Public – Private Cooperation, the Solution, or the Cause?

By Damien Turlay

We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Light-heartedly starting a blog post entry by quoting Albert Einstein is quite the trick. Nonetheless, we do need to acknowledge the role public-private cooperation has played in putting us in the position we are in today before discussing whether it can be the solution. Thankfully for my blog entry, such a quote has also been pronounced by civil-rights activists Martin Luther King Jr, as well as famous French comedian and short-lived politician Coluche. According to the internet.

When thinking of the transitions to come, many metaphors can be used to explain our current situation and future challenges. Is this a wall we are heading towards with unprecedented speed? A cliff suddenly showing up on our path to glory?

Whether it be parachutes, air bags, or emergency breaks we should build, one can only start to wonder: where does that speed come from? Why this sudden height? Has the rug been suddenly pulled out from under our feet? Or have we been running, steadily and cartoonishly rising, only to realise now how far up we have gone since taken-off a mere 150 years ago? As of 2021, the cartoon character has only started to look down, and after being reminded of its existence, gravity will kick in and bring him back to the hard cold truth that all laws of physics tend to hold us onto. Inertia-induced latency: it is as much a TV running joke as an essential part of dynamic systems behaviours.

It has been the private sector’s best trick of the century: finding us all a meaning to life. Making the character’s speed and height our very own objective has been the societal narrative we all have been raised in: sustained growth of GDP will reduce poverty, eliminate unemployment, increase access to education, enhance public health systems and leave no needs unmet. Ok then, let’s wake up at 6am, work 10 hours a day, 5 days a week for 40 years and get a piece of the pie. This has indeed given individuals an objective: chasing wealth, but more importantly it has given our whole society and the public institutions that govern them a clear path and the metric associated with it.

Perpetual growth is sometimes depicted as riding a bicycle, you must keep pedalling or you will fall. But the bike we are on is a very special one: you must keep pedalling faster than you just previously did, otherwise you will fall. The difference is subtle, yet big enough to make it understandably not physically realistic. GDP is a flux, the measure of the velocity times the magnitude of flows of goods and services within a country’s economy. Energy and natural resources are either enablers or essence of said flows. GDP was, is and surely always will be energy and natural resource intensive [1][2]. Stating otherwise is living in a world yet to be invented.

In this optic of chasing growth, the private sector organised its wit and willpower around the efficient use of the only resource on earth that is not limited: money. Money should not meet the modern definition of a resource; money is information. Information on who has the power on both markets and the public debate. Its limited aspect is only due to a common belief born from a monetarist-dominated school of thought from the 70s from which arose monetarily constraining institutions and treaties like the European Union. The quantity of money available is not limited, only the capacity of the economic system of taking it in is. Leading to inflation when topped [3]. Once this narrative of efficient use of capital set, the private sector has managed to bring onboard the public sector to help it clear any obstacle in its way.

Money creation has therefore been taken off the publics’ hands and into the private. Societal investments have been imputed to the public while the profit-generating structures in place have one by one been sold off to the private actors, after being started from the ground up with public investment, and sometimes debt. Examples of such corporate socialism thinking are limitless: railroads access, airports, financial crisis downfalls and most recently in the energy sector. Those are not circumstantial; they are systemic and part of the EU requirements for member states [4]. The ongoing pandemic has been a perfect example so far: public bailouts were weekly news while financial markets have never been so high. Vaccine research and development has been widely financed by public money while the results are patent-protected and record-profit-generating for the firms [5]. Globalisation seems to have shifted the general ambition from an ideal welfare state to a corporate welfare system [6] where the good fortune of the private earnings precedes citizens’ well-being which is assumed subsequent.

This understanding should lead to a paradigm shift. The 20th century has been the century of the efficient use of the money supply, dictated by the private sector. Now that we are beginning to understand the very essence of a good life depends on the equilibrium of the physical flows of the finite planet we live on, the 21st century should be one for the public sector to dictate the efficient use of everything limited. Arable land, pristine ecosystems, clean water, low carbon concentration, stable climate…Staying in the current framework and putting price tags on all aforementioned can only lead to a further disconnection from the invaluable nature of these resources.

Before asking itself how it can participate in such new world order, the architects of the current one must have a long hard look in the mirror and answer the opening question of this piece. The mere idea of economic degrowth took 40 years to transpire from academic work to the public political debate. How long until it gets to Davos? We do not have another 40 years.

[1] STERN, David I. 2015. « The role of energy in economic growth ». In International Energy and Poverty. Routledge.

|2] HICKEL, Jason, and KALLIS, Giorgos. 2020. « Is Green Growth Possible? » New Political Economy 25 (4): 469‑86. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964.

[3] KELTON, Stephanie. 2020. The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy. Chap. 2 “Think of Inflation”.

[4] CLIFTON, Judith, Francisco COMIN, and Daniel FUENTES. 2003. Privatisation in the European Union. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3733-2.

[5] « It Was The Government That Produced COVID-19 Vaccine Success | Health Affairs ». May 14, 2021. https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20210512.191448/full/

[6] WHITFIELD, Dexter. 2001. Public Services Or Corporate Welfare: Rethinking the Nation State in the Global Economy. Pluto Press.

About the Author

Damien Turlay My name is Damien Turlay, I have been a Formula 1 engineer for the past four years and am now a student at Sciences Po in the Environmental Policy master. Since my very young age I have been torn between my passion for motorsport and the awareness that our unsustainable way-of-life was driving our society towards unprecedented outcomes. Rather than confining myself to the engineer’s role of finding low-carbon use and technologies, I wanted to understand what is driving us, as a society, towards high emissions and high energy consumption patterns. Some say it is part of our very nature as a specie, as any other on earth, to always compete and seek for structures maximizing entropy. Some say this entropy is only a consequence of a system build to sustain a certain equilibrium between providing to everyone’s needs while keeping rags to rags, and riches to riches. This is a journey I am on, and every station proposes more interconnections. The next train for me might be about monetary policy and public fundings in the context of economic degrowth for western states.

*This Blog Entry was selected for publication under the call with the subject: What Future for Global Public-Private Cooperation?