On material progress and welfare

I often write about spiritual matters, but in this blog, I want to focus on material progress and welfare. The subject is equally important, as according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, spiritual well-being can hardly exist without material welfare.

How would you measure the material progress of a country or a population? The question may be relevant for us  in order to know if we should be happy or unhappy about our progress versus perhaps the progress of other “developed” or “developing” countries. I also want to look at the idea if war speeds up progress in some way or not. This idea has been raised after World War 1 and 2, when progress had been discovered in fast manufacturing techniques as well as in aviation (jet engine and rockets). Today, it is exactly 76 years ago since World War II started, at least for my home countries Belgium & Flanders.

An interesting question to ask is: what improved the human welfare most in the last 500 years? Which discovery? Which invention? You may be surprised by this answer: the thing that improved our welfare most was the general production and distribution of drinkable water, together with the creation of underground sewerage. Before that time, our life was hell. Living in town was unbearable because of the odour. People died from plague, cholera and poisoning. The creation of hygiene through water infrastructure works constituted the largest step in the improvement of our welfare. If you doubt about this, ask people who went to Afghanistan recently.

Other types of infrastructure (utilities) followed. We added electricity, gas and fuel distribution. Now we are adding mobile phone and Internet connectivity. At the same time, we are discovering that there is one type of infrastructure that still doesn't meet our demand: the road infrastructure or more generally the mobility related infrastructure. The reason why we are unhappy is that things go too slow. There is a lack of public money; most technical people are now working on ICT developments and not enough people are appointed by the government to work on road and rail infrastructure. Today, our spiritual well-being is negatively affected by a lack of stress free transportation.

The effect of war is not only that houses are destroyed. Also general infrastructure is destroyed. As a consequence, engineers and construction people face a double task. They have to rebuild the utilities' infrastructure and they have to rebuild the houses. This prevents them from doing more creative things. The idea that war brings progress is a stupid myth. In fact, war destroys infrastructure and knowledgeable people. Moreover, for the few inventions that have been made during a war, we can list much more inventions that were made in peace time (albeit with military money). Think of the computer, the mobile phone, satellite navigation (GPS), and the Internet.