There are so many young people who want to help fix the problems we face. In Deloitte's 2024 survey of more than 20,000 people across 44 countries, nearly half of Gen Z said they had changed jobs or industries because of climate concerns, or planned to.
But there are so few paid jobs doing this work that the ones that exist are fiercely competitive and badly paid. A popular conservation job can draw 250 applications, and one US study found more than a quarter of early-career jobs in the field paid less than the minimum wage. Plenty of people end up volunteering for work they'd happily do as a career. Victoria alone has more than 200,000 environmental volunteers.
The jobs are scarce because most of this work falls to charities, and charities have been handed every problem that has no customer, and then told to fund it by asking nicely.
Is there a customer?
A problem with a customer gets solved by business.
A problem without a customer goes to charity. Animals can't pay, and neither can a river that's being poisoned.
Some problems belong to everyone and are paid for by no one, like clean air or a stable climate. Those fall to government, if the politics allows.
When policy makes a market
A government's most powerful move is to give a problem a customer.
In 2000, Germany guaranteed anyone who generated solar power a fixed price for twenty years. That reliable demand pulled factories into the market, and as production doubled again and again, the price kept falling, by 85 per cent between 2010 and 2020. The International Energy Agency has called it the cheapest electricity in history, about one in three Australian homes have it on the roof, and the government didn't build a single panel.
Price a harm, or guarantee demand for the cleaner alternative, and a charity problem becomes a business problem. The catch is that it's politics. Australia put a price on carbon in 2012 and scrapped it two years later. A policy like this only lasts with a movement behind it.
Who owns the engine?
Every profitable business is an engine, and someone owns what it produces. Usually it's the shareholders, which is ordinary capitalism, and the government takes a share through tax to spend on the common good.
But there's a third option. A foundation can own the engine outright and point what it produces at a mission.
It already works. The company that makes Ozempic is controlled by a foundation, and Rolex is owned by one. In Denmark, foundation-owned companies employ about a fifth of the private-sector workforce. Everywhere else it's rare.
When a foundation owns the engine
The foundation behind Ozempic is the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark, one of the largest charitable foundations on Earth. It gives away more than a billion dollars a year to science and health research, and it never asks anyone for a donation. Its money comes from a profit engine, a controlling stake in Novo Nordisk, the drug company.
Other foundations own engines too. In 2022 Patagonia's founder gave his company away so that its profits, about $100 million a year, would go to protecting the planet. A problem without a customer can borrow one from a business that has plenty.
A foundation that depends on outside funding has to win it, against every other worthy cause, and government money can vanish with an election.
A foundation with a profit engine doesn't have to ask anyone. Novo's foundation gives away more every year and is still far richer than it was a decade ago. And because nobody can buy the company, it can plan in decades instead of election cycles.
An engine and a keel
Novo and Patagonia are the exceptions. Almost the whole world economy is made of engines that make profit so they can grow and make more profit, mostly for people who are already rich.
A foundation gives that engine a keel. It holds all that power to a direction beyond growth.
We have the young people who want to do this work, and we have the money, in the profits those engines make. The trouble is the organisations in between, still funding the work by asking nicely.
Make it as normal everywhere as it is in Denmark, and the jobs follow. People in the company keep the engine running, and Novo Nordisk alone has nearly 70,000 of them. People in the foundation decide where it goes, paid from profits instead of appeals.
Then the problems nobody pays to fix would finally have someone paying, and the people who want to fix them would be paid to do the work. The way there is to let more foundations own the engines.