Every year and humanity better? – How overabundance “spoils” the world

Undoubtedly, humanity has made huge strides in managing conflicts that plagued the planet for centuries while some redistribution of wealth has apparently been achieved according to experts. However, something is not quite right.

Revolutionary changes were the ones that created modern conditions of partial material well-being and, for large parts of the population, even prosperity.

Among them are the decline in birth rates, the increase in life expectancy, the economic-technological revolution that massively improved agricultural yields and food availability, the information revolution, the creation of international and the advent of nuclear weapons that made the cost of wars.

However, according to Francis Garvin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the US, this success in creating a more prosperous, informed and secure world has, unexpectedly, created a whole new set of planetary challenges that, if not resolved, threaten to destroy, if not by human extinction.

So what exactly are the problems of abundance? As he explains in an article in the American magazine Foreign Policy, the current world order produces a lot of material production, created by the increase in global exchange, but its fair distribution between and among populations is controversial.

The American professor points out that a key feature of the age of abundance is the extraordinary ability to move huge amounts of ideas, money, goods and especially people around the world quickly, regardless of borders and territories.

But this revolution in transmission doesn’t just allow good citizens and goods to move around the world: unwanted agents – from pathogens to terrorists to bad ideas – can also move much more quickly and effortlessly, often with devastating consequences. Expectations have also risen dramatically while remaining unfulfilled.

While the Age of Abundance has promoted tolerance and radical individuality, it has also undermined social cohesion and weakened the sense of common purpose needed to address key challenges.

According to authors Jonathan Bake and Nils Gilman cited by Garvin, the list of threats to human well-being, life and the planet itself created by abundance is terrifying: “climate change, pandemic diseases, stratospheric ozone depletion, loading atmospheric aerosol, space debris, increasing antibiotic resistance, biodiversity loss, anthropogenic genetic disturbances, declining soil health, disrupted nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, ocean plastics—and perhaps even emerging bioforming technologies such as and artificial intelligence”.

The dominant norms and institutions developed to successfully tame scarcity have been exposed as unfit to face contemporary challenges, creating a crisis of political legitimacy and fueling polarization.

This enormous prosperity created by the rise of trade and industrial prowess has created serious risks of climate, ecological, migration and public health disasters.

The emergence of new technologies, largely developed in the private sector, has solved countless problems while also creating terrifying news. However, as Garvin points out, an unlimited amount of data and information, no longer mediated by legacy institutions, poses different but equally great risks as scarce information controlled by religious institutions or the state.

But what do leaders do?

But at the same time why leaders cannot manage these situations. In an age where empire, plunder and conquest are meaningless, the American author and academic wonders how we should make sense of the current atrocities in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and beyond.

“Why do the leading powers seem to focus on issues that have resonated in a world of deprivation, particularly great power competition and war, while offering inadequate responses to the pressing issues created by a world of plenty?” he says and gives himself three main reasons.

First, both the post-9/11 US wars in the wider Middle East and the Russian invasion of Ukraine reflect poor strategic decisions based on deep misunderstandings of the nature of power and motivations in the modern international system, a misunderstanding of the increased difficulty and of reduced reward for using force to conquer lands or subjugate uncooperative populations in times of plenty.

Second, for the American academic it is important to recognize that there are many causes of war and conflict beyond plunder and imperial conquest. Specifically, he says we need to distinguish between past imperial conquests and redemptiveness, or the finite desire of a state to reclaim lands it believes it has unjustly lost.

“The most dangerous places in the world—Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, and the Taiwan Strait—are often where states are willing to fight, at great cost, to reclaim lands they believe are naturally and historically theirs. . Although they may seem similar, imperial conquest and libertarianism are driven by significantly different factors and forces, shaped by different cost-benefit calculations, and require different grand strategic responses,” he explains.

That said, regardless of China’s motivations, the changing conditions created by the Age of Plenty make a return to an autocracy akin to Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany highly unlikely, Garvin reckons.

Third, Garvin argues that it takes some time—sometimes decades—for people, institutions, and states to recognize when their environment and circumstances have changed and to update their assumptions, conceptual lenses, and policy practices accordingly.

However, he warns that this short-sightedness can come at a high cost. “Today’s leaders may share the characteristics of their tragic predecessors on the eve of the First World War. Faced with a rapidly changing world and global phenomena they do not understand, they fall back on their long-held, unspoken and often unexamined beliefs about how the world should work, as opposed to trying to better understand how the world works.”

As terrifying as the problems of scarcity and the geopolitical attitudes they unleash are, at least they are known. The leading powers and their leaders and institutions understand how to play the great power political game that dominated in the past.

The problems of abundance and the solutions required are unfamiliar, disorienting and frustrating. But a melting planet, mass migration, another even deadlier pandemic, destabilizing new technologies, and disparities in cancer incidence, deep polarization, and sociocultural fragmentation and alienation threaten the US and the planet far more than expansionism of the industrial states of the early 20th century, he warns.