In "Addressing the 2024 Great Incoherence" I made three points:
One, the 2024 Great Incoherence shows multiple dimensions. One of the most significant is the mismatch between **rising demand**---ever greater resources needed to "tackle climate change, improve health and education, and rebuild war-torn nations"---and **falling supply**, from declining economic growth and investment, record high public debt, and countries' everywhere sacrificing multilateral cooperation on the altar of national security.
Without growth, investment, and multilateralism somewhere, we will not be improving health and education and tackling climate change anywhere.
Two, there are no automatic forces reducing this Great Incoherence. The mismatch I described might be usefully viewed as demand and supply, but unlike in a market, excess demand is not met by rising supply while over time the needs of our world make for ever escalating demand.
Two millennia ago Thucydides wrote, Great Powers do what they will, the rest of us suffer what we must. If it is the advanced economies that form the supply side in the Great Incoherence, we should expect no reduction in imbalance any time soon. To add to all else, the Great Incoherence is only worsened by world order's move away from unipolarity and the intensification of US-China rivalry.
My third and final point: Build the causal mechanism that takes us from micro-intervention to aggregate growth. Reasoning by Dani Rodrik and Mike Spence have long indicated that combining knowledge transfer and international exchange constitutes a growth strategy; market intervention and efficiency gains do not. Aggregate growth is itself a positive externality, and it is that, in my view, that will make our planet liveable, and resolve this Great Incoherence.