Two Sides of a Coin

Progress is happening, slowly. But bad news - it travels fast.

Author

Verneri Välimaa
June 06, 2024

Source: Virgin Galactic

🥹 Humanity has made massive progress over the last two centuries by continuing to build upon the development of the past generations.

🥺 Humanity has massive inequalities and we are destroying the planet increasingly so from one generation to the next.

😌 It is ok to hold both of these statements to be true. But can they fit in the same philosophy of sustainable development?

I believe they can. We should acknowledge that we have done amazing up to this point in improving human lives but there is still much work to do. Since the industrial revolution, we have rapidly increased our power while our wisdom is lagging behind, signalled by our inability to mould systems in a way that steers technology safely and for the equal benefit of people around the world.

Being an optimist requires stretching the time horizon – analysing our past but also daring to gaze far towards the possibilities of the future. Science and technology develop exponentially and so it is not far-fetched to imagine that the future can be orders of magnitude better for every living being than it is today.

Imagine, how might the world look like in 100, 200, 1000 years? What are the dangers and opportunities ahead? How do we steer humanity sustainably and equitably?

These are some of the questions that motivated me to start writing and curating this newsletter. I invite you to join me in exploring the frontiers of sustainable development and impact.

Two sides of the coin called progress

If you were to take a visual snapshot of the world in terms of sustainable development – it would look like the Doughnut which you see below.

Figure 1. Source: The Lancet Planetary Health

The Doughnut consists of two rings: a social foundation, to ensure that no one is left falling short of life’s essentials, and an ecological ceiling, to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries that protect Earth’s life-supporting systems. Between these two sets of boundaries is the doughnut-shaped light green space that is both ecologically safe and socially just: a space in which humanity can thrive.

To summarise the above “humanity’s selfie” as Kate Raworth, Oxford Professor and author of Doughnut Economics, refers to it:

  • Social Foundation (center area): The red areas indicate shortfalls in life’s essential needs and are based on data from multiple sources such as FAO, World Bank, UNESCO, WHO, Unicef, and more.

  • Ecological Ceiling (outer ring): The red areas indicate overshoot of planetary boundaries based on data from the Stockholm Resilience Center.

You can check out all the data used for the above visual in this research paper from The Lancet Planetary Health. Data related to Social Foundation from Page 3-8 and data related to Ecological Ceiling from Page 8-10.

If you are interested to see Country Comparisons with respect to the Doughnut, e.g. how your country is progressing in sustainable development, check out the interactive site from University of Leeds.

What this side of the coin tells us is that on a global level we still have much work to do to ensure social foundations within the means of the living planet. We have managed a high level of well-being in rich countries, but by being overly extractive of natural resources. In addition, we have not managed to secure social foundations for people on a global level.

On the other side of the coin is global development, or change, on some key areas over a long period of time. The statistics below also tell a compelling story, but with different implications.

Figure 2. Source: Our World in Data

To summarise the charts handsomely compiled by Our World in Data over the timespan from 1820 (beginning of the industrial revolution) to 2018 (basically now):

  • Amount of people living in Extreme Poverty has decreased from 79% of the population to 9%. There are still way too many people living in poverty today (below $30/day), but progress has clearly been made.

  • Amount of people with a Basic Education has increased from 17% to 86% of the population.

  • Amount of people with the Ability to Read has increased from 12% to 87% of the population.

  • Whereas 0 people were living in Democracy by modern standards in 1820, today 54% of the world’s population enjoy those basic human rights.

  • 0 people had Vaccinations compared with 81% of the population today. Smallpox is estimated to have killed over 300 million people in its last 100 years of existence and the Spanish Flu killed around 50 million people between 1918-1920. Those numbers trump in absolute terms the 7 million people who have died from COVID-19, which may have been a more deadly virus had we not developed a vaccine so rapidly.

  • Amount of Children Died before 5 has decreased from 43% in 1820 to 4% today.

Considering this empirical evidence, what share of the population in rich countries would you say believe that the world is getting better?

Surprisingly, the answer is that less than 10% think the world is getting better according to a 2015 survey (long before the COVID-19 pandemic and AI hype). 6% in USA and 4% in Germany.

How can there be such a discrepancy between the facts and people’s experience?

Media does a terrible job at covering progress because it is focused on covering extreme events and individual triumphs. But the thing about progress is that it is happens gradually over the long-term and it is a collective effort. Not exactly click-bait material.

The story of global development is longer than our lifetimes, so it is easy to get caught up thinking that the world is static. But when you look at the statistics, like that above, you can see that we have made progress in key areas.

We should look at this data and feel hopeful that humanity can progress and make things better than we can even imagine. I don’t think our ancestors in 1820 could have anticipated how good (relatively speaking) things would be in 2024, so there’s no reason for us not to imagine a far better world than the one we live in today.

🤔 Perhaps 200 years from now some of our next generations will be living in Space 🪐 making improvements to humanity… or in the safe and just space of the Doughnut 🍩 

I will be posting frontier stuff about sustainable development and impact every single week. If you are interested in these topics make sure to subscribe to the newsletter.

Thank you for being here!

xo

Verneri

Sources used for this Issue: