Economic, Social, and Environmental
The Rise of the Global Middle Class: How the Search for the Good Life Can Change the World
By Homi Kharas. Brookings Institution Press, 2023, 216 pp.
Arguably the single most important economic development of the last half century has been the rise of the global middle class: over four billion individuals who are neither impoverished nor exceedingly rich and who can reasonably “aspire to enjoy the good life,” as Kharas puts it. Middle-class status, many social scientists have reasoned, is associated with fulfilling employment, the ability to support family and community, and, more broadly, satisfaction in life. Scholars have also associated the middle class with the preference for democracy over authoritarianism. Kharas cautions that although those dynamics may have been broadly true of the emergence of the middle class in the twentieth century in the West, these associations may not prevail in other times and places. Higher incomes do not guarantee life satisfaction. Consumerism entails the production of ever more goods at ever-lower prices, resulting in the loss of biodiversity, greater carbon emissions, and ecological destruction. The examples of China, Iran, and Turkey point to the tenuousness of the link between democratization and the rise of the middle classes. Kharas nonetheless concludes on a hopeful note, arguing that the global middle class can be a force for social and political good if its members press for decarbonization, spend their money on sustainable products, and support policies that foster social mobility and create decent jobs for all.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma
By Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar. Crown, 2023, 352 pp.
Suleyman, one of the co-founders of the influential artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, argues that AI
and synthetic biology are poised to transform a world shaped, until now, by human intelligence and natural biological life. These new technologies have the potential to eliminate mundane intellectual labor and eradicate debilitating diseases, promising enormous economic and health benefits. But Suleyman warns that these technologies also pose a dire, even existential, threat to the nation-state and to today’s society. If unregulated, AI and synthetic biology will allow bad actors to unleash massive cyberattacks, engineered pandemics, and tidal waves of misinformation. An authoritarian clampdown on these new technologies would likely require impossible, dystopian levels of surveillance. Efforts to ban these technologies will likewise not succeed, since they will run into powerful business interests that seek to commercialize the technological advances. Instead, Suleyman suggests steps to ensure that developers build appropriate controls into their technologies. To this end, he recommends regular audits, international cooperation to harmonize laws and programs, and measures to slow the pace of technological change that would buy time for regulators and governments to catch up. The author’s argument is compelling and alarming and serves as an important wake-up call.
Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change By Stephen G. Gross. Oxford University Press, 2023, 416 pp.
Energy lies at the center of German politics, as illustrated by former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fateful decision to invest in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and by the recent controversy over phasing out fossil-fuel-based heating in homes. Gross shows that debates over energy have been important since the foundation of the Federal Republic after World War II. He describes several major German energy transitions, beginning with the shift to petroleum from hard coal in the 1950s and ending with the ongoing transition to renewable power, and their concurrent political consequences. The centrality of energy in German political economy rests in the country’s distinctive history. In contrast to France and the United Kingdom, Germany lacked its own global energy companies to secure hydrocarbon supplies, allowing environmental interests to gain traction among political insiders.The country’s status as a manufacturing and export powerhouse enabled it to become a leading producer and exporter of renewable energy equipment, forging an alliance between business elites and environmentalists. Today, efforts by the Greens to build a decentralized, citizen-run power grid have resonated with voters who recall the pernicious role that powerful industrialists played a century ago in encouraging the rise of authoritarianism.
Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
By Ed Conway. Knopf, 2023, 512 pp.
The global scramble for lithium, an essential input in the manufacture of rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles, is a measure of how raw materials power today’s high-tech
world. Conway reminds readers that other, more commonplace commodities, such as sand, salt, iron, copper, and oil, are no less essential. Without sand, there would be no silicon or glass; without iron, no steel; without copper, no modern electricity generation and distribution networks. Without salt, many chemicals and pharmaceuticals and even clean drinking water would not exist. Oil’s importance in powering the modern industrial economy is self-evident. Lithium rounds out Conway’s list of six essential materials. These commodities are obtained through the operation of extraordinarily complex technological, economic, and political systems, often at considerable cost to the physical environment. Government efforts to deal with these environmental consequences are full of paradoxes. For instance, the side effects of manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars include carbon emissions and toxic runoff from lithium and cobalt mines. Conway imagines a world in which humankind succeeds in replacing most of its fossil fuels with renewable alternatives and in which energy is clean and abundant. He warns, however, that getting there will require considerable technological and geopolitical ingenuity.