Economic Prosperity for the Common Good

If the ultimate purpose of an economy is to ensure the common good by bringing prosperity to all of humanity, then it is important to define what is the common good. Is prosperity only material wellbeing, or are there other dimensions of prosperity at the individual, social and even spiritual levels beyond what the economy considers? On what basis do we determine the common good? Clearly, science has a role in this, providing objective measures of human health and the health of the planet we live on. Religion also has a complementary role in opening us to a higher human purpose defined by spiritual values and moral laws, and guiding us to use the knowledge of science for our wellbeing. The world’s faith traditions thus have a significant role to play in defining the common good.

One dimension of what is good for all is to meet basic human needs, as reflected, for example in the Sustainable Development Goals. Eliminating poverty and hunger, ensuring health and well-being, providing education for all, upholding gender equality, providing basic needs for water, energy and decent work including in industry, reducing inequalities, creating sustainable cities and communities with responsible consumption and production, acting on climate change, and protecting oceans, freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity, through peace, justice, strong institutions and partnerships. The SDGs include indicators to measure progress towards meeting these needs. Every human being has the potential to create wealth and wellbeing through work, and prosperity will be universal when this potential is fully realised. No one should be left unemployed.

For our material wellbeing, science provides measures of the state of nine planetary boundaries, defining limits of the Earth system where human activities risk going beyond the safe operating space that maintains the requirements for life on this planet. And followed over time, science can model the dynamics of various processes and project the consequences into the future to support planning and decision-making. We have already overshot seven of the boundaries, and are consuming the planet’s capital rather than living off the interest, with existential threats to our future. Climate change is an obvious example, where extracting fossil carbon for energy has raised the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere causing global heating. We depend on biodiversity for food, materials and many ecosystem functions, yet excessive consumption and habitat loss are creating an extinction crisis. Changing land use and soil degradation are rapidly eroding the productive capacity of the planet. We are overusing freshwater, and it has recently been announced that we are facing global water bankruptcy (Madani 2026) https://iefworld.org/Water_bankrupt. The manufacture and overuse of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers has overwhelmed natural processes and is degrading ecosystems including the oceans. As carbon dioxide is absorbed into the oceans, it raises the acidity, impacting all species with carbonate skeletons. We have invented many novel entities like pesticides decimating insects; plastics and forever chemicals polluting everything including our bodies; antibiotics whose excessive use is generating antibiotic resistance and making old cures worthless; and many other innovations that are profitable in the short term but accumulate long-term threats. Only atmospheric aerosol loading and stratospheric ozone depletion are boundaries that have been addressed through global action and remain within safe limits.

Note that in almost all these cases, the excessive and damaging activities are driven by their profitability in the present financial system and are pursued by economic units, largely institutionalised in corporations, with no legal requirement to respect the common good, but only to provide short-term return on capital. In this economic framework there is no concept of moderation or sufficiency, but only the pursuit of endless growth in material wealth. This leads to what has been described as the tragedy of the commons, where free access to a limited resource by selfish entities inevitably leads to overconsumption and destruction of the resource, now evident as we overshoot planetary boundaries. This may be true when the system is entirely selfish and there is no understanding of and respect for the common good. Fortunately science also demonstrates that the human species can be educated and has evolved great capacity for cooperation, solidarity and justice. Redefining economic prosperity means rethinking the values behind business (Nicholas 2026).

One of our problems is that our economic system relies on the wrong measures for determining the common good, whether the narrow pursuit of profit, or collectively relying on growth in GDP as a measure of economic performance. While GDP accounts for the movement of financial wealth through the economy, it fails to include many dimensions of human wellbeing such as the state of natural resource capital or the contribution of the subsistence economy of the poor, and is increased through many activities that are ultimately harmful, such as arms manufacture, automobile accidents, gambling, narcotic drugs, pollution and wastes. Economic growth today coexists with poverty, exclusion, violence, and serious violations of human rights. For the principal actors, the end of wealth generation justifies any means. Yet for the common good, the economy should take human well-being, sustainability and equity into account, and there are increasing efforts to look beyond GDP, including at the United Nations (UN 2025): https://iefworld.org/beyondGDP.

Complex systems science can also provide some principles to define what economic prosperity should produce for the common good in human society. The most productive and resilient systems have high diversity and specialisation integrated through cooperative and symbiotic relationships with high communication and information flow and a circular economy recycling materials within the system and little loss through waste. The coral reef ecosystem is an excellent example, building its whole environment like a city. Rather than interpreting everything as competition with winners and losers and survival of the fittest, each organism benefits the whole in some way and receives in return its basic requirements. Any disturbance is quickly adapted to through learning, with a return to a dynamic equilibrium.

Behind all of this is the economic assumption that human nature is inherently selfish and aggressive. It is true from a materialistic perspective, so dominant today in our society, that the animal dimension of humanity, seeking material satisfaction and superficial pleasures through consumption, physical satisfaction, and even addiction, is the present definition of prosperity. Yet human nature can be educated to higher purposes, and this has always been the role of religion in its purest form. The great spiritual teachers set the example of growth in higher human qualities like selfless love, forgiveness and spirituality through a simple lifestyle and moderation. The great civilisations of the past were built by cooperation for the collective good through altruism, justice and service to others, and torn down when the ego, greed and selfish power returned to dominate human behaviour, and religion became a lifeless shell. This is why religion has needed to be renewed throughout history. All the faith communities today can return to their spiritual core and contribute to educating humanity for a renewed economy that promotes human and natural wellbeing and serves the common good, leaving no one behind.

In this perspective, rising above the narrow view of the material economy, there are requirements at the social and institutional level for human security and the common good, such as peace rather than war, love rather than hate, cooperation and solidarity rather than winner takes all. These are the qualities reinforcing human relationships, forging a sense of community and leading to civilisation-building. For the individual, these are the lessons at the heart of religion and all forms of spirituality. Collectively, this is the way to build communities. While national sovereignty was a reasonable scale of social organisation in previous centuries, with globalisation the world has become one country, and the nationalism that gives priority to the national interest over other states or the common good at a planetary level is now just another expression of the dysfunctional values of greed in the materialist struggle for power and domination through competition, if not outright imperialism and war, that are today driving the disintegration of modern civilisation. As the nations come to see that their individual well-being depends on the common good, and the planet is demanding that its limits be respected by sending warning signals of its distress, there will be no alternative to a federation combining close cooperation with the autonomy necessary for unity in diversity founded in economic prosperity for all.

SOME REFERENCES

Madani K. 2026. Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, doi: 10.53328/INR26KAM001

Nicholas, Jenna. 2026. Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing. Herndon VA: Amplify Publishing. 193 p.

UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP. November 2025. Interim Progress Report. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/interim_report_high-level_exp…