Is social justice to economic development what physics is to engineering? No. Social justice mixes ethics with believing in a false utopia. Economic development, like physics and engineering, is science-based.
Historians like Yuval Noah Hariri and Tom Holland support the view that a diverse society needs a shared set of faith-based beliefs to bond around common values. As coherence of a post-apartheid South African society could not be achieved through an official national religion, placing collective faith in social justice seemed sensible and it helped to avoid a civil war.
Yet if the life prospects for today’s median school leavers is a reasonable gauge, which it is, it will probably take at least another three decades for South Africa to become a credible version of a just society. Over indulging social justice aspirations always exposed economic development prospects to being sacrificed for the benefit of political elites.
We’ve drifted so far from the similar paths so many nations have taken to achieve broad prosperity that we consider subsistence grants for the majority of our young adults who are unemployed and unlikely to ever experience meaningful employment. Successful nations advance social justice while adhering to economic development fundamentals, whereas our government employs the legacy of past injustices to reject the basic steps which lead to widespread prosperity.
The big picture is that science and commerce have intermingled, while mutually advancing to the point that it has become easy for healthy young adults to achieve a level of productivity vastly exceeding subsistence requirements. The large concentrations of extreme poverty that remain entrenched today are predominantly clustered in resource-endowed nations run by patronage-reliant political parties. South Africa epitomises this profile.
Engineers don’t build bridges by ignoring load-bearing capacities, yet our economy is expected to tolerate the violation of the most basic development principles. Global poverty has been plunging for decades as countries, companies and workers have carved out niches in supply chains through specialising and focusing on productivity, competitiveness, efficiency and dependability.
Essential economic building blocks
Our national government rejects what other nations rightly prioritise as essential economic building blocks. Localisation appeals to our policy-makers as it allows them furtively to buy a bit of time by forcing South African companies and consumers to absorb many of the negative consequences of the economy’s declining competitiveness.
Yet the most harmful consequences of our policies are inflicted upon the majority of each year’s school leavers who become human detritus on the side of the dusty roads our policies produce in lieu of the global highways their counterparts in successful countries navigate. Our political processes resemble those of a functioning democracy yet our youth unemployment is as ultra-elevated as it is entrenched. Only Djibouti, a country of a million people, is as unsuccessful at employing its young adults.
Our negotiated 1990s transition produced a formidable political constitution whose genetic composition reflects centuries of learning what works. Conversely, it is as if our economic policies are intended to further confirm what is wholly unworkable.
The UK, whose political set up somewhat resembles ours, swiftly dismissed a prime minister whose policies were deemed dangerously misconceived. That country, along with many others, is responding to harsh stresses. But as with most countries today, the vast majority of its school leavers will rather quickly find reasonable employment.
What background factors might help explain our unresponsiveness to the dismal prospects our policies have provoked? Baked within our largely peaceful political transition was a faith-based acceptance of social justice aspirations, which was then weaponised by political elites against those not safely tucked within their patronage network.
We are very distant, geographically and by national disposition, from the world’s clusters of wealth-creating nations. This removes the peer pressure of high-performing neighbours. Meanwhile, geological endowments partially offset market pressures while reinforcing the social justice sentiments used to justify the redistribution policies central to supporting massive patronage.
Biggest challenge
The former regime inverted the biggest challenge of constitutional democracies, minority rights, by enfranchising a racial minority. Jesus’ central teachings about the ‘last shall be first’, and the Old Testament’s ‘the humble shall inherit the earth’ were also discarded. Might such perversions of values help to precondition a society for social justice principles being shaped into tools of repression?
What about the professors and administrators at many of the world’s most esteemed universities who deride the giant problem-solvers of the past for not having ascribed to today’s social mores, as defined by those who lecture about critical race theory and the like?
The UK Tories ditching Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss for Rishi Sunak demonstrated rejection of bombast and ideological indulgences in favour of an opinionated technocrat. Sunak’s ethnicity became far less relevant than his expertise. Here in South Africa, we haven’t begun to develop a serious discussion about resolving our youth unemployment crisis. It seems that we want to live in a parallel universe where social justice aspirations can be substituted for real world challenges such as improving productivity.
Centuries ago the father of modern physics, Sir Isaac Newton, recognised that the same force, gravity, that acts on an object falling to the ground, like an apple, also acts on planets. It is wonderful that the night sky inspires poets and painters but the guidance offered by GPS systems relies on accepting universal principles.
We were not wrong to seek common bonds through pursuing just outcomes. But our elected leaders exploited such idealism to silence the technocratic insights that such navigation requires. Course correcting begins with acknowledging this.
[Image: Alexander Antropov from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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