{"id":62425,"date":"2022-04-12T07:07:20","date_gmt":"2022-04-12T12:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62425"},"modified":"2022-04-12T07:07:20","modified_gmt":"2022-04-12T12:07:20","slug":"the-failure-of-global-elites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62425","title":{"rendered":"The Failure of Global Elites"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Failure of Global Elites<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In the 1970s, global political and corporate elites had all the information they needed to put the world on a path toward long-term stability. Systems science was sufficiently advanced that a team of its practitioners organized a\u00a0scenario study<\/a>\u00a0to see how trends in industrial production, population, food, pollution, and resource usage might interact over the next few decades; the study showed that continued growth in population and industrial production would prove unsustainable. Political scientists were beginning to sort demographic, economic, and historical social data for clues to understanding why societies sometimes descend into internal violence; data seemed to show that there was a\u00a0rough correlation<\/a>\u00a0between rising economic inequality and declining social stability. Also, the science of ecology was revealing that forest, ocean, desert, freshwater, and soil ecosystems are inherently complex and resilient, but that they are subject to catastrophic tipping points when subjected to high enough levels of pollution or loss of habitable space. It was\u00a0clear what should be done<\/a>\u00a0in order to put society on a sound footing: discourage population growth, cap the scale of industrial production, reduce economic inequality, clean up past pollution, reduce current and future pollution, and leave plenty of space for nature to regenerate.<\/p>\n

Elites didn\u2019t do those things. Initially, during the Nixon and Carter years, US politicians enacted some thoughtful, far-reaching policies. Then, increasingly, and regardless of the party in power, they simply found excuses to stop pressing ahead or to backtrack. They set their pet economists to work\u00a0writing books and reports<\/a>\u00a0insisting that growth is always good; that economic inequality is excusable because eventually the wealth of the few will surely \u201ctrickle down\u201d as benefits to the many; and that, in President Ronald Reagan\u2019s feel-good but tragically misleading words, \u201cThere are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Failure of Global Elites In the 1970s, global political and corporate elites had all the information they needed to put the world on a path toward long-term stability. Systems science was sufficiently advanced that a team of its practitioners organized a\u00a0scenario study\u00a0to see how trends in industrial production, population, food, pollution, and resource usage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[32827,9098,485,6665,1081,3098,15043],"class_list":["post-62425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-global-elilte","tag-limitless-growth","tag-limits-to-growth","tag-resilience-org","tag-richard-heinberg","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-trickle-down-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62426,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62425\/revisions\/62426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}