Whenever anyone raises the possibility that resource shortages may have serious social consequences in public, they’re almost certain to run into flak from someone citing Julian Simon’s bet with Paul Ehrlich on metal prices. Thus, Jim Henley, in response to my previous post on Gregg Easterbrook and Jared Diamond says:
Right-leaning technophiles adopt this posture because, in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome. We saw Julian Simon win the Great Dispute of the 1970s, and are inclined to think the Julian Simons of today and tomorrow will win their own disputes.
But what I suspect Jim doesn’t know (and what I didn’t know until I read it yesterday in Jared Diamond’s Collapse), is why Simon was quite so confident that metal shortages weren’t a problem. Over to Diamond:
There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort (anti-environmentalist predictions that have proved wrong): e.g. overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage.
Now Diamond himself exaggerates a little when he says one page later that copper cannot be made from other elements by definition, because it itself is an element. More precisely, we could make industrial quantities of copper from other elements if we had the power and the inclination to whizz around the universe creating supernovas. Quite why we would want to create more copper if we had these superpowers is a question that I’ll leave to our readers’ ingenuity and imagination.
Simon’s prediction is far and away the most impressive example that I’ve ever seen of lunatic technological optimism in support of a transparent political agenda. I don’t think that even the boyos over at Flack Central Station would have the chutzpah to make this claim; Easterbrook’s belief that we don’t have to worry about material shortages because we can spread across the galaxy is strictly minor league stuff in comparison. More seriously, Diamond makes a strong case that a qualified scientific pessimism (along with a qualified optimism about the ability of human beings to respond to environmental problems and resource limits) is the appropriate attitude to take. Otherwise, we face a very serious risk of environmental collapse – not the end of humanity, but some very serious problems all the same. Jim should read Diamond’s book (we live quite near each other; I’m happy to lend him my copy) – while I doubt that it would convert him, I do think that it would give him some serious food for thought.
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Foolish leftiste! You forget that nuclear fusion is – as it always has been and always will be – five (5) to ten (10) years away, so we can manufacture our own miniature suns and then we can work on home-brew supernovas without going anywhere and then we can have all the copper our hearts desire bwahahahaha! Stick that in your Islamofasciste-sympathising pipe and smoke it!
People patch together slogan-like generalized cover stories out of scientific or historical materials and then claim that they’re thinking scientifically. Henley’s is the optimistic version, but I used to have a friend who called himself a “realist” whenever he was being knee-jerk pessimistic or cynical. The claim I remember by Simon is infintie substitutability: aluminum for copper. In the area of materials and metals that will work for a long time, but substitutes for topsoil, clean air, and clean fesh water are hard to even imagine. Many schemes depend on infinite energy based on fusion or solar cells in space. One scheme, making all the Arctic rivers flow sow south, looks like a disaster in the making. Someone should make a collection of falsely optimistic futurological predictions. One falsification seems to be here: epidimiologists are now talking about “the post-antibiotic age”, as resistent bacteria evolve. Ilya Prigogine did have a list of scientific discoveries which made things impossible: surpassing the speed of light, Goedel’s proof, squaring the circle, pepetual motion, etc. Many of them, but not all, ere aspects of the entropy law. Hermann Daly (“Steady-state Economics”) tried to write an economics of no-growth sustainability. Apparently the profession was aggressively unreceptive.
Does Jared Diamond indicate where this quote of Simon’s come from. It seems quite inconsistent with his explanation in The Ultimate Resource II. That is, “…we have additional ways to meet our needs. For example, by using fiber optics instead of copper wiring, by developing new ways to exploit low grades of copper ore previously thought not usable, and by developing new energy sources such as nuclear power to help produce copper. , perhaps by extracting it from seawater.” I see no sign of crackpottism in this description. In fact, if Simon made this arguement in is not particularly relevant to his main message for future resourse abundance.
Ed: If you have a quote of someone saying something other than they are quoted as saying, it’s a good starting hypothesis that it is a different quote. Luckily, Google can also be made from other metals:
Unfortunately, Science is a resource which it is prohibitively expensive to extract from its deposits (“libraries”), so we may never know if Simon really really said what people – but only Leftistes, after all! – keep insisting on quoting him as saying.DvB, they’re holding off on the nuclear fusion until they’ve developed the AIs that will use up all that power. AI, unfortunately, is always 10 years away.
simstim: Ten (10) years away? We thought it was twenty (20)! Clearly there have been great improvements, if only in forecasting!
Hmmm. I think the biggest trouble with some enthusiastic technophiles is that they’re sometimes part of the problem, not the solution. Big Problems Can Be Solved™ but you do have to take them seriously. There’s no free lunch: you can’t claim that science will solve all our big problems eventually, but oppose all current efforts to solve them. After all, remember the dinosaur pundits of the Jurassic. “Science” they said “will make asteroids irrelevant”, at the same time pooh-poohing as “demented mammalofascist ideologues” the dino scientists pushing forth the Asteroid Control Policy. It did work, as a guiding principle, for quite a while.
By simple (relatively) deregulation of the public electricity market we could cut price and useage of electricty by ~50%. So if you are putting money on how the future is going to turn out, I wouldn’t bet on the crackpots in the 70’s who said all the growth was behind us. http://www.primaryenergy.com/articles/reports/The%20Case%20for%20Decentralized%20Generation%20of%20Electricity.pdf
in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong,… This sort of inference (going from the above sort of statement to the conclusion that current pessimism is somewhat unfounded) is possibly one of my favorite examples of bad logic. This is mostly because all predictions to date of my own death (and the death of anyone I currently know) have proven rather dramatically wrong—therefore: I shall live forever!
DvB, I was trying to take into account the time-lag inherent in CT’s commenting system.
Oh, I can’t post that link without giving mad props to http://ergosphere.blogspot.com the biggity bomb of energy resource sites.
Thanks DVB for the quote source. The quote I provided seems to better represent Simon’s arguement that we will not need to build our own suns to get copper. If the crux of the arguement against Simon’s position that resource depletion is not a likely source for a decline in quality of life is that we can’t make our own suns then it seems to be a relatively weak point of view.
I’ve never understood why you can’t bring the market worshippers aboard by pitching pessimism as risk management. Looked like it would work for global warming, but we may soon see constitutional amendments forbidding lawsuits seeking damages for unintended consequences.
What a bunch of tards, propping up Simon as a straw man. He may be over the top, but that doesn’t mean technological optimism is wrong. We already have underutilized technology to solve most, if not all, of the world’s problems. Dorks.
Henry, when did Jim claim that Simon et al. had never been over-optimistic? That’s not, as I see it, the meat of his argument. The meat is that the Simons of the world have been closer to the truth than the Ehrlichs of the world—and one piece of evidence for that is that on the resource question Simon was, in fact, right, and Ehrlich was wrong. Besides which, the context provided in the quote Des gives suggests strongly that you’re reading Simon uncharitably. He’s talking about theoretical upper bounds on copper supplies—i.e. bounds which would hold even given tremendous-but-plausible advances in technology. Large-scale controlled fusion, for example, is certainly one such advance; it’s not anywhere close, but it’s not magic either. Moreover, Simon had plenty of other reasons for believing copper was unlikely to run out that required no assumptions about making it from other metals. And even if he was over-optimistic about our far-future capabilities, that doesn’t invalidate those other reasons.
Ed: However, the original and now unchallenged quote is more instructive in establishing the original point that Simon is a batshit techno-pollyanna with few if any scruples. Nobody, so far as I know, has claimed that he is incapable of lucid moments. Would you also like to endorse the “seven (7) billion years” claim, or would you prefer to dispute that he said it?
Environmentalists have the same issue in the opposite direction. Taking a current problem and assuming an environmental catastrophe. The proponents of the “Population Bomb” still have egg on their face.
A problem that I’ve repeatedly felt is overlooked in the limits/no limits debate are the consequences that occur in the process of proving that limits don’t (yet) exist: if we’re running low on a resource, there’s probably some lode of it in a developing country that some transnational corporation can finance and extract. Great! We’ve got more of that resource. Never mind the havoc that is wreaked in the process, we’ve proven there are no limits! So for the ‘limits’ folks: how about concentrating more on what happens on the way to finding those ‘limits’ instead of hypothesizing Malthusian/Ehrlichian absolutes.
DVB - my understanding is that Simon said he was miquoted and meant 7 million years. I don’t think the difference is material in interpreting the quote. By the way, I didn’t and don’t dispute the quote, I just wasn’t previously aware of it. In fact, the quote seems innocuous enough. Do you dispute his arguement or just dislike it on “batshit” grounds. I don’t see how this reflects his scruples.
There’s no free lunch: you can’t claim that science will solve all our big problems eventually, but oppose all current efforts to solve them. I think the response to this would be that the proper investment in science will take place on its own once it becomes worth it for market to do so: i.e. once the costs of the status quo rise to the point that they become unacceptable. Thus, government subsidization of science is bad policy because it is wasteful and unnecessary. The typical textbook example here is that the Japanese government heavily subsidized the development of HDTV in the 1980s, but got no return on its investment because private American firms later decided to invest in HD as well and reaped the benefits themselves without needing any subsidization of their own. For the record, this is all just devil’s advocacy.
Fuck all this chin music, where’s my jetpack?
“,,,that the proper investment in science will take place on its own once it becomes worth it for market to do so.” Yeah, I remember all the speculation in lunar real estate fuelling the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Wait, or was that Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold The Moon”. It’s been so long now.
Simon’s more plausible arguments depend upon markets determing the price of assets and providing a smooth transition. There is now less oil than there was, in real terms it is cheaper, interest rates are lower so the value of future consumption is greater and the rate of consumption is still rising. What kind of a market is that?
I think the response to this would be that the proper investment in science will take place on its own once it becomes worth it for market to do so: i.e. once the costs of the status quo rise to the point that they become unacceptable. Oh that’s a response I share myself 95% of the time (although I do sometimes question the usefulness of the “wait until the market deems it unnaceptable” approach for truly catrastrophic events). In the long run most problems will eventually sort themselves out, but then again, in the long run we will all be … joining the Singularity anyway …
Ed: From my previous source, again:
Perhaps we really have got 6 and a bit million years of yummy vat-grown foods and sheltering indoors to look forward to, but his bluff seems to have been called here… Personally, we will be dissatisfied with any future in which a Deus Ex Technologia doesn’t provide us with a pony, too.…a pony made of SUNS!
Jet, you lame, egregious creepo—I still frequently see Simon cited favorably in the technophile futurological press. He is not a straw man. Simon said at one place that resources are infinite by analogy with the infinite number of points in a line. (Yes, he really said that. I’ve looked it up several times). But if you want to agree that Simon is nuts and that nothing he says should be taken seriously, then we have nothing to argue about. In the case of Simon’s “points on a line” statement, I suspect amphetamine use. All of your ideas look so darn beautiful while the amphetamine is working.
Ehrlich made a mistake using the supply of metals as a key point of his argument. Metals are indeed substitutable, and with materials science, increasingly so. I often hear futurological optimists speaking as if there were a lot of untapped resources available, but there is very little uncultivated land left (mostly in war-torn areas). The long-term productivity of the sea and the tropical rainforests is quite limited.
I think what people miss in Simon’s argument is that it is an essentially bottom-up argument. When a particular reasource looks threatened, Simon says that ways will be found to get around it. What ways? Nobody knows ahead of time—some of the changes that have huge impacts are quite unpredictable. For example, fifteen years ago who would have predicted the impact of digital cameras on the need for silver? Along the same lines, I’d argue we’ve hardly scratched the surface with respect to extremely low-energy telecommuting replacing energy-intensive (and time intensive) physical commuting. Same thing with respect to video-based conferencing vs jet-travel based conferencing. You don’t have to posit space travel or home-fusion reactors to think that unpredictable technological adaptations will arise as needed. But this kind of thinking seems to make left-leaners very nervous. It seems to me that they tend to think we should empanel groups of experts to review our problems, pick the most promising directions, and invest billions of tax dollars in R&D, so we’ll be ‘ready’ when the time comes. Big problems, in their view, require centrally-plannned, centrally-funded solutions.
Finally, futurological optimists are often dogmatic pessismists about social responses, above all governmental or charitable responses. If you look at the big improvements in health and nutrition, for example, over the last 100-200 years, you will see a mix of science and technology, markets, and government itervention. Lots of government intervention. Likewise, many technophiles poo-poo population limitation, even though it seems to be an obvious, necessary response to chnages in mortality rates. But the vast majority of technophiles are knee-jerk, Know-Nothing, anti-government libertarians. Can population continue to grow indefinitely into the future, while the overall standard of living also continues to improve? Even mainstream liberal economists are embarassed by that question(and futurist tehnophiles even more so). To say “yes” is a risky proposition that needs support, but technophiles simply assume it and accuse anyone who disagrees of Luddism.
DVB Julian Simon explained his refusal to take the bet in an interview in Skeptic magazine. In essense he refused the bet because some of the 15 criteria were not directly related to human welfare or could not be adequately measured. There are lots of details on the internets. John. His arguement about the infinity and points on a line was an analogy to the practical infinity or the immeasurability of the size of the resource. Not that I think that Julian Simon would have cared, but he could have avoided a lot of the fulminating broadsides by being a little more precise in what he said. I get the feeling he made these arguements just to set reactionaries like you off.
Quote from Simon in Science 208, 1431-1437 on page 1435: “But the future quantities of a natural resource such as copper cannot be calculated even in principle, because of new lodes, new methods of mining copper, and variations in grade of copper lodes; because copper can be made from other metals; and because of the vagueness of the boundaries within which copper can be found- including the sea and other planets.” Technically speaking, although not practical, there are a couple of fairly stable copper isotope decay products from zinc.
But this kind of thinking seems to make left-leaners very nervous. . . Big problems, in their view, require centrally-plannned, centrally-funded solutions. And as we all know, one can never really solve big problems with “centrally-planned, centrally-funded solutions;” the American (and Soviet, FTM) space programmes were just elaborate hoaxes, as was virtually every independent attempt to split the atom up to and including the Manhattan Project. It’s completely unthinkable why people would have any faith at all in the efficacy of government-funded R&D, isn’t it? I really, truly pray for the day when the IT community figures out what a swindle the “two-legs-good, government-bad” school of libertarianism is. Is it so impossible to imagine trying solutions in combination instead of these goddamned Manichaean oppositions of Good/Market vs. Evil/Government?
Ed said: There are lots of details on the internets. I believe the Timber’s troll-in-residence Jet has a business model patent on backing up this claim with exactly zero (0) links; you will surely be hearing from its lawyers.
For the record, the article by Julian Simon appeared in Science, volume 208, pages 1431-1437 (June 27, 1980); the statement in question was a paragraph at the bottom of page 1435 and top of page 1436. In a reply to criticism, published in the 19 December 1980 issue (vol. 210, page 1306) Simon says “… I am not in error in principle, as Holden et al. note; rather, they claim it is ‘preposterous’ because it is impractical now.” So he clings to his “Captains of the Universe” baloney, although he also, correctly, points out that this was not the main thrust of his article.
But the vast majority of technophiles are knee-jerk, Know-Nothing, anti-government libertarians. Obviously you’ve missed the ‘nexus for progressive transhumanists, or as we say “for democratic transhumanists, nanosocialists, revolutionary singularitarians, non-anthropocentric personhood theorists, radical futurists, leftist extropians, bioutopians and biopunks, socialist-feminist cyborgs, transgenders, body modifiers, basic income advocates, world federalists, agents of the Culture and the Cassini Division, Viridians and technoGaians – transmitting a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future”’ at Changesurfer.com.
Diamond is mischaraterising Simon’s position. Simon’s main position is that material substitutions means that you never really “run out” of a lot of materials. The fact that you would never really need to produce copper in fusion reactors doesn’t hurt Simon’s main point. But it isn’t like there is going to be an infinite amount of gasoline for cars. What do I care if petrochemicals are still available for higher value lubricating uses if there is no way for me to get to work. The real debate should be on the use and value of R&D to lay the groundwork for any future switch in technology. I don’t share mw’s faith. We should be working now to avoid the problems that we can foresee.
Likewise, many technophiles poo-poo population limitation, even though it seems to be an obvious, necessary response to chnages in mortality rates. Your beloved European social democracies don’t have population limitation, but their birth rates are miniscule. There are myriad causes for the drop, but China-style limits aren’t one.
Simon’s analogy still strikes me as loony. Points on a line are imaginary. Darn right he could have avoided some broadsides if he had avoided making loony statements. Stuff like that is where “bat-shit crazy” comes from. I believe that I have seen Simon’s statement translated into economic terminology in order to make it seem more plausible. To me this just shifts the problem; economics does not actually deal with physical resources as physical things, but just as abstract economic inputs, etc., assuming a priori that the resources will always be available at some price. Economists and futurologists aggressively ignore physical sciences like economic geography, demographics, agronomy, oceanography, and climatology whenever they threaten abstract economic theory and the economists’ Utopia.
Des von Bladet, I posted a link to my electricity claim, so before you call names, perhaps you should attend that reading comprehension seminar and familarize yourself with what a link looks like (sometimes they are just pasted http addresses). But I will repeat, simply upgrading electricity production to 1973 technology and decentralizing power production would cut electricity consumption by over 50% while also lowering costs a similiar amount. This is a great example of our energy “crisis”.
I really, truly pray for the day when the IT community figures out what a swindle the “two-legs-good, government-bad” school of libertarianism is. Not me…there are few things as delicious as watching someone use the internet as a forum on which to claim that government-funded scientific research is useless. Oh, and Jet: before you take umbrage at being called names, you might want to reflect on the fact that in your first contribution to this thread you referred to everyone who disagreed with you as “dorks” and “tards.” It’s kinda hard to see you as a victim this time.
It seems to me that Simon’s argument should be seen in the context of the often re-iterated libertarian claim that the U.S. suffers from too much regulation. Surely, the eco doomsters of the seventies might have motivated some of that regulation, which in turn motivated the technologies that substituted for copper, or better ways to use copper. Now we have a chance to watch, as in a laboratory, a system without the eco-doom effect (i.e. environmental regulation): China. And what we are seeing is copper prices inflating like oil in the seventies. It is pretty easy to see: technology and regulation actually are imbricated, while societies that devolve regulation into the laissez faire market (for regulation emerges, one way or another, enforced by the state or by coporate monopolies) will soon strain and then break their resource limits.
Is the “since the beginning of time” thingie in the title a parody of something. Googling doesn’t find anything obvious.
Is the “since the beginning of time” thingie in the title a parody of something. Googling doesn’t find anything obvious.
And as we all know, one can never really solve big problems with “centrally-planned, centrally-funded solutions;” the American (and Soviet, FTM) space programmes were just elaborate hoaxes, as was virtually every independent attempt to split the atom up to and including the Manhattan Project. It’s completely unthinkable why people would have any faith at all in the efficacy of government-funded R&D, isn’t it? I did not say that you can never really solve big problems with central planning. But the wasteful, harmful failure are legion (collectivized agriculture anyone?) When governments make mistakes, they make really big ones and are very slow to change course. The problem with a centralized solution to resource problems is making a single, correct decision about what the most pressing problem is, what solution to pursue, which method to adopt, and so on. Should the government invest its billions in R&D for hydrogen-powered cars? ‘Clean coal’? Advanced fission reactors? Fusion? Wind power? Solar panels? Bio fuels? Or conservation technologies? And what if the experts guess wrong? (And worse, what if those billions get directed not to the most promising technologies but toward those technologies who backers have the best political connections?)
PS —this is why libertarianism so radically misunderstand the social welfare state. That state is not inevitably moving towards the abolition of capitalism—it couldn’t exist without capitalism. Rather, it uses the profit motive as a means of directing capitilism in progressive directions it would otherwise have no motive to move in. Companies, to preserve profit and survive, have to figure out ways of complying with government regulations that prevent them from sluffing off costs onto third parties. They wouldn’t have that motive if profit making was abolished, nor would they have it if profit making legally transcended every other social goal.
Uncle Kvetch, Can anyone really take umbrage at being called a dork or a tard? Hardly names that install a sense of hostility. And I wasn’t claiming victomhood status, merely pointing out that while my claims have yet to be attacked, his claims are provably false by merely scrolling up. And I would have thought you would have taken my side on this one, because as I’ve stated before in other threads, the mis-management of the electrical industry has thrown me solidly behind Kyoto. But either way, my point still stands (uncontested except from name calling) that there are plenty of existing potential solutions to the world’s problems.
John: It’s from the Simpsons. Mr. Burns says “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to blot out the sun.” He then blots out the sun so that he has a monopoly on light generation in Springfield.
Is the “since the beginning of time” thingie in the title a parody of something? Googling doesn’t find anything obvious.
Centralized planning of R&D isn’t as big a problem as mw pretends it is. Basic research just wouldn’t be done without the government. We need to lay the groundwork for future private inovation. Centralized planning of production is a big problem because it ignores price signals, but we can’t rely on private industry to do important yet unprofitable research.
Being called a dork or a tard would offend me no more than being called a lame, egregious creepo would. I just love it when someone else intitiates the namecalling.
On a similar market-based wager, I have an inflation adjusted £1000 that says that insurance premia for buildings on the Ruhr flood-plain will be higher, in real terms, in twenty years’ time; just in case any global warming sceptics fancy a flutter.
mw: Hmmm, last time I checked, neither collectivized agriculture nor de-kulakization were R&D programmes—if the wasteful, tragic failures of government-funded R&D are legion, why not pick one of them as an example? Obviously I’m not arguing that all scientific decisions should be centralized—as the part of my post about a combination of solutions should make clear—but I’ve never been impressed by the libertarian penchant for arguing against a caricature of GOSPLAN every time “government” comes up. When governments make mistakes, they make really big ones and are very slow to change course. Oh, sure. Britain’s privatization of public rail, for instance. ;-) The problem with a centralized solution to resource problems is making a single, correct decision about what the most pressing problem is. . . Only if you imagine that government-funded R&D should by definition focus on making a single, correct decision, and that it should by definition be applied to the absolute exclusion of anything else. But you know these are both strawmen when talking about the “left-leaning” folks you’re attempting to characterize, right?
Simon has indeed said that copper can be made from other elements, and you are right to point out that this does us little good in the near future, while this process would be ridiculously costly (though it would not require supernovae). But in fairness, Simon also points out that there is no absolute human need for the metal copper. It is used for a variety of things in which suitable substitutes are available. The are other kinds of conductors, etc. Computer chips are currently made out of silicon, but they could be made out of other materials. There is no rock solid, everlasting demand for copper or silicon (which could run up disasterously against diminishing supply), but rather for the things which these materials do for us (allow us to feed, clothe outselves, communicate, get around, etc.). I think this is Simon’s point, and while I don’t think it necessarily warrants his limitless faith in markets, the point has not been adequately addressed here.
Simon has indeed said that copper can be made from other elements, and you are right to point out that this does us little good in the near future, while this process would be ridiculously costly (though it would not require supernovae). But in fairness, Simon also points out that there is no absolute human need for the metal copper. It is used for a variety of things in which suitable substitutes are available. The are other kinds of conductors, etc. Computer chips are currently made out of silicon, but they could be made out of other materials. There is no rock solid, everlasting demand for copper or silicon (which could run up disasterously against diminishing supply), but rather for the things which these materials do for us (allow us to feed, clothe outselves, communicate, get around, etc.). I think this is Simon’s point, and while I don’t think it necessarily warrants his limitless faith in markets, the point has not been adequately addressed here.
Centralized planning of production is a big problem because it ignores price signals, but we can’t rely on private industry to do important yet unprofitable research. In the long term, unprofitable research is not a good thing—if it never pays off, it was a mistake. But in the shorter term, private industry makes enormous investments in R&D that may or may not pay off—pharmaceutical companies, are an obvious example, but so are Toyota’s investment in hybrid technology, Google’s recently announced investment in the digitization of university libraries, Microsoft’s investment in the XBox platform, and so on. Any successful effort to solve resource shortage problems would have the potential for enormous profits, so we have every reason to expect industry to make relevant investments as long as there’s any reasonable chance for success.
“The problem with a centralized solution to resource problems is making a single, correct decision about what the most pressing problem is. . .” Only if you imagine that government-funded R&D should by definition focus on making a single, correct decision, and that it should by definition be applied to the absolute exclusion of anything else. But you know these are both strawmen when talking about the “left-leaning” folks you’re attempting to characterize, right? Point taken—the government does not necessarily have to decide on a single approach, but it does tend to choose ‘standards’ and make various ‘this and not that’ decisions that have the effect of channeling money into a small number of possibilities (even when it is not a single approach). And I notice that you did not address the question of research money going to those with the best connections. I worked briefly with some folks who made a living on defense department grants—the question of who was going to be funded and who was not was intensely political. There was very much an ‘old boys and girls’ network. And this doesn’t even bring up the pork-barrel issues of powerful congress members who will undoubtedly try (and succeed) in biasing funding of research in order to benefit their districts independently of scientific merit. Should the U.S. invest in ‘clean coal’ technology. Well, if Robert Byrd has anything to say about it, it will.
Simon merely said that it was theoretically possible (if commercially impractical) to make copper from other elements. He also listed a number of practical methods of increasing copper production. Diamond seriously misrepresents Simon’s position when he suggests that Simon believes that creating copper from other elements is a reasonable method of copper production. I fail to see anything wrong with that statement. There is a big difference between a discussion of what is theoretically possible and what is feasible. The only good argument against Simon in this thread is that he used a fairly bad analogy when he talked about infinite points on a line. That’s not his best moment, but it’s not really a problem with his substantive argument and I don’t think it does much to damage his credibility.
your post title reminded me of this “mr. show” clip: “We are flag waving, God loving, troop supporting, red blooded Americans who simply feel that America can, MUST and WILL blow up the moon
”
Like the points-on-a-line statement, the “making copper from other elements” statement indicates amphetamine rapture. It seemed like a beautiful idea at the time. And both lead one to doubt his judgement about everything else. Simon’s assumption that there are substitutes for everything also strikes me as Utopian and unjustifiable.
the government does not necessarily have to decide on a single approach, but it does tend to choose ‘standards’ and make various ‘this and not that’ decisions that have the effect of channeling money into a small number of possibilities . . . True, and in a great many cases it seems to have been a perfectly workable approach. Perhaps this is because the scientific community does some of the work beforehand by doing preliminary research on what the best possibilities could be. And I notice that you did not address the question of research money going to those with the best connections. I let this lie simply because I don’t believe influence-peddling through personal connections is confined to the public sector; a purely private-sector driven process would hardly be immune to it (though the precise mechanisms would differ).
True, and in a great many cases it seems to have been a perfectly workable approach. Perhaps this is because the scientific community does some of the work beforehand by doing preliminary research on what the best possibilities could be. Yes, and even then it can result in a boondoggle of historic proportions. Rather than the Manhattan Project consider the Concorde. The problem wasn’t that it failed as a government funded R&D project—on its own terms, it was a great success. But the terms were completely wrong. The billions invested resulted in a plane that was technological dead end—it cost a fortune to develop and a fortune to operate, provided minimal benefits and those only to small elite. And it was kept on life support for decades for purely political reasons (and because it was ‘cool’). I don’t believe influence-peddling through personal connections is confined to the public sector Of course it isn’t. But I’d argue that the kind of extremely long-term, blue-sky, government program where not having an eye on ‘profit’ isn’t a bug but a feature…is just the kind where influence and pork-barrel politics, and multi-decade, Concorde-style screwups are most likely to occur.
Both “Population Bomb” (1968) and “Ultimate Resource” (1982) are old enough to be judged by results. I am curious to know if there is anyone out there who has actually read both and still thinks that Erhlich is a genius to be revered and Simon is a loony. I am a greenish progressive who sees shades of gray but thinks Simon gets much the bettor of it.
Point of information: Concorde made an operating profit, for British Airways at least. [Once the tiny matter of the development costs was written off.] This week’s Public Sector Aeroplane Of The Week: the SE5a. This post was brought to you on DARPA’s internet through CERN’s html – enjoy.
I haven’t ever read Ehrlich except one magazine article decades ago (NYTM I think). I certainly never worshipped him and his time seems to have passed. Simon still has followers, and he and they seem loony. Many futurological technophiles seem convinced that the Simon-Ehrlich bet settles all these questions permanently. The overall longterm argument about population still seems valid to me. 30 years is the very short term in demography, much less ecology. One of the reasons population growth has slowed is that people like Ehrlich convinced people that it should be slowed. In such a case the “prophet of doom” is not refuted, but confirmed. Ehrlich was not a fortune teller or predictive scientist; his message was normative.
Henry draws a far more politically engaged observation out of this than I would. My thought is that this suggests that social scientific futurism from the 1950s-1980s was in and of itself an extremely bounded, historically particular phenomena that has to be understood as an artifact of its times. The problem with doing so is one of entanglement, however: that social science is interwoven into the (usually) more prudential and short-horizon practice that is now the norm. Moreover, that form of futurism unevenly but often powerfully invaded popular consciousness. Just look at how many people are absolutely one hundred percent convinced that fatal population explosions are the inevitable near-term future. I would say still, however, that Simon came off the better in that bet and in general, and to some extent, Henry is misrepresenting his position on copper, as I understood it. Not that copper could be made from other elements, but that should copper become too scarce, it would be substituted for by metals which were more plentiful and thus cheaper. Which I think is not a ridiculous assertion, though it doesn’t think through the complicated political economies that make some metal extraction possible and other metal extraction vastly more difficult—these are not easily substituted or equivalent to one another as prices or demand shift. It seems to me that futurism of the heady long-term predictive sort ran aground, hard, on the concrete problem of complexity. Diamond is still running into that problem. He’s using inductive reasoning about past collapses to govern his understanding of the inevitable future, when there’s first off considerable reason to think that post-1750, the rules of the human game became somewhat different (bad and good) and second, because change in complex systems (which human economies and their relationship to environments certainly are) tends to have a nearly-ontological degree of unpredictability to it. If you tried to say, “Look, in all circumstances of resource scarcity combined with run-away overuse of resources, collapse follows”, I could very quickly show you human societies to which that does not apply. Equally, I could show you societies that collapsed on what seem like reasonably comfortable grounds, or that did not overstrip their resource base. Criticality happens, but where that point lies and what ensues after it, I wouldn’t care to predict, either in an Ehrlich-like direction OR a Simon-like one. Perhaps that’s the professional caution of a historian speaking.
I am not done with Diamond’s book yet (so don’t spoil it for me!), but Tim, it does not seem that he is saying what you said. I don’t think you are claiming that he is exactly, but this seems to be the point of much Diamond criticism. I have gotten through his Easter Island, Pitcairn, Henderson, Montana, and Anasazi chapters, and am halfway through the Maya. BTW, Prof. Diamond is one of those, IMHO, who believes that the plural of anecdote is data. Anyway, it seems to me that he goes to great lengths to make sure the reader understands that he is not claiming that what happened to Easter Island et al is our fate as well. He is studying these societies, how they arose and how they collapsed, and inferring from them what might be the greatest challenges to a current society. It seems clear to me at least that, as you say, post-1750 the rules have changed (I haven’t gotten to later examples yet). This book, thus far, seems to be very cautious in its imprecations and warnings. It clearly suggests that we should be concerned about resource overuse, and climate change (not just GW, but also shifts in local climate over time unrelated to human activities). He suggests, rightly IMHO, that a system as complex and interconnected as the modern world is not necessarily more or less vulnerable to these collapse-inducing changes, and we should be prepared for the possibility. One thing in the book that I find interesting is the notion that the person in the society about to collapse is likely to see a society at its peak, with no possibility of collapse in the near term. As far as the Ehrlich/Simon thing, Ehrlich was a fool to bet an economist on an issue he clearly didn’t understand. It seems to me that this says about their respective views on the environment…absolutely nothing.
I don’t think that either Ehrlich, Simon, or Diamond is an ideal representative of their points of view. I read Guns Germs and Steel awhile back, and it was great in Diamond’s area of expertise, great in its willingness to speculate and talk about ideas from many disciplines, but full of stuff I couldn’t justify. It comes with the territory (he gambles a lot). But this means that you can’t refute Diamond and thereby refute his general point of view.
Timothy, my objection was not to Simon’s arguments that there could be substitutes for copper, but to his quite bald (and quite separate) argument that copper could be made from other elements. This isn’t a misinterpretation (read the comments by eudoxis and bob above for more detail) – it’s a claim that Simon made in all seriousness. What I object to in Simon (and in his modern epigones like Easterbrook), is the persistent habit of pulling ad-hoc and entirely speculative technological solutions out of his hat in order to dismiss very serious concerns about resource limits. This isn’t the debate of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and Diamond isn’t a modern Ehrlich. He’s quite careful to stress the limits of historical analogies, and to avoid extrapolating ‘end of the world is nigh’ type messages from current trends. It’s a far more serious effort than the Club of Rome type predictions of the 1970’s, and should really be treated on its own merits. The argument-from-complexity is a different one, but it perhaps cuts against techno-optimism far more than it does against it. Diamond addresses this in passing – examining how international interdependence cuts both ways – on the one hand, societies such as mediaeval Greenland, which are cut off from trade, are more vulnerable to resource crashes, but on the other hand, globalization creates an increase in interdependence – and thus in our exposure to other people’s problems. For a specifically complexity-theory based take on this set of issues, read Thomas (Tad) Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap – he provides a very interesting argument that the increasing complexity of social systems is outrunning the technical means that we have to have to address social problems.
Timothy Burke writes: Criticality happens, but where that point lies and what ensues after it, I wouldn’t care to predict, either in an Ehrlich-like direction OR a Simon-like one. Perhaps that’s the professional caution of a historian speaking. The thing is, though, that we all have a very compelling interest in determining when criticality happens, regardless of whether it is comfortable to predict it or not. Deirdre McCloskey expressed a similar thought in the course of critiquing economists’ attachment to statistical significance: It’s completely obvious, you will agree, that a “statistically insignificant” number can be very significant for some human purpose. If you really, truly want to know how the North American Free Trade Agreement affected the average worker in the United States, then it’s too bad if the data are noisy, but that’s not the point. You really, truly want to know it. You have to go with what God has provided. (McCloskey, The Secret Sins Of Economics, at 53 (2002).)
John Emerson, “One of the reasons population growth has slowed is that people like Ehrlich convinced people that it should be slowed.” You have to have some sort of study to back that up, because it is farcical without support. Or do you really believe people in N. America and Europe stopped having kids over fears of overpopulation in Africa and Asia?
This does not mean that you CAN refute Diamond and thereby refute his overall point of view.
Yes, and even then it can result in a boondoggle of historic proportions. Rather than the Manhattan Project consider the Concorde. Or “National Missile Defense,” for that matter. No arguments there. But, well… rather than the Concorde, consider the Airbus A380 —a project whose very success drew endless complaints about “unfair socialist government subsidies.” My beef is with the evocation of the scare words “centrally-planned” as though the very concept of government-funded R&D is somehow pseudo-Stalinist, disreputable and ridiculous in and of itself. I think, when held up against reality, such a view is completely wrong. If you have serious objections to government boondoggles—and well you should—looking at the flaws in governance that actually allow these things to happen in one case as opposed to another is a way better investment of time than trying to dismiss publicly-funded R&D out of hand. I would dearly love to see libertarians start addressing themselves seriously to questions like “why did the Manhattan Project work, when the Concorde project didn’t”?
mw, The green revolution is a good example of the “unprofitable” research that governments and NGOs can do that the market isn’t necessarily going to do by itself.
Yes, and even then it can result in a boondoggle of historic proportions. Rather than the Manhattan Project consider the Concorde. Or “National Missile Defense,” for that matter. No arguments there. But, well… rather than the Concorde, consider the Airbus A380 —a project whose very success drew endless complaints about “unfair socialist government subsidies.” My beef is with the evocation of the scare words “centrally-planned” as though the very concept of government-funded R&D is somehow pseudo-Stalinist, disreputable and ridiculous in and of itself. I think, when held up against reality, such a view is completely wrong. If you have serious objections to government boondoggles—and well you should—looking at the flaws in governance that actually allow these things to happen in one case as opposed to another is a way better investment of time than trying to dismiss publicly-funded R&D out of hand. I would dearly love to see libertarians start addressing themselves seriously to questions like “why did the Manhattan Project work, when the Concorde project didn’t”?
Jet, I’m sorry that I called you an lame, egregious, creepo. that was cruel, even if true. “Or do you really believe people in N. America and Europe stopped having kids over fears of overpopulation in Africa and Asia?” Ehrlich didn’t localize his overpopulation fears and did not limit them to Asia and Africa. He actually argued (this I do remember) that overpopulation in wealthy nations was more harmful than Asian overpopulation, since wealthy people make more demands on the environment. So yes, I believe that the repeated loud warnings about overpopulation had an effect on fertility in the developed wirld. As I recall, Wattenberg, a big natalist, also believes that. For one thing, high fertility has always been in part the result of the belief that having as many kids as possible is a wonderful thing, and Ehrlich’s type of argument was destructive to that arguments. Guys, quit arguing. If someone says **”Gummint Ain’t No Damn Good Never Nohow”**, they’re not going to change their mind.
mw, The green revolution is a good example of the “unprofitable” research that governments and NGOs can do that the market isn’t necessarily going to do by itself.
Jet, I’m sorry that I called you an lame, egregious, creepo. that was cruel, even if true. “Or do you really believe people in N. America and Europe stopped having kids over fears of overpopulation in Africa and Asia?” Ehrlich didn’t localize his overpopulation fears and did not limit them to Asia and Africa. He actually argued (this I do remember) that overpopulation in wealthy nations was more harmful than Asian overpopulation, since wealthy people make more demands on the environment. So yes, I believe that the repeated loud warnings about overpopulation had an effect on fertility in the developed wirld. As I recall, Wattenberg, a big natalist, also believes that. For one thing, high fertility has always been in part the result of the belief that having as many kids as possible is a wonderful thing, and Ehrlich’s type of argument was destructive to that arguments. Guys, quit arguing. If someone says **”Gummint Ain’t No Damn Good Never Nohow”**, they’re not going to change their mind.
Actually, I think the answer to Jet’s query: “One of the reasons population growth has slowed is that people like Ehrlich convinced people that it should be slowed.” “You have to have some sort of study to back that up, because it is farcical without support. Or do you really believe people in N. America and Europe stopped having kids over fears of overpopulation in Africa and Asia?” is a little more complicated than that. Rather, the slowing of the populations is in synch with the accessibility of contraceptives. Their continued accessibility is due, at least in part, to the arguments of those who, like Ehrlich, think humans should have control over their reproductive functions, and against those, like the Catholic Church, who said that human beings shouldn’t. So the effect of the argument, here, is indirect. Incidentally, this should show that technology qua technology, from an ecological point of view, is neutral.
So Johny boy, Industrialized nations lowered their birth rates do to affluence and longevity. Less industrialized nations lowered their birth rates for the exact same reasons plus government programs to hand out contraceptives and educate women on what exactly causes pregnancy. I’m not sure how 1970’s hippy academics crying over the Human Horde to Come plays into this, but I’m sure you can enlighten me. Did you ever go back and look at my link? It is actually a very cool link that could spread some light in your world. It is quite the mind numbing epiphany to realize that the energy problem (both environmental and cost) are an efficiency problem and not a supply or overuse problem. But it is also counter to the thread of making fun of technophiles, and I would hate to interrupt the mocking of optimist here.
In the long run most problems will eventually sort themselves out, but then again, in the long run we will all be … joining the Singularity anyway … God, let’s hope the Eschaton gets here quickly. (And Charles Stross has a sly dig at libertarians in “Iron Sunrise” by explaining precisely what happens when a bunch of them are plunked in a colony in an asteroid belt)
I will repeat that I believe that Jared Diamond’s primary contribution to this topic is to remind us that we all need to eat. And I will challenge all the unlimited-resource folks among us to name the source(s) of their last meal. I fail to understand how the scarcity of copper driving up the price of cable TV for rich urbanites makes any damn difference. Solve this: we have finite agricultural land. We have a finite budget of sunlight for photosynthesis. We have a finite quantity of fresh water. We are currently susubstituting our finite reserves of fossil fuels for all of these resources.
But, well… rather than the Concorde, consider the Airbus A380 — a project whose very success drew endless complaints about “unfair socialist government subsidies.” There’s no reason why in the long run, like the Concorde, the A380 can’t turn out to be both a major consumer of government subsidies AND a boondoggle. I HOPE the 380 isn’t a big success—I’d much rather fly smaller planes point-to-point than have to go hub-to-hub on a flying Queen Mary, so the Boeing vision of smaller, highly-efficient planes is a lot more attractive to me as a customer (though now Airbus is apparently going back for more subsidies to build a 787 competitor, too). Fortunately it seems that U.S. airports are not going to go in for the infrastructure expansions needed to handle the A380, so maybe we’ll dodge that ‘improvement’ in air travel.
Jet baby—we’re in the blog world. You are alleging that decreased fertility is for once group of reasons, and I’ve alleged that there’s also an additional reason. And somehow you feel that you’ve won the argument that way. Explain, please. And what do hippies have to do with it? No, Jet, I did not read your link. I’m responding to the rest of the thread. It might be an interesting link, but when you sail in calling people dorks and tards, they tend not to click your links.
The green revolution is a good example of the “unprofitable” research that governments and NGOs can do that the market isn’t necessarily going to do by itself. Unprofitable?!? There are huge sums to be made with crops that are high-yield, pest-resistant, drought-tolerant, etc, etc. I was under the impression that lefties held Monsanto primarily responsible for all that nasty ‘frankenfood’.
What, no alchemy jokes? The set of Crooked Timber readers overlaps with the set of Stephenson fans, I’m sure. I was going to suggest that Simon be nominated as Alchemist Royal to the court of King George Bush the Second. But some of you seem to be taking him seriously.
What, no alchemy jokes? The set of Crooked Timber readers overlaps with the set of Stephenson fans, I’m sure. I was going to suggest that Simon be nominated as Alchemist Royal to the court of King George Bush the Second. But some of you seem to be taking him seriously.
The tail end of these threads has to be worth at least a thesis. How do these specific issues of debate spin off from the topic of the thread and why do those topics spin off from that thread? Do those issues represent a core sub-issue of the debated issue? Perhaps it is the newcastle speaking, but if I ever go back to school, blogs and sociology will feature heavily. I mean come on, we have a post making fun of a technophile devolve into a debate over frankenfood and fertility forcings.
I HOPE the 380 isn’t a big success. . . Well, it’s already caused its detractors enough grief by insolently failing to shrivel on the vine. But barring some major disaster (like the sudden and absolute collapse of the market that spawned the Boeing 747) I rather doubt that prayers for a “boondoggle” judgment are going to be answered; IIRC it’s been picked up by ten major airlines and three freight carriers at last count, including FedEx and UPS.
Oh, and BTW mw—which U.S. aiports aren’t making changes? The last news I saw on that front was this.
Solve this: we have finite agricultural land. We have a finite budget of sunlight for photosynthesis. We have a finite quantity of fresh water. Ahem. “The Millennial Project: Colonising the Galaxy in 8 easy steps” by Marshall Savage. Granted, there’s a debate on the science…
To think that Boeing is not a highly subsidized aviation manufacturer is pretty mind-boggling. I suppose somebody better tell the Pentagon. Damn, guess that lease agreement that Darlene Druyan is going to jail for—you remember, the 10 bil overrun thing?—is just another example of your free enterprise system in motion. Boy howdy. Those free enterprising military contractors, going into a laissez faire space where no man has ventured before.
Can’t remember exactly which of the ghastly societies described in Iron Sunrise is the libertarian one – can you enlighten me? IIRC, Wednesday’s family winds up as refugees on a fairly straitlaced asteroid society whose name escapes me for the moment. There’s a bit of exposition in there about how the Eschaton loosely terraformed the asteroids, supplied them with a decades supplies – and then populated them with the loud-mouth pro-space contingent from Earth. Eventually the survivors had to shove the liberatarians out the airlock and build a conformist society just to get by.
Jared Diamond writes for the midrange intellectuals who believe in the mythology of declines being the result of external forces. I have read all of Diamond’s books cover to cover starting with The Third Chimpanzee and I honestly think he is one of the biggest poseurs since the original kosher crypto commie himself, Stephen Jay Gould. The mediocre and the whole pseudo-intellectual entourage trailing dilettantes like Bill Mohr love this guy. Diamond isn’t worth two cents as a thinker and his recent book is a straight plagiarism of lesser known Marc Widdowson’s ideas, converted for the pro-wrestling school equivalent of academics who like their ideas sized down to bite sized portions they can actually chew with their tiny teeth. It’s not external forces that cause the decline of civilizations – it is decline that makes civilizations susceptible to external forces. Healthy societies are in a constant state of innovation – whereas dead ones like our own are like old men prone to catch every little cold that passes through. A little crop failure or a resource challenge could barely put a dent in our ancestor’s ability to continue to invent new technologies and adapt to changing circumstances, but the very same kinds of changes in our modern world are guaranteed to blow our entire society away like so much cheap rubbish during the next few years. The truth about modern people is … they’re pussies. They’re not just pussies, they’re pretentious pussies. They’re already coming up with all kinds of convenient excuses why Zero Point oil is simply an insurmountable hurdle, like the pathetic sadsack apologists that they are. This whole oil decline fiasco was barely a speedbump in the path of progress for our forefathers when whale oil became unrealistic as an energy source. For us, it will certainly spell the end of our world. The Romans … the Aztecs … the Sumerians … the Chinese … these people were always beaten first by what was going on inside … then the natural world took advantage of their vulnerability to put them out of their misery. Jared Diamond is wrong – civilizations choose to fail and be destroyed because they give up first and foremost, just as ours has given up. Don’t get the chicken before the egg.
The truth about modern people is … they’re pussies. They’re not just pussies, they’re pretentious pussies. They’re already coming up with all kinds of convenient excuses why Zero Point oil is simply an insurmountable hurdle, like the pathetic sadsack apologists that they are. Except all those environmentalist pussies, I guess, who keep saying we should invent new stuff to keep that from happening. But the trouble with them is that they’re too goddamned pussy to see that Collapse is just a rewrite of The Coming Dark Age except for all the ways it’s completely different. And they even missed the fact that Gould was a “crypto commie.” What a bunch of poseurs. And you’re right—how dare Jared Diamond fail to argue that societies collapse because of internal factors, aside from writing a whole book on the topic? Rock on, cleve. Rock on.
“original kosher crypto commie himself, Stephen Jay Gould” “the Chinese … these people were always beaten first by what was going on inside” That’s vivid, cleve. Whatever happened to the Chinese? Their demise was real a darn shame.
Shouldn’t Julian Simon be given the benefit of the doubt when something he said sounds on a literal hearing completely silly? He was a bright guy and his comments on copper can easily be read as hyperbolic at worst, uttered in an excess of enthusiasm to reinforce his actual point which was (as has been well discussed above) about the endless renewability of resource economics (or something). It’s the way I first reacted to them. Scarcity drives price which drives exploration and subsitution and new technology, yada yada. And for the forseeable future there’ll be copper available to us, anyway. If something becomes too scarce and expensive, perhaps because a market has done nothing to protect it from overexploitation, people typically discover that we can, after all, cope. I liked Simon’s attitude that we may as well be optimistic, but perhaps he didn’t emphasize sufficiently that markets need to be well regulated because they don’t care about anything that’s really important. All they care about is buying ‘n selling, not whether the goods are oil, slaves, child workers or weapons. So that’s a very interesting paper on the electric power business Jet. Its suggestions, which sound well worthy of immediate consideration to me, certainly do require government initiative and a high degree of government regulation to work – not deregulation but reregulation. It’s not as though Clean Air for instance is just going to be completely forgotten about, is it? Energy like other industries of its scale needs to be well regulated, not deregulated. That paper’s new world won’t happen by private enterprise alone MW.
No.
Ha :) But do you want John to be helped with those issues you have with Simon?
No. (Not a repeat post.)
It’s not external forces that cause the decline of civilizations – it is decline that makes civilizations susceptible to external forces. Such as the Minoans?
Solve this: we have finite agricultural land. We have a finite budget of sunlight for photosynthesis. We have a finite quantity of fresh water. We are currently susubstituting our finite reserves of fossil fuels for all of these resources. Finiteness is not relevant here. There’s a finite amount of time before everything in the universe is iron at the same temperature. There’s a finite amount of time before the sun engulfs the earth. Numbers matter. To address your specific points: the sun provides enough light to feed the expected maximum population of the earth at a US standard of living. We’re currently substituting energy for agricultural land and topsoil and fresh water because it’s cheaper than making more and/or using less, and we’re using fossil fuels because digging them out of the ground is cheaper than building solar cells and more politically palatable than building breeder reactors.
“The sun provides enough light to feed the expected maximum population of the earth at a US standard of living” There is no expected maximum population of earth. And harvesting the light is not a slamdunk. It may not be impossible (the way extracting all the valuable minerals from the sea is), but it’s not that easy. And no, you can’t just say that technology will eventually have an answer.
The UN Population Division issues Low, Medium, and High estimates for population growth. The Low estimate has a peak at around 7.5 billion around 2040, Medium doesn’t peak on their chart but looks like probably around 10 billion in maybe 2100, and the High estimate seems to predict more or less linear growth. The current fracas shows the sensitivity of long-term projections to minor differences in assumptions, but unfortunately I don’t know enough to judge which of the UN assumptions are likely to be correct, but it’s worth noting that the predicted population in 2050 has gone down 4% in two years (from 9.3 billion to 8.9 billion). I think the preponderance of the evidence says that there is a predicted maximum population of the Earth, and that it’s probably going to be less than twice what we have now. Anyone who does the math realizes that the amount of light available for photosynthesis for food production is not even remotely a constraint, for any likely number of people at any plausible standard of living (i.e. present-day US, where we all get fat eating meat). We don’t need to capture all the light, or even close to all of the light.
Jet: You wish me to provide evidence to substantiate my claim that you often invite people to Google for evidence you neglect to provide? I say: go Google for it.
FWIW, I grew up in the 70s, and remember being aware, as a child, of issues with the world’s carrying capacity of humans (although of course I didn’t know the terminology back then). I grew up to be a conservation biologist and passsionate environmentalist, who decided not to contribute any more children to the planet precisely because I know USAmericans use more than our “share” of the earth’s resources, so any child of mine would have a disproportionate effect (over a child in Bangladesh, say). I know I’m not typical, but I can’t be the only person who made this choice either.
Although I’ve been accused by rightwingers of being left-leaning, I am also a scientist. Some ideas, like exhaustion of resources, have been too uncritically accepted by the left. Substitution of resources may come about in unexpected ways, so that we won’t need more supernovas to make more copper. We are going to optical cable, the raw material for which is sand, in many applications. Past examples are that gucky stuff that oozed from the ground in Pennsylvania for whale oil and coal, and automobiles for the horses that kept leaving stuff in the streets of New York. Or the electrons on this screen for typewriter ribbon, paper, stamps, transport over land and sea…
If the UN’s High estimate shows more or less linear growth, then there’s no estimated maximum. These are all obviously seat of the pants ballpark figures. If you’re just arguing against fatalistic inevitable-doomsday predictions, I can agree, but you seem to argue that we needn’t worry about population growth. And it’s good that the middle estimate has been lowered. It means that some of the things people have been doing seem to be working, and that they should keep doing them— not that they should quit doing them because they’re unnecessary. That would be like the schizophrenic who quits taking their meds because they feel so good. Cheryl Rofer, as I said, I think Ehrlich made a big mistake in putting so much weight on metals. Topsoil, energy, clean air, fresh water, fisheries, ozone depletion, greenhouse effect and climate change are the big things to watch. The variable isn’t how much light reaches the earth, but how much can be captured and stored.
If the UN’s High estimate shows more or less linear growth, then there’s no estimated maximum. These are all obviously seat of the pants ballpark figures. If you’re just arguing against fatalistic inevitable-doomsday predictions, I can agree, but you seem to argue that we needn’t worry about population growth. And it’s good that the middle estimate has been lowered. It means that some of the things people have been doing seem to be working, and that they should keep doing them— not that they should quit doing them because they’re unnecessary. That would be like the schizophrenic who quits taking their meds because they feel so good. Cheryl Rofer, as I said, I think Ehrlich made a big mistake in putting so much weight on metals. Topsoil, energy, clean air, fresh water, fisheries, ozone depletion, greenhouse effect and climate change are the big things to watch. The variable isn’t how much light reaches the earth, but how much can be captured and stored.
Technophilia is, I think, an enemy to techno-realism. The various environmental crises faced by the affluent west are surely going to be solved, if they are solved, by some mix of social change and technological innovation. Technophilia, however, is an unreasoning faith in technological progress—it gains its image of technology not from the stops and starts of actual history, but from science fiction. Nobody on this thread has mentioned the Telecosm fiasco, which is rather funny, since it is a case of technophilia run wild. The outlay for running fiber optical wire to the ends of the earth has amounted to over half a trillion dollars, or so Fortune has reported. The result of that activity has been, pretty much, the bankruptcy of every player involved with it. Where are Global Crossing, 360networks, Winstar, PSInet, Exodus? Ou sont les neiges d’antan? The fabulous Simon Ehrlich bet has nothing on the bets put, with heady, technophilic abandon, on wiring up America in the late nineties. Unfortunately, the sums lost here weren’t nominal. Not that this will teach the technophiles any lesson whatsoever. Past non-performance, as they say, is no guide to the future’s dream performance.
Of course there’s an estimated maximum. The UN predicts that world fertility will fall below replacement levels by 2040; therefore the population is not expected to grow without bound. Furthermore, the “Medium” estimate for population in 2050 has been declining for the past 15 years. I’m not arguing that no one needs to worry about population growth; I’m arguing that the current worldwide level of worry about population growth seems to be about right to maybe a little much. And since population growth rates seem pretty strongly inversely correlated to “development”, and since I’d like for there to be a lot less bone-crushingly poor people in the world, I’d rather spend my effort worrying about the latter. If the amount of light per unit area changes dramatically, we’ve got much bigger issues than population growth to deal with. So to the extent that concern over “light” is real, it’s concern over agricultural land. Which we pretty clearly have plenty of; slash and burn farming is only taking place because it’s currently much cheaper than modern farming techniques.
Jake, if you were just saying that the most apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid, then I take back some of what I said. Perhaps I read too hurriedly or merged what you were saying with what another poster was saying.
Oh, and BTW mw — which U.S. aiports aren’t making changes? The last news I saw on that front was this. Ah, bummer. But on the bright side, we’re talking about just the largest airports in the largest cities (and none, fortunately, that I fly out of regularly). Along with smaller jets, I really like smaller airports—you, know, 15-20 gates, park out front and walk in. John Wayne in Orange County is a nice example—so much better to fly to the LA area that way than through LAX. I will say, though, that I have no objection at all if FedEx and UPS want to haul cargo with A380s.
Only an idiot can be optimistic about technology (or anything else for that matter). Technology will kill all of us very soon, one way or another.
John – I think my position is a little more severe than “the most apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid” – it’s probably more along the lines of “most of the apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid”, with a strong side helping of “intuition is no longer useful for coming to meaningful conclusions about this stuff – you have to do the math.”
Only an idiot can be optimistic about technology (or anything else for that matter). Technology will kill all of us very soon, one way or another. I would have been dead before my first birthday save for technology. I’m quite optimistic about it, even while acknowledging the problems. And Cheryl, I’m a “leftist”. Try dealing with people rather than stereotypes sometime.
John – I think my position is a little more severe than “the most apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid” – it’s probably more along the lines of “most of the apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid”, with a strong side helping of “intuition is no longer useful for coming to meaningful conclusions about this stuff – you have to do the math.”
I would have been dead before my first birthday save for technology. Well, OK, but how many dead people would be alive if not for technology? One little hydrogen bomb can kill more people in a second than penicillin can save in a year; Bhopal, Chernobyl; and just you wait till they have nukes in space monitored by computer programs written by someone in Bangalore for $7/hour. Technology is amazing, and it’s controlled by troglodytes under a thin veneer of civilization. Yeah, the future is bright indeed.
?The Millennial Project: Colonising the Galaxy in 8 easy steps? by Marshall Savage. Granted, there’s a