What I learned reading the new report by Piketty and his team, and why I’m convinced the answer to inequality and climate won’t come from governments alone, but from the people who run and finance companies.
By Ángel Bonet, founder and president of ImpactCo
Last Sunday I spent the afternoon reading The Global Justice Report, published this year by the World Inequality Lab and signed by Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and a team of 45 researchers. More than a hundred pages of charts, historical series going back to 1800 and projections out to 2100.
One figure made me close the laptop for a while.
Between 1970 and 2025, the most material- and energy-intensive sectors (food, construction, manufacturing, energy and transport) have consistently accounted for 53% of world spending at constant prices. Consistently. Fifty-five years without the economy shedding a single gram of weight.
I have worked with companies for twenty-five years. Over that time I lived through the arrival of corporate social responsibility, then sustainability, then ESG. Along the way, the departments grew, and so did the reports, the ratings and the dated commitments. That figure confirmed something I had suspected for a while: we have learned to measure very well a world we have barely changed.
I don’t say that as a reproach. I include myself. It’s a collective self-criticism we owe ourselves, and it sits at the centre of the debate on inequality and climate.
What the report says, in two sentences
Some 80,000 people hold 6.4% of the planet’s wealth, while more than four billion barely reach 2%. The authors argue that this distance isn’t only a justice problem. Rather, it is the brake that prevents us from financing and sustaining the climate transition.
Their conclusion is encouraging: a habitable world, with high wellbeing for everyone and warming below 2°C, remains possible. Treating inequality and climate as one problem is the condition. However, it requires progress on three fronts at once: clean energy, an economy less dependent on material goods, and far less inequality. If one fails, the other two collapse. If we do nothing, the report puts warming above 4°C by the end of the century.
Where I agree, and where I don’t
The solutions they propose are mainly fiscal and global: a worldwide tax on large fortunes, an international fund on a scale never seen before, and deep reform of the institutions born at Bretton Woods. Plenty of people will reject them. Plenty of others will applaud. That debate is legitimate, and I won’t settle it in one article.
On inequality and climate, though, I do want to say where I stand. I share the diagnosis almost entirely. Yet I don’t believe change will arrive only from above, through treaties and taxes. It can and should also come from inside companies. From specific people who run businesses, who inherit family firms, who decide where to put their money, and who one day ask themselves what the thing they built actually exists for.
That conviction is what led me to found ImpactCo, and it is what gives meaning to the purpose economy movement. Not as a label or a department, but as another way of doing business: growing while generating economic, social and environmental value at the same time. If we in business don’t offer an answer of our own, others will write it for us. Reasonably so.
What gave me hope
Not everything in the report is unsettling. One finding strikes me as beautiful, because it dismantles one of the great misunderstandings of our time: the idea that saving the planet requires making ourselves poorer.
On inequality and climate, the authors compare two paths. In the first, every country reaches a prosperity similar to Europe’s today, around €60,000 per inhabitant, but changes what it produces and consumes. In the second, we shrink drastically to €15,000 per person without changing anything structural. The first path leaves the planet at 1.8°C. The second, at 1.9°C.
What matters is not how much we grow, but what we grow in.
So what does that possible economy grow in? Care. The report projects that the share of working hours devoted to education and health worldwide will rise from 11% today to 43% by the end of the century. Norway and Sweden already sit between 30% and 35%. Picture an economy where almost half of human effort goes into teaching, healing and caring. I don’t see a sacrifice there. I see a more sensible civilisation.
The proof I had been looking for
Whenever I discuss purpose with a business owner, the same objection surfaces sooner or later: “Ángel, all that is very nice, but it makes us less competitive.”
The report answers with two centuries of data. In the Nordic countries, the gap between the highest and lowest incomes narrowed from 32 times in 1900 to under 4 by 1990. Those same countries rank among those that gained the most productivity across the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the United States, where inequality soared from the 1980s onwards, has not grown in productivity any faster than they have.
This is what I have defended for years. We see it every day in the companies we work with: equality pays. The common good isn’t a cost deducted from profit. Instead, it is one of its most solid sources, which is why corporate purpose has become a survival strategy.
Inequality and climate: capital that grows roots, capital that extracts
One figure in the report will get little attention. Between 2000 and 2025, rich countries received from poor countries a net transfer of between 0.6% and 0.8% of world GDP every year, simply because their foreign investments yield more than they pay on their debt. That is twice all the development aid on the planet.
Economists call it exorbitant privilege. I call it capital that extracts, and it is the same pattern we described when writing about concentrated private wealth. Against it, the purpose economy defends the opposite: capital that grows roots, that stays, that leaves the territory, the people and the planet better than it found them.
Inequality and climate need a movement, not a fashion
The authors close their summary with an idea that has stayed with me since Sunday. What separates us from a habitable, fair twenty-first century isn’t the technology. It is the decision to do it, and the capacity to build a coalition that sustains it.
That coalition on inequality and climate doesn’t get built at international summits alone. It also gets built in family businesses that decide to think about the next generation rather than the next quarter. In funds that choose to invest in what grows roots. In management teams that understand purpose as a management model rather than a speech.
That is the purpose economy: a movement of people who have decided not to wait until someone forces them.
For many of us, 2100 feels far away. For the children going to school today, it doesn’t. They will live in the world we are deciding on now, and inequality and climate are the two variables deciding it.
I have already chosen which side I want to be on. I invite you to do the same.
If you also believe companies can be part of the solution, write to me at tribu@impactco.es. We are building this movement together, and you are missing from it.
Source: Chancel, L., Piketty, T. et al. (2026). The Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. World Inequality Lab.