The case for a Social Guarantee:

Universal access to life’s essentials

Anna Coote
 

The Social Guarantee refocuses progressive politics on human relations, on how we care for each other, and on the importance of investing in the social infrastructure on which the rest of the economy depends. It draws on current thinking about the foundational economy, the care economy, and sustainable economic prosperity It offers a coherent, ethical, and well-evidenced basis from which to address such issues as investment, regulation, and carbon mitigation.

The internationally agreed goal of reducing carbon emissions to “net zero” certainly calls for a rapid transformation of the economy. But the economy is not just a bundle of interacting mechanisms – such as investment, debt, interest rates, trade, competition, supply chains, pricing, consumption patterns, and so forth – to be tweaked by experts. Rather, it is a social construct that involves processing human and environmental resources. And it is a means, not an end in itself. To restate the obvious, “we live in societies with economies, not economies with societies”. So the “Great Turnaround” must focus on people as well as the planet and put human as well as ecological needs at the heart of economic change.


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