The Signal #16
Rewiring the rules entrenching economic opportunity and outcomes.
The language we use in public policy matters because it reveals the underlying assumptions. Poverty has largely been discussed as a problem of insufficient income, inadequate growth or imperfect redistribution. The debate has focused on how to reduce it, measure it and mitigate its worst effects. The underlying architecture of the economy has remained in the background, treated as a given rather than as an object of policy design.
Recently, however, a growing international initiative bringing together researchers, practitioners and policymakers from around the world has begun questioning whether poverty is just an unfortunate outcome of existing systems or something systems actively produce. The New Economies for Eradicating Poverty (NEEP) initiative and its emerging Roadmap do not offer a single ideology or blueprint. Instead, they assemble a wide range of perspectives around a shared premise that deserves serious attention: that eradicating poverty may require rethinking the institutional arrangements that generate it, rather than relying primarily on compensatory mechanisms after the fact. That strikes me as an important signal.
Debates about poverty hitherto have largely revolved around transfers, safety nets and growth strategies. These remain essential policy tools, and there is no shortage of evidence demonstrating their importance. But they also tend to assume that economic systems naturally create prosperity while governments intervene afterwards to soften unequal outcomes.
The perspective emerging from this initiative shifts the emphasis upstream and asks how financial systems, labour markets, housing, taxation, ownership structures, international debt arrangements and governance institutions shape the distribution of opportunity long before redistribution enters the picture. It invites us to examine not only how wealth is allocated but how economic rules determine who accumulates assets, who carries risk and who exercises agency.
Importantly, the Roadmap puts forward concrete proposals spanning public investment, democratic participation, taxation, debt, trade, social protection, ownership models and international cooperation. Readers will undoubtedly disagree with some recommendations and support others. That is to be expected in a project of this scale.
The more interesting observation is that these questions are increasingly being treated as matters of institutional design as opposed to technical adjustment. This resonates strongly with themes I have been exploring throughout Polity Futures.
In my own submission to the initiative, I posited employing imagination and democratic strategic dialogue to expand our policy toolkit and to innovate not just in technology but in governance and social organisation. Debates centred exclusively on GDP or income risk overlooking human agency. Material resources matter enormously, but they ultimately matter because they expand people’s capacity to shape their own lives, participate in society and pursue opportunities they value. Viewed through that lens, poverty is not just a shortage of income. It is a constraint on agency.
That perspective also changes how we think about prosperity itself. Growth remains one of humanity’s most powerful tools for improving living standards, but aggregate growth tells us surprisingly little about who gains capabilities, who accumulates influence and who remains structurally excluded from meaningful opportunity.
Poverty reflects the way societies organise power, opportunity and participation.
International reports alone will not redesign those systems. Roadmaps do not automatically become legislation, and ambitious proposals frequently encounter political and institutional constraints. But they can reshape the conversation by expanding what policymakers consider possible. One reason I wanted to highlight this initiative is that it creates space for that broader conversation.
My own contribution is one perspective among many, and I suspect there are important disagreements across the collection. That diversity is a strength rather than a weakness. The objective should not be consensus for its own sake but a richer discussion about the assumptions embedded within our current institutions and the alternatives worth exploring.
If your work touches on poverty, governance, public policy or institutional design, I would encourage you to spend some time with the Roadmap and engage with it critically. Read the arguments. Challenge the recommendations. Contribute your own perspective if it is in your lane.
The most important signal here may be the growing willingness to ask whether the systems we have inherited are the only ones available to us. That is ultimately a governance question. And with growing societal turbulence, it may prove to be one of the defining policy conversations of the coming decade.
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Warmly,
Sanja
Keep reading
The Guardian: We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way
Geoff’s Substack: AI, AGI and the future
The Renovator: Democracy Futurists at Work
Grace Blakeley: Win or Lose, AI will Break the Economy
