Sustainable Development – Excerpts from a New Lodestar in the Field
Sustainable development has been making the rounds since 1987 as a buzzword to be employed in the rarefied heights of policy discourse on economics, industrialization and much more. Unlike other fashionable concepts, it at least aspires to validity by positing as its main goal the minimization of the cost to the future incurred by advancement in the present. This has many applications, some not utterable anymore in polite society. They include finance, economics, environmentalism (local and global), resource use and many more. The classic example is a society in the present borrowing for wasteful consumption or malinvestment and transferring the burden of its current policies to future generations of taxpayers, including those yet unborn, thereby constraining their own ability to save money and to borrow for projects or for crisis periods. Another example is the exhaustion of common resources under the “tragedy of the commons”, where everybody is incentivized to abuse an asset held in common as gains are privatized, while losses are socialized, leading to an unsustainable pattern and ending in pollution, resource exhaustion and even extinction. The ethics of this can much debated, but the implications are there for all to see. More
