8. Food Supply
Modern humans love to eat, but we don’t like to think too much about how food reaches our tables. Apart from the occasional visit to a farm stand, we buy our food from retail stores and restaurants. We outsource our responsibility for fair treatment of workers, compassionate treatment for animals and sustainable agricultural practices. Our habits are easily shaped by marketers and the press (whose words are, often, shaped by marketers, too). Despite serious health consequences, we surrender to additives because they offer convenience. Our behaviors encourage devastation of not only food supply but forests, ecosystems, and the livelihoods of people with few economic options. Genetic modification is one solution, but the consequences may be unacceptable. Currently, 54 percent of humans live in urban locations, and the number will increase to 66 percent by 2050—with nearly 90 percent of the increase in Asia and Africa. As the lucky few drive to pick up the week’s parcel of fresh veggies at the CSA, the rest of the world is waiting for a long-term solution for a nutritious, affordable, sustainable, ethical food supply.
7. Plastics
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated, every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.” says researcher Tony Andready in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. The author continues, “…half century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics…the longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared.” Andready goes on: “…give it 100,000 years. I’m sure you’ll find many species of microbes whose genes will let them do this tremendously advantageous thing, so that their numbers will grow and prosper. Today’s plastic will take hundreds of thousands of years to consume, but eventually, it will all biodegrade. Maybe high concentrations of plastics will turn into something like [oil and coal]. Change is the hallmark of nature.” Plastic bags and containers are among the culprits, but the biggest shoreline offenders may be synthetic fibers from human clothing. Of course, plastics are not our only man-made environmental challenge. Heavy metals and nitrates also contribute to pollution, as do industrial waste, oil spills, acid rain, deforestation, ocean acidification, ozone layer depletion, and poor urban waste management, but plastics are high on the list of offenders and high on the list of trends that can be controlled as a result of increased awareness and improved policies/enforcement.
6. Fueling The Future
“The story of energy is simple. Once upon a time all work was done by people for themselves using their own muscles. Then there came a time when some people got other people to do the work for them, and the result was pyramids and leisure for a few, drudgery and exhaustion for the many. Then there was a gradual progression from one source of energy to another: human to animal to water to wind to fossil fuel.” Coal made the British Empire possible, increasing energy capacity by twenty times the output of a human. We continue to rely upon fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas. How much power do we need? Per person, about 2,500 watts per second, and “about 85 percent of that comes from burning coal, oil and gas, the rest from nuclear and hydro (wind, solar and biomass are mere asterisks).” To generate enough power for one American, over 500 people would be required to peddle a bicycle on eight-hour shifts, or enough solar panels to cover all of Spain, or wind farms the size of Kazakhstan, or woodlands the size of India plus Pakistan, or hayfields for horses the size of Russia plus Canada, or hydroelectric dams with catchments the size of a third of the earth’s land mass. And that’s just to power America. Simply reducing current consumption is not the solution: too many new consumers are joining the modern world every day. We will need more power. Natural gas is one solution, and the nuclear option might be another. Or, we may invent something completely new. Although it seems wishful, inventing a new approach is the way humans solve big problems. (Much of this comes from The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley.)
5. Can We Eradicate Poverty In Our Lifetime?
“The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500…Despite a doubling of the world population, even the raw number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the 1950s. The percentage living in such absolute poverty has dropped by more than half – to less than 18 per cent. That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the trend is hardly a cause for despair: at the current rate of decline, it would hit zero around 2035 – though it probably won’t.”—Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist. The factors most likely to reduce poverty are articulated in the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (there may be more, or different ones, but these seem like a very good start). They include investment in primary education, gender equality, empowerment of women, reduction of child mortality and maternal health, and ensuring environmental stability. Projections indicate an additional fifty percent reduction by 2030—we’re reducing poverty by about 1 percent per year. The World Bank’s goal: no more than 3 percent extreme poverty within 15 years. From the Brookings Institution, here’s the plan: “With China’s poverty rate now down in the single digits, the baton has been passed to India. Large numbers of its population are on the precipice of escaping poverty, and others are not far behind, meaning that India has the capacity to deliver sustained progress on global poverty reduction over the next decade based on modest assumptions of equitable growth. Once India’s poverty is largely exhausted, it will be up to sub-Saharan Africa to run the final relay leg and bring the baton home. Herein lies the challenge. Sub-Saharan Africa has historically struggled in its fight with poverty.” Meanwhile, 1 in 3 Black children in Philadelphia live below the poverty line. There is a difference between the extreme poverty of Sub-Saharan Africa and the poverty found in West Philadelphia: after we’ve wiped out extreme poverty, what’s next?
4. Citizens & Guns
Hundreds of years of tradition, a poorly worded constitutional amendment, and a powerful conflict between personal choice and government regulation have conspired to make the U.S. one of the world's leaders in gun ownership--nearly one gun per person. Honduras leads the world in gun-related deaths--the U.S. is ranked at about average. In fact, those with the most to fear from U.S. gun owners are more than 250 million animals killed each year in the name of sport hunting. And yet, fewer than 1 in 3 Americans hunt, half of them no more than once or twice each year. Much of the discussion dates back to the American Revolution, when small local militias provided the fighting force. The Constitution’s Bill of Rights was written not long afterwards. Centuries later, we find ourselves attempting to justify personal gun ownership by interpreting language that was probably written for another purpose. Encouraged by the activist NRA, American gun owners claim their rights with gusto, and in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the never-quite-certain reading of the Second Amendment in favor of a personal gun ownership guarantee. Meanwhile, the leaky U.S. system for gun licensing and control, and the widespread availability of weapons at local DICK’S Sporting Goods and other big box retailers, their inserts advertising guns in many of the nation’s newspapers, and the popularity of gun shows suggest a widespread American comfort level with gun culture. Many Americans, and many people in other nations, are resistant to the widespread availability of weapons, regardless of the reasons for gun ownership, regardless of the sad stories. The people have made their choice: Americans have the right to bear arms, regardless of whether they have anything to do with law enforcement, the military, or anything resembling a militia. Will other nations follow our lead?
3. Safety & Security
Every year, every American invest about $2,000 per person to support our $617 billion defense budget. Most of the load is carried by working adults, who invest about $4,000 of their income to keep the country safe. In order to keep our cities and neighborhoods safe, every working adult invests another $500 or so. We spend more money on safety and security than all other nations combined. So: are we safer than all other nations? And where do we set the boundaries? Much of our individual digital activity is available to Federal authorities who may, at their option, further investigate based upon hard facts or reasonable interpretations of individual profiles. A reasonable balance between individual freedom and the need to protect the general public is difficult to achieve, and tends to shift into unreasonable patterns when awful things happen, or awful things might happen. As the pile of digital data grows, it also expands into the lives of people who live in other countries. In each country, the rules are different, and so are the threats. As global collaboration between military and law enforcement becomes more sophisticated, we’ll need an international assurance of personal security, national security, and individual rights of privacy and freedom. None of this happens in a vacuum: politics plays a big role, and key decisions are still made by individual law enforcement officials and military leaders who are, after all, people with a job to do and a lifetime of beliefs that affect their perceptions and decision-making. As all of this continues to evolve, we ought to be certain that the system is set up to succeed, so that we are all clear on assumptions and expectations.
2. Private Property
Property has its roots in the idea that if you make something it is yours. But resources used to make things like land, rivers, and trees, all exited prior to human effort. And yet humans claim ownership of these resources and view bits and pieces of the Earth as property. Another claim to property is that you bought it or by some other means was given it. Lets take a house for example. Suppose there is a very old house that has been passed down for many generations. One day a homeless man walks into the house thinking it would be a nice place to sleep. But the so called owner of the house upon finding the homeless man kicks him out while saying "this is my house, not yours." Few would argue with the home owner's right the dispense of the homeless man. But in what sense is the house really his? One would say it is his because it was given to him by his father. So the next question is, in what sense is it the father's. And the same answer would be given, until we reach the great-great-great grandfather who had purchased the house with money he worked very hard for. But lets consider the person he purchased it from, who I will call the seller. Why did the seller own the house and therefore have the legal right to sell it in the first place? Well, its because the seller owned a title deed to the house. And this title deed was passed down for generations in the seller's family back to his great-great-great grandfather who had worked very hard to earn the money purchase the title deed from the original builder of the house. This original builder had settled to America from Europe in the 1500s. The settler had built his house upon land unoccupied by Natives. He worked very hard cutting wood and what not to build the house. And therefore he owned it. But did he not steal these resources from the animals living in the trees, and from the vermin occupying the land beneath his feet? Does he have the right to claim ownership of this land just because he happened to be the first human to settle there? Private property is theft from God. To own is to claim what fundamentally belongs to no one. To own is to claim for yourself what God gave for everyone.
1. Government For The People
Although it’s easy to lose the essence when observing government in action, the purpose of government is to provide consistent rules and services for its constituents. For the most part, the world has shifted from kings and dictators to the combination favored by the United States: a chief executive, one or two legislative bodies, a court to help determine right from wrong, and a system of checks and balances to make certain that none of these bodies strays too far from good behavior or the public interest. Mimicked by entire nations and various subdivisions (for example, states and provinces), the format relies upon a small number of reasonable people voted into their positions, every few years, by a reasonably well-informed populace. There are variations: the House of Lords in the U.K. with its 790 members in lifetime terms; roughly 30 nations with Kings and/or Queens, and the difficult-to-count nations led by a dictator (CIA Factbook lists only two; certainly, there are more). Although rooted in some past practices, the U.S. version of “government for the people” was a new (and perhaps, crazy) idea that took shape in the mid-1700s. Since that time, it has redefined the purpose and practice of government throughout much of the world. Some nations still struggle with “by the people” and sometimes, “of the people,” but “for the people” has become a very popular idea.
This is the economic flip-side of individual vs. society—how we behave, and construct balanced systems that benefit the individual and the greater good. It always comes with a price. Professor Oliver Goodenough—a good and constant advisor—explains this concept with a common shopping cart. What do we want to carry in that shopping cart? Free education and medical care for all? Housing for everyone? For some but not others, based upon (income, race, zip code, merit, lineage…) Connections to game theory—which helps to bring the decision dynamics to life—allow us to present these ideas as actual games to be played by the individual and by the larger group of participants, a rich and exciting way to learn.
2. Public Vs. Private Good