Using good education in times of change

(pages 60-62 of printed journal)

By Ross Garnaut

You are entering upon a new stage of your lives as graduates from a first rate Faculty in a first rate University. A tiny fraction of one per cent of humanity has such a good start. You are entering this new stage of your lives when those features of the world that reflect and shape human civilisation are changing on a scale and at a pace that has no precedent. Some of the changes threaten human civilisation as we know it. Some have the potential to free humanity from longstanding barriers that have denied civilisation's richest fruits to most of humanity.

Humans have been around for only a tiny fraction of the history of this planet. Human civilisation - the process of building political, social and economic structures that can support large concentrations of population; and the continuous discovery, storage and dissemination of new knowledge, of which the use of agriculture, the wheel, and writing are important parts - is a product of only a small part of the time when humans have been around. Civilisation is a creation of these last ten thousand years or so. And within the years of human civilisation, the last two or three hundred years - the last few decades most of all - stand out as the time of most rapid change.

Economic development over the millennia

In my Climate Change Review, I drew on the story told by economic historian Angus Maddison in the Millennium Report that he wrote for the OECD a bit less than a decade ago.

Economic development in these last two hundred years has taken most of humanity - but certainly not all - from lives that were insecure, ignorant and short, to personal health and security, material comfort and knowledge unknown to the elites of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in earlier times.

In the first millennium after the life of Jesus Christ, global economic output increased hardly at all - by only one sixth. All of the small increase was contributed by population growth, and none by increased output per person. By contrast, output increased 300-fold in the second millennium, with the population increasing 22 times and per capita production 13 times. Most of the extraordinary expansion took place towards the end of the period. From 1820 until the end of the twentieth century, per capita output increased more than eight times and population more than five times.

This extraordinary growth of global output has continued in the early twenty-first century. The Global Financial Crisis notwithstanding, we are on a path to more being added to global production and expenditure in the first two decades of this millennium, than in the whole of the earlier history of humanity. The increase in this period is mainly in output per person rather than population.

What is distinctive about the new millennium is that growth is concentrated in the populous Asian countries that only a generation ago were home to most of the world's poor people - China, Indonesia and India. Rapid economic growth in the large developing countries is lifting people from poverty more rapidly than ever before.

When I was an undergraduate student in the mid-sixties, a bit less than half a century ago, my friends and I saw the biggest global challenge as the reduction and ending of poverty in the populous countries of Asia - in Java, China and India. We saw the biggest Australian challenge as being the removal of many barriers to normalisation of dominant white Australians' relations with people of other racial backgrounds.

We could look at the changes in the world and in Australia in the years since then and say that we have made a reasonable start on the biggest challenges.

In the world, we could point to the large increases in living standards in China, India, Indonesia and many other developing countries.

In Australia, we could point to the end of the White Australia Policy and, recent sadness involving especially Indian students notwithstanding, a now long history of successful large-scale non-discriminatory immigration; to the change from Australian support for white supremacy in Southern Africa to Australian support for democracy; to much closer and more productive relations with our Asian and Pacific neighbours; and - while acknowledging the continuation of tragic circumstances for many Aboriginal Australians - to large improvements in relations between Aboriginal and other Australians.

Humanity's capacity to destroy itself

These successes have another side. The technological progress that has underpinned modern economic growth and the reduction of poverty has given humanity the capacity to destroy its own civilisation for the first time in the history of our species. We have become very efficient at making weapons of mass destruction and widening the range of people who have access to them or knowledge to make them. The greenhouse gas emissions that have accompanied the huge and rapidly growing use of fossil fuels and the destruction of plant life bring high risks of dangerous climate change. The elaboration of financial instruments to support modern economic growth has introduced risks of great economic instability, manifested in the Great Crash of 2008 and its recessionary aftermath.

None of these problems can be solved without close and productive international understanding and cooperation, based on knowledge and sympathy amongst people of different racial and cultural backgrounds all over the world. None can be solved without innovation and good practice in all of the professions, including your own.

I am afraid that large elements of these challenges will remain when my generation has passed on from active professional life. It will be over to you.

Dealing with the challenges ahead

Fortunately you are well prepared to face the great challenges. The intelligence that brought you into this University is a start. Your good education will help. And the remarkable confluence on this and other Australian campuses at this time, of Australians of many backgrounds and large numbers of students from all of the large countries of Asia, will help to prepare you for the challenges of international understanding and cooperation facing the world in the difficult period ahead.

Most of you will be focusing hard on more specific professional challenges in the next few years. That is necessary for you to make your way in the world, and good for the development of the professions that have large roles to play in solutions to all of the world's big problems. But I hope that you will make space for some wider life of the mind - to continue to take an interest in what is being said and written about the broader issues facing humanity. That will improve the chances of humanity meeting the great challenges that we have left to you.

It will also provide some more personal benefits. It will improve your chances of being selected for leadership in the professional or business field in which you choose to specialise. It will help you to understand and to keep in perspective the immense and sometimes worrying change that is bound to remain in the background of your lives. And it will mean that when, like people of my age now, you are moving towards your final appearances on the professional stage, you will be able to do that with joyful anticipation that you will now have more time for the other interesting things that have remained of great interest to you. 

Top ^