World – Progress and the wisdom of our leaders. Cause of satisfaction or disappointment?

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Topics in this article

• The advancement of science and technology
• The misuse of technology
• Intelligence and wisdom of our leaders
• Progress and its measurement
• Index to measure progress and welfare
  • Human Development Index (HDI; UN)
  • Happy Planet Index (HPI; New Economics Foundation)
  • Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI, Redefining Progress)
  • Legatum Prosperity Index (LPI; Legatum Institute)
  • Index of Gross National Happiness (GNH; Government of Bhutan)
• Nordic leadership

The advancement of science and technology

The main distinctive sign of human activity in the twentieth century and the birth of this new century is undoubtedly the advancement in science and technology. But we have to look also to other signs of the times as the bitterness of religious fundamentalism, the accelerated pace of change in family structure, the rise of materialism and consumerism, the indifferent destruction of natural ecosystems, the dehumanization and the gradual dispossession of the meaning of work due to fragmentation in tasks ^{1, 2, 3, 4}, transforming men into a mere production factor, the increased socioeconomic difference between rich and poor and without a doubt, the globalization of human activities.

Not every outcome of human activity is negative, some are positive but are ineffective when they are discussed in context and not just through an isolated figure, such as the increase in global average life expectancy, the eradication of some important diseases, and increased productivity in the global food production. Advances in medical treatments and medicines that help keep or recover good health and increase life expectancy, are not accessible to most people in need, poor people; the additional food production through increased productivity of seed production systems and modernization techniques to grow crops, is enough to adequately feed the entire world population, but fails to do so due channeling it for animal feed, and does not reach people suffering from malnutrition, for various reasons, including commercial and political grounds ^{5, 6,7, 8, 9} .

The misuse of technology

Science and technology have been powerful tools that human intelligence has used, achieving substantially transformation in human life in terms of their worldview, their relationships, health, labor, and environment. As tools, science and technology have been used for purposes both noble and ethically plausible as for selfish and destructive ones. There are known examples of “bad” use of technology: the development and sophistication of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, employed not only in war but also against civilians as the known Russian, Chinese and German genocides, the many cases of Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians, or as the case of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York , wheter it was orchestrated by terrorists or in the upper echelons of U.S. politics and business,¹⁰ and more recently, the case of pandemic arguably caused by the H1N1 virus. According to various sources, especially to journalist Jane Burgermesiter, who backed with substantial evidence, has filed criminal charges to the FBI  against several pharmaceutical companies, leading bankers, WHO, UN officials, the U.S. and of Austria´s government among others, claiming that the pandemic is a plan organizado and supported by all of them to achieve economic benefits and políticoss ^{11, 12, 13}.

Other examples of misuse of technology are the use of weapons to smuggle drugs, people and suppress free speech by threatening and killing journalists or disabling  websites which publish inconvenient news to the powerful, viruses and informatic fraud, violation of privacy rights by spying on personal communications by governments and their agencies, human organs trafficking, production of child pornography digital content, production of synthetic drugs, etc. Other less known examples of technology development used towards wicked aims are “weather manipulation” that causes localized climate change and affecting villages and crops, intentional and negatively, by drought or heavy rainfall, and still under development, the technologies so called “weapons of mind control” with the aim of detecting, measuring and altering psychological states, congitivas skills and behavior in people, instigated and led primarily by the CIA, the Pentagon and the U.S. Defense Department.

Certainly they were smart and creative minds in private banks, mainly in the U.S. and England, which used the standard digital data transmission technologies to publicize and market their financial products worldwide and authorized by national and international regulatory agencies and public bodies. Financial products and complex financial derivatives, of low quality because they were backed by subprime mortgages, and then, through a process called “securitization”, split, mixed, repackaged and sold as high quality investments and highly safety. These intelligent and creative minds who still hold power in senior executive positions in the banking sector and government created and allowed this type of deceptive trade that has harmed directly or indirectly, hundreds of millions of people around the world. Now, that the problem exploded and corrective action is required, this power elite, being judge and party, imposes “sanctions”  consisting to receive billion-dollar sums of public money, taxpayer money.  When the dirty business of selling such financial derivatives  yielded benefit, it went to the bankers´s pockets. And now that the dirty business is causing losses, they are charged to the citizens´ pockets throughout the world. Privatizing profits and socializing losses.

Intelligence and wisdom of our leaders

It is very likely to be right in saying that human intelligence has been very successful, especially in last decades. But are the fruits sweet or sour? Do our political, religious, business and social leaders, wisely led us to a better place to live better?  To live better all? Or just a portion of all mankind? How big or small is that portion?

But are intelligence and wisdom the same?. There are people who may assign the same meaning, however, there is a general consensus to make a distinction between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence can be defined as the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and from experience. While Wisdom can be explained as the knowledge of what is true or right coupled with a fair judgement in acting, or can also be defined as the coordination of knowledge and experience and their deliberate use to improve welfare, as the ability to realize what matters in life for oneself and for others.

So, have our leaders been intelligent and wise? Intelligence is a common trait that can be seen in many leaders like Napoleon and Alexander the Great, although there have been others who have stood out for the lack of it as George W. Bush. There have been wise ones as Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Mahatma Gandhi, W. Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., among others. And there were clearly intelligent but not wise as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Ronald Reagan, H. Kissinger, D. Cheney, V. Putin, A. Pinochet, R. Mugabe, O. al-Bashir and many more. If an historical review is to be done, of all the leaders that humanity has had, it may show up that the leaders who have enjoyed greater power have been rather intelligent than wise.

Planets have been discovered billions of miles away from Earth, and it has been possible to characterize the behavior of atomic quarks, but it has not been possible to eradicate malaria, which can be prevented simply with mosquito nets.

Progress and its measurement

So, how would you evaluate the use of our intelligence?
Progress as a result of it is out of any doubt, but it is not a wise, balanced and caring progress, either with other men or nature. Otherwise, we would not be stressing that much and building awareness on the sustainability of our society, both ecological and on corporate level, where companies, especially large ones, have seen the need or felt the pressure (to improve its image) to create new divisions or departments of Corporate Social Responsibility within the company. Corporate Social Responsibility has a self-regulation function, to ensure the company binding to legal and ethical standards, taking responsibility for the impact of its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, community and other public interests. If Corporations, would genuinely provide a positive input society, as it is theoretically argued, then it would not be the need to do now, these changes in their internal organization in order to show a good public image. That means the tacit recognition that they have been institutions not working in the best interests of society, as has been led to believe.

Private enterprises are certainly a motor for economic activity, making money flow, use of human talent, growth and development. But the trend has been increasingly stripping out capital (natural and human), transforming it into economic capital regardless of the costs or collateral damage (to nature, to employees and consumers) that it entails. As companies are entities that may yield potential welfare, or distress in many cases, they are taken into account as one of the major indicators that governments use to measure progress and welfare of a given country, through measurements of employment, social security, average wages, and educational level demanded.

Conventionally, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is used as a key indicator to measure the development degree of a country, assuming that the greater production of goods and services, the greater social welfare. Overall, this assumption has been true because the social welfare tends to increase as wealth available to the public is greater. But GDP was not created with the aim of measuring welfare, it is not a direct measurement, either of uniformity in the wealth distribution, nor in the people´s quality of life, neither of an efficient and reasonable use of resources.

Index to measure progress and welfare

Wiser leaders are making continuious efforts to transform our society into a more enjoyable and just to live.

HDI – Human Development Index

The Development Program (UNDP) created the Human Development Index (HDI) which combines three dimensions: 1) Life Expectancy, 2) Literacy and 3) The per capita income. This is a better indicator than GDP because it includes two more dimensions which are Health and Education. However, it is possible that a high life expectancy may not be synonymous to welfare. I´ve met people who, not that they don´t want to die, but do not want to live many more years, because they live tiring, borin lives  with no genuine satisfaction and no reasons to get excited.

HPI – Happy Planet Index

The New Economics Foundation (NEF), meanwhile, developed the Happy Planet Index (HPI) which also takes into account 3 dimensions: The Happy Life Years Index Happy composed by 1) the life expectancy and 2) Fulfillment in Life.  The third dimension is the Ecological. In a strict sense, by the way it is computed, the HPI is an index that does not shows a country’s welfare, but it is rather an index that measures the efficiency in using resources to create wellness. A greater prosperity and personal satisfaction of a country´s people  increases the HPI, but an increased draw of resources for achieving this welfare, decreases the HPI.  So the result is an efficiency index to produce welfare.

GPI – Genuine Progress Indicator

The think tank Redefining Progress created another indicator, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), to try to replace the GDP. The GPI is a more detailed index than HPI because it factorizes Progress in a series of components that together constitute measurement factors of wellbeing. Components that are not taken into account in GDP as the value of volunteer work and housework or childcare, the cost of lost leisure time available, the capital value of natural resources, costs pollution and destruction of the depletion of the same, the value of higher education, the health of people, the costs of crime and underemployment. Although the GPI is an index in which the welfare and progress are factored in more measurable and specific factors, it does not necessarily mean that it is more accurate than the HPI. In the HPI, people are asked: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” And from there, it follows the calculation of  the Happy Life Years and the HPI. In the GPI, we obtain information that is highly and positively correlated with welfare, as the components already mentioned, so people´s  satisfaction with their lives and happines can be estimated.

LPI – Legatum Prosperity Index

The Legatum Institute has also created Legatum Prosperity Index (LPI), which is very similar to GPI as Progress is factores in subelements. The LPI is divided into two areas: Economic Competitiveness and Comparative Livability.  The Economic Competitiveness assesses the productive investment, the commercialization of new ideas independence from outside. The Comparative Livability evaluates the encouragement to Freedom of Action, the political environment, environmental and family, the Prevention of Poverty, and the Creation of Social Pillars.

GNH – Gross National Happiness Index

En Bhutan, desde 1972 se institucionalizó el Indice de Felicidad Nacional Bruta (GNH) como un intento de definir la calidad de vida en términos más holísticos y psicológicos que el PIB. In Bhutan, tha Gross National Happiness index (GNH) was institutionalized since 1972 as an attempt to define the quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than GDP. The GNH is based on the premise that true human development occurs when the human and material development occurring at once, in mutual accompaniment. The GNH is divided into the following areas:

1. Economic welfare
2. Environmental welfare
3. Physical well being
4. Mental well being
5. Welfare in leisure time
6. Social welfare
7. Politics welfare
8. Educational welfare
9. Cultural Welfare

It is common to hear comments that people regard money as a secondary value, particularly in personal relationships. En relaciones laborales también con cierta frecuencia se asigna al dinero un valor secundario, cuando se aceptan puestos menos remunerados pero con mejor ambiente de trabajo, más cerca de casa, o para funciones más interesantes para uno. In a labor setting,  money is assigned, with a certain frequency, a secondary value, by accepting less well paid jobs but with a better working environment, closer to home, or more appealing to people.

Although there has been a significant progress on the meaning of Progress and Welfare at an international level, and such measures have been gradually introduced as national indicators, the elites that hold power and the tacit control of governments (bankers and big corporations), will give a strong fight to prevent their domains being affected in their usual commercial, labor and accounting practices, for new measures that require them to stop such abuses. They have strong weapons like money and influence, able to corrupt and coopt governments of all types (a current example of such fight, are the banks bailout measures that the U.S. and Western Europe governments took, clearly on the side of bankers rather than on their citizens).

Nordic leadership

But there are also intelligent people and groups with greater wisdom setting an example of greater fairness, as are the governments of the Baltic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark). These are not only developed countries with high per capita incomes, but they occupy high positions in the ranking of countries in which their population also feels satisfied and happy with their life and confident that their government safeguard their interests ^14. The aspect that they need to improve to the Nordics is their environmental impact. As an example of their sensibility, professionalism and wisdom, is the good management of the banking and financial crisis suffered by these countries in the late 80s and early 90s.

These countries managed their crisis in a resolute, quick, transparent and sensible way, given that the political parties were able to recognize the potential danger and left their differences to achieve effective agreements and jointly support the decisions of their governments. First they exhausted the possibilities of returning to a normal setting only through mechanisms of private capital (mergers and acquisitions), before using public capital and to carry out drastic measures like the bank nationalizations. The government’s economic aid had severe strings attached to ensure that truly operational banking costs were reduced to bring them back into profitability as well as to keep fiscal costs reasonably controlled ^{15, 16}.

The  decisions of the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish governments to support banks, were not taken to protect investors. They protected by contrast, the confidence in the banking system and the taxpayer. Private investors, in the case of Norway and to a lesser extent in Sweden and Finland were the first to pay the costs with their own capital, as the Norwegian government nationalized the banks after setting the value of bank´s shareholders shares to zero, losing everything. The crisis´net fiscal costs to these countries, which in simple terms is the “cost paid by the taxpayer,” and in more technical terms, are the governmental capital contributions, subsidies, etc. less the recoup of those costs through the sale of banks assets by re-privatization, were ^15:

• • • Finland: 5.3% of GDP in 1997
    • Sweden: 1.9% of GDP in 1997
    • Norway: -0.9% of GDP in 2001

The negative fiscal cost of Norway means that the Norwegian public sector generated “profits” by the crisis, that is, reversing the usual flow direction of money. Now the the money flowed from the former bank shareholders to taxpayers. This is what one might call a more just, sensible and wise crisis management. For these reasons the management of the banking crisis in the Nordic countries was regarded by experts as the “best practices” in crisis management.

One must take into account several aspects which makes the banking crisis in the Nordic countries different from the current crisis. The main one is the  strong interdependence of the international banking and financial sector through its deregulation and liberalization in many countries in the current crisis, which makes it less manageable and harder to control. This state of financial cross-border dependence was not prevalent in Norway, Sweden and Finland, nor as widely spread in the world in the late 80s and early 90s as it is now. However, deregulation and liberalization of the Nordic banking sector was one of the main causes of this crisis, as occurred in Mexico in the mid-90s and Argentina at the beginning of this century.  Another difference between the Nordic and the current crisis is the size of economies and the lower presence of financial actors as insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds, etc. ¹⁴.

However, the high professional stance and good sense of Nordic leaders, is in sharp contrast to the poor professional performance, loss of common sense and ethical weakness of the Western Europe and the U.S. leaders mainly, offering their peoples decline rather than progress, and in many cases shame and anger of many of their citizens. Suffice is to say that the ransom money on aid and bail-outs the  Western Europe and U.S governments have given to banks at the end of 2008, is 40 times more than the money spent by them in combating climate change and poverty in developing countries¹⁷.

The disarray over the values priorities in today´s Man is another hallmark of these times, but there still exist, and as long as evil or useless leadership persist, there will be people with better value hierarchies who will act upon them and seek ways to create societies with a more widespread welfare.

References

¹ Duong, L. Dehumanization by Mass Production: The Cause of Job dissatisfaction? Margins Bulletin. University Honors Program. California State University, Stanislaus. 2006. p.43.

² One of the unfortunately many extreme cases, not only the loss of meaning of work, but of slavery in the XX and XXI century. Feature “The Dehumanization of Young Workers Producing Our Computer Keyboards.” This website which exposes the abuse to workers, is also one of the examples of deliberate website blocking of alternative news websites or human rights observers. This site is reported to Google as a dangerous and attack site, so Google, given this complaint, what does in face of user who wishes to see the page, it first displays a warning page about the danger of accessing the site . This discourages many people to continue and find the story. Pero no es de ataque informaático, sino de denuncia. But it is not an attack site, but an exposing inconvenient truths site.

³ Maquiladora Industry Creates-American Mexican Modern-Day Slaves.

⁴ Brown K. Industralization, mechanization and automation in An Introduction to Sociology. Polity Press. 2002. p. 382.

⁵ Gale, D. Hunger, Politics, Economics and Trade. Journal of Increasing Understanding of Public Problems and Policies. 1974. p. 13-15

⁶ Free trade, suicide clause and growing hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean. Excerpt: The Free Trade Agreements that the U.S. and EU propose to Latin America and the Caribbean include waiving sovereign control on food flows.

⁷ Food exports and free trade agreements. Extract: It pops up once again that the food crisis is not an accident on the way of global capitalism, but a situation built up by it …

⁸ Trade and hunger. Madeley  J. Extract: These studies indicate that food security for the poor based on trade is, at least for now, more a mirage than a reality.

⁹ Trade Policy for a New Deal on Hunger. Birdsall N. Excerpt: Meanwhile, the restrictions are driving world prices even higher for food importing countries — by at least 10 percent and possibly much more according to new estimates — as the non-poor in exporting countries benefit while the poor in importing countries literally go hungry.

¹⁰ An internet search with the words “911 conspiracy” or “911 truth” “WTC conspiracy” or “WTC truth will yield a number of pages of reports and analysis on the case.

¹¹ Evidence of toxicity found by Burgermesiter intentional. Jane Burgermeister website.

¹² Project Camelot interviews Jane Burgermeister. Webislam.com

¹³ Criminal charges complaint document of Jane Burgermeister.

¹⁴ Lars J. The Swedish model for resolving the banking crisis 1991-93. European Commission. Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs. Economic Papers 360, Feb. 2009.

¹⁵ Sandal  K. The Nordic banking crisis in the early 1990s.

¹⁶ Honkaphoja S. The 1990s financial crisis in the Nordic countries. Bank of Finland Research .Discussion Papers. May 2009.

¹⁷ Anderson S, Cavanagh J, Redman J. How the Bail-outs dwarf other global crisis spending. Institute for Policy Studies. N0vember 24 , 2008.