With all the gloom and doom being pushed today, the title of this book is one of certain optimism. WUWT reader may recognize the author, Indur M. Goklany, a frequent WUWT contributor. I highly recommend his book, both for the positive outlook and for the factual discourse. – Anthony
Many people believe that globalization and its key components have made matters worse for humanity and the environment. Indur M. Goklany exposes this as a complete myth and challenges people to consider how much worse the world would be without them. Goklany confronts foes of globalization and demonstrates that economic growth, technological change and free trade helped to power a cycle of progress that in the last two centuries enabled unprecedented improvements in every objective measurement of human well-being.
His analysis is accompanied by an extensive range of charts, historical data, and statistics. The Improving State of the World represents an important contribution to the environment versus development debate and collects in one volume for the first time the long-term trends in a broad array of the most significant indicators of human and environmental well-being, and their dependence on economic development and technological change.
While noting that the record is more complicated on the environmental front, the author shows how innovation, increased affluence and key institutions have combined to address environmental degradation. The author notes that the early stages of development can indeed cause environmental problems, but additional development creates greater wealth allowing societies to create and afford cleaner technologies.
Development becomes the solution rather than the problem. He maintains that restricting globalization would therefore hamper further progress in improving human and environmental well-being, and surmounting future environmental or natural resource limits to growth. **Key points from the book** * The rates at which hunger and malnutrition have been decreasing in India since 1950 and in China since 1961 are striking. By 2002 China’s food supply had gone up 80%, and India’s increased by 50%.
Overall, these types of increases in the food supply have reduced chronic undernourishment in developing countries from 37 to 17%, despite an overall 83% growth in their populations. * Economic freedom has increased in 102 of the 113 countries for which data is available for both 1990 and 2000. * Disability in the older population of such developed countries as the U.S., Canada, France, are in decline. In the U.S. for example, the disability rate dropped 1.3 % each year between 1982 and 1994 for persons aged 65 and over. * Between 1970 and the early 2000s, the global illiteracy rated dropped from 46 to 18 percent. * Much of the improvements in the United States for the air and water quality indicators preceded the enactment of stringent national environmental laws as the Clean Air Act of 1970, Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. * Between 1897-1902 and 1992-1994, the U.S. retail prices of flour, bacon and potatoes relative to per capita income, dropped by 92, 85, and 82 percent respectively. And, the real global price of food commodities has declined 75% since 1950.
From the Back Cover
“This optimistic view of the impact of economic growth and technological change on human welfare is an antidote to the prophecies of an imminent age of gloom and doom.”
-Robert W. Fogel, Nobel Laureate in Economics
“Provocative, illuminating, sharp, and fact filled. Do you think that economic growth is a problem for the environment? Goklany will make you think again. Whether or not you’re convinced by his arguments, you’ll learn a ton from them.”
-Cass R. Sunstein, University of Chicago, author of Laws of Fear
“Goklany does an excellent job of refuting the global pessimists by documenting the dramatic improvements experienced in recent times by humankind, not only in the developed world, but worldwide. Goklany addresses a vast array of issues from the improving state of humanity’s life expectancy to his examination of the promise and peril of bioengineered crops. The vast breadth of Goklany’s inquiry is impressive, as is his exhaustive documentation.”
– Roger A. Sedjo, Resources for the Future
“A remarkable compendium of information at odds with the present fashionable pessimism, Goklany’s The Improving State of the World, published by the Cato Institute, reveals that, contrary to popular belief, it is the poorest who are enjoying the most dramatic rise in living standards. Refuting a central premise of the modern green movement, it also demonstrates that as countries become richer, they also become cleaner, healthier and more environmentally conscious. the full review
“In a book to be published next month entitled The Improving State of the World, Indur Goklany, of the Cato Institute, argues that the world’s state is, well, improving. He produces figures to demonstrate that chronic undernourishment has gone down in the past 50 years, we are living longer, we are healthier, the basic necessities of life are cheaper, literacy has gone up and so has educational attainment, economic freedom has increased and a larger proportion of mankind than ever enjoys political freedom. the full article
“Goklany’s essential message in his book, The Improving State of the World, is that the world over, more people are already, or are fast becoming, more blessed than they’ve ever been by a considerable margin. article
“What Goklany concludes is that massive progress has been made in so many areas as a result of the positive impact of economic growth, technological progress and more liberal trade. It’s clear that never have more people had access to education, health care, food, clean water and an improving environment.”
-Michael Campbell, Vancouver Sun
Gary says:
September 29, 2010 at 6:04 am
The net result from globalization may be positive, but some aspects are clearly detrimental.
The problem is not globalization, but the way it was implemented. There is a hard lesson to learn from general systems theory.
Any large system should be recursively modular. It means it is divided into separate “boxes” with standard interfaces between them using standard protocols. The basic structure of each “box” is the same, that is, it is built up from “sub-boxes”, with interfaces and protocols between them again. Recursivity means this principle is applied successively at each level until the basic constituents become simple enough to be handled separately (let’s call them “atoms”).
Complex systems need control structures, otherwise they may assume absolutely undesirable states. But control has costs. It is easy to show that with a recursively modular structure the cost of control is proportional to N*log(N) if N is the number of “atoms”. Therefore costs to be payed by each “atom” are proportional to the logarithm of system size.
On the other hand if the system is not modular, control costs go up as the square of N (each potential connection should be controlled), so they are a linear function of system size for each “atom”. Now, the linear function is much bigger than the logarithm for even moderate values of N (10^20 >> 20).
A recursively modular structure does not hamper traffic, it just regulates it in a distributed way, whatever is meant by “traffic” (money transfer, commerce, transportation, travel, information flow, etc.).
A good working example of a global but recursively modular system is the Internet. If its structure were not recursively modular, routing tables would never fit into the memory of backbone routers and routing updates would take forever. This structure also makes distributed control possible with firewalls, filter lists, etc. which are maintained locally. In fact no centralized power structure is needed for proper operation, recommendations like RFCs are quite sufficient. This structure is also very robust, error propagation is damped, for the entire system to work properly it is always enough to solve local problems on each level.
When Bush, Sarkozy and Barroso met in Camp David on October 18, 2008 and president Bush happened to utter the magic words “Given that the world has never been more interconnected, it is essential that we work together because we’re in this crisis together” one immediately knew we were in deep trouble.
If a SysAdmin were told such a thing during a network crash, he would send the guy to hell, because his basic assumption is his job is to handle the problem locally in his own sphere of responsibility and if everyone does the same, the problem is solved. It does not mean he would not work together with a few people of his choice, but certainly not with everyone involved. As an example, the SQL Slammer crisis of January 25, 2003 was handled in this manner, successfully.
As soon as the system gets so interconnected this simple problem solving strategy ceases to work, all is lost. If everyone should work together, no work gets done at all, because negotiations alone take forever. In major software projects this is the point when a complete rewrite from scratch follows (or the company goes bankrupt).
Therefore the current crisis is not about globalization as such, but it is a demodularization crisis. During the last several decades ill-educated politicians and businessmen removed as many effective module boundaries, time-tested interfaces and protocols from the world system as they could (instead of improving modular structure, interface definitions and protocols) in the hope this way traffic would be more easy and vigorous. To some extent this is what’s happened, but with a plethora of uncontrollable side-effects. The cost of control keeps going up (just think of the bank bailout costs of 2008, payed by taxpayers’ money of course), but there are limits. As soon as cost of control approaches productivity of the system, there is no point anymore controlling it for the sake of control alone.
Unfortunately rebuilding a reasonably modular structure has not started yet, it even goes against some powerful ambitions seeking more centralized control, not less. The current demodularization crisis can not be solved until these basic issues are addressed properly. We are certainly not done with it, just waiting for the next round.
John Whitman,
J.M. Keynes is remembered for other things, but he was an optimist about the future because of his understanding of compound interest. He said:
It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.
He was correct regarding “far greater progress.” Even Keynes would not believe the progress that has occurred since he published his seminal work in 1936.
RE: Steve Wilde, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/29/the-improving-state-of-the-world/#comment-494603
Succinct and well written. Thanks Steve!
Thanks Bruckner8.
It’s surprising how similar are economics and climate.
Each describes a flow (money/energy) through a system (Earth/society) with multiple layers (atmosphere/social classes) each with a variable effect on the speed of flow and in the end the same principle applies that there is only a fixed amount of the available commodity (value of goods and services in the case of money, solar energy in the case of climate).
I would accept that my observations of, and thoughts about, climate and economics have been mutually reinforcing.
Stephen Wilde says:
September 29, 2010 at 11:35 am
A good moment for a reality check devaluation it is right after elections. This has been practiced many times in the past by governments all over the world.
Somebody must pay for the “party”. After laughing, crying comes….however that less nice part of it should be equally shared too.
Berényi Péter says:
September 29, 2010 at 12:17 pm
That is why nature invented frequency. Now, the problem is, that while in nature higher frequencies govern upon lower frequencies, giving them order either by resonance or by interference, in our post modern world, the lowest frequencies and thus of the biggest wavelengths pretend to control the higher frequency ones, in a total violation of cosmic law. In the middle ages they had a cure for it: The Stake. Of course, they won’t succeed but only after doing a mess of the system.
Berényi Péter says:
September 29, 2010 at 12:17 pm
It looks like, somewhere up above, the system administrator, will press the RESET button. 🙂
REPLY: Now that I finally have your attention, you’ve been posting some pretty vile things lately and your comments have been snipped because they are detrimental to this blog. Even though you are on the side of skeptics, please clean up your act. For now, all your posts go into moderation for extra attention. How you behave henceforth will determine if you get put back on regular status. – Anthony
Well done.
Reading one or two Dickens’ and then looking out of the window in London or any other town for that matter would have done the trick for most common sense persons but a more systematic fact based approach definitely helps the argument.
In the Netherlands we had Geert Mak to picture the darkness of the past in his “The century of my father” gin destillers widows getting the weeks pay if their husbands -all alcoholics- tripped and fell in the gin kettles and that was it. Babies died from rat bites, less than 100 years ago in the Netherlands. Salmons start swimming up western European rivers again.
Nothing nostalgic about poverty and shortage nor social inequity.
Maybe mankind has not become much happier in the last century but certainly a lot less miserable.
I have 2 problems with globalization:
1.) Too many products/commodities are shipped as far abroad as possible. The Global Traders are looking for the highest price they can get, and 8,000 miles away is perfect. This results in inefficiency due to the lack of localization. It is the throughput that has to be measured.
2.) The US has been at the wrong end of the stick, mainly due to overeager politicians seeking to buy friendship with countries that do not allow our products to compete. What has been passed off as Free Trade is, in reality, Onesided Trade.
I posted this, or rather, I tried to post this in another thread, and it got deleted by the mods due to the presence of “banned words”, let’s see if it goes this time.
To an extent I can understand people who deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change or the danger it presents. The climate is a complicated system, and our understanding of it is incomplete, etc., those are reasons why one might be skeptical even though they really aren’t in this case, for a number of reasons, but let’s not go into that. It is can indeed be viewed as an untested hypothesis, although it will be tested only once and by the time it gets tested, it will be too late. So if someone comes to me and says “I am not certain that climate scientists know with a sufficient certainty that things will get as bad as they claim”, I can understand that.
However, the fact is that there is almost a disturbingly large, almost complete in fact. overlap between people who deny the reality of AGW, and people who deny the reality of Peak Oil, or the existence of any limits to growth in general. And those aren’t untested theories, quite the opposite, they have been tested time and time again in history, and they are 100% true. Hubbert predicted a peak for the lower 48 in 1970, in 1970 it happened, and that’s only the most well known case, the same has been observed again and again all over the world, with oil and with other non-renewable resources. Yet, people will still deny that there is a problem, and those will be the same people who will cry out “I don’t believe in AGW, it’s not good science, test it”. Well, Peak Oil has been tested, you still refuse to accept it.
Exactly the same thing with the limits to growth – dozens of civilizations have collapsed for that reason historically, the overshoot-collapse type of population dynamics have been observed countless times in the wild, in field experiments and in the lab, yet people will flat out deny the existence of any such things as carrying capacity of the environment and limits to growth that follow from it.
Curiously, those people who deny AGW, who deny Peak Oil, and who deny the existence of limits to growth, all share a very strong adherence to generally right wing, free market ideology, a conviction that if you look at the biographies of their main prophets existed long ago they were exposed to the issues whose existence they so adamantly preach against. Which means that it isn’t any concern about the accuracy of the science that drives them (which is clear just from the fact that science is actually more than good enough), it is their preexisting ideological commitment that leads them into denial mode.
Only that kind of person can be blind enough to ignore the mountains of evidence for what the current state of the planet is, the direction that things are headed into, and what this means for the future of humanity, and to disregard all basic rules of reasoning and logic, in order to write the kind of book that’s being promoted here. And again, if this is supposed to be a blog about “good science”, why is that kind of obviously ideological garbage being promoted here? Once more, you can target the uncertainties in climate science, but this is the intellectual equivalent of flat-earthism.
Reply: I’ll let this through this time despite the implied villification. ~ ctm
It is good to see books like this being published. But I dont think the left is reading them. Its a bit like “The Sceptical Environmentalist” by Lomborg.
It is a question of looking out through the window.
How is the air? The water?
Pretty good, he?
Berényi Péter says:
September 29, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Péter, your post was the very best one.
Stephen Wilde (11:35 a.m.) Glad to have a conversation with you. I agree with everything you have written in this comment. All I am interested in is an open field for critiques. Something like the scientific method. I hear too much “big government” is the ONLY problem today. Try looking at the financial shenanigans of banks and investment companies (e.g., Karl Denninger 9/29 http://market-ticker.org/); their corrupt leaders are at least as guilty as are our corrupt politicians. We need the rule of law in every realm. I like I. M. Goklany’s broad brush for research and critique.
When, in the course of the last election, the present Australian PM was repeatedly and scornfully calling our magnificent coal industry “dirty”, it occurred to me that ingratitude really is the the superbug we have all been encouraged to dread. It infects the minds of the most educated, and prompts them to make ruin in the most complex and educated ways. Ingratitude uses the intelligence of the sufferer, so that the greater the intelligence, the worse the infection.
Consider. I flick a switch and a bountiful supply of power surges toward me without flame, smoke, noise or any kind of intrusion at all. In the exact measure I want. The sheer power of coal! I never see or smell it…and there it is at my command and disposal. Yet Green People send old bicycles to impoverished villages in Asia…so the poor can pedal for their power and not get “addicted” to all the marvels the Green People themselves enjoy at every moment.
Mr. Goklany’s book looks like a real tonic. As Poptech says, it’s in the tradition of Julian Simon, the man who was so shallow and naive as to be right and who was proven right. (Nobel prizes are given to those who are gloriously wrong, or who, like Krugman, predict what every drunk and his dog already knows.)
Let’s hope “Improving State” is strong medicine against that great mental plague of our times: Global Ingratitude.
“Its the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine… ”
REM
KlausB says: September 29, 2010 at 2:53 pm
That was my feeling too, glad to find I was not alone.
Note to New Hampshire and VT residents (and those up here to enjoy the foliage)
Dr Goklany will be speaking at Dartmouth College Thursday Oct 7 at 4:30pm
Location: Rockefeller Hall Room 1
See http://uvliberty.org/m/events/view/Indur-M-Goklany-Lecture-The-Improving-State-of-the-World for more details. I assume this is sponsored by Dartmouth, not Upper Valley Liberty, but I can’t find any mention of it at dartmouth.edu.
It is indeed strange that the only people who truly believe that compound interest, capitalism and trading in Non Tangibles contributed to the growth of Human endeavour are bankers.
Well their machinations are coming home to roost well and truly now.
Thanks to all above for taking on some of my simple lay observations.
Tim Folkerts says: But there is one nagging fear in the back of my head. Are we kind of like a rookie in the NFL? Suddenly we have wealth beyond our imagination (in the form of plentiful cheap energy for the last 100 years) that allows us to live an amazing lifestyle. […]
If energy remains plentiful (and other resources as well), then we can continue to live this wonderful lifestyle. But if that wealth runs out, then were will we be? […]
Don’t we as a race need to develop a plan for “life after oil”? Sure, some think that there is nearly limitless oil seeping up from deep in the ground, but that is certainly not a mainstream view, and I am not quite ready to gamble the lives of my grandkids on that theory.
Well, no worries. Oil ‘depletes’ in a bell curve per the Peak Oil theory. As we took 200 years to reach the peak (if we are even there at all) it will take about the same 200 years to slide down the back side of the curve. It doesn’t just run dry one day.
We can already easily turn any of coal, tar sands, shale, natural gas, and garbage into “oil” products like gasoline and Diesel fuel at reasonable prices (less than they cost in Europe and almost as low as they cost in the USA). Existence proof is South Africa where SASOL makes oil products from coal and they have substantially run the country on the stuff since the mid ’70s – early ’80s.
Recent advances in ‘tight gas’ extraction have put us in energy “glut” for many decades to come with TRILLIONS of cubic feet “found” via this new technology. Also, I don’t think we’re going to run out of trash any time soon… (Trash to fuels is in pilot scale production now with production scale under construction near L.A. from a company called Rentech. There are others.) And we’ve got about 400 years of coal (though I suspect we won’t dig it all up).
After that, we have to start looking more at lots of nuclear electricity. Land based Uranium is good for about 10,000 years, while land based Thorium is good for about 30,000 years. Oh, and we can extract Uranium from sea water at acceptable prices. That’s good for about 2 billion years (when the expanding sun dries up the oceans…)
Cheap energy is the driving force that allowed “unprecedented improvements in every objective measurement of human well-being.” We are dependent on the equivalent of ~ 5 tons of oil per person per year to maintain our current (western) lifestyles. If cheap energy ends, I fear these unprecedented improvements may slide backwards a bit.
There is no technical nor economic reason for cheap energy to end. There is only “Sovereign Risk” from folks like Obama, AlGore, The Club Of Rome, and all the Luddites of the world (Green and otherwise) preventing us from using the technologies we already have in hand and demonstrated at full scale via using our government against us and blocking free enterprise solutions.
So the only thing you have to fear is your government. There is no energy shortage, and there never will be.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
Berényi Péter says:
September 29, 2010 at 12:17 pm
A nice neat description of exactly WHY large systems start to fail as soon as power and responsibility start getting transferred upward.
It’s the reason why a succesful society needs independent professional classes to maintain smooth running yet ALL the more sophisticated societies endeavour to make the professional classes increasingly subjugated to the powerful elites at the top.
Without reducing the independence of the professional classes the ruling elites cannot acquire the degree of control that they think they need.
The last reviewer of the book shown in this article, Michael Campbell, is the twin brother of the current premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell, who was responsible for the implementation of the first carbon tax in Canadian history.
David L. Hagen says: We are now facing a peaking of easily recoverable LIGHT oil.
Which is precisely why it is irrelevant. Like saying we’ve run out of beet sugar and will have to make do with cane sugar. It is the Saudi Light at $2/bbl lifting costs that PREVENTS the use of the other resources by holding prices down. (After the peak of over $100 / bbl the Saudi’s finally ordered some more rigs over to drill some more wells in a few of their fields. Added about 2 Billion bbl IIRC. And they have more to drill if desired. Saudi is NOT following a Hubbert maximum drill plan, so scuttles the Hubbert Peak Curve…)
IMO Imperial Oil and SU Suncor in Canada are building out tar sands operations at a decent rate now. Saudi, as mentioned, added enough capacity to continue to be the ‘swing producer’ and call the tune on prices. PBR Petrobras has found so much oil it’s headed for the #2 Global Producer spot. Deep water in the gulf found a hugh quantity (but Obama has ‘fixed’ that by shutting it in…) and there are the Russian finds in crystalline rock that doesn’t fit the current peak oil model.
Heavier, deeper, different rocks. And the USA Shut In. (Did you know that larger than North Slope and larger than ANWR is the Alaskan Strategic Petroleum reserve? And we’ve effectively shut in both Atlantic and Pacific coasts)
Oil production is static as demand has gone static and supply was increased enough to drop prices back to the “desired” $70-$80/bbl range.
Fasten your seat belts. This will cause an economic roller coaster
Um., probably not. It was glut induces price collapses that caused a roller coaster leading to the Texas Railroad Commission (it’s a long story…) price fixing oil, they then helped OPEC as a follow on global model to try to constrict supply to prevent glut and collapse. A hard lid of production would lead to stable prices and allow the plethora of alternatives to finally have a chance of getting funding.
until major quantities of alternative transport fuels are developed from oilsands, heavy oil, shale and coal – or from solar resources.
Oil Sands? Check. IMO, SU, XOM Exxon, RDS Shell, and many others
Heavy Oil? Check. Darned near any supplier and certainly those using Venezuelan or Mexican crudes. VLO Valero and COP Conoco come to mind, but several of the smaller refiners are adding heavy capacity.
Coal? Check. SSL SASSOL in South Africa and building facilities in China too. Along with SYMX Synthesis Energy Company, SYNM Syntroleum, RTK Rentech and a few others. RTK also going production with trash to fuels and SYNM in partnership with Tyson Foods doing ‘chicken slaughter waste’ to fuels.
That just leaves shale. Costs more than the others to do, so not really important at the moment. Yeah, I know. 3 TRILLION or so bbl of oil expected out of the US shale deposits. But at about $50-$80/bbl, just not as interesting as the other stuff. Yet. Yes, we’ve had demo scale facilities built to prove it can be done, but with Saudi able to crash prices back to $40 if they want, just too risky right now.
You left off the list algae based grown oil using sewage and coal powerplant CO2. (they are CO2 limited as they suck it all out of the air ‘way fast’; best growth comes with powerplant gasses…) that makes Diesel at about $3-4/GALLON in astounding quantities. Lab scale at present, but works any time we ‘need’ it. Origin Oil, Greanstream (something like that), PSUD PetroSun, and a few others.
And so much more. The only “problem” is all that OPEC Light Sweet that they can pump in glut levels of production…
Absolutely no worries indeed. There are no such things as economic and population growth happening at the same time the curve goes down, and society is in no way set up to collapse without that growth. No worries indeed
And of course we get hundreds of units of energy for each unit invested in those processes, and they can absolutely provide hundreds of millions of barrels a day, so there is simply no reason to be worried about anything
And that’s absolutely great because those wells have a much higher EROEI than conventional ones, not only that, they create improve the environment, and they never run out, those people who have looked at the depletion profiles showing wells running dry in a year or two are totally out of their minds…
Out of their minds are also the people who point out that thrash to fuels doesn’t really provide you with any energy because you had already spent a lot of energy to produce the thrash to begin with…
Could you please enlighten us on what those”Accessible prices” are and why nobody is doing it now given that people are already worried about uranium shortages in the not so distant future?
What a profound insight…
Well, if the only thing you have done in science classes in school is sleeping, there is absolutely no shortage of energy to be worried about. But I wouldn’t trust the future of the planet into the hands of that kind of people. It seems like it’s already in the hands of people who haven’t even been in science classes to begin with…
“Peak oil”? What a bad joke. The equivalent of light sweet crude oil can easily be made from any vegetative source. The technical knowledge was discovered prior to 1941, and was writen up in an article in Life magazine in 1941. (I have a copy, but it is in storage now). There have been 2 pilot plants that I know of. Addressing the supply source of the vegetative matter and assurance that “Big Oil” would not lower prices to less than now about $25 per barrel are the only issues preventing investors from removing us forever from the myth of “peak oil”.
Stephen Wilde, as always, you have it right and well-said.
And to Pyromancer76’s point:
While there certainly were bad actors in the private sector in the financial crisis, government’s primary role is to establish rules against fraud and then have mechanisms to discover it (at least on large scales) early-on. In addition, another essential counter-weight to fraud that government must effectively regulate is transparency in transactions. They failed to do that with the derivatives markets. You can’t make people honest by law, you can only prevent them from (or catch them at) being dishonest.
I don’t fault those who tried to “take advantage” of the unregulated sub-prime lending market. I fault our government whose job it is to protect the vast majority of us honest folk against the inevitable shysters every society will always have.
And the above could be said about the failure of government to force transparency in climate research which is the basis on which billions, nay trillions, of our dollars are being bet through the power of the police (taxes) on our incomes.
See, my comment really was about AGW.