Decisions Today to Impact Tomorrow

Positive decisions today can have long-term impacts too

On Monday I wrote about decisions in the last 50 years that have led us to the climate and overshoot crisis we have today. Let’s assume now that in the coming years, we make decisions that put our natural world ahead of profit. What would happen then?

License to operate revoked

2030 - For the first time in the history of the United States a large public company has its license to operate revoked, after it is determined that a major US corporation has put public health at risk in search of profit. After a lengthy Federal investigation it is determined that a public company knowingly endangered the well-being of American citizens in pursuit of profit. The company’s license to operate is revoked, causing outrage in the business community.

The business community’s defense includes statements that “If considerations of public health have to be put above profit, then dozens of companies should not be operating.” The company assumes that this threat will cause the government to back down, assuming that the economic fallout if dozens of companies collapse will cause the government to retreat.

This statement backfires as public outrage putting profit above people remains high, and dozens of US companies do indeed lose their license to operate in the next decade.

Corporate personhood

On a related note, laws that have entrenched corporate personhood begin to be repealed with the first law ending “corporate personhood” coming into effect in the EU in 2028. The reason for this is the the public has turned against the special benefits afforded corporations that tend to put the health of corporations and the power of corporations above the health and power of citizens. By 2050, only a few nations still cling to corporate personhood, but the effects of these laws are limited for global public companies, most of whom have organized around a “series of contracts” model, instead of corporate personhood.

Legal rights to nature

Year by year, states, provinces and nations adopt more legal protection for nature and grant nature more rights. By 2040, most every major river, mountain system and ocean off the coast of nations are protected by legal rights that they did not have in decades past.

Part of the reason to make parts of nature legal entities is so that nature can get compensated, or “made whole” when damage is done. Currently, when nature is harmed, it needs a person to be a plaintiff on its behalf. But any damages that are awarded due to harm to nature – are nearly always paid to the plaintiff, usually in the form of money. This often doesn’t help the nature that was harmed. Nature could be awarded legal rights so that nature can be restored, whatever that would look like.

Financial fiduciary duty includes health of society

Realizing that the concept of fiduciary duty in the sense of serving investor interests has perversely incentivized growth in financial assets at all costs, countries around the world redefine that "fiduciary duty” means, putting the health of society over individual financial returns.

Fiduciary duty up until these changes was often interpreted to mean the duty someone owed to their client to act in their clients best interest. This was interpreted to mean “financial returns above all else” until the early 2030s. However, public support for a movement away from economic growth as an organizing principle of society cleared the way for changes to fiduciary duty rules. These changes then allowed pension funds and other investment vehicles to focus more on “local” finance that solved real problems rather than investing in things that may have had a short-term return but were net-net negative for society.

Ditching GDP

Student protests around the world that began in 2027 resulted in many countries, first in the developing world, and eventually in the majority of the world to drop GDP as a measure of success.

Citizens in countries in the Global South started the trend in 2026 with a few stating that they would no longer track GDP because it ultimately led to countries in the Global North feeling the need to grow their economies which ultimately led to policies that extracted resources from and saddled unmanageable debt on countries in the Global South.

Two years later, the European Union followed suit, noting that although they are ahead of every metric about well-being and development than the United States, they are penalized for having lower GDP than the US. After that larger dominoes began to fall, with Japan, Canada, Australia New Zealand, Singapore and finally the UK all ditching GDP by 2035.

Seasonal based diets

A movement to eat more locally led to the proliferation of communities and apps that organized communities around more local and seasonal diets. State and local governments began to pass laws that heavily taxed produce from other countries that had previously been shipped from overseas (grapes from Chile shipped to Minnesota in February for example).

This began a campaign issue in US elections as food prices continued to rise. Over time, local communities decided to settle for more local and healthier diets that would be more local and cheaper. Over time this “eat local” movement became a virtue, as financing for grow local and seasonal became points a civic pride and a vote winner.

Cap on beef and dairy production

As people came to understand the environmental implications of diets heavy in beef and dairy, citizens began to call for boycotts on beef and higher prices on beef and dairy consumption, echoing the fight over fossil fuels in previous decades.

Because the campaign against beef and dairy called for a reduction in consumption and not in elimination, and the beef and dairy industry didn’t have to same lobbying money that oil and gas did, eventually laws and regulations were passed in the US aimed to decrease beef and dairy production by 15% by 2035, 20% by 2040, and 30% by 2050.

Public job guarantee

Late in 2029, Japan established the first national jobs guarantee as part of their efforts to deal with a quickly aging population. In the coming decades, most developed nations followed suit. The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants to work. These jobs likely aren’t going to be high-paying jobs in an economy. They are meant to match those willing to work, with work that needs to be done.

Generally, a job guarantee offers a fixed wage to anyone willing to work. Such a program may be funded at the state or local level but is administered at the local level. A jobs guarantee is an excellent tool to combat low-wage bullshit jobs (although high-wage jobs can be bullshit too) because a jobs guarantee sets a lower income floor for the economy. Employers can’t pay starvation wages in an economy with a job guarantee, because workers can always get a living wage from the employer of last resort – the government.

The aim of a jobs guarantee is to alleviate poverty, by providing jobs to those that want them. Job guarantees are also seen as a positive social policy that keeps people busy and active in their communities. Jobs also provide people with purpose and provide them with dignity. Most people want to work, and the government stepping in as the employer of last resort can provide those in a population that has a hard time finding a job with some money to pay their bills, yes, but also purpose, and a connection to their communities.

MMT champion becomes head of the Federal Reserve

A jobs guarantee is a key tenant of Modern Monetary Theory, which has become ascendant after people and then policymakers began to question economic orthodoxy that claimed that large national deficits would cripple economies.

As people came to understand that countries that issue their own currency can never go bankrupt, they began to demand more from their governments, realizing the answer “We can’t afford it,” was largely false.

This led to the first President of the US Federal Reserve that was a proponent of MMT in 2030.

AI replaces most lawyers / financial professionals.

The adoption of AI comes for more white-collar jobs, slowly replacing about have of lawyers and financial professionals across the world by 2050. When these number start reaching a critical mass of only about 5% in the early 2030s political support mysteriously materialized for Universal Basic Income across most Western societies.

No matter the reason, with less need for strive for the corner office, many professionals settled into less monetary rewarding jobs. This “settling” coupled with universal basic income and a four day work week slowly led to economies based less on economic growth and more on wellbeing economies.

More people focused on caring for the global aging population and trying to arrest the impacts of climate change and ecological overshoot. Unfortunately, global temperatures still rose to 2.6 degrees above pre-industrial level by 2050. But in 2049, for the first time in the century CO2 ppm actually dropped modesty for the first time, and ocean acidification was predicted to slowly reverse over the next decade.

Things were still plenty bad, but a corner was turned.

Number of global billionaires drops.

By the early 2030s, most Western governments around the world began more aggressively taxing the 1%, and the world’s billionaire class began to shrink by 2035. It’s 2050, and no one counts those things anymore. We wonder why we ever did.