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Snow melts in the rain. The river is high, and after a period of
freeze, it rushes again with a new kind of excitement. The blue heron
reveals its image, first near the bridge in Island Park, then under the
mulberry tree, and then on the diverted water at Argo Dam (I haven't seen
him since summer), while nuthatches move about swiftly and cheerfully as
usual calling my attention from treetops. But today my mind is with some
great minds in economics.
From Ibn Khaldoun
to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Sir
Arthur Lewis, Kenneth Arrow, Robert Solow, Robert Lucas Jr. and Yifu Lin, each pondered on the concept of economic
growth, each sought to understand what drive economic growth, and each
significantly advanced our understandings about economic growth (from
capital accumulation, labor and consumption to trade, institutions and
technology). Nonetheless, today as a few western nations enjoy the fruits
of economic development (which slows down now, by the way), the majority of
developing countries are not successful so far in making the transition to
the developed world. While social scientists and activists are fighting
slums in India, Indonesia, Africa and Latin America, the anxiety of fearing
for a potential economic crisis has never gone away in China despite its
fast continuous economic growth in the past two decades. And we are facing
more and more severe environmental problems across the globe and increasing
inequality in wealth among human populations.
I agree with Dale Jorgenson that Solow might have been wrong in
estimating how much economic growth was attributed to technology advances,
but I do not necessarily agree with Dale Jorgenson's estimates either. It's
simple: economic growth is an outcome of the interplay between many factors
and forces (dependent on the development history as well), and I am not
positive that we can single out the effects of one from others
quantitatively despite our technical advancements in statistics (econometrics).
It may not be necessary or important to do so.
Each place/country has its unique characteristics in natural and
human resources, accumulated wealth, technology level, political system,
history and culture while imbedded in a global network. This is the picture
we should keep in mind when we set out to search a development strategy for
sustained economic growth. And this analysis of economic growth is the
foundation for the larger sustainability science, in which we look at human
well-being (beyond GDP) and treat the environment as an endogenous entity
instead of externality (especially we need to investigate its long-term
feedbacks to human well-being). Human-environment systems should be the
basic units of analysis in sustainability science then. A human-environment
system can be a local place, a region or a nation, and each is a node in an
interconnected network with horizontal and vertical links to others. The
whole globe is a human-environment system by itself, the largest in scale,
and the most complex of all complex systems. I am convinced that
sustainability is all about how large a scope and how far ahead we see -
focusing on short-term local interests will get us nowhere near but only
further away from sustainability.
An important goal of sustainability science is, then, to understand
how social-economic-political-environmental factors and forces interact
with one another to shape human well-being over time in human-environment
systems at both local and global scales. The sustainability science is
therefore a synthesis of many sciences: economics, political science,
sociology, cognitive science, environmental science...
(i)
What kinds of human societies could grow
given the natural resource endowment and the current population, technology
level and wealth?
(ii)
What policies could induce the emergence of
better societies (that is, in which sustained equitable economic growth
increases overall human well-being)?
(iii) And
equally (if not more) important, how to avoid disastrous future outcomes?
Today, on my
walk, it appears ever clearer that seeking for theoretical and empirical
understandings to these questions is worth a life time.
P.S. At
the entrance to Bird Hills from Kuebler Langford Park (where golden leaves
weave a beautiful carpet on an ascending slope every autumn), the sun came
out, and the sky threw open its magnificent mantle in an exuberant blue. If
I could, I would set the cello right then right there on those ascending
stairs to play Bach's suite No.6.
(As the last piece of
a series written for solo cello by Bach, No.6 conveys such a sense of
unlimited possibilities and extraordinary freedom to explore even under the
shadow of death.)
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