Our Perspectives

This essay argues that the integrity of liberal market economies depends on pricing completeness. Milton Friedman’s shareholder-value doctrine, while often cited as a defence of capitalism, implicitly relied on unpriced externalities — a hidden subsidy from nature and society that distorted competition. If a market economy is to thrive, it must evolve toward fair pricing of all input factors, including ecosystem services. This paper introduces the concept of EcoAgency — the managerial and valuation framework that internalises natural and social capital as operating infrastructure rather than externalities.

When I was twelve, I read The Limits to Growth. I remember closing the book with a knot in my stomach. That evening I asked my father if the world might really be running out of time. He smiled and said, “Someone will fix it, Martin. It will be alright.” Half a century later, I know he was only half right. It will be alright—if we choose to fix it ourselves. That lesson returned years later in a boardroom. As a young consultant I once told a CEO, “Your business will be sustainable when you internalise every external effect that isn’t priced—and still make a profit.” He banged the table. “If that’s sustainability, you can close every business on earth.”

Future generations may look back at this decade not as the time of collapse, but as the moment when their ancestors recognised that three great transformations were converging — and chose to align them. The language of “poly-crisis” dominates political and academic discourse. It describes the sense that every system is under stress at once: climate, energy, migration, inequality, governance. It is a diagnosis of simultaneity, meant to capture the feeling of being overwhelmed. But words matter. “Poly-crisis” sounds like pathology, as if history itself were breaking apart. It is more useful — and more truthful — to call it a “starting point”. What looks like breakdown is also the beginning of a new form of coherence, if we choose to see it that way.