A pluralist assessment of industrialization

Abstract

The established method of health technology assessment (HTA) is in this study expanded to a Pluralist Technology Assessment (PTA) including the Ecosystem in the production function. Market economy can grow by moderate reciprocal relations where the Government supports the framework for free market enterprise. However, the PTA concludes that industrial side-effects such as global warming and job-related stress today more than outweigh contemporary gains by GDP growth. Sustainable development requires a stronger economic reciprocity with collaborative (public) finance of interventions for the common good in accordance with the democratic social contract claimed by Rousseau 1762. A development from moderate to strong reciprocity is definitely a biological option based on across-the-center collaboration between Social Liberal and Social Democrat parties. A critical economic-political reform for such sustainable development is a CO2 Tariff (ET) towards global warming. However, in a globalized economy there is a national conflict of interests between Eco-protection by ET and business/employment which slows down the implementation. So, a globalized economy requires that the ET is implemented from the international level. A major part of the international ET revenue, for instance by the partners of the Paris Agreement 2015, can be used for Direct Air Capture of CO2 (DAC) and spillover technologies for instance synthetic fuels for heavy transport by sea and aircrafts. At the national level, the ET revenue must be used partly for social compensation to low-income groups, partly for new technology development in special sectors as agriculture and transport by sea and air. At the population level, “Simple Living” as a bottom-up alternative to consumerism complements the political interventions. Part of Simple Living is meditative in-depth-relaxation for better stress-management where a professional collaboration between Medicine and Health Economics can accelerate the development.