In a year when billionaires added trillions to their fortunes, governments slashed health and education budgets to pay creditors, just as climate-fuelled disasters drove hunger and displacement to new highs. Francesco Vigliarolo says this is what an economy looks like when finance rules and human rights are reduced to decoration.
Picture two scenes. In one, trillions of dollars streak across screens in split seconds, chasing tiny margins through algorithms no person fully understands. In the other, a mother in Somalia waits for rain that may never come, knowing that another failed harvest could kill her children.
These are not separate stories. They are chapters of the same system.
Since the 1970s, the real economy that produces food, homes, medicines and tools has been overtaken by what Karl Polanyi called “high finance” – a universe of money trading with itself. Today, the vast majority of financial transactions have no direct link to real goods and services. Their sole purpose is to make more money out of money.
It is estimated that 95% of financial values have no relation to the goods and services exchanged.
One turning point was 1971, when US President Richard Nixon cut the dollar’s tie to gold. That technical move signalled an era in which financial profits would be freed from the constraints of productive activity. Due to the falling rate of profit, too, some big American manufacturing groups flocked to the financial markets to make huge profits. The dollar became a commodity subject to the laws of buying and selling. In the following decades, foreign-exchange trades exploded from billions to trillions of dollars a day. By the mid-1990s, for every dollar spent on actual goods and services, around 75 were circulating in financial assets. Globally, financial assets swelled to several times the world GDP. It is estimated that 95% of financial values have no relation to the goods and services exchanged.
Historian Eric Hobsbawm warned, since the Industrial Revolution, that capital and production were beginning to walk down different paths. By 2005, in the US alone, financial assets had risen to over four times national output, just before the 2008 crash. A system designed to serve life had quietly inverted itself: now life serves the system.
Growth without well-being
The first casualty of this shift is the link between economic growth and human well-being. As Daly and Cobb showed decades ago, US GDP could keep rising while real indicators of welfare – shared prosperity, social cohesion, environmental quality – stalled or even fell. That pattern has since gone global. Money incomes grow, but rights do not.
Financial crises are not rare accidents in this architecture. They are recurring events.
The distribution figures are blunt. The richest 10% of the world’s population take more than half of all income; the poorest half share less than a tenth. Within many countries, the top fifth hoards most of the wealth, and the bottom fifth gets scraps. Two billion people work in the informal economy with no social protection. In regions like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, informal work dominates; in Latin America and parts of Europe, official unemployment never really goes away.
At the same time, work is pushed to the margins. From the mid-1970s to the 2010s, employment rates in firms fell sharply even as financial incomes soared. Economies appear to grow while millions become superfluous. The pursuit of financial returns through increasingly short-term speculation is distancing finance from the real economy. The result is “jobless growth”: good news for stock indices, bad news for households.
Financial crises are not rare accidents in this architecture. They are recurring events. Dozens of major crises since the 1970s have shredded savings, destroyed public budgets and forced abrupt cuts to social spending. Each crisis weakens the material basis of human rights – food security, housing, healthcare, income security – especially in poorer countries.
Human rights in a financialised age
Read this reality through the lens of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the verdict is harsh.
Article 25 proclaims the right to an adequate standard of living, including food, housing, medical care and social services. Article 23 guarantees the right to work, just conditions and protection against unemployment. Article 26 establishes a right to education. Article 1 calls for a “spirit of brotherhood” between human beings.
Financial capitalism systematically undermines each of these.
When debt markets and austerity shape public budgets, social security is eroded. When work is precarious or informal, the right to just and favourable conditions becomes a slogan. When education and health are treated as cost centres rather than common goods, access depends on income and location. When global finance can move freely but people cannot, whole regions become sacrifice zones.
The model also corrodes politics. States that should protect the common good often act as brokers for powerful lobbies. Labour laws are weakened; finance is deregulated; toxic waste is exported from rich countries to poor ones; environmental destruction is accepted as collateral damage. The international community proclaims human rights with one hand and designs economic rules that violate them with the other. The result is ethical schizophrenia: different principles for declarations and for deals. Yet this is only one side of the story.
The other economy that refuses to die
From the 1970s onward, as financial capitalism tightened its grip, another current emerged – quieter, fragmented, but global. Across continents, new socio-economic practices emerged: social and solidarity enterprises, civil-economy organisations, community and popular initiatives, cooperatives, NGOs, and grassroots associations.
Their shared intent is clear: to put economic activity back in the service of life. In Italy, the number of social-economy organisations grew almost fivefold after 1990; by the mid-1990s, more than 15% of adults were volunteering. Germany saw hundreds of thousands of voluntary organisations; France registered tens of thousands of new associations annually. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, clandestine civic and religious groups became labs for democracy after the fall of one-party regimes.
In Latin America, base Christian communities mobilised millions of poor people in self-help and advocacy networks. Popular economic organisations created community kitchens, cooperatives and alternative schools. Across Asia and Africa, third-sector organisations began providing basic services, training, environmental protection and support to those excluded from both the market and a shrinking welfare state.
They are not marginal charities; they are experiments in a different logic of economic life.
These entities share some core features:
- they are private, but not profit-maximising;
- they pursue activities of general interest – health, education, care, housing, local production, environmental stewardship;
- they reinvest surpluses into their mission instead of distributing them to shareholders;
- they tend to be democratic: one person, one vote; and
- they are embedded in territories and relationships, not just in markets.
In Europe today, millions of such social-economy entities employ well over ten million people and play a visible role in welfare provision, social inclusion and local development. They are not marginal charities; they are experiments in a different logic of economic life.
Toward universal economic socialisation
What unites these practices, beneath all their differences, is an attempt to change what the economy is for.
Not everyone has to live the same way, but everyone must have access to the basics that make a dignified life possible.
Instead of treating the economy as a neutral machine turning inputs into outputs for private gain, they insist that production is always about ideas: what we consider essential, dignified, just. Food, housing, care, education, mobility, energy – these are not just commodities; they are expressions of how we see each other and the planet we share.
This points toward a different organising principle: universal economic socialisation. The idea is straightforward. Societies should build their economies around a shared nucleus of socio-environmental values, translated into concrete processes, goods and services that guarantee human rights for all. Not everyone has to live the same way, but everyone must have access to the basics that make a dignified life possible.
To move in this direction, we need a “meso-economic” level between individual firms and abstract national aggregates. At this level – local, regional, national, international – we can collectively decide which sectors are strategic for rights (food, water, housing, health, education, care, energy, digital access), how they should be organised, and how success should be measured.
Instead of asking only how fast GDP grows, we would ask:
- What share of people have secure, meaningful work with a living income?
- How much investment goes into social and environmental activities versus speculation?
- How widespread is access to education, health and credit for basic needs?
- How large is circular and green production compared with extractive sectors?
- How far are disadvantaged groups actually included?
At the global level, this implies new institutions. A World Human Rights–Economic System Organisation could be tasked with aligning trade, investment and production with the demands of rights: eradicating famine, building essential infrastructure, securing peace and legal protection where development is lowest. A companion World Fund for Economy and Human Rights could steer finance according to ethical and sustainability criteria, backing local production, decent work and ecological regeneration rather than speculative flows.
These are not technocratic tweaks. They require a shift in power and imagination: from a “democracy of money lobbies” to a democracy of value-based lobbies, where movements, communities, social enterprises, unions and ethical investors continuously press states and markets to honour human rights in practice, not just on paper.
Choosing a different wealth of nations
We stand at a fork. One path extends the current trajectory: ever-greater financial power, deepening inequalities, spreading precarity, accelerating ecological breakdown and human rights reduced to rhetoric. The other begins from a simple but demanding decision: to rebuild the economy as if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights actually mattered.
“Economy” originally meant the rules (nomos) for managing a shared house. Our shared house now is the planet. For these reasons, human rights can be the theoretical foundations of a new economy, a universal economy. To do this, the question is blunt: do we want it governed as a casino for the few, or as a common dwelling where, despite all differences, we recognise ourselves as co-inhabitants bound by a basic spirit of brotherhood?
In the age of financialisation, that question is no longer philosophical. It is a matter of survival.
