Date: 2025-08-20 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028907
UNITED NATIONS
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS ... REPORT 2025
The Sustainable Development Goals Report for 2025 is volumous and very depressing.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS ... REPORT 2025
The Sustainable Development Goals Report for 2025 is volumous and very depressing.
Original article: The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2025.pdf
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
The Sustainable Development Goals Report for 2025 is volumous and very depressing.
Sadly I am pretty old and very opinionated and judgmental.
During the Biden administration I was quite 'upbeat'. In fact, I went on the record to say that the United States in around 2022 was in 'better shape' than ar any time in my lifetime thanks to a series of aggressive policy options legislated by President Biden.
In a few short months after the election of Donald Trump, Trumpe and his enablers have made considerable progress in wrecking the American economy in all sorts of malicious ways.
The common thread in most everything that has been done is that Donald Trump and his immediate family accumulate more wealth together with some favored enablers and the rest of us become 'losers'.
For some reason I am reminded of the dinosaurs that roamed the earth millions of years ago. And then they died out.
The modern global economy has relatively few ultra-rich oligarchs. Maybe they will disappear like the dinosaurs
The modern economy also has amazing potential. Modern knowledge and modern technology make all sorts of valuable things possible.
Modern greed and dysfunction make it more likely that the system will be hijacked by the rich and powerful simply for the benefit of the rich and powerful than getting deployed for the 'greater good! and the 'common good'.
My field of work for more than 60 years has been to do with 'management'. Most of modern management seems to be 'out of touch' with what is really needed in the modern world.
This is less about the emergence of new approaches like AI than it is a catastrophic failure of modern education.
Both my parents were trained as teachers ... and I benefitted enormously from their training. I got all sorts of opportunities to learn, some of course within the normal formal school curriculum but also in many different opportunistic ways. I was also encouraged to engage in competitive sports. I was not as good as my father at sports like rugby and cricket where he was near international standard, but did get to play rugby for England as a schoolboy against Scotland.
(Aside: My rugby career got stuck at University. I went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge where I played rugby ... but not particularly successfully. I was a full-back and at the college level the Captain of the college team was a full back! At the university level, the full back was Ken Scotland was also the captain of the Cambridge team as well as being the captain and full back for Scotland. At the schoolboy level I did well in part because I was a near contemporary of Richard Sharp. Richard Sharp played for the Navy, for Oxford and for England as a fly-half for many years. During training games at school I was usually on the full back on the opposing side to Richard Sharp as fly-half. This was uncomfortable to say the least but it was excellent training!) Richard Sharp was a very good 'place kicker' going back to the half. I was almost as good as a schoolboy ... but it never got developed post school!)
My experience with rugby at school taught me something important. I was a year younger than Richard Sharp and played for the First Team at school for two years, the first when Richard Sharp was on the team, and the next year when Richard Sharp had left school. Our school team record turned out to be better in the year when Richard Sharp was not on the team that it had been when he was on the team. The life lesson from this that I took with me was that better results can be achieved with a 'team' than just with a 'star'. Stars may be few and far between, but ordinary performers are everywhere ready to be built into a team!
Peter Burgess