Besides the occasional random stuff, the themes I post about inevitably end up being either sustainability or social justice. At the moment, I’m profoundly optomistic about the former, and seriously doubtful about the latter. Here’s why:

A great deal of sustainable development has to do with improving efficiency. While conservation is important - and by far the easiest path to sustainability - efficiency is, at its basis, about getting more ‘out’ from less ‘in.’ Not only does it reduce the load on the environment, efficiency improvements almost always end up paying dividends economically in the long term. Sustainable policies makes eminent business sense, which is why I suspect that more and more will be adopted; and sooner rather than later.

The same cannot be said about social justice. With the exception of the bottom-of-the-pyramid theory that sees the billions of poor people in the world as the biggest market niche ever ignored, it takes a lot more creativity to find ways to make money by helping people. While some new business models are embracing emerging technologies to do just that, the economic incentive is much harder to see, and without that, nothing is going to happen on any significant scale.