Hey readers, How was your week? Here at Future Perfect, we've been thinking about our next big swings and projects. Without sounding too coy, our team's chatting about what it means to be hopeful and how best to use the agency we have. Stay tuned …
And as always, we'd love to hear what you're thinking, too. Let us know what's resonating with you! Don't be afraid to shoot us an email at futureperfect@vox.com about what you're enjoying here and what you'd like to see more of.
—Kelsey Piper, senior writer
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Q&A: Solidarity, agency, and a more complete picture of well-being |
From the 1940s to the 1970s, it looked like economic and social prosperity came hand-in-hand. But while economic growth in the US continues to rise, social prosperity — people's broader well-being within their community — is no longer following suit, according to Katharina Lima de Miranda and Dennis Snower, two economists from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Climate change, souring mental health, and growing political polarization are all contributing to the fragmentation. As a result, "we see economic growth, but we don't see the same rise of prosperity in the social domain," Lima de Miranda told me. "This is why we say social prosperity is becoming decoupled from economic prosperity." To help guide policymakers in "recoupling" economic and social prosperity, Lima de Miranda co-developed the Recoupling Dashboard in 2020. It measures well-being beyond GDP alone, using what Lima de Miranda and Snower call the SAGE framework. While a number of alternatives to GDP exist, SAGE introduces a new way to measure the elusive idea of "solidarity." I spoke with Lima de Miranda about how solidarity and agency provide innovative new measures for neglected components of well-being, and what societies can do to promote them.
—Oshan Jarow, Future Perfect fellow A lot of alternative GDP indicators will adjust for things like inequality or sustainability. The SAGE index, in addition to material Growth (G) and Environmental performance (E), includes measures for Agency (A) and Solidarity (S). Why do you focus on these additional dimensions, in particular? You're correct that there are measures out there that focus on sustainability and the environmental domain ... and there are efforts for the social domain, looking at either inequality, or capabilities and opportunities, which goes in our direction of agency. But we really think there's more to this dimension than just individualistic opportunities in life and education. So the agency part focuses on individual empowerment, civil liberties, and human capabilities. But for me, this solidarity part is actually the most innovative one because it tries to embed this human need for social belonging into the well-being measurement. One thing we know from psychology is that people long for social embeddedness, and have cooperative purposes in addition to individualistic ones. I think these two dimensions are innovative and new, so we focus on those. |
Courtesy of Katharina Lima de Miranda. |
Your research suggests that whether further economic growth and development have positive impacts on welfare depends, at least in part, on the surrounding factors of agency and solidarity. How do levels of agency and solidarity affect the welfare effects of growth?
In the first paper, we give three examples of drivers of decoupling: globalization, automation, and financialization. So, these three are examples where you see that there is economic growth, but it can lead to [declining social prosperity]. For example, in terms of globalization, if a plant shifts to a different country, it can lead to disempowerment as people lose their jobs. And with automation, we know from the literature that the more distant you are from the product you're creating because it's done by machines, the more alienated you feel from the product.
In terms of financialization, a lot of human interactions are now done through market transactions, which drives out intrinsic motivation, and again, this growing feeling of being detached from what is happening in the economy and in society.
What policies and strategies do you see are available to societies if they want to focus on improving agency or solidarity?
So, this could be social policies from the government, for example, promoting quality housing for all, education, and health.
There have been some calls for universal social protection systems, and that could be something that really enhances solidarity because everybody gets access. And there are many attempts to think about how we might construct cities so that people actually meet [each other]. There's this idea of the 15-minute city, where within 15 minutes [on foot or bicycle], you can [easily] reach everything. This is something that could increase social cohesion in communities because you have more opportunities to meet the same people in different places and to really interact with one another, and also being able to take part in different activities in the community.
Another thing that we think might be very good are active labor market policies, so that there is social protection, but a kind that enables people, for example, if they lose their job, to take part in skills trainings to get a new job, and placement schemes where people are actively placed in the labor market again.
We really need societies that talk about what our goals are as a society and make that visible to policymakers. So take part in the conversations and get active because I think it's important that we, as a society, take part in shaping our nations and our policies.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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The impending debt ceiling collision of 2023 — and how Biden can avoid it — explained |
With the new Republican majority in the House as well as a Republican speaker of the House, it's likely there will be a massive fight over the debt ceiling. Breaching the ceiling would be almost incomprehensibly bad: Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor's, was hardly alone in 2017 when she predicted that "the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating markets and the economy." Luckily, there is a way out of the dilemma: ending the debt ceiling once and for all, argues senior reporter Dylan Matthews. "I covered the first debt ceiling crisis in 2011, and that year and ever since policymakers have proposed a variety of solutions, from invocations of the Constitution to zany schemes with platinum coins, to get around the limit," Matthews said. "I personally doubt Biden has the chutzpah to try any of them, but he hasn't ruled any out, and they'd offer a way to avoid an ugly defeat by House Republicans." More on this topic from Vox: |
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Big Meat just can't quit antibiotics |
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images |
If you're sick with a cold, you can't be prescribed antibiotics — that's to prevent the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. But our efforts are only one part of the battle: Big Meat's antibiotic usage went up 7 percent from 2017 to 2021, reversing years of progress. It's a sobering turn of events with life-and-death implications. In 2019, antibiotic-resistant bacteria directly killed over 1.2 million people. The FDA and the US food industry have proven that they can make progress on the issue — but to keep antibiotics working, they need to do a lot more, writes reporter Kenny Torrella in his latest piece. "I think a lot of people assume factory farming is just an animal welfare problem, but it's also a threat to public health, whether it's the looming threat of antibiotic resistance, zoonotic disease risk, or air and water pollution," Torrella said. "Stricter rules for antibiotic use seems like a no-brainer, and yet the FDA is largely taking a voluntary — which usually means ineffective — approach with industry."
More on this topic from Vox:
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| This week I saw M3gan (spoilers ahead), the buzzy new horror-thriller about an AI robot that goes on a killing spree to maximize her "objective function" of protecting a 9-year-old kid. AI safety researchers aren't worried about killer robots, but the movie — which is very funny and self-aware — does focus on one of the fears that drives their work: AI misalignment. It's the concern that an AI will misunderstand humans if we don't clearly distinguish the parameters of an objective (e.g. protecting a child and not killing innocent adults in the process). Such misalignment could result in AI harming people, as M3gan did, or on the more extreme end, destroying humanity altogether. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer
On Sunday, HBO will debut its attempt at high-end dystopian fare with the zombie apocalypse series The Last of Us. I'm sure it will be great — humans infected with a mutated version of a real-life fungus, Oberon Martell and Lyanna Mormont from Game of Thrones reunited; how could it not be? But I'd recommend the striking 2013 video game on which it's closely based. Gaming already brings in more revenue than the music and movie industries combined, but the original The Last of Us is one of the few games that could truly qualify as a work of art. And I can't imagine anything as terrifying in the TV show as the feeling of trying to guide your character through the dark, pursued by the eerie sound of "Clickers." (Trust me, you'll see.) —Bryan Walsh, editor Since the start of 2023, severe storms have been battering the state of California, causing deadly floods and mudslides. Peter H. Gleick, the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, writes in this Opinion column for the Washington Post about this weather crisis, and how man-made climate change has made storm series like this one worse. Gleick introduces readers to the tumultuous history of California weather — from the devastating 1862 ARkStorm to the recent 22-year "megadrought" — and proposes tangible ways to better prepare for such disasters. Gleick leaves readers with an optimistic outlook of what can be done: "We are not helpless in the face of extreme events." —Rachel DuRose, Future Perfect fellow
AI language robots might soon come for my job, but at least, as I learned from Insider's story "I asked ChatGPT to reply to my Hinge matches," love and dating are very much still the domain of human beings. —Marina Bolotnikova, staff editor
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