The Learning Curve
Posted by diedo on April 21, 2008
As you can see, I changed the design theme again. I can’t seem to agree on a final look. There’s also a lot to be done on the content of the blog. The ‘Book Reviews’ page already reflects what I have in mind; using the left side of each page to show the arguments of those who seek active stance against overpopulation, and the right side for who disagree. Anyway, it’s more time-consuming than I’d like.
Originally I planned to publish my first two reviews, but instead you can find just the first one at ‘Book Reviews’, on the Dutch book Tien miljoen voor een duurzame bevolkingsomvang. The review itself is open for comments, so feel free to post there. The second one about The Population Explosion was a bit harder. I want my reviews to serve multiple purposes. They should reflect my critical opinion (as any review does), but they also need to convey the most interesting information and most important conclusions. I don’t want you to read these books per se whether I recommend them or not, and if you don’t, my reviews should be written as if I’ve read them for you. This what I aim to do, and what is also making these reviews a little more difficult to write than what I’m used to. It’s not like panning the latest Hollywood blockbuster!
On another note, if you read the comments on the previous post, you will see that author Pete Murphy has kindly offered to send me his book for review. If have humbly accepted and look forward to receiving and reading his book. Be assured, I will judge the book and its contents fairly and critically. His offer came quite unexpectedly, but a most pleasant surprise and is an additional stimulus in getting this blog where I want it to go. May it be the first free book of many. Yay, free books!
And on a final, lighter note; a friend sent me this YouTube link to stand-up comedian Bill Burr on David Letterman, who has his own spin on overpopulation issues (he gets around to it at 2.30):
Nathaniel said
It won’t work. Global Warming isn’t about population. It is occurring because people chose to do things that increase the amount of CO2 in the air.
There never has been any set person to factory, car, or coal power plant (and so on) ratio. The average house size in the USA has been increasing since the 1950s as has the transit time (drive time for those who decide to use cars, trucks, or SUVs) to get to work. Some European nations have even seen population shrinkage while the amount of pollution they put out has increased. China is unique in that it is industrializing without a population boom (1 child policy) and the amount of pollution it puts out has been rising at a pretty high rate.
If you actually want to deal with Global Warming get a handle one the number of factories and power plants that are being built and what people buy or “consume”. The world population is projected to hit 0 population growth between 10 and 11 billion and then decline slowly. This time period could be terrible for the environment not for the number of people but for how much resources they use and the level of pollution they create-both things that are marked by the high level of development that goes along with the declining birthrate.
And it may be hard to have a Superbowl if there aren’t enough people to fill out teams worth watching when they play.
Diedo said
Nathaniel, thank you for your comments. You make perfectly valid points, which form the type of points which led to me starting this blog and reading books on the subject. I’m having a hard time finding a book from your point of view that is well written and not as hotly contested as Lomborg’s book (though I’ve decided to read that as well, and I think he doesn’t see that much of an environmental problem as you do). If you know of any, let me know.
And as a reply to some of your arguments; global warming is just one of many issues which are definitely related to population, since population determines the scale of such problems, and the vulnerability of the systems in which they occur.
Now, consumption of energy and resources, as you point out, is also important, especially for developing countries, and I always try to see overconsumption and overpopulation in tandem. If emerging countries such as China, India and Brazil reach higher, or even developed standards of consumption, we have an even bigger problem. Even if population peaks in 2050 the momentum gained will still have considerably impact, exactly because we are too overpopulated yet manage to continue to consume more per capita. In an even worse scenario, pressures on food production and such may lead to developments in biotechnology or something similar, in turn causing a second Green Revolution of sorts enabling and causing an even larger global population.
I agree with you on ‘getting a handle on what people buy or consume’, but I also think that this should be done within a more suitable population size. Not 30.000 ofcourse, but not 10 billion either. I try to think what would be utopian, and for me, at the moment, it would be this:
The global population and their consumption would be sustainable i.e. their environmental impact would be constant on average (so new technology may give the option of increasing the population size). Women’s rights should be a priority since they’ve led to the low birth rates in developed countries. Government should give incentives to raise fertility to replacement levels. In this case no infringement on personal freedom occurs (such as in one-child policy) since the government only encourages higher fertility when population is below the ideal level, and drops incentives when they are above.
Now, my utopia touches on matters of overpopulation, overconsumption, sustainability and emancipation of women. The first two hard hardest two tackle; with overconsumption being our common ground. I would very much like to hear your utopia, but instead I might make it a more general question to all readers in my next post.
Nathaniel said
Was my last post published? As you can probably guess I have no problem with women having educations.
Nathaniel said
I tried typing a decently long explanation and I see it didn’t post. So here is a more refined version.
Actually, I see Overpopulation and Overconsumption as very different. Overpopulation is where the population is so large that the resources each member needs overtakes the resources available. Overconsumption is where the resources people chose to use are much more than they actually need.
You really cannot have both at the same time. If you tried that would be like giving all the food to 2 out of 10 people when there is enough to for 5 (meaning the 2 eat more than twice what they need already while 8 starve).
But a point I would like to make is that you cannot really tell if there is food for 5 or 20 because no matter how much there is if it only goes to 2 then there is a shortage and 8 starve. This is a point worth noting because even as there were food riots in a few nations earlier this year there was enough food grown to overfeed every man, woman, and child on the Earth. So food “shortages” in modern times aren’t because of an actual lack of food.
Getting more directly to Overconsumption, I think that developed nations use more resources per person than the rest-this is especially true for the USA where consumption is the norm and the size of houses as well as the number of gadgets that take power to use (or even just build) has increased on average. This can be seen via families that now have 2 or 3 cars where there used to be 1. You also noted that developing India, Brazil, and China are increasing consumption.
Here comes the scary/unusual economics part. In Macroeconomics there is an equation referred to as the Solow growth model. In this model the rate of GDP and capital (factories, computers, roads, and so on) growth per worker is equal to rate of capital growth minus the rate of labor growth. Yes I said minus labor growth. This is because wealth that would be put towards raising, educating, and caring for the next generation could instead be spent on building new factories and making other capital investments that are increased development (which leads to increased consumption).
A different way of looking at this equation is rate of GDP growth equals savings times output per each additional unit of capital minus savings times inflation (the amount of savings inflation eats up) minus population growth.
How and why would increased output be used up by fewer people? I mentioned it earlier, increased toys, cars, and whatnots per household. So fewer people can actually use more resources. How could fewer people use more resources…. well didn’t you mention how scared you were that India, China, and Brazil would hit developed nation levels of consumption? This means there population can totally stagnate (not even grow by a single person more) and the amount of resources these nations use will still grow by an incredible number.
That is part of why it can be argued that Global Warming is the fault of the wealthy, for only the wealthy have enough control over the worlds resources (via ownership or purchasing power) to decide how well or how badly those resources are used.
Last I heard the planet Earth can handle 40 billion people, even if those estimates are overoptimistic and it can only hold 30 billion that is still more than double the 10-11 billion many expect the world population to level out at. However, one of the things that should really concern environmentally aware people is that part of the reason birthrates fall is increased development (as you have to pay to take care of children rather than using them like a future labor force that makes you money). If development grows to such a level that the birthrate decline is worldwide then I truly wonder how much resources will be used at that time. I think we may be heading to a point where how much we chose to consume per person and out of habit far outstrips any number put together simply by guessing where population growth will be in the future.
In sum, we are slowly starting to replace men with machines in the future economy, except the men don’t pollute as much or as directly as the machines (using coal and oil) do. So the environment could be worse of with stable population levels.
Diedo said
It still amazes me how much I agree with you with the major exception of our views on overpopulation. For example:
I think we may be heading to a point where how much we chose to consume per person and out of habit far outstrips any number put together simply by guessing where population growth will be in the future.
I definitely agree, because the governing growth between now and 2050 lies in increase of consumption, not population. In fact, I’m going to write an essay on the topic of sustainability within the context of overconsumption. However, when I read your comment:
You really cannot have both at the same time. If you tried that would be like giving all the food to 2 out of 10 people when there is enough to for 5 (meaning the 2 eat more than twice what they need already while 8 starve).
I believe you can, and I believe that what you are describing is exactly what is happening to a varying degree, depending on which resource you’re looking at.
Thanks again for your thoughts, especially on the Solow growth model which I hadn’t heard of before.
Nathaniel said
I’m glad I mentioned something you hadn’t heard of before in Solow.
While it may be possible in theory to have overpopulation and overconsumption at the same time I would like to point to where I said that food shortages today aren’t because of a “lack of food”. This implies that the food price spikes aren’t due to the real world being reflective in a situation of both overpopulation and overconsumption. As there is more than enough food to feed to world there may be an argument that the latter is happening but not the former (as overpopulation implies we don’t have the resources it would take to feed everyone and the fact that we could make everyone-not just a select few-on the world fat shows we have not surpassed the available resources).
I think I’m different from some of your idea sources in that I try to take the environment seriously but have an extremely low and doubtful opinion of Malthus. I feel Malthus praised the people who were the greater environmental problem and was also used to justify man allowed (even made) disasters. One that I think of in particular was the Irish potato famine. While the Irish were literally starving and dying in the streets at this time wheat grown in Ireland was exported elsewhere (I believe, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that Ireland was even the top wheat exporter in western Europe at the time). Image watching food grown in your homeland being shipped out as you starve, I suspect it actually did for a few Irish. Thus I see the ability to create or allow major problems and Malthus being used to make the situation worse when it really doesn’t have to be that way.
In modern times we have overproduced food for the past several years running (where there has been more food than human mouths to eat it). When Malthus leaning individuals heard about riots in Haiti the first thing the did was ask or claim that his predictions were coming to pass (after years of being wrong in a couple of ways). They never thought to question if the food allocation/distribution system of the world needs to be examined.
As many people aren’t aware that we have more food in the world than it would take to feed everyone I suspect that many aren’t aware of the high levels of consumption and pollution in the developed world when compared to elsewhere.
So there is a general lack on knowledge on those fronts, in addition (and in further explanation of my pro-Environment and anti-Malthus views) I feel like the sources you refer to either don’t have protection of the environment in mind (especially as some of their political allies may be the same industries that environmentalists are concerned about) and thus question environmentalism more than Malthus. And environmentalists, seeing nothing that appears to directly work against their goals (which I think are frequently worthwhile), aren’t questioning enough of neoMalthusians who claim to support them and are potentially more concerned with the industries I mentioned already. In this manner I think Malthusian thoughts manage to avoid the tougher questioning that I think they deserve.
I guess I’m unusual in that I’m an environmentalist whose historical knowledge is high enough that I’m doubtful of Malthus in general. And I’ve gained an appreciation for the manner of human practices itself of being capable of screwing things up.
Good luck on your essay and thanks for the quick reply after a few weeks of waiting for my comments.
Diedo said
You keep mentioning “the fact that we could make everyone-not just a select few-on the world fat shows we have not surpassed the available resources”
But I’ve never heard of this, and am highly doubtful, since I’ve also read that we need several times our food production to get everything at European, let alone American, food consumption standards. The FAO World Report would suggest that such an increase is only possible through developments in biotechnology, aquafisheries, less dependence on meat, more on grain, etc, since availability of remaining arable land is reasonable, but limited, and world fisheries are generally strained or even depleted. Also, food production has been able to keep up in general (or surpass as you say), but there have been years in which world grain stocks have been in decline i.e. annual supply below demand.
I absolutely do not see how you can seperate issues of population numbers and consumption levels, since both are factors in the same equation.
Number of people X How much they consume = Consumption of resources
Whether you add the prefix ‘over’ to either word, I really don’t think that’s very important. Their product causes deforestation, fishery depletion, decline in biodiversity, pollution, etc.
I do agree that equal food distribution would definitely help to feed every mouth in the world (at this moment) at some very acceptable level (but much lower than Western standards) and that the wealthy are mostly responsible global warming since they consume the most. However, our numbers leave little room, are at the source of the global nature of these problems, and so determine the vulnerability/precariousness of these issues.
As for the Irish potato famine, as I understand it, the introduction of the potato led to rapid demographic growth and complete reliance on the potato as a food source. This led to a precarious, vulnerable relation between the Irish people and this food source. It wasn’t export, but a potato fungus and a severe winter in the following year that led to famine, mass emigration and related epidemics.
Diedo said
In addition:
You said that you’ve “gained an appreciation for the manner of human practices itself of being capable of screwing things up.” I would like to add that this too fascinates me, especially to what degree it is an conscious vs unconscious effort. In the latter case, I wonder to what extent our various global predicaments have somehow been inevitable and we (mankind) are merely, passively at the mercy of our own development. Ofcourse, this is more of destiny vs free will discussion and that’s a whole other ballgame.
I’d also like to say that the population part of the problem has already played itself out and at this point we’ll probably hit the 9-10 billion peak in 2050 no matter what. So, I do agree (though after different reasons) that Western consumption should be the focal point of solving any environmental problems and that striving for things such as equal distribution and sustainability are top priorities.
Have you read ‘Cradle-to-Cradle’ by McDonough and Braungart on sustainability? It’s very popular in the Netherlands and to me is the most visionary view on sustainability I have seen. Their philosophy has some practical issues, but it’s definitely the kind of thinking that the Western world can use.
Nathaniel said
Is it accepting my new posts?
Nathaniel said
Hmm…. I see that but not what I had typed before it.
I was worried that it will not post (instead looses) large responses so I’ll try to do this in 2 parts (I made a copy the 2nd time I wrote this so I wouldn’t loose it again).
The first was this:
The Irish Potato Famine was made worse by what the British (who had political control and served as landlords) did. Yes the potato crop suffered from blight, but large amounts of other food crops like barley, corn, and wheat were exported from Ireland while the famine was going on.
Here is a quick link to history website that doesn’t have as many statistics as I would like but can show you that what I’m talking about actually happened.: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/ireland_great_famine_of_1845.htm
A specific excerpt is:
The whole issue was not helped by the majority of landlords in Ireland who showed no sympathy for those who worked their land. Those who could not pay their rent were evicted despite the government’s effort to establish some form of employment in rural Ireland. Also during the time of the famine, £1million of corn and barley were exported from Ireland to mainland Britain, along with quantities of dairy produce. This fitted in with the free trade approach of the time. Those who produced these vital products simply got a better price for them than in Ireland. Driven on by free trade, foodstuffs left Ireland – despite the fact that it was desperately needed in Ireland itself. Any initiatives in London were also hindered or simply blocked by the chief civil servant to the Treasury – Trevelyan. He was symptomatic of those who worked for the government in Westminster. A supporter of free trade, Trevelyan was also less than sympathetic to the Irish or their problems.
So historically it has have already proven that the human race (via the system it creates that runs social and economic aspects of society) can send large amounts of food away from a place where people are starving and to a place where they are not.
Lets see if that gets on.
Nathaniel said
It really doesn’t seem to want to read the 2nd part of what I typed.
Nathaniel said
It really doesn’t seem to want to read rest of what I typed.
Nathaniel said
I tried to say look up the 12 myths relating to food under the organization “foodfirst”. Their website ends in an org rather than a com. The blog is being really touchy about my post.
Nathaniel said
It doesn’t seem to want to let me provide a link to foodfirst which posted based on a book called World Hunger:Twelve Myths.
Nathaniel said
I would recommend looking over their website as they also list off the sources for there argument there.
I think the people * individual consumption is consumption equation is too simple. Not everyone consumes at the same rate plus individual consumption rates are changing rapidly (in part because of the increased development we talked about earlier. Thus I think the equation doesn’t note the changes and variability in consumption that relate to our prior discussion.
Thanks for the book recommendation and I’ll see if it is at the library next time I’m there.
Nathaniel said
“their argument there”. Sorry for the typo, there are probably a few in my prior posts.
Myth 1:
Not Enough Food to Go Around
Reality: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn’t even count many other commonly eaten foods – vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs – enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most “hungry countries” have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.
Myth 2:
Nature is to Blame for Famine
Reality: It’s too easy to blame nature. Human-made forces are making people increasingly vulnerable to nature’s vagaries. Food is always available for those who can afford it – starvation during hard times hits only the poorest. Millions live on the brink of disaster in South Asia, Africa and elsewhere, because they are deprived of land by a powerful few, trapped in the unremitting grip of debt, or miserably paid. Natural events rarely explain deaths; they are simply the final push over the brink. Human institutions and policies determine who eats and who starves during hard times. Likewise, in America many homeless die from the cold every winter, yet ultimate responsibility doesn’t lie with the weather. The real culprits are an economy that fails to offer everyone opportunities, and a society that places economic efficiency over compassion.
Myth 3
Too Many People
Reality: Birth rates are falling rapidly worldwide as remaining regions of the Third World begin the demographic transition – when birth rates drop in response to an earlier decline in death rates. Although rapid population growth remains a serious concern in many countries, nowhere does population density explain hunger. For every Bangladesh, a densely populated and hungry country, we find a Nigeria, Brazil or Bolivia, where abundant food resources coexist with hunger. Or we find a country like the Netherlands, where very little land per person has not prevented it from eliminating hunger and becoming a net exporter of food. Rapid population growth is not the root cause of hunger. Like hunger itself, it results from underlying inequities that deprive people, especially poor women, of economic opportunity and security. Rapid population growth and hunger are endemic to societies where land ownership, jobs, education, health care, and old age security are beyond the reach of most people. Those Third World societies with dramatically successful early and rapid reductions of population growth rates – China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Cuba and the Indian state of Kerala – prove that the lives of the poor, especially poor women, must improve before they can choose to have fewer children.
Diedo said
Wow, lot’s to think about. I don’t have the time right now to carefully consider all that you wrote, but I do wish to add to the second Myth, that although the Netherlands is a net exporter of foodproduct (I believe third in the world after US and France) it is also a major importer. The ‘net’ export is value added and does not mean we actually export more food than we import in terms of volume, only in value. That would be impossible for such a small, densely populated country, although we do have lots of greenhouse grown vegetables and cattle considering. In fact, 15% of our export is flowers, which are also counted as ‘agrarian products’ and misinterpreted as ‘food products’.
Diedo said
I meant third myth…
Diedo said
I meant third myth…
Nathaniel said
A fair question of the myth. But I am glad I gave you some thoughts to chew over.
Good luck with the things that are keeping you busy. Also I have to say that I think you did a very good job on your blog (trying to include a fair amount of detail and points of view).