by Guy Dauncey  

Palgrave MacMillan, January 2026

Chapter 1: The Great Mistake

(Draft: Not the final version)

“Because we all share this planet Earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other, and with nature. This is not just a dream. It is a necessity.” – The Dalai Lama^[1]

Our world needs more kindness. People need more kindness. Nature needs more kindness. But we need it deep within our economies, where so many of our troubles begin. 

We have been told a thousand times that the free-market economy is the best and only kind of economy that works, but for so many people, and for nature, it’s not working. Surely, there must be a better way. Our capitalist economy has been built on the primacy of selfishness, and all around the world, because of this, things are going off the rails. What is the alternative? It’s the economics of kindness – and it’s not just an idea. It’s a very real thing. 

Before we begin, we must answer the question that’s causing so much anxiety: 

“What’s going wrong? Why is our world in such a mess?”

We’ve got inflation, and the rising cost of living. We’ve got stagnant wages. We’ve got the housing crisis. We’ve got the climate crisis, and the collapse of biodiversity. We’ve got the ridiculous increase in inequality, and the tax-avoiding billionaires. We’ve got an epidemic of loneliness. We’ve got seemingly endless wars. We’ve got refugees. We’ve got millions of people who desperately want to escape to a more stable country. And just when we need calm decisive action, we’ve got anger, crazy rabbit-holes of hate, and attacks on democracy, with the billionaires seemingly wanting to rule the world. 

So many people are struggling financially. So many people feel disillusioned. So many people feel angry that some people can be so rich, while they can’t pay their rent or mortgage. When young Canadians aged 16 to 25 were surveyed in 2022 almost three quarters said they felt frightened about the future.^[2]

How to make sense of things? A thousand philosophers have offered a thousand answers, but our troubles seem only to get worse, and the threat of authoritarian fascism becomes ever more real. 2073 beckons, if you’ve seen Asif Kapadia’s dark and alarming movie.^[3] The billionaires are having a field day, but billions are struggling, getting more frustrated and angrier every day.

I have spent my life working in various movements for social change, including thirty years in the climate movement. Through it all, I have sought answers to questions like this. In pursuit of understanding I have become a voracious reader of books, always searching for new pieces of the puzzle. It was not until 2016, however, that I had the courage to do a deep dive into the realm that had always intimidated me: economics. When I studied it at university none of it seemed to connect with my real-world concerns. I now realize that such intimidation is widespread, perhaps even intentional. Very few people understand how money is created, or why the central bankers can print money to bail out their fellow bankers, but not to tackle poverty or finance solutions to the climate crisis, which threatens our very existence.

After eight years of immersion in anthropology, economics, and economic history I have thrown out all answers save one, which is embarrassingly simple. No long words. No post-graduate degrees needed. The reason why our world is in such trouble is because we have been persuaded to craft our economies around the primacy of selfishness and capital gain, rather than the primacy of kindness, cooperation, and social and ecological gain. 

This crafting has been written into the principles of conventional economics and embraced by millions of students, who have carried them into their jobs and used them to shape the models and policies that govern the economy. But the principles are wrong – wrong in the way that the belief that the Sun goes round the Earth was wrong. Wrong in the way that the belief that cholera was caused by a miasma in the air was wrong. Trying to navigate our way to a better world using such mistaken principles is guaranteed to bring disaster, just as it would if NASA tried to navigate its way to Mars using the principles of neoclassical astronomy, with Ptolemy as their guide.

In the real world, we are not always selfish and rational. Sometimes we are. Sometimes we are not. We choose how we behave, based on various influences. Most people want to act cooperatively, as long as other do too. The belief that all humans are selfish rational actors, and that the only way to moderate our selfishness is through a free competitive market with minimal government interference, is dangerously wrong. This is our great mistake. Selfish investors love such thinking, because it justifies their quest to maximize their capital gains while ignoring the housing distress, the ecological collapse, and the climate chaos that this kind of thinking causes. And now that things are falling apart, we are in danger of making our second great mistake, if we turn to strong-man demagogues and populists who promise salvation by blaming alien ‘others’, as Mussolini did a hundred years ago, followed by Hitler. 

A cooperative way of running an economy is not only possible. It is also better in every way, regardless of how you vote or frame your political identity, conservative or progressive, republican or democrat, green or purple. An economy based on kindness will bring wellbeing to all, regardless of political allegiance. It will shrink our differences. It will bring stability. It will protect nature. It will restore neighborliness. It will make communities strong. It will make people happy.

During the last two hundred years, western economies have oscillated between periods when wealthy people won power and used it to their selfish advantage, and periods when ordinary people, the 90%, won power and used it to establish universal suffrage, labour unions, public healthcare, the welfare state, laws to protect nature, and so much more, for our collective benefit.

Following the horrors of the Great Depression and World War 2, there was consensus among most nations in favor of policies that supported economic growth for the benefit and wellbeing of all. Investors who wanted to supress labor unions and remove banking restrictions were themselves supressed, which they experienced as a frustrating irritant. They organized under the banner of neoliberalism and by the 1980s they were back in power, reshaping banking, trade, and most of the global economy around the economics of selfishness. Over those years, they transferred $62.5 trillion out of the pockets of working people and into the pockets of the wealthiest 10%.^[4]

Using their ability to control democracy through campaign donations, they established the primacy of capital gain as the guiding principle of existence, a story that has been well told by the American visionary Marjorie Kelly in Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (2023). They made it culturally acceptable for investors to maximize their returns on investment, regardless of the harms it caused to workers, communities, nature, the climate, and democracy. It’s a political philosophy they call neoliberalism. Since 1980, they have taken over many functions of government, replacing them with illegitimate, unelected, opaque agents and organizations, as Susan George reveals in Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are Seizing Power (2015). They draw strength from assumptions of selfishness that are embedded within conventional economics, giving them permission to think and act in selfish ways. As Susan George says, “Aside from the fact that it doesn’t work and cannot create a healthy economy serving everyone, neoliberalism is selfish and cruel, even anti-human.”

It gets worse. The selfish pursuit of freedom in a capitalist economy easily aligns itself with hate, bigotry, violence, and fascist politics, as the scholar Henri Giroux fears. ^[5] 21^st century capitalism can turn oligarchs into monsters, as the editors of Prospect Magazine have observed,^[6] threaten the twilight of democracy, as the economist Martin Wolf fears,^[7]  and bring tyranny, as the historian Timothy Snyder fears.^[8]

In the jungle, among chimpanzees, selfishness drives the impulse to become an alpha-male. Understanding the threat that self-importance posed to their cooperative way of life, our hunter-gatherer ancestors developed ways to suppress it. In so doing, they found a way to live cooperatively that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. With the coming of food surpluses, however, the impulse to dominate escaped suppression, and for most of the past 5,000 years it has shaped our societies and economies. Over the last few hundred years, however, the impulse to cooperate has re-asserted itself in furious demands for fair democracy, votes for women, fair competitive markets, justice for workers, an end to slavery, solutions to the climate crisis, respect for nature, and so much more.

What of Nature?

Most of us have based our relationship with nature on the assumption of superiority, believing that nature and the animal realm exist to meet our needs, rather than pausing to ask, with compassion, “What are your needs?” We have applied the same attitude to Earth’s atmosphere, with alarming consequences. Business leaders have assumed the right to cut down forests, empty the oceans of fish, and spray harmful chemicals across the land. Indigenous people have always thought and acted otherwise, as have millions of other people, but our progress is slow. Far too slow.

For most of our history our ancestors were not a dominant species, so their impact on nature was limited. Later, they changed their landscapes through the use of fire, and wherever they traveled outside Africa and Eurasia they wiped out the megafauna, including the mammoths and the flightless birds. With the coming of agriculture, their ignorance about the soil often caused desertification. The constant grazing of their sheep and goats destroyed trees, creating the ecological barrens that are widespread today in North Africa, the Middle East, Scotland, and Wales. In recent times things have gotten really bad for nature due to the widespread use of fossil fuels, chainsaws, explosives, pesticides, and bottom trawlers. The kindest of people can live in denial of the cruelty that takes place in a factory farm, veal crate, or puppy mill, or the destruction caused by ocean fisheries, clearcut forestry, or palm oil plantations. When we do extend our kindness to nature, however, we may be astonished at how rapidly she responds. 

Four Thick Fogs

That harm that selfishness can cause in a family is easy to see, but when it comes to the economy, our ability to see it has been obscured by four thick fogs. The first is the fog of ecological ignorance, which makes us oblivious to the harms we cause. The second is the fog of history. For thousands of years our ancestors lived in a world dominated by wealthy rulers and landowners to whom they were compelled to be subservient, whether as slaves, peasants, or workers. Most women were dominated by men, and most people with a darker skin were dominated by people with a paler skin. The dream that we might live cooperatively, with kindness instead of selfishness, was dismissed as pie-in-the-sky utopianism. 

The third fog has been the fog of neo-classical economics. For more than a hundred years, economists have claimed that economics is a science and that all humans behave like homo economicus, being consistently rational and self-interested, rather than homo cooperativus, who balances self-interest with cooperation and kindness. They have used this falsehood to justify their belief that a free-market capitalist economy is the only kind of economy that works, and that everything else is the slippery slope to tyranny. In this way they have intimidated the public, making it hard for people to realize that a different kind of economy is possible – a cooperative economy in which we show kindness and compassion to each other and to nature. 

The fourth fog has been the fog of deliberate deception. For a hundred years, in America and elsewhere, business leaders and media millionaires have gone out of their way to promote selfishness and resistance to regulations, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway reveal in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023). They have waged a well-financed campaign of propaganda to persuade people that attempts by governments to regulate the economy, hinder the power of monopolies, impose fair distributive taxation, and grant workers the right to organize are an attack not just on the rights of investors, but on their God-given freedom.^[9]Their propaganda has been financed by powerful industrialists and oligarchs, but between 1933 and 1980, starting with the New Deal in America, millions of people pushed back, building instead an economy that aimed to be fair and respectful to all.^[10] In the 1980s the oligarchs and would-be oligarchs seized back control, however, restoring the rule of selfishness and greed, leading us to the ocean of trouble we in today. 

The encouraging news is that for several centuries another kind of economy has been quietly growing, based on cooperation and kindness. The neoliberal capitalist economy is not the only kind of economy that is possible. The alternative is the economics of kindness – and it’s a very real thing. It changes the way we think about our economies, including our banks, businesses, housing, communities, jobs, farms, the way we create money, and the way we trade. Such an economy is not capitalist, but nor is it socialist in the traditional use of the term. It is cooperative. It seeks the wellbeing of all, including nature.

The components of this economy have been hiding in plain sight for thousands of years. Over the centuries its pioneers have developed the cooperative use of money, the market economy itself in its non-abusive form, cooperative businesses, and entire cooperative economies that are more successful than their capitalist counterparts. From the Bronx to Bali, millions of people already know the dignity and stability of working in an economy based not on the ruthless pursuit of profit and power, but the cooperative pursuit of a better life for all. 

The desire for such an economy is deeply rooted among those who believe in a religion of kindness, who have not been infected by the virus of dogmatism or religious tribalism. The Jewish rabbi and scholar Hillel (70 BC – 10 AD) said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the entire Torah.” Jesus, when asked “Which is the most important commandment?” responded that it was to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and then to love your neighbor as yourself. Islam encourages kindness and compassion towards everyone, no matter one’s religion, status, or color. The Rotarians have a four-way test: “Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?” The Jains base their entire worldview on the need for kindness. At the core of the Sikh religion is the principle of sewa, which asks all Sikhs to engage in acts of kindness, service and compassion, and eschew self-importance. Confucius’ golden rule was never to impose on others that which you would not choose for yourself. For the Dalai Lama, “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy.” The fact that some religious followers behave otherwise does not invalidate the call to suppress self-importance and show kindness to all.

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.

If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

– The Dalai Lama

We need to extend our kindness deep into the heart of our economies. And it needs strength, to suppress the impulse to become self-important and dominate. We can turn things around; we can transform the economy; we can build a better world. How can we despair, I ask myself, when most people don’t yet know the myriad solutions we could be embracing? It is like saying “No, I can’t finish this marathon,” when you have only run two hundred yards. I am of one mind with Sergio Fajardo, the former Mayor of Medellin in Colombia, and his colleague Alejandro Echeverri, who, when working to transform Medellin from a hell of drugs and violence into a civic wonder of parks, pedestrian spaces, museums, art, culture, and social justice, wrote that:

Pessimism is an indulgence,

Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention,

Despair is an insult to the imagination.^[11]

Given the dire nature of the climate crisis and the speed at which we are destroying nature, there is critical urgency to this work. In addition to transforming our economies, we must build resilience against the next climate disaster, and prepare for the next financial crash, which will bring a surge in unemployment, homelessness, despair, and anger. We must inspire people to come together to build a better future for all. If we fail, we risk a repeat of the 1920s and 1930s, when fearful people in Italy, Spain, and Germany gave their loyalty to fascist bullies and strongmen rather than to those who were working to build a more just society. 

Right-wing authoritarians offer three simple values: love, fear, and freedom. Love of homeland and tradition; fear of crime, social breakdown, communists, aliens, and immigrants; freedom from government regulations. They offer one solution – give your power to me, and I will deport, jail, or kill everyone who opposes our efforts to restore our homeland and our beloved traditions. 

Those who think otherwise can also offer three simple values: kindness, democracy, and freedom. Kindness to everyone, including our political opponents, and to nature. Healthy democracy that will encourages everyone to participate. And the freedom that allows us to take pride in personal and cooperative achievement, enabling us to make the most of our lives.

Building such an economy will generate heated resistance from the élites who benefit from the status quo. Women did not win the vote without prolonged and bitter struggles. Americans did not achieve the New Deal in the 1930s without bitter resistance from industry leaders who were determined to hold onto their monopoly powers. Scandinavians did not win their relatively egalitarian prosperity without turmoil and strife in the 1920s and 1930s. The economics of kindness goes beyond the norms of most social democracies, however, which submit to the dominance of capitalism. We need an economy in which all can flourish, children and elders, women and men, workers and investors, rivers and reindeer alike. 

This is not a fantasy. Such an economy is already being built in the world’s three million cooperative businesses, including in Bologna, Italy, where most of the city’s residents are owners in one or more cooperative. 

It is being built wherever welfare policies provide a safety net for all through public systems of healthcare, education, and social security.

It is being built wherever anti-trust policies prevent the development of monopolies, which are a primary cause of inflation. 

It is being built by the world’s 8,000 B Corporations, which have redefined their purpose and practices to serve the common good and nature. 

It is being built in Denmark, where most people live with kindness to each other in a social democracy with a successful entrepreneurial economy.

It is being built in in Ethiopia, with its 82,000 farm cooperatives, and in Japan, where almost every farmer, fisherman, or forest owner is a member of a cooperative.

It is being built in Ecuador, which has granted legal rights to nature, and enshrined the right of people to live in a healthy environment into its constitution.

Is it being built in Amsterdam, where citizens are using Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economy model to build a green, socially just economy.

It is being built in South Korea, where the government is supporting the growth of thousands of cooperatives and social enterprises.

It is being built wherever labor unions are respected; wherever women play an active role in corporate governance; and wherever workers have seats on the company board. 

It is being built in Germany, where community and state-owned banks serve 64% of the financial market, and in Vancouver, where Vancity’s 560,000 members enjoy an ethical alternative to the big banks.

It is being built in housing cooperatives and other non-profit solutions to the housing crisis, where people share not just housing, but community wealth.

It is being built in Preston, once one of England’s poorest towns, where the hospitals, airport, colleges, university, police, and local government are allocating a share of their procurement budgets to local producers. 

It is being built in Quebec, where 11,200 social purpose organizations generate $48 billion annually in sales, creating 220,000 jobs, and an economic security that was previously disappearing.

It is being built in Kerala, where members of the Kudumbashree movement are eliminating poverty through their network of 290,000 neighbourhood groups, led mostly by women.

It is being built in Egypt, where businesses and social enterprises in the Sekem network are integrating the economic, ecological, cultural and social dimensions of life, creating an economy of love.

It is being built in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where cooperatives and private businesses are working in partnership with their governments to create one of Italy’s happiest and most successful regional economies.

It is being built in Mondragon, Spain, where 75,000 people work in a hundred worker-owned cooperatives, building an advanced, worker-owned, democratically governed, cooperative industrial economy that competes successfully against fierce global competition.

We are living in a critical period of our history. In response to the growing resentment, anger, and authoritarianism, we need a global movement for cooperation and kindness that will bring a profound transformation of the global economic system, as the French economist Thomas Piketty believes we need. ^[12] We need a new story that will inspire people all across the political spectrum, as the British author George Monbiot believes we need. The economics of kindness is that story. It comes from our hearts, which long for peace, stability, compassion, justice, and kindness.

Capitalism is not, after all, an economic system. It is a cultural system based on values of selfishness, which are expressed in the economy through the use of capital. A cooperative economy, by contrast, is a cultural system based on values of cooperation and kindness, which are expressed in the economy through the use of democracy. The New Yorker journalist Nick Romeo, in his encouraging book The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy (2024), writes that “What we need is not a revolution in values, but an economic system that reflects the values we already have.” By understanding this, we can undo our great mistake and build for ourselves a cooperative economy that will nurture kindness and wellbeing for all, for humans and nature alike. 

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^[1] Lama, His Holiness The Dalai. “The 14th Dalai Lama’s Nobel Lecture.” 1989 The 14th Dalai Lama, 7 Feb. 2024, www.dalailama.com/messages/acceptance-speeches/nobel-peace-prize/nobel-peace-prize-nobel-lecture Accessed Apr 23 2024

^[2] Lindsay P. Galway a, et al. “Climate Emotions and Anxiety among Young People in Canada: A National Survey and Call to Action.” The Journal of Climate Change and Health, Elsevier, 10 Jan. 2023, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667278223000032 Accessed Apr 23 2024

^[3] Cadwalladr, Carole. “‘Trump Has Been Explicit about Revenge’: Asif Kapadia on His New Film about the Threat to Democracy.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Dec. 2024 http://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/15/asif-kapadia-2073-amy-winehouse-senna-maradona-trump 

^[4] Price, Carter, and Kathryn Edwards. “Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018 | Rand Corporation.” Rand Corporation, www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html Accessed 7 Feb. 2024. At $2.5 trillion a year, the “stolen money” had reached $62.5 trillion by 2025.  https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

^[5] Giroux, Henry A. “DeSantis’s ‘Freedom’ Is a Force for Domination, Not a Key Form of Empowerment.” Truthout, Truthout, 3 Oct. 2023, www.truthout.org/articles/desantiss-freedom-is-a-force-for-domination-not-a-key-form-of-empowerment     Accessed Apr 23 2024

^[6] Staff, Prospect. “The Art of Loving.” The American Prospect, 7 Aug. 2023, www.prospect.org/podcasts/07-28-2023-elon-musk-billionaire-brain-worms   Accessed Apr 23 2024

^[7] Wolf, Martin. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Allen Lane, 2023. 

^[8] Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Thorndike Press, 2021. 

^[9] Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. Bloomsbury, 2023. 

^[10] Stoller, Matt. Goliath: The 100-Year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2019. 

^[11] Davis, Wade. Magdalena: River of Dreams. Vintage Canada, 2022. Page 157.

^[12] Piketty, Thomas. A Brief History of Equality. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022. p. 103