Rights, laws and governance institutions: These form the backbone of societal structure and show great promise for further redesign.
Having mastered the material world, now recognize governance needs reform. Societal issues being more about governance than economics (production).
The major economic problems facing the world today are relational: income inequality, housing, and migration. Properly reformed governance could redress income inequality. Housing shortages are location specific. As services and jobs become remotely available, the crowding of housing into infrastructure hubs will lose some of it’s attraction, easing the housing shortage in urban cores. Housing distributed to the periphery will counteract the 20th C. drive toward urbanization. Migration, is a distributional problem, related to the arbitrary lines that national governments have drawn upon the earth, to the concentration of jobs, opportunities, education, and government assistance in focal hubs. Some of these could be redistributed to the periphery by reformed governance.
Since mid-20th Century, across wide swaths of Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, tyrannies have loosened and/or collapsed, liberating billions of people. We are currently experiencing a backsliding growth of tyrannies, but seen in a longer context the global trend toward individual freedom is unmistakable and unstoppable. With the glaring example of the Middle-East, on every continent cooperation has evolved among nations previously at war, to where we can hardly imagine their further differences being settled militarily. Hot spots will flare and major cultural batles remain, but in general nation states are learning to seek cooperation where objectives align. The United Nations was established in 1948 facilitate such cooperation. The era of American hegemony is dissolving into a multi-polar world, dispersing and equalizing not only military power but also financial, informational and institutional power. It was only in the 1960’s in Vietnam that America and the world learned the limits of military force, and unfortunately America is still learning it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yaman and elsewhere. The hierarchy of national powers if flattening. The discovery and proliferation of nuclear weapons certainly raises the costs of uncooperative behavior. Will democratic institutions continue to make inroads against authoritarian regimes, as they began to do over the last half-century in Africa, China, Russia and South America? It’s a question for Societal Adolescence.
Up until the recent wave of populism across the globe, many governmental, corporate and other organizations and institutions were enacting constant and substantial progressive reforms, in every aspect from rationalizing material efficiency to overall design and mission. Populism has undermined progress at the level of government and private non-profits, and tribal polarities are here thwarting reform, but the underlying progressive forces are alive and the human quest for freedom is a force of nature, resourceful and indomitable.*
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* Will democracy movements asymptotically reach only so far, leaving room for authoritarian regimes which can enforce common purpose and thus perhaps avoid certain frictions inherent in democratic systems? How should we balance the interests of individual versus tribe vs society, and should government authority be entirely subservient to individual voters, to tribe or perhaps to ideals. See discussion of balance among capitalist, socialist and utopian ideals under “Governance Ideals”.
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Democratic governments at all levels, answerable to voters only periodically, are burdened with programs that are inappropriately conceived, inefficiently implemented, and compromised by the influence of special interests or that in other ways less than optimally serve the public good. The justice system is often too expensive, inaccessible, arbitrary and sometimes corrupt. The reform, restructuring and diametric reorientation of government and other bureaucratic institutions hold possibilities for raising the quality of human life on earth to a much higher level, at perhaps little material cost and presumably with net material benefits. The transformation is well underway and proceeds all around us, despite the populist backsliding. On the one hand we see the dismantling of old institutions and systems of human connections, and on the other the rebuilding of new ones.
The global financial and economic crisis of 2008-9 and subsequent rise of tribal populism is forcing governments and the voting public to reexamine the entire enterprise of government, from details of practical operation to philosophical underpinnings. Putting aside the philosophical choices for the moment (to be discussed in section xxxx), on the practical level of efficient resource use there are reforms of a practical cost-benefit nature to be made. At the opposite extreme, government’s most broadly conceived possibilities for fundamental redesign raise philosophical issues about government’s mandate itself. In between, distributive justice issues involve emotional judgments of fairness and balance, and reforms of this type involve raising to consciousness the processes by which to reach feeling judgements collectively, systematically, and circumspectly.