Later, agriculture, fish farming, and livestock imposed the need for human societies to appropriate and control land for such purposes. This Neolithic transition presumably also formed the notion of property because having toiled at clearing and sowing a piece of land, a person felt it should be his or her possession, at least until the time for harvesting and better forever. This gave rise to the idea of inheritance, passing the property to the next generation, justified at first by the effort imbedded in the conversion of the land to agricultural standards, but later by attaching a utility-based value to the land.

Soon farming had a profound impact on the stratification of society into those possessing land and those who did not, a division made durable by the concept of inheritance. The notion of property also created the need for defending one’s property against anyone suspected of wanting to steal or take over the land, so the invention of weapons and war ensued. One suggestion is that the transition from mythology (existential thinking) to religion (formation of institutions with set prescriptions for such thinking) was also happening as a result of the need felt to make some people, such as those who did not own land, accept slavery or slavery-like conditions of low welfare, provided that they were compensated by the newly-invented idea of a better afterlife (Sørensen, 2012a).

Today, land and property rights have been further elaborated and monetary values have been assigned to each asset. This first of all signals the fundamental importance of these assets to the current structure of societies, divided as they are into nations formed upon territorial ambitions. With a negotiable price tag attached it is now possible to buy and sell land as well as other property (from buildings to equipment and claimed intellectual achievements). The price of land has been linked to its allowable uses, which in many parts of the world is governed, for example, by zoning legislation, causing average prices per unit area to lie in different cost brackets depending on whether the land areas are classified as urban, marginal/recreational, or reserved for agricultural or forestry usage. Figs 2.1 and 2.2 show current global agricultural and rangeland (for crops or livestock), Fig. 2.3 shows the forestland, of which most is exploited for timber or other wood applications and Fig. 2.4 shows the urban land, including land occupied by infrastructure, such as roads and buildings. The remaining global land area is classified as marginal or recreational. Figs 2.5 and 2.6 show the offshore waters used for capture of some major fish resources, and Figs 2.7 and 2.8 correspondingly the areas, mainly inland, used for some important aquaculture plant or fish/shellfish production. Areas used for extraction of mineral resources will be discussed in Section 2.1.2.

Agriculture has a history stretching back more than 10,000 years, and the areas used in this way have changed over time in ways considerably more complex than just reflecting population variations.^* The efficiency (crop yield per unit of area) has not increased systematically with time, but has been affected by both climatic and cultural changes. In the northern temperate zones, climate is favorable for agriculture, with enough precipitation but few torrential rains, and with adequate solar radiation during the growing season but few incidents of scorching by high levels of radiation. Nutrients are also available, due to the stable humus layer formed over long periods of time, with at least a partial recycling of nutrients by simultaneous soil-conditioned cultivation and spreading manure from animal husbandry. Yet the farming yields in these regions have gone up and down under the influence of land ownership and economic practices, and over long periods of time this has left agricultural work to an underpaid stratum of society, with no attempts to improve the practices by advances in the tools used. Only recently, mechanization and scientific optimization of methods have caused an unprecedented rise in productivity, so that some agricultural areas are currently being converted into fallow land in order to keep the overproduction relative to demand so low that market prices are not seriously affected. The crop yields in north European societies reached around eightfold (i.e., eight times the continuity requirement of next year’s seeds for sowing) during the late Stone Age and Iron Age, but subsequently decreased to a mere twofold during the Medieval and Renaissance periods (Sørensen, 2012a). After major agricultural reforms during the 19th century, yields have resumed growth and are now around 100-fold in Denmark.

The situation in regions closer to the equator is different. Historically, domestication of both cereals and livestock started in Mesopotamia, which was then a fertile area. Today, this and many other early sites of agriculture have been transformed into dry land or desert, likely as a result of the human interference. Removing trees makes the evaporation from the soil increase, and much more than is the case in temperate climates. This process is compounded by planting annual crops that during parts of the year occupy only a fraction of the land surface. The current situation is characterized by the use of inefficient agricultural technology in many low-latitude regions, but with increasing application of irrigation in the more affluent regions. Although below the level in high-latitude regions, the efficiency is improving and there is room for further improvement using advanced drip-irrigation and tillage methods together with adequate nutrient management. This will be necessary due to expected population increases but it is clearly tied to the general development of the regions involved. Current world production of food may be adequate for feeding the actual population, but due to the variations in economic ability and the rules of the liberal market economy, there are regions where people are starving and others where surplus food is discarded as waste.

In some regions of the world the ratio of meat and vegetable components in the human diet is greater than considered healthy. However, meat and fish components play an essential role in providing the proteins and other constituents necessary for human health. A vegetarian diet can supply these necessities only by applying certain fermentation techniques to plant material growing only in few parts of the world. Particularly, fish and shellfish are often seen as an important option for feeding a growing world population, but this would only work if the catch areas can be effectively protected against overfishing that may reduce stocks of certain species. Another problem is that seas and waterways have been used to dump waste of all kinds (including radioactive substances) for quite some time, and pollution with unhealthy trace elements is even felt in the largest oceans.

During the latest decades, aquaculture has grown in importance and currently supplies vegetable matter (e.g., kelp, seaweed), shellfish (clams, shrimps, etc.) and fish (salmon, bream, etc.) in rising quantity. Poor management of fish farms has exhibited a number of risks similar to those of industrial pig and cattle farms, with epidemic diseases periodically spreading over human societies as a consequence. Some of these issues may be handled by reducing the size of individual (fish or meat) farms, and by replacing the administration of pesticides and preventive antibiotic treatment by health and environmentally safe methods, such as certified ecological practices (also called “organic” agriculture and aquaculture). The known 10–20% reduction in yields obtained by sustainable ecological farming would seem acceptable at least in the present period of surplus production, by avoiding abandonment of areas previously used for farming (Ponisio et al., 2015; Sørensen, 2012a).

Property is usually defined as assets that are accorded ownership and considered heritable. This caused severe criticism of the property concept during the period following the French Revolution (Proudhon, 1840), but had actually been discussed earlier in England, during the mid-17th century (Woodhouse, 1951). In principle the nature of the property asset can be anything, from land and buildings to intellectual achievements, such as patents or copyrighted art and literature. Although available statistical surveys, such as national accounts are keen to include private property, the treatment of public property is often scanty. This is because most statistics focus on economic valuation, and while private property is routinely valuated in order to form the basis for taxation, government property, such as the historical buildings, waterways, or the underground with whatever resources it may contain, and publicly owned protected areas and museums with art or historical/archeological artefacts are rarely subjected to a precise monetary evaluation. This makes it difficult to assess the loss to society when governments decide to privatize public assets to gain short-term liquidity, and more generally, it makes it difficult to quantify the total wealth of a society.

Wealth is a concept related to property. As a general term, wealth has appeared in historical literature for a very long time, also before Adam Smith’s treatise (Smith 1776). When econometrics entered the scene, wealth received a monetary definition as the present value of future consumption (Fischer, 1906). “Present value” means that future economic payments are replaced by a current value by reverse-discounting the actual payment for future consumption, that is, replacing it by the sum of money that today would have to be set aside (deposited or invested) to generate the necessary future sums after inclusion of accumulated interest. Interest rates should not be high like those used for individual home or consumption loans (usually high due to the finite lifetime of humans – interest rates measure the advantage of having a sum of money now rather than N years into the future) and not the more modest type, sometimes called “social interest rates,” of government bonds (on average around 3% per year over the 20th century), but they are supposed to be the intergenerational interest rate ensuring that future generations are not given poorer conditions than the current generation of people. Such intergenerational interest rates could have positive components from the stock of useful things we leave to the following generations, but negative components from the environmental degradation and resource exhaustion we commit. Unable to determine these components in detail, one should probably just set the intergenerational interest rate at zero. It simply cannot be said if future societies would be happy with the assets and problems we pass to them because history has taught us that especially problems not thought of when the act that caused them was committed have a habit of turning up and becoming problems at some later moment in time. Some current economists pretend to “play it safe” by assuming a positive intergenerational interest rate (1.5% per year in a study by the World Bank, 2011, also Hamilton and Liu, 2014), while others argue for zero interest on ethical grounds (e.g., Quiggin, 2012).

In any case, the stock concept of wealth has for a while been shown little interest by the economists and governments making national accounts, relative to the flow measurements of annual income and expenditure, and only recently have a number of economists called for the procurement of better data that would allow renewed focus on wealth, including its distribution among nations (notably the precursors to the World Bank study references and studies of household wealth distribution and inequality by the United Nations University, e.g., Ohlsson et al., 2006; Davies et al., 2008;  2009). National accounts have allowed detailed investigations of (private) income distributions (OECD, 2012), but wealth distributions are incomplete and highly uncertain (Piketty and Saez, 2014; Piketty, 2014). However, attempts to remedy the situations have been made by adding proxies for some of the wealth categories, for which national data are not directly available, notably by Hamilton and Clemens (1999), World Bank (2006,  2011), Liu (2011), and Hamilton and Liu (2014).

To explain these ideas the relationship between wealth and the concept of welfare (appearing in the title of this book) should first be clarified. Dasgupta (2001) defines welfare as the present value of utility along a path of development, utility being the ability to satisfy human needs or desires, a concept that does not lend itself easily to measurement. Some economists distinguish between personal welfare and social welfare, recognizing that a society may have needs (e.g., for coherence) going beyond those of the individual’s needs. The focus is on evaluating (consumer) goods, for which utility would be their constant or declining usefulness over the lifetime of the product. Referring to both needs and desires makes the concepts of utility and welfare very woolly, depending on pressures from peer groups or advertising agents (advocating e.g., sports cars, designer dresses) and many economists prefer to replace them by wealth, arguing that wealth is a fair proxy for welfare. Rather than looking at absolute values, Hamilton and Clemens (1999) use the change in social welfare, which they call “genuine saving” after correcting the value of assets produced but not consumed for depreciation and for stock building, such as increased knowledge or with negative sign depletion of environmental assets. It is not considered that welfare could contain components that cannot be monetized. This is reminiscent of the situation 50 years ago, where economists called social and environmental impacts “externalities” and omitted them from their analysis, albeit sometimes expressing slight regret. Today, we routinely try in some way to incorporate “externality” questions in policymaking, no matter if they can be monetized (which has become possible, although inaccurate, e.g., for air pollution and global warming impacts) or not (e.g., biodiversity, leisure time, cultural activities, human relations).

The World Bank studies associate wealth with three types of capital:

Wealth is, as mentioned, taken as the present value of future consumption, but in practice it is restricted to categories appearing in national accounts and tuned by assumptions on utility life and interest rate, the two parameters without which, the present value cannot be calculated. This procedure is of course prompted by the availability of annual accounts and short-term forecasts and the unavailability of proper wealth data. The intangible capital found by these studies turns out to be very uncertain (and sometimes negative). Liu (2011) identifies human capital as the most important part of intangible capital and uses years of school attendance as a proxy for it, leaving what seems a small remainder, however which may just be taken as a reminder that many things are omitted from the analysis, such as items difficult to monetize, and that crude lifetimes and discount rates are used. In the World Bank study, a 4% interest rate is used for land and underground mineral resources, including fossil fuels, with a depreciation time of 25 years or the time taken to use remaining proven reserves. For produced goods or structures (Fig. 2.9), the World Bank uses a 5% interest rate and a 20-year lifetime.^† This covers different items, where consumer goods and industrial machinery currently have lifetimes of 15–20 years (or less, if they are produced in certain developing countries), while buildings have typical lifetimes of 80–200 years, and structural items, such as roads and bridges have lifetimes of 50–100 years, all depending on the level of maintenance and repair undertaken (and recorded as annual flow expenses despite their influence on product lifetime and thus wealth). The interest rate used by the World Bank seems to be a personal one reflecting the options of a private consumer for borrowing.

The natural capital included in the World Bank model of wealth include fossil energy and other mineral resources with a depreciation linked to depletion, but also cropland, forests, and protected areas (valued as if they were in the other categories). The valuation is a kind of rent,^‡ given that it depreciates over a 25-year period, and the assumed interest rate includes a part reflecting consumption growth. However, the problem is more serious because a piece of cultivated land or a forest can continue to be productive for any amount of time, provided that sound farming and forest replanting techniques are used. This means that one must use a long-term intergenerational interest rate, which, as argued, should probably be taken as zero. The argument for this is furthered by considering that the stock of building and structure assets we may pass on to future generations will last no more than at most a few hundred years, while the negative impacts of for example, radioactive waste or greenhouse gas emissions will prevail for much longer. Taking the long-term interest rate as zero implies that the value or wealth constituted by permanently used land, forest, or water property is infinite. The World Bank tables showing a finite “natural capital” based only on 25-year rental of the property are simply meaningless, and the durable natural resources fundamentally cannot be treated as wealth on the same footing as consumer products. This constitutes a strong support for Proudhon’s suggested abandonment of property rights, at least associated with land, forestry, fisheries, and use of renewable energy (where solar and wind power is often favorable precisely on the marginal land otherwise valued lowly). Instead, one could restrict handling of these assets to renting agreements with inheritance replaced by new rental. In fact this is not too different from the actual situation in many parts of the world, for example, where farmers only nominally own their land. In reality, they have borrowed the money and pay an annuity every year to a bank or real estate institution of private or public status. Replacing all long-term durable property ownership by rental, the wealth comments are again on the same footing because this is or could be the setup for the consumer goods of finite lifetime, making wealth a concept describing the volume of assets that a person (or a society) has been able to secure rental agreements for, presumably involving some assessment of the person or society’s ability to pay for the rental, by work or otherwise. This definition of wealth avoids the infinite value of future options for consumption.

Fig. 2.10 shows the World Bank figures for wealth associated with nonrenewable mineral resources, including fossil fuels, the only components of “natural wealth” that makes some sense. As mentioned, the present value is calculated with a 25-year depreciation time (to depletion) and a 4% interest rate, reflecting 2.5% consumption growth, and a 1.5% real interest rate. Renewable resources are not considered. They should be associated with land areas and be assigned an infinite lifetime (solar and wind energy are power-derived from conversion of energy received from the Sun, and so is hydro-derived from the global water cycle, again sustained by high-quality energy received from the Sun and returned as lower-grade energy to the universe). These renewable resources make many areas of land classified as “marginal” as valuable as cropland, forestland, or sea areas, allowing fishery or aquaculture. The accumulated wealth connected with renewable energy flows, is clearly much higher than that connected with depletable resources, such as fossil fuels.

The Fig. 2.11 shows a significant part of what the World Bank study calls “intangible capital,” namely, the educational skills available in different countries, based on expenditures for the educational sector in each country, and multiplied by the number of years an average person is able use such skills productively. Generating educational skills for the next generations involve new educational efforts and expenditures, so in this case the wealth created in finite. Other components in the “intangible” category include human, social, and institutional capital, including cultural assets of science, music, literature, the arts, as well as historical and archeological artefacts and their restored synthesis. These are (hopefully^§) never lost, and thus constitute nondiscountable wealth components. The actual World Bank assessment further includes net financial assets, which may change with time and thus affect the estimates of wealth at a particular moment in time.

Since cultural and shared intellectual capital is durable and permanent, in contrast to education that must be renewed for each generation, evaluating them will give infinite results, like for land. Current practice is to allow ownership for a limited period (patents, copyrights) and then place such assets in the public domain. Generally, the upgrading of natural and cultural assets relative to current practice of mainstream economists discussed previously, relative to quickly consumed goods, offers an explanation of the fact that some studies find (nonquantified) indications of high welfare in societies with high public awareness of the intangible assets, but still with an emphasis on relatively recent conquests (in areas, such as free health care, free education, unemployment compensation, gender equal opportunity, and not least the full range of civil liberties encoded in the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations, UN, 1948).

The World Bank estimates of land value (land used for agriculture, forestry or recreation) are not shown because it replaces wealth by a 25-year rental income from these assets, while as argued the proper benefit period is nearly infinite. To this, the World Bank economists would argue that with a large, positive interest rate, the period beyond 25 years is unimportant. However, this is not a valid argument because there is no stock building to support a positive interest level. This can be seen by narrowing the arguments made earlier to land assets; no improvement of the value of the land itself can take place, only possibly increased yields due to improved agricultural practices (at a given time), which do not alter the value of the land itself (but may alter its sale price in a market). Negative long-term interest rates are possible if nutrients are removed from the land (recycling manure can never conserve 100% of the nutrients) or if use of pesticides degrade the land. Thus, a negative long-term interest rate for natural assets, such as land is likely, and the zero value is really the highest that can be defended.

Other studies of welfare have approached some of the data-poor areas by interview studies, which of course have their own set of caveats and uncertainties. Terms like “satisfaction” and “happiness” are employed, presumably to signal the subjective nature of some of the methods used (Estes, 1984; Legatum Institute, 2011). A credible approach to describing welfare in qualitative or quantified terms must address not only household or private wealth components, but also public assets, such as the total physical environment (from government-owned assets to the “commons”), the infrastructure system, health, administration, and educational systems (beyond the building and construction parts included as produced capital), as well as cultural assets involving arts, music, literature, and other media (comprising recorded deliberations on social arrangements and governance), science and other knowledge, any preserved historical or archeological artefacts, in summary embracing all that contributes to a specific civilization.

The deliberations presented in this section have shown that the seemingly innocent assumption of a zero intergenerational interest rate has far-reaching implications, including demonstration of the absurdity of private ownership and property inheritance for any piece of the natural Earth or its renewable energy flows. No one can in this perspective afford ownership of land. Land must be a common good like solar energy or wind. The economist definition of wealth and welfare in terms of a present value of future consumption takes a different shape with the recognition that some assets can sustain indefinite profit (provided that we do not abuse and destroy them) and are immune to depreciation because the equal consideration of the present and any future generation of planetary inhabitants requires the long-term interest rate to be zero. Short-term rental arrangements have not been excluded, but whether this is the best way to go or not will have to be further discussed in Chapter 3 on governance and paradigm shifts.

In any case, the remarks made here suggest a major revaluation of the capital or wealth values assigned to different property categories, with natural and cultural assets having infinitely higher value compared to the items reflecting running consumption.

Figs  2.12–2.16 show a selection of important mineral resources currently mined and mapped according to their location. The quantity of minerals at each site is not shown and is less easy to quantify than the resource extraction level that may be achieved in the next decades, eventually by exploitation of new deposits, either those already known or those that may be found in promising geological areas. Often, the geology of underground ores and composites do not allow a precise quantification of the overall resource or the economy of recovery. As always in resource estimation, there is a cut-off toward concentrations, for which recovery is considered highly uneconomical or impossible, at least with currently known extraction technology. One uses terms, such as proven reserves, possible reserves or ultimately recoverable resources to classify the estimates. The proven resources are often quite low, allowing only some 15 years of extraction at current level for minerals such as gold, silver, or lead and no more than 90 years for resources such as iron and aluminium (World Bank, 2011).

However, unlike fossil fuels, mineral resources like metals or building materials are not irrevocably depleted by their use in human society, but may as mentioned be reused or recycled. At present, recycling fractions range from under 1% (e.g., lithium or germanium) to over 50% (e.g., iron, copper, silver, gold, and platinum), as shown for the product end-of-life recycling levels in Fig. 2.17. Additional recycling options exist at the resource extraction and product manufacture levels. The global amount of minerals imbedded into buildings and other structures, vehicles, industrial equipment, and consumer goods on average works out to some 80 kg/cap. of aluminium, 45 kg/cap. of copper, 2200 kg/cap. of iron, 8 kg/cap. of lead, and 0.1 kg/cap. of silver, with the transportation sector being the primary user of aluminium, followed by the buildings and construction sectors, which are also the prime users of copper, iron, and lead, while the principal use of silver is in consumer goods, such as jewellery (UNEP, 2010). Some minerals are presently growing in importance, for example, lithium used in batteries that are currently expanding from consumer electronics to road vehicles, and this will certainly demand moving Li from the low recycling level of Fig. 2.17 to a much higher value (Mohr et al., 2012).

Whereas current mineral extraction is mostly from mines drilled into the subsoil of land areas, at the surface or deeper, there has long been an interest in offshore mining (Odell, 1997; Baturin, 1997), notably of the nodules with a high mineral content found on the bottoms of many ocean locations. However, the cost of extraction is in most cases still seen as too high. New focus with more short-term prospects has been directed at what is called ‘urban mining’, meaning extraction and recycling of mineral resources from the urban waste, which currently is increasingly being collected and separated (rather than incinerated, at the source or at a waste treatment centre) in a number of countries around the world (Zhu, 2014). A variety of recycling processes, adapted to the relevant product mix, have been developed and in many cases, and recycling rates of over 90% are available (e.g., for chromium and certain iron products; UNEP, 2011) or promised in the near future. An important example is recycling of rapidly growing amounts of scrap from electronic equipment (Tuncuk et al., 2012). For other products, such as the dominant current type of solar cells, the recycling request must be based on environmental concern because the chief material, silicon, is an abundant mineral and recycling therefore not warranted by direct economy (McDonald and Pearce, 2010).

Hydropower is also based on atmospheric processes triggered by solar radiation, namely, the evaporation and condensation of water. These processes involve about a quarter of the incoming solar radiation, primarily due to the substantial energy required for evaporation. Precipitation is one of the most important flow resources, and is essential for plant growth as well as for the use of surface water resources in a sustainable mode. A small fraction of the energy in the water cycle appears as hydropower, based on the gravitational energy associated with water vapour having condensed at some elevation. Fig. 2.19 gives an impression of the available hydropower, based on water runoff measured or calculated with use of atmospheric modelling (i.e., the crude, large-scale only, circulation models used in weather forecasts and in climate change calculations) and the topological heights. Exploitation of hydropower is possible only in a fairly few locations, and the total amounts of energy that can be extracted is small compared with, for example, wind power. Still, at the endowed locations, very large hydropower plants can be established if correspondingly large elevated reservoirs can be formed, which depends on other possible uses of such areas.

The Fig. 2.20 shows the distribution of potential wind power extraction. Wind has been used for propulsion at sea long before turbines for mechanical or electrical energy production were invented. A wind turbine cannot bring the wind to a standstill, so there is a limit to conversion efficiency (about 59%), but also a limit to how close wind turbines can be placed to each other without diminishing the winds received by turbines in the wake of others. A number of complex processes are available for restoring the wind speed by interaction with nearby air masses, on the sides and above. The turbine-spacing limit is roughly that the ratio of turbine swept area to the average land area available to each turbine is not larger than about 0.001, for land-based wind turbines. For ocean wind farms, the ratio may be a bit larger (Sørensen, 2010,  2015). Fig. 2.20 shows that the best wind conditions for power extraction is offshore or close to coasts, but presently, no proven technology is available for extracting wind power except by turbines mounted on foundations stretching to the bottom of the sea.^¶ Thus, the current limit to extraction is that the water depth must be less than about 50 m.

Solar energy allows green plants to produce the biomass that we depend upon, for food (involving all sectors of farming: cereal crops, vegetables, fruit, and fodder for livestock), timber and a number of products derived from wood and plant materials. In terms of energy, the conversion of solar radiation by plants is of low efficiency (on average below 0.2%, rarely above 2%; Sørensen, 2010). This is the reason that large areas have had to be set aside for farming and forestry, a fact that opens the possibility of using biomass not suited for the primary purposes for energy tasks, as it has been done throughout human history and also before the introduction of agriculture (burning biomass for heating, cooking, and later many other tasks, such as metal production). Today, although burning wood is still common in the least developed regions of the world (plus regrettably for cosiness in some rich countries), it is discouraged in any advanced society due to the severe pollution caused by wood combustion in smaller burners not equipped with particle filters and other emission-reducing additions. A future use of secondary biomass for the production of liquid or gaseous biofuels is seen as a more acceptable pathway, at least for an interim period where especially the transportation sector has few alternatives.

The geographical distribution of net biomass production is shown in Fig. 2.21, for the case where no artificial irrigation is applied. Several areas currently using irrigation have been demonstrated to cause unsustainable use of surface water or to lower of the ground water level (Wada and Bierkens, 2014). Due to the large areas already committed to agriculture and forestry, the residues from these activities have the potential to deliver a sizeable part of the energy needs of societies, considering that biofuel production largely can avoid emissions and collect undesirable substances for responsible disposal or further transformation into useful materials (Sørensen, 2010). As with current uses of biomass, there is a fundamental requirement for returning nutrients to the soil in order to ensure long-term sustainability. Part of this task is carried out by livestock manure, when rotation between crop and range uses of agricultural land is practiced or by the farmer spreading collected manure, but also the abundant subsoil populations of decomposing agents form an essential part of the functioning and sustainability of plant ecosystems (Bardgett and Putten, 2015). Any new technology for using biomass must honor the nutrient management requirement, but because it is a fact that current biomass users often neglect nutrient recycling, there is presently reservation expressed by ecologists against any additional use of biotechnologies.

In history, animals have played several roles, from being food prey, to dangerous threats to get rid of, occasionally becoming domesticated sources of companionship, serving as hunting partners, as agents of protection, or livestock. As a complement to vegetable food, animals represent a store of food energy. Earlier, when food preservation by freezing was not available, this could help to avoid starvation following a failed harvest. In any case, the solar energy conversion efficiency of the chain of processes leading to production of animal food is considerably lower than that of producing vegetable-based food. Recently, additional worries about biodiversity and loss of species have been raised, starting with mammals but eventually considering that other species should perhaps also receive attention (Scheffers et al., 2012).

Humans see themselves as having conquered the main stage of the Earth, with diminishing roles for ‘wild’ animals not being managed by humans. However, this is primarily true in relation to mammal species and other ‘large’ animals. Bacteria are far more abundant than humans, occupying not only the human gut but also an entire range of environments, from soils to plants and animals, and the same can be said of viruses. Other ‘small’ animals, such as soil nematodes are also very abundant, as are the somewhat larger insect animal species of ants, flies, and mosquitoes. Also birds seem at least as numerous as humans. Many of these animals are very well adapted to life on Earth and see humans as a convenient resource, for example, for food or as host for parasitic action. Species, such as ants have a higher resistance than humans to extreme conditions, for example radioactive fallout after a nuclear war, and may thus be the surviving inhabitants of the planet after the human species has become extinct. The late astronomer Carl Sagan and coworkers launched a project in 1980, involving search for intelligent life on other planets in the universe. A component in this program was to ask people to lend their computers to analyse signals from space when they were not in use by the owner. The surprising result that no intelligent messages were received has been interpreted as saying that when inhabitants of distant planets get so intelligent that they can send and receive messages to other solar systems, they also have invented nuclear weapons, and therefore likely destroyed their planets before they thought of communicating with us. In fairness it should be said that other interpretations of the missing results are possible: maybe intelligent beings realize that advanced inhabitants of other planets in the universe are most likely hostile, so the best strategy is to stay hidden by not sending any messages into space (Nørretranders, 1999).

For livestock there are detailed statistics, such as the abundance of cattle, pigs, and chicken shown in Figs 2.22, 2.23, and 2.24, while for other species and particularly the insect and bacterial varieties, no precise data are available. Fig. 2.25 shows the distribution of the current human population, for comparison. It is seen that none of the distributions are uniform, but that the distribution of cattle is roughly similar to that of man, except for South East Asia. In China, the abundance of pigs and chicken is considerably larger than that of cattle, and the Middle East region has a high abundance of chicken, but for cultural reasons not of pigs. Cattle are traditionally abundant where range areas suitable for grazing are present, and pigs on mixed-pasture land, but with increasing competition from stable-based cattle and pig farms where the animals are fed industrially produced fodder. The size of such farms influences disease frequency and possible spread to humans. Chicken may be raised in denser human settlements, such as those found, for instance, in eastern China. This has well-known implications for the spread of diseases that can be transferred from animals to humans, such as influenza varieties.

Intellectual resources, such as art, literature, music, and skills based on education were mentioned in the property Section 2.1.1, noting that monetary valuation is mostly available for copyrighted material, and largely excluding items, for which the originator has been dead for more than the legal 50–70 years. The abundance of older works is variable. Literature is very abundant because it can be reprinted and digitally redistributed with no loss of utility, while digital renderings of artwork are usually not considered as cultural assets on the same footing as the original painting or sculpture. Musical compositions are like books regarded as cultural values for their contents, making availability of the original score manuscript less important and the same is true for scientific treatises describing important new insights. In terms of orders of magnitude, our literary inheritance may consist of several million works, our musical inheritance of some hundred thousand scores and the art inheritance at a similar level, depending on where the division line between art and applied-art-design is placed. More broadly, cultural resources comprise architecture (e.g., for buildings), historical and archeological sites, as well as the artefacts they contain, or which have been moved to museums. Both museums and cultural sites are abundant in most of the world (numbers run in tens of thousands), and accommodate cultural values ranging from those of central interest to humanity to others of more local interest. Fig. 2.26 shows the sites designated as World Heritage sites by UNESCO. They include both outstanding cultural sites and sites with exceptional natural features.

Adam Smith (1776) formulated his market theory on the basis of three essential assumptions:

Whether these conditions may have been approximately fulfilled at the 18th century time of introducing the liberal market theory is difficult to ascertain but today, they are certainly not fulfilled, and yet a widespread belief in the liberal market theory has seemed to emerge, particularly over the last 50 years. The power equality of market actors is certainly not fulfilled in the present situation with multinational giant companies and the full range down to personal companies with one or a few employees. Furthermore, companies do everything they can to hide information from competitors, thereby preventing them from being able to make ‘rational’ decisions. Without rational decisions, the market cannot work as stipulated by Smith, and one must expect major flaws stemming from this irrationality. Examples include the recurrent financial crises and ‘bubble economies’ caused by banks incorrectly estimating the value of assets, such as property, and issuing ghost loans, which turn out not to have any collateral security once the bubble bursts and inflated prices (read: inability of the market to reach the correct prices) revert toward factual ones.

Current believers in the capitalistic market economy would claim that the classical market economy has been remedied by adding new theoretical ballast in what they call neoliberalism. It is rarely defined in a precise way but seems to postulate that the three nonfulfilled Adam Smith conditions may not make the market theory invalid because the market is seen as having an ephemeral ‘intelligence’ allowing it to make the correct decisions for any economic system, regardless of flawed composition.^†† The essence of neoliberalism is thus to let the market (and preferably a global one encountering no trade barriers) govern all economic development with no interference from governments or individuals, demanding maximum deregulation and privatization. The only role seen for the state is to enforce property rights (DeMartino, 1999,  2000). Critics of the neoliberal market variant characterize it as trying to maximize inequality in society (Braedley and Luxton, 2010; Lavoie, 2014; Kotz, 2015). In this, neoliberalism has indeed been quite successful as demonstrated by Piketty (2014) and the study by World Bank (2011) discussed in Section 2.1.1. That the people in the lower part of the wealth scale are accepting such a fate and even casting their votes on neoliberal political parties is explained by the massive advertising campaigns of questionable content that have replaced serious popular political debate, but it is also due to a more subtle feature of neoliberalism, which is the worship of indiscriminate growth. This phenomenon will be further discussed in Chapter 3, but its role in hiding inequality leads to the concept that large economic growth can be combined with a slight improvement in wealth for the poorest strata of society (sometimes called the ‘trickle-down effect’) and still make inequality increase because although each new contribution to wealth is predominantly being collected by the already wealthiest layer, the autonomous market mechanisms (with a concern not just for profit but also for the related volume of consumption) make sure that the lowest strata in society are not experiencing or at least not noticing a fall in wealth. In reality division lines, such as the ‘poverty limit’ used in some countries are not static, and the real development over the recent 25 years may be argued to be one of increased poverty (Quiggin, 2009).

During the late 20th century, neoliberalism replaced the Keynesian view of the state as ultimately governing economic development by mending the flaws that kept appearing as the market failed to make the right decisions (as prompted by the 1929 financial crisis that started in the United States and subsequently spread globally). For some decades, the dominant economic policy in large parts of the world involved collaborative governance executed jointly by the government and the private sector. The 2007 financial collapse still being felt all over the world should have brought the neoliberal model to a fall, but no current governments seem to have the courage to dismiss their mainstream economic advisors, which tend to regard the crisis as a passing fluctuation. According to Quiggin (2010,  2013), the only thing that has recovered after the crisis is the self-esteem of mainstream economists.

Since the total amount of resources on Earth is finite, this means that eventually, our societies will have diluted mineral resources to an extent causing a severe reduction in the options for industrial manufacture, as we know it. Some would argue that this situation is too far away to warrant concern, but that belief is linked to the prevailing economic discounting practice, where a positive interest rate makes anything happening 25 years into the future unimportant and anything happening 100 years into the future irrelevant. Seen in light of this planet having been occupied by humans for over a million years, the question of what we leave for future generations takes a more compelling form. We simply must ensure that important mineral resources are not diluted to an extent making them useless even with future advances in technological ability.

Current economic thinking deals with such issues in the following way: Of course, recycling is recommended whenever the cost of recycling is lower than that of new mineral extraction, which the market will ensure happens once the easily accessible geological resources are exhausted. However, the nature of the market-based theory is such that all minerals and other materials discarded before the price of new materials reaches that of recycled materials will not be available for recycling, at least in cases where the disposal of the materials leave them in less concentrated form than required for recycling (e.g., after incineration, today the most common way of handling refuse). Thus, only a small fraction of the original resources will be available to society at the time where the market economy wants to start employing recycling, namely the fraction residing in products at that moment. This is another example of the fallacy of the neoliberal mantra of ‘let the market decide’, but it is not the only way the current economic paradigm handles the raw material issue. The other line of defence is that of substitution.

Realizing that the incorrect handling of the timing for introducing recycling may lead to unavailability of minerals and other materials needed by industry, the suggestion of substitution is put forward: Just find another mineral that will do the same job. Usually, this does not always prevent short-term crises because it may take some time (shorter or longer) for the scientific and technological establishment to develop substitution options. The question is of course if the alternatives have been made ready by development prior to their necessity, and this is the basis for most societies actually spending money on research and development (R&D), despite the fact that the neoliberal economic paradigm would not allow money to be spend on such things before the market says it is necessary. Currently, the nations most enthused by neoliberal thinking are systematically removing funds from research and development, and although this is primary hitting public funding of such activities, the private sector enterprises following the prevailing economic paradigm are doing the same. For example, when several states in the United States privatized the electric utility system during the 1990s, R&D departments were closed and the following decades saw increasing numbers of blackouts in a supply and transmission system that became increasingly antiquated (OECD/IEA, 2005).

Concretely defined, the substitution hypothesis states that if a needed resource becomes depleted, another one will take its place, possibly at the higher price already prevailing and thus presumably accepted when the initial resource draws toward its end. This solution is market-driven and according to the neoliberal economists, there are no resources that cannot be substituted by new materials, and such new materials will always be developed when the marked says it needs them, with minimal delay.

Substitution has sometimes worked, other times not. An example of lacking preparation for substitution is provided by what has been called the ‘first oil crisis’ in 1973. The US oil producers wanted to raise prices so that extraction within the United States would again be feasible by use of the more expensive ‘enhanced’ extraction methods to get oil from deposits where as much had already been extracted as could be done with simple methods (Friberg et al., 1974). The Middle-East oil-producing countries at first declined raising prices, but after the Yom Kippur War they decided to both double prices and launch a supply embargo on Western countries. Since no one had developed alternatives to oil that could be implemented at short notice, and because no strategic oil stores had been built, the negative effect of the embargo and price hike became far more devastating for Western economies than it needed to have been. The new doubling of Middle-Eastern oil prices in 1980 did not have nearly the same impact on the Western economies, partly due to new oil fields having been developed outside the Middle East (North Sea, Mexican Gulf, accepting that oil production at much higher production costs could be profitable) and partly because newly established strategic stores ensured that supply to consumers were not immediately disrupted, while a number of alternative technologies (notably based on natural gas and coal) had already been put in place and were now ready to use.

An example of a successful substitution introduction is found in the development of silicon solar cells. Until the 1990s, the solar cell industries were using scrap material from the microelectronics industry as a raw material for silicon cells because it was inexpensive and available in amounts sufficient for the nascent solar cell demand. When demand increased, this was no longer the case. Microelectronic chips are increasingly miniaturized, while solar cells need to cover a large area to be intercepted by solar radiation and therefore cannot benefit from miniaturization, except for making the cells thinner, which has actually been achieved by replacing monocrystalline by multicrystalline technologies. On the other hand, solar cell silicon does not need to have the same level of purity and precision in doping (the process that adapts the material’s nuclear properties to the frequency spectrum of solar radiation) as the microelectronics silicon material, which must allow very small patterns of electron pathways, and therefore the solar industry developed a ‘solar-grade’ silicon material that after a few years of learning became cheap enough to replace the microelectronics scrap material. The total solar cell price, that had declined systematically from the space cells of the 1970s and 1980s, stayed constant or slightly rising for a few years, but after 2005 again continued its decline and is now approaching a level where solar cells can viably enter energy supply systems in many locations with good access to solar radiation (Sørensen, 2012b). In this example, the substitution (involving two similar materials both of a lifetime exceeding 25 years) took place along with an ongoing development and thus avoided any disruption of supply.

Looking at the manufacturing industry in general, the last 50 year has seen massive substitution of organic polymer materials (plastic) where metals were used earlier. Even electrically conducting polymers have come into existence during the last decade. This makes it difficult to predict, which properties of each group of materials that may be essential and may refuse substitution. Medieval and Renaissance houses in northern Europe used to be made from burned clay bricks, having a bright red colour. This type of clay became totally exhausted by the mid-20th century, and for a while, houses had to be built from dull yellow bricks. Today, red bricks are back in the repertoire, due to synthetic dying, but a number of new building materials have been created and they sometimes offer possibilities not available earlier. An example is the façade elements with high structural strength, integrated heat insulation and no cool bridges that allow houses to be built with very low heat losses in winter and very low heat intrusion during summer. Before such materials were invented, there would be beams and poles providing the structural strength, and insulating material was put between the structural elements, unable to prevent heat to be conducted by way of the higher heat conductance of the structural beams. The bottom line is that it would be very difficult to say, if there are durable materials that fundamentally cannot be substituted.

While this is true for durable materials, it is not for nonrenewable material, such as fossil or nuclear fuels. When these are used they are, as mentioned previously, converted into substances too dilute to be reused, and real depletion is thus possible. For nuclear fuels, this is a two-step process because current light-water reactors use nuclear fuels in a way that makes the reserves no larger than those of oil and natural gas, but where future use in breeder reactors could extend the effective period to depletion considerably (although still very short compared with timescales of human societies). The substitution hypothesis, which originally seemed to work well among fossil energy resources (Hubbert, 1962), under the assumption that the prices of different fuels would be similar once their conversion was suitably developed, is now appearing invalid because substitutions offered currently have much higher prices and then require that the energy sector assumes a dramatically larger share in the total economy, which is not inviting an economic business-as-usual future. One must also note that the substitution of plastic (organic polymers) for metals mentioned earlier is only a short-term solution, as the main raw material for plastic is fossil fuels and particularly oil. If other options can appear in the future is not known.

The verdict on the substitution hypothesis is vague. In the long-term, substitution of course will have its limits, while in the near future only resources that are indisputably depletable will require a detailed investigation of possible alternatives, their costs, and the time it will take to make them viable, technically and maybe economically. If economic viability is not possible, then arrangements of society need to be made that make the substitutes work anyway, with adaptation of the social organization to higher prices. Nearly all the critical remarks of a general character directed against infinite substitution options were formulated in a paper by Ehrlich (1989).

The cost of environmental damage (pollution, climate change, land deterioration, habitat removal and lack of diversity) and social damage (health effects, poor work conditions, risk and accidents, change in human rights and political conditions) can in principle be evaluated and sometimes quantified in monetary terms by a lifecycle analysis and following assessment (Sørensen, 2011). Numerous examples show that the lifecycle cost, including costs occurring from the technology cradle to grave for both the product and the side-chains providing inputs and outputs to the product during its lifetime, can be quite substantial, and that restricting cost comparisons to direct cost can be very misleading because some technologies have few externalities, while others have total costs dominated by externalities. This means that the neoliberal focus on direct cost is generally false and will lead to wrong decisions made by consumers as well as by societies.

Advocating that the market will arrange all to the best is easy in a world where several previous decades have established a number of social safeguards that would not have emerged in the minimal government paradigm. Food items are sold in marketplaces, but with regulations ensuring they do not containing harmful substances, are not too old for consumption and based on farm products under continual agricultural authority inspection. Houses are built and sold in conformity with regulations, such as building codes and electricity norms, ensuring safety from collapse or unsafe installations. When the industry and commerce responsible for the products and services traded in society still chose to obey some rules of decency, it is because they see that not all consumers are of the neoliberal persuasion and they would like to retain those who are not as customers. To cater to that group, companies even find it useful to create a ‘green’ image for their enterprise. For instance, there is currently a choice of both energy-efficient cars and less efficient cars, and even some four-wheel drive offroad vehicles are becoming fairly efficient.

One would have to conclude that the current attitude toward the ‘full costing’ methods offered by life cycle analysis and more simplified versions of externality inclusion is mixed and that even those who generally endorse the neoliberal paradigm often make exceptions in the form of at least rudimentary concessions to environment and health.

The UN Declaration from 1948 contains a number of far-reaching statements that are reproduced below in full, with a few remarks added about the current status relative to the articles of the document, as well as remarks on where there may have arisen a need to expand or modify the text, although these are very few in number. The Declaration starts with a sharp and beautifully written preamble (in a fluent legal language!), which needs no updating:

 

Following this acknowledgement of what defines free human beings in a community setting, the declaration states in 30 articles the rules it sees as needed to make the human societies function:

The first articles set out a number of basic human rights and the following ones give guidance for how to set up civil law and define admissible ways of conducting police and judicial work: forbidding arbitrary arrest, torture during detention and requiring guilt to be decided by courts in innocent-unless-proven-otherwise procedures conducted under full public scrutiny. These paragraphs are, for example, systematically violated by countries, such as the United States, in its processes against suspected terrorists (people disliked seem to currently be as routinely termed terrorists as they were termed communists 50 years ago). They are allegedly arrested and kept jailed in secret, without notifying anyone, are subjected to water boarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation,” and are not allowed a fair trial in an open court. Of course, many other countries currently violate human rights, but what makes the United States special is the hypocrisy of claiming that they interfere with the affairs of other countries in an effort to teach them democracy, freedom and justice! The following articles deal with rights of each citizen:

Article 12 forbids interference with the personal life of human being, including the collection of information from letters (and Internet visits) and other abuses of privacy, such as the US National Security Agency’s spy activities on global phone conversations, emails and Internet surf-patterns. The following articles ensure freedom of movement, but accept that the world is divided into country entities that may be visited (without political persecution) but where permission is needed for a foreigner to take permanent residence. The strong emphasis on nations is appropriate today, but other forms of global organization with fewer rights accorded to national entities are possible, as will be further discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.

Article 16 deals with the freedom of marriage. Some would disagree with paragraph 16.3 stating that the traditional family is the basis of society, and problems of overpopulation may imply the necessity to restrict the number of children that a woman can have, as it has been tried in China. Also the provisions regarding rights to own property could be seen as based on a particular economic arrangement, which is not of a sufficiently universal validity to warrant inclusion in the declaration of human rights (cf. the discussion in Section 2.1.1 of rental arrangements substituting ownership for some types of property, namely those with infinite value, as further elaborated in Section 3.1).

Articles 18 and 19 contain fundamental statements of the rights of freethinking, of holding any beliefs (e.g., of a religious nature) and free expression, whether in speech or otherwise. These are personal rights although it is stated that they could be exercised in unison by a group of people. Free expression includes free flow of information in any type of media across national borders. The nature of rights as pertaining only to individual citizens is emphasized in Article 20, stating that individuals may but cannot be forced to belong to any association, whether political, religious or of any other kind. Specifically, no rights are given to institutions. This article is today de facto violated not only by Islamic extremists, but in many cases by all Islamic institutions, just as they have been violated by the Roman Catholic Christian Church through its early cleansing campaigns, its crusades and inquisition, as well as its forced conversion to Christianity during the colonial period.

Article 21 about governance is remarkable as it does not take a stand on whether democracy should be direct or through representatives. Article 22 is a sweeping plea for everyone’s right to be accorded secure economic, social and cultural conditions. Mentioning that the agents securing these rights can be national or international is a statement on the role that the United Nation hoped to be increasingly accorded, extending the modest start during the early post–World War II years.

Articles 23 and 24 sets out the rights to work and leisure time, with remuneration, but may be criticized for being vague on the possibility of work arrangements different from those of current salaried workers and employees serving enterprise owners. Furthermore, the right to form worker’s unions would seem already covered by Article 20 and it is not clear why such unions should have a fundamental role in society, particularly because their methods of operation and providing help to workers is not defined in the declaration text. Here the United Nation is probably responding to problems characterizing the previous history of capitalism, but in a form not quite possessing the universality aimed at in the declaration.

Article 25.1 starts spelling out the most fundamental rights of food and shelter, as well as the right to assistance in cases of health problem, unemployment, and other disabilities outside the individual’s control. It is not specified who should provide the required services and pay for them. Moreover, the formulation ‘himself and his family’ indicates an unfortunate endorsement of patriarchal societies, which is not weakened by the fact that the other part of the article deals with motherhood. Article 26 states the basic right to education, careful not to restrict it to childhood schooling and emphasizing the important role of education in creating the conditions for securing respect for the human rights. Many will find it unfortunate, that paragraph 26.3 accords parents the right to decide what education their children should have. This may seem in the real world to be a prescription for avoiding progress in the direction of making the human rights generally accepted, and the possibility that governments could be more progressive than parents is excluded by according the education selection right to all adult citizens, independent of their own education. Even if unlimited democracy is generally in place, Article 26.3 would seem to allow any minority to educate their children in ways disregarding some or all of the human rights in the declaration. One may also note that gender issues are not highlighted in the declaration except in the preamble, but they can be said to have been dealt with by the general rights accorded to everyone.

The cultural and scientific sides of activities taking place in a society are dealt with in Article 27, inviting everyone to enjoy but at the same time emphasizing the right to institute patent and copyright protection. Current implementations of these ‘rights’ are only modestly benefiting those creating the artwork, music or inventions of a scientific or technological nature, relative to publishers and companies reaping the profits for periods that by far exceeds the life of the originator (e.g., in Europe, copyrights currently extend 70 years after the death of the originator). Whether occasional inheritance of rights by children (usually not involved in the creation) is a remedy remains open to debate.

Article 29.1 is remarkable as it introduces duties that are connected with the benefits of human rights. This subject may be expanded, but its introduction here is farsighted. Articles 29 and 30 sum up the perseverance of the rights formulated in the declaration. A declaration of human rights should be universal, independent of time and place and as this brief review of the Human Rights Declaration seen through a 2015 eye shows, the 1948 UN documents come close to achieving this. Despite the abundant violation of these rights that takes place, they have indeed become part of the luggage that a large part of the world’s population carries, if not always conscientiously.

Some countries have incorporated a number of the human rights into their constitutions, along with paragraphs on governance and occasionally additional topics. The formulation or updating of constitutions to make sure that they address both basic rights and pressing issues currently identified will be addressed in Section 3.2.

Current implementations of democracy are basically not using the classical Greek idea of direct democracy (Section 3.2.1), but rely on a representative democracy, which indeed was also the outcome of the attempts to shape a democracy in ancient Greece. The standard objection to direct democracy is that if people are asked to vote yes or no to paying taxes, a majority voting ‘no’ is likely, while the same voters probably would vote ‘yes’ to expenditures seen as benefiting them. This behavior would invalidate many of the functions usually expected from national entities, but the example could as well be taken to illustrate that democracy cannot be based upon uninformed voters, and that earning the right to vote should rather be tied to having proven that the issues voted upon are understood (more on this line of thinking in Chapter 3). However, in a representative democracy there may well be singular issues that are best determined by a general referendum, and most current democracies have provisions for staging such referenda, even if the basic governance is through representative parliamentary assemblies and executive governments.

The basis for current democratic implementations is one or more parliamentary congregations (one is becoming the most common preference) with members elected by a legally determined procedure. They constitute what is termed the legislative branch of government (issuing specific laws on any relevant matter), and are supplemented by an executive branch (ministers and their departments) and by a legal branch (courts to resolve disputes and ambiguities of interpreting laws). Some countries have a government headed by a prime minister, but at the same time a king or a president. Kings are of course left over from the time before democracy, and because they are hereditary and not elected, they should not have any power in a democracy. Yet constitutions are often unclear on this point or even accord a certain power to the king. The same is true for presidents, although they are usually elected and their power therefore more legitimate, but the relative distribution of power between presidents and parliament, and the roles of ministers (sometimes called secretaries) in government departments (including the prime minister usually heading a state department) as demonstrated by their choice in dividing loyalty between president and parliament, also differ between nations.

Procedures for election vary substantially between countries, but the tendency has been toward replacing person election by party election, meaning that one votes for a party and optionally state, which candidate in this party is preferred. The advantage of this scheme can be that if the person voted for already has enough votes to get elected or has far too few, then your vote may go to another person in the same party, possibly with similar opinions. However, the details of voting legislation may prevent such a vote transfer. Some countries have ‘winner-takes-all’ elections on both state and regional levels, where votes on other candidates than the winners are lost. If there are many candidates for an important position, say, for the election of a president, some countries have legislation requiring additional elections if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, omitting in the second round the candidates with fewer votes than the two highest ones. For election of the members of parliament, it is often considered important that each region of a country is represented, and some countries have a fixed number of delegates to be elected in each region. This may also cause bias because the distribution of population originally used to set the number of delegates can change with time. For example, in the United Kingdom, such numbers of delegates were kept fixed from before the industrial revolution to recent times, causing cities with many workers to be grossly underrepresented in parliament, relative to smaller communities often dominated by people with employer outlooks. The same is true in the United States, where each state has a number of representatives based on population distributions valid some time ago. As a result, the presidential candidate getting most popular votes may lose the election (as it happened for Al Gore vs. George Bush Junior in the year 2000; Katz, 2001a). This is in violation of the very basic democratic principle that each vote cast should count the same. Some European countries have remedied this by a procedure invented by d’Hondt in Holland, in which some fraction of the parliamentary delegates are elected according to local preferences, while the rest are elected from otherwise lost votes on a national scale, by attributing same party votes until the average number of votes necessary for a seat is reached. Obviously, this procedure only works within a party-based frame of elections. Countries based on party democracy usually have a lower limit for parties (typically 2–5% of all votes), under which no seats in parliament may be won by the d’Hondt redistribution method. This means that ‘lost votes’ have not fully been eliminated. In any case it is a questionable presumption that if you vote for a person that is not elected, then you do not mind that your vote is donated to someone else in the same party.

Following parliamentary elections, a government is formed by adjusting department portfolios and selecting ministers for each department. The procedure for this also varies between countries. Some let the largest party try to form a government, then if it fails the next largest and so on. Others have the king or president decide on how the government establishment is accomplished. In the end, the goal is to establish a government, eventually as a coalition between more than one party that does not have a parliamentary majority against it (at least not initially). This may even be a minority government, if some parties do not want to be part of the government but also do not wish to overthrow it.

Reducing the political debates and deliberations to party quarrels obviously involves severe dangers because it largely restricts the area of political action to inflexible party programs and agreed policies, losing the pluralism of personal attitudes held by the totality of members of a parliament and even more those held by their constituencies. Some countries have constitutions stating that members of parliament, once elected, are bound only by their own conscience, but this cannot be so if the parliament is divided into a number of parties, requiring their representatives to vote in unison on each important issue. The situation becomes cloudier in the present political climate, where many parties seek election by making populist statements aimed only to please the voters and by paying for advertising campaigns (often conducted by professional media-manipulating companies). In both cases, there is no guarantee that the policy pursued will resemble the preelection statements and promises or that these are at all amenable to execution.

Mair (2013) flatly concludes that party democracy is no longer a valid or acceptable form of democracy. He explains the increasing indifference of citizens towards politicians and politics by noting that voters do not see lifetime party politicians as actually ruling the country: often groups outside the political parties decide important issues in defiance of democracy and unchallenged get away with influencing decisions by acting as ‘stakeholders’ (USA) or ‘lobbyists’ (EU), often in consort with civil servants in government departments, violating the professional detachment expected from them (Blinder, 1997; Katz, 2001b; Zakaria, 1997). Actually, requiring unbiased work from civil servants is a European specialty because European civil servants are not replaced when the government changes colours, in contrast to, for example, the USA, at least for the upper echelons of bureaucrats. The problem is not just with illegitimate influence on decisions by nonelected actors, but also the party-based democracy is accused of often acting for party promotion rather than for the constituency (Katz and Mair, 2009), just as politicians have been accused of promoting their own livelihood as lifetime social parasites.

Most of the near 50% of the current world not embracing the notion of democracy have governments and parliaments that often borrow several traits from their democratic counterparts. Some countries allow only one party but still stage elections and have political debates, although often hidden in the corridors of an oligarchic minority, but they are occasionally influenced by expressions voiced in the general public or by important enterprises. Other countries have an autocratic ruler not admitting public debate, but occasionally still being influenced, for example, by advisory bodies.

Different efforts to quantify welfare have been made (Section 2.1.1), for example by resorting to interview studies when data have not been available. Clearly, a sober measure of welfare would be much more useful than the GNP, and efforts to construct alternatives to GNP that would approach this goal will be presented in Section 3.1.2.

It should be mentioned that focus on welfare has led to practical results in the form of governance schemes giving welfare a central role. This is the case for the Scandinavian Welfare Economic Model that was implemented in the 1930s and onward in the three Scandinavian countries. It is based on

In addition to these social benefits, the welfare economic model made use of the substantial public sector created to handle such payments, financed by progressive taxation to also create strategic sectors handling transport, energy production, mail and telecommunication, arguing that these services could not be left to the fluctuating market choices. However, all other sectors were left in private hands and no general nationalization was foreseen. This defined the Social Democratic political paradigm, as distinct from the socialistic one. The late 20th century transition to a neoliberalistic economic paradigm has so far not affected the four basic benefits listed, although debates on ‘user-payment’ have occasionally surfaced, but the paradigm change has led to privatization of nearly all the former strategic sectors.