Humanity's assets, liabilities, and the pathway to one-planet prosperity — a double-entry ledger of civilisation across 3,500 years.
Not an argument about whether civilisation is good or bad. A tally. Assets on one side, the cost on the other, net equity at the foot — and an honest attempt to price what economics usually leaves off the books: war, soil, biodiversity, and the accumulated knowledge that turns out to be the largest asset of all.
Figures in quadrillions of US dollars, GDP horizon 1 CE–2025. Sources include World Bank CWON 2024, McKinsey MGI 2025, the Maddison Project 2023, and Krausmann et al. (PNAS 2017). The knowledge-endowment figure is an original construct, labelled as such.
| Line | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Civilisational Knowledge Endowment | ~$2.5Q | Original construct: the annual productivity premium of accumulated knowledge, capitalised at 4% |
| Human capital — living workforce | $900–1,300T | World Bank CWON; PPP-adjusted; living workers only |
| Built environment | $400–500T | McKinsey 2025; real estate + ancient heritage |
| Machinery & transport | $80–150T | Non-real-estate fixed assets |
| Energy assets | $80–150T | IEA cumulative + CWON subsoil NPV |
| Natural capital (surviving) | ~$125T | CWON 2024, net of depletion; falling ~0.7%/yr |
| Total assets | ~$4.0–4.5Q | excl. 1,100 Gt material stock, valued separately |
| Line | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| CO₂ environmental liability | $322–540T | Social cost of carbon × 1,740 Gt cumulative since 1750 |
| Explicit financial debt | ~$348T | IIF all-sector, Q4 2025 |
| Climate adaptation, locked-in | $150–250T | Present value of committed damages |
| War & conflict destruction | ~$130T | ~$75T physical (WWI–present) + ~$50T human capital |
| Soil & land degradation | ~2B ha | FAO; largely absent from economic accounting |
| Biodiversity loss | contingent | 69% vertebrate population decline 1970–2020; no established dollar value |
| Total liabilities (monetised) | ~$1.0–1.3Q | the largest is the unpriced one |
From the Bronze Age river valleys to the Great Acceleration, the arc bends almost entirely at the end. The single sharpest finding on the whole ledger:
The final 75 years (1950–2025) produced ~80% of all economic output since 1 CE, emitted 73% of all CO₂ accumulated since 1750, and added more material stock than the sum of all prior human history. The entire sustainability crisis is modern — and so its solutions must be.
India holds 18% of world population but only ~3–5% of material stocks, at 20–40 tonnes per capita against a rich-world 300–340. It has the most room to grow and the most to gain from leapfrogging. The physical form it builds in the next fifteen years — dense or sprawling, rail or road, clean or coal — will set its civilisational trajectory for a century. The ledger's redemptive pathway is not austerity but convergence: electrification × circularity toward a materially self-sustaining, post-extraction economy — provided those above descend faster than those below ascend.