Further Industrialisation and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Living and working in a busy modern city in a developed nation where we squint into the sun for two hours a day commuting to and from work, to earn enough money to make the two days off a week enjoyable for ourselves and our loved ones, it is easy to romanticise the past.

How easy and uncomplicated would life have been 100 or 200 years ago? How wonderful to live be part of 19th Century London as they began to build their empire or be forging a pioneering life in the Western United States when gold was discovered? Perhaps we could even go further back and marvel at the simplicity of life enjoyed by the noble savage that is sometimes paraded on TV who is still etching out a Hunter Gatherer existence somewhere?

The issue is that these romanticised ideals neglect to show the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In 19th century London, to imagine yourself in a house in Mayfair with servants is to imagine yourself at the very pinnacle of the world’s wealth. For a clearer picture of what you would be doing in London in the 1800’s check out London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew.[1]  

These romanticised pictures neglect to show us the shortened life expectancy, the infant mortality, the failed crops, the untreatable diseases, the poor personal hygiene etc. So why then, when we talk of further industrialisation, do some people still worry about the consequences?

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Robert K. Merton coined the phrase ‘unintended consequences’ to describe unanticipated or unforseen outcomes of a purposeful action. He notes that there are potentially three unintended consequences to any action:

1.  A positive outcome

2.  A negative outcome

3.  The opposite to what was intended

Further industrialisation will no doubt produce both intended and unintended consequences. It will create technologies, jobs, energies, foods, beliefs, knowledge, human behaviours, laws, and government policies that will both improve and diminish our quality of life.

Life is a process, it changes and it does not stagnate. So we have to move in a direction.

I cannot accept the argument of those who propose that we move in a backwards direction. There is a documentary called 'The Economics of Happiness'[2] in which they discuss only the drawbacks of industrialisation and then suggest the solution is a return to localisation.

Initially, the romantic in me is very attracted to the idea of locally grown food that does not use pesticides and does not require obscene amounts of transport for production. Unfortunately the solution tabled is impractical and cannot be implemented from our current position/lifestyle. I live in a street that contains about 150 families. According to the figures presented in the DVD we would need to find 7.5 families that would be happy to stop living their current life and turn their land into a garden to feed the surrounding families. This is unlikely in a suburban street such as mine and laughable in a block of units.

I believe there is also a possibility that further industrialisation can and will lead to an increase in the environmentally friendly nature of the industrialisation … and that will have unintended consequences. I saw a news story on SBS the other night (Sorry I can’t get any more specific with the reference than that) where scientists were talking about the possibility of storing increased information in a double helix / biological format.

Every time we gain something we also lose something. When we put use-by dates on food we started to slowly lose the art of sniffing the milk and deciding if it was OK.

[1] Mayhew, Henry; 2010, London Labour and the London Poor, Oxford University Press, USA.

[2] http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/