Ours

We think our wealth today comes from productive corporations and workers, but they merely add icing to a cake baked long ago. In this provocative book, Peter Barnes argues that most of today's wealth is co-inherited from nature and past human efforts, not individually earned. If some of that co-inherited wealth were placed in trust for each of us, living and yet-to-be born - creating what Barnes calls "universal property" - capitalism would be fundamentally transformed.

As Barnes notes, capitalism as we know it has two tragic flaws: it relentlessly widens inequality and destroys nature. Both flaws are a result of one-sided property rights that favor capital over everything else. Adding universal property to the current property mix would create a market economy in which businesses prosper, nature's limits are respected, and a large middle class thrives. This smart and concise book could set the agenda for a post-COVID world.

Auteur
Peter Barnes is a socially responsible entrepreneur and writer about capitalism. His previous books include Who Owns the Sky?, Capitalism 3.0, and With Liberty and Dividends For All.

Contenu
Acknowledgments
Foreword by James K. Boyce
Author's Note
1 What Is Universal Property?
2 Why Markets Fail
3 Twenty-First Century Realities
4 The Jobs Of Universal Property
5 Interlude for Imagination
6 Universal Money Pumps
7 Toll Gates at Nature's Edges
8 The Politics of Universal Property
9 The Adjacent Possible
Notes
Bibliography
Index