Sternfels and Mckinsey have issued this report on fertility decline, bemoaning its impact on economic growth.

Mckinsey is worth over $100 billion.

But here’s the problem. Their report is contradicted by the reality of economic health in places like Japan, where degrowth and strong economic performance go hand in hand. 

So what is Sternfels and McKinsey doing? He has a bigger problem than being wrong.

He and McKinsey are hiding liability for countless deaths in the climate crisis, because their vast wealth was made by not paying the costs – in fundamental systems of cost/benefit analysis based on assumptions about entitlements. Their wealth was made by never paying the full costs of evading the climate crisis, autocracy, and vast inequity.

They started all of their economic analysis by assuming a right to violate children’s right to a fair start in life, using unsustainable growth enabled by a lack of investment in kids to degrade ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath a key threshold, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk.

Their wealth was made at cost to our freedom, environmentally, socially, and politically. You feel those costs every dat,

You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact. In essence the proponents are using a shell/ponzi scheme, identified as such by Nobel laureates, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocent persons around the world. 

The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health. This is exacerbated by vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our current trajectory, and all of this loss of freedom is measurable by widely accepted metrics used for assessing sustainable development.

And yet legal systems, and legitimacy, require the measurable inclusion of constituents in order to be representative, and to legitimately claim authority to ensure compliance with the law.

 

 

Sternfels and Mckinsey did not create value. They violated birthrights in externalizing costs in order to make money. And they owe that back.

Moving that wealth can save lives, and there are ways to do it. 

Stenfels and his family of a wife and three kids denied others the basic things they seemed to value throughout their lives, e.g., 1) seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare while letting at risk children and certainly many members of future generations die in infancy through deprivation and abuse that could have been avoided; 2) expecting equal access to opportunities while the exponentially discriminatory birth positioning of others resign them to a life of servitude, 3) participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed while ignoring the way dilution and positionality ensure the voices of some carry no weight, 4) using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health while others are born into the deadly results of racist ecocide, an outcome that contradicts the efficiency many of these leech-like academics laud in the abstract as they enjoy growth-based investments, and 5) enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions while others and those in the future have no such option, etc.

This is not a right/left issue. We are all complicit.

None of us conditioned the legitimacy of our systems on actually fulfilling children’s birthrights, no one can explain legitimacy while continuing that error – or how we get to justice from injustice, and denying that the error underlies all we do clouds liability for climate reparations which can save lives.

 

That makes Sternfels what some call a key “legitimating barrier,” spreading misinformation to hide wealth that is owed to future generations, wealth that could be used to save lives.

Sternfels and other leaders at Mckinsey have thus done more to harm our shared values – like experiencing moderate temperatures and enjoying access to food and water –  than they have done to further them. Sternfels has literally enriched his thee children at deadly cost to countless children of color. There are extensively peer-reviewed reasons his kids could inherit his death debt, a debt universally enforceable through crowdsourced mechanisms.

How do we ensure he and McKinsey are held accountable?

 

Several scammy organizations in high-emission nations have been running animal protection and environmental campaigns – our most demanding ideals – by fundraising on claims of reduced emissions, while total emissions and negative infant outcomes are rising, and the reductions having been vastly undone by growth-based political inequity. More and more children and animals have been brought into conditions with no resources with which to deal with the impact of the growing emissions, lack of political influence, and degrading ecosocial safety systems.

Human birth and development is the largest determinant of all outcomes we experience. It is thus the fundamental driver of the climate crisis – not just emissions, but political influence to control them, and and the resilience to deal with them. And yet even now, wealthy funders driving social justice reforms are hiding their liability for the violations, costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

The Fair Start Movement was formed as the world’s first constitutional watchdog to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would choose to avoid liability for the crisis, and for life-saving and legitimating reparations.

 

Our tactic is simple: We take impact claims made by public entities and interest organizations and we assess them against objective measures of ongoing losses of political equity and democratic influence, or a zero-baseline measure of the full spectrum of harm caused by the crisis. Fair Start does not replace downstream public interest interventions; it reorients them from preemptive, rights-based, legitimating and upstream base.

Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of the rights of children, and animals.

The disclosure, as explained below, contrasts impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero baseline. Fundamentally orienting from that rule is the first necessary condition of being free, or self-determining, a conclusion backed by some of the leading political theorists in the world.

 

Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurate communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that truth to be self-determining. In that discourse, how could we account for fundamental obligations without first ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions, the fundament of empowering relations?

If they are willing to admit owing costs to future generations, we urge key barriers to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today. Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “non-constituitive ” barriers: Those entities who refuse to derive authority and entitlement back to demonstrably empowering the constituents from whose political sovereignty these things flow and are conditioned upon.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Stenfels here to redo the report, but now accounting for this key cost: How children entered the world in conditions that violated their rights; degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health; and exacerbated vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our current trajectory.

In forthcoming work we will contrast the wealth his children enjoy, at deadly cost to countless children around the world, so that all can judge Sternfels full liability.