We think we are rational and wise. Human knowledge and societies have evolved a great deal since cave times. Collectively, we now know so much about nature, from the atom to the stars, and have developed intricate organizations and social structures, like modern governments or multinational corporations. Still, we get by as a species with remarkably little collective planning. And I fear this will eventually lead to our demise.
WE HAVE NO PLAN
As we have grown in numbers and economically, our footprint on Earth has become undeniable. Our garbage piles up in landfills and oceans. The carbon we emit has raised global temperatures, increasing drought conditions in some places and flood conditions in others. These disruptions have hurt farming in many regions of the world, including some of the poorest. Meanwhile, our farming expansion has shrank our planet’s clean water reservoirs, forests, and biodiversity. Our oceans are becoming dead zones due to increased water temperatures and overfishing. And our expansion throughout the continents is bringing many land animals close to extinction too. Humans now substantially outweigh all other mammals except for those we raise to feed us. (1)
In addition to the gradual degradation of our environment, we face risks of global death and destruction from our own creations. The most likely source of death on a worldwide scale continues to be nuclear war. Still, several other existential risks have sprung from our technology. As knowledge of microbiology increases, it opens the possibility of new cures but also of new, deadlier bioweapons that may run out of our control. Similarly, the development of artificial intelligence may result in the intentional or involuntary unleashing of unstoppable killing machines. (2)
A common thread among these risks is that proper mitigation would require collective action on a scale that we are currently incapable of as a species. Actions by individuals or individual countries can reduce the severity and likelihood of some of these problems. But genuinely addressing the risks of climate change, nuclear weapons, or biowarfare requires the cooperation of most countries of the world or, at least, of most of the powerful countries. And we are not currently equipped to collaborate on such a scale.
Early humans hunted and gathered freely from nature. Their numbers were small, so they did not have much impact on the environment. With the development of agriculture, humanity started to settle. As we settled, our built environment and resource exploitation began to affect nature. In the last two hundred years, our impact has exploded, as our ability to produce has grown exponentially since the Industrial Revolution. But our ability to reason collectively has not matched our economic development.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small groups, united by kin. As far as we can tell, these groups were often led by the strongest among them. As we settled into cities and towns, the need to manage relations between kins increased, and ancient forms of government started to develop. Still, most people, in most places, have been ruled by “the men with the guns.” Kings, emperors, and warlords of various kinds have ruled over most of humanity, most of the time, since the agricultural revolution. When might makes right, societies tend to be led by the ruthless and power-hungry and decisions are made to benefit those in charge, to perpetuate power rather than to the benefit of all.
The last couple hundred years have seen the blossoming of democracy in much of the world, with an acceleration in the last seventy years. Democracy implies rule by the people, with decisions requiring majority support. Despite the expansion of democracy, the wealthy and well-connected still have more influence than the average person in the functioning of most democracies. Still, democratic governance has substantially improved the welfare of the population of most democratic countries, as democracy has led to much higher investments in the education and healthcare of the masses and the provision of income support to the poor and the elderly, among other welfare-enhancing policies.
But democracy as a tool to govern our collective life cannot, on its own, overcome human biases and shortcomings. To appeal to voters, politicians often support policies that prioritize short-term concerns and the measurable interests of individual groups over long-run, strategic concerns or measures that could boost the welfare of society as a whole. Modern societies are incredibly complex, and policies result in myriad interactions. Voters have trouble making informed choices that can best reflect their long-term interests. Faced with the complexity of society, voters often prioritize group affiliation and zero-sum thinking in making their choices. This results in politicians remaining unmotivated to make decisions that produce the best long-run results and the greatest benefit for all.
Our failure to prioritize and collaborate does not solely expose humanity to substantial existential risks. It also severely limits our ability to invest our collective energy in what could benefit us all. The nations of the world, collectively, spend substantially more on their militaries than on scientific development. If the funds, resources, and time that go into producing more and better ways to annihilate each other could instead be directed into developing new cures for disease, clean energy sources, or ways to make food with more limited environmental impact, how much greater could our collective welfare be?
I am not naïve in thinking that the world could be improved overnight if some countries started to dispense with their militaries and police departments. Under the current mentality of large swaths of humanity, those who unilaterally chose pacifism would get crushed by the most vicious and power-hungry. Still, I believe that our best chance of achieving our collective potential and limiting the chance of disaster is to boost, at the individual level, our appreciation of the importance of our long-term, collective well-being. If individuals throughout the world believed that striving for our collective good is the right way to live our lives, such belief would support our ability to cooperate to address our problems and use the opportunities to increase the well-being of our communities.
A change of human hearts and minds away from selfishness and shortsightedness is hard to conceive. Throughout human history, we have prioritized our well-being and that of those close to us to the detriment of the well-being of others, and prioritized short-term benefits over long-term ones. Still, there has been moral and ethical progress. The world’s largest religions have popularized the “golden rule,” do unto others as you expect others to do unto you, which may not have been intuitive to our cave ancestors. Later, ideals of enlightenment and liberalism brought many to the conclusion that we are all beings of equal moral worth, an idea that would have been unthinkable to most just a few centuries prior. Also, ideals of patriotism, while sometimes having their dark side, have created a cultural environment where many believe that sacrificing for one’s country is morally worthwhile. This is a significant development, albeit we still need the additional step of believing that not just our family, friends, or country are worthy of making sacrifices for, but also the world and all of humanity.
While this essay lays out arguments for why improving our collective decision-making should be an utmost priority, I am not optimistic that we will accomplish such improvement. Our culture reveres status and ever-growing consumption, and our primitive brains may not allow us to de-prioritize competitiveness and self-interest and avoid short-sightedness in favor of a long-term view and positive-sum thinking. But we should try to open our eyes to our predicament and the possibilities that a different way of being would bring. Nature and the universe do not care about us. We have multiplied and thrived because we have adapted and mastered our environment. But our history provides examples of civilizations collapsing because they depleted their resources… and they did not have nuclear or biological weapons. Hopefully, we can take control of our destiny and not be subject to a great filter of our own making.
The remainder of this essay is organized into three sections. Section two discusses the opportunities better collective thinking would provide. Section three examines the obstacles to better collective and long-term decision-making. Lastly, section four discusses how to foster a mindset that favors collective decision-making and concludes.
WHAT COULD BE
The possibilities of a world of cooperation are mind-boggling. In addition to mitigating existential risks and sources of misery, a world with better planning and collaboration is a world where much more investment in our common good could occur. If countries did not prioritize acquiring ever better means of conquering or destroying each other, many human and material resources would become available to promote human well-being. Our “me-first” attitude leads to endless disposable consumption that does little to improve our lives. Sharing a vision that we can achieve great things together would allow us to invest much more in collective goods that benefit us all.
Prime among the collective goods we underinvest in is knowledge. Knowledge is the ultimate durable good; once acquired, it costs little to keep. We can gain knowledge about the world primarily through scientific research. Science is the great engine of human progress. In a world where people and their governments prioritize long-term success and positive-sum thinking, much more investment could be made in science. People who truly internalize how science can help them live better lives could support the taxation needed to increase our collective investment in scientific research and development. Maximizing collective well-being through investment in science would likely favor investment in developing new medicines and treatments that would allow us to live longer and healthier lives; in developing technologies that rely on clean energy sources, and thus reduce our carbon footprint and the pollution in our air; and in developing new techniques for food production that reduce our toll on nature and ensure that all in the world have good food to eat. Better technologies can also lower the drudgery of everyday life by performing activities we do not like and, thus, allowing us to pursue fulfilling activities and spend more time together. In a world where people prioritize long-term thinking and collective well-being, one hopes that scientific and technological development would not center on tools of destruction or on products that capture our short attention span or signal wealth while having little to no benefit to our welfare.
Other areas of our collective life could benefit from more, smarter investment. Our transportation system, centered around private vehicles, results in much pollution and congestion that wastes precious time in our lives. The development of cleaner vehicles should be a priority to reduce environmental impacts. Also, increased investment in reliable and frequent public transportation options, like trains, could further reduce pollution and congestion. Better availability of public spaces could also improve our communal life. Natural parks, beaches, museums, sporting facilities, and town squares with seating and attractions can all bring us together, enjoying the world and the company of our fellow citizens. In a world where we prioritize our common well-being and dignity, something as basic as clean, public bathrooms could be more widely available. We all need to use them sometimes when we are out and about, and we should not need to depend on the benevolence of private businesses to do so. Investing in such collective goods aligns with a long-term perspective on well-being. Once built, many collective goods can last for a long time, with limited maintenance costs, providing us with durable benefits unlike much of our disposable consumption. We do not have to live lives of private affluence and public squalor if we prioritize investing in our common good.
At least in the short term, more resources invested in collective goods would mean fewer resources available for other types of consumption we have grown used to. From a perspective that sees individual consumers and their choices as the primary signal of what is valuable, it may seem that I want to impose unwanted preferences on everyone else. I believe such a perspective is shortsighted. As individual consumers, we do not face a full menu of options of what could be bought with our money. Businesses can sell us what is profitable to sell to individuals and families. However, no private business model will deliver the amount of research on life-threatening diseases that I, and likely most of you reading this essay, would like to happen. Investing in many critical drivers of our well-being takes coordinated, collective action.
Housing is also an area in which taking a society-wide perspective on policy tradeoffs could significantly improve our collective well-being. Limitations in housing construction have greatly hampered housing availability and affordability in many of our communities. Reasonable concerns, such as congestion or destruction of green space, often motivate such limitations. But we all need a place to live. Those we block from living in our communities have to live somewhere, often in farther away places, leading to longer commutes and the destruction of nature. Extending our circle of concern beyond ourselves and our immediate family would help us be more generous in the policies we support and more welcoming of newcomers to our communities. Such a change would allow our communities and countries to have better and more convenient places to live.
In much of the developed world, large increases in the housing supply could be easily achieved through market means. If regulations, like zoning, that constrain housing supply were relaxed, private developers would happily build more housing as there is much money to be made. Where liberalization of home building does not result in sufficient supply to ensure affordability, the public sector could contribute directly through building. Public sector housing does not have to take the form of subsided housing targeted at low-income households, which has often resulted in environments of concentrated poverty. Instead, public housing could be offered at market rates, aiming to lower prices across the board through increased supply and producing an income for the state that could be reinvested into more housing production or other priorities. (3) Low-income families and individuals can benefit from such interventions, as general housing affordability also increases affordability for low-income households. Improved housing affordability would do much to reduce homelessness, as the leading cause of homelessness is the inability to pay rent.
Growing, vibrant cities can help attain a better future. Tall buildings can help with housing availability and affordability, as they allow more people to live in less land area and thereby increase the housing supply. Such compact living is also more environmentally friendly, as it reduces transportation and heating costs and the need to uproot green spaces to make space for people. City living need not to be cramped. In a world where anti-growth regulations did not artificially constrain the housing supply, many more apartment buildings could be built, including more spacious apartments for families and those who crave more space.
Beyond the potential for lower housing costs and reduced environmental harm, cities provide great cultural and economic benefits. By concentrating people with different preferences, cities provide the demand for more varied cultural products and food offerings. By bringing people together, cities allow for more effective collaboration and development of clusters of specialized knowledge, significantly increasing economic productivity as the Bay area shows for the tech industry. Cities are often associated with isolation. But in a society that invests in public spaces, cities can be where people from all walks of life interact more easily and frequently.
Ultimately, many prefer a rural lifestyle to an urban one and many need to live in the countryside to farm, mine, and perform other non-urban activities. People should be able to live fulfilling lives wherever they prefer. Still, we should avoid imposing artificial constraints on cities, as they are a great source of economic and cultural growth and, unintuitively, contribute to more eco-friendly lifestyles. Societies that take the long-term costs and benefits of our territorial distribution seriously would remove constraints on city growth and incentivize city living.
Better collective planning would allow us to bring back a greener, healthier environment. Better transportation options and denser living would reduce our pollution and geographical footprint, leaving more space for nature to remain wild. We could reduce our carbon emissions, and so our contribution to the warming of our planet. We could also reduce our emissions of small particulates, a substantial cause of death and disease around the world. (4) Across a range of issues, accepting that some of our actions cause negative externalities and supporting the idea that these externalities should be priced would help us reduce our environmental impact. When we cause harm to others or the environment, it is fair to bear the costs of our actions.
To the extent that climate change cannot be avoided, collective planning would also allow for better adaptation. Many areas of the world, some highly populated, are likely to experience water shortages. Communities need to manage their water usage. Low-value uses, such as golf courses or lawns, should not continue to enjoy cheap water while water reservoirs dwindle. Unfortunately, certain crops, like almonds, may no longer be viable in regions that are depleting their fresh water. As we careen towards dangerous levels of planetary warming, geoengineering interventions to reduce warming should also be considered. (5) But given its consequences to all in the world, attempts to manipulate our climate should ideally be based on international consensus rather than rogue actions by a nation or group of individuals.
A world where we care about all of humanity is a world where much more migration across countries would be allowed. Many of our fellow human beings live lives of destitution in under-developed countries, while they could easily find jobs or start businesses in wealthy countries that would allow them to support themselves and their families. Our draconian limits on migration waste much human potential. Many of our biggest companies and essential inventions have come from immigrants from developing countries into the developed world. Most research finds that immigration benefits most people in the receiving countries. Immigrants grow the economy of receiving countries, increasing the demand for the goods and services produced by locals and allowing many locals to get better jobs in supervisory positions. Also, while brain drain could conceivably hurt countries losing people to migration, migration often benefits the countries of origin too, as emigrants reinvest in their home countries and bring back new ideas.
Across much of the world, the population is aging and starting to decrease. A reduction in the human population may be good news for our natural environment, as it limits our use of resources and destruction of habitats. But population decline has severe consequences for the remaining humans, as it reduces the number of young people who can support the old, who are living longer and longer. Part of the solution, at least in the short and medium term, is for the countries with falling populations to let in more immigrants from countries with still-expanding populations, which are often developing countries. Still, measures to stabilize the population are likely needed in the long term, at the risk of immiseration of the remaining aging populations. Societies that take this challenge seriously would provide incentives for child-rearing, including reducing taxes and increasing subsidies for those with children. Those who are childless may perceive the benefits provided to the children of others as giveaways to those who choose to have kids. But the children of today are the adults of tomorrow and, without working adults, the childless elderly of tomorrow will have no one to provide the services they need.
Despite substantial improvements in recent decades, hundreds of millions continue to live in severe poverty, with associated malnourishment and premature death. In addition to more migration, in a world where we value all of humankind, rich countries would invest in researching and developing tools to combat poverty, such as medicine for common diseases and better crops. Ultimately, beyond creating the conditions for our fellow men and women mired in poverty to take care of themselves, all of us in rich countries can also help eradicate poverty through direct solidarity. We can help unleash much human potential and, through our solidarity, become better people.
The ideas discussed above reflect my vision of what could be accomplished if we worked together to improve our common good sustainably. Others may have a different vision of what can improve our lives. For example, space exploration animates the dreams of many. I like my planets with water and oxygen, and the prospect of reaching another habitable planet seems too impractical given our current technology. Ensuring the Earth continues to be habitable seems more productive than dreaming about terraforming Mars. But while our dreams of a better tomorrow are bound to be different, an appreciation of the need to cooperate and think long-term would help us figure out together what the best choices are.
WHY WE STRUGGLE
We struggle to get organized collectively in sensible ways because our evolutionary inheritance does not favor collective action on a large scale. We care about ourselves, our families and, to a lesser degree, our social groups. Many of us care for our countries, but less so than we care for those close to us. Selection pressures have led us to this way of thinking. In times of material scarcity, those who could acquire resources for themselves and their families were more successful at reproducing and ensuring their families survived, so their lineage would live on. But what is an adaptive strategy for an individual or family may not be an adaptive strategy for our species as a whole, as resource overuse and pollution can destroy the habitat that supports us.
Our selfishness is at the root of many of our collective problems. Greed leads many to pursue activities that maximize monetary rewards over activities that could most benefit our common good. In a more widely reviled fashion, greed leads many to engage in corruption and other types of criminality, subverting the rules of our societies and each other’s trust. In addition to the unscrupulous pursuit of monetary gain, another manifestation of our selfishness is a constant strive for status. Enjoying high status in class and caste systems has historically provided benefits. Many spend much time and energy trying to increase their status, jockeying for positions with more power and recognition. The obsession with status frequently leads to decision-making aimed at perpetuating or increasing individual status and power instead of benefiting our communities today and in the future.
When considering the myriad shortcomings of our societies, our primary instinct is to blame others for these ills: the rich, the politicians, the lazy, the foreigners. Given selection pressures, we can expect that the wealthy are likely to be greedier and those in positions of power are likely to be more power-hungry than the rest of us. I do believe that the rich and powerful have more moral responsibility for the state of our world and much more ability to improve our current state of affairs. Many of our collective problems could be solved or at least mitigated if those with money and power were more generous and civic-minded. And I think that some reflection would lead the rich and powerful to realize that contributing to the common good can be more fulfilling than constantly pursuing money and power and that living in more equal, safer, and well-run societies would also benefit them. The wealth of the rich embeds the effort and ingenuity of those they employ and the purchasing power of others in society. A healthy, productive society is to the great benefit of the rich.
However, blaming those with money and power for our problems lets the rest of us off the hook too easily. While the actions of the rich and powerful have often caused or aggravated our common problems, their ways of thinking and motivations are widely shared in our societies. Without changing how most of us think and what we value, we should not expect better outcomes if today’s rich and powerful were replaced tomorrow by the average person from the street.
Many regular folk hold the same not-so-civic-minded or generous values they criticize in the rich and powerful. Many are just as greedy as the rich, just don’t have as much money. Many have no problem with corruption, think that the corrupt are smart, and profess they would do the same if the opportunity presented itself. Many cheat on their taxes with no remorse, thinking that is the smart thing to do. Many are unwilling to bear any costs to support a more environmentally friendly way of living, despite understanding the costs our actions have to our environment. Many are happy to keep others out of their neighborhoods, blocking those less well-to-do from opportunity and condemning some to homelessness, not to be inconvenienced by traffic or to keep low-income children from sharing a school with their children. And many are happy to keep immigrants out of their country, fellow men and women who did not have the luck to be born in countries with more economic opportunity. By and large, we are not a very generous bunch.
Our love for our families can be an obstacle to building inclusive communities and societies. We want the best for our family, and particularly for our kids. Parents want their children to go to the best schools, the best colleges. Parents want these things because they believe, correctly, that being better prepared will help their children out-compete others and succeed in a world where having money and a good job can be crucial to living a good life. This is very understandable and human. But the actions we take to advance our loved ones, if to the detriment of everyone else, can aggravate the dysfunctions of our societies. Often, people refuse to support policies that would benefit our communities or societies not out of greed, but out of wanting to have what is seen as enough to provide for their families. But if we solely focus on earning more and more to provide for our families in the present, we can lose opportunities for our communities to do better together. If, to ensure our children have a good school, we try to bar or price out low-income kids from being in their school, we contribute to limiting the economic opportunities of less fortunate children. If, to ensure our children live in a pleasant and safe neighborhood, we try to bar or price out low-income families from living in them, we are contributing to the economic segregation of our communities. Thinking about one’s family first, it is easy to rationalize that someone else should provide opportunities for those with less. But if we all think like that, inequality of opportunity will remain. Supporting policies that improve our schools and our neighborhoods for everyone is how we build strong, inclusive communities. Being more generous and welcoming is key to creating a society that gives more opportunities and, ultimately, benefits everyone.
Despite lofty purported goals, scientific research and academia also showcase the frailties of the human spirit. Science aims to find the truth and has contributed significantly to our collective knowledge. But like in other human activities, selfish incentives for money, power, and status often get in the way. The publish-or-perish imperative of academia leads many young scholars to prioritize researching what they believe is publishable—which frequently means small bore, derivative work—over what would be more impactful outside their academic bubble. Much productive potential from our top minds is lost due to the perverse incentives of academia and our individual and collective unwillingness to challenge them.
Many spend little time trying to understand political issues and how to best vote or engage productively with our democratic systems. Lives are busy, so many do not have the energy to understand our political systems better. Also, people often lack curiosity about political matters due to a mix of believing that politicians’ decisions do not affect them (6) or that whatever they think or do will not affect ultimate outcomes. We are prone to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias when thinking about political and societal matters as we much more readily accept the arguments and facts that confirm our preferred truths. The complexity of our collective life is hard to grasp, and the lack of clear actors to blame for our ills is hard to accept. People want easy answers to complex problems. As a coping mechanism, many indulge in conspiracy theories, which can be quite fantastical but provide evil individuals or groups to blame for our societies’ failures. Investing little time and effort to understand what is going on in our societies may be individually rational, as each of us has a small share of the power in our democracies. But if we act this way, we forfeit our ability to contribute to better decision-making in collective matters, leaving the decisions to those more motivated by ideology or direct monetary benefit.
Our modern belief systems reflect our bias toward thinking, first and foremost, about ourselves and those close to us. The politics of unselfishness are losing. Most in the political class understand well that political messages must focus on what the politician can do for you, the voter, preferably in the short term. Low taxes are always a favorite promise, as is spending that directly favors the intended voters. Politicians know that expressing support for policies that primarily benefit groups that are not the politician’s target audience is likely to lose votes. This includes left-wing politicians, who, despite holding views that favor more material equality in society, often promise to provide benefits to the broadest group possible to maximize support. Programs focused on improving conditions for the poor often have shallow support.
The short-sightedness of voters makes it difficult for politicians to win elections while supporting policies to address long-term problems, such as environmental degradation, that have meaningful short-term costs. Voters want more money in their pockets now—or at least to be promised that—and are not easily persuaded by a vision of a greener, healthier, more equal tomorrow. To be clear, voter skepticism of politicians’ promises is often well-founded, as the power-hungry will adopt whichever messages work better to obtain political power and then proceed to renege on their lofty promises. But just because voter skepticism is often justified, it does not mean that societies where all that matters is the immediate bottom line—and, therefore, politicians are constrained to focus on getting money in voters’ pockets—are societies that can adapt to the problems we face and reach for the opportunities we can only achieve together.
People seek a sense of order and stability and avoid risk. There is wisdom in existing arrangements and in how many problems have been solved through the years, and it is natural and often correct to be skeptical that significant changes will be for the best. These human desires and intuitions provide the positive appeal of conservatism as an ideology. However, the world and its people are constantly changing, so our culture and environment need to change with them. Trying to freeze things in place, whether good or bad to begin with, is bound to lead to worse outcomes than embracing and shaping change, so the good outweighs the bad. Unfortunately, the desire to freeze power structures in place—so some are and always will be above others—motivates much of conservatism. I appeal to the better angels of our conservative brethren. A better world could be ours if we work together with equal freedom and dignity.
Markets and property rights have been great engines of economic growth in recent history. Competition among businesses has led to better goods and services to meet our needs. The ability of entrepreneurs and innovators to retain the gains of their effort and ingenuity gives them the incentive to work hard and develop new ideas that we all benefit from. As Adam Smith famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.” The fruits of this economic system have been enormous and are all around us. But markets have limitations on what they can provide us. Most businesses must maximize profit to survive and prosper. Business models have to focus on what can be monetized, preferably over the short term. Much energy goes into developing, producing, and marketing goods and services that exploit our psychological weaknesses and do little to improve our well-being. Meanwhile, innovation and deployment of new products and technologies that could improve our well-being are limited by the possibility of developing business models around them. For example, medicines that cure diseases are often less profitable than medicines that treat symptoms, and we should expect profit-maximizing drug companies to favor the latter over the former. Building business models for projects with high up-front costs that provide substantial but diffuse benefits is hard. So, there is substantial scope to act collectively, through the state, to achieve what businesses and corporations cannot offer us.
For fair and economically efficient reasons (for example, rewards for effort and innovation) as well as for unfair and not efficient reasons (for example, rewards for rent-seeking (7)), markets tend to generate substantial inequality of income and wealth. Ideally, the opportunity to live a good life would be less stratified in our societies by access to economic resources. Unfortunately, much deprivation befalls those of low-income and their children. Poverty and deprivation lead to the loss of human potential, which negatively impacts us all. Much good can be achieved, at a relatively low cost, if those who succeed in the markets are willing to share the fruits of their success with those with less.
Political supporters of free markets tend to be skeptical of taxation to fund public projects and of programs that reduce inequalities in income and opportunity. Some of this opposition results from legitimate concerns with governments’ mismanagement of public resources and the sometimes perverse incentives introduced by public programs. But much of the opposition is based on the selfish feelings of those who have more, not wanting to share their prosperity with those who have less. I hope that the supporters of free markets can continue to advocate strongly for the benefits of markets, while also recognizing their limitations and opening their hearts more generously to those with less opportunity. As a society, we must employ our individual energies of innovation and entrepreneurship, often best channeled through markets, to address our collective problems.
Inequalities have historically given rise to political currents aiming to reduce or eliminate them. The struggle for equality has brought significant benefits to our societies: the end of slavery, women’s rights, access to healthcare, the end of child labor, worker rights like the 40-hour work week and paid time off. Political movements motivated by left-wing ideologies have fought for and accomplished improvements to the material conditions of workers and low-income families. I have great sympathy for these ideals of equality. However, forces connected to left-wing ideologies and parties often also stand in the way of policies that could benefit society as a whole.
Left-wing parties and social movements cherish labor power and labor unions. In most cases, workers are the weaker party in negotiations around wages and labor conditions, and organizing workers through unions is critical to ensure that workers can receive a fairer chunk of the fruits of their labor. However, unions can also act selfishly, and their demands—while aiming to benefit their members—can negatively impact society as a whole. When labor rules contribute to excessive cost of construction projects, we all lose the opportunity to have better infrastructure. When union rules stop bad teachers from being fired, our young lose the opportunity for a better education. When union rules prevent bad cops from being fired, we are more at risk of being harassed, or worse, by those who should not wear a badge. When rules around the employment of government workers contribute to government inefficiency, we all lose out on having a more effective government and the government loses credibility as a tool to improve the lives of our communities. Professional associations, such as those for doctors, often also act selfishly, lobbying to limit the number of professionals in their area—beyond what is reasonable to ensure safety standards—to reduce competition and increase the bargaining position of their members, at the expense of the availability of needed services for the rest of us.
Concerns about workers’ income have often been an obstacle to technological change. The original Luddites destroyed machinery in cotton and wool mills in the early 1800s due to fears of replacement. Progress did not stop because of this opposition, and I hope we can continue to embrace technological change. Automatization should continue to improve productivity, releasing us from the need to perform unnecessary work. Still, automatization often does cause some to lose, at least temporarily, the ability to perform higher-value work. Societies that have effective mechanisms to act collectively should be able to implement better technologies while minimizing the hardship of those who lose their roles to the new machines.
The class struggle envisioned by socialist ideologues falls short as an organizing principle of a politics that aims to unite us for the betterment of our communities and societies. While many rich and powerful act as genuine villains, the greed in their hearts is not so different from the feelings of many less-well-to-do. It is easy to say that the rich should be more generous. It is harder to change ourselves to be better citizens of our societies. Focusing on immediate material conditions, while essential to address much deprivation that still exists, is not enough to address the challenges we face and make the most of the opportunities for a better life ahead of us.
Collective decision-making on a large scale is challenging. Attempts at implementing a socialist or communist vision of society through a single-party system, with wide-ranging state ownership of the means of production, have been colossal failures. Communist states have all become dictatorships, as the power-hungry have always managed to take over control. Moreover, central planning of entire economies has proven too much for communist leaders. These states have remained quite poor, failing to improve the lot of their populations. Given our dispositions as people, it may be that concentrating too much power in the state, without effective ways to discipline it (like democratic control), is bound to result in authoritarianism or dictatorship. This conclusion of history may bode ill for my vision of acting collectively to achieve a better life. I do not presume to have all the answers on how to organize our communities, states, and supranational institutions so that they are powerful enough to shepherd a better future while not being prone to take over by those who seek to subjugate others. Still, I submit that a citizenry who cherishes the common good—instead of greed, status, or power—would seek to build institutions that work for all. Ultimately, whether it is possible to build organizations that help mitigate our existential risks and move us toward a brighter future does not change that we may be bound to succumb without such organizations. The universe does not care whether we can get organized.
WHAT CAN BE DONE
To be able to work together for a better future, we need to change our way of thinking and what we value. We cannot expect to solve our lack of collaboration and planning just with changes to economic incentives or political structures. Any sophisticated economic or political structure aiming to improve our lives can be undermined by those who do not want to adhere to its spirit. Hearts and minds need to change. Good ideas need to replace bad ideas. We need to increase our circle and horizon of concern. Such changes in ideas and values would create the ideological conditions for adopting better policies. People with more solidarity in their hearts would be more capable of supporting the decisions that make the most sense for society as a whole, even when they are not to their immediate benefit.
Acts of altruism are all around us. People volunteer their time and effort to help others, donate money to those they’ve never met, vote for politicians who promise to raise their taxes to support others, and dedicate their lives to jobs that allow them to help others despite small financial rewards. These actions and lifestyles sometimes reflect a desire to be seen as generous, sometimes a desire for status. Still, it is positive for our societies if individuals value helping others. And altruistic actions are often performed for their own sake, just for the intrinsic joy they provide. Ideally, altruistic motivations should be coupled with an understanding that many challenges require systemic solutions. But an altruistic ethos is a great start! Improving our collective life largely depends on more of us understanding and interiorizing the value of caring about others.
Cynicism is prevalent in modern societies. Many believe others are just out for themselves and, in certain social groups, not caring about things, being cynical about life, is seen as cool. Cynicism is a progress dead-end. We cannot achieve better if we believe trying is futile. Idealists are frequently seen as naïve. But without those who believe we can reach further, achieve what hasn’t been done before, and sacrifice to attain these dreams, all of us would live much worse lives. Idealism needs to be cherished and promoted. Cynicism should not.
People need to do things just because they are the right thing to do. If all are looking out for number one, no system of economic incentives can be devised to ensure our actions are in the interest of our communities. We need workers, professionals, managers, business owners, and politicians who take the right action, contribute, just because it is right, without thinking first about what will advance their career or wealth. This is particularly the case for public sector jobs. We should value public service more. People should want to work in public jobs, even when they don’t pay as much as other jobs, as working in the public sector allows one to serve the community, contributing to a better future. People should not see public jobs as a way to an easy life, where they are well paid while working little. I do believe that most public employees care about contributing to a better country. However, when doing the right thing is hard and poses a danger to career advancement, people often avoid it. For the more ambitious, the thinking may be, “I’ll just keep my head down now, and I’ll make things right when I’m higher up.” This seems particularly prevalent in politicians, who already are in the position to lead and do the right thing but often appear to only care about being re-elected or angling for a higher position. When one passes on the opportunity of doing the right thing on something important, the chance may not come by again. The time to do the right thing is now, in our jobs, in our day-to-day, not at some imaginary point in the future.
Social trust is critical for economic development. Research has shown that countries with high social trust grow more. Social trust likely facilitates the maintenance of institutions that enable effective collective decision-making. Some research has suggested that social trust is easier to maintain for countries with uniform populations, like the Scandinavian countries, than for large multiethnic countries, like the United States or India. I do not know the silver bullet to ensure groups with different cultures can collaborate more effectively. Promoting shared experiences through integrated cultural events, schooling, and service activities may be helpful. Also, if we all act honestly, do the right thing in our interactions with others, and act more altruistically, we can contribute to a stronger social trust, forming the basis for more effective collective decision-making.
While I believe we can improve our political systems to facilitate more effective governance of our societies, I do not think we can create the conditions for improvements in our collective decision-making of the magnitude we need and can achieve just with clever tweaks to how our political systems operate. We need changes in our values and motivations to predispose us to support better political structures and policies. How can this be achieved? We all have a role to play…
Education of the young is an obvious avenue for promoting integrity of character, altruism, acceptance of those different from us, collective consciousness, and long-term perspective. Those who can revise school curricula to embed these values should do so, and teachers everywhere should model and pass along these values even when curricula do not explicitly prescribe them. But just like politics is unlikely to be a silver bullet without a change in the values of the public at large, I don’t think teachers and the education system can single-handedly embed these values into our societies without our collaboration in the effort.
Creators of media can have a big role in promoting a better future. We spend untold hours as receptors of media. Those who create media have a megaphone that they can use to promote better values. Instead of glorifying greed, vanity, tribalism, and violence, creators should conceive novel stories and heroes that embed the values we need for a better collective future. I realize that, in competing for eyeballs in our saturated media environment, creators think that they have to give the market—meaning us—what the market wants. And what the market wants is often the lowest-common-denominator-type content, requiring little challenge to our preconceived ideas. Still, it seems to me that the point of being a creator is to have a voice… ideally a voice that can say useful things. Creators can insist, in big and small ways, on conveying messages that improve our collective life, instead of messages that degrade it.
Ultimately, the mass of us should not idly wait to be saved. We all can contribute to a better society through our choices, including by promoting the values needed to achieve such a society. There is so much each of us can do, in big and small ways, for a better future. We can do the right thing when we have the opportunity, be honest, value others, be altruistic, volunteer, prioritize what is important for our community in our career choices, get informed, vote wisely, engage in our democracies beyond voting, limit the damage we cause to our environment, and promote the importance of acting collectively and planning for a better future… It is easy to blame others for our societies’ ills and think of how others need to change their behavior. I submit we all need to look inward and reflect on how we can contribute to a society that works better for all.
There are two primary motivations for my call to action. As I have explained, I believe that improving how we act collectively can bring significant benefits to our societies in the present and future and directly improve the well-being of almost everyone, both by reducing the risks of catastrophic events and by improving everyone’s access to better collective goods. Even the very rich can benefit directly from better collective decisions in myriad direct and indirect ways. But I don’t think that doing the right thing by our neighbors and communities should just be motivated by thinking our own life will be better. Dedicating our lives to helping our neighbors, communities, countries, the world is also its own reward. Virtue is its own reward, as doing good makes us better people.
It may be easy to dismiss this essay by noting that I do not fully live up to the values I claim to care about or that my words come from a place of privilege. I say I care about the environment, yet I still travel by plane frequently and eat substantial amounts of meat. I say I care about poverty, yet my direct financial generosity has been limited. I say population aging is a problem, yet I have no kids. It is easy for me to talk about altruism because I have a good job and no financial challenges. In my defense, I have pursued a career where I prioritize public service over other goals and stand ready to support policies that better my community, even if they have substantial immediate financial costs to myself. This may seem insufficient to some, to which I say fair enough! But I would also say that it does not matter whether I live up to the message I convey. What should matter is whether the message is sensible. Few among us are perfect, and we should not wait for the perfect messenger to embrace good ideas.
The changes to the human values advocated in this essay, particularly the appreciation of the importance of acting collectively and planning for the future, may be too difficult to conceive, as they may seem to go against our nature and the dynamics of our communities and societies. I readily concede this is the case. But other changes to human values have happened of perhaps similar magnitude. The largest world religions have pushed their followers to adopt intricate value systems. More recently, Enlightenment values have spread throughout the world, leading to a much greater appreciation of the dignity, equal worth, and freedom of all human beings. The values of our communities can change. It is less clear whether that will happen fast enough to address the significant challenges we face in the near future.
I am not optimistic we will succeed. Just because tackling our problems collectively is hard, it does not mean that we do not need to do so for our civilization to survive and thrive. No law of nature implies that our civilization will collapse in the following decades or hundreds of years, nor is there any law implying otherwise. Only we can save us from ourselves. With our great power comes great responsibility.
– Marco Migueis
Marco Migueis Personal Website
1. See https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass.
2. Artificial general intelligence and the “singularity” may or may not be something we will create any time soon and, if created, it may or may not lead to disaster. But what seems certain is that the world’s militaries will continue to apply developments in artificial intelligence to powering the most efficient killing machines possible.
3. Viena, Austria, provides an example of large-scale public ownership of housing resulting in housing affordability across income classes. See https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma.
4. See https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health.
5. See https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/geoengineering.
6. Spoiler alert: they do affect everyone.
7. To rent-seek is to seek to gain wealth through exploiting our economic or political institutions, rather than through creating new wealth.
