Letters to the Editor
-
If you're worried about starvation,
then obviously productivity gains are good things, and the more the better. But increased productivity can be bad for a capitalist economic system if it's too great.
When asked why increased productivity is a good thing, economists answer that it's because it allows management to raise wages without also raising prices. But of course, management doesn't unilaterally raise wages because to do so would put Firm A at a competitive disadvantage with Firm B. The failure to raise wages coupled with increased productivity results in increased inventories of unsold goods which results in lower prices and lower wages which exacerbate the problem of unsold inventories.
That's exactly what happened in the Great Depression which followed directly on the heels of the 1920s which is still the decade of greatest productivity growth (5.3%/year average) in U.S. history.
-
bio fuels to blame
I'm pretty sure that increasing oil prices lead to some of the higher costs (costs of farming & transporting goods)... But I was under the impression that the biggest increase was due to the bio-fuel initiative that was taking an increasingly large share of US production.
So maybe the problem isn't a malthusian failure to keep production on par with population growth, but a misguided use of resources?
-
What is a "Malthusian fate"?
The question of whether humanity will escape a Malthusian fate will likely be answered, if not in my lifetime, then in my children's. And considering how long humans have been bumbling about, that's a pretty amazing prospect to consider.
Well, it bears asking — what exactly is a "Malthusian fate"?
Is it one in which humanity avoids any constraint on population growth? Or in which overpopulation doesn't lead to famine, pestilence, and war?
If we accept either or both of those conditions, then the verdict is already in — we haven't escaped our fate in any way. Population control (whether voluntary or otherwise) and socio-economic turmoil are the realities of our world.
Why would we think that Malthus didn't apply? Yes, his specific argument about geometric population growth and linear growth in production is technically wrong on both counts — our population doesn't grow geometrically anymore, and growth in production has increased in highly non-deterministic ways, as Andrew Leonard (and others) have pointed out, because of innovation. But to say that that's the only way to look at Malthus is taking him awfully literally.
His main point — that there are environmental constraints on population growth — is a reality that we face every day. A free, well-educated people may choose how to be constrained, rather than being obliged through starvation and die-off, but choose they will.
And part of why we're free and educated enough to make those choices — about resource consumption, sustainability, reproduction, and so on both on a personal and a societal level — is because of the influence of Malthus.
-
What is our response?
Andrew, your point is a very good one, but it bears remembering that what's really important is not necessarily the shortage itself, but our response to those shortages.
Shortages of oil (e.g. "Peak Oil") have been the main focus of the shortage discussion, at least for people keyed in on this topic, but of course oil is necessary for food, and it supplies energy for manufacturing and productivity. So a shortage of cheap, available oil ultimately leads to other shortages.
How we will respond to this? The track record of the American government is not a good one. To date, our response has been "plan world conquest to seize control of remaining oil assets." Hence the invasion of Iraq and our hate-affair with Venezuela.
At what point does America wake up and realize that we need a new type of response to these questions of Malthusian proportions?
I read on the New York Sun today that there are food shortages in Northern California -- are people so out of it, so tuned out to the problems of the world that they will literally have to starve before they start asking what's going on?
-
Knowledge may be an "unlimited resource"
but I'd like the cornucopian cheerleaders over at BusinessWeek to explain to me how I can eat knowledge, heat my home with knowledge, and travel on knowledge power.
Oh right, they will explain with insulting condescension, that "knowledge-driven increases in efficiency" will enable us to better utilize available resources to provide more food, energy, and so on from the same resources.
Wonderful.
But "efficiency" is most certainly not an unlimited resource. Supposing we can increase our utilization efficiency from, say, 30% to 97% for a given resource. That's a big improvement. We gobble up this efficiency in no time with exponential growth. Now our unlimited reserve of "knowledge" can give us another boost, from 97% to 98 or even 99.9% efficiency. In other words, it can give us nothing at all. It has only delayed the inevitable "end of the growth line." Exponential growth comes to a crash.
On another point I would argue that knowledge is not actually an unlimited resource, but that is not necessary.
-
Malthus and Biotech
Alarm over genetic engineering is vastly overplayed by some of the environmentalists--monoculture, soil loss, and over-reliance on petroleum-based fertilizer present more serious threats to sustainable production--but the notion that we could solve the food supply problems if only the tree huggers would stop opposing technology is mostly just self-interested corporate propaganda.
Agrobusiness wants a free hand with biotech because its techniques can improve profitability. Any increase in the production of foodstuffs of decrease in their price is incidental; and, to date, genetic engineering has had more to do with "improvements" like increasing the shelf life of tomatoes than increasing the number of tomatoes on the shelf.
Enthusiasm for genetic engineering as a magic technology is rather like enthusiasm for drilling the North shore of Alaska for oil. It's not that inserting a new gene here or there might not benefit food production just as drilling some new wells would indeed produce more oil. The problem is that such quick fixes are likely to be marginal and temporary and the hopes they raise distract attention from fundamental problems.
-
Just premature
Malthus and the Club of Rome weren't wrong, they were just premature, and they focused on food and oil instead of water.
When our little experiment with the technological/scientific/industrial revolution started just a couple of hundred years ago, it had taken since the retreat of the glaciers for H. sapiens to accumulate a billion souls on the planet.
Our response to prosperity seems to be to seek the human carrying capacity of the earth. We may well prove the limit by exceeding it.