Uncertainty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty

Situations often arise wherein a decision must be made when the results of each possible choice are uncertain.

Uncertainty or incertitude refers to situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown, and is particularly relevant for decision-making. Uncertainty arises in partially observable or stochastic or complex or dynamic environments, as well as due to ignorance, indolence, or both. It arises in any number of fields, including insurance, philosophy, physics, statistics, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, medicine, psychology, sociology, engineering, metrology, meteorology, ecology and information science.

Concepts

Although the terms are used in various ways among the general public, many specialists in decision theory, statistics and other quantitative fields have defined uncertainty, risk, and their measurement as:

Uncertainty

The lack of certainty, a state of limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe one or more of the following: the existing state or goal or set of options, the full set of possible future states or their probabilities or their values or utilities to stakeholders, the full set of stakeholders involved, or any other piece of information that inhibits the calculation of the full set of expected values for the options available.

Measurement

Uncertainty, only when considered as objective or subjective risk, can be measured through a set of possible states or outcomes where probabilities are assigned to each possible state or outcome – this also includes the application of a probability density function to continuous variables.

Second-order uncertainty

In statistics and economics, second-order uncertainty - expressed as the confidence over outcome probability estimates - is represented in probability density functions over (first-order) probabilities.

Opinions in subjective logic carry this type of uncertainty.

Risk

Risk exists when the future realized point value of a distribution of possible outcomes is not known but an estimated value can be calculated, and where some possible outcomes have an undesired effect or significant loss. Measurement of risk includes a set of outcome probabilities along with the valuations of those outcomes, where some possible outcomes involve losses. This also includes loss functions over continuous variables. Because an expected value for a decision can be calculated, some do not consider risk to be a true type of uncertainty (see below).

Risk versus variability

There is a difference between risk and variability. Risk is quantified by a probability distribution which depends upon knowledge about the likelihood of what the single, true value of the future quantity will be, as in the case of a roll of the dice. Variability is quantified by a distribution of frequencies of multiple instances of the quantity, derived from observed data, as in the case of a batting average.

Knightian uncertainty

In economics, in 1921 Frank Knight distinguished uncertainty from risk with uncertainty being lack of knowledge which is immeasurable and impossible to calculate. To Knight, uncertainty is uninsurable while risk is (hypothetically) insurable. Because of the absence of clearly defined statistics in most economic decisions where people face uncertainty, he believed that we cannot measure probabilities in such cases; this is now referred to as Knightian uncertainty.

Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of risk, from which it has never been properly separated.... The essential fact is that 'risk' means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating.... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or 'risk' proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.

— Frank Knight (1885–1972), Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921), University of Chicago.

There is a fundamental distinction between the reward for taking a known risk and that for assuming a risk whose value itself is not known. It is so fundamental, indeed, that … a known risk will not lead to any reward or special payment at all.

— Frank Knight

Knight pointed out that the unfavorable outcome of known risks can be insured during the decision-making process because it has a clearly defined expected probability distribution. Uncertainties have no known expected probability distribution, which can lead to extreme outcomes when borne. Because Knight refers to those who do bear uncertainty as 'entrepreneurs', the field of entrepreneurship includes a stream of research on uncertainty and how it creates opportunities.

Other taxonomies of uncertainties and decisions include more specific characterizations of uncertainty, specifying what is known, knowable, and unknowable about the phenomenon, as well as how it should be approached from an ethics perspective:

A taxonomy of uncertainty

There are some things that you know to be true, and others that you know to be false; yet, despite this extensive knowledge that you have, there remain many things whose truth or falsity is not known to you. We say that you are uncertain about them. You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.

Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Risk and uncertainty

For example, if it is unknown whether or not it will rain tomorrow, then there is a state of uncertainty. If probabilities are applied to the possible outcomes using weather forecasts or even just a calibrated probability assessment, the risk has been quantified. Suppose it is quantified as a 90% chance of sunshine. If there is a major, costly, outdoor event planned for tomorrow then there is a risk since there is a 10% chance of rain, and rain would be undesirable. Furthermore, if this is a business event and $100,000 would be lost if it rains, then the risk has been quantified (a 10% chance of losing $100,000). These situations can be made even more realistic by quantifying light rain vs. heavy rain, the cost of delays vs. outright cancellation, etc.

Some may represent the risk in this example as the "expected opportunity loss" (EOL) or the chance of the loss multiplied by the amount of the loss (10% × $100,000 = $10,000). That is useful if the organizer of the event is "risk neutral", which most people are not. Most would be willing to pay a premium to avoid the loss. An insurance company, for example, would compute an EOL as a minimum for any insurance coverage, then add onto that other operating costs and profit. Since many people are willing to buy insurance for many reasons, then clearly the EOL alone is not the perceived value of avoiding the risk.

Quantitative uses of the terms uncertainty and risk are fairly consistent among fields such as probability theory, actuarial science, and information theory. Some also create new terms without substantially changing the definitions of uncertainty or risk. For example, surprisal is a variation on uncertainty sometimes used in information theory. But outside of the more mathematical uses of the term, usage may vary widely. In cognitive psychology, uncertainty can be real, or just a matter of perception, such as expectations, threats, etc.

Vagueness is a form of uncertainty where the analyst is unable to clearly differentiate between two different classes, such as 'person of average height' and 'tall person'. This form of vagueness can be modelled by some variation on Zadeh's fuzzy logic or subjective logic.

Ambiguity is a form of uncertainty where even the possible outcomes have unclear meanings and interpretations. The statement "He returns from the bank" is ambiguous because its interpretation depends on whether the word 'bank' is meant as "the side of a river" or "a financial institution". Ambiguity typically arises in situations where multiple analysts or observers have different interpretations of the same statements. Ambiguity can also refer to a type of uncertainty where the range of a distribution of possible outcomes is known, but not their probabilities. Daniel Ellsberg is famous for his urn experiments that illustrated ambiguity, its delineation from risk, and its separate avoidance.

At the subatomic level, uncertainty may be a fundamental and unavoidable property of the universe. In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle puts limits on how much an observer can ever know about the position and velocity of a particle. This may not just be ignorance of potentially obtainable facts but that there is no fact to be found. There is some controversy in physics as to whether such uncertainty is an irreducible property of nature or if there are "hidden variables" that would describe the state of a particle even more exactly than Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows.

Radical uncertainty

The term 'radical uncertainty' was popularised by John Kay and Mervyn King in their book Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future, published in March 2020. It is distinct from Knightian uncertainty, by whether or not it is 'resolvable'. If uncertainty arises from a lack of knowledge, and that lack of knowledge is resolvable by acquiring knowledge (such as by primary or secondary research) then it is not radical uncertainty. Only when there are no means available to acquire the knowledge which would resolve the uncertainty, is it considered 'radical'.

In measurements

Main article: Measurement uncertainty

See also: Uncertainty quantification and Uncertainty propagation

The most commonly used procedure for calculating measurement uncertainty is described in the "Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement" (GUM) published by ISO. A derived work is for example the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Technical Note 1297, "Guidelines for Evaluating and Expressing the Uncertainty of NIST Measurement Results", and the Eurachem/Citac publication "Quantifying Uncertainty in Analytical Measurement". The uncertainty of the result of a measurement generally consists of several components. The components are regarded as random variables, and may be grouped into two categories according to the method used to estimate their numerical values:

• Type A, those evaluated by statistical methods
• Type B, those evaluated by other means, e.g., by assigning a probability distribution

By propagating the variances of the components through a function relating the components to the measurement result, the combined measurement uncertainty is given as the square root of the resulting variance. The simplest form is the standard deviation of a repeated observation.

In metrology, physics, and engineering, the uncertainty or margin of error of a measurement, when explicitly stated, is given by a range of values likely to enclose the true value. The uncertainty is often the standard uncertainty, which assumes an approximately Gaussian distribution, with the uncertainty expressing one standard deviation. This may be denoted by error bars on a graph, or by the following notations:

• measured value ± uncertainty
• measured value ^+uncertainty
  _{−uncertainty}
• measured value (uncertainty)

In the last notation, parentheses are the concise notation for the ± notation. For example, applying 10 1⁄2 meters in a scientific or engineering application, it could be written 10.5 m or 10.50 m, by convention meaning accurate to within one tenth of a meter, or one hundredth. The precision is symmetric around the last digit. In this case it's half a tenth up and half a tenth down, so 10.5 means between 10.45 and 10.55. Thus it is understood that 10.5 means 10.5±0.05, and 10.50 means 10.50±0.005, also written 10.50(5) and 10.500(5) respectively. But if the accuracy is within two tenths, the uncertainty is ± one tenth, and it is required to be explicit: 10.5±0.1 and 10.50±0.01 or 10.5(1) and 10.50(1). The numbers in parentheses apply to the numeral left of themselves, and are not part of that number, but part of a notation of uncertainty. They apply to the least significant digits. For instance, 1.00794(7) stands for 1.00794±0.00007, while 1.00794(72) stands for 1.00794±0.00072. This concise notation is used for example by IUPAC in stating the atomic mass of elements.

The middle notation is used when the error is not symmetrical about the value – for example 3.4+0.3
−0.2. This can occur when using a logarithmic scale, for example.

Uncertainty of a measurement can be determined by repeating a measurement to arrive at an estimate of the standard deviation of the values. Then, any single value has an uncertainty equal to the standard deviation. However, if the values are averaged, then the mean measurement value has a much smaller uncertainty, equal to the standard error of the mean, which is the standard deviation divided by the square root of the number of measurements. This procedure neglects systematic errors, however.

When the uncertainty represents the standard error of the measurement, then about 68.3% of the time, the true value of the measured quantity falls within the stated uncertainty range. For example, it is likely that for 31.7% of the atomic mass values given on the list of elements by atomic mass, the true value lies outside of the stated range. If the width of the interval is doubled, then probably only 4.6% of the true values lie outside the doubled interval, and if the width is tripled, probably only 0.3% lie outside. These values follow from the properties of the normal distribution, and they apply only if the measurement process produces normally distributed errors. In that case, the quoted standard errors are easily converted to 68.3% ("one sigma"), 95.4% ("two sigma"), or 99.7% ("three sigma") confidence intervals.

In this context, uncertainty depends on both the accuracy and precision of the measurement instrument. The lower the accuracy and precision of an instrument, the larger the measurement uncertainty is. Precision is often determined as the standard deviation of the repeated measures of a given value, namely using the same method described above to assess measurement uncertainty. However, this method is correct only when the instrument is accurate. When it is inaccurate, the uncertainty is larger than the standard deviation of the repeated measures, and it appears evident that the uncertainty does not depend only on instrumental precision.

In the media

Uncertainty in science, and science in general, may be interpreted differently in the public sphere than in the scientific community. This is due in part to the diversity of the public audience, and the tendency for scientists to misunderstand lay audiences and therefore not communicate ideas clearly and effectively. One example is explained by the information deficit model. Also, in the public realm, there are often many scientific voices giving input on a single topic. For example, depending on how an issue is reported in the public sphere, discrepancies between outcomes of multiple scientific studies due to methodological differences could be interpreted by the public as a lack of consensus in a situation where a consensus does in fact exist. This interpretation may have even been intentionally promoted, as scientific uncertainty may be managed to reach certain goals. For example, climate change deniers took the advice of Frank Luntz to frame global warming as an issue of scientific uncertainty, which was a precursor to the conflict frame used by journalists when reporting the issue.

"Indeterminacy can be loosely said to apply to situations in which not all the parameters of the system and their interactions are fully known, whereas ignorance refers to situations in which it is not known what is not known." These unknowns, indeterminacy and ignorance, that exist in science are often "transformed" into uncertainty when reported to the public in order to make issues more manageable, since scientific indeterminacy and ignorance are difficult concepts for scientists to convey without losing credibility. Conversely, uncertainty is often interpreted by the public as ignorance. The transformation of indeterminacy and ignorance into uncertainty may be related to the public's misinterpretation of uncertainty as ignorance.

Journalists may inflate uncertainty (making the science seem more uncertain than it really is) or downplay uncertainty (making the science seem more certain than it really is). One way that journalists inflate uncertainty is by describing new research that contradicts past research without providing context for the change. Journalists may give scientists with minority views equal weight as scientists with majority views, without adequately describing or explaining the state of scientific consensus on the issue. In the same vein, journalists may give non-scientists the same amount of attention and importance as scientists.

Journalists may downplay uncertainty by eliminating "scientists' carefully chosen tentative wording, and by losing these caveats the information is skewed and presented as more certain and conclusive than it really is". Also, stories with a single source or without any context of previous research mean that the subject at hand is presented as more definitive and certain than it is in reality. There is often a "product over process" approach to science journalism that aids, too, in the downplaying of uncertainty. Finally, and most notably for this investigation, when science is framed by journalists as a triumphant quest, uncertainty is erroneously framed as "reducible and resolvable".

Some media routines and organizational factors affect the overstatement of uncertainty; other media routines and organizational factors help inflate the certainty of an issue. Because the general public (in the United States) generally trusts scientists, when science stories are covered without alarm-raising cues from special interest organizations (religious groups, environmental organizations, political factions, etc.) they are often covered in a business related sense, in an economic-development frame or a social progress frame. The nature of these frames is to downplay or eliminate uncertainty, so when economic and scientific promise are focused on early in the issue cycle, as has happened with coverage of plant biotechnology and nanotechnology in the United States, the matter in question seems more definitive and certain.

Sometimes, stockholders, owners, or advertising will pressure a media organization to promote the business aspects of a scientific issue, and therefore any uncertainty claims which may compromise the business interests are downplayed or eliminated.

Applications

• Uncertainty-as-risk is designed into games, most notably in gambling, where chance is central to play.
• In scientific modelling, in which the prediction of future events should be understood to have a range of expected values.
• In computer science, and in particular data management, uncertain data is commonplace and can be modeled and stored within an uncertain database.
• In optimization, uncertainty permits one to describe situations where the user does not have full control on the outcome of the optimization procedure, see scenario optimization and stochastic optimization.
• In weather forecasting, it is now commonplace to include data on the degree of uncertainty in a weather forecast.
• Uncertainty or error is used in science and engineering notation. Numerical values should only have to be expressed in those digits that are physically meaningful, which are referred to as significant figures. Uncertainty is involved in every measurement, such as measuring a distance, a temperature, etc., the degree depending upon the instrument or technique used to make the measurement. Similarly, uncertainty is propagated through calculations so that the calculated value has some degree of uncertainty depending upon the uncertainties of the measured values and the equation used in the calculation.
• In physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle forms the basis of modern quantum mechanics.
• In metrology, measurement uncertainty is a central concept quantifying the dispersion one may reasonably attribute to a measurement result. Such an uncertainty can also be referred to as a measurement error.
• In daily life, measurement uncertainty is often implicit ("He is 6 feet tall" give or take a few inches), while for any serious use an explicit statement of the measurement uncertainty is necessary. The expected measurement uncertainty of many measuring instruments (scales, oscilloscopes, force gages, rulers, thermometers, etc.) is often stated in the manufacturers' specifications.
• In engineering, uncertainty can be used in the context of validation and verification of material modeling.
• Uncertainty has been a common theme in art, both as a thematic device (see, for example, the indecision of Hamlet), and as a quandary for the artist (such as Martin Creed's difficulty with deciding what artworks to make).
• Uncertainty is an important factor in economics. According to economist Frank Knight, it is different from risk, where there is a specific probability assigned to each outcome (as when flipping a fair coin). Knightian uncertainty involves a situation that has unknown probabilities.
• Investing in financial markets such as the stock market involves Knightian uncertainty when the probability of a rare but catastrophic event is unknown.

Philosophy

Main article: Philosophical skepticism

In Western philosophy the first philosopher to embrace uncertainty was Pyrrho resulting in the Hellenistic philosophies of Pyrrhonism and Academic Skepticism, the first schools of philosophical skepticism. Aporia and acatalepsy represent key concepts in ancient Greek philosophy regarding uncertainty.

William MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University, has also discussed the concept of Moral Uncertainty. Moral Uncertainty is "uncertainty about how to act given lack of certainty in any one moral theory, as well as the study of how we ought to act given this uncertainty."

Artificial intelligence

Many reasoning systems provide capabilities for reasoning under uncertainty. This is important when building situated reasoning agents which must deal with uncertain representations of the world. There are several common approaches to handling uncertainty. These include the use of certainty factors, probabilistic methods such as Bayesian inference or Dempster–Shafer theory, multi-valued ('fuzzy') logic and various connectionist approaches.

Climate change and civilizational collapse

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Climate change and civilizational collapse

Climate change and civilizational collapse refers to a hypothetical risk that the negative impacts of climate change might reduce global socioeconomic complexity to the point that complex human civilization effectively ends around the world, with humanity reduced to a less developed state. This hypothetical risk is typically associated with the idea of a massive reduction of the human population caused by the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, as well as a permanent reduction of Earth's carrying capacity. Finally, it is sometimes suggested that a civilizational collapse caused by climate change would soon lead to human extinction.

Some researchers connect historical examples of societal collapse with adverse changes in local and/or global weather patterns. In particular, the 4.2-kiloyear event, a millennial-scale megadrought which took place in Africa and Asia between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago, has been linked with the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Liangzhu culture in the lower Yangtze River area and the Indus Valley Civilization. In Europe, the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which was defined by events such as crop failure and the Thirty Years' War, took place during the Little Ice Age. In 2011, a general connection was proposed between adverse climate variations and long-term societal crises during the preindustrial times. Drought might have been a contributing factor to the Classic Maya collapse between the 7th and 9th centuries. However, all of these events were limited to individual human societies: a collapse of the entire human civilization would be historically unprecedented.

Some of the more extreme warnings of civilizational collapse caused by climate change, such as a claim that civilization is highly likely to end by 2050, have attracted strong rebuttals from scientists. The 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report projects that human population would be in a range between 8.5 billion and 11 billion people (median - 9.75 billion people) by 2050. By the year 2100, the median population projection is at 11 billion people, while the maximum population projection is close to 16 billion people. The lowest projection for 2100 is around 7 billion, and this decline from present levels is primarily attributed to "rapid development and investment in education", with those projections associated with some of the highest levels of economic growth. However, a minority of climate scientists have argued that higher levels of warming—between about 3 °C (5.4 °F) to 5 °C (9.0 °F) over preindustrial temperatures—may be incompatible with civilization, or that the lives of several billion people could no longer be sustained in such a world. In 2022, they have called for a so-called "climate endgame" research agenda into the probability of these risks, which had attracted significant media attention and some scientific controversy.

Some of the most high-profile writing on climate change and civilizational collapse has been written by non-scientists. Notable examples include "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells and "What if we stopped pretending?" by Jonathan Franzen, which were both criticized for scientific inaccuracy. Opinion polling has provided evidence that youths across the world experience widespread climate anxiety, with the term collapsology being coined in 2015 to describe a pessimistic worldview anticipating civilizational collapse due to climate anxiety.

Suggested historical examples

Ruins of Mohenjo-daro on the Indus River in Pakistan

The Mayan ruins of Palenque. Drought might have been a contributing factor to the Classic Maya collapse between the 7th and 9th centuries.

Archeologists have identified signs of a megadrought which lasted for a millennium between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago in Africa and Asia. The drying of the Green Sahara not only turned it into a desert but also disrupted the monsoon seasons in South and Southeast Asia and caused flooding in East Asia, which prevented successful harvests and the development of complex culture. It coincided with and may have caused the decline and the fall of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization. The dramatic shift in climate is known as the 4.2-kiloyear event.

The highly advanced Indus Valley Civilization took root around 3000 BC in what is now northwestern India and Pakistan and collapsed around 1700 BC. Since the Indus script has yet to be deciphered, the causes of its de-urbanization remain a mystery, but there is some evidence pointing to natural disasters. Signs of a gradual decline began to emerge in 1900 BC, and two centuries later, most of the cities had been abandoned. Archeological evidence suggests an increase in interpersonal violence and in infectious diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis. Historians and archeologists believe that severe and long-lasting drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia caused the collapse. Evidence for earthquakes has also been discovered. Sea level changes are also found at two possible seaport sites along the Makran coast which are now inland. Earthquakes may have contributed to decline of several sites by direct shaking damage or by changes in sea level or in water supply.

More generally, recent research pointed to climate change as a key player in the decline and fall of historical societies in China, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. In fact, paleoclimatogical temperature reconstruction suggests that historical periods of social unrest, societal collapse, and population crash and significant climate change often occurred simultaneously. A team of researchers from Mainland China and Hong Kong were able to establish a causal connection between climate change and large-scale human crises in pre-industrial times. Short-term crises may be caused by social problems, but climate change was the ultimate cause of major crises, starting with economic depressions. Moreover, since agriculture is highly dependent on climate, any changes to the regional climate from the optimum can induce crop failures.

The Mongol conquests corresponded to a period of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Medieval Warm Period was giving way to the Little Ice Age, which caused ecological stress. In Europe, the cooling climate did not directly facilitate the Black Death, but it caused wars, mass migration, and famine, which helped diseases spread.

Modern discussion

2000s

As early as in 2004, a book titled Ecocriticism explored the connection between apocalypticism as expressed in religious contexts, and the secular apocalyptic interpretations of climate and environmental issues. It argued that the tragic (preordained, with clearly delineated morality) or comic (focused on human flaws as opposed to inherent inevitability) apocalyptic framing was seen in the past works on environment, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1972), and Al Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992).

In the mid-2000s, James Lovelock gave predictions to the British newspapers The Independent and The Guardian, where he suggested that much of Europe will have turned to desert and "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the 21st century. In 2008, he was quoted in The Guardian as saying that 80% of humans will perish by 2100, and that the climate change responsible for that will last 100,000 years. By 2012, he admitted that climate change had proceeded slower than he expected.

2010s–present

In late 2010s, several articles have attracted attention for their predictions of apocalyptic impacts caused by climate change. Firstly, there was "The Uninhabitable Earth", a July 2017 New York magazine article by David Wallace-Wells, which had become the most-read story in the history of the magazine, and was later adapted into a book. Another was "What if we stopped pretending?", an article written for The New Yorker by Jonathan Franzen in September 2019. Both articles were heavily criticized by the fact-checking organization Climate Feedback for the numerous inaccuracies about tipping points in the climate system and other aspects of climate change research.

Other examples of this genre include "What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy?", a year 2022 article for TIME magazine by Parag Khanna, which had asserted that hundreds of millions of people dying in the upcoming years and the global population standing at 6 billion by the year 2050 was a plausible worst-case scenario. Further, some reports, such as "the 2050 scenario" from the Australian Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration and the self-published Deep Adaptation paper by Jem Bendell had attracted substantial media coverage by making allegations that the outcomes of climate change are underestimated by the conventional scientific process. Those reports did not go through the peer review process, and the scientific assessment of these works finds them of very low credibility.

Notably, subsequent writing by David Wallace-Wells had stepped back from the claims he made in either version of The Uninhabitable Earth. In 2022, he authored a feature article for The New York Times, which was titled "Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View". The following year, Kyle Paoletta argued in Harper's Magazine that the shift in tone made by David Wallace-Wells was indicative of a larger trend in media coverage of climate change taking place.

In October 2024, 44 climate scientists published an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers, claiming that according to scientific studies in the past few years, the risk of collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has been greatly underestimated, that it can occur in the next few decades, and that some changes are already happening. Climate change may weaken the AMOC through increases in ocean heat content and elevated flows of freshwater from melting ice sheets. The collapse of the AMOC would be a severe climate catastrophe, resulting in a cooling of the Northern Hemisphere. It would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world. Others disagree.

Scientific consensus and controversy

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report projects that human population would be in a range between 8.5 billion and 11 billion people (median average - 9.75 billion people) by 2050; the median population projection for the year 2100 is at 11 billion people, while the maximum population projection is close to 16 billion people. The lowest projection for 2100 is around 7 billion, and this decline from present levels is primarily attributed to "rapid development and investment in education", with those projections associated with some of the highest levels of economic growth. In November 2021, Nature surveyed the authors of the first part of the IPCC assessment report: out of 92 respondents, 88% have agreed that the world is experiencing a "climate crisis", yet when asked if they experience "anxiety, grief or other distress because of concerns over climate change?" just 40% answered "Yes, infrequently", with a further 21% responding "Yes, frequently", and the remaining 39% answering "No". Similarly, when a high-profile paper warning of "the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future" was published in Frontiers in Conservation Science, its authors have noted that "even if major catastrophes occur during this interval, they would unlikely affect the population trajectory until well into the 22nd Century", and "there is no way—ethically or otherwise (barring extreme and unprecedented increases in human mortality)—to avoid rising human numbers and the accompanying overconsumption."

Only a minority of publishing scientists have been more open to apocalyptic rhetoric. In 2009, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the Emeritus Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, stated that if global warming reached 4 °C (7.2 °F) over the present levels, then the human population would likely be reduced to 1 billion. In 2015, he complained that this remark was frequently misinterpreted as a call for active human population control rather than a prediction. In a January 2019 interview for The Ecologist, he claimed that if we find reasons to give up on action, then there's a very big risk of things turning to an outright catastrophe, with the civilization ending and almost everything which had been built up over the past two thousand years destroyed.

In May 2019, The Guardian interviewed several climate scientists about a world where 4 °C (7.2 °F) of warming over the preindustrial has occurred by 2100: one of them was Johan Rockström, who was reported to state "It's difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that" in such a scenario. Around the same time, similar claims were made by the Extinction Rebellion activist Roger Hallam, who said in a 2019 interview that climate change may "kill 6 billion people by 2100"—a remark which was soon questioned by the BBC News presenter Andrew Neil and criticized as scientifically unfounded by Climate Feedback. In November 2019, The Guardian article was corrected, acknowledging that Rockström was misquoted and his real remarks were "It's difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that".

In 2022, the United Nations published a report called Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR2022) saying societal collapse due to extensive crossing of planetary boundaries is possible. The UN report call to preventive policies including incorporating planetary boundaries in the SDG targets. Allegedly, a senior advisor to the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and contributor to the Global Assessment Report who spoke to Byline Times on condition of anonymity said, that the report was strongly censored before being published, so that "The GAR2022 is an eviscerated skeleton of what was included in earlier drafts". However, the study which mentioned this possibility and was included in GAR2022 was a scenario study with no actual measurements or timescales.

Generally, the number of scientific studies dealing with societal collapse from climate change is rising.

Climate endgame

In August 2022, Schellnhuber, Rockström and several other researchers, many of whom were associated with Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, have published a paper in PNAS which argued that a lack of what they called "integrated catastrophe assessment" meant that the risk of societal collapse, or even eventual human extinction caused by climate change and its interrelated impacts such as famine (crop loss, drought), extreme weather (hurricanes, floods), war (caused by the scarce resources), systemic risk (relating to migration, famine, or conflict), and disease was "dangerously underexplored". The paper suggested that the following terms should be actively used in the future research.

Conceptual causal loop diagram of cascading global climate failure used in the "Climate endgame" paper

Defining key terms in the Climate Endgame agenda

Term	Definition
Latent risk	Risk that is dormant under one set of conditions but becomes active under another set of conditions.
Risk cascade	Chains of risk occurring when an adverse impact triggers a set of linked risks.
Systemic risk	The potential for individual disruptions or failures to cascade into a system-wide failure.
Extreme climate change	Mean global surface temperature rise of 3 °C (5.4 °F) or more above preindustrial levels by 2100.
Extinction risk	The probability of human extinction within a given timeframe.
Extinction threat	A plausible and significant contributor to total extinction risk.
Societal fragility	The potential for smaller damages to spiral into global catastrophic or extinction risk due to societal vulnerabilities, risk cascades, and maladaptive responses.
Societal collapse	Significant sociopolitical fragmentation and/or state failure along with the relatively rapid, enduring, and significant loss capital, and systems identity; this can lead to large-scale increases in mortality and morbidity.
Global catastrophic risk	The probability of a loss of 25% of the global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades).
Global catastrophic threat	A plausible and significant contributor to global catastrophic risk; the potential for climate change to be a global catastrophic threat can be referred to as "catastrophic climate change".
Global decimation risk	The probability of a loss of 10% (or more) of global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades).
Global decimation threat	A plausible and significant contributor to global decimation risk.
Endgame territory	Levels of global warming and societal fragility that are judged sufficiently probable to constitute climate change as an extinction threat.
Worst-case warming	The highest empirically and theoretically plausible level of global warming.

Overlap between state fragility, extreme heat, and nuclear and biological catastrophic hazards according to the "Endgame" paper

 

Overlap between future population distribution and extreme heat according to the same paper This graphic was criticized for using a scenario considered unlikely and worse than the present trajectory.

The paper was very high-profile, receiving extensive media coverage and over 180,000 page views by 2023. It was also the subject of several response papers from other scientists, all of which were also published at PNAS. Most have welcomed its proposals while disagreeing on some of the details of the suggested agenda. However, a response paper authored by Roger Pielke Jr. and fellow University of Colorado Boulder researchers Matthew Burgess and Justin Ritchie was far more critical. They have argued that one of the paper's main arguments—the supposed lack of research into higher levels of global warming—was baseless, as on the contrary, the scenarios of highest global warming called RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5 have accounted for around half of all mentions in the "impacts" section of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, and SSP3-7, the scenario of slightly lower warming used in some of the paper's graphics, had also assumed greater emissions and more extensive coal use than what had been projected by the International Energy Agency. They have also argued that just as the past projections of overpopulation were used to justify one-child policy in China, a disproportionate focus on apocalyptic scenarios may be used to justify despotism and fascist policies. In response, the authors of the original paper wrote that in their view, catastrophic risks may occur even at lower levels of warming due to risks involving human responses and societal fragility. They also suggested that instead of the one-child policy, a better metaphor for responses to extreme risks research would be the 1980s exploration of the impacts of nuclear winter, which had spurred nuclear disarmament efforts.

"Youth vs Apocalypse" banner seen at San Francisco Youth Climate Strike in 2019

Timescale

Bill McGuire (a professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards and the author of Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide) suggest that the collapse may occur by 2050.

A study published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology in the year of 2020, suggest that "current business-as-usual trajectory of global civilization is heading toward the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade—and at worst, could trigger societal collapse by around 2040".

Public opinion

See also: Media coverage of climate change, Psychological impact of climate change, and Doomer

Some public polling shows that beliefs in civilizational collapse or even human extinction have become widespread amongst the general population in many countries. In 2021, a publication in The Lancet surveyed 10,000 people aged 16–25 years in ten countries (Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and the US): one of its findings was 55% of respondents agreeing with the statement "humanity is doomed".

In 2020, a survey by a French think tank Jean Jaurès Foundation found that in five developed countries (France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US), a significant fraction of the population agreed with the statement that "civilization as we know it will collapse in the years to come"; the percentages ranged from 39% in Germany and 52% or 56% in the US and the UK to 65% in France and 71% in Italy.

Progressivism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism

Progressivism is a left-leaning political philosophy and reform movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform. Adherents endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere throughout the globe. Progressivism arose during the Age of Enlightenment out of the belief that civility in Europe was improving due to the application of new empirical knowledge.

In modern political discourse, progressivism is often associated with social liberalism, a left-leaning type of liberalism, and social democracy. Within economic progressivism, there is some ideological variation, as well as occasionally some variance on cultural issues. Illustrative examples of this include some Christian democracy and conservative-leaning communitarian movements. While many ideologies can fall under the banner of progressivism, all eras of the movement are characterized by a critique of unregulated capitalism and a call for a more active democratic government to safeguard human rights, promote cultural development, and serve as a check-and-balance on corporate monopolies.

Early history

From the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution

Main articles: Industrial Revolution, Modernity, and Social justice

See also: History of liberalism and Reformism

Immanuel Kant, German philosopher

John Stuart Mill, English philosopher

Immanuel Kant identified progress as being a movement away from barbarism toward civilization. 18th-century philosopher and political scientist Marquis de Condorcet predicted that political progress would involve the disappearance of slavery, the rise of literacy, the lessening of sex inequality, reform of prisons, which at the time were harsh, and the decline of poverty.

Modernity or modernisation was a key form of the idea of progress as promoted by classical liberals in the 19th and 20th centuries, who called for the rapid modernisation of the economy and society to remove the traditional hindrances to free markets and the free movements of people.

In the late 19th century, a political view rose in popularity in the Western world that progress was being stifled by vast economic inequality between the rich and the poor, minimally regulated laissez-faire capitalism with out-of-control monopolistic corporations, intense and often violent conflict between capitalists and workers, with a need for measures to address these problems. Progressivism has influenced various political movements. Social liberalism was influenced by British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill's conception of people being "progressive beings." British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli developed progressive conservatism under one-nation Toryism.

The first modern socialists of the 19th century followed utopian socialism, and experienced pushback from progressive socialism. This reformist approach was reflected in a readiness to question revolutionary tenets of Marxist orthodoxy, as well as challenges to sections of scientific socialism. G.A. Kleene, a 19th-century economist, defined progressive socialism as Eduard Bernstein's stand against "'Old-School' Marxism." Progressive socialism has historically been associated with reformist openness to question scientific socialism, such as by criticizing the law of growing misery.

In France, the space between social revolution and the socially conservative laissez-faire centre-right was filled with the emergence of radicalism which thought that social progress required anti-clericalism, humanism, and republicanism. Especially anti-clericalism was the dominant influence on the centre-left in many French- and Romance-speaking countries until the mid-20th century. In Imperial Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck enacted various progressive social welfare measures out of paternalistic conservative motivations to distance workers from the socialist movement of the time and as humane ways to assist in maintaining the Industrial Revolution.

In 1891, the Roman Catholic Church encyclical Rerum novarum issued by Pope Leo XIII condemned the exploitation of labor and urged support for labor unions and government regulation of businesses in the interests of social justice while upholding the property right and criticising socialism. A progressive Protestant outlook called the Social Gospel emerged in North America that focused on challenging economic exploitation and poverty and, by the mid-1890s, was common in many Protestant theological seminaries in the United States.

20th century: U.S. Progressive Era, New Deal and post-war consensus

Main articles: Progressive Era and New Deal coalition

See also: Progressivism in the United States

 

Progressive Era

 

Theodore Roosevelt, 26th U.S. President, progressive conservative

 

Woodrow Wilson, 28th U.S. President, progressive liberal

Early 20th-century progressivism included support for American engagement in World War I and the creation of and participation in the League of Nations, compulsory sterilisation in Scandinavia, and eugenics in Great Britain, and the temperance movement. Progressives believed that progress was stifled by economic inequality, inadequately regulated monopolistic corporations, and conflict between workers and elites, arguing that corrective measures were needed.

In the United States, progressivism began as an intellectual rebellion against the political philosophy of Constitutionalism as expressed by John Locke and the Founding Fathers of the American Republic, whereby the authority of government depends on observing limitations on its just powers. What began as a social movement in the 1890s grew into a popular political movement referred to as the Progressive Era; in the 1912 United States presidential election, all three U.S. presidential candidates claimed to be progressives. While the term progressivism represents a range of diverse political pressure groups, not always united, progressives rejected social Darwinism, believing that the problems society faced, such as class warfare, greed, poverty, racism and violence, could best be addressed by providing good education, a safe environment, and an efficient workplace. Progressives lived mainly in the cities, were college educated, and believed in a strong central government. President Theodore Roosevelt of the Republican Party and later the Progressive Party declared that he "always believed that wise progressivism and wise conservatism go hand in hand."

President Woodrow Wilson was also a member of the American progressive movement within the Democratic Party. Progressive stances have evolved. Imperialism was a controversial issue within progressivism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in the United States, where some progressives supported American imperialism while others opposed it. In response to World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points established the concept of national self-determination and criticised imperialist competition and colonial injustices. Anti-imperialists supported these views in areas resisting imperial rule.

New Deal and Post-war consensus

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd U.S. President, progressive liberal

 

Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th U.S. President, progressive liberal

 

Rab Butler, a Deputy Prime Minister and U.K. First Secretary of State, progressive conservative

During the period of acceptance of economic Keynesianism (the 1930s–1970s), there was widespread acceptance in many nations of a large role for state intervention in the economy. The "progressive" brand was frequently identified with supporters of the New Deal by the year 1936. While the more progressive Second New Deal was more controversial in the public, the progressive consensus of the New Deal was strong, and even future moderate Republican presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon worked to preserve it. The New Deal provided the context for future expansive progressive programs, especially the Great Society measures of Lyndon Johnson's administration. With the rise of neoliberalism and challenges to state interventionist policies in the 1970s and 1980s, centre-left progressive movements responded by adopting the Third Way, which emphasised a major role for the market economy. There have been social democrats who have called for the social-democratic movement to move past Third Way. Prominent progressive conservative elements in the British Conservative Party, such as from the likes of Rab Butler, promoted the post-war consensus, and others have criticised neoliberalism.

Into the 21st century and social democratic turn

See also: Social democracy § Analysis

Progressive Alliance

International organizing

Main articles: Progressive Alliance and Progressive International

Founded in Leipzig, Germany, on May 22, 2013, the Progressive Alliance is an international political organization made up primarily of social democratic political parties and organizations. The organization was established as a substitute for the already-existing Socialist International, of which many of its constituent parties are either present or previous members. In January 2012, Sigmar Gabriel, then chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), decided to terminate the SPD's annual membership fee of £100,000 to the Socialist International. Gabriel criticized Socialist International for admitting and maintaining undemocratic political movements, leading to the establishment of the Progressive Alliance. The organization has a stated goal to become the worldwide network of "the progressive, democratic, social-democratic, socialist, and labour movement."

Progressive International

 

Bernie Sanders, United States Senator from Vermont

 

Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance

PI logo

In May 2020, Progressive International was formally founded and launched on 11 May 2020, responding to a 2018 open call by the Democracy in Europe Movement and the Sanders Institute for united progressive forces around the globe. The open call was echoing two twinned appeals published in 2018 by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis, who is a Greek economist and self-described libertarian Marxist, to form an international movement to combat the rise of hard right authoritarianism and potential neofascist global influence represented by U.S. president Donald Trump. PI's founding was supported by a group of 40 advisors including Ece Temelkuran, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Yanis Varoufakis, Carola Rackete, Nick Estes, Vanessa Nakate, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Niki Ashton, Rafael Correa, Fernando Haddad, Celso Amorim, and Alvaro Garcia Linera. PI seeks to combat authoritarian nationalism around the world and is opposed to what it describes as disaster capitalism.

Europe

Main articles: Blairism and Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn

United Kingdom

Greens taking part in the 2011 London anti-cuts protest in the United Kingdom

20th century progressivism in the United Kingdom highlights enduring tension and factionalism between more avowedly left-wing progressives and those who incorporate more syncretic politics into their progressivism. Groups like the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Fabian Society, and Progressive Britain are organizations represent a wide variety of U.K. progressive thought. Progressivism in the United Kingdom has seen shifts from New Labour's early dominance to the rise of cultural liberalism, environmentalism from the Green Party, and grassroots movements with a variety of focuses, including pro-Palestine anti-war causes, radical democracy, and universal basic income. Tony Blair's government represented a significant period of progressive growth, although his politics were more centrist than previous progressive movements that leaned further left, and his government faced criticisms for its Third Way market-oriented policies and emphasis on deregulation. The Blairite consensus was dominant within U.K. progressivism from the mid-1990s and through the end of Blair’s premiership, which ended in 2007. New Labour continued to evolve with the subsequent Labour leadership of Gordon Brown and was formally abandoned by his successor, Ed Miliband, for One Nation Labour in 2010.

Jeremy Corbyn (right), U.K. Labour leader from 2015 to 2020, and Keir Starmer (left), U.K. Prime Minister since July 5, 2024

Jeremy Corbyn represented a staunch return of the Labour party platform to its more historic democratic socialism with a focus on nationalization, robust public spending, and both anti-austerity and anti-war stances. Corbyn appealed to a progressive left base disillusioned with previous Labour governments, but he was a controversial figure in the party who oscillated between a loyal base of support and electability concerns. Subsequent leader and eventual prime minister Keir Starmer shifted Labour toward pragmatic, economically cautious centrism, striving for electability by striking a balance between broad public appeal, traditional Labour beliefs, and Starmer's own conviction that economic changes made previous more left-wing economic positions untenable. The animosity between Corbyn and Starmer intensified with Starmer's suspension of Corbyn from Labour in 2020, accusing Corbyn of an inadequate response to antisemitism. Corbyn was supported against these accusations by Progressive International. Starmer said in 2023 that "the very best of progressive politics is found in our determination to push Britain forward," but "there are precious things – in our way of life, in our environment, in our communities – that it is our responsibility to protect and preserve and to pass on to future generations. If that sounds Conservative, then let me tell you: I don't care." Corbyn supported the foundation of the socialist Your Party in 2025 with Zarah Sultana in a further schism for U.K. left-leaning progressive politics. Facing challenges from Brexit and increased right-wing presence, contemporary progressivism in the United Kingdom can be characterized by increasing cultural liberalism and factionalism surrounding the role of capitalism in society.

Latin America

Main articles: Lulism, Kirchnerism, Presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Morena (political party)

Argentina

Néstor Kirchner, 55th President of Argentina, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, 56th President, in September of 2010–one of their last public appearances before Néstor's death

Kirchnerism in Argentina refers to the political strategies of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who were successive Presidents of Argentina. In favor of his wife, Néstor Kirchner chose not to run for reelection in 2007 after taking office on May 25, 2003. After Isabel Perón, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was the first woman to be elected directly to the presidency of Argentina. Cristina Kirchner has led the Justicialist Party since 2024. Kirchnerist policies are labeled Peronist, progressive, and left-wing. Social services were sponsored by Kirchnerist administrations, which were perceived as blatantly anti-neoliberal. Some political scientists propose the term "Pink Tide neopopulism" to characterize movements that are regarded as a response and a counter to neoliberalism. This is in contrast to the neoliberal populism that was prevalent in the 1990s. Kirchnerism is seen as a response and a counter to neoliberalism. Healthcare and income transfers were greatly increased, most notably by giving 15 million people—roughly 41% of the country's total population—free prescription drugs. Kirchnerists also adopted the traditional Peronist strategy of endorsing wage hikes and participating in labor battles. Argentina's period without widespread strikes during the Kirchnerist governments was only surpassed by the 1946–1955 era of Perón’s government.

Brazil

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 35th and 39th President of Brazil, taking pictures with supporters at São Bernardo do Campo

Lulism in Brazil demonstrates the broad coalitional and reformist nature of contemporary progressivism. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 2022 presidential comeback campaign was a progressive resurgence narrative focused on the working class and anti-corruption, running against incumbent right-wing populist President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula was 17% ahead of Bolsonaro in a poll in January 2022 in what was seen as an early sign of shifting progressive sentiment in the voting population against far-right politics of the Bolsonaro government. In the first round of the presidential election, Lula was in first place with 48% of the electorate, qualifying for the second round with Bolsonaro, who received 43% of the votes. Lula was elected in the second round on 30 October with 50.89% of the vote, the smallest margin in the history of Brazil's presidential elections. Lulism features an overlaps in political parties, including the Workers' Party founded by Lula. While seeing a democratic socialist society as the ultimate goal, Lula has called for a reformist "social liberal" approach to begin resolving poverty gap while acknowledging the reality of existing market structures.

Mexico

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (right), 65th President of Mexico, and Claudia Sheinbaum (left), then Head of Government of Mexico City and eventual 66th Mexican president, in June 2019

Described as a social democratic progressive and left-wing populist, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, was a national politician for over three decades, and ultimately elected President of Mexico following a 2018 landslide victory. López Obrador has been characterized as the "ideological twin" of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and Corbyn invited López Obrador to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. After winning the 2019 election in Argentina, López Obrador formed a "progressive alliance" with President Alberto Fernández, as reported by El País, marking one of López Obrador's first official trips abroad to Mexico. During his presidency, López Obrador commenced a number of progressive social reforms and encouraged public investment in industries that had been liberalized by earlier administrations. His supporters commended him for reorienting the nation's neoliberal consensus toward bettering the working class's situation and for fostering institutional rejuvenation following decades of extreme inequality and corruption. While credited and praised by supporters for progressive reforms, López Obrador has also received criticism for illiberality and contributing to democratic backsliding.

One of López Obrador's first measures was to raise the minimum wage from MXN $88.36 to MXN $102.68, representing a 16.2% increase—the biggest since 1996. This revision had an immediate impact on average worker salaries, which increased by 5.7%. López Obrador executed his promised "Republican Austerity" upon taking office as well, which aimed to cut spending on political privileges and non-essential government products and services. He canceled presidential pensions and imposed a pay cap for government personnel, ensuring that no one could earn more than the president. López Obrador reduced his own compensation by 60% and chose not to live in Los Pinos, the expensive presidential complex with upkeep costs totaling around MXN $30 billion over the last two administrations. López Obrador auctioned away several government planes and helicopters including the presidential plane "José María Morelos y Pavón", for roughly MXN $1.658 billion. The auction revenues supported hospitals in Tlapa, Guerrero, and Tuxtepec, Oaxaca.

The AMLO presidency also aimed to streamline the bureaucratic structure of the Mexican government, which López Obrador characterized as benefiting elites and mismanaging public finances. The AMLO budgets often included spending cuts to various government agencies, including prosecutors and the public health system, leading to layoffs, salary reductions, and poorer services. To centralize operations and address the reduced workforce, López Obrador often utilized the military for infrastructure projects. López Obrador called for the removal of independent government bodies in February 2024, saying that they duplicated the work of some cabinet ministries, suggesting that their duties be taken over by the Mexican cabinet to save funds and promote government efficiency. The proposal faced widespread condemnation, including from opposition members who criticized it as retribution against autonomous agencies. In the same month, López Obrador successfully proposed a constitutional amendment requiring the minimum wage to consistently rise above the rate of inflation.

Claudia Sheinbaum, a member of the left-wing political party Morena, was widely perceived by her party as the frontrunner to succeed López Obrador, and she eventually received the candidacy of the ruling coalition, Sigamos Haciendo Historia. Xóchitl Gálvez emerged as the opposition frontrunner in Fuerza y Corazón por México. On October 1, 2024, Sheinbaum was sworn in as president, becoming the first woman and person of Jewish origin to assume the office. Ifigenia Martínez, president of the Congress of the Union and a noted figure for the Mexican left, awarded her the presidential sash. The Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), the Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE), the National Institute of Transparency for Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI), the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), the National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (MejorEdu), and the Federal Economic Competition Commission were among the seven autonomous agencies that Sheinbaum consolidated into executive authority. Critics claimed that the measure compromised openness, regulatory independence, and limits on executive power. On 5 February 2025, Sheinbaum offered a constitutional reform to Congress prohibiting immediate reelection and barring family members of sitting officeholders from campaigning for the same public offices. The Senate delayed implementation of the reform until 2030. The bill was published on 1 April.

North America

Canada

Main article: Premiership of Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau, 23rd Prime Minister of Canada, at a 2022 protest in Ottawa

While not a member of the Progressive Alliance like the further-left New Democratic Party, Canada's Liberal Party experienced progressive inclination in the 21st century from the premiership of Justin Trudeau, who was a self-described progressive liberal. The Trudeau government's economic vision was initially based on greater tax collections to compensate for increased government spending. While the government has not balanced the budget, it has cut Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio annually until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Trudeau self-described his cultural policy as staunchly feminist and progressive, and his government advocated for the advancement of abortion rights, introduced the bill that made Canadian conversion therapies illegal, established the right to medically-assisted death, and legalized cannabis for recreational use. Trudeau made the announcement in 2021 that a national strategy for child care would be developed with the objective of lowering the cost of day care at a rate of ten dollars per day for each child during a period of five years. The Trudeau administration supported green politics through new pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030 and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 via a federal carbon pricing policy. Additionally, legislation for marine protection was passed by Trudeau's parliament as well as banning six common single-use plastic products and improving evaluations of environmental impact. Despite a generally green stance, Trudeau supported oil and gas pipelines to bring Canadian fossil fuel resources to foreign markets, which was met with opposition from environmental activists.

In March 2022, the NDP agreed on a confidence and supply arrangement with the Liberal Party, including policies such as establishing a national dental care program for low-income Canadians, progress toward a national pharmacare program, labor reforms for federally regulated workers, and additional taxes on financial institutions. The NDP and the Liberal Party terminated their confidence and supply agreement in September 2024. The agreement had been in place since March 2022, however it was terminated nine months ahead of schedule. On January 6, 2025, during a political crisis, Trudeau announced he would resign as Liberal leader and Prime Minister by 24 March 2025 upon the election of a new party leader, attributing his decision to intraparty dissent. The Liberal Party moved further from its more progressive stances toward the center under new leadership from Mark Carney, who became the first prime minister in Canadian history never to have held elected office. Carney would lead the Liberals to a minority government in late 2025 after advising the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and trigger a federal election.

United States

Main articles: Progressivism in the United States and Sandersism

President Obama (center) nominating Richard Cordray (right) as the first director of the CFPB. Elizabeth Warren (left) conceived of the CFPB and was both its inaugural interim director and special advisor

Senator Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, democratic progressive socialists in the U.S.

In the United States, both the Progressive Era and the modern movement are rooted in the notion that free markets lead to economic inequalities that can be fixed through government action and protect the working class. In the 21st century, progressives continue to favor public policy that they theorize will reduce or lessen the harmful effects of economic inequality and additionally are focused on ending systemic discrimination such as institutional racism; to advocate for social safety nets and workers' rights; and to oppose corporate influence on the democratic process. The unifying theme is to call attention to the negative impacts of current institutions or ways of doing things and to advocate for social progress, i.e., for positive change as defined by any of several standards such as the expansion of democracy, increased egalitarianism in the form of economic and social equality as well as improved well-being of a population. Proponents of social democracy have identified themselves as promoting the progressive cause. Landmark developments in progressive governance include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was originally proposed in 2007 by Elizabeth Warren, a self-described progressive capitalist who played a key role in its institutional creation. In reaction to the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed in 2010, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as an independent bureau within the Federal Reserve.

U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC emblem

The Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign road a wave of left-wing populist and progressive sentiment coming out of the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The campaign and Sanders himself praised social democratic programs in Europe and supported workplace democracy via union democracy, worker cooperatives, and workers' management of public enterprises. This continued into his 2020 presidential campaign and the Fighting Oligarchy tour with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, sharply critiquing neoliberal capitalism. Sanders and broader coalitions like the Congressional Progressive Caucus have called for universal, single-payer healthcare, living wage laws, reductions in military expenditure, increased corporate regulation, ending mass incarceration, and strong measures to reverse climate change. Some socialists and major socialist organizations have described Sanders as a democratic socialist, market socialist, or reformist socialist, while others have called him a reformist social democrat. Throughout the mid-2020s, progressive politics in the United States are continually moving toward left-populist economic policies, as seen in the insurgent campaigns of Zohran Mamdani (who was successfully elected the 111th mayor of New York City in 2025), and Senate candidate for Maine Graham Platner. As a candidate and as mayor, Mamdani has called for New York City to raise the local minimum wage to $30 by 2030, implementing higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners to fund free tuition at CUNY and SUNY, universal childcare, city-owned grocery stores, and free public transit, while cutting taxes for outer-borough homeowners and reforming New York's property tax system.

Types

Cultural progressivism

Main article: Cultural liberalism

The term cultural liberalism is used in a substantially similar context and can be said to be a synonym for cultural progressivism, deriving from the concept of moral progress and viewing liberalism as central to the development of culture. Cultural progressives may be economically centrist, conservative, or progressive. For example, American libertarians, who are a prominent strain of neoclassical liberalism, are often characterized by their fiscal conservatism and cultural progressivism. The Czech Pirate Party is classified as a culturally progressive party, and it calls itself "economically centrist and socially liberal." Economist Emily Chamlee-Wright has written that cultural liberalism is one of the "Four Corners of Liberalism" (the other three being economic, epistemic, and political), describing cultural liberalism as "encourag[ing] us to experiment with different ways of living. It allows us to learn that peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society is possible. And it helps to ensure that minority communities are considered full-fledged participants in the social order." Chamlee-Wright noted a special interchange between political liberality and cultural progressivism, pointing to Jonathan Rauch's contention that "the legalization of gay marriage would not have happened without free speech, which drove cultural progress. But that cultural progress arguably accelerated change that favored a politically liberal outcome." Civil libertarianism is considered a more radical variant of cultural liberalism or cultural progressivism.

Economic progressivism

Main article: Economic progressivism

Economic progressivism—also New Progressive Economics—is a term used to distinguish it from progressivism in cultural fields. Economic progressives may draw from a variety of economic traditions, including democratic capitalism, democratic socialism, social democracy, and social liberalism. Overall, economic progressives' views are rooted in the concept of social justice and the common good, and aim to improve the human condition through government regulation, social protections and the maintenance of public goods. Some economic progressives may show centre-right views on cultural issues. These movements are related to communitarian conservative movements such as Christian democracy and one-nation conservatism.

Techno progressivism

Main article: Techno-progressivism

An early mention of techno-progressivism appeared in 1999 as the removal of "all political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization". According to techno-progressivism, scientific and technical aspects of progress are linked to ethical and social developments in society. Therefore, according to the majority of techno-progressive viewpoints, advancements in science and technology will not be considered proper progress until and unless they are accompanied by a fair distribution of the costs, risks, and rewards of these new capabilities. Many techno-progressive critics and supporters believe that while improved democracy, increased justice, decreased violence, and a broader culture of rights are all desirable, they are insufficient on their own to address the problems of modern technological societies unless and until they are accompanied by scientific and technological advancements that uphold and apply these ideals.