The 19th-Century Family Fortunes Funding Degrowth

In their launch editorial, the authors of the New Economies for Ending Poverty (NEEP) roadmap called for “changing the rules of the global economy.” They were promoting a policy playbook for the ‘degrowth’ movement, which has the stated goal of reducing economic production to redistribute wealth and reduce resource consumption.

An Effort News investigation identified the source of NEEP’s income: 19th and early 20th century family fortunes. Those calling for degrowth are not the poor and hungry. Instead, they are heirs to generational fortunes, whose wealth insulates them from the shortages degrowth would cause.

NEEP proposed 80 policy measures, including maximum income, price controls, job guarantees, and binding limits on resource use. Their plan drew widespread outcry from economists, who argued NEEP authors were misrepresenting the views of economists and misrepresenting reality.¹

NEEP’s own finances are convoluted — their donation sizes are literally hidden using Swiss bank accounts. NEEP is primarily funded through P4NE, or Partners for a New Economy, whose funds were held by the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation (SPF). Effort identified these donors using public records and filings:

Here’s how P4NE hid the full list, along with donation amounts, from the public. P4NE’s funds are held by the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation (SPF), meaning that SPF is the recipient of all P4NE donations. SPF combines 106 hosted funds into a single mixed fund, obfuscating donation totals for each.

This technically lawful practice hides the amount donated by each P4NE donor. However, by cross referencing multiple sources with SPF’s filings, Effort identified minimums for several donors.

The reality is that donors give money to causes because those causes advance their goals. The strongest backers of P4NE’s degrowth projects are families that secured generational wealth, some centuries ago.

Past all of the language of ‘justice’ and ‘equality’, degrowth NGOs like P4NE share two things in common. First, their source of income makes them immune to the struggles ordinary people face in an economic downturn. Second, their inherited wealth makes them indifferent to the obstacles to creating new wealth.

Conceptually, the degrowth movement is the extension of the hidden, inherited wealth that created it.