The season of superlatives — that is how it is. Every week and every month we are gaining at the hottest, coldest, the driest, the worst. They don't have the fiscal space that's required for many countries to actually combat some of the severest problems of our time, and we do not currently have the action that we require globally to treat these problems collectively, systemically, and in an economy-wide way.
These problems require us to tackle them as problems that require outcomes and solutions. What a mission approach does is it begins with a challenge — take the water challenge, turns it into a mission, for example making sure that no child dies due to the fact they don't have access to clean drinking water — and then breaks down that problem into all sorts of different solutions that are required across different sectors. So from a challenge to a mission and a moonshot to an intersectoral collaboration. Fundamentally, the missions are designed to be able to achieve the things that governments ought to be doing but very often don't do. How do we create a cleaner, greener society? How do we get people to love themselves? How do we get people to ensure that others can eat and others can have access to water? How do we keep public safety and public health? So all of those are part of the common good, because the truth is if we drop the ball in public health, then the whole society's at risk. If we drop the ball in terms of citizen security, the whole society's at risk. If we lose our biodiversity, then the balance of us and the rest of the environment is at risk. So in a very real way, the missions are designed to achieve a better planet and a better people, but that doesn't happen on its own. And what missions then require is for governments to rethink all the different levers they have, whether it's public sector procurement, whether it's a public loan, whether it's the design of an innovation collaboration — how do we use these tools to catalyze bottom-up experimentation towards mission accomplished? Because if we don't identify what unites us and what our common purpose is in saving both the planet and people, we won't be able to do it on our own. The real need to actually have a new framework that allows us again to hold all the different actors to account and to make sure that we treat these problems with the same kind of urgency that we treat wars. We are at that stage of moment where not just Christianity but almost every region has its...
If we took the fact that shipping has a value of $7 trillion and you were to take a 1% levy, you would raise $7 billion minimum. Think of what happened with COVID. Was the goal simply vaccines? Of course not. The goal was to make sure that everyone in the world had access to those vaccines, so that if you were to look backward at how we produced that vaccine, how we had solidarity to produce that vaccine and distribute the vaccine, instead of having what we ended up having, as Dr. Tedros, the head of the World Health Organization, calls vaccine apartheid.
Mariana has been great in helping us put together many of these principles in the context of a practical way to bring our economies together and to bring our societies up, and we recognize that human beings like tasks, they like missions, and if you give people a mission, they do their work to complete it.
So I've had the fortune to work on this idea of mission-oriented policy with different governments, from a small island state like Barbados to large countries like Brazil, Colombia, even the United States of America. And my recent thinking is that in order to actually land this mission-oriented policy to be an economy-wide transformational policy, we have to fundamentally rethink the underlying economics. We can't just talk about the good stuff as the public goods that are correcting for something the private sector is not doing — that's just a correction mindset, will always be too little, too late, just patching things up. What I've been working on, in fact, this is the objective of the new book that I'm writing, is to rethink common good economics. The common good is not just a correction, it's an objective, and the objective is not divorced from the how we're going to achieve it. So just like with political philosophy, where you had Aristotle talking about the telos, which was the goal, and then the polis, which was the democracy, the participation amongst different actors in terms of debating that goal itself — we need that in our modern-day economies to have a mission-oriented approach. Yes, that's the goal, but the how we get there, how we collaborate, how we innovate, how we structure finance, how we structure water rights and property rights really, really matters. So common good economics to me is an outcomes-oriented economics where the how matters as much as the what, and it's about objectives and not corrections. It's the ex-ante pre-distribution, not just the ex-post redistribution mindset.
This new way of thinking about the common good, in my opinion, has to actually be founded on top of some pillars that we hold the system accountable. And the five different pillars that I've been thinking about are: first, direction and purpose — not surprising given all my work on missions; second, the admission that this is also about co-creation and participation — this is the polis part of Aristotle's theory of the common good; the third is also about sharing — sharing knowledge, especially in the 21st century where we talk so much about collective intelligence. How do we share the knowledge along the way? How do we bang heads together but also structure that, for example through patent pools, but also knowledge-sharing agreements in these collaborations? The fourth is sharing not just the knowledge but the rewards, the profits — how do we socialize both risks and rewards? The Prime Minister of Barbados says, 'Share the burden, share the bounty.' And the fifth, very important, is about transparency and accountability. If we don't have the data sharing in terms of what's actually happening in the system, we can't then actually hold it accountable — who's doing what and why.
Listen to the words of those leaders to breathe these concepts of solidarity and to bring them at the most concrete level in terms of national finance, global finance, and again hold the system to account and don't mince their words at these large, large global conferences, whether it's the COP conference or the World Bank conferences, to really make sure that we are all working collectively because we simply do not have time to waste.
