The argument in one page
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The reasoning of the present work comes in six movements.¶ 1
The problem. Decisions — monetary, digital, commercial, climate-related — cross borders; accountability, for its part, stops at the threshold of the jurisdiction that decides.¶ 2
The diagnosis. The international system is not empty: it is dense but discontinuous. Between measuring a harm, qualifying it, drawing a consequence from it, financing that consequence and opening a remedy, the evidence is lost from one link to the next.¶ 3
The theory. The Global Accountability Chain states what complete accountability requires: functional completeness (all the functions are covered), relational completeness (each is linked to an identifiable forum) and procedural completeness (evidence and uncertainty are transmitted at the interfaces), ordered by the functions and grounded in rights.¶ 4
The instantiation, the 7+3. Seven functions — measure, qualify, price where applicable, adjust, finance, certify, adjudicate — and three instruments — the Carthage Charter, the Global Accountability Framework and the Call of Carthage. It is a candidate instantiation, not the theory itself, and above all not necessarily seven new organisations: a function may be carried by an existing institution, a protocol or a federated network.¶ 5
The testing. The chain is tested on four testing grounds: an integrated demonstrator (an artificial intelligence data centre), monetary policy spillovers, development financing (Sevilla) and preventive peace.¶ 6
The decision. A minimum viable pilot, graduated and non-binding adoption pathways, and explicit criteria for maintaining, simplifying or rejecting the architecture in the light of what it produces.¶ 7
The landscape: twenty families, five modes, the same order of magnitude. Before any theory, the magnitude. The benchmarks below come exclusively from third-party sources; they are not results of the research programme. They measure different objects and do not add up — but each lens, independent of the others, arrives at the same scale. The detail of the twenty families appears at §2.4; the five modes of transmission at §2.3.¶ 8
The table is wider than the screen: drag it sideways.
| What the lens measures | Order of magnitude | Third-party source |
|---|---|---|
| Fossil fuel subsidies — including the under-pricing of environmental and health damage | ≈ 7,400 billion dollars per year (2024), of which 6,700 implicit | IMF (Black et al., 2025) |
| Sustainable Development Goals financing gap | ≈ 4,000 billion dollars per year | United Nations (2025a) |
| Illicit financial flows out of developing countries | ≈ 1,000 billion dollars per year | Global Financial Integrity (2021); Tax Justice Network (2023); FACTI (2021) |
| Sovereign rating asymmetry (mid-2024) | 68 developing countries below investment grade, as against 24 within it | UNCTAD (2024) |
| Financial and technological mechanisms: high-frequency trading, tax havens, algorithmic biases, data extraction | Tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, each | BIS (2023); UNCTAD (2023); OECD (2023); ILO (2023) |
| What is not counted in dollars — air pollution, ambient and household | ≈ 7 million premature deaths per year | World Health Organization (2024) |
None of these figures is a sum, and none is claimed by the present work: they are orders of magnitude established by third parties. They suffice to pose the question to which everything else responds — these effects cross borders and generations; which institution measures them, qualifies them, draws a consequence from them, and before which forum can they be contested?¶ 9
Cite this section
Yaïche, Nizar (2026). The argument in one page. In The Humanity Compact (v2.3). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22746533
@incollection{yaiche_hc_the_argument_in_one_page,
author = {Yaïche, Nizar},
title = {The argument in one page},
booktitle = {The Humanity Compact},
year = {2026},
version = {2.3},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22746533},
publisher = {Zenodo},
url = {https://humanitycompact.org/ouvrage/the-argument-in-one-page/}
}A book by Nizar Yaïche, former Minister of Finance of the Republic of Tunisia. Who is the author?