The Depopulation Bomb?

Should we be worried about depopulation?:

The coming population bust, by Jeff Jacoby, First of two columns, Boston Globe: Thomas Malthus has been dead for 170 years, but the Malthusian fallacy - the dread conviction that the growth of human population leads to hunger, shortages, and a ravaged environment - is unfortunately alive and well:

• America's congested highways are caused by "population growth wildly out of control," the group Californians for Population Stabilization laments in a new ad. So are "schools and emergency rooms . . . bursting at the seams." And with every additional American, immigrant or native-born, "comes further degradation of America's natural treasures."
• In a new documentary, Britain's Prince Philip blames the rising price of food on overpopulation. "Everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food," the queen's husband declares, "but it's really that demand is too great - too many people."
  ...

Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before. ...

True, fewer human beings would mean fewer mouths to feed. It would also mean fewer entrepreneurs, fewer pioneers, fewer problem-solvers. Which is why it is not an increase but the coming decrease in human population that should engender foreboding. For as Phillip Longman, a scholar of demographics and economics at the New America Foundation, observes: "Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation."

And depopulation, like it or not, is just around the corner. ...

Human fertility has been dropping for years and is now below replacement levels - the minimum required to prevent depopulation - in scores of countries, including China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, and all of Europe. The world's population is still rising, largely because of longer life spans... But with far fewer children being born today, there will be far fewer adults bearing children tomorrow. In some countries, the collapse has already begun. Russia, for example, is now losing 700,000 people a year. ...

By mid-century, the UN estimates, there will be 248 million fewer children than there are now. To a culture that has been endlessly hectored about the dangers of overpopulation, that might sound like welcome news. It isn't. No society gains when it loses its most precious resource, and no resource is more valuable than the human mind. The coming demographic winter will chill us all.

Will it? I don't know world demographic history all that well, but in the cases where depopulation is correlated with falling prosperity, what caused the population declines? War, disease, famine, something like that? Were population declines the result of falling prosperity, or were population declines the cause of declining prosperity? In the present case, the (anticipated) population decline appears to be an individual or societal choice, it is not being driven by some other factor such as those listed above. For that reason, the correlation between prosperity and population could be quite different than other cases in the historical record.

Update: Andrew Leonard has more on population declines and the standard of living:

...I'm ... interested in the assertion that "Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation."

Is that really true? I am reminded of a startling section from Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke's "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium," concerning the consequences of the Black Death for the European economy.

Drastic depopulation in Western Europe appears to have led to a dramatic improvement in the living standards of the surviving working class. Total production, is is true, declined overall, but there was a significant rise in "per capita real income and wealth, since land and physical capital remain unchanged and the livestock population was apparently unaffected by the plague."

With less labor available, surviving workers were able to command a premium.

... The data suggest a sharp rise in English real wages from the middle of the fourteenth century. Real wages continued rising for about a century, so that by the middle of the fifteenth century laborers were earning more than twice as much in real terms as they had been doing on the eve of the Black Death...

I will concede that there is some cognitive dissonance to be mined in the concept of the Black Death having an upside. It's not exactly a strategy one would recommend to labor organizers, for example. But the fundamental premise is provocative: a world with fewer people competing against each other could mean a better life for the workers who do end up getting born.

Comments

[Bruce Wilder]

As far as I can tell, the 9 billion humans in the population at mid-century will be about 8 billion too many. Depopulation will happen one way or another -- maybe voluntarily, but if we are to accept history's precedents, the smart money would be on war, pestilence, and famine.

What Jacoby refers to as fallacy and prejudice, I would call sensible realism. I am not worried about having fewer writers of sitcoms or fewer light-fingered bankers to clutter humanity's hallways. I am worried about whether the ocean's prime ecologies can survive, whether the rainforests can survive.

I am not really worried about whether we can grow enough food -- I think it obvious that we can; what really worries me is whether we can dispose of the waste from an industrial economy encompassing more than a couple of billion people, without poisoning and destroying every last wild place, every last clean place, every last place, period.

[Gegner]

There exists a goodly degree of 'hysteria' in both directions...depending on POV.

In one direction we have those whose 'prominence' in this world depends on the continued dominance of fossil fuels.

What better way to 'stretch out' supply than to 'eliminate' demand? Worse, if the ultimate goal of mapping the human genome is to find a cure for the most dread disease of all (death) then we would have a severe 'surplus population' problem in the eyes of the newly immortal.

While on the other hand there are those who fret that our system of 'entitlements' will collapse if the number of payers sinks below critical mass.

Is the glass half empty or half full? It's all in how you look at it.

In the face of 'energy scarcity', Malthus may well be proven correct.

Naturally, is energy really becoming scarce? I don't think so. We will definitely run out of oil ('relatively' soon) but the sun has a good long time before it goes nova...which leaves us to ponder why alternative energy isn't being aggressively pursued?

And the answer to that question may well lie within the most abundant products produced to date by genetic research...longevity products.

[kio]

Quantitatively, the link between real GDP and popualtion is as follows:

GDP growth rate and population
(This paper is available from the Working Paper Series of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ):
http://ideas.repec.org/p/inq/inqwps/ecineq2006-42.html )

Real GDP growth rate in developed countries is a sum of two terms. First term is the reciprocal value of the duration of the period of mean income growth with work experience, Tcr. Current value of Tcr in the USA is ~40 years.
Second term is inherently related to population and defined by the relative change in the number of people with a specific age (9 years in the USA), (1/2)*dN9(t)/N9(t), where N9(t) is the number of 9-year-olds at time t.
The Tcr grows as the square root of real GDP per capita. Hence, the evolution of real GDP is defined by only one parameter - the number of people of the specific age. Predictions for the USA, the UK, and France are presented and discussed.
A similar relationship is derived for real GDP per capita. Annual increment of GDP per capita is also a combination of economic trend term and the same specific age population term. The economic trend term during last 55 years is equal to $400 (2002 US dollars) divided by the attained level of real GDP per capita. Thus, the economic trend term has an asymptotic value of zero. Inversion of the measured GDP values is used to recover the corresponding change of the specific age population between 1955 and 2003. The population recovery method based on GDP potentially is of a higher accuracy than routine censuses.

A good example of depopulation influence on real economic growth is Japan:

The Japanese economy
http://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/2737.html
The Japanese economic behavior is modeled. GDP evolution is represented as a sum two components: economic tend and fluctuations. The trend is an inverse function of GDP per capita with a constant numerator. The growth rate fluctuations are numerically equal to two thirds of the relative change in the number of eighteen-year-olds. Inflation is represented by a linear function of labor force change rate. The models provide an accurate description for the poor economic performance and deflation separately. Using the models, GDP per capita is predicted for the next ten years and recommendations are given to overcome deflation.

[reason]

The answer to this question could perhaps be found by looking at islands. Has somebody done this research?

This
No society gains when it loses its most precious resource, and no resource is more valuable than the human mind.
is just silly. There are lots of minds out there I would love to lose. We don't have 9 billion Einsteins.

[reason]

kio...
Why do you think GNP is an appropriate measure?

[reason]

And I thought this
Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation.
was wrong. Didn't average prosperity rise substantially in the period following the great plague. Or in Europe following the great migration to America, and the second world war.

[kio]

reason,

This is just a quantitative link between two measured variables: population and the growth rate of real GDP. Not more, not less.
The US is an example of increasing population and Japan is a counter-example.

If you would like to use or introduce any other measure of "economic prosperity", I have nothing against it.

[reason]

Of course the answer to his diatribe is reductio ad absurdum. Eventually the weight of human beings would exceed the weight of the biosphere - which cannot be. There is clearly an upper limit to his fantasy - the question is how high can it be? I wonder if this guy really knows just how big a number 9 billion is.

[OhNoNotAgain]

It would seem to me that it's a lot easier to get people to start having more sex than it is to get people to stop having as much sex. That's the type of problem that countries would love to have, and the fix doesn't cost a cent.

[ndd]

Every now and then our gracious host puts out some raw red meat for the ravenous chorus to devour.... (pardon the pun)

The world's fisheries are in a state of collapse.

200 yeats ago lobster was so abundant, it was junk food (servants would demand as a condition of employment that it be served no more than twice a week). When the European colonists arrived, the Chesapeake bay was full of mollusks and fish. No more. These are just two examples.

I wonder if there were articles like this on the local stone tablet on Easter Island?

[ken melvin]

The guy is nuts.

[kharris]

reason,

Your point about the Black Death also helps clear up some other issues. "Prosperity" may be defined as simple GDP growth, but Malthus knew better. Prosperity, as it matters to individuals, should be measured on a per capita basis. If you like GDP, then GDP per capita. Only the Church notion that we should add up the utility of everyone feasting at God's table justifies looking at total GDP.

The counter-claim against limits-to-growth arguments has long involved pointing to the simultaneous growth of population and prosperity. What is conveniently ignored is the passage of time. Yes, more brains has meant more techological development, but technological development is, at least since the early Middle Ages, cumulative. The passage of time is a very big part of the growth in our technological base. The claim that a billion more people is what really matters to development, to the extent it ignores the importance of accumulation of knowledge over time, is silly. We are better off now not simply because there are more people now thinking things up, but because people thought things up in the past. We need to consider whether, at our present level of technology and resource use, feeding more human brains into the process is going to improve human welfare faster than feeding human bellies will reduce welfare. There is no reason to think that inputs to human welfare are all linear in their interactions over time.

The same pro-population crowd likes to point out that the poor do less environmental damage than the rich, and that may be true, depending on how you measure. That, however, needs to be seen in context, as well. If the same pro-population people also argue for progress among the poor, they make nonsense of their own position. The poor aborb fewer resources than the rich only so long as they remain poor. Recent oil and food price gains are exhibit A for this point.

It is also important to distinguish between resource use and waste disposal when comparing the impact of the rich and poor on the environment. Rivers in rich countries are cleaner now than 30 years ago. The air in rich countries is cleaner now than 30 years ago. The same cannot be said of poor countries. So while the poor use fewer resources, whether the poor do less environmental damage depends on how one weights various environmental costs.

[kharris]

ken,

Don't forget the giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, apparently the result of US farming practices. Bad things run off fields, into the Mississippi and then into the Gulf.

[spencer]

Over the past decade of supposed stagnation Japanese per capita real gdp growth has been stronger then in the US.

[One Salient oversight]

Population decline - the sort brought about by long term drops in birth rates - does have a cost to society. These costs include increasing health care for aged and infirm people that will be borne by a shrinking labour market and tax base.

Unfortunately, those who see "depopulation" as a massive societal problem do not balance out these increased costs with the increased savings that a shrinking population will have. These include:

* Cheaper housing (demand for housing will drop while supply remains static)
* Lower infrastructure costs (there is less need to build new power lines, telecommunications, water/sewerage and roads/rail).
* Lower educational costs (less children = less schools)

Another issue is that a declining population has a negative impact upon GDP. This, again, fails to take into account the impact of rising GDP per capita - if GDP is contracting at a lower rate than population, then the average person is getting richer even though the economy is shrinking.

[btg]

what matters is GDP per capita...

I recommend "Beyond Growth" by Herman Daly to anyone who hasn't read it - we cannot have exponential population growth much longer because of the consequences.

[kio]

spencer,

The following table provided by the Conference Board - http://www.conference-board.org/economics/downloads/TED08I.xls
demonstrates that real GDP per capita in Japan has been growing at an (average) annual rate of 1% since 1997, i.e. the last decade. At the same time, real GDP per capita in the US has been growing at a rate of 1.9% during the same period. (GDP per capita in 1990 GK$).
I guess that you use a different source (then please provide a link) or just did not check your database well.

[Andrew]

kharris,

To build on your point of accumulated knowledge, I suspect that in this information age, we have something of an excess of knowledge. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn 30 years from now that the answers to all of our problems were solved before 2005, and have just been waiting on some shmoe's website for anyone to notice, or has been in a decade-long back and forth with publishers who aren't sure the research fits in with the image they are trying to project.
I am exaggerating, but only a little.

Gone are the days when the world's top minds could sit around and discuss virtually any topic with a fair amount of expertise. There is just way too much to know, and we don't have any efficient way to sort through it all.

[Economic layman]

Isn't the problem that producing highly educated children is much more expensive nowadays?

The cost of college education, homeownership and foremost the opportunity costs of highly educated parents. Some of them might decide not to raise children at all. In Germany there is a very high percentage (more then 25%)of childless women, but other countries are also well above 15%.
http://bp1.blogger.com/_ngczZkrw340/RnP9fZIXHLI/AAAAAAAAAMI/RioqItYK7Co/s1600-h/childless+women+in+six+eu+countries.jpg

Here are stats on the number of women who say they don't want any children. Germany leads again, but Austria, Belgium and Netherland are quite high.

http://bp1.blogger.com/_ngczZkrw340/Rkms7LCOxoI/AAAAAAAAAD4/5YmPKsMgSWc/s1600-h/women+who+don%27t+want+children.jpg

Isn't raising highly educated children in a knowledge economy more and more a positive externality?

If this is the case, couldn't we get a "dumbing down" trend? Given the high demand of educated workers, this would be an important market failure. A side effect would be rising inequality.

[hari]

Take the case of India (and China), in 1970s, the average family has about five kids. Today the scale has come down to more or less two kids/family.

China's one kid family continues (inspite of shortall from recent earthquake and deaths) although the central gov has relented and will now allow extra kid, as demanded by rural families.

In both cases, +2 Billion population, child nourishment and healthcare has markedly improved and infant mortality rate has come down also. Although urban/rural social indicators are moving in opposite directions - as wealth and education increases in urban population centres.

In a way, without sounding cynical, there is a sort of creative destruction taking place in emerging Asia which is reinforcing the concept of maximizing wealth and providing decent education to their children.

At some point in time, I suppose, Asian population will stabalize, as wealth generation takes off with good to better healthcare and education. In rural India, it is already happening and putting a lot of budget pressure on local govs to prioritize education at primary levels.

Therefore, I see optimistic signs for the future - not a zero sum game.

[kio]

The reason why the number of young (some specific age) people influences real economic growth could be very simple. They create new demand for credits, which covers approximately half of their life - education, homes, medical care, etc.
When the number of young people entering a given economy is constant over time, the change in new demand is effectively zero and the economy evolves at its potential rate.
A decreasing influx of young people leads to economic underperformance, like in Japan. An increasing number of 9-year-olds in the US was observed between 1985 and 2001 what corresponds to the years of a better performance. Since 2001, the number has been decreasing and will reach its minimum in 2010. So, the years were not good. After 2010, the US economy will be evolving at a somewhat increased rate. Although, potential rate is inversely proportional to the attained level of GDP per capita. So, in the future, the growth rate will be approaching zero level, but from positive side.

[reason]

Economic Layman + Hari...
The demographic transition is not dependent on growth in income, it is dependent on social welfare. Three policies are important
1. Compulsory education (especially for girls)
2. Public pensions
3. Public health (reducing infant mortality)
These things could be done (as was the case for instance in China) before economic growth takes off. Once birth rates fall, capital accumulation can increase (see China again).

There are also policies that have worked to increase birth rates in richer countries (as is much discussed in Germany). One is public child care, including all day schools. Another is parental leave policies. Being a father of children in Germany is an eye opener on how it hard it is for mothers. They often say here Germany is a child unfriendly country. It isn't - it is a mother unfriendly country.

[paine]

kio

you put to much faith in your metrics
the precision is a false dazzle
like most commercial forecasters
one here must claim more then is justified
to market the system

my guess --a safe one --
facts down the road in either direction backwards or forwards would and/or will
prove this model
at best temporarily coincidental
with societies "laws of motion"

show how to ground the model
in plausible behavioral assumptions

[paine]

modern society
has yet to reach the limit
of per capita
human capital
not only is it
far from any upper limit
it's not even at its upper margin
at the point of reduced incremental return

in aggregate
the more years of building up "personal " hu cap
the higher the rate of return

[Walker]

I would like to know what is a fallacy about Malthus. I do not think that word means what he thinks it does.

All of these arguments fail in the face of finite resource constraints. Yes, we solved one resource constraint (agriculture advances addressed Malthus's concerns). But we replaced them with another limited resource: fertilizer and, ultimately, oil. Optimism that we will find another resource to replace these is not an argument. Who has the fallacy now?

An exponential and a logistic curve look the same in the beginning of their ascent. But once the resources deplete, they look very different.

[paine]

it is obvious why a russian scholar
might want to see the dynamics of raw population by cohort
not only as the key to social destiny
but endogenously given
unless countered by interventionary policy

then again its ultra encouraging
to see any post soviet scholar
chiming off 'round here
who is not ...
or at least not
by implication
worshipping the optimality of
some spontaneous "ground level" social action
as the best of all possible ...

[ken melvin]

When we have more people than we can feed, cloth, provide security for, protect the rights of, provide health care for, ... we need more? Duh.

[kio]

I am not the paine
I am simple and plain
Metrics is my bread
Physics makes my head

Metrics validates
Downroad and dates
Models only right
When precision high

Standard tools one needs
Not the wording tricks

[paine]

economic layoff
raises an ugly issue

in "advanced" societies
the under educated out repro
the hyper educated nowadays

notions of a degarding average iq gene pool

very nasty indeed

clan galton attendez vous

[paine]

precise claims are the problem not precise methods

[jm]

Decades ago when I was young, I concluded that the reason China was so poor was that it was grossly overpopulated.

In the decades since, I've seen nothing to change my mind on that point.

Much of the technological advance that has held out some hope of a better life for the people in China and other overpopulated Asian nations has come from the US -- which was relatively underpopulated for obvious reasons -- and Europe -- which avoided severe overpopulation through cultural norms that discouraged early marriage and child-bearing.

The green revolution depends on availability of fertilizers, whose future availability will be constrained in some cases by the energy intensity of their production, in others by the fact that they are, in essence, mined as minerals from deposits of limited size.

says...

"Physics makes my head"

bravo.....but social actors
are not monads not mind atoms

btw i like your use of the word credit
in your implicit job cycle model
the hu cap building tends to be front loaded
and thus booms as the cohorts pasing
thru t that stage expand
it is indeed an investment sector
and does pull funds from our chronic over supply of credit

but we live in an open high ed economy
foreign student influx .....

[reason]

Paine...
Surely what kio's model is really saying is the GDP is an even worse measure of progress than we thought. It seems to say that demand drives the economy not production. Whoa there!

[reason]

But I wonder. Maybe the PARENTS of 9 year olds are at their most productive.

[roger]

The case made by Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms is, basically, that Malthus can be trumped by one resource of which there is no upper bound - knowledge. But Clark is not so sure that the Malthusian resource limit can be trumped forever.

In the case that Jacoby cites - California - one has to ask questions about the geographic particulars - there's no "model" that is going to smooth those away. It is forecast that the American West may be adding 50 million people in the next 25 to 50 years - many of them migrating to the region from elsewhere - while at the same time water resources are probably overused for the population now, and the West is likely headed into its 60 year drought cycle. At a certain point knowledge - say, the building of desalination plants for water - is going to hit a cost limit. If we combine the drought with effects of global climate change - the radical diminishment, for instance, in glacial ice that provides fresh water - we have a situation in which overpopulation leads to a pretty large diminishment of the quality of life.

While economists like to concentrate on knowledge, they don't really distinguish between its positive and negative outcomes from a Malthusian perspective. Knowledge can lead to grotesque acts of Malthusian stupidity. I'd say, for instance, that Las Vegas, which is a million person metro in a desert, centered around an entertainment industry that uses water to, for instance, recreate waterfall spectaculars for tourists, is an excellent example of Malthusian stupidity, which would never have come to pass without 'knowledge'. Its a good bet that the billionaires who depend on all that water waste will spread the disaster - they will seek hard, in the coming decades, to support themselves by privatizing, say, the water in Montana, allowing it to be shipped to Vegas in order to be fed into waterfalls to entertain guests coming from the Northeast, where water falls in abundance from the sky. This is surely negative growth, although it will be hailed by economists as a free market solution to a resource problem.

[kio]

reason,

As a thought experiment, I could imagine the situation when more time and resources are spent for the sake of physical and mental health and strength of population.
There could be a much faster (technical and social) progress for everybody, but it would breake current (economic) inequality status and an economics professor would have almost the same benefits as a housekeeper. Therefore, it will never happen in this inequality structure and you understanding of progress will never become reality.

Reality is GDP per capita as an unbiased measure of economic growth.

says...

"It seems to say that demand drives the economy not production"

but if there is chronic slack
and
boot strap pull effects
...ie I(y,r)not just I(r)

note
demo is destiny housing construction department

this is
demo is destiny hu cap construction department

now we got 9 for one model and 18 for another

9 is a pure hu cap play
where 18 has an entering job force cohort play
as wel as
an entering higher hu capping play

[Dr. Steven J. Balassi]

There will be fewer children born when countries, like Africa, reduce poverty rates. These countries now have about 5 children born for each woman. Most developed countries are around 2 children per women. The reason the fertility rates drop is that the children will have a much better chance to live longer. A mother won’t have to have five kids if she knows they have good odds to stay alive until adulthood. Children will become an expense instead of an investment (as they are now).

[cm]

kharris: "Rivers in rich countries are cleaner now than 30 years ago. The air in rich countries is cleaner now than 30 years ago."

That's in good part because of the offshoring of manufacturing, mining, etc. Plus of course improved environmental standards of whatever remained here.

After the fall of "communism", East Germany likewise has seen some spectacular successes in environmental cleanup. The largest input into it was regionwide plant closures, to the tune of 20% unemployment, in the affected regions probably far exceeding that at the time.

[Demographics is Destiny]

In modern times, rising populations generated additional GDP. A falling population raises the possibility of a falling GDP, if population falls faster than productivity rises.

[Patricia Shannon]

Greater knowledge and technology leads to greater unanticipated results. Eg., tiny amounts of sunscreen in water has recently been found to cause coral bleaching. (It is not the only chemical that does this). They have finally admitted that genetically modified crops may be implicated in honey bee colony collapse. Like duh, we grow crops that we have engineered to produce a natural pesticide, the obvious result is damage to beneficial insects. "Intelligence" is not wisdom.

[piglet]

"By mid-century, the UN estimates, there will be 248 million fewer children than there are now. To a culture that has been endlessly hectored about the dangers of overpopulation, that might sound like welcome news. It isn't. No society gains when it loses its most precious resource, and no resource is more valuable than the human mind. The coming demographic winter will chill us all."

This is a stupid statement that shows that the author doesn't understand demographics. If world population is finally to stabilize - I'm talking about stabilization, not "depopulation" - after centuries of rapid growth, then there *must* be a significant shift in the population pyramid, meaning a higher proportion of elderly people and a lower share of children and young families. This is unavoidable unless exponential population growth continues indefinitely, which the laws of physics won't allow. The imbalance in the population pyramid will in time be adjusted naturally and there's no reason to spread panic about it. There will be more elderly people to support but this is offset by fewer children needing support. Falling GDP is not a concern in itself; nothing prevents us to distribute wealth more equally so that most people will be better off. As to losing our "most precious resource" - what a joke given that even in the US, we are not ready to pay for decent schools to nurture those precious minds.

[Bawdyscot]

roger,

I was wondering when someone was going to bring up water. No one is going to want gold or dollars if they are dying of thirst.

[Economic layman]

"economic layoff
raises an ugly issue"

Yes, paine, but not in the way you are suggesting.

My question is: if -in "advanced" countries- producing highly educated children becomes more and more a positive externality, isn't there a collective responsiblity to compensate parents?

In the olden days when feminism was still very active, there was this idea to pay mothers for their work. Why do a job if it doesn't get paid, right?

Today parents have only the choice between raising children while working which means lots of stress or being married which means for one of them losing his/her independence.

Why not getting paid for raising children? Why can't working as a mother (or a father) be part of the normal job market? Why is division of labour not possible in this case?

An ugly issue?

[Callahan]

I'll be helping with the depopulation soon, as I'm an getting to be an old geezer.

[Cathexis]

Every Biology major can tell you about the "Carrying Capacity" of biological popualtions. Basically, EVERY biological population that is allowed to reproduce at will tends to increase (was it geometrically or exponentially? A lot, in any event, and at an ever-faster rate, in terms of original numbers) ... UNTIL it reaches the "carrying capacity" of its environment.

Then it experiences a population crash as there are insufficient resources to maintain numbers at or beyond that level.

What am I missing that this is considered "a fallacy?" I have a minor in Zoology and that was considered a basic premise.

[Cathexis]

So far, humans successfully raised the carrying Capacity of the environments several times (Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution, etc.).

Seesm to me, though, that we such Revolutions are not necessarily something we can "assume" will always happen.

[Gerard MacDonell]

Speaking of limited resources, the liberal side is about to face a competency test.

We pride ourselves on the being the rational ones, able to ditinguish the grays, not just identify the blacks and whites. So how will be deal with the Republicans' plan to allow more oil drilling on the continental shelf? How we respond will say much about us.

What we know is that there is an environmental cost to drilling. We may not know exactly what that cost is, but we know it exists. There is also an opportunity cost to not drilling. We don't know what that opportunity cost is, either, but we do know it has risen substantially.

So the socially optimal amount of oil drilling on the continental shelf has probably gone up. It may have even risen above the actual amount of drilling, in which case the Republicans may have a point. Are we strong enough to concede the point and get empirical about this. Or will we conform to the Republican caricature of us?

[Icarus]

The issue with population is deeply connected to class relations, across nations.

The population segments that are growing are the poor in the developing world. Perhaps it's a strategic move...

Shanty towns are growing, as they provide low wage labor for the growing economies of the globe.

[david]

Tell you what, Gerard. You get back to me with a decent system for measuring the environmental benefits and opportunity costs, and I'll buy in for getting empirical. Until then, all talk of hard-nosed empiricism will be understood as most likely a mask for helping out the people who've bought the politicians.

[Jim]

'Carrying capacity' is far higher than the number of individuals required to effectively maximize whatever it is the human enterprise is about, unless of course counting souls is what is important.

[Andrew]

So how will be deal with the Republicans' plan to allow more oil drilling on the continental shelf?

How about pointing out that getting fuel from shelf drilling 15 years from now is not solution to today's problems. By then we can substitute oil for more efficient/greener tech.

[Patricia Shannon]

Drilling more oil means adding to global warming, which means we will need more fuel for air-conditioning, and spend more dealing with natural disasters. Will we really be better off, even in the relative short run?

[deng Jintao]

At the end of the day it's going to be all about migration. While low fertility in many developed countries suggests that the depopulation process is already underway, the fact is that on a net basis the world's population continues to increase by a fairly healthy rate. Therefore developed countries that sustain their populations through immigration can (more or less) maintain their current economic arrangements. (The U.S., Canada and Australia are all looking good.) On the other hand, countries that don't let in lots of foreigners will have to make some hard choices. (Japan is cooked.)

As for the neo-Lamarckian "A Farewell to Alms," the less said the better, but if Hemingway were still around he'd take the next train to the coast and stomp that guy.

[JV]

Quantity of life does not equal quality of life. If humans occupy every corner of the earth and we have a wonderful sustainable lifestyle it will be a horrible world indeed. I recommend Blade Runner and what Rutger Hauer said as he died.

The earth is finite.

As far as oil drilling -- yes we need to drill as much as we can and mine our coal until we can develop other energy sourced. Those sources are about 50-75 years away. Think microprocessor. The first integrated circuits were late 50's. A million transistors on a chip was 30 years later and it was another 20 years from that time to get to what we have today. Sustainable energy infrastructure will take that long to just get started. We need the oil and coal until we can get there.

The more people that come in those 50 years the more stuff we have to build and the more oil we have to drill for. Resources are finite as is the surface of the earth.

[reason]

kio
Reality is GDP per capita as an unbiased measure of economic growth.
a. Why do you think it is unbiased? Do you have evidence that it is unbiased. (Think about movements from unmeasured to measured, from non-market to market. And also about costs associated with joining the paid workforce.) Think also about recent uncertainty about price deflators.
b. What do you mean by "economic" growth? Do you just mean "growth in the economy" in which case you may be correct, but I repeat again - is that what we are interested in? Aren't we really interested in improvements in human welfare, net of natural asset degradation?

[reason]

kio
However I digress, if you just show broad correlations with demographic movements and economic aggegates, that is hardly surprising. What really is interesting however from a policy point of view is those cases which which notably diverged from this broad correlation.

[reason]

Kio
also, the demographic movements are endogenous. Correlation is not causation. You need to control for other factors which might influence both.

[reason]

paine...
but if there is chronic slack
and
boot strap pull effects
...ie I(y,r)not just I(r)

If there is chronic slack, that is a revolution in economics. My model says people extrapolate and consume what they think they will be able to afford. If growth accelerates savings rise. If it slows down savings fall. Kio's model says they spend what they think their kids need. It is a significant difference.

[kio]

reason,

You are right that real GDP is not a directly measured variable, i.e. it is actualy the difference between nominal growth and GDP price deflator, which includes subjective valuation. On the other hand, GDP is a quantitative variable and one can apply standard quantitative tools to model it.
Therefore, the sense of the term "unbiased" in my interpretation is that one can measure GDP in some units and find a quantitative relationship to another measured variable - the number of 9-year-olds. This relationship demonstrates statistical properties, which are required for a relation to be an equlibrium and long-term one, considering the uncertainty of corresponding measurements. I (successfully) tested the relationship between real GDP per capita and the number of 9-year-olds for cointegration:
Kitov, Ivan & Kitov, Oleg & Dolinskaya, Svetlana, 2007. "Modelling real GDP per capita in the USA: cointegration test," MPRA Paper 2739, University Library of Munich, Germany. http://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/2739.html

In that sence, a "biased" variable would not allow quantitative modeling because it contains some components not described by actual relation between variables.

Effectively, this is the same situation that we have in physics. Any "fundamental" law is actuaaly a scatter plot with a finite uncertainty, as follows from numerous experiment. But one never knows what happens below the uncertainty level. Our current fundamental physical laws can (and I would say "must") fail at a higher level of measurement accuracy.

"... is that what we are interested in? "
As a physicist, I am interested in quantitative links between measured variables. I am trying to do what I can do. If you ask me what will be real GDP per capita in the US in ten years, I have an answer. If you want to know how happy will be US citizens, I have no answer.

says...

"If you ask me what will be real GDP per capita in the US in ten years, I have an answer"

predicting solar eclipse type tricks fail
with social systems

that u have "found" a relationship between
demo and econ
is to be expected

but to think your quantity measures add "precision"
well...

training in physical science
can be counter productive
if you don't grasp the difference
in your basic causal unit
a human mind

what ever useful math muscles you might acquire
studying particle actions
too often ends up arrogantly
flexing the wrong member
and taxing the wrong faculty

as a refuge for failed or aged physical scientists
economics is a clover patch
much good economics has come from engineers
and even physical scientists
but beware the fool hardy "clarifactions"
your precise mind
suddenly feeling like gulliver in lilliput
mistakes for a farther seeing deeper penetrating
more fruitful insight

says...

"If there is chronic slack,
that is a revolution in economics"

two words
effective demnd
the revolution of which you speak
occured in 1936

[kio]

... training in physical science
can be counter productive ...

The absence of training in hard sciences prohibits any quantitative discussion.
I can only present my economic models in very narrow terms related to variables involved in these models.

One can check Figure 2 in my post

http://inflationusa.blogspot.com/2008/05/modeling-labor-force-participation-in.html

for visual evaluation of the accuracy associated with the model linking GDP and the number of 9-year-olds. Despite the model has passed formal statistical tests including that for cointegration, one can decide is it a good model or not.

[reason]

paine...
I know it is you!
Keynes didn't say effective demand was chronically lacking! He said it was cyclically lacking. Not the same. You have to explain why prices (such as real interest rates and exchange rates) don't adjust in the medium term to balance supply and demand.
kio...
As I said you need to look at the exceptions to really understand your model.

[reason]

By the way kio I think you are right that demographic factors are important and are often overlooked. But we live in interesting times. Can your model explain China? The one child policy and all that?

[kio]

reason,

It sounds as a surprise but the accuracy of population estimates is very low. There is a reference in my papers to a research by the Census Bureau, which shows that the accuracy of 9-year-olds' estimates in the US is around 5%. Because of time derivative involved in the model an annual change of 5% in the number of 9-year-olds might be not significant. This is the unceratainty of the model.
Now imagine what is the acuracy for China. At the same time, according to their low real GDP per capita, potential growth is very high. So, population changes might be not so realtively large now and hardly distinguished.
Same potential rate was obvserved in developed countries about 100 years ago, as my another paper shows:
Real GDP per capita in developed countries

Population estimates (age pyramide) are very poor before the 1960s - in general they are represented by crude approximations. SO, I do not have actual quantitative justification for the following statement:
The Great Depression was the result of very low birth rate in the USA after 1919 and the low number of 9-year-olds in 1929-1933. The reason for that is WW1 and flu.

Also, main recessions in developed countires in recent history are induced by WWII and therefore differ between the Germany with satelites and the Coalition. These waves have been decaying over time and recessions become smoother and smoother.

[Patricia Shannon]

How much is leisure time worth? How value to affordable, time and money, plays, concerts, and sporting events?

[paine]

sorry use to tag me automatically

reason:

Keynes did indeed claim the future would bring
an effective demand that was chronically lacking
albeit in a conjectural mode
recall
his crude and erroneous notion
of secular propensity to save more
as national income rises

"hard "science as in difficult ....exact

or just typical positiviste
bull shit

in the states here
these cult notions
died with the eisenhower era

surely russians even hard science russians can catch up

an engineering approach to the social sciences
with healthy dollups of stat based oracularity
is as out today
even among "math on board" attack econ cons
as lyenko over in the old country
..well of course here's .... menzie chinnnnn

says...

"How much is leisure time worth?"

at the margin we're to believe
and hope
some where near
your pay for job week hour 40

ps they tlls us never
to compare total welfares
only marginal increments

totals are uncomputable
even using the hardest of hard science gimmicks

[paine]

"The Great Depression was the result of very low birth rate in the USA after 1919 and the low number of 9-year-olds in 1929-1933. The reason for that is WW1 and flu"

chaulk this one up to
give a guy enough rope and .....

magician becomes clown

[paine]

reason

my use of chronic slack
has one basic institutional source

a chronically stuffed
and thus booming job market
with its ever rising real wage bargains
is incompatible
with corporate long run well being

[John]

Kio: You need far more precise data to connect the economic situations at various times with the fractional change of 9yos. Japan's lackluster economic performance came from the crash of its massive real estate bubble near 1990. The great depression could not possibly have been caused by a shortage of 9yos around the time. The stock market crash, the heavy debt leverage that it exposed, the tight-money Fed policies -- all contributed to the Depression.

If one searches hard enough, one can find a variable that correlates to high precision, with anything. The strong correlation of smoking to lung cancer is validated by the following obvious fact: smoke enters the lungs when one smokes.

A possible correlation between the number of cars on I238 between 3:00 and 7:00 every day, with the number of new flu cases in Madagascar the following day, is obviously coincidence.

[John]

Paine:

> give a guy enough rope and .....
>
> magician becomes clown

I think that your response was better than mine. There are some things that are most obviously ridiculous. Unfortunately, I've been on the receiving end of ridicule for something that is valid -- in this case, the mockers show themselves to be fundamentally pathologically illiterate.

[kio]

I understand that this is an illegal move.
Below is a list of RePEc authors (~15000) by abstract vies and paper downloads per author over the past 12 months. My place is 32 and 296, respectively. I hardly need a good advice.

http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.adownloads.html
http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.aabsviews.html

Rank Author Score
1 Pablo Fernandez 41544
2 Christopher F Baum 37062.91
3 Nicholas Cox 36069.25
4 Robert J. Barro 27251.6
5 Enrique Yacuzzi 22483.55
6 M. Carmen Guisan 22068.08
7 Joseph E. Stiglitz 21662.28
8 Ben Jann 17885.16
9 Robert E. Lucas Jr. 17051.9
10 Thomas J. Sargent 16832.66
11 Peter C. B. Phillips 14834.25
12 Gerard Charreaux 14508.5
13 Ross Levine 14213.83
14 Jean Tirole 13981.41
15 J. Scott Armstrong 13740.75
16 Eugene F. Fama Sr. 13729.69
17 Robert C. Merton 13661.33
18 Barry Julian Eichengreen 13506.21
19 Andrei Shleifer 13504.85
20 Martin Ravallion 13169.08
21 James J. Heckman 13116.33
22 David E. Card 12768.3
23 Paul R. Krugman 12339.16
24 Martin S. Feldstein 12270.16
25 John Y. Campbell 12227.38
26 Sebastian Edwards 12020
27 Douglass C. North 11991.34
28 Edward C. Prescott 11989.58
29 Daron Acemoglu 11653.21
30 Stephen P. Jenkins 11645.98
31 Steven Levitt 11484.25
32 Ivan O. Kitov 11322.66
33 George Borjas 11166.26
34 John Henry Alexander Munro 11085
35 Frederic Mishkin 11040
36 Jeffrey Alexander Frankel 10777.91
37 Alan B. Krueger 10745.23
38 Alberto Alesina 10456.15
39 Ben S. Bernanke 10429
40 Peter W. Jones 10328
41 M Hashem Pesaran 10264.25
42 N. Gregory Mankiw 10197.66
43 David Malin Roodman 10197.66
44 Bruno S. Frey 10059.26
45 Amartya Sen 10058.08
46 Olivier Blanchard 10053.75
47 Robert F. Engle 10000.54
48 Edward Ludwig Glaeser 9992.36
49 James Poterba 9987.26
50 Richard B. Freeman 9864.95

[Patricia Shannon]

Man-made' Water Has Different Chemistry
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080619135123.htm

ScienceDaily (Jun. 19, 2008) — As population growth, food production and the regional effects of climate change place greater stress on the Earth’s natural water supply, “man-made” water – created by removing salt from seawater and brackish groundwater through reverse osmosis desalination – will become an increasingly important resource for millions of humans, especially those in arid regions such as the Middle East, the western United States, northern Africa and central Asia.
...
The study, published this month in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology, details for the first time the isotope geochemistry – or chemical fingerprints – of the elements boron, lithium, strontium, oxygen and hydrogen found in reverse osmosis-desalted seawater and brackish groundwater.
...
Identifying these unique geochemical and isotopic fingerprints gives scientists and water-quality managers a new array of tools for tracing the presence and distribution of man-made fresh water in a region’s soils, surface waters and ground waters, Vengosh says.

“We studied the chemistry of water produced in several of the largest desalination plants on earth and found that that composition of the desalted water is totally different from those of natural waters,” he explains. “As this water leaks into the environment through poor infrastructure or enters it directly through irrigation, it will be possible to use our new tracers to track the water back to its origin.

“It’s sort of like a detective who collects fingerprints at the scene of the crime and matches them to the guilty suspect,” he says.

Being able to trace water back to a desalinated source through its isotopic and geochemical fingerprints will allow local governments and water utilities to zero in on the problem of valuable water loss and correct it more quickly and efficiently.

Disturbing but typical. The difference between natural and artifically desalinated water is seen by the scientists as a handy way to trace the origins of water. What about possible effects on living beings, including humans? There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom. Perhaps it is an example of a difference in how men and women tend to think, with men narrowly focused on specific short-term goals, while women look at a broader scenario. Using the strengths of both kinds of thinking would benefit us more than just using one kind. Which I expect is why the Apaches had to get a proposal to go to war approved by the women of the tribe.

[reason]

Hey guys let off Kio. As the father of a 9 year old it is kind of cute to find that I'm what holds the economy together. But next year I'm expendable!

[Real Person from the Real World]

I've been waiting to comment, and tho I may have missed it, I heard this argument YEARS ago, from a left winger type I knew. Depopulation as a problem? Why, the answer is to bring in young workers to pay in to social security for benefits of the glut of retirees, according to the guy. Also, coincidentally, a nice argument for bringing in all those H1b visas for big business. Then there were the unintended consequences of trying to manage the social agenda..... bring in people to pay for retirees actually ended up losing good paying jobs for our own grads.... and now, right wing pols and corporate American want to get rid of social security! Solve one problem that wasn't really a problem and create another different problem, then scrap trying to fix the original problem which was not a problem in the first place. Games....

[Icarus]

Jeez Real Person, you're like Lou Dobbs complaining about mexicans.

Are H1's the bane of your existance? Really? Do you really think people who study a needed discipline, emmigrate, obey rules, and provide a valuble labor service are your enemies?

I think you need to re-group your thoughts, and start looking in the mirror as to why certain classes of americans just cant cut it anymore.

I, for one, am hopeful that this will only continue, and the violent settler society which feels entitled to a middle class way of life will one day be insignificant.

[Real Person from the Real World]

We have had h1b fired, and the employers refusing to pay us, even tho the visa guy's vendor wanted his money. No one really checks the references, that is why the whole IT department has to quiz the guy before hiring him. Even so, good talkers beat the system, sometimes. So, the US grads that went to school and studied hard, are not worth the same consideration as someone imported from a low wage country with possibly questionable credentials? The only problem in the US is the IT industry unwillingness to implement training and entry level programs. Icky, you are an ignoramous.

[Janet Baker]

We have to go to outer space. Check out "Please Send Catholics to Outer Space" on my site.

[Julio]

If the state of the economy is correlated with the number of 9-year-olds, I think I know my duty.

See you later.

[Julio]

paine,

"a chronically stuffed
and thus booming job market
with its ever rising real wage bargains
is incompatible
with corporate long run well being"

Is this a narrow definition of "corporate" and therefore its "well-being"?
The corporation-as-machine-and-servant can adjust quite well, no?
And "ever-rising", read literally and forever, OK, can't be done; but with a little slack in the definition, why not?