Economy & Commons

"There Is No Alternative" — The Evidence That Alternatives Already Exist

280 million people work in cooperatives. Three basic income experiments have documented their effects. Amsterdam changed its economic compass. The WIR Bank has been financing Swiss SMEs since 1934. Here is the data.

Published on 10 min de lecture

“There Is No Alternative” — The Evidence That Alternatives Already Exist

TL;DR: “There Is No Alternative” — TINA — was the economic motto of the 1980s. The problem: 280 million people today work in cooperatives, three basic income experiments have produced measured results, Amsterdam adopted a new economic framework, and the WIR Bank has been financing Swiss SMEs since 1934. The alternatives exist. They work. Here is the data.

“There Is No Alternative.”

Margaret Thatcher declared it so often during the 1980s that the acronym TINA entered the political dictionary. The idea: free-market competition, growth measured by GDP, maximisation of shareholder profit — this is the only economic system viable at scale.

This thesis has a factual problem.

While TINA became an axiom, 3 million cooperatives were forming across the world, employing 280 million people — 10% of the global employed population. The 300 largest generate $2.79 trillion in annual revenue. This is not a niche movement. It is a global economic infrastructure that quietly ignored TINA for forty years.

This article documents five economic alternatives at scale — not as utopias, but with measured data.

1. Cooperatives: a $2.79 trillion sector

According to the International Cooperative Alliance (2025 edition of the World Cooperative Monitor), there are 3 million cooperatives in the world, with more than one billion members — 12% of the global population. These structures employ 280 million people, or 10% of the active workforce. The 300 largest generate $2.79 trillion in annual revenue.

But the aggregate figures mask what structurally distinguishes this model. Take Mondragon, the Basque worker cooperative federation founded in 1956: it now encompasses 81 self-governed cooperatives, employs 70,000 people, and operates in 37 countries with 104 production sites, selling across more than 150 countries.

What sets Mondragon apart is not only scale — it is distribution. The wage gap between the highest-paid and the lowest-paid is 1:9 at Mondragon. In a FTSE 100 British company, that gap is 1:129. The value created is distributed differently — without sacrificing economic viability.

Energy illustrates this potential in an infrastructure sector. The REScoop network federates 743 citizen energy communities and cooperatives across Europe, covering Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, and more than twenty other countries. Citizens who own their local energy production, collective dividends: a counter-model to large centralised providers, and one that is growing.

Honest perspective: cooperatives are not immune to economic failure. The model distributes risks and value differently — it does not eliminate them. The resilience data during crises is solid; performance data during stable periods shows a real but moderate advantage.

2. Universal basic income: three experiments, three lessons

“If you give people money without conditions, they will stop working.” The intuition is common. But three rigorous experiments have produced data that contradicts it.

Finland (2017–2018) — The Finnish government paid €560 per month to 2,000 job-seekers for two years, unconditionally. Result: recipients worked on average 6 more days than the control group (78 days vs 72). But the clearest effect was not employment — it was well-being: they were “more satisfied with their lives and less stressed mentally than the control group.” The employment effects were described as “minor” in the official report — an honesty worth preserving: basic income is not a silver bullet for unemployment.

Stockton, California (2019–2021) — 125 residents received $500 per month for 24 months. The full-time employment rate rose from 28% to 40% (+12 percentage points) for recipients, versus +5 points in the control group. Less than 1% of transfers was spent on alcohol or tobacco. The share of recipients able to cover an unexpected expense rose from 25% to 52%.

Kenya — GiveDirectly (since 2018) — The largest experiment ever conducted covers approximately 200 villages. The initial results (2023) are clear: “no evidence that UBI promotes laziness”; recipients “invested, became more entrepreneurial, and earned more.” The lump-sum payment format had the strongest impact on income: +50% of the average revenue of the control group.

Honest perspective: these three experiments remain small-scale pilots. Finland tested 2,000 people out of 5 million active workers. Stockton had 125 recipients. Scaling to a national level raises questions of financing and political economy that these experiments do not resolve — they only demonstrate that the most common fears about human behaviour did not materialise in these contexts.

3. Doughnut Economics: changing the compass

In April 2020, during lockdown, the city of Amsterdam adopted the Doughnut model as the framework for its post-Covid economic recovery. The first city in the world to do so. By 2025, more than 50 local governments across the world had incorporated the approach into their policies.

What is the Doughnut? Developed by economist Kate Raworth and first published in 2012 in an Oxfam report, the model defines a safe and just space for humanity between two circles:

  • The social foundation — 12 dimensions drawn from the Sustainable Development Goals, which every society should guarantee: food, water, health, education, housing, equity.
  • The ecological ceiling — 9 planetary boundaries defined by Rockström et al., beyond which lie unacceptable environmental degradation.

The goal: to thrive in the doughnut — without exceeding the outer circle or falling below the inner one.

What this changes in practice: municipal decisions incorporate indicators beyond GDP growth — air quality, access to healthcare, housing equity, imported carbon footprint. A construction project that would destroy a local wetland must justify its real ecological cost, not just its financial return.

Honest perspective: Doughnut Economics is a decision-making framework, not a tested policy with long-term measured macroeconomic results. Amsterdam is in its early years of application. What is documented is institutional adoption — not yet performance indicators comparable to those of the UBI experiments.

4. Local currencies: the proximity economy that lasts

The WIR Bank was founded in Switzerland in 1934, during the Great Depression, by entrepreneurs who could no longer access bank credit. Its principle: a complementary currency, the WIR franc, usable exclusively between SME members of the network in the hospitality, construction, retail, and manufacturing sectors.

Nearly a century later, the network has 62,000 members, with an annual volume of 6.5 billion WIR francs exchanged (2005 data — the most recent verified). Its defining characteristic: counter-cyclical behaviour. During recessions, when conventional bank credit dries up, WIR activity increases — maintaining exchanges between SMEs when Swiss franc liquidity contracts. The bank claims continued operation even through general economic crises.

This model is not designed to replace the national currency — it complements it, precisely where it falls short. It is a monetary safety net for smaller economic actors, proven over 90 years.

Honest perspective: the available data for the WIR Bank dates from 2005. Other local currencies exist (Bristol Pound, Regiogeld networks in Germany), but their systemic impact data has not been verified in the primary sources used for this article.

5. The circular economy: nothing is wasted, everything has a cost

One statistic to reframe the problem: according to the European Commission, 90% of biodiversity loss is caused by the extraction and processing of resources. And up to 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage.

The circular economy proposes a response: design to reuse, repair, and recirculate — rather than for obsolescence and disposal.

Where does Europe stand? The circular material use rate in 2024 reached 12.2% in the EU (up from 10.7% in 2010). The target is to double this rate to 24% by 2030. To be honest: Europe is currently off track for this objective.

But national disparities reveal what is possible. The Netherlands records a rate of 32.7% — already beyond the 2030 target. Romania is at 1.3%. The gap shows that the result depends on political choices, not material inevitability.

On plastics, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that a circular approach for this sector alone could reduce by more than 80% the volumes of plastic reaching the oceans, generate $200 billion in savings per year, and create 700,000 net jobs by 2040. These projections are modelled extrapolations based on observed trajectories in sectors where circularity has already been applied — they do not constitute certified scientific forecasts.

What you can do today

None of these models is perfect. Cooperatives can fail; universal basic income has not yet been tested at the scale of a large wealthy country; Doughnut Economics is in its early applications; the WIR Bank covers Swiss SMEs, not the global economy. That is true.

What is also true: these models exist, they work, and their data refutes the most common arguments against them. The basic income “laziness” did not materialise in three very different contexts. Mondragon distributes at 1:9 where the FTSE 100 distributes at 1:129 — without vanishing from the market. The Netherlands circulates 32.7% of its materials while the European average is 12.2%.

The question is not whether these alternatives are possible. It is: in which sectors do you choose to develop them?

A few concrete entry points:

  • Join or create a consumer or worker cooperative in your sector.
  • Check whether your local authority applies a social and solidarity economy policy, or a Doughnut-type framework.
  • Support citizen energy — the REScoop network lists 743 European energy cooperatives.
  • Look for active complementary currencies in your region.
  • Buy second-hand, repair, and support reuse networks as deliberate economic acts.

A sentence from Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize in Economics 2009, sums up what this data suggests: “Humans have a more complex motivational structure and a greater capacity to solve social dilemmas than assumed by rational choice theory.”

TINA was not an economic truth. It was a hypothesis about human nature. The data suggests it was wrong.

Sources

See also: Having a purpose beyond profit makes companies more resilient

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