Our debt to future generations will be discharged to the extent that we maintain a high rate of quantitative and qualitative progress—to the extent that we alter, in a direction favorable to human welfare generally, the conditions that determine the choices open to men when they are free to choose. Already ... the heritage of knowledge, equipment, and economic institutions that the industrial nations are able to transmit to future generations is sufficient to overcome the potentially adverse effects of continual and unavoidable shift to natural resources with properties which, on the basis of past technologies and products, would have been economically inferior. The industrial nations have learned, in short, how to maintain technological progress, to avoid quantitative diminishing returns. An open question is whether they have also learned how to maintain social progress, to continue improving the quality of life, to avoid qualitative diminishing returns. Even more open is the question whether these nations, in cooperation with those that have not yet become industrialized, will be able to assure both quantitative and qualitative progress for mankind.
The capacity of scientific progress to create new problems for society, it appears, has outrun the capacity of social progress to solve them. Because of the lag of social innovation, it is possible to be concerned with whether man has learned how to avoid something comparable to diminishing returns in the quality of life ... The dynamic, accelerative character of technological change seems to suggest that expansion in the number of social value standards are not much changed from [John Stuart] Mill's day. And, unlike Mill, we do not look forward to a stationary state, with endless time to contemplate and devise a steady, costless improvement in the quality of life. There is, therefore, a question of whether requisite changes in our mechanisms of choice will keep pace with the dynamic development of the scope of choice. The classical economists saw the process of growth as subject to limitations, and we agree. But they saw the limitations as residing in nature, and we see them as residing more in man. The consequential problems may be old but their form and urgency are new.
Extracted from Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability, by Harold J. Barnett and Chandler Morse.
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 1963 issue of Resources magazine.
