Authored by Satyajit Das via The Independent,

Current growth, short-term profits and higher living standards for some are pursued at the expense of costs which are not evident immediately but will emerge later. Society has borrowed from and pushes problems into the future...

The world cannot countenance the idea that human progress might be at an end or even have stalled.

The belief that advances in science, technology as well as social and political systems can provide continuous improvement in human life is perhaps the most important idea in Western civilisation. Yet attempts to measure actual progress are curiously vague. In January 2016, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi dispensed with practicalities arguing that “Europe cannot just be a grey technical debate about constraints, but must again be a great dream”.

Thomas Carlyle’s 19th-century analysis of England provides a useful benchmark for assessing human achievements.

Carlyle was critical of a world "submerged in mamonism". The undeniable improvement in living standards over the last 150 years is seen as evidence of progress. Improvements in diet, health, safe water, hygiene and education have been central to increased life spans and incomes.

The lifting of billions of people globally out of poverty is a considerable achievement. But many of these individuals earn between $2 (£1.50) and $10 dollars a day. Their position is fragile, exposed to the vicissitudes of health, employment, economic conditions and political and societal stability. As William Gibson observed:






“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

Economic progress also has come at a cost. Growth and wealth is increasingly based on borrowed money, used to purchase something today against the uncertain promise of paying it back in the future. Debt levels are now unsustainable. Growth has been at the expense of existentially threatening environmental changes which are difficult to reverse. Higher living standards rely on the profligate use of under-priced, finite resources, especially water and energy, which have been utilised without concern about conservation for future use.

Current growth, short-term profits and higher living standards for some are pursued at the expense of costs which are not evident immediately but will emerge later. Society has borrowed from and pushes problems into the future.

The acquisition of material goods defines progress. The concept of leisure as shopping and consumption as the primary economic engine now dominate. Altering Bob Dylan’s lyrics, the Angry Brigade, an English anarchist group, described it as: “If you are not being born, you are busy buying”.

Carlyle, who distrusted the “mechanical age”, would have been puzzled at the unalloyed modern worship of technology. Much of our current problems, environmental damage and pollution, are the unintended consequences of technology, especially the internal combustion engine and exploitation of fossil fuels. The invention of the motor vehicle was also the invention of the car crash. Technology applied to war continues to create human suffering. Mankind’s romance with technology increasingly is born of a desperate need for economic growth and a painless, cheap fix to problems such as reducing in greenhouse gas without decreasing living standards.

Carlyle’s hope for an “aristocracy of talent” has not been fulfilled. After a brief period of decline in the years after the Second World War, inequality measured as concentration of wealth and income is rising. Less than 100 billionaires now own as much as 50 per cent of world’s population, down from around 400 billionaires a little more than five years ago. Hereditary monarchies and “an idle landowning aristocracy” are less prevalent than in Carlyle’s time, although the current US administration and many emerging nations still emphasise filial ties. Instead, a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates and a powerful working aristocracy of politicians, business leaders, professional and bureaucrats dominate public affairs. These include graduates of elite educational establishments such as America’s ivy league school, Britain’s Oxbridge complex or French ‘enarques’, America’s technology entrepreneurs or alumni of prestigious institutions and think tanks, which function as shadow governments. The new feudalism is like the older model, with class, privilege and wealth still highly influential.

Pre-occupation with narcissistic self-fulfilment and escapist entertainment is consistent with Carlyle’s concern about the loss of social cohesiveness, spirituality and community. His fear of a pervasive “philosophy of simply looking on, of doing nothing, of laissez-faire … a total disappearance of all general interest, a universal despair of truth and humanity, and in consequence a universal isolation of men in their own ‘brute individuality” … a war of all against all … intolerable oppression and wretchedness” seems modern.

Carlyle’s fear of the loss of individual freedom has proved well founded. The Black Lives Matter movement, the treatment of women and minorities and growing racial and religious intolerance highlight the disappointing limits of social progress. Following the 9/11 attacks, a fearful population has acquiesced in an unprecedented loss of privacy and civil liberties. Technology and social media permit an extraordinary level of monitoring of private lives.

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, historian & broadcaster, whose special interest is medieval Italy and particularly Florence & Venice.

In this broadcast she discusses how the generational pact may have broken down. Nothing seems as sure anymore. We no longer believe our children will be better off than we were, in fact we fear they may be worse off. This is a reversal of centuries of belief.
The tradition of looking after your children when they are young and in turn they look after you when you are old is slipping away.

So she is coming at the same notions as Das, but not from his perspective of an economist, rather as a social historian

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08z9dc4

All progress depends on the unreasonable man: that's great.

I do remember reading that a while ago on your signature: great stuff!

bogarde73 wrote on Aug 1^st, 2017 at 12:54pm:

Debt is just a game the insane play: the work of the future involves fixing the climate and refurbishing industry to do it!

bogarde73 wrote on Aug 1^st, 2017 at 12:54pm:


After China will be India. Then the South American basket cases will get their poo together, and South East Asia. Africa will probably be last, except perhaps for the middle east.