Rational Optimism versus locavorism

Over at Cafe Hayek, George Mason University professor Don Boudreaux posted a letter he wrote to the NY Times.

David Sassoon of Harlemville, NY, is a locovore because, in his words, he’s “interested in restoring community through the act of eating, rather than swallowing the cold logic of global economics” (Letters, Aug. 28).

So Boudreaux points out that Mr. Sassoon, everyone in fact, might consider getting everything locally. Off the top of my head, in just the C category are clothing, computers, carnations, cars, cat litter, cabinets, CDs, and cabbage patch dolls. Everything would be made from materials within a day’s walk of where they live. A good idea?  Of course not, Can you imagine how long it would take to build a computer if it came from materials gathered and refined within a 100-mile radius and then assembled by a local builder? It’s absurd. And, while a locally grown fruit might be tasty, we like more variety in our diet.

A beautiful consequence of the so-called “cold logic of global economics” it that it knits people from around the world into a kind of community – into a worldwide web of peaceful and productive mutual dependence.  Commerce over large geographic areas undermines the nativism and insularity – and poverty – that result when people live in local communities with little or no contact with outsiders.

That is the brilliance of trade. It opens minds when it opens markets. If that logic’s cold, give me more, please.

iPads and Kindles are better for the environment than books? Come again?

Brian Palmer (aka Slate’s Green Lantern) writes that “iPads and Kindles are better for the environment than books.”

If the Lantern has taught you anything, it’s that most consumer products make their biggest scar on the Earth during manufacture and transport, before they ever get into your greedy little hands.

He then papers glosses over an important part of the manufacture of electronics. Mining. So I commented:

Paper versus plastic

“E-readers also have books beat on toxic chemicals.” I’m not so sure of this. As noted, “E-readers do, however, require the mining of nonrenewable minerals…”

Industrial extraction of such non-renewable minerals primarily uses cyanide compounds to separate metals from the raw ore. And, though U.S. mines pollute less than others around the world, hard-rock mining produces more toxic waste than any other industry in the country, according to the EPA. For example, one ounce of refined gold (used in electronics manufacturing) generates nearly 80 TONS of toxic waste. The leftovers are akin to nuclear waste for the mining industry: around for a long time, hazardous, and no one really knows what to do with it. The waste contains “every element in the periodic table,” says Robert Moran, PhD., an expert in geochemistry. Moran’s company, Michael-Moran Associates, has commented extensively on the environmental impacts of mining projects around the world for both the mining industry and for environmental activists.

If you think clearcuts are ugly, try open-pit mines, 2,000 feet deep, and one to two miles across.“These are not your grandfather’s mines,” he says. Mines are “constructed on a huge scale unheard of less than thirty years ago.”

Bottom line: Forests return after harvesting. Plastics and cyanide dumps don’t go away. Instead of saving trees for our descendants, we’re leaving tons of toxic wastes and despoiled landscapes where trees may not grow for millennia.

For more on ereaders and dead-tree books see:

Should there be a new way of living for the top one billion? – iPat edition redux

Steven Earl Salmony of the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, commented on Dot Earth’s, “Do the Top Billion Need New Goals?”

Dear Timberati,

Do you think there is any chance at all that Paul Ehrlich, despite his poor showing as prognosticator and gambler, will be shown to be one of the greatest scientists of all time?

After all Paul Ehrlich is the forerunner for recent research by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel that appears to indicate with remarkable simplicity that human population dynamics are essentially similar to, not different from, the population dynamics of other species.

Since many too many population experts remain silent about this research and blogmeisters associated with the mass media refuse to discuss the peer-reviewed evidence, perhaps you could take a look at it, make your comments, and encourage by your example others to do the same. You can find the article, Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply, by Hopfenberg and Pimentel on the worldwide web or at the links below.
http://www.panearth.org/
http://sustainabilityscience.org…
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

—-
Now I visited the panearth.org site and came away unconvinced and with a feeling that even if it’s well-meaning, it hates humans.

I replied:
Dear Steve,

No.

Paul Ehrlich will be no more right than Tertullian was 1810 years ago, no more right than was Malthus 212 years ago, no more right than was Forrester 38 years ago, no more right than was et. al.

Again, to quote Macauly, “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

This ain’t my first rodeo.

I am NOT saying that feeding the 9.2 billion people that will inhabit this earth in 2075 will be a snap. Certainly not, especially if governments and greens try to keep agriculture in the mid 20th century. Yet it can be done as Norman Borlaug wrote a year or two before his death [ed note: here I’m incorrect, the quote is from 2002 and Borlaug died in 2009], “While challenging, the prospects are good that the world’s farmers will be able to provide a better diet at lower prices to more people in the future.” By the way, after the population peak, the UN (and other demographers) projects world population to fall.

Here’s the human race‘s track record so far:

“The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before that: years of lifespan, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of travelling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout. This generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles and, of course, cash than any that went before.” (The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley)

This, not despite free trade, but because of free trade.

However, according to the panearth.org slide show, food production increase = population growth, or put another way, “If you feed them, they will come.” I disagree. While true for most animals, as ecologists are wont to point out the boom/bust nature of animal populations and food supply, it’s not true for humans. The number of children per woman links much better to infant mortality (arguably, if you want to lower birth rate you would feed people better not feed them less). So, the healthier (and more urbanized and wealthier) we become, the fewer babies women produce. (See Gapminder.org graphs: http://bit.ly/bjGoVN http://bit.ly/clvx0p and http://bit.ly/9jcCDX Note Mauritius and Botswana) Panearth.org packages Malthus’s theory as Powerpoint. I fundamentally find the panearth.org solution morally repugnant. It’s wildly misanthropic in its neo-Malthusian demand that we not increase food production because that will fuel a population explosion.

And, as you well know, population growth is plummeting. Not one country has a higher birth rate now than it had in 1960.

“Most environmentalists still haven’t gotten the word,” writes Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame), “On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birth rates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep dropping.”

Again, I am not saying things will magically become better. I am saying that increasing the wealth of all and placing resources in the places where we (the top one billion) get the best bang for the buck makes sense to me.

What should we top one billion commit to? (List from the Copenhagen Consensus Center)

1 Micronutrient supplements for children (vitamin A and zinc) to combat malnutrition
2 Enact the Doha development agenda to promote free trade
3 Micronutrient fortification (iron and salt iodization) to combat malnutrition
4 Expand immunization coverage for children
5 Biofortification to combat malnutrition
6 Deworming and other nutrition programs at school to combat malnutrition and improve Education
7 Lowering the price of schooling
8 Increase and improve girl’s schooling
9 Community-based nutrition promotion to combat malnutrition
10 Provide support for women’s reproductive role

You and I may not be able to reach an understanding with this one. This may be a case of what Easterbrook terms, “The collective refusal to believe that life is getting better.” For me, not only is the glass half-full, there’s evidence that everyone will have more to drink soon.

============================

I doubt that I can change Dr Salmony’s mind. After all, he believes enough in the inevitability of the population implosion, (where humanity runs out of food and other resources causing a dramatic drop in numbers. Billions will perish) that he heads a campaign and now is in competition to get attention and funds.

I do hope to change the minds of some who visit Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog. Instead of contributing to, what to my mind is a misanthropic endeavor, that they consider one or all of these three charities: FARM-Africa, International Policy Network, AgBioWorld Foundation

Should there be a new way of living for the top one billion? – The iPat edition

Malthus cautioned law makers on the effects of...
T. Robert Malthus. Image via Wikipedia

Andrew Revkin asks on his blog, Dot Earth, ‘Would the world benefit from a set of millennium development goals for the “top billion”?’

Michael Schesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois, among other things, wrote,

“Perhaps humanity and the Earth can survive with 9 billion people in 2050, but what type of world will that be?”

I answer:

It’s a misanthropic question framed as one of great concern for the lives of the yet unborn, animal and plant.

By all indications the world of 2050 will be wealthier, happier, better fed (using less acreage than is used to grow food today), less violent, more interconnected, and more urban than today. Because it will be more urban and therefore denser, it will use less land.

I know, I know, I’m naive. Edward Abbey wrote, “[W]e can see that the religion of endless growth–like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason–is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease…Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

People are less than worthless, in Abbey’s curmudgeonly view, they are an invading virus.

Schesinger’s pessimistic assessment of the world of 2050 apparently mirrors Abbey’s, Lester Brown’s, Tertullian’s, Thomas Malthus’s, Paul Ehrlich’s and others. The world careens toward a Tertullian/Malthusian catastrophe. Brothers and sisters the end is near and we stand upon banana peels between vipers and the abyss. We stand on the brink of droughts and mass starvation; forests reduced to stumps, no oil, foul air, frozen earth [scratch that frozen bit, put in scorched due to global warming instead] and polluted water. The high prophet of 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich summed it up for us: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Why? Ehrlich sprinkled scientific dust on his Malthusian catastrophe with what is now called the IPAT formula: I = P × A × T (where I = Environmental Impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology). There you have with mathematical clarity, we’re the seven hundred pound gorilla playing with china plates.

Yet, that’s the wrong way to look at it; it’s not a zero-sum game.

You may have noticed Ehrlich miscalculated by 40 years and counting. Humans are still here. The world’s population has almost doubled since his prediction, yet things are better. Instead of cleaning off every whit of resource and the world being poorer, sicker, and hungrier, we find that since 1970: we are three times richer (in real terms), the percentage of people in abject poverty has dropped by over two-thirds, a greater percentage of people are better fed, the average person in a developing country eats more, the world’s forests cover 98% of what they did in 1970, and the known oil reserves have nearly doubled.

Why? Because, IPAT is Malthus dressed up as mathematical empiricism and empirical evidence points otherwise. For instance, the development of agriculture reduced the acreage needed to support one person thereby freeing up land for wildlife. The development of oil meant kerosene lighting which meant that whales were preserved and not hunted to extinction. The use of petroleum products to power plows and conveyances freed up 1/3 of agricultural acreage needed to feed the animals so that it could be available for wildlife. Technological advances have generally meant lowered impact on land not more.

IPAT’s pseudo-formula leaves out a resource that weighs heavily in earth’s favor and ours: the ingenuity of humans to solve problems is inexhaustible.

I suspect I won’t change anyone’s mind here. As the late Julian Simon said, “First, humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.”

Malthusian die-hards, cheer up. I don’t want to completely pee on your parade. Things may yet grow worse. As Bullwinkle J. Moose used to say, “This time for sure.”

Should there be a new way of living for the top one billion?

Andrew Revkin asks on his blog, Dot Earth:

“Would the world benefit from a set of millennium development goals for the ‘top billion’?”

He notes:

There’s a set of Millennium Development Goals for the poorest of the poor — a cohort of humanity sometimes described as the “ bottom billion.”

But, as yet, there’s no set of such goals for those who are already living lives that many analysts say are consuming resources at a pace well beyond the planet’s carrying capacity…

There are plenty who contend that unrestrained pursuit of prosperity is a prerequisite for a mix of environmental care and technological advancement that will continue to improve the state of the planet. But there’s self interest in an examination of how much is enough. Some analysts have found, for example, that diseases accompanying affluence exact a toll in lost years of human lives that is not far behind the losses from diseases of poverty. And then there’s the issue of what’s being pursued — the good life as defined in Vegas or by Plato.

My answer:

There’s a cute saying, “Live simply so that others can simply live.” It’s complete hokum. It’s not that simple because it’s not a zero-sum equation. (To paraphrase P. J. O’Rourke) Life is not a pizza, if I eat two pieces you don’t have to eat the Dominos’ box.

Wealth is not a pizza. If I eat too many slices, you don't have to eat the Dominos' box. (Creative Commons License photo credit: Adam Kuban)

According to Charles Kenny at Foreign Policy magazine, “[I]n 1990, roughly half the global population lived on less than $1 a day; by 2007, the proportion had shrunk to 28 percent — and it will be lower still by the close of 2010.” This is not despite the way the top billion live but because of the way the top one billion live. Without the consumption of goods and services by the T1B there would not be demand for the goods the bottom one billion produce.

To the point about disease, (again according to Charles Kenny) “The overwhelming global picture is of better health: From 2000 to 2008, child mortality dropped more than 17 percent, and the average person added another two years to his or her life expectancy, now just one shy of the biblical standard of three score and 10.”

“On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” – Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830

In other words, for the bottom one billion to continue to be better off, the top one billion need to continue living as they have.

P. J. again:

We have to kill ideas like the wealth gap. The world doesn’t need to be thinking about the wealth gap; the world needs to be thinking about wealth. Wealth is good. Everybody knows that about his own wealth. Wealth improves your life; it improves your family’s life. You invest in wise and worthwhile things, and you help your friends and neighbors. Your life would get better if you got rich, and the lives of all the people around you would get better if you got rich. Your wealth is good. So why isn’t everybody else’s wealth good, too? I don’t get it. Wealth is good when a lot of people have it, and wealth is good when just a few people have it. And that is because money is a tool, nothing more. I mean, you can’t eat money, you can’t sleep with it, you can’t wear it as underwear very comfortably. And wealth, accumulation of money, is a bunch of tools. Now when one person, a carpenter for instance, has a bunch of tools, we don’t say to him, “You have too many tools. You should give some of your saws and drills and chisels to the guy who is cooking the omelets.” We don’t try to close the tool gap. – P. J. O’Rourke

Your thoughts, am I off base?

Gapminder

If you’ve not discovered Gapminder, try it. It’s amazing. It shows demographic trends. Graphically.


Click here and see how life expectancy at birth and number of children born per woman changes.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Here, Hans Rosling explains his reasons for developing Gapminder and how it helps to debunk myths about the developed and developing world. From TED Talks 2006.

Book Review: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Let me recommend a startling book to you, because whether you read a book a week or you haven’t picked one up since you discovered the wonders of the internet, this one deserves your attention. The book is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (438 pages) written by Matt Ridley and published by HarperCollins ($26.99). Ridley, a Brit, used to write for the Economist magazine and knows how to make abstract concepts accessible.

In this book Ridley challenges the precepts of most environmentalists. He argues that the less independent and less self-sufficient we become and the more we rely on others (people, companies, nations) for our needs, the better off we (humans, plants, animals, land, ecosystems) all are, and will be, forever. He says we are living better, living longer, and the planet is healthier because of our interdependence.

Arguing that life is improving, for us and earth’s biomes, is a tough sell. I know this from experience. Last April, I wrote a post (Happy 40th Anniversary Earth Day) about what has happened in the forty years since the first Earth Day; how we now have less pollution, more food, and fewer people in abject poverty. The post has a poll about whether the reader was now more optimistic, more pessimistic, or ambivalent about the future. Overwhelmingly, people were (and apparently are) pessimistic about the future of the earth. Mind you, this is a tiny sample and completely non-scientific, still I suspect it is pretty close to representative of the population. In fact, a 2010 CBS News poll reveals 57% of Americans believe the world’s environment will deteriorate further in a generation.

The reason circumstances have improved for us and our world is that we’ve moved from being hunter-gatherers needing lots of land, to being specialists needing much less land. And the big reason for this specialization was the invention of exchanging one thing for a different thing. No other animal on earth trades one thing for something else with an unrelated animal. Trade is quite different from reciprocity, which is “you scratch my back, then I’ll scratch your back.” Trade involves exchanging things that are different at the same time. And trade has allowed all who do it to specialize and be better off. You can now trade things you know how to make for things that you don’t know how to make or cannot make.

Trading meant that we no longer had to be good at a lot of skills; we only needed to do one thing. Of course, by doing only one thing we need to rely on others to do those other things. Ridley argues that self sufficiency is poverty and that interdependence is a good thing. “In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is…suppose your local wheat farmer tells you that last year’s rains means he will have to cut his flour delivery in half. You will have to go hungry.” Instead, you benefit from a global marketplace, “in which somebody somewhere has something to sell you so there are rarely shortages, only modest price fluctuations.”

Because he is a libertarian, Ridley is predisposed to look favorably on commerce. He believes in small government and free markets of goods and services with few rules. Critics pounce on this and point out when he was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, his bank’s policies of high-risk lending and high risk borrowing contributed to the economic bubble that caused the major recession that much of the world is still dealing with. It’s a fair point: How can he be a rational optimist if he participated in, what in hindsight was, irrational exuberance?

I found Ridley’s ideas and arguments compelling. Trade and commerce make everyone richer, as long as someone is willing to pay for a service there is no such thing as unproductive work, and that in a generation we will be richer still and the earth in better shape. “The rational optimist invites you to stand back and look at your species differently,” writes Ridley in his book, “to see the grand enterprise of humanity that has progressed–with frequent setbacks–for 100,000 years. And then, when you have seen that, consider whether the enterprise is finished or if, as the optimist claims, it still has centuries and millennia to run.”

I dare you to be rationally optimistic.

Postcards from 1938-1939

In 1938, Walter C. Lowdermilk, Vice-Director of the Soil Conservation Service, was dispatched by then Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, on a world tour to learn of soil conservation successes and failures. Lowdermilk called the enterprise, “agricultural archaeology.” Lowdermilk packed the family Buick with provisions and his wife, son and daughter, niece, and his own Passepartout.

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Walter C. Lowdermilk taking movie of a market scene in North Africa, possibly Tunisia.
103-33 Holland
Farmer in pre-WW II Holland unloading what look to be cantaloupes.
128-15 Iraq
Wife and niece smile for the camera. The Lowdermilks brought rain to some normally parched areas. This is in Iraq.
127-23 Iraq
WC Lowdermilk with a shepherd in Iraq.