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MIT Institute's Gloomy Prediction: 'Global Economic Collapse' By 2030
suraj.sun writes "A new study from researchers at Jay W. Forrester's institute at MIT says that the world could suffer from 'global economic collapse' and 'precipitous population decline' if people continue to consume the world's resources at the current pace. The study's researchers created a computing model to forecast different scenarios based on the current models of population growth and global resource consumption, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control and environmental protection efforts. Most of the computer scenarios found population and economic growth continuing at a steady rate until about 2030. But without 'drastic measures for environmental protection,' the scenarios predict the likelihood of a population and economic crash."
In other news, the sun is bright.
How do we keep the Internet running? Come on, this is about priories.
On the one hand, people have been predicting the imminent collapse of civilization for quite a while now with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, our high-tech society is basically a house of cards and it has to collapse sooner or later.
Forrester's group, btw, are the same folks who produced the Club of Rome-funded "Limits to Growth" study in the early '70s, which also predicted serious trouble around 2030. You can choose to read this as consistency, good initial assumptions, or simply a pig-headed insistence on sticking to his original premises rather than admit error, as you wish.
Were they using SimCity, Civilization, or simply the Sims to predict what is glaringly obvious.
i can imagine the Civilization model:
World ends in 2030 when Bismarck conquers Spain!
Is they assume that we will go on like business is usual. As soon as scarcity of a resource gets past a point we go and find alternatives. The Prius came popular at US gas went over $4.00 a gallon back in 2008. Then when prices went down the Prius wasn't popular and now it is getting popular again at $4.00. For US consumers $4.00 a gallon is a price enough to evoke change in behavior and look for alternatives.
We tend not to deplete a resource if possible, but when it gets scarce enough we go for alternatives. If pork or cattle get to expensive we go with less resource needed chickens or turkeys.
Usually the things that us humans kill off forever, are things that at least in our short term mindset see are things that are not directly useful for us. We don't see a drop in cattle. But we see a drop in wolves, as they are in competition with us for our cattle... So we kill the wolves, they are not really a direct resource for us so they killed. As well as lot of bugs and other animals. I am not saying this is a good thing we should work hard to preserve nature for it is better in the long term. But as human nature when scarcity happens we change our behavior, and we wont change our behavior until we feel the effect of scarcity.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The wonderful thing about this prediction is that it is testable.
Nothing is going to change significantly in the next 18 years, so we will see whether this prediction is accurate.
My guess: It isn't accurate.
It's amazing how few people understand that Club of Rome's predictions were never disproved in principle. Sure the timing was off, but it's impossible to predict the oil peak accurately given uncertainty of reserve data and technological progress. BTW, if you put your money on the latter, please know that it cannot outrun the laws of nature. The economic growth will have to stop (or, at least, become less than exponential, which is anathema just the same to most modern economists) before the humankind will boil itself with the amount of energy it will need to use to continue it. As things stand, we may not even be able to tech our way out of the oil crunch.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
So you'll be old, unable to work, and have no money? How is that "good timing" for you?
An economic collapse won't just let you alone, you know. Actually, the people with kids are more likely to survive (and prosper): they will have children willing and able to support them. You? You'll have a mostly worthless retirement fund. You may not have though this all the way through.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Malthus would have been correct, save for the development of atmospheric nitrogen-fixing processes for making fertilizer.
We are currently using 10 calories worth of energy (mostly from non-renewable petro-chemicals) to make 1 calorie of food --- this is not sustainable, and rising food prices will eventually push the poorest of the poor into starvation, unless there is some sort of intervention.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Land Area of the Earth: 148,940,000 km^2
Population of the Earth 7,000,000,000
Land Area Per Person: 0.02127 km2 -> 21270m^2
So approx 200m x 100m (americans read yds per person)
But then there are mountains, desert, barren lands, asphalt to take into account.
Lets say 100m x 100m per person (roughly 2 football fields). That is the source of your food, your clothes, ....
This is ignoring all other life as that is likely part of the food chain that feeds us.
And that land is used year after year, getting less fertile, limited resources disappearing, getting smaller and smaller as more people appear.
Easy. Enjoy life, enjoy all those little pleasures that are either immoral or you get fat/sick from them. Drop dead before the onset of senility. QED.
Every single male from my extended family during the last 2 generations has dropped dead from heart attack/stroke way before they turned into barely moving lump of protein requiring 3 nurses, 2 iPads and a mobile toilet to "live". Me, with my pack a cigarets a day - I am expecting the same fate. Long life is not as nice as people think...so no, I have covered that angle (ergo, no need for children to take care of me).
If am wrong, I've covered that angle too - as a scientist and a person with enormous interest in all kinds of subjects I keep my mind very busy, so no senility for me. Thus, when the body really starts giving up but the mind is still clear...well, meet my little friend - 2L bottle with compressed nitrogen and a face mask. You cannot fire me, I quit! (bonus: no (grand) children will be hurt by my action).
Rationality - can't beat it! So join it!
They had it upside down. World ends in 5105.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Go study population ecology. The population of many/most organisms goes in the same sort of cycles. It's most drastic in insects and micro organisms, but also applies on longer scales to larger creatures.
The population will stay mostly low and constant for a time, and then when the conditions are right, there will be an abundance of resources (food), and the population will spike. Breeding will increase exponentially until the resources aren't enough. Rather than just some of the population dying off to keep balance - the vast, vast majority starves. The population is then less than where it started, and the cycle will repeat with time.
Humans aren't immune to this! It just happens over much longer time scales.
It's not about avoiding breeding completely as a society - it's about using our intellect and breeding a lot less so that we don't all die of starvation because our resource production can't keep up. Unless we can do that, we're really not much smarter than grasshoppers, and no, I'm not an optimist.
Or market distortions like people not being able to produce enough energy, due to demand outpacing technological progress. Sure, the system will still "self-correct," but in that scenario, self-correction can include drastic reduction in the number of people.
Except us. Fortunately, I'm already working on my remote outpost. There's a decent water source, and it happens to be a great place for harvesting methane.
In addition, I've got a short guy, and a really big guy who work well together. I also have a few designs for a small coliseum in the center for entertainment.
You have to understand that you can't just pick a hypothesis and refuse to refine it with the coming of new data. When you continue to make wrong prediction after wrong prediction, you have to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED, and start from scratch. Let the DATA guide you, not your own dumb ideas that are based on nothing but your own destrudo.
Recent data tell that the global oil production has been on a plateau since 2005, despite the rollercoasting prices. It's hard to tell without hindsight, but the peak of the oil-fueled civilization may be happening now. And there has never been a time in history when people had to change their primary fuel source on the global scale, when the previous best option was becoming scarce. But let this not upset your cozy, self-assured, technologically optimistic worldview.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
You may mock Roosevelt, but perhaps he was aware, as you seemingly aren't, of how many past civilisations have collapsed due to timber crises... Easter Island being one of the most dramatic. What if someone hadn't invented creosote coatings? Sure, technology provided a solution that time, and many other times in recent history, but there are plenty of other times it hasn't.
Our modern global/western civilisation is big and impressive, I'll give it that. But if you take the historical perspective, the number of civilisations that have collapsed is quite a long list, and some of them were quite big and impressive, too.
So yeah, we've got lots of scientists. You think we're the first civilisation to have lots of scientists? Sure, we're more advanced than our predecessors, but do you really think that our civilisation's size, or even technology like the internet makes us so different from all other civilisations to come before us, that we're immune to collapse? On the contrary, our current civilisation is so big that most efforts to make significant changes seem almost completely ineffectual. And that oil is going to run out.
I've certainly not abandoned hope, but I'd like to think I've got beyond the mindset of thinking that people in history were so radically different from us. Technology may well provide a solution to all our problems, but it also might not. Isn't it wise to prepare, at least slightly, for that eventuality? Isn't believing otherwise just placing blind faith in a deus ex machina?