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Because the current situation changes a lot on political, social and climate issues, we cannot be sure what will happen in the future. But we can look at the progress of international politics and the technical and economic perspectives of the future, as thinking about the situation and what will happen in the next 10 years can be very volatile. All products will become services. "I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or clothes, "writes Danish MEP Ida Auken. Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose residents have fallen for clean energy and borrow what they need on demand. It seems utopian, until she mentions that her every move is being followed and that outside the city there are swathes of discontent, the ultimate representation of a society divided in two.
There is a global price for carbon. China took the lead in 2017 with a trade market for the right to emit one tonne of CO2, setting the world on the path to a single carbon price and a powerful push to ditch fossil fuels, predicts Jane Burston , Climate and Environmental Manager at UK National Physics Laboratory. Europe, meanwhile, has found itself at the center of the cheap and efficient solar panel trade as renewable energy prices have fallen sharply. American domination is over. We have a handful of world powers. Nation states must organize a return, writes Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarapé Institute. Instead of a single force, a handful of countries - led by the United States, Russia, China, Germany, India and Japan - display semi-imperial tendencies. At the same time, however, the role of the state is threatened by trends such as the rise of cities and the spread of identities online.
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Goodbye hospital, hello home-hospital. Technology will have further disrupted the disease, writes Melanie Walker, physician and World Bank adviser. The hospital as we are will be disappearing, with fewer accidents thanks to autonomous cars and great advances in preventive and personalized medicine. Scalpels and organ donors are out, tiny robotic tubes and bio-printed organs are in it. We eat a lot less meat. Much like our grandparents, we will treat meat as a treat rather than a staple, writes Tim Benton, professor of population ecology at the University of Leeds, UK. It will not be large-scale agriculture or small artisanal producers that will win, but rather a combination of the two, with ready-made meals redesigned to be healthier and less harmful to the environment. Syrian refugees today, CEO of 2030. Highly educated Syrian refugees will have come of age by 2030, advocating for the economic integration of those forced to flee the conflict. The world must be better prepared for people on the move, writes Lorna Solis, founder and CEO of the NGO Blue Rose Compass, because climate change will have displaced 1 billion people. The values that built the West have been tested to the breaking point. We are forgetting the checks and balances that strengthen our democracies at our peril, writes Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. By the 2030s, we will be ready to move humans to the Red Planet." Plus, once there, we'll likely find evidence of alien life, writes Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA. Big science helps us answer big questions about life on Earth, as well as open up practical applications for space technology. A large part of experts and analysts fear that people's use of technology will mainly weaken fundamental aspects of democracy and democratic representation over the next decade.
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they also have important social and civic innovations by 2030 to address emerging issues. In this new report, tech experts who shared serious concerns for democracy during a recent Pew Research Center startup express their views on the likely changes and reforms that could occur in the years to come. A total of 697 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists answered the following question: Social and civic innovation and its impact on the new challenges of the digital age: As the industrial revolution swept across societies, people finally took action to counter the abuses and prejudices that emerged. For example, new laws have been enacted to make workplaces safer and protect children; standards have been created for the safety and efficacy of products; new types of organizations have emerged to help workers (eg new educational institutions have been created (eg trade schools); domestic roles in families have been reconfigured. The "techlash" Today come to light the problems that have surfaced in the digital age. The question: Will there be significant social and civic innovations by 2030? By 'social and civic innovation' we mean the creation of such things as new technological tools, legal protections, social norms, new or reconfigured groups and communities, educational efforts and other strategies to meet challenges. of the digital age. Some 84% of these respondents say there will be important social and civic innovations by 2030, while 16% say there will be no significant social and civic innovations within the timeframe. When asked a follow-up question about whether the use of technology by humans will drive or prevent important social and civic innovation, 69% of those surveyed experts said they expected the use of technology helps alleviate problems, 20% predicted that the use of technology prevents significant alleviation of problems and 11% responded that the use of technology is likely to have no effect on the problem. social and civic innovation.
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This is a non-scientific canvassing of experts, based on a non-random sample. The results represent only the opinions of the people who answered the query and cannot be projected onto any other population. The methodology underlying this canvassing is elaborated here. Part of this major report is the written responses of these experts The coverage of their responses. The people interviewed in this survey addressed three general themes on the evolution of the technological landscape and its impact on the political and social activities of citizens. First, they predict that connectivity between people and their devices will increase globally as more digital applications allow people to create, share and observe information. This trend could accelerate as people employ intelligent agents and robots to interact with other people or other people's avatars. These experts claim that persistent and extensive human connectivity affects how people engage with each other as citizens and will influence how they work to create groups aimed at impacting policies and communities policies. Some might argue that this will change the way people interact with democratic institutions. Second, the experts who answered here connected a sharp increase in connected devices - for example, clothes, household appliances, cars - which could even more deeply people to their surroundings. Indeed, some buildings envision that the additional aspects of connectivity will expand as the environment itself becomes 'smart' - as cities, streets, plots of land and even bodies of water become. loaded with sensors that feed data from analysis systems. This will have an impact on the level of knowledge people have of themselves and their environment. This, in turn, could lead to a change in policy, as factual information about the world proliferates. Most of these experts believe that the explosion of data generated by people, the third environmental sensors is affecting the level of social and civic innovation in potential directions. They are believed that the existence of a growing amount of data - and people's knowledge of collecting it - will draw more attention to privacy issues and perhaps people's norms and behaviors. In, some say that the way the data is analyzed has determined a closer examination of the performance of algorithms and artificial intelligence systems, especially with regard to questions related to fairness and the explanation of the results. data usage. Two comments illustrate how these trends fit together and could have social and civic changes.
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political law
Political law (or political activity law is an established legal practice area encompassing the intersection of politics and law. Political law comprises election law, voting rights law, campaign finance law, laws governing lobbying and lobbyists, open government laws, legislative and executive branch ethics codes, legislative procedure, administrative procedure, constitutional law, and legislative and regulatory drafting. Political laws are applied primarily to government officials, candidates, advocacy groups, lobbyists, businesses, nonprofit organizations, and trade unions. At the federal level, the Federal Election Commission enforces campaign finance law with respect to races for the United States House of Representatives, United States Senate, and the office of President of the United States. Campaigns for federal office are subject to contribution limits and certain contributions are prohibited. The Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section (PIN) has jurisdiction involving alleged criminal violations of many political laws.
At the state level, most states have administrative agencies to enforce state law with respect to campaign finance and ethics rules. The attorney general of the state may also play a role in enforcement. Some local governments also maintain ethics agencies. At the state and local level these agencies might simply provide for disclosure of campaign finance registration and reporting forms (or lobbyist registration and reporting), or they may provide an enforcement scheme. Political Law—is that branch of public law which deals with the organization and operations of the governmental organs of the State and defines the relations of the State with the inhabitants of its territory. "Pay-to-play" restrictions are an example of political law. For instance, in the context of municipal securities dealers, rules promulgated by the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board effectively prohibit certain individuals from contributing to the political funds of officials of issuers.
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Political philosophy begins with the question: what ought to be a person's relationship to society? The subject seeks the application of ethical concepts to the social sphere and thus deals with the variety of forms of government and social existence that people could live in – and in so doing, it also provides a standard by which to analyze and judge existing institutions and relationships.
Although the two are intimately linked by a range of philosophical issues and methods, political philosophy can be distinguished from political science. Political science predominantly deals with existing states of affairs, and insofar as it is possible to be amoral in its descriptions, it seeks a positive analysis of social affairs – for example, constitutional issues, voting behavior, the balance of power, the effect of judicial review, and so forth. Political philosophy generates visions of the good social life: of what ought to be the ruling set of values and institutions that combine men and women together. The subject matter is broad and connects readily with various branches and sub-disciplines of philosophy including philosophy of law and of economics. This introduction skims the most relevant theories that the student of political philosophy is likely to encounter. The article covers Liberalism, Conservativism, Socialism, Anarchism, and Environmentalism.
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Ethical Foundations : Political philosophy has its beginnings in ethics: in questions such as what kind of life is the good life for human beings. Since people are by nature sociable – there being few proper anchorites who turn from society to live alone – the question follows as to what kind of life is proper for a person amongst people. The philosophical discourses concerning politics thus develop, broaden and flow from their ethical underpinnings. To take a few examples: the ethical utilitarian claims that the good is characterized by seeking (that is, attempting to bring about) the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people (see consequentialism). Accordingly, in the political realm, the utilitarian will support the erection of those institutions whose purpose is to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In contrast, an ethical deontologist, who claims that the highest good is served by our application of duties (to the right or to others), will acknowledge the justification of those institutions that best serve the employment of duties. This is a recognizable stance that merges with human rights theorists' emphasis on the role of rights (to or from actions and/or things). In turn an ethical relativist will advocate a plurality of institutions (within a nation or around the world), whereas an ethical objectivist will condemn those that are seen to be lacking a universally morally proper purpose (for example, those that support certain inalienable rights).
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As ethics is also underpinned by metaphysical and epistemological theories, so too can political philosophy be related to such underlying theories: theorizing on the nature of reality and of how we know things logically relates to how we do things and how we interact with others. The greatest and most persistent ethical-political issue that divides philosophers into a host of schools of thought is that concerning the status of the individual: the ethical 'person'. Although the variety and subtleties of this area of thought cannot be examined here, suffice it to say that philosophers divide between those who deem the individual person as sacrosanct (that is, ethically and thus politically so) and those who consider the individual to be a member of a group (and accordingly for whom the group takes on a sacred status). Others consider political institutions to be sacred in their own right but this is hardly a tenable position: if humanity did not exist such institutions would be meaningless and hence can only gain their meaning from our existence. The key question that divides political philosophers returns to whether it is the group or the individual that should be the political unit of analysis.
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The language used by the opposing thinkers to describe the political primacy of their entity (that is, individual or group) alters throughout history depending on other competing or complementing concepts; but today the division is best characterized by the "rights of the individual" versus the "rights of the group." Other appropriate terms include: the dignity of the individual; the duties and obligations owing to the group; the autonomy or self-determination of the group or individual – and these in turn resolve into particular and applied issues concerning the role of cultural, racial, religious, and sexual orientations. In political theory courses, the debate proceeds today between communitarians and liberals who debate the middle ground of rights and obligations as they stretch between groups and individuals. This caricature of extremes enables us to consider the differences and the points of agreement between the several schools of political philosophy in a better light. But as with generalizations made of historical events, the details are much more complicated and subtle. This is because the application of philosophy in the political realm necessarily deals with social institutions, and since people are sociable – indeed could hardly be said to be human if we possessed no society or culture – both extremes must examine and evaluate the social-ethical realms of selfhood, friendship, family, property, exchange, money (that is, indirect exchange), community, tribe, race, association, and the state (and its various branches) – and accordingly the individual's relationship with each.
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Methodological Issues : In pursuing a philosophical examination of political activity, philosophers also divide between those who are methodological individualists and those who are methodological holists. Methodological individualists seek to explain social actions and behavior in terms of individual action – and politically are known as individualists, whereas holists seek to explain behavior by considering the nature of the group. The bifurcation results from a metaphysical division on the appropriate unit of study. In contrast to methodological individualists, who claim that a society (or culture, people, nation) is no more than the sum of its living members, holists argue that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, which in the political realm is translated into the state being greater than the citizenry, or the race, folk, or people being greater than the individual; politically, holism translates into the general theory known as "collectivism," and all collectivist theories deny or lessen the value and authority of the individual in relation to the higher status accorded a collective entity. Methodological individualism translates into political individualism, in which the individual's cultural or group membership is either rejected completely as not worthy of study or its causal or scientific relationship is deemed too amorphous or pluralistic and changing to provide anything by qualitative assessments of social affairs.
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Simmering in the background, it must also be noted, are theological-political philosophies that deny any primacy to the individual or to the group in favor of the supreme status of the divine realm. Yet these too must also split between individualist and holist conceptions of the individual (or of the soul) and for our purposes here can be said to follow the same dialogue as secular oriented political philosophers. Once theologians admit to having to have some kind of government or rule for the living on earth, the general debate of political philosophy can be admitted and expounded upon to define the good life for people amongst people.A second important methodological issue that relates both to epistemology as well as to ethics is the role that reason plays in social affairs. The extreme positions may be characterized as rationalism and irrationalism, but the descriptions are not necessarily logical opposites. A rationalist may declare his belief in rationalism to be ultimately irrational (for example, Karl Popper), and an irrationalist may act rationally.
Political rationalism emphasizes the employment of reason in social affairs: that is, individuals ought to submit to the logic and universality of reason rather than their own subjective or cultural preconceptions. Rationalists argue that reason unifies humanity politically and hence is a conducive vehicle to peace. Irrationalists, on the other hand, downplay the efficacy of reason in our human affairs or more particularly in our social affairs. In turn, a broad range of alternatives are put forward in reason's stead: emotions; cultural, religious, or class expectations; atavistic symbols; or mystical forms of intuition or knowledge. Irrationalists of all hues can also criticize rationalists for ignoring the subtle wisdom of intellectual and social heritage that often lies beneath contemporary society or which is deemed necessary for the reasoning mind; politically, they consider the demands of reason to be rationalizations of a particular culture (usually the criticism is leveled against the West) rather than demands that are universal or universalizable claiming that political solutions that appear rational to one group cannot necessarily be translated as solutions for another group.
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Some irrationalists uphold polylogism – the theory that there are (or ought to be) more than one form of logic, which ultimately collapses into an epistemological subjectivism. That is, tribal logic is predicated on the separateness or distinctiveness of particular groups' logic or methods of discourse and thinking. However, other irrationalists deny that the human mind develops alternative logics around the world, but that human action does develop alternative methods of living in different places and from different historical circumstances. Politically this stance translates into conservativism, a philosophical stance that is skeptical of rationalist designs (say to overthrow all political institutions so as to begin 'afresh' according to some utopian blueprint) and which emphasizes the continuity of wisdom – as contained in institutions and the language of politics – over the generations and in specific localities. To return to the epistemological problems facing holism, the existence of overlapping loyalties that often characterize groups presents a strong criticism against collectivist doctrines: which group ought to be the subject of analysis when an individual belongs to more than one sociological entity? (Marx, for instance, based his philosophy on class analysis but did not give any precision to the term 'class'.) If an epistemological relativism is permitted, say in the field of logic ("European logic is different from American"), further analysis must permit more particular gradations ("German logic is different from French logic" and "Bavarian logic is different from Schleswig-Holstein logic") until one reaches the final thinking agent – the individual ("Franz's logic is different from Katja's"). The rationalist aspires to avoid such fractional implications of polylogism by maintaining the unity of human logic. Yet, if the rationalist is also an individualist, the paradox arises that individuals are united into the collective whole of rational beings (all individuals share reason), whereas irrationalism collapses into a plurality of individualistic epistemologies (all groups are ultimately composed of subjectivists). Nonetheless, between individualists (who emphasize the sacred status of the individual) and collectivists (who emphasize the sacred status of the group) exist a panoply of schools of thought that derive their impetus from the philosophical shades – the gray overlapping areas, which are today found in the perpetual disputes between individualists and communitarians.
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3. Political Schools of Thought
Having illuminated some of the extremes that characterize political philosophy with regards to method and terminology, the major schools of thought can be introduced. What will be noted is not just to which end of the methodological spectrum the school leans, but also its implied connections to ethics. Similarly, other aspects need to be elucidated: does the school emphasize the primacy of reason in social affairs, or does it underplay the role of reason in political affairs in favor of the forces of history, heritage, emotional or tribal predispositions? Liberalism : The term "liberalism" conveys two distinct positions in political philosophy, the one a pro-individualist theory of people and government, the second a pro-statist or what is better termed a "social democratic" conception. Students of political philosophy ought to be aware of the two schools of thought that reside under the same banner to avoid philosophical confusions that can be resolved by a clarification of terms. The "Great Switch," as cultural historian Jacques Barzun notes, took place in the late Nineteenth Century, a switch which was the product of shifting the political ground towards socialist or social democratic policies under the banner of liberal parties and politics. Etymologically, the former is the sounder description since liberalism is derived from the word "liberty," that is, freedom and toleration rather than notions of justice and intervention that took on board in the Twentieth Century. Yet, the pro-statist connotation pervades modern thinking so much so that it is difficult to separate its notions from the previous meanings without re-classifying one or the other. The former is often referred to as 'classical liberalism' leaving the latter unchanged or adapted to "social democratic liberalism," which is a rather confusing mouthful; "modern liberalism" is an easier term to wield and shall be used unless the emphasis is laid upon the socialist leanings of such modern liberals.
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In the broadest, presently popularly accepted term the modern liberal accepts rights against the person and rights to entitlements such as health care and education. The two positions do not sit well philosophically however, for they produce a host of potential and recurrent inconsistencies and contradictions that can only be resolved by stretching the definition of freedom to include the freedom to succeed (or freedom to resources) rather than the freedom to try. This sometimes generates difficult and perhaps insurmountable problems for those who seek to merge the classical and modern doctrines; nonetheless, the (modern) liberal project is actively pursued by modern thinkers such as J.S. Mill, John Rawls, Will Kymlicka, Ronald Dworkin and others. For these writers, the historical emphasis on toleration, plurality and justice underscore their work; they differ on their interpretation of toleration, public and private roles, and the perceived need for opportunities to be created or not. Some modern liberals, however, do try to remove themselves from classical liberalism (for example, Kymlicka) and therefore become more like 'social democrats', that is, humanitarians of a socialist bent who assert the primacy of minorities and even individuals to partake freely in the democratic processes and political dialogues, or whose emphasis on equality demands an active and interventionist state that classical liberals would reject. Dworkin, for example, claims justice is the essential motif of liberalism and that the state's duty is to ensure a just and fair opportunity for all to compete and flourish in a civil society. That may require active state intervention in some areas – areas that classical liberals would reject as being inadmissible in a free economy. Dworkin's position emanates from Aristotle's ethical argument that for a person to pursue the good life he requires a certain standard of living. Poverty is not conducive to pursuing the contemplative life, hence many modern liberals are attracted to redistributive or welfare policies. Such fairness in opportunity to create equal opportunities underpins John Stuart Mill's liberalism for example. However, the modern liberal's emphasis on equality is criticized by classical liberals who argue that people are neither born equal nor can be made equal: talents (and motivation) are distributed unequally across a population, which means that attempts to reduce men and women to the same status will imply a reduction in the ability (or freedom) of the more talented to act and to strive for their own progression. Similarly, the modern liberal's criticism of inherited wealth is chastised as being misplaced: although the policy connects well to the desire to ensure an equal start for all, not all parents' gifts to their children are monetary in nature. Indeed, some, following Andrew Carnegie's self-help philosophy, may contend that monetary inheritances can be counter-productive, fostering habits of dependency.
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Both modern and classical liberals may refer to the theory of a social contract to justify either their emphasis on the free realm of the individual or the fostering of those conditions liberals in general deem necessary for human flourishing. Classical liberals derive their theory of the social contract initially from Thomas Hobbes's model (in Leviathan) in which individuals in a state of nature would come together to form a society. Liberals of both variations have never believed such a contract ever took place, but use the model to assess the present status of society according to criteria they believe the contract should include. Hobbes leaned towards a more authoritarian version of the contract in which individuals give up all political rights (except that of self-preservation which he sees as a natural, inalienable right) to the sovereign political body whose primary duty is to ensure the peace; John Locke leaned towards a more limited government (but one that could justly take the alienable life of an aggressor); Rousseau sought a thoroughly democratic vision of the social contract; and more recently Rawls has entertained what rights and entitlements a social contract committee would allot themselves if they had no knowledge and hence prejudices of each other. Both classical and modern liberals agree that the government has a strict duty towards impartiality and hence to treating people equally, and that it should also be neutral in its evaluation of what the good life is. This neutrality is criticized by non-liberals who claim that the assumed neutrality is in fact a reflection of a specific vision of human nature or progress, and although critics disagree what that vision may entail, their claim prompts liberals to justify the underlying assumption that promotes them to accept such issues as: equal treatment by the law and by the state; liberty to pursue one's life as one sees fit; the right to private property, and so on.