that I didn’t know even a quarter of what would be needed to make a useful contribution.
Fifteen years later, fresh off completing my novel Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible, I was walking into the forest where we live on Vancouver Island when out of nowhere this question arose in my mind: “What is the economic value of kindness?” And with that, I began reading, reading, and more reading, determined to understand this thing called ‘the economy’.
Together, more than 450 authors have contributed to my understanding, which will always be incomplete. Was my research sufficient? Probably not, but at some point, we all have to draw the line. So now I offer it to you, my readers. As they say here in Canada, “enjoy”.
Table of Contents
PART ONE: THE ECONOMICS OF KINDNESS
- The Great Mistake
- The Selfishness of the Impulse to Dominate
- The Selfishness of Neoclassical Economics
- The Selfishness of Neoliberal Capitalism
- The Selfishness of Everyday Life
- A New Paradigm
- A New Story
- The Pioneers
PART 2: PRACTICE
- Kindness in Business
- Kindness in Community
- Kindness in Housing
- Kindness at Work
- Kindness to the Earth
- Kindness to Nature
- Kindness to the Land and Ocean
- Kindness in Banking and Finance
- Kindness in Tackling Inflation
- Kindness without Domination
- Kindness in Education
- Kindness in Welfare
- Kindness through a New Social Contract
- Kindness in Taxation
- Kindness through Democracy
- Kindness in Governance
- Kindness in the Global South
- Kindness in the Global Economy
- Circle of Hope
From Chapter 1: The Great Mistake
Our world needs more kindness. People need more kindness. Nature needs more kindness. But we need it deep within our economies, where so many of our troubles begin.
We have been told a thousand times that the free-market economy is the best possible kind of economy, but for so many people, and for nature, it’s just not working. Surely, there must be a better way. Our capitalist economy has been built on the primacy of selfishness. What is the alternative? In this book, I hope to convince you that it’s the economics of kindness, which we can use to achieve massive transformative change and build a new ecological civilization. And it’s not just an idea. It’s a very real thing.
But first, we must address the question that’s causing so much anxiety: why are things in such a mess? We’ve got the rising cost of living, the housing crisis, and the ridiculous increase in inequality alongside the tax-avoiding billionaires. We’ve got increasing loneliness. We’ve got refugees, and desperate immigrants. In America, we’ve got oligarchy, kleptocracy, and billionaires who believe they are entitled to rule the world. And all the while, with ominous drumbeats of warning, we’ve got the climate crisis, the collapse of biodiversity, and the reality that we are overshooting Earth’s ecological boundaries. And the horrible ongoing wars. And just when we need calm decisive action, we’ve got social media chaos, increasing anxiety, anger, and hate.
When young Canadians aged 16 to 25 were surveyed in 2022, almost three quarters said they felt frightened about the future. So enough! It is time for change. Time for determined hope. Time for moral ambition, as the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman puts it in his clarion call to action.In the pages of this book you will find a solid analysis of how we got into this mess, and a practical guide for not just how we can get out of it, but for how we can build an economy based on cooperation and kindness, as the foundation for a new ecological civilization.
But first, how to make sense of things? A thousand philosophers have offered a thousand answers, but our troubles seem only to get worse. The year 2073 beckons, if you’ve seen Asif Kapadia’s dark movie: democracy obliterated, minorities silenced, dissenters arrested, social media co-opted.The billionaires are having a field day, but billions are struggling, growing angrier and more resentful by the day. Some become extremists who want to tear it all down. A violent coup against democracy that would have been unthinkable ten years ago is now a present possibility in some countries. We need to peel back the myriad symptoms of dysfunction, and discover what’s driving them
From Chapter 6: A New Paradigm
In Chapter 3, I wrote that “economics does not need a new suit of armor. It just needs to take off the old armor and reveal what’s beneath, which is simply nature, and us humans.” The word ‘economy’ comes from the Greek words for household (oikos) and management (nomos). Today, our household is the entire planet, from the mountains to the rivers to the sea, as the Snuneymuxw people say, on whose traditional lands I live. The economy is the totality of human exchanges in seven interconnected realms (Fig 6.1). This is the real economy. From a cooperator’s perspective, purpose in each realm is the wellbeing of all. From a dominator’s perspective, each is grist for the mill, to be exploited and controlled.
The American economist Ronald Trosper, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, author of Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands, holds that this coherence of relationships across the whole economy is similar to the Quecha principle of sumac kawsay, the relationality of all beings.The Spanish economist Unai Villalba shares this view, that at its fullest, the economy includes all forms of existence, from the family to the community and beyond, with no division between nature and society. With this understanding in place, we can focus on nature, and real people, in the real world. If anthropology is the queen of the humanities, economics is a branch of anthropology. A glorious one, full of fascination and intrigue, but just one branch among many.
Starting in the late eighteenth century, European and American poets, artists, and thinkers rebelled against the cold, objective world of reason, and the industrial machinery that was destroying nature. They called themselves the romantics. They embraced the full range of human experience. They celebrated human agency, and imagination. The economics of kindness brings romanticism to economics. It does not replace rational thought, analysis, and numbers; it complements them by restoring the other dimensions of existence that make life full and whole.
From Chapter 11: Kindness in Housing
Can the economics of kindness help us to end the housing crisis, once and for all? The answer is a very solid YES. All around the world, people living on the cruel side of the housing crisis are really hurting. The distress is real for everyone who struggles to pay sky-high rent, who is burdened by mortgage terror, who is forced to live far from their place of work, who lives in a car or on someone’s sofa, or who is homeless. For millions, the hope that they might one day own their own home has vanished. For speculators and investors, by contrast, housing has become a valuable asset that yields a handsome return. The financialized economy, bereft of kindness and applied to housing, is creating misery for millions.
(…)
To end the housing crisis we need to do four things: stop the financialization of housing; build millions of affordable homes; help struggling tenants and the homeless; and mobilize people to fight for change.
(…)
Step Two is to focus on housing cooperatives, and other forms of social housing. Building more market homes won’t end the crisis. We need millions of units of social housing to make up for the deficit that has accumulated since 1980, when governments stopped caring. The best kind is a cooperative, since it restores agency and self-respect. In a housing coop, you are your own landlord. Once your mortgage has been paid off your monthly costs are low, just as they are for a homeowner. Cooperatives restore agency and self-respect. They come in two forms. In a private co-op, anywhere from four to 4,000 people band together to buy a house or build shared dwellings. In a non-profit co-op, a non-profit organization or community land-trust owns the land and buildings, while the residents manage the property and have a life-long right to live there. It may not suit everyone, but it’s a pretty good solution. In Vienna, 25% of the residents live in 200,000 cooperatively run flats built by non-profit housing associations. In Zurich, 34% of the residents live in housing cooperatives. In Norway, 20% live in one of 14,700 housing co-ops. In New York, 50,000 people live in Co-op City’s cooperatively owned high-rise buildings that were built in the Bronx in the 1960s, funded by a coalition of labor unions. In Hamilton, Canada, when the tenants realized that their 21-unit apartment building had been put up for sale, they raised $4.8 million in loans to buy it from their landlord and turn it into a cooperative
From Chapter 25: Kindness in the Global South
Can those who live in the global south use the economics of kindness to lift their communities out of poverty, build community wealth, and end domination by their élites? The answer is a clear yes.
(…)
In South Korea, in 1997, tens of thousands of people responded to a financial crisis by forming self-sufficiency enterprises, village enterprises, and cooperatives. When the country was obliged to take on $58 billion of debt, people mobilized to donate 227 tons of family gold, raising $3 billion to help pay off the debt. The goodwill generated encouraged politicians to support the growing wave of community initiatives and give them legal recognition. The government also gave them financial assistance and required public agencies to support them through their procurement budgets. By 2019, the number of self-reliance centers where people come together to help each other had risen to 970. There were 4,412 certified social enterprises, and 1,897 village community enterprises. By 2023, there were 22,610 cooperatives, including 3,360 for childcare and elder care. “While there is a long way to go,” writes the political economist Minsun Ji, “Korea’s example provides a model for how government policy and procurement can advance a social and solidarity economy.”
The economics of kindness is the path Gandhi’s followers championed in India’s villages in the Sarvodaya movement in the 1950s. Sarvodaya means ‘uplift of all’. It is the same path that Sri Ariyaratne champions in Sri Lanka, in the 15,000 villages that participate in the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement. Shramadana means ‘gift of labor’. Participation begins with a village discussion on what’s needed and how things might be done differently. People might proceed by forming a village council, building a school, setting up a family program, or starting a village bank. In response to the economic crisis that began in 2019, Sarvodaya launched a ‘We Are One’ campaign to create 150 community kitchens, 600 home gardens, and a national food banking system. Within six months, their initiative had reached 300,000 families. If Sri Lanka’s government had embraced this path of development, it would have achieved greater self-reliance and not have fallen into the trap of import-dependence and debt, which caused its economy to collapse so disastrously.
The economics of kindness is also being followed in the Indian state of Kerala, the least impoverished and second-most urbanised state in the country. Various historical factors have enabled this success, including a tradition of village and town self-governance that was never supressed by the British colonists; Christian missionaries who challenged the heavy-duty caste system, won converts, and spread free public education; militant trade unions and peasants organizations who fought for land reforms; and popular support for the Communist Party, which won its first majority in 1957 and has governed on and off ever since, in partnership with its political allies. If Kerala had been in South or Central America, instead of far away in India, the United States would have doubtless intervened to overthrow the government. In the absence of such interference, the people of Kerala and their government have been able to achieve the lowest rate of population growth, the highest literacy rate, the highest life expectancy, the highest human development score, and the status of being the least corrupt and best-governed state in India.
The government-supported Kudumbashree movement has worked since 1998 to empower women and eradicate poverty in Kerala through a huge variety of women-led initiatives. By 2025 the movement had 317,000 neighbourhood groups, each consisting of five to ten women, who identify their neighborhood’s needs and participate in training. The movement’s 4.8 million members are democratically represented through 19,500 area development societies. Kudumbashree means ‘prosperity of the family’. As the women say, “Till yesterday, there were many people to tell us what to do. Today, the decisions we take are our own.”
From Chapter 27: Circle of Hope
We have come to the end of reading, and the beginning of doing. As citizens of this planet, we face a critical choice between two very different paths.
The one leads to the collapse of democracy, and the restoration of rule by élites and oligarchs. Throughout history, this has been a recurring reality. Time and again, from the loss of democracy in Greece in 338 BC to the defeat of the Song Dynasty’s Renaissance city of Kaifeng in 1127, from the surrender of cooperative self-governance in Italy’s northern cities to the collapse of democracy in Germany’s Weimar Republic, internal stresses and external assaults have enabled warlords and aristocrats to seize back control. People who crave power, who believe in their God-given right to rule, are always waiting in the wings.
If we allow this to happen now, the result would not just be authoritarian rule by wealthy élites. Because of their greed, their selfishness, their climate denial, their ecological carelessness, and their pandering to billionaires and corporations, it would signal the unthinkable – the loss of a livable planet.
It takes a while for the penny to drop, to grasp what this really means. It would be a world in which the housing crisis gets worse, tax evasion gets worse, loneliness gets worse, social media madness gets worse, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, debt of all kinds get bigger, and monopolies get more power. And that’s the least of it. It would be a world in which the turmoil unleashed by the climate crisis would shatter the foundations of our civilization. It would be a world in climate chaos, with increasingly frequent heatwaves, droughts, forest fires, storms, and floods, trailing poverty, refugees, famine, and death in their wake. For nature, it would mean further devastation, and loss of species.
The other path is the economics of kindness, and the kind of solutions proposed in this book. In choosing this other path we need to understand why it is that some people are willing to hand power back to the billionaires and oligarchs. It is because democracy has not yet reached the economy. It has so far been unable to prevent the rise of neoliberalism, with all its ills. To quote the old English folk poem, the neoliberal political order punishes the man or woman who steals the goose from the commons, but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the commons from the goose.
Building an economy based on cooperation and kindness will be a huge task, but it is one we must surely embrace. Our children, our grandchildren, and Earth’s myriad species are all beseeching us to do it. We need to generate a force-field of kindness that will encircle the Earth, reaching every family, every village, every city and town; every business, school, and college; every sports team, arts ensemble, and community of worship. Every government, every nation.
To achieve this, we need a huge global citizens’ movement. I think of it as our Circle of Hope. Around the world, millions of people are working to achieve the kind of goals laid out in this book. We need a unifying initiative that will bring us together, so that we can plant our flags in the ground, and chant:
We need an economy that’s just and fair,
We need to cooperate, everywhere,
We need to sing with Nature’s flair
To make it happen – NOW!
