|
xssve -> RE: The myth of endless economic growth (3/26/2012 11:18:55 AM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: MrBukani
quote:
ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
quote:
Who says that population will increase forever?
The evidence shows that more developed countries slow down population growth.
Well, actually, Edwynn is right, Bukani. As third world countries develop, birth rates drop.
I never claimed that.
And who is to say they wont rise again in the future.
For example look at religious people in developed countries.
Religion is rising again.
And since a lot of them dont like birthcontrol there is many families with 5 or more kids again.
Kids are expensive, what if life becomes cheaper. And wealth rises.
Its all speculation.
Just like I show you there is more to growth in economics then the population and resource availability.
IMO the bickering just leads to tunnelvision.
There are exactly Three ways an economy can grow:
population growth: more people = more demand, more labor = more economic activity, and economic expansion is more or less axiomatic until a given population comes up against it's resource limit.
Resource availability: more resources, through territorial expansion/migration, and or efficiency - this leads to higher living standards, but can lead to a decline in the necessity to conserve and use those resources wisely (even when that resource availability is based on more efficient production/extraction), which can bite you in the ass eventually - see irrigation and subsequent salinization in the fertile crescent, Easter Island, even Spain, etc.
Economic efficiency: this is the value added paradigm, it applies to the previous Two modes of economic expansion, where innovation occurs on a largely ad hoc basis, but it does occur regularly in a manner similar to punctuated equilibrium: i.e., when a population comes up against it's resource limit, and cannot expand for whatever reason: geographic or technological limitations, competition with other populations, etc., innovation comes to the fore: Europe underwent centuries of cyclical starvation as fields were planted to support growing urban populations, then depleted due to overplanting, which led to mass starvation and Malthusian correction - this happened over and over again, population growth followed b a sudden drop off, then gradual re-expansion, probably what led to Malthus observations.
In this case, the complicating factor was social: the Catholic church, with it's deep superstition of both science and nature, attributed the soil depletion to evil spirits - farmers who paid attention to nature knew that planting the same field over and over again would eventually lead to soil exhaustion, and learned to rotate crops - a relatively simple tech, but the nevertheless. Problem is, as the fields of their neighbors around them failed, they found themselves accused of witchcraft, they would be burned, their fields divided between the Church and their accusers, who would proceed to overplant for a few years of spectacular gains, but exhaust the soil all over again and go back into inevitable decline. Bad money crowds out good, or in this case, bad superstition crowds out good science.
In fact a negative feedback loop formed, as malnourished children grew into brain damaged adults, even more superstitious or psychopathic - it's a very robust explanation for why rates of all mental illnesses are so much higher in European populations than any other, as many of these disorders in fact appear to be adaptations, and are heritable for an indeterminate number of generations after which they appear to reset, if the initiating stressor is resolved.
Malthus's problem was really behind his times rather than ahead of them, b that time, the decline of religious inspired persecution and superstition was waning greatly, farmers could rotate crops without fear of reprisal, and the spread of that that one basic tech discredited Malthus.
There is, however, an upper limit, which the planets human population has not yet reached - Basic Malthusian correction affect every organism on the planet - ever see the films of Australian agriculture overrun by sudden exponential increases in the rodent population? Pest control is another tech associated with sustainable and predictable agricultural expansion - when the mice had eaten all the grain, they died off just as quickly.
i.e., a more cogent re-statement of Malthusian economics might be: "a given population will expand to the extent of it resources, at which point it will either decline to sustainable levels, or expand it's niche".
A corollary to that might be: "when a population reaches it's resource limit, no further growth is possible, and the economics shift to zero sum".
Technology expands niches, opens new ones: crop rotation and pest control expand a virtual niche of agricultural production, allowing growth at the margins of resource limits, and postponing a zero-sum shift, and/or a Malthusian population correction (often amounts to the same thing) just as clothing and fire expanded climatological niches, and allowed humans to expand to every niche on the planet for the equator to the arctic circle, from the bottom of the ocean to the moon, although the latter Two mostly symbolically, so far.
One could say the same for energy, we've expanded our economic niche globally in ways far beyond what wind and coal allowed - we can transport people and cargo from New York to Bejing in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months, roads allow goods and services to be distributed to the smallest of non-local markets, thousands of miles away from major distribution points, allows us to build bigger factories, power universities, laboratories and machine shops, steel mills and supercolliders.
Oil is basically the difference between horse and buggy and the space age - you can power a train with coal, but I don't believe anyone has managed to power much more than a hot air balloon with it.
You might call it "economic Malthusianism" - leaving population corrections aside, given economic niches are made possible because of specific, and often finite, categories of resources, economic niches in this case, upon which we've become dependent for growth or progress by nearly any definition.
So, we are in a position where the Third factor in economic growth is come to the fore, while half the population seems pretty much stuck on the first Two.
On wonders how much of that is due to superstition, fear of change, or simple inability to adapt, or whether it's more a matter of deliberate leveraging of these social phenomena in order to protect margins and profit centers of those special interests capable, but unwilling to adapt.
That is your point of friction between planned and unplanned economies: in an unplanned economy (laisez faire), some significant statistical proportion of that economy will always follow the path or least resistance to the fattest margins, in pursuit or short term self interest even to the detriment of group fitness - and it is therefore rational to expect the group to regulate this sort of behavior in it's own self interest.
Oops! I said a dirty word - let the knee jerking commence, although to be fair, the argument that regulation itself can be abused in pursuit of short term interests to the detriment of group fitness is a cogent one, there is no reason to discount that probability
I hope to stimulate a discussion on the modes and means, the why's and wherefores, rather than the polar extremes of whether or not.
i.e., regulation is a necessity, it's not even debatable, traffic laws are "regulations" we require to avoid playing one big game of demolition derby, it's only a question of what regulations and why, with full and complete attention to the law of unintended consequences, and accepting as fact that for the first time in human history, we're about out of new environmental niches - colonizing the moon for example, raises significant adaptation issues, that would ultimately require radical biological modification in order to adapt to zero-G - the result would most likely not look much like a human - ditto, to a large extent, the sub-marine environment.
And finally, tacit acceptance of the probability of climate shift via extensive and relentless terraforming, which is also a relevant issue in spite of frequent asinine oversimplification - you may or may not accept it, but I have no wish to debate the issue, plenty of other threads to do that in, again, I want to hear why's and wherefores, not whether or not's.
This is my proposition, and the parameters, w/regard to the topic: call it "whining" if you like, but the alternative is let the chips fall where they may and the devil take the hindmost.
Been there, done that, called it "The Dark Ages".
|
|
|
|
