CONTINUOUS CRITICAL PROBLEMS

AN ILLUSTRATIVE LIST

1)Explosive population growth with consequent escalation of social, economic, and other problems.
2)Widespread poverty throughout the world.
3)Increase in the production, destructive capacity, and accessibility of all weapons of war.
4)Uncontrolled urban spread.
5)Generalized and growing malnutrition.
6)Persistence of widespread illiteracy.
7)Expanding mechanization and bureaucratization of almost all human activity.
8)Growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth throughout the world.
9)Insufficient and irrationally organized medical care.

10)Hardening discrimination against minorities.
11)Hardening prejudices against differing cultures.
12)Affluence and its unknown consequences.
13)Anachronistic and irrelevant education.
14)Generalized environmental deterioration.
15)Generalized lack of agreed-on alternatives to present trends.
16)Widespread failure to stimulate man's creative capacity to confront the future.
17)Continuing deterioration of inner-cities or slums.
18)Growing irrelevance of traditional values and continuing failure to evolve new value systems.
19)Inadequate shelter and transportation.

20)Obsolete and discriminatory income distribution system(s).
21)Accelerating wastage and exhaustion of natural resources.
22)Growing environmental pollution.
23)Generalized alienation of youth.
24)Major disturbances of the world's physical ecology.
25)Generally inadequate and obsolete institutional arrangements.
26)Limited understanding of what is "feasible" in the way of corrective measures.
27)Unbalanced population distribution.
28)Ideological fragmentation and semantic barriers to communication between individuals, groups, and nations.
29)Increasing a-social and anti-social behavior and consequent rise in criminality.

30)Inadequate and obsolete law enforcement and correctional practices.
31)Widespread unemployment and generalized under-employment.
32)Spreading "discontent" throughout most classes of society.
33)Polarization of military power and psychological impacts of the policy of deterrence.
34)Fast obsolescing political structures and processes.
35)Irrational agricultural practices.
36)Irresponsible use of pesticides, chemical additives,insufficiently tested drugs, fertilizers, etc.
37)Growing use of distorted information to influence and manipulate people.
38)Fragmented international monetary system.
39)Growing technological gaps and lags between developed and developing areas.

40)New modes of localized warfare.
41)Inadequate participation of people at large in public decisions.
42)Unimaginative conceptions of world-order and of the rule of law.
43)Irrational distribution of industry supported by policies that will strengthen the current patterns.
44)Growing tendency to be satisfied with technological solutions for every kind of problem.
45)Obsolete system of world trade.
46)Ill-conceived use of international agencies for national or sectoral ends.
47)Insufficient authority of international agencies.
48)Irrational practices in resource investment.
49)Insufficient understanding of Continuous Critical Problems, of their nature, their interactions and of the future consequences both they and current solutions to them are generating.

It should be evident that these Continuous Critical Problems are meant merely to serve as general labels under each of which entire trees or clusters of issues that appear analogous, can be classified.

Further, neither their rate of occurrence nor their intensity is uniform throughout the world. Therefore, the causality structure that underlies such a listing is obviously of extreme complexity and actually impossible fully to ascertain through mere observation for, even on direct empirical evidence, it is clear that the true list must be many times larger than what we have given.

However, even from this limited listing we begin to sense that these large problem-areas are system-wide, interdependent,interactive and intersensitive; that they transcend national frontiers, or even regional boundaries; and that they are seemingly immune to linear or sequential resolution. This, in turn, suggests that when the problem-trees have grown to world-wide proportions their branches intertwine --or,if we use the image of clusters, we can say that the clusters overlap. Such areas of overlap then create new problem-areas ----------* These Continuous Critical Problems are not listed or grouped in any particular order; nor is the list to be regarded as complete.