The End of the Rainbow

Brad Delong sees a promising future before us:

The pot of gold could soon be accessible to all, by J. Bradford DeLong, Project-Syndicate: For quite a while now -- certainly since the terrorist attacks on the US on Sept. 11, 2001, and before as we watched the slaughter in Kosovo, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Rwanda and Congo on our televisions -- the news has been dominated by war and rumors of war, by violent death and threats of violent death. Everyone, everywhere is keenly aware of the power of our weapons. ... [W]e have used our technology to greatly amplify the dark parts of our nature as a violent -- and not even a properly predatory -- species.

I certainly do not want to downplay or dismiss this side of humanity's history and our current events. ... But that is not the whole story. Indeed, the human abattoirs of the 20th century -- and even the slaughterhouses that various humans are preparing now -- may not appear from the perspective of the future to be the most important part of our experience and condition, and of what our descendants will regard as their history.

For them, the most important features of what our experience may instead be very different. The experiences could include what UN demographers foresee as the end of the population explosion: the halting of the growth of the human population at 10 billion or so around the middle of this century.

They could include the coming of a truly humane world as the numbers of those engaged in subsistence agriculture -- or those whose wages are kept at subsistence levels by labor market pressure from those who have migrated from the countryside into teeming cities -- fall to a small fraction of the human population.

For most of the 20th century, large chunks of the world remained desperately poor for one or more of four related reasons: one, criminal misgovernment; two, lack of the machines to do anything useful and productive in the world economy besides subsistence agriculture and unskilled service work; three, lack of the public education system needed to give people the literacy and the skills to operate machines; and four, barriers (legal and physical) that kept people where demand was low from selling the products of their work where demand was high.

But over the course of the late 20th century, these four causes of desperate poverty have largely fallen away. Governments as bad as Kim Jong-il's in North Korea are now extremely rare. Nearly all countries in the world are at most one generation away from near-universal literacy. The fast pace of technological progress has created a cornucopia of invention and innovation that is open to every place that can send someone away to get a master's degree in engineering.

Most important, the barriers to making goods and services in Mauritius, Mozambique, or Mauritania and selling them in New York or Berlin, Santiago or Tokyo are dropping swiftly. ... The use of information technology to manage transportation and distribution channels is likely to have a similarly profound effect. Moreover, the advent of the Internet and the fiber-optic cable will do as much to make service-sector work internationally tradable as the coming of the iron-hulled steamship a century and a half ago did to make bulk agricultural products and manufactures internationally tradable.

It will take at least a generation for these changes to make themselves felt in most corners of the world. But inside the industrial core of the world's rich countries there is already concern about these looming revolutions ... as citizens in rich countries fear that as the remaining barriers to international trade fall, industrial-core income distributions, social orders, and politics will be shaken to their foundations.

For the world as a whole, however, the next two generations are ones that will bring an extraordinary opportunity for economic growth and world prosperity. Perhaps at the end of history there is a pot of gold, after all.

If population does converge to a steady state of around 10 billion by the middle of the century, something unimaginable to me just a few decades ago and something I still have doubts about, then there is certainly room to be optimistic that technology and world economic growth can bring more prosperous conditions to the vast majority of people.

Comments

[Bruce Wilder]

I guess I would like to see the Malthusian arithmetic on 10 billion people * $20,000 per capita, with corollary calculations on global warming and general bioload/pollution, before I got too warm and fuzzy about an equilibrium population of 10 billion people.

My gut estimate would be that the earth can comfortably support, maybe, 1-2 billion people, in the style to which we would all like to become accustomed. It is already clear that the earth cannot sustain the 6 billion we've got, even with a large proportion in abject poverty. So, it looks like we are overshooting the mark (population * standard of living) by almost an order of magnitude. Oops.

It does not take much imagination to see that economic growth with even 10 billion people is going to exhaust the earth's resources pretty quickly. A population crash -- either in the human population and/or the populations of most other species in the biosphere -- is no longer a remote possibility; it has to be regarded as a probability.

[dryfly]

If population does converge to a steady state of around 10 billion by the middle of the century, something unimaginable to me just a few decades ago and something I still have trouble accepting, then there is certainly room to be optimistic that technology and world economic growth can bring more prosperous conditions to the vast majority of people worldwide.

Mark - I'm as big a fan of technology as anyone... studied engineering & still work with the stuff.

But I also studied a lot of bio-chem & micro, almost double majored. You ought to go to lunch with a fellow prof from your university's microbiology department, somebody who understands epidemiology & infectious disease - there has to be somebody there like that at your school, there were more than a few where I studied (big state u in the Midwest w/ med school on site, I worked as a UGRA at the med school).

Find a guy like that and chat with him. There is NO WAY the planet supports 10 billion people for long... a couple generations at the tops. Infectious microbes will look at '10 billion people' worth of potential hospitable environment like it was that much raw hamburger sitting uncovered on the counter.

And there is no way medicine can stop them - not forever. Its like the terrorists, the bugs only have to get lucky once & if you believe in evolution like I do you know they are working at it 24x7.

We are talking 1919 Spanish Flu like epidemic but in a much bigger way, more 'fuel' & faster spread. Its just a matter of time. 14th century black plague like mortality percentages, worldwide, but worse because so much of the world is dependent on technological systems to keep it all functioning... even in the developing world as people leave farming communities to migrate to these mega-cities to get 'wealthy'.

Won't kill everyone but will sure prune that 10 billion back a lot.

Go to lunch with the guy & review Malthus. There is a damned good blog entry there. Call Brad, invite him too.

::::

BTW - I once told a friend that after I took 'microbiology' the whole world started to look like one giant petrie dish and that the bugs look at us like six billion skin covered bags full of nutrient broth.

[reason]

Peak oil, global warming, fishery depletion, salination, water shortages .... lots of problems in the pipeline. Lets not open the Chardonay in California yet.

[Jim Harrison]

Peak oil, peak natural gas, peak food, even peak water, aren't necessarily the intractable limits. The most serious problem may be peak science. What politicians and economists often seem to assume is that the nature of things offers a goody basket of technological possibilities that can deal with any challenge.

I'm not predicting disaster. I'm just pointing out that the optimistic presumption is just as unfounded as the pessimistic.

[FredW]

Big sections of the globe do not seem to be making any progress toward Brad's goals - think Africa. In the aggregate, their infrastructure crumbles and so do their political institutions. Is South America progressing? Visit Lima or Sao Paulo - and then double the population - an explosion seems more likely than prosperity as the last arable land is denuded and gas and oil run dry.

Even in the US, with salaries stagnant for such a long time, our progress has been stunted. As pointed out above, we are building an environmental and ecomomic debt that will be very difficult to pay off.

Like Brad, I live in the Bay area and life seems rosy if you live in the hills overlooking the Bay. Elsewhere, I simply don't see the "extraordinary opportunity for economic growth and world prosperity."

[anon/portly]

For an alternative view on "The End of the Rainbow:"

"I feel for you, you little horror
Safe at your mother’s breast
No lucky break for you around the corner
‘Cos your father is a bully
And he thinks that you’re a pest
And your sister, she’s no better than a whore

Life seems so rosy in the cradle
but I’ll be a friend, I’ll tell you what’s in store
There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow
There’s nothing to grow up for anymore

Tycoons and barrow boys will rob you
And throw you on the side
And all because they love themselves sincerely
And the man holds a bread-knife
Up to your throat, is four feet wide
And he’s anxious just to show you what it’s for"

Etc.

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/song_o_matic.asp?id=52

[ghostacres]

We depend on nature and we only take. As a biologist, I find our glowing reports of the future a facade. We are at the apex of our growth. It always looks good from the mountain top. We are shredding the biological systems that support life on this planet and as the net user of those systems-- something's gotta give. The biological
systems are crashing around us and I believe global warming will give it that final shove. You see the flaws in our twisted economic system and see other people deny the truth. As a biologist, I see denial all around me. A good book is "The Ecology of Commerce" by Paul Hawken. I believe we've overstepped our ecological bounds and the men who say that we are on the edge of a new future are right--- fast and furiously downhill.

[JRossi]

Funny that DeLong's column is in a Taiwan newspaper. Good economy there, environmental cesspool. A great place to live if you stay indoors. Externalities Prof. DeLong, externalities.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/books/review/Scully.t.html

September 10, 2006

God Is Green
By MATTHEW SCULLY

In the academic habitat of evolutionary scientists, religious sympathies are weeded out over time, and the fittest survive to pass along their traits through haughty books and lectures examining the "delusion" and purely biological origins of faith. So when an eminent evolutionary biologist breaks from the pack to address religious folk in warm and respectful terms, this is what's known in the field as "punctuated" change — a sudden and, in this case, pleasant variation.

There is good reason for the friendlier tone, explains Edward O. Wilson in this engaging and gracious book. A renowned entomologist and Harvard professor emeritus, Wilson has warned for years, in books like "The Future of Life" (2002), of global warming, mass extinction and other troubles of humanity's own making. But these works were addressed largely to fellow environmentalists, and that approach will get you only so far.

More out of habit than considered judgment, Wilson believes, many religious people and especially conservative Christians tend to brush off environmental causes as liberal alarmism, vaguely subversive, and in any case no concern of theirs. Wilson's book is a polite but firm challenge to this mind-set, seeking to ally religion and science — "the two most powerful forces in the world today" — in an ethic of "honorable" self-restraint toward the natural world.

In learned and congenial prose (I understand now how a book called "The Ants" could win a Pulitzer Prize), Wilson casts his appeal as a letter to an imaginary Baptist minister from the South. As a boy in Alabama, Wilson recalls, he too "answered the altar call," and though today a "secular humanist" he proposes to the pastor that as gentlemen and Southerners they lay aside principled disagreements about evolution and intelligent design. We do not need to answer or agree upon every mystery of the universe to confront problems that are, by any account, serious and urgent. Some will see in the natural world a divine creation, and the Lord of Life who makes nothing in vain. Enough for others "living Nature," every plant or animal a "masterpiece of biology," as Wilson writes. "Does this difference in worldview separate us in all things?" he asks. "It does not. ... Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share."

Looking around the real world, we find "the rest of life" vanishing. Half of all species — from the glorious tigers and elephants to the lowlier "little things that run the world" — could be gone forever by the century's end, leaving only the genetic codes that wildlife biologists have stored away. No lions left to lie down with the lamb.

About "5 percent of the Earth's land surface is burned every year" to make way for cattle and crops, helping to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases "sufficient to destabilize the climates of the entire planet." ...