Is Sustainable Progress Really Possible?
What should we mean by the term “Progress”, and is it really possible to have long term sustainable progress?
In Steven Pinker’s latest book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, he makes a strong case that we have made considerable progress since the enlightenment, and will likely continue to do so, but perhaps with occasional bumps along the way. This progress has occurred across a wide variety of different issues: reductions in violence, poverty, and disease, and substantial improvements in education, human rights, life span, and overall human fulfillment.
But what are the practical prospects for continued progress in the future? To discuss this, we need to have a better understanding of what we mean by progress, and what types of progress are sustainable (not all are).
Sustainable progress does not require ever-increasing GDP.
Sustainable progress is certainly not compatible with ever-increasing consumption of resources. Physical limits on resource extraction and waste production will soon impose limits on resource consumption.
What worthwhile aspects of progress can be sustainable? If we define progress broadly as “improved quality of life”, then there is room for continued long term improvements in the many areas that don’t directly clash with environmental limits. An optimistic view of the future includes focusing on improvements in the following areas.
- Physical and mental health, including mortality rates, quality of life, and longevity
- Security, including greater safety and social safety nets
- Human capital, including education and employment
- Effective governance
- Social capital, such as relationships, trust, and community groups
- Equality of opportunity, justice, and equal treatment under the law, including crime, poverty, and unnecessary suffering
- Common/shared spaces, such as parks, outdoor areas, community facilities, and public transportation
- Intellectual capital, including technical and scientific knowledge
- Cultural capital, including institutions and social norms of behavior
- Maximizing individual achievement, including personal development and expression
- Resilience, in the sense of a society capable of dealing with disasters
There are all sorts of technological achievements that might contribute to this. Improved medical technology, better computers and communication, safe and environmentally sound transportation, and carbon-free energy production are examples.
We believe that humanity can change the relationship between quality of life and energy consumption. While some past improvements in the quality of life were not dependent on increased energy consumption (e.g. the polio vaccine), the two have generally increased together. Progress, to be sustainable, will require this to change. While this is certainly possible with focus shifting more to the areas I mentioned above, this will certainly be a substantial cultural change.
The challenge of sustainable progress is even greater when you consider that resource consumption rates are already above the sustainable level in many cases and will need to be reduced. One example that is particularly worrisome is the rapid depletion of fresh water supplies due to large scale agricultural irrigation in many arid regions.
Reducing resource consumption gets even more challenging when you take into consideration the differences between the developed and developing world. It is much harder to imagine progress continuing in the developing world without increase energy and resource usage. Sustainable progress measured on a global scale will require some leveling and convergence of resource usage across the globe. That will require an even bigger reduction in energy and resource usage in the developed world.
Possible? Yes. Challenging? Very. The solution must be a combination of technological, cultural, and political changes.
