Postmaterial Experience Economics, Population,
and Environmental Sustainability
Douglas
E. Booth
Prior
to retirement, Douglas Booth taught economics at Marquette University for 26
years. A specialist in urban and environmental economics, he has published ve
books, including Hooked on Growth: Economic Addictions and the Environment
(2004) and The Environmental Consequences of Growth: Steady-State Economics as
an Alternative to Ecological Decline (1998), and a number of articles on urban
and environmental topics. His latest publications are “Postmaterialism and
Support for the Environment in the U.S.,” Society & Natural Resources,
30:11 (2017) and “Postmaterial Experience Economics,” Journal of Human Values
(2018 forthcoming).
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DOI: 10.3197/jps.2018.2.2.33
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Booth, D.E. 2016. 'Postmaterial Experience Economics, Population, and Environmental Sustainability'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 2(2): 33–50.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2018.2.2.33
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Postmaterial values with their
reduced emphasis on accumulating material possessions lead to greater political
support for limits on environmental pollution and to a less entropic way of
life that increases environmental sustainability. Similarly, reducing human
fertility to replacement levels can stabilize population and increase
environmental sustainability in the future by reducing the pressure of
population growth on environmental resources. In recent history, increases in
per capita economic well being has been a primary driver of expansion in
postmaterialism and reduce human fertility worldwide. The irony of this phenomena
is that economic development potentially destructive to the environment leads
to more postmaterialism and reduced fertility, both of which benefit
environmental sustainability. In this article, the underpinnings of these
conclusions will be set out as well as possible ways around the dilemma they
bring.
The
driving motivation in the modern life of the global economy most observers
would agree is to accumulate material possessions. From possessions come life’s
essential accomplishments and enjoyments. Many profess a belief in God as the
final source of meaning, but what we do in practice to give our life
significance is go to the cathedral of the mall or amazon.com.
An emerging alternative view, one that can be called ‘postmaterialist’, claims
instead that many human satisfactions come from the experiences of creative
expression and interactions with human others in the enjoyment of life’s
cultural and natural wonders independent of private possession. Economic
theorizing focuses heavily on the notion that accumulating material possessions
is a necessary and sufficient path to a positive life experience. While
material possessions may be necessary for the good life, they need not be
sufficient nor even necessary beyond a threshold amount, opening up the
possibility for human engagement in activities where material possession is
secondary and not especially important.
The purpose of this article is
to set out a theory of postmaterial economic experience that takes as a point
of departure Ronald Inglehart’s highly regarded theory of postmaterial values
and to explain the potential relationships between postmaterialism, human
population, and environmental sustainability. Postmaterial values, and their
reduced emphasis on accumulating material possessions, lead to greater
political support for limits on environmental pollution and to a less entropic
way of life that increases environmental sustainability. Similarly, reducing
human fertility to replacement levels can stabilized population and increase
environmental sustainability in the future by reducing the pressure of
population growth on environmental resources. In recent history, an increase in
per capita economic well-being has fostered an expansion in postmaterialism on
one hand, and reduce human fertility worldwide on the other. The irony of this
phenomena is that economic development potentially destructive to the
environment leads to more postmaterialism and reduced fertility, both of which
benefit environmental sustainability. In the pages to follow, the underpinnings
of these conclusions will be set out as well as possible ways around the
dilemma they bring.
Inglehart’s Theory of Postmaterial Values
The
theory of postmaterial experience economics presented here is inspired by the
work of Ronald Inglehart, a University of Michigan political science professor,
who formulated the original conception of postmaterialism in terms of attitudes
towards collective social goals with an eye to its use in empirical research
(Abramson & Inglehart, 1995; Inglehart & Abramson, 1994, 1999; Welzel
& Inglehart, 2008). If you attach high priorities to such purposes as (1)
protecting freedom of speech, (2) giving people more say in important
government decisions, (3) seeing that people have more say about how things are
done at their jobs and in their communities, (4) trying to make our cities and
countryside more beautiful, (5) progress toward a less impersonal and more
humane society, and (6) progress toward a society in which ideas count more
than money, then you are a postmaterialist. If instead you attach high
priorities to such goals as (7) maintaining order in the nation, (8) fighting
rising prices, (9) a high level of economic growth, (10) a commitment to strong
defense forces, (11) a stable economy, and (12) the fight against crime. In
this case you are a materialist. If your highest priorities are all
materialist, that’s what you are; if your highest priorities all go the other direction
you are a postmaterialist; if you have a mix of highest priorities you fall on
a spectrum between materialism and postmaterialism (Abramson & Inglehart,
1995; Inglehart, 2008).
Survey
research on postmaterialism finds that if you are currently a young adult, you
probably grew up in a period of economic prosperity, and if you are older you
more likely faced economic deprivations in your pre-adult years. Because
our basic values are formed by the time we reach adulthood, whether or not we
face economic scarcity or social upheavals in our youth matters. As we
age, our orientations fluctuate to some extent with economic and social
conditions, but our basic outlook does not change much. In explaining this
position, Inglehart offers a socialization hypothesis claiming that our basic
value structure is formed in our youth, and a scarcity hypothesis proposing
that our values will focus most heavily on those items we lack. If, for
instance, our life is highly insecure when we are young, one of our highest priorities
will always be a safe and secure social and material environment (Inglehart
& Abramson, 1994). This is not to say that our values won’t change over
time, but that our basic outlook will be strongly anchored by our coming of age
experience. The result of this behavior pattern will be an increase in the
extent of postmaterial values as younger generations replace older in the adult
population (Abramson & Inglehart, 1995; Inglehart, 2008; Inglehart &
Abramson, 1994, 1999). According to Inglehart, this inter-generational shift in
value orientations can be ultimately explained in terms of Abraham Maslow’s
famous theory of the hierarchy of human needs (Inglehart, 1971; Maslow, 1987).
The hierarchy hypothesized by Maslow includes (1) the basic needs such as food,
drink, sleep, and sex; (2) the need for safety; (3) the need for a sense of
belongingness including love, affection, and acceptance in a community; (4) the
need for self-esteem flowing from prestige and social status; and (5) the need
for self-actualization including being creative or accomplishing worthwhile
purposes in life. The central point of Inglehart’s research findings is that
younger generations came of age farther up the hierarchy of needs than older
and thus place relatively more importance on postmaterialist as opposed to
materialists social goals. Moving up the needs hierarchy in effect shifts one
in the direction of postmaterial experience as a more central focus and away
from an emphasis on materialist economic experience.
Postmaterial Experience
While many of us are strongly
oriented to expanding and reshaping our private world of material possession,
some of us look increasingly to enjoying the publicly available experience of
our cultural and natural legacy. The former among us I shall refer to as
economic materialists, and the later as economic postmaterialists. If we are
materialists our life’s focus is on gaining control over objects and
transforming them to mirror our deepest wishes. Our experience of such control
and its resulting manipulations of the material stuff of life is sensual and
virtual, a product of our perception-driven, conscious thought process. Our
desire to physically manipulate and alter objects as we find them in nature
ultimately calls sometimes for huge transformations of the material world.
Witness the transformation of the global environment following, first, the
agricultural revolution and, second, the industrial revolution (Harari, 2015). For postmaterialists, the essential quest in life is
experiences of the physical world apart from any requirements for ownership and
private control of it. Some material ownership and control is inevitably a part
of our lives—we all need our own private supply of food, clothing, living
space, and such—but post materialists look increasingly for experiences not
necessarily contingent on ownership of physical objects in our field of
perception. To summarize, a materialist is someone who focuses on seeking out
the ownership of objects as an essential ingredient in the mental satisfaction
interactions with them bring. A postmaterialist to the contrary is someone
whose basic need for feelings of control over objects has been met and is
instead more directly oriented to the experiences of phenomena in the physical,
social, and cultural world(Booth, 2018).
Ecological Release, Experience, and Entropy
In a
strictly biological conception of economic behavior, mental experience drives
material acquisitions. A feeling of hunger pushes us to acquire and consume
food; cold temperatures, wind, and rain stimulate us to gain protective
clothing or cover; sexual and family love cause us to copulate, reproduce, and
acquire the material requirements for nurturing, protecting, and defending our
lovers and kin. Mental motivations combined with the contingencies of daily
experience drive our accumulation of control over material goods essential for
long-term survival. We humans in contrast to other species enjoy the privilege
of ecological release, meaning that we need not spend every waking hour in the
satisfaction of our material necessities (Sahlins, 1974). This privilege comes
to us by virtue of our special mental faculties that permit us to exploit
nature’s resources at uniquely high rates of economic efficiency. As a
consequence, we can of course engage in the production of material goods well
beyond our basic needs, or we can hang out and contemplate the beauties of the
world around us, sing songs, or think the big thoughts. We can produce more
than we need and use it to pay others to entertain us with stories or dance,
teach us how to do mathematics, or to take us on guided nature walks. Economics
doesn’t distinguish between baking bread and presenting Shakespeare’s Richard
the III; both are economic goods for which people are willing to pay, and both
offer mental stimuli and satisfaction. There is an important difference between
them, however; bread is enjoyed in an act of physical consumption, and the
pleasure of Richard the III is a shared perceptual and mental experience. The
loaf of sourdough French bread I gobble down becomes unavailable to you, but we
can both experience Shakespeare together without detracting from each other’s
pleasure. The experience of consuming a loaf of bread involves a using up of a
material good, and the experience of consuming Richard the III does not.
Experience requires stimulus from the physical world, but not necessarily a
substantial physical transformation of that world. Experiences can be placed on
a spectrum, heavily dependent on altering the material world at one end (eating
bread and drinking wine or driving your Cadillac Escalade SUV around town), and
not requiring any alteration at all on the other (enjoying a sunset or
Shakespeare in the park). At one end you and I cannot consume the same exact
material thing (a particular glass of wine), and at the other we can (a
sunset). The first activity is relatively more entropic than the second. The
first absorbs nature’s energy and reduces the chemical bonds of it’s material
being and the second does not.
Complications
do arise. We can share a Shakespeare play, but if the audience is too big, some
of us will not be able to get close enough to perceive all the action on the
stage. In sharing a physical phenomenon, crowding can be a problem. Too many
people detract from the experience. In some cases, such as a rock concert,
where audience reaction is part of the experience, too few people instead can
be a problem. In wilderness hiking, where the act of it does little to modify
the physical world, the sharing of it can detract from the experience if one is
running into someone on the trail too often or if all the good campsites are
taken. In short, the number of people sharing an otherwise benign experience
(i.e. with an innocuous physical impact) matters. In some cases the more the
merrier, and in some more is bad (Olson, 1965).
While
the direct enjoyment of a Shakespeare play is physically and entropically
benign, its production is not. The stage, the costumes, and all the other
necessary paraphernalia of making a play happen re-arrange the physical world
just as does making loaves of bread. The difference between the two goods is
that consuming the play is benign and the bread entropic. You and I can’t
consume the same loaf of bread but we can the same play. Some things in life
are actually entropically free: you and I can enjoy the same sunset and the
physical world is unchanged from what it otherwise would be. Of course, if the
sunset is over Sonoran desert mountains, you and I will have used up material
resources in our travels and caused some physical entropy, but once on the
scene the extra physical changes we cause in watching the sunset becomes
vanishingly small. And, of course, just walking around the desert will have
some impact, but not much, especially if we step with care. In practice,
experiences lay on a spectrum from heavily entropic to completely benign
(causing near-zero entropy).
Entropy and the Form of Life
Richard
Florida, a regional science professor, has gained star standing among urban
planners for his book, The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002). Florida
presents evidence for the emergence of an economically important group of
individuals who play a driving role in a renaissance of downtown urban
revitalization and have a new take on life that bears the marks of
post-materialist thinking. According to Florida, this creative class is compose
of professionals, such as scientists, engineers, university professors, poets,
novelists, entertainers, designers, architects, and opinion-makers who conceive
new intellectual or artistic forms of economic or public value. Its members are
at once bohemian and conformist. They have an intense desire for personal
self-expression, which includes body-piercing jewelry and tattoos, but also
possess a powerful work ethic and passion for personal accomplishment,
especially in the digital arena doing software development or graphic arts.
These are the people one increasingly sees sitting around gourmet coffee shops
huddled over their computers or conversing in small groups about website
design, solving a computer software problem, pulling off the conversion of an
old commercial building into condominiums, or getting someone elected to
political office. They don’t like bureaucratic hierarchy, but believe strongly
in being recognized for their work on its creative merits. They especially
believe in social diversity of all kinds, and feel comfortable working with
others of different races or sexual orientations. Members of the creative class
both work and play hard, and express only limited interest in accumulating
material possessions and are especially oriented to consuming individual and
shared “experiences” such as adventure travel, road biking or rock climbing or
other vigorous activities, offbeat theater performances, cutting edge studio
art, or experimental musical events. While Silicon Valley is a suburban bastion
for such individuals, they increasingly find urban centers such as downtown San
Francisco, Seattle, or Minneapolis to be exciting places to live and work.
Youthful
creative types, along with the return of aging suburban expats, fuel much of
the boom in condominium construction and conversion of distinctive older
commercial buildings to residences in downtowns around the country. Both groups
are attracted to the excitement of urban street life in neighborhoods with
concentrations of trendy restaurants, theaters, art galleries, espresso shops,
brew pubs, bookstores, and entertainment venues. Retailing matters, but its
orientation is to specialty foods or wines, boutiques, and outdoor stores that
serve the active life of the new inner city residents.
The
interest of affluent young professionals in downtown living finds confirmation
in a Brookings Institution study of census data by Eugenie Birch, Professor of
City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania (Birch, 2005). In
a sample of 44 cities, downtown population grew by ten percent in the 1990s and
the number of households expanded 13 percent, a substantial recovery after
years of decline. In 2000 25 to 34 year olds compose a quarter of downtown
populations, up from 13 percent 30 years earlier. The proportion of downtowners
having a bachelor’s degree rose to 44 percent, a figure that exceeds both that
for cities as a whole and their suburbs. The young and the educated moving
downtown are exactly those groups where post-material values predominate.
Not
all the creative occupations referred to by Florida in his writings enjoy the
affluence of the creative class as a whole. True creativity doesn’t necessarily
bring wealth as the artists of the world historically discover repeatedly. Yet
it is this group that concentrates most heavily among all occupations in the
central city today and serves as a driving force for neighborhood renewal (Ann
Markusen & Schrock, 2006; Strom, 2010). The popular image of starving
artists or aspiring actors living in garrets and waiting tables for their
living stands up to academic scrutiny. Artists (defined broadly to include
actors and directors, announcers, architects, drama and music teachers,
authors, dancers, designers, musicians and composers, painters, sculptors,
craft artists and printmakers, and photographers), in comparison to other
professionals, are highly educated but poorly paid (Alper & Wassall, 2006).
They often hold multiple jobs in a given year, work outside their chosen
occupation to make ends meet, face frequent periods of unemployment, and
contend with an income distribution highly skewed towards the relatively few
who experience substantial success. Financial accomplishment as an artist is a
‘winner take all’ gamble that very few achieve. Nonetheless, the number of
artists has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force in recent decades,
reflecting an expansion in public demand for the products and experiences
artists have to offer as a well as a continued willingness of many artists to
endure a lower income for the intrinsic rewards of creative work.
Given
their economic vulnerability, artists normally choose to locate in inner city
neighborhoods with inexpensive rents (A. Markusen & Gadwa, 2010). For those
who require studios or places to rehearse, declining, seedy commercial or
industrial areas often provide affordable space in which to both work and live.
Artists concentrate in central cities to a greater degree than most other
occupations and tend to cluster together in neighborhoods that best suit their
needs for expansive but cheap workspace, artistic community connections, and
access to customers. Clustering enables interactions, from which spring ideas
and information on economic opportunities, and the concentration of supporting
art galleries and display spaces or performance venues.
A
modest trend towards high-density city living in the U.S. and other
auto-centric countries may not seem like much, but if it continues it will be a
big deal. A shift to living at higher densities along European lines may well
come in the nick of time to help reverse our ominous march to climatic warming
(Newman & Kenworthy, 1999). If you live in a densely packed urban setting
instead of a spatially expansive suburb, you move around much less to get to
work, for shopping, and doing all the other things you love to do. When you do
move around, chances are greater that you will walk, bike, or take public
transit than if you live in a low-density suburb where odds are that you would
drive everywhere because everything is so far apart. In short, if you move from
suburb to city, you will cut back on your driving and the volume of
auto-related greenhouse gas emissions you cause. Also in the city, chances are
you will live in a smaller dwelling that requires much less greenhouse
gas-emitting energy for heat and light, and if you live in a multi-family unit
and share heat-emitting exterior walls and roof areas with others, your
dwelling will be much more energy efficient than a single family, low rise
house in the suburbs. By deciding to live in the city, you will do the
environment a big favor whether you think much about it or not. If you are a
post-material environmentalist, you might even decide to live in the city to
live out your own philosophical values apart from realizing the benefits of
city living.
Evidence for Postmaterial
Values and Experience
The
form that one’s life takes matters for its use of material resources and impact
on the environment. Living in a high-density city with multiple modes of
transportation in general will be less entropic than life in a low-density
suburban environment. The experience of life will differ as well in the former
than the latter. In the central city, more of daily life will be spent in the
public arena moving around, strolling in parks, hanging out at sidewalk cafes,
and enjoying various cultural amenities that concentrate at urban centers.
Suburban living with its heavy auto-dependency will be intrinsically more
entropic than daily being in the central city. The density at which individuals
live around the world truly matters for environmental sustainability as outline
in the works of Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy (Newman & Kenworthy,
1999, 2015).
What
one does in that daily life matters as well. The life of a postmaterial urban
artist whose labor constitutes the vast bulk of an art object’s economic value
will be less entropic than, say, a highway engineer who designs freeway ramps
and bridges. By the simple act of living a central city with all its
opportunities for post material experiences, one lives less entropically than
would be the case in a suburban location. While how one lives and what one does
intuitively matters for environmental sustainability, direct empirical evidence
on the values individuals possesses and their effect on the environment is only
just beginning to be accumulated.
Inglehart Postmaterial Values
A
lengthy literature exists on the global presence and effects of Inglehart
postmaterial values and is summarized in a variety of sources (Abramson &
Inglehart, 1995; Booth, 2017; Inglehart, 2008; Welzel & Inglehart, 2008;
Welzel, Inglehart, & Deutsch, 2005). Such values have expanded their presence
over time in both Europe and the U.S., although they may have suffered a
setback more recently as a consequence of the recent growing popularity of
conservative populist politics in many countries (Inglehart & Norris, 2016,
2017). An extensive literature using the World Values Survey and other survey
data confirms that postmaterial values positively predict political support for
environmental protection as well as public action in support of the environment
(Booth, 2016, 2017). In my own research, a measure of environmental concern is
taken from a two-part question that requires a trade-off between environmental
protection and economic growth. Each respondent chooses one of the following
two statements that best reflects their attitude: (1) Protecting the
environment should be given priority, even if it causes slower economic growth
and some loss of jobs; (2) Economic growth and creating jobs should be the top
priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent. Three different
questions provide measures of actual respondent behaviors directed at
environmental protection, including whether the respondent (1) is an inactive
or active member of an environmental organization, (2) has recently given money
to an ecological organization, or (3) has recently participated in a
demonstration for some environmental cause. In all cases, an index of Inglehart
postmaterial values predicts environmental support and environmental action in
the U.S. as well as for a global sample that includes 60 countries. To the
extent that such individual attitudes and actions get translated into
government action in the political arena, postmaterial values contribute to
environmental sustainability.
Postmaterial Experience
The
effect of postmaterial values on political support and actions in favor of the
environment matters only if such support and actions get translated into actual
government policies that diminish environmental pollution and increase
environmental sustainability in practice. So far the evidence for this being
the case is fairly limited although convincing (Gerhards & Lengfeld, 2008;
Tjernstrom & Tietenberg, 2012; Zahran, Kim, Chen, & Lubell, 2007). A
shift in favor of an increased orientation to postmaterial experience could
lead more directly to environmental sustainability by reducing the entropy of
daily human activities as explained above. These activities depend first and
foremost on the reality of postmaterial experiences in everyday life.
The
presence of postmaterialist experience on a global basis has only just begun to
be investigated empirically. In my own work, using data from the World Values
Survey, I have found evidence that global participation in such experiences as
(1) membership in voluntary organizations, (2) participation in work that
offers creative tasks and independence such as that undertaken by artists, and
(3) participation in political action to be relatively extensive in a large
global sample covering 60 countries (Booth, 2018; World Values Survey
Association, 2015). I also find using regression analysis that a desire for
riches fundamental to the accumulation of material possessions fails to predict
memberships in voluntary organizations, and is a negative predictor of creative
and independent work and participation in political action. In sum, those who focus
on accumulating material possessions lack an interest in post material
experiences. Positive statistical predictors for all three forms of experience
activities include the importance to the respondent of thinking up new ideas
and being creative, doing something for society, and looking after the
environment. The nature of the three types of activities themselves matter for
participation, as opposed to any private material benefits they confer.
These
three forms of individual activity typically lack an orientation to the
accumulation of material possessions or an extensive incremental need for
material possessions beyond a basic threshold. There are, of course,
exceptions. The creative highway engineer who thinks up new ways to build
freeway overpasses and bridges would be engaged in an activity that supports a
highly entropic activity, motor vehicle travel. This would be much less the
case for the musician or landscape photographer. Nonetheless, statistical
predictors suggest that those engaged in creative and independent work are less
orientated than others to the accumulation of material possessions and are more
likely to possess a desire to do something for the environment. In addition to
possible positive consequences for the politics of environmental protection,
the expansion of a postmaterial outlook on life can cause a shift to a less
entropic and more environmentally sustainable way of life. Instead of spending
our days worried about accumulating more material possessions, we can focus on
the daily experiences of life embodied in social interactions, cultural
activities, and the wonders of the natural world. To do this we indeed require
basic economic and physical security, but once accomplished we have the
ecological luxury of focusing our attention on the existing wonders we
encounter in daily life without adding much to the material transformation of
the world.
An
expansion of postmaterialism globally could in theory have a direct positive
effect on environmental sustainability, but this proposition remains an
untested hypothesis. Environmental economists have, however, invested heavily
in a testing a related somewhat more general hypothesis that rising per capita
income in individual countries ultimately leads to a reduction in per capita
pollution emissions. In short, economic development in itself constitutes the
final solution to environmental problems. If this is the case, then an
expansion of postmaterialism contingent on rising individual economic security
would accelerate that trend. Unfortunately the validity of this more general
hypothesis remains to be settled, as we will now see.
Postmaterialism and
Environmental Kuznets Curves
The
gold standard for investigating the link between affluence and the environment
is something called an “Environmental Kuznets Curve”, named for an economist,
Simon Kuznets, who discovered the presence of such a curve in the case of
income inequality (Kuznets, 1955), a conclusion that only recently has come
under challenge in the works of Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2014). According to
environmental Kuznets curve theory, as an economy advances from an agricultural
to a modern industrial and digital economy, and as per capita incomes grow,
environmental problems such as water and air pollution increase, but at some
point such problems begin to diminish because of advances in pollution control
technology and increased environment regulation fostered by a rising middle
class with political demands for a higher quality environment. In brief,
plotted against a country’s per capita income over time, the curve of pollution
emissions per person has an inverted U-shape. The hypothesis remains
controversial and has generated numerous research papers in environmental economics,
some finding empirical support for the it, and others denying its existence
(Ben Jebli, Ben Yousseff, & Ozturk, 2016; Galeotti, Lanza, & Pauli,
2006; Stern, 2004). The controversy continues, especially for greenhouse
emissions such as carbon dioxide. The best one can say is that the curve may
exist for relatively wealthy countries such as those belonging to the OECD, but
there is little evidence for it outside the OECD. In short, poor countries of
the world face environmental deterioration as they develop under prevailing
economic arrangements, and the rich have achieved stability and perhaps modest
reductions in their environmental impacts. In the case of greenhouse gases, the
rich, western industrialized countries of the world of course bear most of the
responsibility historically for cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, most of
which continue to persist in the atmosphere to this day (Freidrich &
Damassa 2014).
To
put it in Kuznets curve lingo, a turn to postmaterialism bends the curve
downward more quickly than otherwise by increasing political support for the
environment and shifting human activities in a less entropic direction. The
problem with the rise of postmaterialism is that its advance occurs at a fairly
glacial pace (Inglehart & Norris, 2017) while such environmental problems
as climate change and natural habitat degradation are advancing much more
rapidly (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2015).
Population and Postmaterialism
In
contrast to the modest pace of postmaterialism, global human fertility has
plummeted from around 6 children per female to about 2.5 in the last 75 years
(World Bank, 2017), an amazing drop by historical standards, but substantial
population growth yet remains in the pipeline (World Bank Population Blog, 2015).
Before global population begins to stabilize due to reduced fertility, still
more downward pressure on environmental sustainability will occur in the near
future as added individuals expand global material consumption. Whether a shift
to postmaterialism and a less entropic way of life also operates to increase
sustainability by fostering an added reduction in human fertility and
ultimately population growth remains an open question yet to be explored
empirically. Across countries, post-material values are more extensive on
average in high- than low-income countries as confirmed by data from a
sixty-country sample from the latest World Values Survey (World Values Survey
Association, 2015). Population fertility for these same countries, is
negatively correlated to per capita income as can be expected in light of the
“demographic transition” (Kirk, 2010; World Bank, 2017a; World Values Survey
Association, 2015). Postmaterial values and reductions in fertility are thus
correlated, but correlation, of course, is not the same thing as causation. The
reduced emphasis on economic accomplishment in a postmaterial way of life may,
or may not result in a reduced desire to procreate. This question has yet to be
investigated. In the U.S., fertility is declining among younger women who are
delaying getting married, having children later in life, and having fewer
children (Stone 2018). Since postmaterialism is relatively higher among younger
people worldwide, such a decline in fertility may well be attributable to a
postmaterial way of life. If so, then postmaterialism will indeed lead to a
demographic shift reducing human fertility and increasing environmental
sustainability. By decreasing the number of children they have, couples can
have a profound long-term effect on the environment, especially for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions (Wynes & Nicholas 2017).
Whatever
the actual relationship between postmaterialism and human fertility, a rise in
global per capita income does nonetheless have a double effect as described above:
(1) a shift to less entropic postmaterial values and experience, and (2) a
decline in human fertility. Both ultimately benefit global environmental
sustainability.
Conclusion
A
problem for sustainability yet arises because the shift to postmaterialism and
reduced human fertility, each beneficial to the environment, are both advanced
by an increase in per capita living standards on a global basis that can itself
cause a decline in environmental sustainability. This is the critical dilemma
of economic development as a way out of the environmental crisis.
To
moderate such a decline, public efforts are essential that shift the global
economy to clean energy and bring a halt to habitat degradation for all of the
world’s species. While optimism in today’s political arena on the face of it
seems unwarranted, an advance in postmaterialism could in the end make a
difference given the current relatively even split between forces for and
against public action addressing climate change. A few more young postmaterialists
in the political mix, especially in the USA, could tip the balance for the
outcome of future elections in the favor of political actions that mitigate
environmental degradation, but this remains to be seen (Booth, 2017). The one
other hope is the downward plunge in clean energy unit costs will continue and
eventually force fossil fuels out of the global energy market (Lazard, 2017).
This could be a big bonus for solar-rich less developed countries arrayed
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