When asked why a young student is interested in pension funds, Sophie Neuber replies that “they are the true intergenerational contract”. Neuber is a student at Cambridge University, studying Development Economics and working in Mergers and Acquisitions at J.P. Morgan. “We have to restructure incentives to align interests,” she says, “and make all generations choose decisions that are beneficial and environmentally conscious for everyone else.”

In countries like Poland (where she has her roots), the taxes a young professional pays contribute directly to not only their future pension, but also to that of their grandparents, the Cambridge development economics student says. To look at the way pensions payouts are distributed differently means to connect the dots and improve the quality of life for both the elderly and early-career workers.

The idea proposed in Neuber’s award-winning essay is for the mathematical function that now regulates pension payouts to include two new aspects: net greenhouse gas emission per capita, to keep track of the environmental impact that a company has, and the Gini coefficient, a proxy that shows the income inequality in a given area.

Louis Klein took part in the essay competition in 1992. At the time, the atmosphere was very different. “Thirty years ago, we were all in a world that was sort of dominated by the idea of competitive advantage,” Klein says. “At that time it suffused everything, thinking about business or thinking about politics, or thinking about well-being in the world.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall made the notion of competition outdated. “Today competition is probably not such a good idea,” Klein says.

Still, Klein says, we need to take things one step further: “We need to ask ourselves, rather than playing the game, how do we change the game?” When tackling complex issues like climate change, Klein suggests that we should focus on relationships, rather than focus on complexity. “This is what brings us back to the St. Gallen Symposium,” Klein says. “It’s the easiest way to have compassionate conversations where out of deep listening grow human relationships. All that we can possibly think about governance, politics, economics goes back to that.”

Pictures by Markus Ketola

Sharon Zeller