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Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size?
Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer prize winning writer Thomas Friedman writes that in few years we may be looking back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? 'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.' According to the Global Footprint Network we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth's resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. 'Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,' says Paul Gilding. 'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"
No.
The Earth wasn't supposed to be able to support half the current global population.
Then Norman Borlaug came along, and turns out we could support more. Who knows this time around?
It's a little early to include the tornadoes as part of a discussion on global climate change. Just like one hot summer doesn't prove it and one cold winter doesn't disprove it (even ignoring the false notion that global climate change != getting warmer everywhere all the time) we'd need to see evidence of increased storm activity for multiple years in close succession before we could draw any conclusions. In general i'm a "believer" in global climate change, but i'm not in favor of using incorrect data to try and prop up the idea.
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He has a 9.6 million dollar, 11,400 square foot home.
Oh and his wife used to own a company developing mall properties, those high square foot, poorly insulated buildings surrounded by heat absorbing asphalt.
See: tragedy of the commons...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
is the cause of the higher prices.
Perhaps we'll become extinct. Perhaps we won't. In the grand scale of things, either outcome, in light of the Earth's roughly 5 billion year lifespan bears less significance than we'd like to believe
We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter.
I wish I could be as sure. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed does a nice job of documenting societies that, when faced with the same choice, picked collapse. Granted, they didn't have Jared Diamond's book to read beforehand, but neither did they have our capacity for self-immolation.
"Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in."
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
we need to let go of. Most of the so called economic growth of the last few hundred years has been entirely based on digging things out of the ground and consuming them. Nothing grew, we just reduced the value of our asset base in favour of revenue to spend. Yes we could find other assets to strip that would keep us 'growing' a while longer but really, can we keep pretending?
Korma: Good
I was forced to read "The Earth is Round" as part of my MBA. When it comes to amazing him, the bar is set pretty low. He could probably write a column on how the sun rises in the east
"Empire of Debt" has a delicious and well-deserved excoriation of Friedman. If it wasn't such a great book in and of itself, it would be worth reading just for that.
In 1971, Paul Ehrlich predicted a maximum sustainable world population of 1.2 billion people. By 1994 Ehrlich raised his estimate to 2 billion saying, "the present population of 5.5 billion [..] has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it." Two decades later we're closing in on 7 billion souls the overwhelming majority of which are not expected to starve to death or otherwise suffer a Malthusian catastrophe.
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich, peak oil, etc, etc. Now Friedman.
A succession of people saying all will be disaster unless you immediately do X that, by the way they consider wise to do for other reasons.
In the reign of Emperor Augustus, historian Livey claimed that if Rome did not return to its founding values (which didn't really exist during its founding by a pretty savage lot) it would surely fall.
He was right. 500 years later for the western part of the empire, and 1000 for the eastern part.
One day such doomsayers will be right. But thus far they have been wrong so many times.
Has anyone noticed how similar this is to the preacher that was saying the world would end on May 22nd?
Like him, when the world fails to end, they say they didn't account for something and set a new date. Now in October, I think?
Similarly, it's now not 1975 or 1980 when it falls apart and we all starve. It's 20xx and we've really got it right this time. We think...
Yeah. Uh huh.
(Note I don't think wasting resources, unending population increase or not conserving energy is wise. I'm highly in favor of efficiency increases. But the claim the gas tank is empty hasn't agreed with what actually happened.)
And what if those claims of how cheap and plentiful solar/renewables are really work?
The same shining lights of this game, Ehrlich, Lovins etc. have stated that a truly cheap clean, plentiful energy source/sources would be a disaster for the world. Mankind would use it to further destroy nature and thus should be limited in energy availability.
That's completely BS.
In the USA in the 19th century, with a gold standard, there were a tremendous number of unjust banking shenanigans which resulted in the confiscation of assets from the productive sector into the banking owners.
There was always fractional reserve, and private banks had their own control over the money supply. LIke it or not, the Federal Reserve system was an improvement.
you are wrong.
The easy way to display that Federal reserve provided a much worse economic climate, than private banks before it did, even though some of them did do fractional reserve even with gold (sure, why not, fractional gold reserve is the same thing), is that in 19 century the value of US dollar rose by a factor of 2, but since 1913 the value of dollar fell by over 99%, and I left a comment here with numbers in it, displaying just how much purchasing power USD lost since 2003 alone.
But not only did the dollar lose value since the Fed was created, but the prices went up significantly for everything for the people, and think about this fact: prior to 1965 people in USA paid for their doctors out of pocket, insurance was extremely cheap (order of 10 dollars/person per year) but it was insurance with a large deductible of maybe 500USD, but if you need really expensive treatments, you were covered. How many people can afford out of pocket doctor care today?
How about education? How many people can afford their own education today? Well, back before 1979 dep't of education, and before SS and Medicare took more money from people for general taxes, people used to pay for their own education, especially before all the government loans caused tuition fees to spike out of control.
Even based on health and education affordability, USA was doing better before the Fed and before various taxes (income / SS /Medicare) and before all the departments and government loans.
You can't handle the truth.
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
Yes, you are correct. We should continue on our present course without considering the consequences. We will never run out of anything.
I personally think that unless some steps are taken to bring world population growth to zero fairly quickly that there are going to be some truly horrible wars in fifty to one hundred years. First world countries will be very reluctant to give up all their modern amenities, and developing countries will be unwilling to curb their population growth to keep competition for resources to a minimum. At some point, there are going to be some very serious shortages, and the wars that result will not be conducted around the traditional goal of military conquest for resources, but rather the goal of making the world population much smaller in a very short time. I certainlly hope that doesn't happen, but there are enough despotic people in power around the world that I think it might.
The fact is that there are not infinite resources. If there are too many people using those resources, you will run out. The problem is that when this happens, it will basically be like an inflection point on a graph, where change will happen very quickly.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The UN estimates of world population now indicate an increase until around 2075 (9.2 billion), and then a decrease after that.
Birth rates in all developed nations are falling fast, many are under replacement rate already. The US population would be lower than the replacement rate right now if it weren't for immigration.
The problem with Malthus is not the math, it's the model. Anyone can pick assumptions and make a model, and from there make predictions. Mathus erred in assuming that things would not change. An exponential curve is indistinguishable from a bell curve at the long tail beginning, so the evidence seemed to support his prediction.
What's changing is the demographics. Once raised out of poverty, people naturally start having fewer children. There are a variety of proposed reasons for this, and the evidence is very strong.
The prediction now is that once everyone is reasonably above the poverty line (mostly Africa, with some contribution from SE Asia) population growth will reverse.
Interestingly enough, in 75 years time there may be the reverse problem - population *shrinkage*.
e.g. will we start letting the excess die in a gutter? The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no. I don't know of a third answer (that doesn't boil down to one or the other in practical terms).
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I noticed that this website is in English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian--meaning it is mostly directed to the west. The fact that it doesn't even have Mandarin or Cantonese despite China's 1.3 Billion tells you that he is more interested in extracting money from guilt-laden westerners than solving any problems. French! Less than 2% of the earth speak French as their native language. Heck, more people speak Bengali or Telugu or even Marathi than the entire population of France!
Most of the western countries are stable or have declining populations. The United States is an exception, however much of that is due to immigration. Yet you have India with 1.2 Billion and growing, Indonesia with 237 million and growing, Nigeria with 158 million and growing, Bangladesh with 150 million and growing---and the site is dedicated to telling Westerners why it is all their fault. Solving the real problem, 3rd world population growth, isn't going to get done by telling Westerners to reduce their "footprint".
It's meaningless to ask if we have reached maximum sustainable population size unless you also specify what standard of living you are talking about. I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though. Pick a resource utilization number and multiply by population. Is it greater than the available resources? If yes then we have passed the sustainable population. OTOH divide available resources by population and you have the allowed resource utilization to maintain that population.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you treat resources as finite.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of growing technological capabilities.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of human nature.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Who gives a flying fuck what the purchasing power of [arbitrary currency unit] is? What matters is how much a typical person can buy with a day's wage. That is a hell of a lot higher today than it was in the 19th century.
In other words, it's the same discussion we have had in the 1950's, and the 1900's, and the 1830's, 1870's, and ...
There really isn't anything to add here. Really.
The short version : This specific prediction has been made as often as the end of the world predictions. Needless to say, most dates of "civilizational collapse" have passed, and nobody noticed. Every time something appears to go wrong, whether it's the real fucking great depression (1870, just not felt that hard in America because America played the role China plays today), WWI, the spanish flu, the great depression, WWII, the conflict with Japan, the oil crisis, the various crisises in the 80's, 90's and even the 2000's (how do you even call those ? The 00's ?) there is a new cohort of Malthusians that predict that "this time" it's really going to happen !
Let's now all mention the corollaries : peak oil, peak grain, peak food, peak corn, peak water, peak God's goodwill (this was the original version : God's "good will" will only support about 800 million people, so we'll never exceed that population), peak cows, ... and, to some Global Warming is just another version of the Malthusian argument (given that we don't actually know very well what will happen with Global warming, there is something to be said for this : Global warming won't kill us even if we just let it happen, we'll have to move a few cities. You could say that's simply "stimulating the economy". Perhaps that's even true)
What is the mechanism that will rectify this? Zambian miners forming a union and demanding jobs at the Glory Hole in Alaska?
It's a bit of a wild idea and would have huge ramifications, but applying a COLA pegged labor adjustment tarrif on all imports could. If it take 10 man hours for a pound of sellable material, and the COLA in Zimbabwe was ~$10 US ($0.005/hr) compared to similar labor costs of $60,000 (~$30/hr) in the US, then the tarrif would be just shy of $300 per pound.
It would be a huge equalizing for as it would give international vendors a choice: Sell cheap, but pay a huge tarrif, or pay your employees comprable rates to the US labor force, and get no tarrif. The impact though, is that prices for cheap stuff in the US would skyrocket, and that international vendors would look at automating as much of their labor as possible.
I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, as it would have some huge ramifications, but I think it would be an interesting idea to have some economist debate over.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs