When John Maynard Keynes died, 70 years ago on Thursday, he was a man with serious unfinished business. While he achieved much in his lifetime, he lost out to the American delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Against his objections, the US dollar was made the global currency, and Keynes’ foresighted idea for a new institution to more equitably balance the interests of creditor and debtor countries was rejected.

What we got instead was the IMF, structural adjustment policies and more than half a century of largely unnecessary pain and suffering for the world’s poorest countries.

Looking back at the final years of Keynes’ life underscores an important point about the world we live in today: some of the key decisions that define it were made more than seven decades ago by an elite group of white men in a meeting at a swanky New Hampshire ski resort.

To steer away from an economic system marked by rising inequality, environmental devastation and a lack of accountability, we need to do what Keynes tried to do 70 years ago: imagine a different kind of Bretton Woods.



Inequality is now killing middle America Read more

Since the global financial crises, there’s been no shortage of such calls. Luminaries like the former Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker and leaders at the G20 have called for a new Bretton Woods to restore a rules-based system of global monetary policy. In 2008, the Guardian featured a wide range of proposals for revamping the way world economies deal with balance of payments issues and economic coordination. But Bretton Woods was really about more than monetary policy – it was about defining the worldview and intellectual foundation behind our economic system.

The ideas and institutions enshrined at Bretton Woods set the stage for a new age in which governments at all levels took on an unprecedented orienting mission to maximize GDP growth. For the US in particular, Bretton Woods led to GDP growth coming to serve as the foremost indicator of national progress.

The need for a different kind of worldview has never been clearer. This is revealed by a look at any of the problems of our age, from climate to inequality to social exclusion. GDP – the barometer of progress that underlies the Bretton Woods world – actually tends to rise not only with pollution and radically unequal returns from capital but also with societal challenges like crime, commuting time and family breakdown. The Deepwater Horizon disaster registered as a net positive for the economy in terms of GDP because of cleanup and rebuilding activities. Disasters like Hurricane Sandy were also, according to many estimates, net positives for the economy, based on the measure we use.



America is finally waking up to its inequality problem Read more

Designing a new global economic framework requires a global-scale conversation. Yet the forums at which that’s supposed to be possible now – namely, governmental meetings like the G20 and elite talk shops like Davos – are either feckless or counterproductive.



So what might a Bretton Woods for the 21st century look like? Is it possible to design an economic gathering that prioritizes the design of frameworks to advance the interests of people and the planet? It’s not only necessary – it’s increasingly possible.

The Next System Project, a network of hundreds of creative thinkers and activists, is putting forward actionable blueprints for the new economy, from old post-industrial cities to rural agricultural communities. Leaders of that movement, including Gar Alprowitz, Ai-jen Poo, Medea Benjamin, Danny Glover, the congressman John Conyers, Sarita Gupta, Daniel Ellsberg and others, have been working to compile something as comprehensive as the framework the world got in 1944.



Next year, a separate initiative, the Ecos gathering, is seeking to bring thinkers and activists from marginalized communities and indigenous cultures to systematically envision a new political and economic system.

These are just a couple of the many possibilities for a new economic visioning conference.

A new Bretton Woods clearly wouldn’t have the same kind of immediate translation into policy outcomes as the great powers’ economic summit at the end of the second world war. Nor should it. The contours of a new system cannot be identified overnight or imposed on anyone. The idea is to plant seeds of what’s possible – and we should start now.