D.P.#2: The impact of limited approaches on development goals

In my previous post, I presented the idea that governments not only ignored the Club of Rome warnings and recommendations, but also acted in the opposite way, constantly trying to promote the economic growth at any cost. The result is was a rising inequality in the world, pretty much as predicted by the group. As motivations that lead politicians to behave in this way, I mentioned the preferences for local and short term results, instead of global and long term achievements. These features were brilliantly summarized in the graph below, taken from the “Limits of Growth”.

As we can see, people’s perspectives are concentrated on the next weeks within the familiar sphere, and the importance of the situation decreases as we move toward bigger social groups and longer periods. There are some motivations that clearly influence this behavior, and in this text I’ll explore those related to the closer groups, focusing on geopolitical issues.

The first thing to have in mind is that there is an important psychological regarding this behavior. As studied by Gustav Le Bon, Sigmund Freud (1992), Abraham Maslow (1943), among others, humans, as most of other animals, need to feel that they are part of a group, like family, community, country or any other social group with a shared interest or feature. There are many ways people behave in order to manage this multiple identities. Brewer (2001), a prominent contemporary psychologist, presents an approach in which people “segregate different group identities to different domains so that multiple identities are not activated at the same time (e.g., adopting national identity in the international arena, occupational identity when economic interests are at stake, and ethnic identity in the cultural domain)”. Another psychologist, Tajfel (1974) states that these feeling of belongingness to each of the several groups we are usually part of, may come from the distinctiveness we want to have from other groups or from the fact that the external group are perceived as common threat.

The combination of the theories above, explain a little bit the idea of why humans’ social groups tend to think locally and be concerned exclusively about the problems that are closer to them or to the groups they belong to. Stronger the ties with the group members are, more concerned people are about its issues, as we saw in the graph above. Applying the theory for politics, an explanation for the politicians’ the local-oriented vision emerges. Besides the fact that they are leaders of huge groups, usually there is a strong necessity for them to have their power legitimated by people, through elections. Voters are expecting them to act in favor of their groups, and if the concerns about a common good result in a situation worse for these groups, even if it’s based on short term considerations, they will be punished in the polls.

Despite this situation, a few things have changed in the world during the latest times, resulting in changes on this approach in a global level. Firstly, the globalization brought people closer, exposing even more the common features we share with people around the world and tightening the knot we have among different regions or groups. Secondly, countries realized that the negative outputs of other countries in terms of economic, social and environmental issues affect directly their own performance. This was what Jay Forrester and his students called negative loops within a system that affects the outcome of the system as a whole, in the context of the System Analysis studies used afterwards by the Club of Rome.

To conclude, it’s important to mention that economic crisis in the developed countries moved us a few steps back in this positive path we can see for our common future. Anyway, initiatives such as the global warming fighting agreements, that now are expected to count on every country in the world, shows that we are able to think globally and get a better common result for our societies. The participation and enforcement power of organizations such as the United Nations seem to be critical on this track, as long as they assure promoting equal treatment to people and countries all over the world.

References:

Simmons, MR 2000, Revisiting the Limits to Growth: Could the Club of Rome have been correct, after all?. Available at: http://greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_of_rome_revisted.html

Freud, S 1922, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 6th edn (1949), The Hogart Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London.

Maslow, AH 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 370-396.

Brewer, MB 2001, The Many Faces of Social Identity: Implications for Political Psychology, Political Psychology, International Society of Psychology, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 115-125.

Tajfel, H 1974, Social identity and intergroup behavior, Social Science Information, Sage.

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