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The Forum > Article Comments > Building a good society > Comments

Building a good society : Comments

By Don Aitkin, published 18/3/2014

Half a dozen value statements follow. They are mine, and I have been working on them for a long time. If they stimulate you to look at your own, well and good.

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Don, there is something that you haven’t mentioned that is of fundamental importance for a good society.

This is to live sustainably. To live well within our means. To keep the scale of everything well within the ability of our resource base to provide not only all the necessities for life but the necessities for a high quality of life, with a big safety margin.

If we don’t do this, we will face all manner of problems. The rule of law will be badly eroded. The rich, powerful and ruthless will rule the roost. There will be massive real poverty. There will be enormous civil strife.

A good society needs a government that is independent of the enormous influences that drive it to continuously expand and become less sustainable, especially when vital resources such as water are already highly overutilised and stressed right out.

If this doesn’t happen, we can forget about great altruism coming to the fore, or ordinary people feeling like they are real stakeholders in the development of a positive future, or the smooth transition to a new predominantly renewable energy regime rather than a rapid and quite catastrophic change.

Is Australia a good society?

It is not too bad at the moment. But what are the chances of it actually improving?

Not at all good…. because we are completely failing to observe the fundamental principle of sustainability. And therein of getting the supply capability of all our fundamental resources, goods, infrastructure and services to comfortably meet the demand, rather than the demand being forever rapidly increasing with the supply side trailing well behind and struggling desperately to keep up.

The likelihood of it all getting steadily worse in the near future is very high.

Sustainability is as important as your six points put together.
Posted by Ludwig, Wednesday, 19 March 2014 9:03:15 PM
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Ludwig,

You make an important point, but I feel that you overdo it. How sure are you, and why are you so sure, that not living sustainably will lead to those apocalyptic consequences? It is the challenge that societies face as they come to the limits of a resource, like oak-trees, that causes the curious and the entrepreneurial to shift to a new resource, like coal and iron. It was feared in the 1890s that cities would disappear under horse manure; that didn't happen either. We feared that copper would be too expensive to connect everyone telephonically. That fear proved unnecessary too.

In my view, living sustainably can be an important personal ethic, but I don't think it can apply to whole societies, even when each of us does his/her bit to follow the maxim.
Posted by Don Aitkin, Thursday, 20 March 2014 8:49:45 AM
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Ludwig,

I disagree with where you put your emphasis. To me, if we want to live sustainably we must focus on income versus expenditure. We cannot continually run deficits and run up debt to fund recurring expenditure. We need to live within our means. Governments must too. That is where the focus must be if we want sustainable, content societies.

The richer the country (and the world) is the better we are able to manage environmental issues. Consider how much better the developed countries do in managing environmental issues compared with the under developed and developing countries for evidence to support this statement. Look at the ‘GapMinder’ link I posted in my first comment.

Our focus needs to be on long term sustainable economic growth to lift the world out of poverty and to continually improve human wellbeing. That is what governments should focus on.

There are two fundamental inputs to everything we have: human ingenuity and energy. Everything else we have comes from these two inputs (there is a third, but I’ll leave this aside for now). Energy is effectively unlimited, e.g. about 30 TW of power from nuclear fission energy for a billion years according to Professor Barry Brook. That’s just fission energy, without even considering fusion. So the energy available on Earth is effectively unlimited. With effectively unlimited energy future generations will be able to do just about anything they want.

What will cause the apocalyptic consequences you envisage is poverty and unequal distribution of poverty throughout the world. Lack of access to cheap energy is a critical problem. If access to energy is constrained, that will lead to wars, just as it has always done in the past.
Posted by Peter Lang, Thursday, 20 March 2014 11:02:04 AM
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Thanks for the reply Don.

<< In my view, living sustainably can be an important personal ethic, but I don't think it can apply to whole societies >>

Wow. I am surprised!

Sustainability doesn’t mean a lack of dynamism or a state of complete stability in terms of resource usage. It means striving to balance resource usage and environmental impact with demand, in an ongoing manner.

It is of vital importance in Australia that we steer ourselves in the direction of sustainability, given how rampantly we are going in the opposite direction.

Surely you must agree that we should at least be striving to NOT further stress already highly stressed resources. Water being our prime concern.

We should also realise that the current state of political discontent is very largely due to the LIE that we need evermore growth and the FAILURE of this basic dictum perpetrated by our politicians of all persuasions over many years to address all the issues that this growth has been supposed to address.

Striving to live sustainably is surely THE most fundamental principle for building a better society. If we don’t do this a whole range of stresses will manifest themselves, and the ugly side of the human condition will come to the fore.

We need to be doing well at the basic level in order to be able to improve in the ways you desire us to.

If the basics of essential resource consumption, ever-rising prices for energy, more congestion, worsening health, education and all manner of other services, are going to plague us, then how can we possibly become more altruistic, more meaningful stakeholders, or eliminate poverty, etc?

As we become a less sustainable and more stressed society, we will definitely move in just the opposite direction that you (and I) desire.

[Hello Peter. I will reply to you later].
Posted by Ludwig, Friday, 21 March 2014 10:54:57 AM
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Ludwig,

Your original point and this response to me suggest that I ought to make this issue the subject of a further post, sometime next week. Thank you for getting my mind on what is an important subject.
Posted by Don Aitkin, Friday, 21 March 2014 11:49:25 AM
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Ludwig,

The simple, overriding fact is the wealthier the world the better for human well being.

For evidence of this see ‘GapMinder’, and graph the key UN ‘Human Development Indexes’ (HDI) against income per capita and energy consumption per capita, and run 'Play' each time to see changes through time. Notice how the countries and regions are improving on just about every key HDI as income per capita increases and energy consumption per capita increases. Can you demonstrate, persuasively, that my opening statement is incorrect?

Here is another example. Consider global disasters. Disaster costs are reducing per GDP per capita: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/disasters-cost-more-than-ever-but-not-because-of-climate-change/. Excerpts:

>“Modern disasters bring the greatest loss of life in places with the lowest property damage, and the most property damage where there’s the lowest loss of life.”

>”In the 20th century, the human toll of disasters decreased dramatically, with a 92 percent reduction in deaths from the 1930s to the 2000s worldwide. “

>”the data show an inverse relationship between lives lost and property damage: Modern disasters bring the greatest loss of life in places with the lowest property damage, and the most property damage where there’s the lowest loss of life. “

>”a nation with a $2,000 per capita average GDP — about that of Honduras – should expect more than five times the number of disaster deaths as a country like Russia, with a $14,000 per capita average GDP.”

>”As countries become richer, they are better able to deal with disasters — meaning more people are protected and fewer lose their lives. Increased property losses, it turns out, are a price worth paying.”
Posted by Peter Lang, Friday, 21 March 2014 12:00:35 PM
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