The Things-Moving Theory
We humans spend much of our lives moving things around. We move food, materials, money, information and ideas. We move ourselves from place to place, between jobs, homes and countries.
Why?
Because we want things to be different from how they are. We want food, shelter, security, comfort, freedom and opportunities. We move things, and ourselves, to make the world more like the world we want.
This simple observation is the starting point of what I call the Things-Moving Theory.
It is not a moral theory. It does not tell us what we should want or whether our actions are good or bad. It attempts to explain what we do, why we do it, and how the systems we create can eventually produce results that nobody intended.
When things are scarce
Imagine a small group of hunter-gatherers living directly from nature. They collect berries, hunt animals, find water and build shelters. They move themselves to where resources are available and carry resources to where they are needed.
Life is not necessarily a constant struggle for survival, but the availability of food and other necessities depends on local conditions. There are limits to what nature can provide in a particular place and at a particular time.
When several people want the same scarce resource, competition may arise. They may also cooperate, share, negotiate or move elsewhere.
Competition, in this view, is not necessarily an instinct that determines human behaviour. It is one possible response to scarcity.
And scarcity comes in many forms. There may be too little food, too few homes, too few people with particular skills, or too few positions that offer power, prestige or influence. Even in a wealthy society, people can compete fiercely for things that not everyone can share.
Rules, rulers and money
As human communities grow, our ways of moving things become more complicated. We need to coordinate the actions of people who do not necessarily know one another.
Kingdoms and states develop institutions to organise territory, establish rules, collect taxes and maintain order. Money becomes an increasingly important means of transferring resources and coordinating exchanges.
Money makes it possible to separate the exchange of one thing from the acquisition of another. Instead of having to find someone who wants exactly what we can offer, we can sell it to someone, receive money and use it elsewhere.
Money does not create food, energy or other physical resources by itself. But it gives us a powerful way to organise who can obtain them, and for what purpose.
The machines arrive
Then comes industrialisation.
Machines allow us to produce goods on a scale previously unimaginable. Resources from nature are transformed into food products, buildings, clothing, vehicles and countless other things. Production becomes more efficient, and goods that were once scarce become accessible to much larger parts of the population.
Capital makes this process possible on an expanding scale. Money is invested in machinery, factories and infrastructure in the expectation of future returns. Profits can be reinvested, production expanded and new markets developed.
Competition between businesses creates powerful incentives to reduce costs, innovate and grow.
The result is extraordinary productive capacity. Many people enjoy longer lives, better housing, improved healthcare, education and material comforts that earlier generations could scarcely imagine.
Industrialisation has solved, or greatly reduced, many forms of scarcity.
But it has not eliminated scarcity itself.
When prosperity creates new desires
As our circumstances improve, our wishes can change. We discover new possibilities, develop new needs and compare our lives with those of others.
We want better products, more convenient services, more attractive homes and more interesting jobs. We may also want higher status, greater influence or a more prestigious position.
Some of these desires improve our lives considerably. Others are relative: their value depends partly on how we compare with other people.
We can manufacture more shoes, cars or computers. But we cannot give everyone a higher relative status at the same time. Nor can we create unlimited amounts of land in the most desirable locations.
Greater prosperity can therefore reduce material scarcity while creating new forms of competition.
Meanwhile, the systems we have built continue to shape our behaviour. Businesses need revenue and often face pressure to grow. Governments depend on economic activity for much of their tax revenue. Workers depend on jobs and incomes. Public services depend on the resources society can provide.
Nobody needs to have designed this entire arrangement. It emerges from many decisions made by people moving their things within existing rules.
The system can continue to expand even when further expansion no longer brings equivalent improvements in human well-being.
One planet, one interconnected ecosystem
Here we encounter a fundamental limit.
All our natural resources come from the same global ecosystem. We extract materials, use land and water, harvest living resources and draw energy from natural processes. We transform these resources into things we want, and return waste and emissions to the environment.
Nature is not simply an endless warehouse outside our economic system. It is the living foundation on which the entire system depends.
Industrial production can become more efficient. Technologies can reduce resource use, and circular systems can reuse materials. These developments are essential. But efficiency alone does not guarantee that total resource consumption will fall. If lower costs and greater productivity lead to more production and consumption, the overall environmental pressure may remain high or even increase.
Nor can individual countries solve every ecological problem independently. Climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean pollution and the depletion of shared resources cross national borders. This is where the Tragedy of the Commons becomes relevant. Even if everyone would benefit from protecting common resources, each participant may fear losing out if others continue exploiting.
This outcome is not inevitable. Communities can establish effective rules for managing shared resources. But where the resource is the global ecosystem, the challenge is to create institutions capable of protecting it across the entire planet.
We have become extraordinarily effective at moving and transforming natural resources. But we have not yet developed an equally effective global system for governing our collective impact on the ecosystem that supplies them.
When our solutions become our problems
The Things-Moving Theory suggests a way to understand this dilemma.
We create systems to solve problems. Those systems change our possibilities, our incentives and our desires. They can then generate new problems that require further solutions.
Industrialisation helped us overcome many forms of material scarcity. But the resulting economic system can also create dependencies on continued production and growth. Governments need resources to maintain public services. Businesses face competitive pressures. Individuals need incomes to support themselves and their families.
Changing the system is therefore difficult, even when we understand the risks.
This does not mean that industrialisation, markets, money or economic growth are inherently bad. Nor does it mean that we should simply produce less of everything. Many people still lack basic necessities, and technological development can help meet human needs while reducing environmental damage.
The question is whether we can organise our economic activities so that human well-being no longer depends on continually increasing our demands on a finite planet.
To answer that question, we need more than better machines and more efficient production. We need to examine the rules that govern our collective decisions.
From moving things to governing together
For much of human history, communities could manage many of their problems locally. States later developed institutions to coordinate larger populations and territories.
Today, however, the consequences of our actions extend across national borders. The decisions of one country, company or generation can affect the lives of people who have no say in those decisions.
Our economic activities are global, but our democratic institutions remain predominantly national.
This creates a growing mismatch between the scale of our problems and the scale at which we make collective decisions.
The Things-Moving Theory does not, by itself, tell us what political system we should adopt. It does, however, help identify the question we must answer.
How can humanity make legitimate collective decisions about the shared conditions on which all human lives depend?
Perhaps the next step in our history is not simply to become more efficient at moving things, producing goods and satisfying desires. Perhaps it is to become better at deciding together which things should be moved, which resources should be protected, and what kind of world we actually want.
Our common ecosystem has no national borders. The consequences of our actions do not stop at them either.
If our problems have become global, we need to find democratic ways to make decisions together at the global level.
That is where the Things-Moving Theory leads us: not to a final answer, but to the need for a shared understanding of reality and a democratic system capable of acting on it.