Foundations of ideology
An ideology develops from conditions in the society where it exists. Three pillars form the foundation of most ideologies. These three pillars are, respectively, the economic, the social and the environmental balance of the society in question.
By a good economic balance is meant a balance where the availability of goods and services (through domestic production and imports) and the use of goods and services (for investments and consumption) is balanced in such a way that unemployment is low, prices are stable, and the international balance of payments is under good control.
By a good social balance is meant a balance where a society’s social groups resolve their differences through peaceful dialogue, without use of force or violence. The underlying assumption behind such a balance is that the society practices freedom of expression, and that social groups have the legal right to organize themselves and express their views through peaceful actions.
By a good environmental balance is meant a balance where human use and extraction of resources from nature is such that it does not affect nature’s biological reproductive capacity. By the use of nature is meant both cultivation, transformations produced by urbanization, and other uses (including use for purposes of disposing of different types of refuse and emissions from human activity). By extraction is meant mining, petroleum extraction, fisheries and all other activities that extract resources from their natural environment.
Any country which wishes to have a successful and peaceful development, must strive towards the simultaneous achievement of these three balances. They need to co-exist. If the economic balance gets out of hand, it will soon affect the social balance through the mechanisms of income distribution and distribution of welfare between social groups. Both unemployment and inflation have strong adverse effects on the social balance through these distributive mechanisms. If the social balance gets out of hand, it will quickly spill over into a disturbance of the economic balance, through the actions or reactions of those groups who have been hit by an imbalance. These actions will normally affect economic production quite quickly. An environmental imbalance is probably the most serious of all, because it takes a long time to develop, a long time to discover statistically and an even longer time to “repair” - assuming politicians agree on how to repair it. In the meantime, it will have strong effects on both of the other balances, because of the type of measures it may require for “healing”.
Historically, the polarized ideologies have shown themselves incapable of achieving good balances for the three balances simultaneously. A free market system without the proper checks and balances has not been capable of securing a good social balance. A communist system has, through its need to control both the production and the distribution of resources, not been capable of generating a good economic balance. None of these systems have produced good solutions for the environment. Hence the need for new approaches.
Economic balance
The supply of resources comes from a country’s own production and from imports. The demand for a country’s resources comes from domestic consumption, domestic investment, and foreign demand (exports). If the demand is lower than the supply, we will see a pressure to reduce prices and imports, so as to achieve a new balance at a lower level of activity – with increased unemployment. If demand is higher than supply, we will see a pressure for increased prices and imports, so as to achieve a new balance at a higher level of activity – with reduced unemployment.
Imbalances which lead to high long term unemployment are a waste of resources and they create social hardship on those who become unemployed. They are therefore in most countries politically undesired. So are imbalances that lead to long term inflation and deficits in the balance of international trade. The major danger of inflation is that it creates increased differences in remuneration among the country’s citizens and undermines the country’s long term capacity to import goods that are necessary for its development.
Such imbalances being undesired, it is necessary to strike a balance between demand and supply of resources that is such that unemployment is mostly of a short term nature, linked to the natural movement of employees from firms that reduce their activity to firms that increase their activity. This must be achieved in combination with a price development which is not out of line with that of the country’s major trade partners, so as not to upset the trade balance.
This is a complicated balancing act, because it implies achieving an aggregate demand which is at roughly the same level as the production capacity of the country, taking account of the level of imports this implies. The country’s government must therefore have a policy that is capable of influencing domestic consumption, domestic investment, and exports. No economic system has shown itself capable of steering aggregate demand in a precise way, but by governing in a steady, predictable fashion this balancing act is feasible in a rough manner. Policy instruments in a market based economy can only act indirectly, by way of incentives and links between factors that influence the final result. Those systems that have tried to govern demand and supply directly by central planning have not proved to be feasible in practice, because they do not manage to handle the enormous amount of information and logistics required to match detailed, individual demand and supply. In addition, these systems are particularly open to corruption.
So far, these balancing acts have not been taking account of how the Earth’s natural environment has reacted to the increasing production and consumption of an increasing population. In the early 1970s it became clear to everybody who had the slightest interest in these questions, that the Earth was suffering in many ways from the methods of production, the disposal of waste from production and consumption, and the expansion of these factors resulting from the population growth.
The global economy was made up of independent countries taking their own independent decisions, even though they were linked by many factual interdependencies. Many large countries were not interested in discussing environmental issues in the 1970s. They were acting as if the problems did not exist. In this way they avoided taking unpleasant decisions that might irritate producers and consumers. This was easy enough, because no supra-national authority had the powers to put pressure on those countries which did not care about the environment. It was furthermore difficult for other countries to implement costly environmental measures, when their large competitors in the international markets did not.
This is where we stand today as well. Some global funds are directed towards preserving forests, and a system for trading emission permits is being implemented. It remains to be seen whether these measures will have an impact in the real world. It is not yet clear whether the funds involved will end in the wrong pockets, with no real impact on the ground. Only measures that contain significant incentives for the operative choices made by producers and consumers will have any effect. There is yet not, after 40 years of beating around the bush, any systematic thinking on a global basis about the use of incentives for the improvement of the environment. Some countries are applying incentives in selected areas, but these are limited to those countries and to those areas – with no global significance.
China has realized that its future development will be choked by a dying environment and a dying population if it does not implement measures with significant effects on the ground. It will rely heavily on technological innovations to achieve the necessary improvements. When a major country like this leans on technological innovation, it is likely to have effects on the research efforts being carried out. It is in technological innovations that the hope for the environment lies. Examples are hybrid automobiles and electric automobiles. If environmentally neutral products are presented to consumers and investors alike, they will choose them if they are affordable – but not otherwise.
Social balance
A good social balance is obtained when a society’s social groups resolve their differences through peaceful dialogue, without use of force or violence. The necessary context for this is that the society practices freedom of expression, and that social groups have the legal right to organize themselves and express their views through peaceful actions (including strikes). If this were not the case, it would not be possible to assess whether the lack of conflict was due to oppression or to harmony.
When academics wish to compare between countries the levels of conflict between the social partners, they generally use the number of days that countries experience strikes or lock outs (corrected for the size of the conflicts involved). There will never be harmony in the sense of total absence of conflicts. However, a nation’s capacity to solve its problems through dialogue, without use of threats of violence or other forms of oppression, is crucial for the possibility to obtain a genuinely good social balance.
The quality of the dialogue will depend on how representative the partners in the dialogue are. They need not only to represent a majority of the groups they are supposed to represent, but they also need to be in touch with their base in such a way that their representation is genuine.The availability of properly represented social partners in the dialogue is thus crucial for the success of the social dialogue. If the representation of the relevant social partners is fragmented, the complexity of the dialogue will increase correspondingly. The more consolidated a social group manages to make its representation, the more strongly will it be able to make its views understood. In some countries, authorities or businesses are under the illusion that if they can make the labour organizations more fragmented – or make them disappear altogether – they will achieve better results. This is at best a view that will be valid only in the short term. In the long run it is a recipe for social unrest and major disruptions in production.
Experience shows that countries where the social dialogue functions well, are better able to take difficult decisions that involve all social partners. They are also better assured that such decisions will be respected and followed up. These decisions will take longer to prepare and to make, but they will stick better once they are made. Furthermore, the time lost in preparing for the decision, will be recuperated by time gained in handling reduced levels of conflict after the decision is made. Confrontation and polarization does not work well as a long term political strategy for running a democratic country.
Environmental balance
As mentioned above, a good environmental balance is a balance where human use and extraction of resources from nature is such that it does not affect nature’s reproductive capacity. By the use of nature is meant both cultivation, transformations produced by urbanisation, and other uses (including use for purposes of disposing of different types of waste and emissions from human activity). By extraction is meant mining, petroleum extraction, forestry, fisheries and all other activities that extract resources from their natural environment.
Some kinds of extraction may come from renewable resources such as forestry and fisheries, and for these the amounts of extraction have to be balanced against the reproductive capacity of the whole ecosystem involved. The ecosystems involved in different types of extractions contain extensive interdependencies between plants, animals and human activities. One type of intervention will most often destabilize a temporary equilibrium that has been reached between the life and activities of the species involved in that ecosystem. Some time will pass before a new equilibrium may be reached (if any), and this new equilibrium will have new characteristics. If the stock of one particular species has been depleted, the animals depending on this species will have to adapt to the new situation. Awareness of the mechanisms and repercussions involved in dealing with extractions is necessary in connection with policy making and monitoring.
Similarly, the effects of transformations generated by urbanisation, road building and other forms of infrastructure developments need to be monitored with respect to how they affect environmental balance. The balance is always affected, but the degree to which the effects are acceptable will depend on the results of monitoring and research – and of the political tolerance for changes in the balance.
The most difficult environmental problems and challenges stem from disposal and emissions of toxic substances into air, water and land. These disposals and emissions are hard to monitor, their effects are hard to assess (even when monitoring is successful), and the agents who actually cause the disposals or the emissions are not always easy to identify. Toxic disposals and emissions are the main threat to long term environmental balance and human survival, because they influence the quality of air and water as well as the capacity of land to produce non-toxic food. This comes in addition to the on-going discussion on climate change, caused by those same factors.
Economic growth, caused by expanding activity per capita as well as increased global population, is at the heart of this discussion. Only technological innovations and radical changes in incentive structures (that may induce change in patterns of behaviour) can realistically change the relation between economic growth and environmental development. The present relation between economic growth and environmental development is not sustainable in the light of those growth patterns and demographic developments we see now. In the absence of appropriate global decision making capacities, the prospects for long term survival of the human species on the planet are dim.
The national political systems in most countries are such that action on a problem is only initiated when the problem has reached proportions where most people (including media) consider it to be a crisis. We must here of course distinguish between crises that are generated by media with little foundation in reality, and real crises that actually take place and are perceived as such by people in the areas involved. However, a crisis taking place in one country does not affect the perceptions in other countries, except very indirectly and slowly (if the crisis persists and becomes very visible). Therefore, for the global political community to act on a problem, the problem would have to be operating simultaneously in a majority of the major countries – like when we had the global financial crisis. In environmental matters, the evolution does not take the same form in every country, and the problem is therefore not perceived in the same way by all major countries. This also applies to problems that are of transnational character, where the effects that may have the same cause take different shapes in each country because of different local ecosystems and their respective types of resistance to impacts of the same order. Hence, no agreement is reached on the measures to be taken. As long as the problem is perceived differently in different countries, the stalemate on significant global action will persist.
By a good economic balance is meant a balance where the availability of goods and services (through domestic production and imports) and the use of goods and services (for investments and consumption) is balanced in such a way that unemployment is low, prices are stable, and the international balance of payments is under good control.
By a good social balance is meant a balance where a society’s social groups resolve their differences through peaceful dialogue, without use of force or violence. The underlying assumption behind such a balance is that the society practices freedom of expression, and that social groups have the legal right to organize themselves and express their views through peaceful actions.
By a good environmental balance is meant a balance where human use and extraction of resources from nature is such that it does not affect nature’s biological reproductive capacity. By the use of nature is meant both cultivation, transformations produced by urbanization, and other uses (including use for purposes of disposing of different types of refuse and emissions from human activity). By extraction is meant mining, petroleum extraction, fisheries and all other activities that extract resources from their natural environment.
Any country which wishes to have a successful and peaceful development, must strive towards the simultaneous achievement of these three balances. They need to co-exist. If the economic balance gets out of hand, it will soon affect the social balance through the mechanisms of income distribution and distribution of welfare between social groups. Both unemployment and inflation have strong adverse effects on the social balance through these distributive mechanisms. If the social balance gets out of hand, it will quickly spill over into a disturbance of the economic balance, through the actions or reactions of those groups who have been hit by an imbalance. These actions will normally affect economic production quite quickly. An environmental imbalance is probably the most serious of all, because it takes a long time to develop, a long time to discover statistically and an even longer time to “repair” - assuming politicians agree on how to repair it. In the meantime, it will have strong effects on both of the other balances, because of the type of measures it may require for “healing”.
Historically, the polarized ideologies have shown themselves incapable of achieving good balances for the three balances simultaneously. A free market system without the proper checks and balances has not been capable of securing a good social balance. A communist system has, through its need to control both the production and the distribution of resources, not been capable of generating a good economic balance. None of these systems have produced good solutions for the environment. Hence the need for new approaches.
Economic balance
The supply of resources comes from a country’s own production and from imports. The demand for a country’s resources comes from domestic consumption, domestic investment, and foreign demand (exports). If the demand is lower than the supply, we will see a pressure to reduce prices and imports, so as to achieve a new balance at a lower level of activity – with increased unemployment. If demand is higher than supply, we will see a pressure for increased prices and imports, so as to achieve a new balance at a higher level of activity – with reduced unemployment.
Imbalances which lead to high long term unemployment are a waste of resources and they create social hardship on those who become unemployed. They are therefore in most countries politically undesired. So are imbalances that lead to long term inflation and deficits in the balance of international trade. The major danger of inflation is that it creates increased differences in remuneration among the country’s citizens and undermines the country’s long term capacity to import goods that are necessary for its development.
Such imbalances being undesired, it is necessary to strike a balance between demand and supply of resources that is such that unemployment is mostly of a short term nature, linked to the natural movement of employees from firms that reduce their activity to firms that increase their activity. This must be achieved in combination with a price development which is not out of line with that of the country’s major trade partners, so as not to upset the trade balance.
This is a complicated balancing act, because it implies achieving an aggregate demand which is at roughly the same level as the production capacity of the country, taking account of the level of imports this implies. The country’s government must therefore have a policy that is capable of influencing domestic consumption, domestic investment, and exports. No economic system has shown itself capable of steering aggregate demand in a precise way, but by governing in a steady, predictable fashion this balancing act is feasible in a rough manner. Policy instruments in a market based economy can only act indirectly, by way of incentives and links between factors that influence the final result. Those systems that have tried to govern demand and supply directly by central planning have not proved to be feasible in practice, because they do not manage to handle the enormous amount of information and logistics required to match detailed, individual demand and supply. In addition, these systems are particularly open to corruption.
So far, these balancing acts have not been taking account of how the Earth’s natural environment has reacted to the increasing production and consumption of an increasing population. In the early 1970s it became clear to everybody who had the slightest interest in these questions, that the Earth was suffering in many ways from the methods of production, the disposal of waste from production and consumption, and the expansion of these factors resulting from the population growth.
The global economy was made up of independent countries taking their own independent decisions, even though they were linked by many factual interdependencies. Many large countries were not interested in discussing environmental issues in the 1970s. They were acting as if the problems did not exist. In this way they avoided taking unpleasant decisions that might irritate producers and consumers. This was easy enough, because no supra-national authority had the powers to put pressure on those countries which did not care about the environment. It was furthermore difficult for other countries to implement costly environmental measures, when their large competitors in the international markets did not.
This is where we stand today as well. Some global funds are directed towards preserving forests, and a system for trading emission permits is being implemented. It remains to be seen whether these measures will have an impact in the real world. It is not yet clear whether the funds involved will end in the wrong pockets, with no real impact on the ground. Only measures that contain significant incentives for the operative choices made by producers and consumers will have any effect. There is yet not, after 40 years of beating around the bush, any systematic thinking on a global basis about the use of incentives for the improvement of the environment. Some countries are applying incentives in selected areas, but these are limited to those countries and to those areas – with no global significance.
China has realized that its future development will be choked by a dying environment and a dying population if it does not implement measures with significant effects on the ground. It will rely heavily on technological innovations to achieve the necessary improvements. When a major country like this leans on technological innovation, it is likely to have effects on the research efforts being carried out. It is in technological innovations that the hope for the environment lies. Examples are hybrid automobiles and electric automobiles. If environmentally neutral products are presented to consumers and investors alike, they will choose them if they are affordable – but not otherwise.
Social balance
A good social balance is obtained when a society’s social groups resolve their differences through peaceful dialogue, without use of force or violence. The necessary context for this is that the society practices freedom of expression, and that social groups have the legal right to organize themselves and express their views through peaceful actions (including strikes). If this were not the case, it would not be possible to assess whether the lack of conflict was due to oppression or to harmony.
When academics wish to compare between countries the levels of conflict between the social partners, they generally use the number of days that countries experience strikes or lock outs (corrected for the size of the conflicts involved). There will never be harmony in the sense of total absence of conflicts. However, a nation’s capacity to solve its problems through dialogue, without use of threats of violence or other forms of oppression, is crucial for the possibility to obtain a genuinely good social balance.
The quality of the dialogue will depend on how representative the partners in the dialogue are. They need not only to represent a majority of the groups they are supposed to represent, but they also need to be in touch with their base in such a way that their representation is genuine.The availability of properly represented social partners in the dialogue is thus crucial for the success of the social dialogue. If the representation of the relevant social partners is fragmented, the complexity of the dialogue will increase correspondingly. The more consolidated a social group manages to make its representation, the more strongly will it be able to make its views understood. In some countries, authorities or businesses are under the illusion that if they can make the labour organizations more fragmented – or make them disappear altogether – they will achieve better results. This is at best a view that will be valid only in the short term. In the long run it is a recipe for social unrest and major disruptions in production.
Experience shows that countries where the social dialogue functions well, are better able to take difficult decisions that involve all social partners. They are also better assured that such decisions will be respected and followed up. These decisions will take longer to prepare and to make, but they will stick better once they are made. Furthermore, the time lost in preparing for the decision, will be recuperated by time gained in handling reduced levels of conflict after the decision is made. Confrontation and polarization does not work well as a long term political strategy for running a democratic country.
Environmental balance
As mentioned above, a good environmental balance is a balance where human use and extraction of resources from nature is such that it does not affect nature’s reproductive capacity. By the use of nature is meant both cultivation, transformations produced by urbanisation, and other uses (including use for purposes of disposing of different types of waste and emissions from human activity). By extraction is meant mining, petroleum extraction, forestry, fisheries and all other activities that extract resources from their natural environment.
Some kinds of extraction may come from renewable resources such as forestry and fisheries, and for these the amounts of extraction have to be balanced against the reproductive capacity of the whole ecosystem involved. The ecosystems involved in different types of extractions contain extensive interdependencies between plants, animals and human activities. One type of intervention will most often destabilize a temporary equilibrium that has been reached between the life and activities of the species involved in that ecosystem. Some time will pass before a new equilibrium may be reached (if any), and this new equilibrium will have new characteristics. If the stock of one particular species has been depleted, the animals depending on this species will have to adapt to the new situation. Awareness of the mechanisms and repercussions involved in dealing with extractions is necessary in connection with policy making and monitoring.
Similarly, the effects of transformations generated by urbanisation, road building and other forms of infrastructure developments need to be monitored with respect to how they affect environmental balance. The balance is always affected, but the degree to which the effects are acceptable will depend on the results of monitoring and research – and of the political tolerance for changes in the balance.
The most difficult environmental problems and challenges stem from disposal and emissions of toxic substances into air, water and land. These disposals and emissions are hard to monitor, their effects are hard to assess (even when monitoring is successful), and the agents who actually cause the disposals or the emissions are not always easy to identify. Toxic disposals and emissions are the main threat to long term environmental balance and human survival, because they influence the quality of air and water as well as the capacity of land to produce non-toxic food. This comes in addition to the on-going discussion on climate change, caused by those same factors.
Economic growth, caused by expanding activity per capita as well as increased global population, is at the heart of this discussion. Only technological innovations and radical changes in incentive structures (that may induce change in patterns of behaviour) can realistically change the relation between economic growth and environmental development. The present relation between economic growth and environmental development is not sustainable in the light of those growth patterns and demographic developments we see now. In the absence of appropriate global decision making capacities, the prospects for long term survival of the human species on the planet are dim.
The national political systems in most countries are such that action on a problem is only initiated when the problem has reached proportions where most people (including media) consider it to be a crisis. We must here of course distinguish between crises that are generated by media with little foundation in reality, and real crises that actually take place and are perceived as such by people in the areas involved. However, a crisis taking place in one country does not affect the perceptions in other countries, except very indirectly and slowly (if the crisis persists and becomes very visible). Therefore, for the global political community to act on a problem, the problem would have to be operating simultaneously in a majority of the major countries – like when we had the global financial crisis. In environmental matters, the evolution does not take the same form in every country, and the problem is therefore not perceived in the same way by all major countries. This also applies to problems that are of transnational character, where the effects that may have the same cause take different shapes in each country because of different local ecosystems and their respective types of resistance to impacts of the same order. Hence, no agreement is reached on the measures to be taken. As long as the problem is perceived differently in different countries, the stalemate on significant global action will persist.