WE CAN’T AFFORD IT, GO AWAY: “Sustainable Development’s” $4 Trillion Price Tag.

If you ask the question – what would it take to put the world on a track of sustainable development? – the best guesses of the experts who have spent most time trying to figure this out tend to congregate around $4 trillion in investment, per annum over the next decade. This was the conclusion of a panel of experts working for the COP27 meeting in November 2022 headed up by Vera Songwe, Nicholas Stern and Amar Bhattacharya.

One could write an interesting story about the calculation of these numbers and the remarkable resurgence of world-level development thinking they imply. To be talking about a “big push” harkens back to the early days of development economics. Is the message from Vera Songwe, Nicholas Stern and Amar Bhattacharya that we need go “back to the future”?

You might say that as in earlier generations of development thinking there is something disembodied, utopian, anti-political about asking this question – what will it take? – and answering with a round number – $ 4 trillion per annum. After all, there is no “we”, no global government that will answer this call. Nation states pursue geopolitics. As ever, national politicians want to retain power. They have short time-horizons. Capitalism is driven by profit, pure and simple. What kind of political process do we envision that would mobilize and direct this immense amount of money? What kind of revolution would it take? . . .

The experts and their networks form a world that is real enough. This circularly self-recruiting epistemic community is closely connected not only to academia and think tanks but institutions like the World Bank and private business. One could write an interesting study of how such expert groups are constituted and constitute themselves.

The record of the “experts” over the past few years does not inspire me to want to give them more power or resources. These people have no skin in the game; if their ideas fail — and, history suggests, they will, and disastrously — they will suffer no consequences.

And note that the $4 trillion figure is per annum. My prediction: $2 trillion will go to various forms of graft, and most of the rest will be spent in ways that do more harm than good.