pensive ways of finding carbon.” When the price goes down, consumers conclude that they can drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. However the market fluctuates, the price does not factor in the externalities, the true costs of environmental impacts on the global economy.
Another shock is the “demographic timebomb,” the addition of another two billion people to the planet by mid-century, most of them in poorer countries. In the richer countries, falling birth rates and rising longevity are creating rapidly aging populations. With fewer working-age people to support more retirees, workers are under pressure to generate enough wealth to save for their own long retirement as well as contribute to the support of today’s retirees through payroll taxes. Demographic change puts additional stress on the economy in several ways: requiring the financial system to deliver high investment returns for retirement accounts, increasing the demands on public spending for the elderly, and increasing the flow of migrants from rapidly growing poor countries to slower growing but aging rich countries.
The world cannot afford a leisurely transformation to the postcapitalist economy Mason foresees. The world needs a rapid deployment of new technologies to produce as much as we can, but do it in a cleaner, greener way that mitigates environmental damage. The potential benefits are enormous, but the task of getting from here to there is daunting.
Because of the urgency of the situation, Mason believes that a spontaneous process of increasing information-based activity is not enough. The process needs to become a conscious project, based on the insight that “a new route beyond capitalism has opened up, based on promoting and nurturing non-market production and exchange, and driven by information technology.” He calls it “Project Zero” because “its aims are a zero-carbon energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary labour time as close as possible to zero.”
The state has a special role to play in Project Zero because only the state is “centralized, strategic and fast” enough to address the urgent problems. However, Mason rejects the old socialist idea of a centrally planned economy, arguing that a centralized bureaucracy cannot respond to new data fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in the information society. Recall the earlier point that the key agent of change will be the educated and networked individual, which implies a high degree of decentralization.
Limits on private capital
So what can the state do to facilitate the transition to postcapitalism? First, it can curb private economic power in industries where it has become a danger to the public good. The energy industry would be one, as the discussion of the climate issue illustrates. The state should actively discourage fossil fuel production and encourage cleaner sources of energy. Mason also sees a much larger role of government in the financial industry. One proposal sure to provoke controversy is that the state take control of the central bank in order to implement a monetary policy that helps debtors more than creditors. That would be a looser monetary policy that keeps interest rates low but allows the inflation rate to be somewhat higher. Over time, that erodes the real value of debt, in contrast to a strict monetary policy that protects wealthy lenders by placing primary emphasis on fighting inflation. Since government itself is a large debtor, that would help governments recover from the fiscal crisis resulting from demands for both low taxes on capital and high spending on social programs to assist struggling wage-earners.
Mason would also reorganize the banking system to make it less profit-driven, by encouraging non-profit banks, credit unions, peer-to-peer lenders, and “a comprehensive state-owned provider of financial services.” He would regulate the remaining profit-oriented banking to curb wasteful speculation and encourage its proper role of efficiently allocating capital to pr