finally, my wife, Cathy. Like most authors, I have been a grumpy and distracted companion as I ploughed my way through drafts and redrafts. Cathy has been an insightful intellectual companion, not only encouraging me to avoid beginning sentences with ‘But’ and ‘And’ and to reduce sentence length, but, more importantly, with the development and elaboration of my ideas. She is too tactful to say so, but I am sure she is even more relieved than I am that the book has eventually been completed. I cannot measure her generous assistance.
Notes
1 1 http://freemanchris.org/publications.
2 2 https://robinmurray.co.uk.
3 3 www.carlotaperez.org.
1 A Fork in the Road
We live in perilous times.
Not just have we damaged our environment, but our environment is now damaging us. Our economies no longer function effectively – economic growth has been uneven, has slowed and is increasingly precarious. Our politics and social fabric are in trouble – societies have become more unequal, citizens feel a loss of agency, and populist leaders flourish. Most recently, we have been overcome by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the underlying structural problems in our societies. It is evident that, once (if?) we overcome the pandemic, we cannot return to ‘normal’, since ‘normal’ was clearly the problem in the first place.
What will it take to return us to a semblance of a more sustainable world? The distinctive feature of this book is that it sets out an integrated programme which spans economic, social and environmental agendas requiring action not just by governments, but also by a range of societal stakeholders.
The central argument of this book is that the integrated systemic response required to provide a more sustainable world is built on an appreciation of the character of humankind’s economic and social progress over the past three centuries. This has been marked by a series of surges in economic growth that I will refer to as techno-economic paradigms. Each of these paradigms involves a synergy between economic structures and social and political relations, and each has had characteristic environmental footprints. After a period of roughly five to six decades, each surge has decayed and been superseded by a new dominant paradigm. This book will show how the interrelated economic, social and environmental crises which are now overwhelming us result from the atrophy of the most recent paradigm (Mass Production).
But there is hope, in the form of the new techno-economic paradigm which is unfolding – the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) paradigm. This offers the potential for a more sustainable trajectory of economic growth and a more equal, cohesive and inclusive society and polity. However, the emerging ICT paradigm is malleable. It has a ‘dark side’, seen in the growing asymmetry of power and income, the development and diffusion of alarming and frightening autonomous military technologies and the erosion of privacy. So, what measures are required to allow the ‘bright side’ to triumph? These policy responses are set out in Chapter 8, and the key stakeholders required to achieve progress are analysed in Chapter 9.
Clearly, before we can get to these policy issues, we need to step back and understand the historical trajectory which has resulted in the confluence of connected economic, social and environmental crises. We begin in Chapter 2 with what I believe is the most technical chapter for non-specialized readers. This charts the rise and fall of Mass Production as an economic system. It evidences the unprecedented ‘Golden Age’ after World War 2 when economic growth proceeded at historically unprecedented rates, not just in the richer northern economies but in almost every country of the globe. But, after roughly three decades, the ‘Golden Age’ of Mass Production began to atrophy. Not only did the rate of economic growth slow in all of the major high-income economies, but, as the millennium approached and advanced, the underlying fundamentals of growth became increasingly uncertain. A high-tech financial bubble in the late 1990s was followed by the prolonged Great Recession after 2008. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 raised the stakes in economic fragility, exposing underlying structural weaknesses which have been unfolding for some decades.
As in each of the previous post-Industrial Revolution surges, the Mass Production techno-economic paradigm was supported by patterns of social and political organization, by lifestyles and by societal norms and values. In the ‘Golden Age’, this saw the extension of liberal democratic political systems, mass consumption, suburbanization and, despite periods of turmoil, a generalized sense of common social and political purpose. Despite differences, there was a widespread sense that ‘We are all in it together.’ But, just as the economic system of Mass Production began to atrophy from the mid-1970s, so too did the social compact which supported Mass Production. In Chapter 3, I describe the evolution of these social and political developments which, since the early 1980s, have resulted in increasing inequality, increasing social discontent and the rise of populist politics.
Whilst the link between the economic, the social and the political can be seen as involving a ‘close synergistic fit’ between 1950 and the late 1970s, and then their interrelated decay after the early 1980s, the unfolding environmental crisis has much deeper roots. Although the origins of the environmental crisis go back at least until the Industrial Revolution in the early eighteenth century, after 1950 the biosphere witnessed a sharp increase in the forces driving climate change and environmental unsustainability. This has come to be termed ‘The Great Acceleration’. Although the Great Acceleration and its increasingly severe impact on the environment is in large part a consequence of sheer numbers (of people and consumption), in some important respects it also flows from the specific character of the Mass Production techno-economic paradigm. These developments are described in Chapter 4.
Chapter 5 explores the character of these interlinkages between the economic, the social, the political and the environment through the lens of what is referred to as ‘socio-technical systems’ – that is, the body of theory which I use to analyse the rise and fall of the Mass Production techno-economic paradigm. Working with this framework, I analyse and explore the nature of these interactions during the Golden Age, and then the linked crises in sustainability after the late 1970s.
Chapters 6 and 7 turn to the future. Chapter 6 recounts the development and evolution of the ICT techno-economic paradigm. It illustrates the ‘revolutionary’ and disruptive nature of this new technology, seen though the historical lens of five previous techno-economic paradigms. Each of the previous paradigms was driven by a core ‘heartland technology’ – that is, a technology which has ubiquitous use through the terrain of economic and social activity, which offers major reductions in cost and the possibility of new products, and which not only is characterized by declining cost but has no physical limits to its supply. Information and Communications technologies exhibit all of these attributes. In Chapter 7, I present three case-studies which not only evidence these ‘heartland technology’ characteristics, but also show the synergy between the economic, the social and the political, and their capacity
