Imagine it is 500 years in the future and there is a student whatever-the-equivalent of ‘reading’ whatever-is-the-equivalent of a ‘book’ of history*Given that ‘history is written by the victors’ and the narrative recorded in the ‘book’ will thus depend on the path society has taken, we are necessarily predicting the future when we seek to answer the question. But absurd idealizations of objectivity aside, how might the present moment be viewed? about our present. What will be considered the grand challenge of our time*One boundary condition is necessarily that there is someone to ask the question, thus some degree of ‘victory condition’ must have been met (from an existential perspective). So in answering the question, perhaps it is impossible to avoid the bias of our own perspective on what must be true if we are indeed going to survive.?
The contenders:
Climate Change
Finite Resources
A World Without Growth
Evolving Our Values
Expanding ‘I’
Coping with Acceleration
Digital Life
Polarization vs. Homogeneity
Polarization vs. Homogeneity
Does growth create or require polarization? Does emergence require specialization? Do we still need either?
We live in a time of perceived polarization – of wealth, of politics, and of visions for our collective future. At its core, our question of whether we should drive towards a society with less polarization is a question of values. However, regardless of how our collective values have evolved over the prior centuries, a paradigm shift is merited in light of the dramatic leap into the anthropocene that we have made in the past decades.
Prior to exceeding the carrying capacity of our planet, we had not been operating with in a zero-sum framework. Wealth, quality of life, freedom – these aren’t conserved quantities. Consequently, and thankfully, absolute standard of living has increased for the vast majority of humanity, and this is (to some degree) reflected in average GDP per capita over time.
Source: World Bank
But the average GDP per capita doesn’t tell the whole story. The Gini Coefficient is a metric quantifying income inequality. Most of the world is experiencing a reduction in income inequality. However, certain countries (like the U.S.) are experiencing growing inequality.
Source: Our World in Data
In the U.S., the rate of increase of wealth appears supralinear in relation to present wealth, meaning that the richest of our society are growing richer faster than the poorest of our society.
Source: Piketty et al.
What matters more – absolute or relative wealth? There are certain elements of quality of life that rely on absolute wealth, and certain elements that depend on relative wealth.
As a proxy for some of the more ‘absolute’ quality of life metrics, we can look at the accessibility of food.
Source: Our World in Data
Or perhaps we can look at the amount of life accessible over time:
Source: Our World in Data
There are clear exceptions to the rule, but (generally speaking) quality of life has been improving for the worst and the best off among us.
What about those elements of quality of life that are ‘relative?’ We can track the polarization of wealth over time (see Gini Coefficient above). The global variance in the distribution of wealth has been decreasing over time.
Source: Our World in Data
Tax policy (and other means of redistribution) is also important in determining the relative distribution of wealth:
Source: Our World in Data
Much of our perception of our wealth is relative – the old “keeping up with the Jones'”. This is a consequence of both cultural norms and capitalistic policies. Consequently, much of our perceived quality of life is a consequence of not just our absolute wealth, but on the share of the total pie that we find ourselves receiving.
It is important to distinguish between polarization of quality of life and polarization of generated and captured wealth. This is another reason for why measuring what we value matters so much – we’re focusing so much on polarization of wealth in this discussion because we measure it!
The relationship between economic inequality and our climate challenges is complex. However, interesting features emerge if we plot the per capita GHG emissions vs. Gini Coefficient by country:
Source: Hubler 2016
For wealthy nations, if one squints one might divine a positive correlation between our per capita emissions and our level of economic inequality.
What values and beliefs are reflected in organizing principles that enable vs. mitigate polarization?
Arguments in favor of policies that enable polarization include that innovation and ‘total pie’ growth are best served by allowing for competition, and that extreme outcomes incentivize invention, entrepreneurship, and achievement. Another line of reasoning might be that specialization (which inherently implies a lack of homogeneity) is critical for overall economic efficiency. More aesthetic arguments might indicate that homogeneity itself is not a value to strive for, and that individuality is a principal virtue by which to organize a system of government.
Freedom, autonomy, agency, individuality – do these require polarization? Growth, innovation, creation – do these require polarization? How about adaptation in a world of finite resources, a world with reduced growth, a world where more and more elements of quality of life are digitized and relative wealth is increasingly synthetically constructed? What might enable us to evolve into a superspecies?*There is a biological analogy to draw. What relative level of ‘wellbeing’ of cells makes for a healthy whole organism? Is there a tradeoff between subjugation and overall adaptability / survivability? In a survival paradigm, fitness is a key selector. However, might we not have the luxury of choosing a different paradigm because we have sufficient collective abundance that we aren’t fighting for survival? Perhaps this is our grand challenge – to pull ourselves back from the billion-year survival-driven journey and to enable a new framework for selection. Our own, informed by reason, and compassion, and self-awareness.
We are presently running a grand experiment. Much of the world is actively reducing polarization (of wealth at least, and we might presume that other axes of polarization should follow or at least be correlated with the same policies). However, a few countries (of which the U.S. is one) are on precisely the opposite path. What are the consequences of polarization? How does it affect growth, competitiveness? How will that change in a world that is increasingly zero-sum due to our collective exceeding of carrying capacity? These are questions that will be explored in the coming century. How we choose to value equality and specialization – this is a grand challenge.
Conclusion
Climate may only be a symptom of the grand challenge of our time, but it might prove that working to solve this canary in the coal mine will be the practice through which we address the underlying challenge. This is an opportunity for emergence, for evolution, because it will require us as a species to act together, as one. It will require intentionality around the values we hold and a willingness to revisit them to define what humanity really is.
Or maybe we will find ourselves seeking divorce from the physical world; perhaps in the face of an evolving climate we will commit to digitization, to evolving our very definition of the ‘reality’ within which we live.
I don’t know the answer to the question of ‘what is the grand challenge of our time?’ And, perhaps, we can’t yet know because it will depend on the path our future takes. However, struggling to find a solution to climate change might be the crucible for our species to find its way through both the question and the answer to it.
Hübler, M. (2016). The Inequality-Emissions Nexus in the Context of Trade and Development - A Quantile Regression Approach. Ecological Economics, 134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.12.015
