Sustainable development: Human progress and prosperity

From my 2015 prospectus for Managing sustainable development:

So what are we to understand as to the basic path of human progress, towards environmental sustainability and sustainable development? First, poverty is the natural state of man. Poverty has been the primary if not exclusive state of being for 99% of the existence of humankind. For thousands of years, life has been, as “nasty, brutish and short.”[1]Second, for those same thousands of years, the environment has been a terrifying, mysterious, two-edged sword, the source of all natural wealth (generally fixed, limited or zero-sum) and a daily threat to human life as well as those same natural resources necessary for life. Third, it has only been the mastery of the environment, primarily through education and the application of technology, that has created the wealth and natural resources consumed on a daily basis by 7.5 billion people today.[2] To wit, sustainability has long been a given, development is a very recent advancement, and sustainable development is the ideal strategy for achieving that delicate balance between the continuation of the natural environment and the advancement of an ever-growing global population. As Matt Ridley has noted, humans are the only species that become more prosperous as they have become more numerous.

Notes [1] Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. [2] Many decry the disappearance of natural resources for consumption, yet world health is more negatively impacted by obesity and lifestyle-induced diseases than it is by a shortage of foodstuffs. Most hunger or starvation today is the product of the misallocation or mal-distribution of sufficient foodstuffs, not to any overall lack of same.

From Chapter One:

Around the world, average personal income has increased, the percentage of people living on less than a $1 a day has declined dramatically,[1] and life expectancy has improved markedly.[2]

Unfortunately, some people have fallen behind while others moved ahead, and some people have not moved at all. While absolute poverty had generally decreased, relative poverty has been exacerbated by differences in the quality and quantity of life between the wealthy and the less wealthy. For this first group, those falling behind, globalization has meant tough economic competition and this, in turn, led to the decline in prosperity for many workers in prosperous nations who have seen their jobs “shipped overseas.” In fact, more jobs are lost due to productivity improvements and technological enhancements than to outsourcing, but the visible loss of work and wages, coupled with the new jobs in developing countries has created resentment among formerly well-to-do workers.

For the second group, those not moving forward, a lack of education, health care, and opportunity has kept many people off the global juggernaut. To compound this problem, some people convey the issue of globalization and wealth creation as a “zero sum game,” erroneously assuming that one country’s or one person’s gain in wealth can only come at a loss to another person or country. But wealth is not finite, nor is the number of jobs.

Notes [1] Using standard, globally accepted and adjusted measures of absolute poverty, world poverty fell from 44 percent of the global population in 1980 to 13 percent in 2000, its fastest decline in history. See http://www.iie.com/publications/newsreleases/newsrelease.cfm?id=83 [2] For a dynamic illustration of the past 50 years of life expectancy around the world, see http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=2;ti=1950$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0TAlJeCEzcGQ;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=lin;dataMin=0.842;dataMax=8.7$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=18;dataMax=83$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=