The Last Border Is the Mind

The Peace Economy “Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is an output — and like every output worth having, it must be produced.” We come now to the constructive heart of this book. In the chapters that follow, I will describe four pillars of what I have, throughout the manuscript, called the Divine Presence of Peace — the proposed civilizational architecture in which the diagnosis of the first three parts and the philosophical reframe of the fourth and fifth parts become infrastructure. The four pillars are: the Peace Economy (this chapter), MarVertisement (Chapter 19), Vocational Renaissance Centers (Chapter 20), and the Divine Presence as the integrating institutional logic (Chapter 21). The Peace Economy comes first because, without an economy that produces peace as a deliberate output, the other three pillars cannot scale. The economic flows are the bloodstream. The other pillars are organs. The organs cannot function without the bloodstream. So we begin with the bloodstream. The Existing Economy Is, On Net, a Producer of Conflict I want to make a claim that I expect will be contested. The claim is this: The dominant configuration of the existing global economy is, on net, a producer of conflict — not because anyone designed it to be so, but because its incentive structures, taken together, reward the production of conflict-adjacent outputs and punish the production of peace-adjacent outputs. This is not a moral indictment of individual market participants. It is an observation about the aggregate behaviour of the system. The system, taken as a whole, does the following: It allocates extraordinary capital to the global arms industry, which produces, by its own self-description, instruments of organized violence in volumes that vastly exceed the legitimate defensive needs of any community. The world spends, conservatively, more than two trillion US dollars annually on military expenditure. A small fraction of that figure, redirected, would fund the entire global vocational renaissance, every Vocational Renaissance Center this book imagines, several times over, with money left for the climate transition. It rewards extractive industries that operate by transferring value from communities of origin to communities of consumption, in ways that produce, predictably, the long-term political grievances that, in time, produce conflict. It rewards consumer technologies whose business models, as we have discussed, optimize for the engagement of attention rather than for the flourishing of the user, with measurable consequences for the social fabric of every population they reach. It rewards financial products whose complexity exceeds the regulatory capacity of any single nation, with the consequence that systemic crises are routinely externalized onto populations whose participation in the products was minimal or non-existent. It rewards labour arrangements that, at the global supply chain level, externalize costs onto the most powerless workers in the chain — and in some cases onto children — while concentrating returns in jurisdictions where the externalities are politically invisible. I am not arguing that all of contemporary economic activity is of this character. A great deal of it is not. But the activities I have listed are, in aggregate, significant enough that they constitute, in the present configuration, the net direction of the system. The system, in this sense, has a vector. The vector is currently pointed away from peace, not toward it. The Peace Economy is the proposed reorientation of the vector. The Architecture of the Peace Economy The Peace Economy, as I propose it, is not a separate sector. It is a transformation of the existing economy through a set of policy levers, market mechanisms, and cultural shifts that, taken together, redirect the system’s aggregate vector toward the production of peace as a recognized economic output. The transformation operates through five principal levers. Lever one: tax policy. The tax system is the most powerful single lever that governments possess for redirecting the vector of an economy. Activities that produce conflict-adjacent outputs are currently, in most jurisdictions, taxed similarly to — and in some cases more favourably than — activities that produce peace-adjacent outputs. The Peace Economy proposes a deliberate divergence: activities that produce, on net, the conditions of conflict (arms production beyond legitimate defensive need, extractive operations without commensurate community benefit, consumer technologies whose business model optimizes against user flourishing) are taxed at substantially higher rates than activities that produce, on net, the conditions of peace (education, healthcare, vocational training, ecological restoration, civic infrastructure, ethical AI development, peace-oriented cultural production). The differential tax is not a small adjustment. It is a five-to-ten percentage point divergence, large enough to materially shift the relative profitability of the two categories. Lever two: public procurement. Governments are, collectively, the largest single purchaser of goods and services in most economies. Public procurement currently allocates this purchasing power without systematic reference to the Peace Economy framework. The proposal is that, over a transition period of perhaps a decade, public procurement be progressively realigned such that suppliers who meet specified Peace Economy criteria are preferred, on transparent and contestable terms, over suppliers who do not. This is, by any measure, an extraordinary lever. A government that commits to sourcing half of its procurement from Peace-Economy-aligned suppliers within a decade has, by that single commitment, created a market opportunity of enormous size for businesses willing to align themselves accordingly. Lever three: capital markets. The Peace Economy framework proposes the development of a Peace Index — a publicly auditable rating of publicly traded firms against the criteria of contribution to peace-adjacent or conflict-adjacent outputs. The Peace Index would be analogous to the existing ESG ratings, but with a more rigorous methodology and a sharper normative anchor. Institutional investors with mandates to consider non-financial criteria — pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds — would, over time, allocate capital with reference to the Peace Index. The capital allocation, in turn, would affect the relative cost of capital for firms in the two categories. Firms that produce peace would, over time, enjoy lower costs of capital. Firms that produce conflict would, over time, face higher costs of capital. The financial logic is straightforward. The political logic, of building the institutional consensus to implement it, is harder — but not impossible. Lever four: trade policy. International trade is currently governed by frameworks that focus, almost exclusively, on the reduction of tariffs and the protection of intellectual property. The Peace Economy framework proposes that trade agreements include, as enforceable provisions, minimum thresholds of Peace Economy alignment — both for the goods being traded and for the production conditions under which they are produced. Goods produced under conditions of severe labour exploitation, severe ecological destruction, or severe political repression would, under the framework, face automatic tariff differentials. This is a controversial proposal. It will be opposed, vigorously, by exporters whose competitive advantage depends precisely on the conditions the framework seeks to discourage. The opposition is to be expected. The opposition is also, in the long run, surmountable, provided the framework’s adoption begins in a coalition of nations large enough to provide a meaningful internal market for compliant goods. The European Union, in coalition with several other jurisdictions, has the capacity to lead this transition. The early steps are already underway, in nascent form, in the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism and similar instruments. Lever five: cultural prestige. This is the lever I want to emphasize most strongly, because it is the one most often overlooked. As I noted in Chapter Fourteen, prestige is allocable. A society that chooses to confer cultural prestige on the producers of peace — the vocational educators, the peace artists, the civic builders, the ecological restorers, the dignity engineers — will, within a generation, attract a substantial share of available talent to those activities. A society that confers prestige primarily on the producers of conflict-adjacent outputs — the derivative traders, the attention engineers, the disruption celebrants — will attract talent to those activities. The allocation of prestige is not the work of governments alone. It is the work of universities, of media institutions, of cultural awards, of public commemoration, of school curricula, of family conversations, of dinner-party introductions. Each of these is a small allocation of prestige. The sum of the small allocations is the cultural vector. The vector can be deliberately turned. The MarVertisement chapter that follows will discuss how. The Financial Feasibility A common objection to proposals of this scale is that they are unaffordable. The objection is, I have found over the years, almost always made without careful examination of the actual numbers. Let me sketch the actual numbers, in approximate but defensible terms. The total global expenditure on military activity is, as noted, on the order of two trillion US dollars annually. The total global expenditure on official development assistance is, by comparison, on the order of two hundred billion dollars annually — that is, roughly one-tenth of military expenditure. The total annual cost of building the Vocational Renaissance Centers infrastructure described in the next chapter, at the global scale required to materially affect the conditions of dangerous migration, is, by reasonable estimate, in the range of one hundred to two hundred billion dollars per year for a decade. This is, in other words, in the range of five to ten per cent of current global military expenditure, sustained for ten years. This is not unaffordable. This is a budget reallocation of modest proportions relative to the size of the global economy. It is unaffordable only if we insist on treating the existing budget structure as a fixed constraint rather than as a deliberate choice. The existing budget structure is not a fixed constraint. It is, like every other feature of the global economic system, an artifact of past choices that can be modified by present choices. The same arithmetic applies, at smaller scales, to the funding of the Index of Dignity, the support of ethical AI development, the construction of civic infrastructure in wealthy cities, the rebuilding of the social fabric. None of these is, by the standards of contemporary public finance, expensive. They are small relative to the existing expenditures that produce, on net, the opposite outcomes. The reform is, in the strict financial sense, self-funding — provided we are willing to redirect the existing flows rather than seeking entirely new sources of revenue. This is the deepest insight of the Peace Economy as an economic framework. We can afford it now. We could have afforded it twenty years ago. We will be able to afford it twenty years from now. The constraint has never been money. The constraint has been direction. The redirection is the project. The redirection requires political coalitions willing to take on the lobbies that benefit from the current direction. The lobbies are powerful, but they are not invincible. They have, in the past, been defeated on issues of comparable difficulty — tobacco regulation, leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting refrigerants, slavery itself. The defeat of entrenched lobbies is not unprecedented. It is, in fact, a well-understood political art. The Peace Economy is the application of that art to the most consequential economic question of our age. A Note on Profits I have committed, at the beginning of this book and throughout my professional life, to the principle that the strategic mission profits of the institutions I lead — the Peace Artists Foundation, BIG SYSTEMS, the publishing and educational ventures connected to this manuscript — will be directed, in their entirety, to the humanitarian and civilizational projects this book describes. This commitment is not virtue signalling. It is, in my view, the only logically consistent posture for an author who proposes the Peace Economy and then seeks to enrich himself on the proceeds of proposing it. The Peace Economy framework requires that those who profit from its propagation be visibly accountable to its principles. The author of this book cannot, in good conscience, claim otherwise. The accounts will be public. The donations will be auditable. The projects will be visible. The reader who chooses to participate in the broader publishing ecosystem of the Divine Peace Civilization Collection is, in a real sense, participating in the funding of the Vocational Renaissance Centers, the Peace Artistry programmes, the AI literacy initiatives, and the dignity infrastructure described in these pages. This is not the dominant model in contemporary publishing. It is a model that, in my view, more publishing ought to follow. I offer it here not as a constraint binding any other author but as a personal accountability that I have chosen to impose on myself and on the institutions I serve.