Scraped from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ in 02/2021
This is a critical breakdown of each of the UN’s sustainable development goals. Please note that this is to strengthen the ultimate purpose they’re trying to attain, not tear it down.
I’m aware that my views are unpopular. It doesn’t change them, and I’m fairly certain that this is the only way to make social progress.
One far-reaching issue across these goals is Shirky’s Principle. Organizations don’t have much reason to entirely fix a solution when their existence depends on resolving the problem. The only way to fix that is to create a temporary-only group with no permissible time extension.
Goal 1 – No Poverty
We must define poverty.
- If we measure poverty by the quality of life, technology today would make 99.99% of the people who lived 100 years ago qualify as “poverty-stricken”.
- Quality of life is also inherently difficult to quantify with money. Someone living on the equivalent of $1.90 a day in sub-Saharan Africa is living better than someone living on $10 a day in New York City. It goes back to market prices for goods and services and employment, both parts of Goal 8.
- If poverty refers strictly to inequality, we must move the discussion to Goal 10.
In general, poverty exists as a comparative store of human power, and people are too selfish to give up their proportionally higher power entirely.
Goal 2 – Zero Hunger
This affects a ton of the other goals, since survival is literally at the bottom of the hierarchy. If everyone focused on this goal and Goal 6 above everything else, people would feel safe enough to start solving everything else from inside their community without needing international cooperation.
As of now, world hunger should no longer be an issue. We have enough technology and an adequate supply chain system to feed the world five times over.
Goal 3 – Good Health and Well-Being
As of now, uneven healthcare shouldn’t be an issue. Medical technology is sufficient to address many issues, with many geniuses building increasingly cheaper solutions to resolve this problem.
The primary issue is that this technology’s adoption often undermines the people who have power in those portions of the world. Aide packages mysteriously disappear once the country’s military helps distribute them, for example.
The only solution is either more control over that nation’s leadership, more incentive for their government to distribute medical equipment, or more access to a free market for medical components and services. Healthy, happy people make a country thrive, but they also start climbing Maslow’s ladder enough to ask why they can’t have a democratically elected leader, and most military-enforced governments don’t like those questions.
One of the most effective forms of improved healthcare, though, comes in understanding basic hygiene and infectivity, which comes naturally with Goal 4.
Goal 4 – Quality Education
Understanding is critical to all success, and education is the means to that understanding.
The onset of the internet makes education trivially easy. Thus, this goal could easily be rephrased as “Unfiltered/Free Internet for All”.
This won’t come without pushback. There’s plenty of power at risk of redistribution by groups that control information. For example, educated people tend to resist conformity and question the legitimacy of an authority’s power.
The most lasting form of education, though, comes through the wisdom and experience of the older generation. In that sense, in all disciplines, venerating the works of the elderly is the best way to glean tribal knowledge that’s as-of-yet unattainable via systemic reproduction.
Goal 5 – Gender Equality
Females and males are biologically different from birth. Unfortunately, those differences often create nuanced differences in purpose.
Like with many left-leaning ideologies, the hangup ties to the specificity of the term “equality”. In that sense, this is a subset of Goal 10.
Since males and females don’t think precisely the same way, they will not accomplish purposes in the same way, or with a similarly predictable timeline. Should we give females and males an equal shot at everything, or make compensating efforts to accommodate for inadequacies in one gender or another?
Generally, while anyone can agree on mistreatment and dehumanization of one gender (specifically females), it’s self-evident that since about 50% of people are males, both females and males should find an agreement on things that are equal. Given the absurdly difficult challenges natural to merely living in the same building together, we should start with imitating the modeling done within the vast variety of healthy marriages sprinkled across society.
Goal 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation
This problem is foundational to everything else. Developed societies need hygienic, healthy people, which requires free access to water.
Like with Goal 2, there’s zero reason why we can’t make this happen. Michael Pritchard has made a pristine and affordable solution for clean drinking water that doesn’t need plumbing.
Goal 7 – Affordable and Clean Energy
Accomplishing this Goal will make every other Goal much easier.
We have technology to industrialize every nation right now, but this is a very political topic because of Goal 13.
In the absence of climate-related discussions, we could provide access to cheap electricity to all the nations. However, that would likely shift around the power dynamic, and some NGOs (non-governmental organizations) would lose their funding if they’re no longer useful.
The impact of this is huge. Charles Eliot once called electricity “carrier of light and power, devourer of space and time, bearer of human speech over land and sea, greatest servant of man–yet itself unknown.” It multiplies force and is the greatest form of non-human power we have available to us.
Goal 8 – Decent Work and Economic Growth
Generally, people work when they have a reason to work. The most clear version of this is money, but it can be any form of power to accomplish what they want, except for enslavement.
Very often, governments of many countries strip motivations to do society-enhancing things. A policy can create a perverse incentive, and other times a totalitarian regime makes people feel their sense of identity can’t extend into the world around them.
Other times, non-government groups possess enough power to control what a government does (e.g., oppressive religious groups, corporations). In those situations, clearing out corruption pushes against many groups at once and becomes nearly impossible without a proper war.
Either way, giving freedom for people to work the way they want, on things they want, without large-scale oppression, typically requires outside competition. If governments fear invasion (especially when they may fall behind on technology trends), their leaders will frequently adopt changes they wouldn’t have otherwise made that work in the best interests of the public.
Goal 9 – Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
There’s really no such thing as “sustainable” infrastructure, since it’s the product of past-tense actions by the people in a region. Thus, the only sustainable infrastructure comes through the continued maintenance by motivated people who wish to build and improve their environment.
In that sense, Goals 7 and 8 naturally lead to automatically satisfying this Goal. More broadly, Goal 11 addresses sustainability.
Goal 10 – Reduced Inequalities
We must define inequality.
- As a concept, reality itself makes us all unequal. Some are stronger, smarter, more popular, likeable, or strong-willed than others. This is a statement of fact.
- However, the perceived inequality comes from the values we prioritize on things.
- In a fair game, there will always be winners and losers, and the only people in any game with a problem with the arrangement are the losers.
- More accurately, we must consider unjust inequality.
- Unjust inequality fits into several classifications:
- Unfair opportunity – some people have more than others when they didn’t earn it
- Unfair treatment – some people are given uneven treatment compared to others
This entire discussion of inequality also has time-sensitive implications. Is the child of an oppressor responsible for the oppressor’s actions? It’s safe to say that the majority of crimes against humanity have happened by long-dead people, so how do we reconcile this?
The first thing, before anything else, is partial forgiveness by the injured against their persecutors, specifically as release. Then, when the unjustly treated can speak reasonably about their suffering and the people who may lose from the dialogue can have compassion on the victims enough to sacrifice for them, then and only then everyone can fairly discuss terms.
A nation is made of its citizens, and individual differences create individual inequalities. Entire nations become unequal because of differences between those nations. Instead of “fixing” an inequality, we must thoroughly understand why any inequality exists. Dictatorships have fewer hard-working citizens in them than democracies, and that has very little to do with who is in charge compared to how that society distributes power.
The sensible action would be to see which countries measure up as the most prosperous and expect the other countries to imitate that of their own governmental volition, with inequalities only measured after accounting for unwillingness to work with “best practices”. Generally, the USA has been fantastically prosperous (contrary to leftist complaints), and other countries could learn from that.
Goal 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities
Sustainable, like many other words, is often stated and rarely defined. Broadly, it means that things persist indefinitely.
The only legitimate deterioration of things persisting indefinitely comes through misuse of an object:
- Tragedy of the commons is when people don’t maintain what they don’t believe they own (i.e., public property). Privatizing everything runs the risk of monopoly, but no monopolist wants to lose power, so they’ll continue making something (and farming it) as long as they gain from it. As it stands now, we live in an oligopoly, which seems to be the sensible solution to the issue of deteriorating commons.
- Abuse, typically through addiction or hoarding power, prevents maximizing resources. This can best be solved by allowing a free market that permits inventors to pursue further purposes that use as-yet unknown resources. Technology tends to generate new resources all the time (e.g., copper was just a pottery material until we developed electricity).
To make something sustainable, everyone should feel peace about their purposes. This requires all classes of society to have equal and fair rules, equally enforced.
But, equal rules aren’t easy because corruption often creeps into the highest places of society. The answer is a hybrid republic and democracy form of government, along with term limits, complete public transparency about everything, and a completely unfettered press, just in case anything starts becoming suspicious. Even then, it can implode at any time if enough groups conspire together to overthrow it, from inside or out.
Goal 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production
While this is a subset of Goal 11, there’s a bit more regarding how it develops.
Because of human purpose, we always want to maintain and sustain things if we find meaning in their maintenance. Independent fishermen and loggers, for example, have every incentive to “farm” their stock since they wish to maintain their careers indefinitely.
However, as groups scale, the purpose shifts. A logging manager, for example, cares more for self-interested management than self-interested logging, and there’s more in common among management roles in different industries than there is among their lowest-ranking members.
In that sense, large organizations that create a subgroup of cultural elites are the general cause of all large-scale waste. However, this tends to happen with any group that lasts more than a few decades.
Goal 13 – Climate Action
One scientific reality about climate change is that carbon measurements aren’t anywhere near as useful to measure climate change as water measurements:
- Rainfall and precipitation
- Sea and river levels
- Cloud formation
- Desertification
- Changes in water temperatures
- Growth patterns of icebergs
As it stands, our climate is improving dramatically, mostly because we have plenty of technology and governmental control methods to prevent environmental damage.
However, the positive impact of the climate pales in comparison to the power games played with the climate narrative. By making a broad claim of “reduce emissions”, governments get unlimited access to measure any data they deem necessary.
If the climate is in utter peril, and we’re all precariously close to imminent death, then we must submit absolutely all forms of activity to our governments, since there’s not a single human thing that doesn’t make carbon. Further, depopulating via mass genocide is absolutely critical for the survival of humanity.
Otherwise, if there’s even the remotest doubt about the measurements’ connection to the climate, or there’s been tremendous political swaying of the legitimate risks associated to the climate, we should seriously consider whether all these anti-human-activity actions are even necessary.
The fatalist Climate Changeism is more a religion of our times than anything else. Certain scientific facts indicate truth that opposes the mainstream narrative (e.g., the Mount Saint Helens eruption caused more pollution than the entire Industrial Revolution, some bacteria eat radiation and hydrocarbons), but today’s modern, trendy ideas are as resistant to influence as the ubiquity of the Roman pantheon two thousand years ago.
Goal 14 – Life Below Water
As an extension of Goal 13, there’s not much to say on it, except that we don’t really know much about it.
While the body of information is slowly building, we presently know more about stars millions of years away than about everything underneath our oceans. Before we make decisions about our bodies of water, we need more data.
Goal 15 – Life on Land
As another extension of Goal 13, we must consider the philosophical concept of mankind.
While it’s our natural tendency to imagine a human/nature dichotomy, we are a part of nature. Religious perspectives aside, we have the dominant right of nature to whatever we please purely as a principle of power.
In an evolutionary sense, other organisms on this planet aren’t as fit as us. They either serve our purpose or we can do away with them. Anything of the sort that says, “We have a right to protect the Earth” is simply religious sentimentalist jargon.
Goal 16 – Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
The justice of a society hangs heavily on its culture. A good society requires a culture driven on aspects of love for each other. Otherwise, it requires fair and well-enforced laws.
The culture of a society is determined by its leaders, both big and small. I’m not advocating for Plato’s philosopher-kings, but we must know the moral basis for everyone who comes into power.
The closest thing we have, barring a theocracy, is a free-market solution: everyone gets a vote. This is subject to abuse since political power becomes a popularity contest, but it’s worked the best so far to preserve life and liberties compared to all the other solutions (e.g., military takeovers).
It’s a compounding issue: the culture affects the leadership, which affects the culture. The solution goes back to everyone receiving basic human rights, then making sure in some way that the leadership is punished for violating them.
Goal 17 – Partnerships
The entire idea of everyone partnering together is a pleasant-sounding one, but a poor one.
History has shown that people most frequently unify over a common enemy. It’s the reason we have the history of the nations as they are.
The only way for there to be any unity is to have a shared hatred of the same thing threatening society. Goal 13 is an attempt at it, but COVID-19 has shown that a few short months of society shutting down can undo decades of unhealthy pollution, so it’s difficult to get everyone on a shared purpose about it.
Conclusion
These goals are driven by a valiant desire for justice, and it’s worth noting. We already have technology and systems in place that can solve all the world’s problems.
The only reason we still have these issues after millennia is because there’s too much to gain (e.g., money) in treating the issue instead of fixing it. It’ll likely persist as long as the moral condition of mankind stays the same.
However, if you’re really compelled to change things, there’s a sane order to approach it:
PHASE 1 – DE-CORRUPTION
- Goal 4 – Quality Education
- Goal 16 – Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
PHASE 2 – SURVIVAL
- Goal 2 – Zero Hunger
- Goal 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation
- Goal 7 – Affordable and Clean Energy
PHASE 3 – SAFETY
- Goal 3 – Good Health and Well-Being
- Goal 8 – Decent Work and Economic Growth
- Goal 9 – Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
PHASE 4 – EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
- Goal 1 – No Poverty
- Goal 5 – Gender Equality
- Goal 10 – Reduced Inequalities
PHASE 5 – ACTUALIZATION
- Goal 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities
- Goal 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production
- Goal 13 – Climate Action
- Goal 14 – Life Below Water
- Goal 15 – Life on Land
- Goal 17 – Partnerships
Skipping over Phase 1 means the rest won’t matter.