If you have ever wondered why, after so much effort and billions upon billions of dollars that are spent every year... there is so much conflict, poverty and environmental degradation in the world...
Have you also wondered why there seems to be no end to those ills?
Are They Human-Behaviour Challenges?
...or Are They Structural Problems?
For a long time, the civil, human rights and international development communities have been focusing on a multitude of grievances and intractable situations that in most countries impede the improvement of wellbeing and the sustainable growth of labour productivity. However, most of the money spent on the improvement of civil and human rights, on the reduction of conflict and alleviation of poverty, and on the protection of the environment appears to be wasted because there has been no agreement on what is the best thing to do.
Some experts in the subject have pointed out that since there are so many social factors, and due to the resulting complexity of human dynamics, there can be no activity or practice that fits all situations. The consensus seems to be that efforts should not be made to identify best practice, being that apparently there is no such thing in the domain.
Examples of the precarious state of affairs abound both in developed and underdeveloped countries. Whilst issues like discrimination, criminality, terrorism, wage stagnation and climate change are mainstays of the media in industrialized nations, UNICEF reports that every day around 20,000 children die on account of poverty, and the World Health Organization indicates that 2.5 billion people lack basic sanitation facilities.
Donor countries also illustrate the difficulty of the situation by having funneled US$ 223 billion in 2023 through Official Development Assistance (ODA), for what management scientists could call a decades-long firefighting mission in their quest to eliminate global poverty.
Perhaps because people favour convenience, or maybe as a result of frustration out of feelings of impotence, or of lack of trust towards institutions, they may at times manage social stress by showing concern for those or other difficulties, grievances and challenges in emotional ways. But lasting conditions like subconscious frustration have ways of inducing chronic stress, notably when it originates from lack of control over unresolved current issues affecting one's daily life at home, out in the street, or at work.
Stress plays a useful role when accumulated, and then released. It pushes and pulls people towards getting things done. But if stress accumulates over time without release, it becomes chronic and triggers what Psychology Today magazine calls Public Health Enemy No. 1: the release of excess cortisol into the bloodstream. In turn, pumped-up chronic stressors may go on a subtle but heinous warpath either by disturbing people about issues such as the future of their nation, money, work, the political climate, violence and crime, or perhaps by embedding dysfunctional and polarizing thoughts that motivate humans to become alienated or impulsive, tribal, sectarian or factional, or to express other adrenaline-driven "fight or flight" behaviour.
Methods of expressing suppressed anger or hostility could range from displays of anxiety, despondency or distress to feuds, public disputes or civic unrest, mass rumours or hatemongering, discrimination, criminality, organized protest or riots to insurgencies, looting, displacement of refugees, mass economic migration, diasporas, ethnic cleansing, vendettas, mass murder, pogroms, genocide, guerrilla or open strife, or in kind.
Granted that most people cope by trying to ignore unresolved civic issues, as they withdraw into their family and work lives those unresolved issues eventually take their toll. Some escape their misery and discomfort into alcohol or other addictions, while others do rise above the issues and channel those same emotions into support and action for the common good.
As social stresses build up, "Powerful groups demand more opportunity and less government interference in their quest to benefit from the forces of change, while other groups, no less powerful, demand more government support and protection from those same forces. The threats of class warfare and regional disaffection are never far away" is the take of Robert D. Hormats in his August 2003 HBR article, Abraham Lincoln and the Global Economy.
Too often human beings try to resolve their differences or disagreements by blowing themselves up, or by causing bodily harm to others either informally, or very formally through national agencies whose sole purpose is standing ready for unleashing death and destruction by way of national protection. In a May 2016 lecture at the Oxford Martin School, The Hon. Baroness Valerie Amos indicated that the economic cost of conflict and violence was US$ 14.3 trillion in 2014, constituting 13.4% of the global economy for that year. That horrific figure indicates an urgent need for change, especially because it has been worsening. The Global Peace Index indicates that the cost of conflict and violence was $19.1 trillion for a 13.5% of the global economy in 2023.
Mural of War (1896), by Mural artist Gari Melchers (1862–1932). Photographed in 2007 by Carol Highsmith (1946–), who explicitly placed the photograph in the public domain.
The first proposition that arises from such a scenario indicates that there must be a global disconnect, or a giant invisible barrier or logjam blocking citizens from using a friendlier and more practical, convenient and effective way to both express and realize their expectations on how civic life should be like.
The proposition can arise from proverbial situations where cultural imperatives may create official indifference or civic restrictions or instances of oppression, or when political priorities create corruption, or where citizen requests or petitions may fall on deaf ears, or are perhaps appeased with empty promises on the part of elected public officials.
The reply is yes. There certainly seems to be a worldwide sense of powerlessness, disillusionment and of distrust in the capacity of society to satisfy the expectations of individual citizens. It looks like a disconnect in the form of an overbearing global constraint. Much of the time the constraint also appears to complicate social stress. It seems to inhibit the forementioned fight-or-flight release of intractable emotional tension and frustration, or seems to create emotional and/or social deprivation -even hopelessness- while citizens, as Adam Smith would have said, "strive to improve themselves and their lot in their daily lives."
For instance, Robert Wright´s August 28, 1995 TIME International article, The Evolution of Despair, points out how up to that time, rates of depression had been doubling every 10 years in some developed nations, and that suicide was the third most common cause of death among young adults in North America, after car wrecks and homicides. In May 2013, the BBC published a qualitative vs. quantitative indicator of sorts. It reported that since 2009, suicide has claimed more Americans than land-wheeled-vehicle crashes.
The constraint also seems to carry over its effect on to the factory floor, resulting in a labour-management gap of trust, with the consequent sluggish growth in productivity and the high cost of quality underlined by stagnant wages.
The second proposition lies further down the road; environmental degradation is mostly a result of a few very visible variables like solid and liquid waste, and gaseous emissions. So in principle, it should be easier for people to act upon the issues that impede human society from carrying out all of its activities in an eco-friendly manner.
Yet, in addition to the spectre of billions of humans either not having enough to eat, or not having proper living accommodations or healthcare, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) points out that human activities are rapidly damaging the ecosphere to the no-return point, just as the NASA Global Climate Change website informs that Antarctica is suffering an irreversible meltdown.
And as if to add a tangible sense of urgency to the dire long-term global situation, the North Pole Environmental Observatory (NPEO) maintains a webcam at the North Pole. After NPEO said that in July 2013 the North Pole had turned into a meltwater lake, the World Economic Forum has forecasted more plastic than fish in the oceans by the year 2050.
The Engineering of Systematic Resolution to Global Issues
Typically, the various fields of the engineering sciences deal with the design and improvement of objects, machines and systems like locomotives, roads, bridges, the software and hardware of computers of all types, rockets, tanks, nuclear weapons, machine guns, land mines, EKG machines, heart-rate monitors, electric wheelchairs and all kinds of hospital equipment and instruments, heart valves, prosthetic arteries and limbs, satellites, automobiles, airplanes, the structure of buildings, stadiums and oil and aircraft carriers, plus chemical processes for making from medicines to shampoos to petrol, also roller coasters and light bulbs, and electrical generation and distribution systems.
The list goes on with telephone systems and smartphones, industrial mass production, factory-farming and food-mass production systems, Moon and Mars rovers and the International Space Station too, optical and infrared instruments from microscopes to the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, refrigerators, the machines that make office equipment and supplies and cookware, tableware, eye wear, jewelry, wristwatches, and the ones that make the books people read and the clothes and shoes they wear, etc. The importance of engineering professionals becomes personally apparent when one realizes who keeps electricity and tap water flowing every day, who keeps traffic lights working at intersections, and who is responsible for street lights being on at night. Just about every mechanism, human-designed process or structure is designed or improved upon by engineers.
On the other hand, socioeconomic issues have usually been dealt with by professionals of the social and economic sciences, but industrial engineering, which has popularly been identified with the mass-production line, concerns itself with the human-machine or human-operating system interface. Human-factors engineering or ergonomics is one of the industrial engineering techniques used for designing or improving stress-dosing and stress-release methods the individual worker or work group must carry out when operating and controlling machinery, production equipment, and/or the overall production system, in an efficient manner.
Taking into account the famous conclusions Elton Mayo came to at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company between 1924 and 1927, industrial engineers consider the work group a social group. Mayo´s findings have helped industrial engineering practitioners hone the macroergonomic functions work groups, and whole organizations, must satisfy while operating complex sociotechnical systems such as an assembly line, a complete factory or a network of factories, a nuclear submarine, a cruise ship or an airliner, a supermarket-counter system, a transportation system or a call centre, etc.
In the cases of industrial underdevelopment and sustainability, industrial engineering contends with the methods large organizational groups, such as whole societies, must carry out towards financing and influencing the machinery of their own governments -MoG, as it were, in a macroergonomically effective manner. It is at this point that industrial and systems engineering practitioners unfold their Global CASoS Engineering capabilities conductive to handling the optimization of complex socio-technical processes. So it is within the scope of the discipline to help raise global productivity as it identifies the factors and variables human society must modify in contemplation of optimizing its activities vis-â-vis the needs of the ecosphere as a closed ecological system.
As a starting point, it might be useful to look at probably one of the most visible characteristics of the global condition at the beginning of the 21st. Century: The shantytowns people will build in the absence of sufficient affordable housing to meet the demand. In this UN Habitat Video, Professor Edgar Pieterse suggests the name "slum urbanism," and that we call favela urbanism for the Brazilian expression, and for the informal process that girds the globe. Because in the Global North poor abandoned areas are usually called slums and sometimes ghettos, the network calls slums the poor areas that started out as planned communities of the Global North, but which for various reasons have fallen into disrepair and abandonment.
However, residential areas of the Global South that have started out as chaotic conglomerations of dirt-floor tin shacks, or shanties, are in a league of their own and as such the name favelas or favela slums may be more appropriate. Extrapolating from the actual situation in the South American nation of Venezuela, every day humans build around fifty thousand shanties. And the figure may be in the right order of magnitude because Prof. Pieterse's bar chart (min. 3.30 of the video) indicates a growth of 2 billion favela-slum residents in 40 years, which works out to the dystopian figures of 50 million new favela-slum residents every year and over 10 million new shanties per year if we estimate about 4 persons per family living in each shack...
Formulating The Problem
By devising a System of Systems model for an industrial engineering approach to industrial underdevelopment in the Global South, where 75% of Earth's human population resides, The Global SoS Network has carried out operations research in the domain. First, the network has found that resolving this challenge involves grasping the unwieldy issue of favela-slum urbanism. Moreover, the act of focusing on the favela-slum urbanism issue involves scrutinizing a logistical constraint that feeds on a lack of information and that, true to the hierarchy Professor Pieterse illustrates in his lecture, impedes access to basic services, blocks the development of the required infrastructure, and then frustrates the construction of affordable urban and rural housing units for somewhere between a quarter and a half of the world's citizens.
A habitat with good public services is important if businesses are to operate sustainably at a profit, but the reality in much of the Global South is quite the opposite. Favela-slum urbanism describes a situation in which the lack of good public services is the norm. Those absences act as chronic stressors to business managers, who are not going to invest if they feel they are going to lose perishables because of rolling blackouts, or that they will have to stop production lines because of water mains being in bad repair, or that they are going to waste their investment capital because public officials demand bribes for allowing new construction for the expansion of production facilities or even to put up a new fence, etc. The result is a general impediment to investments and a general reduction or stagnation of stable employment, a situation that Professor Pieterse clearly illustrates at the 6:20 minute mark of his video. At this stage, the logistical constraint generates collateral damage in a form that he calls an Urban Polycrisis, with a dearth of private investment hence very low productivity and very low salaries accompanied by abject poverty. It is a vicious circle characteristic of the entrenched industrial underdevelopment object of the original enquiry. The best practice page treats further the logistical constraint.
Secondly, by delving further into the problem, the network has also found that industrial underdevelopment is but the persistent manifestation of another underlying and much larger unresolved issue that hinders the growth of productivity and the improvement of the quality of life around the globe. Most if not all of the other major social, economic and environmental difficulties and challenges facing human society at the beginning of the 21st. Century are direct and indirect effects of an overriding technological constraint. The overriding constraint can be classified as technological because it impedes individuals -in their roles as constituents- from using information about stress-creating cognitive, emotional, or other types of conflict, and from initiating the communication processes required for the resolution of such constituent conflict, and for the release of its coexistent stress. This assessment catalogues industrial underdevelopment, poverty, conflict, and sustainability as systems problems, not people problems.
More specifically, the information revolution makes knowledge about all types of social, economic, and environmental challenges readily available to citizens. As humans live their daily lives, they gather information and converse and debate with their families, peers, and coworkers regarding civic challenges and the perceived incapacity of government to address such issues.
Citizens own the information that can bring about the ending of alienation, privation, homelessness and inequality, injustice, corruption, tribalism and racism, criminality of all types, of simmering radicalism, anti-business sentiment and corporate greed, terrorism, civic turmoil, open conflict and international aggression, and of environmental degradation. But it looks like the pervasive sense of discontent Robert Wright wrote about emerges, the world over, because humans are unaware of how to put all that collective brainpower to effective use -hence the technological constraint. Consequently, other key questions emerge from this scenario...
What are humans to do with that information?
Whom do they communicate it to?
How can human society exploit its major technological constraint?
