April 4, 2020: Managing sustainable human development

Excerpts from my "Managing sustainable development" lectures and manuscript from my last years at Loyola.

Dean Brackley, SJ: Brackley, a Jesuit priest, educator, and writer moved to El Salvador, taught at the University of Central America, and dedicated his life to Salvadoran people following the murders of his Jesuit brothers in 1989. “The problem ... is that the new freedoms and economic security have distanced the non-poor from the kind of daily life-and-death struggle that has been the daily fare of the poor of all times right up to today. Maybe 90 percent of all the people who have ever lived have struggled every day to keep the household alive against the threat of death through hunger, disease, accidents, and violence.”

Niall Ferguson: “We know that about 106 billion peoplehave ever lived. And we know that most of them are dead. And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia. And we also know that most of them were or are very poor -- did not live for very long. Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today [2011]. We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800. And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners:  Europeans, North Americans, Australasians. 19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth.

If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny -- five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States,controlled vast global empires -- 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output. “[1]

Matt Ridley: "When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds.Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled."[2]

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/niall_ferguson_the_6_killer_apps_of_prosperity/transcript?language=en

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex/transcript?language=en#t-4350