Many Experts are Worried! (The World Economy Is a Machine Optimised For a Function That Is Killing Its Host)

In Europe, they are twice as likely to expect worsening conditions in the next six months as they are to expect improvement. Half of business professionals globally predict increasing unemployment in their countries, the largest share since September 2020. Policy uncertainty permeates every forecast. Consumer sentiment has collapsed across the developed world. Yet the spreadsheets still function. The metrics still compile. China’s GDP growth is projected at 5 per cent. Its trade surplus has hit $1 trillion for the first time in history. Global growth forecasts hover between 2.3 and 3.2 per cent. The system persists. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached 425.7 parts per million. This is 52 per cent above pre-industrial levels. Global temperatures are on track to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages within the decade. Carbon emissions hit an all-time high of 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025. The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5°C is virtually exhausted. Four years at current emission levels and the budget is gone. The economists measure the slowdown. They calculate the risks. They model the uncertainty. But the machine still runs. The trade numbers still flow. Capital still accumulates. This is what counts.

China is supposedly the success story of 2025. Despite tariffs, despite weak domestic consumption, despite deflationary pressures, the engine is still accelerating. The trade surplus hit $1 trillion in the first 11 months of the year alone. November saw a record 3.5 million vehicles roll off the assembly lines. But here is what the headlines miss: while the world worries about Chinese electric vehicles flooding Western markets, 76 per cent of China’s auto exports since 2020 have been fossil fuel cars. Gasoline. Diesel. The old combustion engines that China cannot sell at home because its domestic market has shifted to EVs. They are building cars they cannot buy. The EV subsidies that crushed Volkswagen, GM, and Nissan in China did not kill the gasoline factories. They left them idle. China now has capacity for 30 million gasoline vehicles annually but only 20 million EVs. The maths is brutal. The factories run to keep employment up, to service state debts, to maintain the fiction of growth. The surplus must go somewhere. Poland. South Africa. Uruguay. Mexico. Chile. Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa. Markets with scarce EV infrastructure. Markets where Chinese state-owned dinosaurs (SAIC, Dongfeng, Changan, BAIC) can dump 4.3 million petrol-burning vehicles this year alone. The $1 trillion trade balance is not a trophy. It is a pressure valve releasing fossil fuel dependency into the Global South. “The fact that we are state-owned is key,” said Dongfeng’s Central Europe manager. “There is no question that we will survive.” This is not resilience. This is planned obsolescence at planetary scale. China’s domestic green transition is being exported as carbon lock-in. While Beijing lectures the world on climate leadership, its legacy automakers flood emerging markets with the combustion engines it no longer wants. The economists call this growth. They see the export volumes. Goldman Sachs raises its forecast. The IMF raises its forecast. But this is not net growth. This is displacement. This is the externalisation of contradiction. China solves its domestic overcapacity crisis by locking the developing world into decades of fossil fuel infrastructure. The pie is not expanding. The carbon budget is burning.

The European Slaughter

In Berlin and Stuttgart, the mood is funereal. The German industrial model (import cheap Russian energy, export expensive machines to China) has suffered a double decapitation. The energy long gone. Now, the market is gone too. For decades, Europe believed its luxury brands were immune. They were wrong. In 2025, the firewall collapsed. Mercedes-Benz sales in China plunged 27 per cent in the third quarter. BMW is down 11.2 per cent. Even Ferrari is shipping 13 per cent fewer cars to the region. The Chinese consumer, once the saviour of German industry, has turned away. They are buying BYDs, they are buying Nios, or they are not buying at all. Walk into a dealership in Beijing: a Porsche Panamera, once a store of value comparable to gold, now sheds 30 per cent of its price the moment it leaves the lot. Deflation has come for the status symbols. The CEO of Mercedes calls it “hyper-competition.” This is a polite term for execution. The German factories are idling. The workers are nervous. The capital is fleeing. But the knife has another edge. While German manufacturers bleed, Chinese-owned brands are lobbying Brussels to tighten the noose. Volvo and Polestar, both owned by China’s Geely conglomerate, are urging the European Union to maintain the 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel cars. Their argument: “The Chinese will not pause.” If Europe delays the ban, Chinese competitors will dominate. The irony is exquisite. The same Chinese industrial policy flooding the Global South with 4.3 million gasoline cars now uses its European subsidiaries to demand that Europe ban combustion engines. China plays both sides. It pushes Europe towards an EV-only future that German manufacturers cannot afford to reach, while simultaneously dumping the fossil fuel vehicles it no longer wants on markets in Poland, South Africa, Uruguay. The regulatory squeeze complements the market rout. Volkswagen and BMW lobby for delays. Volvo and Polestar, speaking for Beijing, demand acceleration. The European Commission wavers. Germany wants breathing room. China wants the kill. Europe is not just stagnant; it is being hollowed out by the very forces the economists are celebrating in Beijing. This is not competition. This is a controlled demolition.

The Global Stagnation

Step back. Look at the world economy in December 2025. Global GDP growth is projected between 2.3 per cent and 3.2 per cent, depending on which institution you ask. The World Bank warns this will be the weakest period of sustained growth in decades, outside of outright recessions. The United States is slowing under the weight of tariff wars and policy uncertainty. Japan is struggling. The emerging markets that are not China face mounting challenges: reduced exports, lower commodity prices, tighter financial conditions, elevated debt burdens. And yet, the system persists. Capital continues to seek returns. Trade continues, rerouted through Vietnam and Indonesia to bypass tariffs. Production continues, shifted to Southeast Asia and Mexico. The machine adapts. The machine survives. This is what capitalism does. It finds a way. But at what cost? The 2025 Global Carbon Budget projects 38.1 billion tonnes of fossil carbon dioxide emissions this year. This is a new record. Fossil fuel emissions have never been higher. Global warming projections based on current policies now point to 2.8°C. The Paris Agreement is failing. Not because countries are not trying, but because economic growth and carbon emissions remain structurally linked. You can improve efficiency. You can shift to renewables. But if the underlying imperative is endless expansion, if GDP must grow, if productivity must increase, if trade volumes must rise, then emissions will follow.

The Property Trap

Property is where the contradictions crystallise. It is where capital parks when productive investment opportunities dry up. It is where households store what little wealth they can accumulate. It is where states extract tax revenue and where banks create credit. Here in 2025, it is breaking everywhere at once.

In China, the property sector is in its fourth year of managed collapse. Evergrande, Country Garden, and dozens of smaller developers have defaulted. Construction has stalled on millions of pre-sold apartments. Local governments, dependent on land sales for 40 per cent of their revenue, are starving. The official line is “controlled adjustment.” The reality is systematic deflation. Property prices in major cities have fallen 10 to 15 per cent from their peak. In smaller cities, the decline exceeds 30 per cent. But here is what matters: Chinese households have 70 per cent of their wealth in property. This is not a market correction. This is the erasure of middle-class savings at scale. The Party cannot allow a full crash without risking social stability. But it cannot reflate the bubble without creating the very speculation it claims to oppose. So it manages. It injects liquidity. It lowers mortgage rates. It removes purchase restrictions. The measures are calibrated to prevent collapse, not to restore growth. The property sector, which once accounted for 25 to 30 per cent of GDP, is being slowly squeezed down to something the system can bear. But capital must go somewhere. If not into property, then where? The stock market is a casino. Consumer spending is weak. Productive investment opportunities in a deflationary environment are scarce. So capital sits. It waits. Or it leaves.

But here is what the metrics do not capture: what has already been built. Between 2011 and 2013, China poured more concrete than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. Concrete production alone accounts for 8 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Steel, which goes into every high-rise, every shopping centre, every infrastructure project, accounts for another 7 per cent. China has built entire cities that stand empty. Zhengzhou New District. Ordos. Tianducheng. Miles of apartment blocks with no residents. Shopping centres with no shoppers. Roads with no traffic. The construction was not for use. It was for growth. It was to keep the GDP numbers rising, to keep the workers employed, to keep the debt serviced. The buildings are monuments to a system that must expand even when expansion serves no human need. And every tonne of concrete poured, every beam of steel installed, every pane of glass fitted, released carbon into an atmosphere that cannot absorb it. They built the future. Then they discovered the future was uninhabitable.

In Europe, the picture is equally grim but differently structured. Germany’s property market, once the bastion of stability, has seen commercial real estate values plunge 20 per cent since 2022. Residential construction has frozen. Rising interest rates have made mortgages unaffordable for first-time buyers while simultaneously crushing the collateral values banks depend on. In Britain, the story is even more perverse. Property prices have remained stubbornly high despite stagnant wages, collapsing productivity, and chronic underinvestment in infrastructure. Why? Because property is not housing in Britain. It is a rentier asset class. Buy-to-let landlords, institutional investors, and foreign capital treat British housing stock as a financial instrument. The result: homeownership rates among the young have collapsed, private rents consume 35 to 40 per cent of income nationally, but exceed 50 per cent in London and major cities, for those under 30 it can be more like 60 per cent, and social housing has been liquidated. Britain has built a property market that functions for capital appreciation but not for habitation. Rishi Sunak claimed he would build 300,000 homes per year. Keir Starmer has promised 1.5 million over five years. Neither will deliver. Not because of planning constraints alone, but because the structure of the market makes building unprofitable unless land values continue to rise. And land values can only rise if access to credit expands. And credit can only expand if wages rise or interest rates fall. But wages are stagnant and inflation makes rate cuts impossible. The contradiction is total. Britain needs more housing. But more housing would lower prices. Lower prices would destroy the collateral underpinning household wealth and bank balance sheets. So nothing is built. The market remains tight. Prices stay elevated. An entire generation is locked out.

The United States presents a variation on the same theme. Post-pandemic, property prices surged 40 to 50 per cent in many markets, driven by loose monetary policy and remote work. Mortgage rates were at historic lows. Then came inflation. Then came rate hikes. By 2025, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate hovers near 7 per cent. Buyers have vanished. Sellers refuse to move because trading a 3 per cent mortgage for a 7 per cent mortgage is financial suicide. The market has frozen. Existing home sales are at their lowest level since the 1990s. Meanwhile, corporate landlords have consolidated their positions. Single-family rental companies now own over 600,000 homes. Private equity has moved into manufactured housing, mobile home parks, and affordable housing, raising rents aggressively. Housing has financialised. It is no longer primarily shelter. It is an asset class generating returns for institutional investors while locking out working-class buyers. Homelessness has reached record levels. Tent encampments line the streets of Los Angeles, Portland, and San Francisco. The richest country in the world cannot house its population because housing is not produced for use. It is produced for profit. And profit requires scarcity.

This is the property trap. And it is not just a crisis of affordability. It is a crisis of carbon. Construction and buildings account for nearly 40 per cent of global CO2 emissions. This is not just operational emissions, the energy required to heat and cool buildings. This is embodied emissions: the carbon released in producing cement, steel, glass, and timber. The carbon released in demolition and construction. The carbon embedded in every structure before anyone ever switches on a light. The existing global building stock is catastrophically energy-inefficient. Retrofitting it to any reasonable standard would cost trillions. Not retrofitting it means ongoing massive emissions just to keep the buildings habitable. There is no good option. Only impossible choices the system cannot resolve.

Here we have the temporal trap within the trap: property markets are sustained by 25 to 30 year mortgages. A household buying today commits to three decades of debt servicing. This requires stable employment. Stable employment requires economic growth. Growth requires energy. Energy, today, overwhelmingly means carbon. The entire edifice rests on the assumption of continuity. The assumption that in 2045, in 2050, the economy will still function, employment will still exist, and the debt can still be serviced. But we have four years of carbon budget left at current emission levels before we exhaust the 1.5°C target. Four years. We are financing property on 30-year timeframes while operating on a planet with a 4-year window. The mortgage durations are longer than the remaining habitable timeframe. Every young couple taking out a mortgage today is making a bet that the climate models are wrong, that the scientists are exaggerating, that somehow it will be fine. They have no choice. They need somewhere to live. But the math does not work. The system is writing cheques the biosphere cannot cash.

In China, they build and nobody lives there. The emissions are released. The cities stand empty. In Britain and the United States, they do not build and nobody can afford to live there. The emissions are avoided in construction but the scarcity drives prices higher, which drives financialisation deeper, which locks more capital into unproductive assets. Both scenarios generate the same outcome: a housing crisis. But through opposite mechanisms. China produces too much concrete. Britain and America produce too much financialisation. Both are responding to the same imperative: capital accumulation, not human need. One system overbuilds. The other underbuilds. Both fail to house their populations. Both generate systemic instability. And both are incapable of addressing the climate emergency because property, in both models, is not about shelter. It is about wealth storage, credit creation, and GDP growth.

Then there are the pension funds. Across the developed world, pension funds are heavily exposed to property. Directly, through real estate holdings. Indirectly, through investments in construction firms, developers, and mortgage-backed securities. When property values fall, pension funds collapse. When pension funds collapse, the elderly starve. This is why states cannot allow property crashes. It is not just about banks. It is not just about homeowners. It is about the entire inter-generational wealth transfer mechanism. The system has made old age security dependent on rising property values. Rising property values require each generation to pay more than the last. This is literally unsustainable. But the alternative, allowing property values to fall to affordable levels, would wipe out the savings of an entire generation of retirees. So the contradiction is locked in. The young cannot afford to buy. The old cannot afford for prices to fall. The system has created a zero-sum conflict between generations over access to shelter. And it has done so while releasing 40 per cent of global emissions into an atmosphere that is running out of capacity to absorb them.

This is the property trap. And it reveals something essential about the system: when capital can no longer find profitable outlets in productive investment, it flows into assets. Property. Stocks. Bonds. Commodities. It chases returns in speculation rather than production. But speculation does not create value. It extracts it. It inflates prices. It generates volatility. And when the bubbles burst, the state intervenes to stabilise the system, which means bailing out the speculators, which means imposing austerity on everyone else. The cycle repeats. The wealth concentrates. The emissions accumulate. And the underlying problem, the exhaustion of profitable accumulation opportunities, remains unresolved. Property is not productive. It does not generate new value. It does not increase output. It is a claim on existing wealth, a mechanism for extracting rent. When capital flows into property rather than into productive investment, it is a sign that profitable opportunities elsewhere have dried up. It is a sign that the system is eating itself. And when property markets are in crisis simultaneously in China, Europe, Britain, and the United States, it is not a coincidence. It is a symptom of the same underlying disease: the exhaustion of profitable accumulation opportunities in a system that requires endless growth. On a planet that cannot sustain it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Metabolic Rift

Here is the fundamental contradiction that the economists cannot see: the metrics they worship measure activity on a finite planet as if the planet were infinite. Productivity measures how much output a worker generates per hour. Growth measures the increase in total output. Trade surplus measures how much more a nation exports than it imports. All these metrics share one assumption: more is better. More output, more trade, more production, more consumption. The line must go up. But the planet is not infinite. The atmosphere has a finite capacity to absorb carbon. The oceans have a finite capacity to buffer heat. The forests have a finite capacity to store carbon. When China increases productivity in electric vehicle manufacturing, it is converting rare earth minerals (finite), using energy (carbon-intensive), generating electronic waste (toxic), and producing vehicles that will eventually require disposal. The GDP goes up. The trade surplus grows. The productivity improves. But the material base erodes. This is what Marx called the metabolic rift: the systematic rupture between human production and the natural conditions that sustain it. Capital treats nature as an infinite store and an infinite dump. It extracts without replenishing. It emits without absorbing. It produces without considering the conditions of reproduction. Nature has limits. Capital does not care. When the global economy grows at 3 per cent, it means more extraction, more combustion, more emission. It means more forests cleared, more minerals mined. The economists see growth. The planet sees depletion. This is not a measurement problem. This is a fundamental mismatch between the logic of capital accumulation and the logic of planetary boundaries.

The Structural Imperative

Capitalism requires growth to survive. This is not a choice. It is a structural feature of the system. If capital cannot expand, it goes into crisis. Debts cannot be serviced. Investments cannot be repaid. The financial system seizes up. This is why every government, regardless of ideology, pursues growth. This is why China cannot simply stop producing cars, or building tower blocks, even when its own people cannot buy them. Its social stability depends on employment. Its debt servicing depends on growth. Without growth, the system collapses. So the machine keeps running. The economists keep forecasting. The policymakers keep stimulating. The corporations keep producing. And the carbon keeps accumulating in the atmosphere.

The Death Rattle

What the economists call a productivity slowdown, what they call “subdued performance,” are not technical glitches. They are the arrhythmias of a dying system. The OECD’s 2025 Compendium confirms it. Labour productivity in the Euro area fell by 0.9 per cent, the steepest collapse since the financial crash of 2009. This is not stagnation; this is contraction. Europe is working more hours to produce less value. Meanwhile, the United States posted a 1.6 per cent increase. The economists cheer this as “decoupling.” They call it American dynamism. But look closer. This growth is almost entirely concentrated in the speculative tech sector, driven by the AI capital expenditure bubble. It is not broad-based industrial health; it is a fever dream fuelled by debt. Underneath the divergence, the rot is universal. Multifactor productivity, the measure of true innovation and efficiency, has “stagnated or turned negative” across the majority of the OECD. This is the signal: the easy sources of exploitation have been exhausted. The fossil fuels that powered the twentieth-century boom are depleting. The cheap labour that fuelled globalisation is organising. The ecological systems that absorbed the waste are breaking down. The “efficiencies” of the digital age have turned out to be distractions. And yet, the response is always the same: more growth. More stimulus. More “structural reform.” The only solution capital knows is expansion. When expansion stalls, capital panics. This is why China is flooding global markets with petrol vehicles. This is why the United States is imposing tariffs. This is why Europe is freezing. They are all fighting for a share of a pie that is no longer growing, on a planet that is actively dying.

The Emissions That Do Not Count

Here is what the growth figures do not show. The combined effects of climate change and deforestation have turned Southeast Asian and large parts of South American tropical forests from CO2 sinks to sources. The planet’s lungs are failing. Efforts to halt deforestation remain off track. Permanent forest loss reached 8.1 million hectares per year in 2024. The line is going the wrong way. Steel alone is responsible for upwards of 7 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Since 2018, the carbon intensity of steel production has increased. We are making more steel (growth) less efficiently (productivity decline) with more carbon (emissions increase). The metrics do not tell us to stop building skyscrapers in cities where buildings already sit empty. They do not tell us to stop producing cars when public transport would suffice. Because contraction is not an option. Contraction is crisis. Contraction is collapse. The economists look at December 2025 and see reasons for hope. Renewable energy is expanding. Electric vehicle adoption is accelerating. But the numbers do not add up. Total energy demand continues to grow. Total energy-related CO2 emissions increased by 0.8 per cent in 2024, hitting an all-time high. Clean energy is being added on top of fossil fuels, not replacing them. We are running faster just to stay in place. No one will say what the science requires: contraction. Degrowth. Planned reduction of material throughput in the wealthy nations. Because to say this is to challenge the fundamental logic of the system. And the system cannot contemplate its own obsolescence.

The Question No One Asks

When the IMF projects China’s growth at 5 per cent, when Goldman Sachs raises its forecast, no one asks: growth towards what? Five per cent growth in an economy already responsible for 30 per cent of global emissions means more coal burned, more steel produced, more concrete poured. Five per cent growth in electric vehicle production means more lithium mines, more cobalt extraction, more rare earth processing. All of this generates carbon, destroys ecosystems, exploits labour. But the vehicles are “green.” The growth is “sustainable.” The development is “high-quality.” The words obscure the material reality. The economists cannot think this way. Their models cannot process it. GDP does not have a degrowth function. Productivity does not have a sufficiency target. So we measure what we can measure and ignore what we cannot. We count the trade surplus and ignore the emissions embedded in the exports. We celebrate the productivity gains and ignore the extraction that enables them. We applaud the growth and ignore the forests cleared to achieve it.

The Beneficiaries

Look at the numbers. In 2025, global billionaire wealth hit $16.1 trillion, up $1.9 trillion in a single year. There are now 3,028 billionaires. This is not distributed. This is concentrated. Fewer than 60,000 people, the top 0.001 per cent of humanity, control three times more wealth than the entire bottom 50 per cent of the world’s population combined. The system is not failing. It is working exactly as designed. Just not for workers.

The top 10 per cent of the global population own 75 per cent of all wealth. The bottom 50 per cent own 2 per cent. In 2025, the top 10 per cent captured 53 per cent of global income. The bottom 50 per cent received 8 per cent. This is not stagnation. This is systematic extraction. And it is accelerating. Since the 1990s, the wealth of billionaires and centimillionaires has grown at approximately 8 per cent annually, nearly twice the rate experienced by the bottom half of the population. The wealth share of the top 0.001 per cent has risen from 4 per cent in 1995 to over 6 per cent today.

China: The workers building 3.5 million cars per month do not own them. The profits flow upward to state-owned enterprise executives, party officials, and the private sector elite who have captured regulatory power. While property values collapse for middle-class households with 70 per cent of their wealth locked in real estate, the wealthy moved their capital offshore years ago. Vancouver. Sydney. London. They saw it coming. The 516 Chinese billionaires, including those in Hong Kong, collectively hold hundreds of billions whilst the state manages deflation to prevent social unrest without allowing the workers who built the boom to share in its gains. This is not communism.

United States: Corporate profits as a share of GDP are at historic highs. Worker wages as a share of GDP are at historic lows. The S&P 500 has grown 113 per cent since 2020, delivering returns of over 14 per cent annually. Who owns stocks? The top 10 per cent own 87 per cent of all stocks. The bottom 50 per cent own essentially nothing. In 2025, the top 1 per cent of households held 31 per cent of total household wealth. The bottom 50 per cent held 2.5 per cent. When Goldman Sachs raises its growth forecast, it is not forecasting prosperity for workers. It is forecasting returns for shareholders. The 905 US billionaires now hold $7.8 trillion in combined wealth. This is nearly double the total wealth of the entire bottom half of American households, all 66 million of them, who together hold $4.1 trillion.

Europe: Luxury goods sales are down in China but LVMH still posted record revenues. How? The ultra-wealthy are fine. They always are. While German auto workers face redundancy, BMW executives are not suffering. Dividend payments continue. Share buybacks continue. The wealth extracts upward even as the productive base collapses. Between 1990 and 2022, EU emissions fell by 21 per cent, almost entirely due to cuts by the majority of Europeans. The bottom half reduced their emissions by 27 per cent, the middle 40 per cent by 23 per cent. Meanwhile, the richest 0.1 per cent increased their emissions by 14 per cent. Europe’s wealthiest emit more carbon in a week than someone from the bottom half does in an entire year.

Britain: Property wealth concentration has accelerated. Those who owned before 2000 have seen assets appreciate 300 to 400 per cent. Those born after 1990 own nothing. The rental extraction flows to a landlord class that produces nothing, builds nothing, and contributes nothing except the ownership of title. Ten per cent of MPs are landlords. The state serves the rentier class because the rentier class is the state. Meanwhile, Britain is losing an estimated 16,500 millionaires in 2025, fleeing to jurisdictions with lower taxes, leaving behind a hollowed-out productive economy and a working class locked out of housing.

The pension crisis? It does not affect those with private wealth. It affects the working class and lower middle class who depend on collective pension schemes tied to property values and equity markets. The wealthy do not have pensions. They have portfolios. Diversified. Offshore. Protected. When pension funds collapse because property values fall or equity markets crash, the elderly who depend on them starve. The wealthy simply rebalance.

The carbon divide: The richest 1 per cent are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the poorest half of humanity. In 2025, the top 1 per cent used their entire annual carbon budget, the amount of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere without exceeding 1.5°C of warming, within the first 10 days of the year. Someone from the poorest 50 per cent would take nearly three years, 1,022 days, to use up their equivalent share. A person from the richest 0.1 per cent emits over 800 kilograms of CO2 every single day. Someone from the poorest 50 per cent emits an average of 2 kilograms per day. The top 1 per cent of emitters produce over 1,000 times more CO2 than the bottom 1 per cent.

But this is not just personal consumption. The average billionaire produces 1.9 million tonnes of CO2 annually through their investments alone. Almost 60 per cent of billionaire investments are in high climate impact sectors such as oil and mining, meaning their investments emit two and a half times more than an average investment in the S&P Global 1,200. The emissions of just 308 billionaires’ investment portfolios total more than the combined emissions of 118 countries. Private jets. Multiple homes. Yachts. Superyachts. The consumption patterns of the ultra-wealthy are apocalyptic in scale. But they will be the last to suffer the consequences. They will buy their way out. Gated communities. Climate-controlled bunkers. New Zealand bolt-holes. They are not worried about the 1.5°C target because they can afford air conditioning.

This is not a system in crisis. This is a system functioning perfectly for a microscopic minority while externalising all costs onto workers and the planet. The Chinese worker cannot afford the cars he builds. The profits go to party elites and shareholders. The British worker cannot afford the home he needs. The rent goes to landlords and institutional investors. The American worker cannot afford healthcare. The profits go to pharmaceutical executives and private equity. The European worker cannot afford energy. The profits went to energy companies posting record earnings during the cost of living crisis.

Every crisis described here is a crisis for labour and a windfall for capital. The productivity collapse in Europe? Worker output falls but corporate profits remain protected through layoffs and wage suppression. The property trap? Workers are locked out whilst asset-holders accumulate wealth through appreciation. The carbon emergency? The poor will drown and burn whilst the rich relocate. The trade surplus? It measures capital accumulation for elites whilst workers face deflationary pressures and declining real incomes.

The system is not broken. Calling it broken implies it once worked. It is functioning exactly as capitalism functions: concentrating wealth ever upward, externalising costs downward and onto the planet, and calling this efficiency. The metrics measure accumulation for a class so small it could fit into a mid-sized football stadium, whilst 3.9 billion people, the bottom 50 per cent, share amongst themselves an income averaging $2,000 per year and collectively produce less carbon than 308 individual billionaires produce through their investment portfolios alone.

When the IMF projects growth, when Goldman Sachs raises forecasts, when the OECD measures productivity, they are measuring returns for this class. Not prosperity for humanity. Not ecological sustainability. Not the maintenance of biophysical systems that make life possible. They are measuring how efficiently capital extracts value from labour and nature, concentrates it in fewer hands, and calls the devastation progress. The spreadsheets do not lie. They simply measure what capital wants measured. Ignoring everything else.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Against the Abacus

The world economy in December 2025 is a machine optimised for a function that is killing its host. Every gain in productivity, every increase in growth, every expansion of trade brings us closer to system collapse. Not economic collapse. Ecological collapse. The collapse of the biophysical systems that make economic activity possible in the first place. The economists will keep measuring. The forecasts will keep coming. China will keep exporting. Europe will keep fading. And the carbon will keep accumulating. Because no one in a position of power will say what needs to be said: the metrics are wrong. Productivity is not progress when it drives destruction. Growth is not prosperity when it leads to collapse. Trade surplus is not success when it is built on ecological debt. They are optimising the spreadsheet as the ship goes down. They are measuring growth on a dead planet. And they will continue measuring until there is nothing left to measure. The abacus of the apocalypse keeps clicking. The beads slide back and forth. Growth up, emissions up, temperatures up. The economists keep counting. The planet keeps dying. And the question they will never ask: what is the value of an economy on an uninhabitable Earth? The question is not whether the system will collapse. The question is what comes after, when it does.