There exists a stark difference between the rates of the biological and socio-cultural evolution of humans. Scientists believe that we are still evolving and adapting, but not any serious breakthrough has occurred for a long time. On the other hand, our socio-cultural evolution has gone faster over time.
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Nearly 10,000 years ago, we developed ourselves to perform agriculture and lead a sedentary lifestyle. And 7,000 years ago, we learnt to ‘write’ which historians believe is the most important feature of a ‘civilized’ society. Of course, not all the communities were on the same page.
The period before we learnt to write (proto-history) is generally associated with the Stone Age. It was a major breakthrough in our socio-cultural evolution to learn to use such tools, as not many species enjoy this prerogative.
The first major civilizations appeared with the dawn of the Bronze Age, which again drew us to a whole new adventure of metallurgy. Iron Age helped us clear the dense forest for settlements across the valleys and fertile plains.
We also established social institutions such as family, kinship, and marriage to regulate our members. Major political institutions such as state, empires, army, and democracy also bloomed with time. To regulate the economy, we created taxation and currency; and to augment them, we established the universities, urban centres, and transport vehicles.
During medieval times, humans explored new landscapes and inhabited new avenues. Not just land, but the ocean also became a centre of power. Some of the architecture crafted in this era still awes its viewers with the same intensity. New technologies and inventions led humankind to unfathomable distances.
Modern times came with some stellar changes in our timeline. The Industrial Revolution increased our potential to the skies and made human capabilities unbound. Today our space probes have crossed the boundaries of the solar system and we are aspiring to develop a “Type 2” civilization, by exploring the resources of our solar system. Nanotechnology has made big tasks appear small, and Artificial Intelligence is doing the jobs that were impossible for the humans themselves some centuries ago.
Researchers are trying to play with the laws of nature, and artificially creating, evolving, and augmenting the organisms to our benefit. But again, our natural biological evolution seems to be so little and trivial vis-a-vis this sea change of socio-cultural revolution. This poses a serious question that is our natural biological evolution being able to keep up with our socio-cultural revolution or vice versa?
Malthus held that the resources grow arithmetically and population exponentially. A similar difference seems to be the case with the evolutions.
Technological Paradox
Everything comes with a cost, and so does the technology. There are several paradoxes created by technology. Although it is supposed to make our lives easier, it also makes them tougher in various ways.
Learning to use new technology is one of them, which becomes even more serious in the case of less advantaged groups. Old people often struggle to adapt to the new technologies coming in every day. Socially or economically disadvantaged groups often lack the means to access, avail, and afford such technologies, which is highlighted by the lockdown and online education.
What seems most paradoxical is that we have created these technologies to save our time, energy, and resources; but on the contrary, these technologies have increased the wastage of the same!
If technology would have saved time since the Industrial Revolution, today we would have been sitting idle! In the modern urban lifestyle, one saves time through tech and then goes to the gym to work out in the saved timeslot. The net time saved remains zero.
Earlier, it was not essential to visit gyms because our lifestyles were such. Today, our biological and socio-cultural evolutions are not synchronised. Our body has almost the same needs which it used to have a millennium ago, but our lifestyles today do not allow us to avail of those needs.
Consequently, lifestyle diseases have increased manifold nowadays. As we know, certain things are a good servant but a bad master. Henceforth, for our very own benefit, we need to stay closer to nature.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.