Business as usual is where – for the time-being at least – the money is, and in our world that means it is where the power is. That power gives business-as-usual a gravitational force even when good sense and science call out for change, and even when in the long-term it’s a losing game financially. Power leads us astray, and fairness requires that we find some counterbalance to this force. Only then will change come.

We see this gravitational force of business-as-usual most powerfully in the world’s climate negotiations. The vast majority of the world’s scientists tell us that we have no time to lose and that economies and business must change. The Pacific island nations and developing economies more generally (without the money that might pad them from the increasing physical impacts of climate change) are increasingly urging change. Unusual and devastating weather patterns are being felt worldwide. We cannot continue to pump the same levels of CO2 and other climate-changing gases into our atmosphere.

A carbon-constrained future will look economically very different, and the companies that prosper in its business-as-usual will differ from those that look good now. Yet the status quo predominates in the political process. Most strikingly, governments of the world have been content to allow petrostates to co-opt the climate COP process. The last two Conferences of the Parties Serving as the Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (no wonder the COP abbreviation is preferred) have been held in the UAE and Azerbaijan, respectively the world’s 9th and 25th largest oil producers and perhaps more importantly with at least two-thirds of their economies dependent on fossil fuel industries. The chair of each conference was a senior executive in that country’s oil industry. It can be little surprise that agreements for rapid change to our fossil fuel-dependent economies have not been forthcoming.

The greatest thought experiment in fairness is John Rawls’s idea of the veil of ignorance. Those designing a just society must sit behind a veil of ignorance so that they are unaware of where they will fit in that society: this makes it most likely to be fair to all, Rawls argues. In our unveiled world, those with power, meaning those with money, continue to set the rules – and knowing that they will benefit, they continue to skew the world towards the status quo, which means in their own favour.

This favouring of the rich and powerful is of course nothing new. My latest secondhand bookshop purchase was a collection of three plays by the deeply unfashionable JB Priestley. Published in 1945, it is eager to make clear its obedience to wartime strictures. “This book is produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards” it reads. Like his most famous play, An Inspector Calls, there’s an undercurrent of class resentment and frustration with a status quo that keeps power in the hands of the old and frustrates youthful ambition and opportunity. We don’t always see those tensions in modern depictions of the interwar years, not least because they and we know all too well the changes that were to come as the war swept away past structures and strictures.

All three plays are terribly dated, displaying the careless heavy misogyny of that age, and an odd metropolitan superiority. But one still has interesting elements. Called The Golden Fleece, it is set in the eponymous hotel in Cheltingate Spa, a scarcely disguised Cheltenham. The title also has a second meaning, referring to the wealth generated from taking advantage of others (the play’s original title, Bull Market, at least to modern ears carries some of the same connotations of trickery). The Golden Fleece centres around a debate between those who feel justified in taking such advantage because that’s how the world works and those who are unwilling to do so because it would be better if it didn’t. It involves some stock market manoeuvrings that are certainly no longer legal, and seem barely credible even at the time (though that may simply be failures in the playwright’s understanding, or elisions in his story-telling).

Youth’s frustrations at age and tradition in the 1930s come out clearly from the ambitious young doctor, railing at a gouging tendency in private health (this was, of course, before the creation of the National Health Service). Talking about his doctor boss, Alec says: “He may look like a harmless old pussycat, but really he’s a pest and a menace. Instead of being a man of science, which he pretends to be, he’s something between an old charlatan and a rich old woman’s butler. He doesn’t speak or even think the truth. He doesn’t care about anything but fat fees and fat dinners. He’s an example of what’s wrong with this pussy-footed, rich old man’s country.”

But the core of the play’s arguments come from the mouth of a different character, who calls himself William Lotless. “Money! Money! It’s a servant that’s become a master,” says the scoundrel trader, for once using his skills for good – though rather tempted by the excitement to act just for the joy of it. Tongue loosened by alcohol but with his thoughts made staccato, he goes on:

“Money – was intended to be simply a sign, a token, a convenience – something like a – well a railway ticket. That’s all. But what’s happened to it? Got all out of hand. Become a source of power. The way we allow people to handle money as power, it’s just as if we let ‘em handle battleships and bombing squadrons for their own private benefit.”

Military images abound in a play written in the first months of the war. It’s impossible to read it now without thinking of the coming destruction of all that is established. It feels like, and is, a wholly different world from our own.

We know that the 1950s and 1960s brought strong economic growth that was broadly shared across the population. It may not have been entirely fairly shared (certainly not, for example, between the sexes), but economies operated largely to the benefit of all, not the few. The existing order was overturned by the war. Let us hope it doesn’t take such a destructive dislocation to shift the pull of the current business as usual; we need a veil of ignorance, or some other way to escape our ready tendency to listen harder to those who already have power through money, as that traps us in a business as usual that isn’t working.

I am grateful to my colleague Nick for the conversation where we linked COP to Rawls.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

See also: Power leads us astray: fairness lessons from Grenfell
Squid Game ‘fairness’
Sea level rise: the most unjust transition

The Golden Fleece, JB Priestley, 1940

A Theory of Justice, John Rawls, 1971

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls, 2004