My Strife With Aggregate Scales

social

The Kardashev Scale was created in 1964 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev for classifying civilizations based on how much energy they are able to harness. Although it was created to set search parameters for detecting other civilizations, it has since been used by science communicators to quantify the technological progress of a civilization. There have been many criticisms and reworks of this scale—such as Carl Sagan’s version that uses bits of stored information rather than energy—but they all stay within the same lens: a civilization is as advanced as the aggregate of its society. I do not agree with this premise. Although it is completely valid and useful to look at a society’s progression through the aggregate, this is only one way to look at it, and treating it as the only way is dangerous.

As humanity pushed through the industrial age, there has been an ever-growing focus on maximizing productivity. This seemed to work for much of that era. More productivity usually meant everyone was better off. But it becomes dangerous when you take it as an axiom. Progress and advancement simply for the sake of progress is akin to a cancer cell spreading for the sake of growing. Who actually benefits from these advancements? Is a Kardashev Type 1 civilization that enslaved the majority of its population to harvest its planet’s energy more “advanced” than a Kardashev Type 0.5 civilization where the energy harvested is used to meaningfully better everyone’s lives? The scale has no answer for that. It was never designed to.

To be fair to Kardashev, the scale was created to set search parameters for detecting alien life and was only later construed as a measure of the evolution of civilizations. But it is important to understand the context in which it was created. At the height of the Space Race, the idea that progress meant harnessing ever-larger amounts of energy—being expansionist and industrial for its own sake—was not a new idea. The scale almost solidifies the culture in the air at the time: that aggregate progress was inherent to defining the growth of a civilization. It’s a good example of how even technical, ostensibly neutral frameworks embed assumptions of the time and place in which they were created. The dominant technology of any era becomes the lens through which we interpret everything else. Freud built his entire model of the mind around the steam engine—pressure, drives, release valves. Today we speculate whether the universe is a simulation simply because computer simulations are a new, impressive technology we currently have for interpreting reality. Every era mistakes its most impressive technology for a universal truth. The Kardashev Scale is no different.

We see aggregate scales used to define societal progress everywhere today. A country with a higher GDP is considered more developed than one with a lower GDP. The UN created the Human Development Index specifically because it recognized GDP was too narrow. It is a better number, but it is still is in the lens that the aggregate is how we should measure progress. A society where the worst-off are getting worse and the best-off are getting better can still have a growing HDI. Averages and aggregates are useful tools, but they have become so implicit in how we measure progress that we treat them as the only valid approach.

I am not proposing we discard these scales. I am proposing we become aware that they are a choice, not an axiom, and that we start building scales that measure something different—specifically, how well the most vulnerable members of a society are doing. This is not a revolutionary idea. Even wild animals understand this. Wolf packs slow down for injured members rather than leaving them behind. Humpback whales intervene when orcas attack other species with no apparent benefit to themselves. The instinct to protect the most vulnerable member of a group—even when doing so makes the group as a whole worse off—is older than civilization. It is older than humanity. It is baked into what it means to be a social species. Industrialization taught us that productivity is the ultimate goal above all else, and somewhere along the way we forgot this instinct. The scales we celebrate weren’t designed to measure this notion of progress and we should ask ourselves why we have been so comfortable with that.

Smallpox eradication is worth thinking about here. It is one of the few large-scale human achievements that explicitly targeted the floor rather than the aggregate. The goal was not to reduce the average number of cases or improve the median outcome. It was eradication. Compare that to how we talk about poverty, healthcare access, or housing. We declare progress when the average improves, even if the bottom lags indefinitely. The difference comes from how we define progress. We don’t care how the most vulnerable do as it is not a measure of success for us. We have not demanded that the floor move—only that the average does. This leads to a mindset where we are so focused on achieving the next productive goal that we forget to make sure everyone has access to the previous one.

With that in mind, I want to propose a complementary scale. One in which progress is not considered achieved until every person in a society has practical access to it. The point is not the specific bullet points—which can and should be debated. The point is the principle: that there are basic rights every person deserves, that those rights should grow as a society develops the means to provide them, and that it is disingenuous to say that a society has truly progressed until everyone has access to the previous tier before moving on to the next.

Type 0

No floor exists. The most vulnerable members of the society have no reliable access to anything that they are not able to provide for themselves. Most of human history. Probably still most of the world today.

Type 1

Every person has practical access to physical survival:

  • Clean water
  • Enough food to survive
  • Shelter sufficient to protect from the elements
  • Healthcare sufficient to not die from preventable or treatable conditions
  • Freedom from systemic violence and persecution

Type 2

Survival is solved. The floor moves to focus on enabling humans to help themselves and their communities live better lives:

  • Everything in Type 1, but better
  • Education
  • Meaningful participation in the systems that govern your life
  • Freedom of movement

Type 3

The floor reaches into human meaning and belonging:

  • Everything in Type 2, but better
  • Means for self-actualization
  • Social identity and belonging that is protected and celebrated, not merely tolerated

The rights guaranteed under each type will naturally look different across different societies and even within the same society. Someone living in the Arctic needs shelter that provides far more insulation than someone living in a temperate climate. This scale is based on a person’s needs and not based on how productive they are or anything else.

We have spent millennia building ceilings. It is time we started caring as much about the floor.