Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Ryan Bourne, Cato's R. Evan Shaff Chair for the public understanding of economics.

Every so often, a manifesto appears arguing that the world has too much freedom and needs more direction from above.

The World Inequality Lab's new Global Justice Report, associated with French economist Thomas

Piccatee and arriving as Joseph Stiglitz pushes a G20 inequality panel, is one of them.

Cloaked in the language of sufficiency and sustainable convergence, it wants to reorient

the global economy around delivering rapid decarbonisation

and economic equality, both between and within countries, suggesting that the price of this

focus would be to cap national income in most countries to roughly $70,000 per person by

2100. That would leave many Americans worse off than today by the end of

this century. To get there, it proposes a global net wealth tax, a 90% top income tax rate,

legislation to half the amount of time we work, soaring transfers to poorer countries,

rapid decarbonisation, and efforts to shrink

leisure, manufacturing and construction industries to grow the health and education sectors.

How have we got to a position where prominent economists argue for this sort of degrowth ideology?

What would their proposals entail? And should we take these ideas for global planning seriously?

To discuss this, I'm joined by my Cato colleague, Marion Toope, who is the founder and editor of

Human Progress.org and co-author of the great book, Superabundance. Marion, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks, Ryan. Great to be here. So, Marian, let's start off. When somebody proposes such a

dramatic suite of policies as this, wanting to change the world so dramatically, no doubt they

have a pretty intense critique of where we are today and how the economy works today. So what did

you make of the way that they see the world as it is?

Well, Ryan, I feel like a mosquito on a nudist beach.

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