Re-thinking Capitalism
Artwork: Sophie Gladstone, "Home" (from the series Promise & Demand), 2021.
ANNUAL THEME
ANNUAL THEME
Re-thinking Capitalism
This year at THE NEW INSTITUTE is dedicated to questioning the status quo of our capitalist societies. Our six programs link big-picture questions about markets and global governance to real-world challenges.
ABOUT
The current global economy is overshooting planetary boundaries while billions of people continue to live in poverty. Democracy, liberalism, and globalization – once hailed as the unassailable foundations of progress – now stand on shaky ground.
As societies around the world grapple with economic turmoil, widening wealth disparities, and a planet in peril, the problems with this grand structure are becoming impossible to ignore.
We have six programs this year, which link big-picture questions about markets and global governance to real-world challenges. These include using finance for social good, improving food systems, creating markets that benefit society, and balancing economic growth with environmental limits. Running through all the programs is an examination of how market mechanisms create value. Across our different fellow groups, we will discuss how much we need to change our current systems and what really counts as progress.
Each program analyzes the potential for the current economic system to generate social well-being on a global scale within planetary boundaries and identifies key points within the system that must be rethought and leveraged for change. These range from specific sectors, such as financial markets and global food production, to business design in the national context of Nigeria, to new concepts for restructuring the economic system itself.
The aim is to link foundational questions about how economic markets work, how they should work, and how we should reform our global governance architecture to concrete problems such as how to redirect financial instruments toward social goals, how to reform food supply chains, and how to incentivize markets to promote alternatives. Given the trans-sectoral and international composition of our fellow groups, we expect our programs to move us beyond the stale debate of whether capitalism as such should be supported or abandoned.
PROGRAMS 2024/25
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Futures of Capitalism: Radical Democracy and the Financial Imagination
How do the workings of financial markets shape our social reality, and how can practices of speculation and distortion become tools of radical democratic imagination?
The Futures of Capitalism program seeks to develop a new language for analyzing, critiquing, and reforming the complex configurations through which finance exerts its influence. Bringing together scholars and artists representing diverse fields of research and practice, our work will be organized around three interconnected streams, each reflecting a core tenet of capitalist dynamics: technology, society, and politics.
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Africapitalism: Shared Entrepreneurship
How are community-based businesses economically empowering rural and urban Africa?
Capitalism receives criticism for its negative impacts, despite its benefits. Efforts to reform it are underway. Based on the concept of Africapitalism, this program explores fit-for-purpose capitalism and promotes shared entrepreneurship rooted in communal ties, offering a blueprint for addressing poverty and inequality. The program emphasizes the importance of indigenous approaches to economic empowerment in Africa and aims to contribute to the global discourse on the transformation of capitalism.
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Beyond Capitalism: War Economy and Democratic Planning
How can we create a fairer, sustainable society amidst global crisis, using a democratic 'war economy' and redefined concepts of freedom and progress?
This program explores the concept of a democratically driven 'war economy' as a means to reshape society towards equality and sustainability amidst global crises. It aims to redefine notions of freedom and progress in response to the unfolding planetary catastrophe.
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The Future of Food: Power and Biodiversity
How can harnessing biodiversity enable progressive power shifts in the food system?
Without a significant, proactive, and sustained long-term change in the power forces defining food, which includes recognizing the pivotal role of biodiversity and the imperative to diversify food production and consumption, it is hard to imagine achieving sustainable, healthy, inclusive, and fair food systems. In this project, we will address these and other challenges by identifying obstacles arising from power asymmetries and offering multidisciplinary and systemic solutions. We will provide a comprehensive analysis on biodiversity and power, developing concrete multidisciplinary recommendations to promote food systems diversification.
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Planetary Governance
How can planetary governance reform proposals be implemented?
This program will tackle the implementation of the Climate Governance Commission's report Governing Our Planetary Emergency to refine, sharpen, and move forward with the implementation of critical climate governance reform.
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Bitter Victory: Is Victory Possible in the 21st Century?
Terror, violence, and wars persist relentlessly, affecting every corner of our planet. Civil and civic, socio-political, economic, scientific, and cultural discourses are contaminated by the pervasive presence of militant rhetoric and warrior-like language. Our project aims to dissect and compare the evolution of victory doctrines and explore their implications on the termination of violence and establishment of peace.