Benefits and costs of proposed choices include consequences that are long-term as well as short-term, and indirect as well as direct. The more remote the consequences of a personal or social decision, the harder it usually is to take them into account in considering alternatives. But benefits and costs may be difficult to estimate.
Learning Goal 2
In deciding among alternatives, a major question is who will receive the benefits and who (not necessarily the same people) will bear the costs.
Learning Goal 3
Social trade-offs are often generational. The cost of benefits received by one generation may fall on subsequent generations. Also, the cost of a social trade-off is sometimes borne by one generation although the benefits are enjoyed by their descendants.
Learning Goal 4
It is difficult to compare potential benefits of social alternatives. One reason is that there is no common measure for different forms of good. Another reason is that different groups of people place greatly differing values on even the same kinds of social good.
Learning Goal 5
Peaceful efforts at social change are most successful when the affected people are included in the planning, when information is available from all relevant experts, and when the values and power struggles are clearly under-stood and incorporated into the decision-making process.
Subchapter G
Global Interdependence
For Grades: 9-12
Learning Goal 1
The wealth of a country depends on the balance between how much its resources and products are sought by other nations and how much of other nations' resources and products it seeks. Even if a country could produce everything it needs for itself, it may still benefit from trade with other countries.
Learning Goal 2
International trade is often complicated by political motivations taking priority over economic ones.
Learning Goal 3
The migration of workers between nations—temporary and permanent, legal and illegal—plays a major role in the quality and availability of the workforce in many nations. It can bring both economic benefits and political problems.
Learning Goal 4
The growing worldwide interdependence of social, economic, and ecological systems means that changes in one place in the world may have effects in any other place.
Learning Goal 5
Communication and transportation technologies, coupled with political and economic policies, now allow people to interact with people in different countries almost as easily as they interact with people in their own country. This has allowed for the spread of political, economic, and cultural influences across the planet much more rapidly than had been the case in the past. Like any social change, there are trade-offs in the globalization of the planet, and it benefits some people more than others.
