Everyone knows (and feels) that when it comes to economic wealth, the UK is a very unequal society and that inequality is growing over time (after falling for decades from the Victorian period it started rising again in the last couple of decades and that has accelerated since the financial crash in 2008 and it accelerated even faster during Covid).
According to Google:
In 2020, the ONS calculated that the richest 10% of households hold 43% of all wealth. The poorest 50%, by contrast, own just 9%. More than that, for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.
A couple of images below show this inequality and the trend over time.
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Is there any disagreement that Fundamental Capitalism is now failing? I think the jury was out for a lot of the post-war period but I'm not sure there are many people now living in the UK that are happy with the prospect of inequality rising further and as we see more automation, big data systems and AI technology supplant existing systems the trend is only set to accelerate even further with more and more people being pushed into the low income class and the middle income class become smaller and smaller while the top percentiles increase exponentially. According to the World Economic Forum, one of the biggest challenges that western societies face in the future is mass obsolescence. There will almost certainly be a period where automation and AI will cause the loss of at least 25% of all jobs and a delay for new jobs to be created. There is also the possibility that it is simply impossible to replace all those jobs with new jobs and it looks like the era of 'not-real jobs' in government and charities is also scaling back and lets face it how many of us want to or are even capable of, are perky or interesting enough to do the new not-real jobs like having an Only Fans page, selling your farts on the internet, running a you tube channel or a big tik-tok following, being a successful online day trader or crypto investor or being an influencer. Let's face it, for a lot of humans, particularly if you live in the UK, it aint looking too good out there.
So what does the collapse of Fundamental Capitalism look like? I think it looks like what we see around us happening now- , the increase in inequality, the extermination of the middle class, polarisation of society, lack of motivation, a lack of opportunity, a breakdown in stable societal structures and hierarchical structures, a mass demand for banality and not being able to see much of a future. Fundamentally it also looks like the disconnection of people from nature and natural systems.
I also think that alongside that collapse we are beginning to see what a post GDP paradigm will look like. Fundamentally upgrading Capitalism into Sustainable Systems involves the capturing of externalities into value models, basically bringing things in like the value of Ecosystem Services into the market place. It's all started already, carbon credits, natural capital accounting, net gain, net zero and all building on ESG frameworks and the roots of multi-metric systems.
Indeed most of what is happening at the moment is green wash and bullshit and we are probably several extreme disasters (including wars of many shapes and forms) away from the kind of policy and technological changes that are required to actually move out of the GDP paradigm into a paradigm that measures growth in Ecological-Economic and Social terms. Presumably any new system in the future will be firmly digital based using big data and AI to manage complex planetary (and interplanetary !) management challenges including the redistribution of wealth and new digital based hierarchical , reward and motivational systems plus ecological management and natural capital management.
The more the GDP paradigm fails, the more hope there is for change. The worse things become the more hope there is for people to start demanding fundamental change. A lot of us are in a situation at the moment where things are shit but not shit enough to do anything about it. The wolves are howling out on the perimeter but they haven't crashed the doors down yet and started chewing on your nuts. That might be different for the new generation which are basically being thrown from the education bubble into the jaws of the canines so its more in their interest to drive these changes forward.
If you ask me, there will be a new type of wealthy person to aspire to be in the future and we can already see that coming too with the rise in millionaire and private nature conservation. There is a new elite emerging- the Natural Capitalist, someone who doesn't show off their large mansion and fancy cars and material wealth but someone who is defined by how much natural capital they own- how many species are in the land they own or the territory they manage, how much carbon sequestration, what is there Nature Positive and Carbon Positive value? Corporations are beginning to take on this value system and following COP15 there are now UN policies being introduced where companies now need to start reporting on natural capital. Biodiversity is the next carbon and it looks like we are set to see Biodiversity credits and biodiversity markets appearing soon- something I would fall over myself to get involved in (unfortunately I'm just a pleb with no elite contacts so might just be a big fan of all this and maybe invest a bit in it).
A new system needs a new Elite and what better type of Elite is there than an Elite that manages the planet sustainably and responsibly, drives the recovery of nature and generates more global equality. Personally I'm not a fan of Fundamental Communism or Socialism (I've always run my own business in a blended form of capitalist values and social and environmental models) and I believe that a gentle hierarchy, a gentle inequality is a better solution, so enough incentive to climb and also enough dire consequences if your lazy but not too steep and one with a large and healthy middle class. The current way that nature is managed is mainly through NGOs which is basically a communist like structure where nature reserves are collectively owned. This doesn't work at scale as we know (just look at the biodiversity trends) and that needs to change too with a more private and market focus.
Fundamental Capitalism and the GDP model (and nature being managed through collectives as a counter measure to that) was a crude way of dealing with the first stages of all this, just a way of dealing with abject poverty and creating global systems (at the expense of the environment and ecology) to form the foundations for the next stage of societal evolution. In that next stage I'd like to see a new middle class emerge, the Natural Capitalist middle class which is involved in a return to land ownership and nature, the dismantling of intensive agriculture and the rise of regeneration in private hands and the generation of a wealthy thriving private natural capital economy. At the moment this is already happening in the elite upper income class but a sustainable society needs a growing middle class in this sector.
Fundamental Capitalism is indeed failing but a return to Nature and private nature ownership is ( for some of us), hopefully a solution.
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