Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

THE FUTURE?

Imagine the scene, about a hundred years from now: a small girl, sheltering with her family against the ravages of the climate and the constant danger of violent marauding bands, looks at her grandfather and says accusingly, “Grandpa, why didn’t you do anything?”

It is a terrifying vision of the future. A 2009 British movie directed by Franny Armstrong called The Age of Stupid featured a similar idea, with an old man looking back in regret on a world gone wrong.

Although we can never predict the future, it is realistic to be very concerned. We don’t need to tell you that the problems besetting our world in the second decade of the twenty-first century are huge: climate change, freak weather, polluted seas, increasing wealth inequality. We are assaulted by out-of-hand religious fanaticism, mass migration, corporate powers overshadowing national governments, interminable local wars, failed states, a fragmenting European Union, population growth out of control; the politics of fear, blame and denial are spreading as fast as political apathy among the young. And the new dilemmas of the future—such as data banks, genetic engineering and robotics—threaten to arrive on top of the unsolved crises of today.

Need we say more? We all know these problems affect all of us on the planet, but we seem incapable of solving them, and time is running out. Do we really want some future grandfather to be accountable for our inaction? Why can’t we just sort it out?

Is it just because the issues are too big? Or is it that political leaders cannot find the will to deal with them? Is it that greedy financial interests are bent on total destruction in the service of profits? Are we too selfish, too ostrich-like or, worse, too lemming-like?

Or are we just not thinking about them in the way we need to?

A GLOBAL IMPASSE NEEDS A GLOBAL SOLUTION

In answer to these pressing questions this book makes four main claims.First, that there is just one single barrier that prevents us from solving all of these problems: the pursuit of international competitiveness. We show how every government’s need to keep its economy attractive to corporations and investors—its need to stay internationally competitive—makes it impossible for any nation to make the first move. Whether it’s climate change, fair corporate taxation, poverty reduction, migration or almost any other global issue, we will show that it’s the fear of competitive disadvantage that stands in the way.

Competitiveness isn’t only a way to attract investment and jobs: it has a rarely recognized destructive side that operates as a vicious circle preventing action on global and many national problems. The relentless drive for competitiveness—the very pursuit we are told will assure our prosperity—turns out to be slowly killing us. We call this vicious circle “Destructive Global Competition” or DGC for short, and the solution, we argue, lies in a new form of global cooperation.

Our second claim is that there is a way to break the vicious circle and to achieve global cooperation. We outline a global campaign that offers a means of overcoming the first-mover competitive-disadvantage problem, called the Simultaneous Policy. SIMPOL is founded on three principles:

Simultaneous Implementation

If all or nearly all nations can be brought to implement appropriate policies simultaneously, no nation, corporation or citizen would suffer a competitive disadvantage. All nations win, and the vicious circle of DGC is broken.

A Multi-Issue Framework

Addressing global problems one at a time, as the world is now, is unlikely to be successful—in fact, it’s designed to fail. This is because dealing with any single issue means there will always be some nations that win and others that lose, and the losers have no incentive to cooperate. SIMPOL offers a framework for negotiating two or more issues together so that nations that might lose on one issue can gain on another. Not only will this vastly improve the chances of reaching substantive agreements, it can make action in every nation’s immediate interest. It can make nations want to act now.

A New Way to Use Our Votes

Today there is little incentive for politicians to reach or uphold international agreements. If they fail, they can always claim “the national interest” as a legitimate excuse. A powerful carrot-and-stick inducement is required to encourage politicians towards productive outcomes. SIMPOL provides this by inviting us to use our votes in an entirely new way, driving national governments towards the target. As we’ll show, it’s like having two votes rolled into one: the vote you already have that works nationally and a new one that works globally. We’ll prove to you that you already possess both, and that they both work. Just when many of us sense that voting has lost its potency, SIMPOL transforms our votes into the most powerful weapon for global solutions.

The third claim we make is that global cooperation, as outlined above, cannot come about until there has been an inner revolution in the way we think about and see the world. At the heart of this book is a re-evaluation of our habitual ways of thinking, because unless we find a way to change how we see the world and think about its problems we will not be capable of effective action on a global scale. We will not even understand why there is no useful option but cooperation.

In a statement widely attributed to Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest genius of modern times, this inner revolution was predicted when he sagely advised that we will not solve our problems with the same thinking that created them. Unless our world finds a way to think differently, the image of the little girl and her grandfather risks becoming all too real.

Changing the way we think is always a mighty challenge and you may be wondering whether it can really make much difference. “How can a handful of people who read a book like this possibly change the world?” you may be asking.

Our answer is also our fourth claim, that it doesn’t take masses of people to change the world—in fact, it never has. We will show how many key transitions in human history were catalyzed by small numbers, and we’ll show how SIMPOL fits this pattern, too. That’s why you matter.

Our four claims leave us with three steps:

Step 1 is to recognize exactly how stuck we are and what keeps us stuck;


Step 2 is to understand the nature and value of the cooperation imperative; 

and Step 3 is to evolve a new way of thinking and seeing that enables us to take swift, appropriate and effective cooperative global action.

We invite you to come on a journey with us to explore the implications of our claims and to join us in taking these steps. To give you a closer idea of where we’re headed, here’s the itinerary we propose.