Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
For a while, I taught a course in human-powered machinery for the Peace Corps. You know, bicycle powered generators, treadle powered pumps, that kind of thing. One of the very rough rules of thumb regarding human energy is that an adult human can put out about a hundred watts on an ongoing, constant all-day basis. If you were to hook up a bicycle to a generator you could generate a kilowatt-hour every day … if you were in good shape and you put in a ten-hour day. Sounds like work to me.
Figure 1. Human-powered aluminum can crusher, Burning Man 2012.
I got to thinking about this number, one kilowatt-hour’s worth of electricity for a long ten-hour day’s work, in the context of the discussion about energy costs. Some people think raising energy costs to discourage CO2 production is a good thing. I say that raising energy costs, whether to discourage CO2 or for any other reason, trades a certain present loss for a very doubtful future gain. As such, it is an extremely bad idea. Here’s why:
The existence of electricity is perhaps the one thing most emblematic of human development. With electricity, we get refrigeration to preserve medicines and foods, light to extend the day, electric heat, power to run machinery, the list goes on and on. Now, as I showed above, we can hire somebody to generate electricity for us, at the rate of a kilowatt-hour for each ten-hour day’s work. Where I live, this day’s worth of slave labor, this thousand watt-hours of energy, costs me the princely sum of about thirteen cents US. I can buy an electric slave-day of work for thirteen cents.
That is why I live well. Instead of having slaves as the Romans had, I can buy a day’s worth of a slave’s constant labor for thirteen measly cents. That is what development consists of, the use of electricity and other forms of inexpensive energy in addition to and in lieu of human energy.
Now, here’s the next part of the puzzle. Out at the farther edges of society, where people live on a dollar a day or less, electricity is much more expensive than it is where I live. In the Solomon Islands, where I lived before returning to the US in 2009, electricity in the capital city cost fifty-two cents a kilowatt-hour, and more out in the outer islands.
Now, let us consider the human cost of the kind of “cap-and trade” or “carbon tax” or Kyoto Protocol agreements. All of these attempts to decrease CO2 have the same effect. They raise the cost of energy, whether in the form of electricity or liquid fuels. But the weight of that change doesn’t fall on folks like me. Oh, I feel it alright. But for someone making say $26.00 per hour, they can buy two hundred slave-days of work with an hour’s wages. (Twenty-six dollars an hour divided by thirteen cents per kWh.). Two hundred days of someone working hard for ten hours a day, that’s the energy of more than six months of someone’s constant work … and I can buy that with one hour’s wages.
At the other end of the scale, consider someone making a dollar a day, usually a ten-hour day. That’s about ten cents an hour, in a place where energy may well cost fifty-two cents per kilowatt-hour. Energy costs loom huge for them even now. I can buy six months of slave labor for one hour of my wage. They can buy a couple of hours of slave labor, not days or months but hours, of slave labor for each hour of their work.
And as a result, an increase in energy costs that is fairly small to me is huge to the poor. Any kind of tax on energy, indeed any policy that raises the cost of energy, is one of the most regressive taxes known to man. It crushes those at the lowest end of the scale, and the worst part is, there is no relief at the bottom. You know how with income tax, if you make below a certain limit, you pay no tax at all? If you are below the threshold, you are exempt from income tax.
But energy price increases such as carbon taxes don’t even have that relief. They hit harder the further you go down the economic ladder, all the way down to rock bottom, hitting the very poorest the hardest of all.
So when James Hansen gets all mealy-mouthed about his poor grandkids’ world in fifty years, boo-boo, it just makes me shake my head in amazement. His policies have already led to an increase in something I never heard of when I was a kid, “fuel poverty”. This is where the anti-human pseudo-green energy policies advocated by Hansen and others have driven the price of fuel so high that people who weren’t poor before, now cannot heat their homes in winter … it’s shockingly common in Britain, for example.
In other words, when James Hansen is coming on all weepy-eyed about what might possibly happen to his poor grandchildren fifty years from now, he is so focused on the future that he overlooks the ugly present-day results of his policies, among them the grandparents shivering in houses that they can no longer afford to heat …
Perhaps some folks are willing to trade a certain, actually occurring, measurable present harm to their grandparents, in order to have a chance of avoiding a far-from-certain distant possible future harm to their grandkids.
Not me.
I say let’s keep the old geezers warm right now, what the heck, they’ve been good to us, mostly, and lets provide inexpensive energy to the world, and thus encourage industry and agriculture to feed and clothe people, and let the grandkids deal with the dang future. That’s what our own grandparents did. They didn’t dick around trying to figure out the problems that we would face today. They faced the problems of their day.
Besides, according to the IPCC, fifty years from now those buggers are going to be several times wealthier than we are now. So why should I be worried about Hansen’s and my likely wealthy grandkids in preference to today’s demonstrably poor children? My grandkids will do just fine. Heck, they’ll probably have the dang flying cars I was promised, and the fusion power I was supposed to get that would be too cheap to meter, so let them deal with it. We have plenty of problems worrying about today’s poor, let’s focus on that and let the future take care of their poor.
The real irony is that these folks like Hansen claim to be acting on behalf of the poor, in that they claim that the effects of global warming will hit the poor hardest. I have never found out how that is supposed to happen. I say this because the effects of global warming are supposed to hit the hardest in the extra-tropics, in the winter, in the night-time. I have a hard time believing that some homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk in New York City in December is going to be cursing the fact that the frozen winter midnights are a degree warmer … so exactly which poor are they supposed to be saving, and from what?
w.
The Pompous Git says:
January 6, 2013 at 10:08 am
Thanks, Git, glad to hear from you.
For better or for worse, the claim that the population will always and inevitably outstrip food production, with attendant starvation/riots, is called “Malthusian”. Might not be fair, but that’s how it is. A couple of ideas combine under that rubric.
First is the idea that there is a mathematical underpinning for the claim, which is the idea that population increases geometrically and food only increases linearly. Note that neither of those is true, and that both Ehrlich and Malthus believe(d) that they are true.
This is associated with another idea, which is the inevitability of the oncoming crash. It is believed to be inevitable because of the supposedly “rock-solid” mathematical underpinnings of the idea. Again, both Malthus and Ehrlich believed in this inevitability of a food-scarcity-driven population crash.
Now, as others have noted, for Malthus this made sense. He lived years ago, when the lives of most people were not touched by human imagineering. He couldn’t conceive, for example, that Japan could have more food than it needs and a falling population. Perfectly understandable, he was born in 1766. They’d never seen anything like that.
For Ehrlich to still believe in “The Population Bomb”, on the other hand, requires a pretty impressive concentrated focus of blindness, particularly after his first two predictions failed so miserably. But Ehrlich is perfectly convinced that Malthus’s math is correct, that population increases geometrically but food only increases arithmetically. So even after two failures, he still says that a big population crash and massive starvation and food riots are just around the corner …
That’s why he’s called a “Maltusian”. Because he’s just making Mathus’s same old argument, that population will always and inevitably outstrip food supply because one increase is geometric and the other is arithmetic.
Was this Malthus’s only claim? By no means. As you point out, he argued for more statistics, he wanted censuses, he wanted, like any good scientist, more data. He would have loved the data access afforded by the web, I suspect.
So you and others are correct that the “Malthusian” argument of population outstripping food wasn’t his only claim to fame. However, it was the popular argument, the one that got the ink then and now … and it was incorrect. Sadly, he’s known more for the mistake that’s attached to his name than for the other good work he did, but life is like that, not always fair.
w.
@Willis: You wrote: “Again, both Malthus and Ehrlich believed in this inevitability of a food-scarcity-driven population crash.”
Something make this come true… a new ice age. But short of that, I see that their model is wrong. The problem with models, is that often ignorantly “model” reality. Reality is often too chaotic and organic to be modeled. The higher the number of “chaotic variables” that are involved, the further from reality the models become.
Willis Eschenbach said @ur momisugly January 6, 2013 at 1:54 pm
Back at you Willis; it’s always a pleasure to read your writing.
You write:
Perhaps I’m more cynical than you. I see Ehrlich as a bullshitter, one who unlike the truthsayer,or liar, has a complete disrespect for truth. He knows he’s wrong, but doesn’t care.
“Now that the United States is using 40 percent of its crop to make biofuel, it is not surprising that tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which imports nearly half of its corn.”
http://junkscience.com/2013/01/06/as-biofuel-demand-grows-so-do-guatemalas-hunger-pangs/#more-33319
h/t Junkscience
Oops, sorry, wrong thread.
The Pompous Git says: January 6, 2013 at 10:08 am
Vince Causey said @ur momisugly January 6, 2013 at 6:59 am
For centuries, population sizes remained fairly static – they occasionally crashed such as during plagues, but grew back to achieve a new status quo.
===========================
Except populations didn’t remain static for centuries. For example, Medieval Britain suffered 95 famines, and France at least 75. The famine of 1315–6 is estimated to have killed at least 10% of England’s population (500,000). This was a period of relative food abundance (think Medieval Warm period). The Little Ice Age saw a great increase in the <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, Git, it is true such disasters overtook populations from time to time. Vince’s point was that the decrease was temporary and that population was restored within a generation or less, which is not so long when viewing the big picture.
This was the school of Malthus, who saw from history that disasters such as crop failure scythed down the population from time to time, yet such disasters were exceptional. He observed that the potential fecundity of populations meant power of unlimited increase, yet the limited food resources of his day seldom led to famine because such increase was held in abeyance. He then asked the important question: why was this so?- that is, why were these incidents of famine exceptional in a world predicated on unlimited population increase?
His answer to that question was the foundation of such studies as population dynamics and demographics: the behavior of populations. Malthus saw that populations acted in such a fashion to “govern” increase through various types of behavior, and he enumerated the different aspects of this “governance” in detail. This is the contribution of Malthus. It is true that his prospect included a vision of famine, pestilence, war, etc., but these were the realities of his day, as well as the teaching of history.
The catastrophists, such as Erhlich, ignore the teachings of Malthus in great part. They focus on the prospects of overpopulation, famine, war, civil strife, etc. and ignore the postulates that Malthus formulated as restraints against population increase. And so it is that Malthus has been presented as a catastrophist in our day, because disasters sell books, newspapers, movies, etc., and nobody is interested when someone says “not to worry”.
This brings us to the CAGW crowd, who are essentially catastrophists, but also boobs, half-wits, frauds, etc. They use the same sort of tactics as Erhlich & Co. And this is why people like Willis see red when someone suggests that Malthus was right in the main.
But now Willis perhaps sees that the “real” Malthus can be used to pooh-pooh the catastrophists and refute them by the writings of the same Malthus that they claim as authority for their panic mongering.
Now, I have simplified Malthus somewhat. His writings covered many more aspects than I have given. He addressed economics, formulated theories on wages, rent, surpluses, and more. But these were all within the purview of his study of the behavior of population.
He also recognized that population increase led to increase in food production by adding to more intensive cultivation of the land. Yet he saw that the power of population increase, which he termed as “geometrical”, surpassed the power of food increase, which he termed as “arithmetic”. This terminology, however, was not meant to characterize his demography as a matter of bald mathematical constraints.
Malthus failed to foresee the developments in agronomy which led to our present food surplus. No matter, the principles of this profound thinker of demography, population dynamics and economics are still respected in those disciplines. Yet he was controversial in his day, and he remains controversial. But I have to believe that much of that stems from ignoring the real contributions of Malthus and concentrating on the prospects of disaster that were addressed in his postulations.
One more thing. Perhaps some have seen my comments wherein I confront the CAGW idiots with the prospects of famine in the future. I do this to piss them off. They wail about doomsday warming, I wail louder about doomsday cooling. Nothing pisses them off more or shuts them up faster. They retreat, muttering dark prophesies against my grandchildren. This is the way I amuse myself, and it does not necessarily mean that I subscribe to catastrophism. But I do know as a solid, incontrovertible fact, that life flourishes in a warmer world, and that cooling is the sycthe.
Thank you for your attention and WHEW!
Dear Gail- you said:
“A high standard of living is the best way of limiting the human population.”
Standard of living is wealth per capita. Regardless of the metric used to produce any figure for wealth, these facts are immutable:
there are but 2 ways to increase the wealth per capita- increase the numerator or decrease the denominator.
There are 2 reasons for the correlation you perceive. One is increase of the numerator, wealth, by innovation and productivity, and has been discussed. The other is reduction of the denominator.
It is nonsense to say that an increase in wealth limits population.
It is, per Malthus, death that limits population. Modern accounting practice just keeps it off the books unless there’s a birth certificate.
To elaborate a bit on the observation that wealth affects behaviour, if you want to challenge any of the explanations and examples given in support of this idea, you can, because the exact mechanism for how it works is not understood and indeed there may be thousands of distinct mechanisms with a strong co-operative effect. You really need to be in ethology up to your eyebrows to really begin to understand how it works.
But what is clear beyond doubt is the observation itself: wealth negatively affects reproductive behaviour. I want to point it out to gnomish and others who seem incredulous about this simple fact that we don’t need to know how things work to make a positive statement about the effect.
But there is more. Wealth is not the only factor that is negatively associated with replacement rate. It is also the manner in which we cluster. The urban population’s growth is more affected by wealth than that of the rural population. What you see in big cities (and that’s where populations tend to cluster) is crowds of people engaging in a host of activities that can generally be described as expensive self-harm (note expensive and note harm: that should give you a hint about one of the possibilities for a mechanism).
Civilisation is maladaptive.
Dear Gnomish:
No, wealth is not ‘per capita’. Sorry. Wrong initial assumption so all the rest is void.
Wealth is an individual property. When the individual is more wealthy, they have fewer children. When the individual woman is better educated that woman has fewer children.
Take a population of 1 Million poor serfs and 2 rich SOBs. Kill 100 serfs. The SOBs did not suddenly get wealthier. (Depending on the society they might have gotten poorer if the serfs are slaves…)
Kill 1000 serfs, it has no effect on the rest of the serfs or what their birth rate might be.
Put 1/2 million serf women in school through college and give 1/2 million serf men a good job such that they have a TV set, full fridge, and know their children will live to be adults, they are now individually relatively rich and birth rates drop to about 2.7. Make them bored with their wealth and it drops to under replacement rate. Leave 1000 of them as serfs, they continue to have the serf level of fecundity…
Further, your view that Malthus was right presumes a ‘zero sum game’. That just isn’t how the world works (and why Malthus was wrong). The USA has way over doubled in population a couple of times, we are more wealthy than ever (both as individuals and as an average) and we have the lowest birth rate ever. Education, health, and wealth reduce reproductive rate (fecundity).
THE best way to drop birth rates it to give every woman a college education and all the medical care needed to assure children survive and thrive. That is individual ‘wealth’ in the form of education and medical care. Add in reliable food and some comforts; folks then would rather have 2 kids and party than 4 kids and not.
that’s quite a disjointed collage of strawmen, mr smith. what kind of butthurt makes you gibber so?
@gnomish: I love reading your posts. However, I have to call you on what you wrote: “It is nonsense to say that an increase in wealth limits population.” You wrote this in response to Gail Combs who wrote “A high standard of living is the best way of limiting the human population.”
I think Gail’s statement passes the smell test, and your quoting someone else’s words begins to sound like religion. You wax eloquent, but I think I know what she’s talking about. It is a fact that the more affluent are waiting longer to have children… and they have fewer of them. Poor people have more children. Our society in the US even rewards single mothers with more money than if she were married. Each baby gets more funding.
Ideology can not replace actual data. Gail usually makes sense (to me) when she posts – except when she’s sarcastic… I can’t always know if she’s just messing with us or not. I’d say if she does not make sense, it’s because I don’t understand. She probably is making sense.
You rock Gail…
Mario-
well, thanks. i like to read Gail’s comments, too. i confess, too, that my words were my own, though i wouldn’t claim that my thoughts are original or exclusive to me.
my main point, which must have been badly presented, was that wealth is not a behavior and is not directly related to contraception or abortion, the means by which individuals successfully regulate the rate of population increase absent disease, famine or war. (i would not credit abstinence for it).
Malthus: “That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,
that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase”
==================================
“The present level of food production would be unobtainable without the improvements in agronomy of the past 150 years” – none dispute this
“Without the agronomic improvements of the last 150 years, populations worldwide would be much lower.” – many dispute this
@All:
OK, a couple of hours later I’ve dredged through the rest of the upthread comments. Quite a load.
Unfortunately, a lot of it Economics. ( I’m a degreed Economist… ) so it’s ‘my field’. The good news is that I’m not going to correct it all (as at this point in my life I’m rather bored with Economics). The good news is that I can give some decent crib notes.
For those not aware of it, Malthus is considered a “founding light” of Economics. Required study. “We’ve met”. Demographics is part of Economics. “We’ve met”.
Malthus was a profound thinker who set the course of development of Economics, Demographics, Resource planning, and a few other Economic disciplines. He was also wrong… Like many “first lights”, lots of bright ideas that end up getting ‘fixed’ later, but still lauded in the field… Willis has pretty much put his finger on the “wrong bits”.
In a nut shell: Malthus might still be proved right and the “4 horsemen” might still collect his wager for him, but it’s not looking that good for his side. IFF we ever ‘get off this rock’ and into space, he’s simply flat out wrong. Forever. IF we don’t, eventually we come to terms with a limited planet. We might do that via war, pestilence, famine, etc. Or we might all “Go Japanese”. Time will tell. (Present trend, as Gail pointed out, is “we all go Japanese”… even in Latin America…)
Per Club Of Rome: FWIW, they are still around. Who do you think started pushing this whole Global Warming thing? Yup. Same folks.
As to who at the UN would push for such a thing as Agenda 21: Maurice Strong. Collecting massive Rent Seeking for decades. There are loads of others, too.
I see Gnomish couldn’t stay away long. Sorry Willis… I also see he doesn’t know about actual demographics. Despite having stated it once, he needs it more than once. OK, for the ‘slow learners’:
1) Time has past since Malthus. Demographics has advanced rather a lot. We now know what causes fecundity (tendency to have children) to drop. #1 on the list is the education level of women. This is not my opinion it is measured data. #2 on the list is income level ( wealth). You don’t need kids to care for you. #3 on the list is health (you know you and your spouse and your kids are likely to live). No need for ‘extras’ for insurance. After that the effects of #4 and on are not very important. So those are what actually drives fecundity. No, it isn’t death that limits population, it is education and wealth and health.
2) Labor and capital produce wealth. Diminish the labor, you diminish the wealth. “When the cobbler dies, everyone wears old shoes.” (In modern terms we would add energy resources as they are fungible with some physical labor and ‘intellectual capital’ – what we know – as a kind of capitol stock, but labor is still in there.) So when you kill off population you reduce your wealth creation. (There is a quibble here in that ‘unproductive’ folks dying doesn’t do that. Godwin’s muse exploited that ‘loophole’. I think we can choose not to ‘go there’.) This is where capitalism is NOT a zero sum game. We make more stuff with division of labor and less when the labor force is reduced and narrowed.
3) Fecundity is a function of the individual status. Not of the collective. Take 100 women and put 50 of them through college, it is THAT 50 who have the lower birth rate. It is not an average property. (Though the population numbers reflect the average effect). Similarly wealth. Similarly health. It is bringing those properties to individuals that reduces the fecundity of those individuals.
BTW, #3 is also why Malthus has a shot at being right very long term. As the well educated wealthy die off, the remaining ‘few poor’ continue to have high fecundity. Eventually they make ‘more of them’ and the economy may slide back down the Malthusian chute. I say “may” as so far the experience has been that the society as a whole doesn’t do that. We all get ‘rich enough’ and the whole population has fewer kids. The recent diaspora of Muslims may yet change that, though, as they have a doctrine of the ‘war of the womb’ in some sects and God told them to have more Muslim babies.. But as of now, even Muslim countries are following the ‘education / wealth / health’ curve. (Except in places where Taliban like folks keep women out of schools…)
Hopefully that expansion of the known facts of Demographics and Fecundity will make it easier for Gnomish to follow.
On “Running out”:
In college I had an Econ class “The economics of ecology” that was based on “The Limits To Growth” by Meadows et. al. Great class. The prof. got us wound up the first half reading “Limits” then sent us off to the library with a reading list of critiques to do a report the last half. Folks felt so ‘burned’ by having swallowed the crap in “Limits”… THE largest thing missed in Limits was “resource substitution” via technology change. We don’t need ivory for billiard balls anymore, nor does my screen need 12 lbs of lead for the ‘lead glass’ to protect me from the “CRT X-rays”. My lantern no longer needs propane or gasoline and a thorium mantle (now LED and solar cells) We use metal 2×4 studs and sheetrock instead of old growth tree paneling. It’s a long list.
“The stone age did not end for lack of stones”.
The other major “wrong bit” was they went exponential growth on ‘reserves’ consumption and assumed fixed supply. Ignoring ‘ultimate resource’. Reserves means “economical today”. Resource means “May be economical tomorrow if the price rises.”. As soon as you run a bit short, the price rises… So we have had “running out of oil” since about 1975. 38 going on 40 years of “running out”. The result? We have “50 years of reserves”. In my book collection is a nice engineering book from 1919. It was pointing out there were only “50 years of reserves”. In 1975 we had, yup, 50 years of reserves. As of now, the “ultimate recoverable resource” of oil is about 3 Trillion barrels from “unconventional oil” source alone. “Limits” said we had 10 years of natural gas “reserves” left!!! Bet you didn’t know we ran out of nat gas in 1984 did you? (We have about 90 years of ‘resource’ in the USA as of right now).
So you see the “Limits” folks and the “Peak Oil” folks have a tap root that goes (along with the AGW folks) straight back to the Club Of Rome and through them to Malthus.
Did I mention that Malthus was a great thinker? Who was wrong?…
Some details on energy and oil up thread from:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/05/we-had-to-pave-the-environment-in-order-to-save-it/#comment-1191926
WHY “Limits” was wrong:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
And an interesting example of resource vs reserves is that Uranium at $150 / kg or so is functionally unlimited and can cheaply supply all the power the world needs for 4 times the present population forever (including hydroponic food). But as Uranium sells for less than that, it’s not a ‘reserve’ so we’re going to run out of ‘reserves’ Real Soon Now… (at which time more will ‘magically’ appear due to a small price rise….)
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
So, please, “Honor your dead” in Malthus… but use the modern Demographic knowledge…
“wealth is not a behavior and is not directly related to contraception or abortion, the means by which individuals successfully regulate the rate of population increase absent disease, famine or war. (i would not credit abstinence for it).”
That is exactly wrong.
Wealth determines behaviour (as does health and education). They directly determine contraception. (In the case of some particular religious educations toward more kids… but even as a child of a Catholic, the increase in wealth and education in my family had Grandpa 13 kids, Dad 4 kids, me 2 kids…)
Disease, famine and war determine the rate of death, but not of fecundity. It is fecundity that drives population growth. Focusing on the means of death is a, pardon, ‘dead end’… Malthusian, if you will. What matters is what young healthy women choose. (Only women matter as only they have children. Sorry. That’s just the way the demographics of population and fecundity works. That’s also why women having a college degree matters and men not so much…)
In W.W.II we had a heck of a lot of dying in war and disease. The result was a Baby Boom we are still dealing with demographically. The reason was a lot of young non-college folks deciding to be fecund while they had the chance…
This is all “Old hat” in the economics of demographics. I think it was even in Econ 1A… though expanded in an upper division class. I’ll have to look in Samuelson (I still have my original copy) and check…
Yup. Samuelson, pgs. 30-36. I’d make that first week of the first Econ entry level class. Malthus and all. (Including where he was wrong). Expanded in section 6, so we came back to it later for more depth. So most everyone who had Econ had this even if they dropped the class the second week. (Samuelson was pretty much the Econ Starter Bible for a couple of decades…) Even has the “boomers” and that wealth and health were the major drivers (with the religion caveat). IIRC the “college for women” was covered later.
i guess willis made a mistaken assumption, chiefio, as did you.
to falsely attribute contraceptive powers to health or wealth is not just a mistake.
do inquire of a healthy, wealthy female what means she employs to reduce her birthrate.
if you put up another wall of text in deliberate obfuscation, i will have no more time for you.
Oh, and @The Pompous Git:
As covered here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/05/we-had-to-pave-the-environment-in-order-to-save-it/#comment-1191926
Fresh water is no longer a limit. Sea water is.
a sample of the details in that other comment:
http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/abudhabi.html
Note that this is in production.
End Quote.
That, btw, is an example of WHY I’m so tired of the Club Of Rome and dumb Green Malthusians and their “running out” scare. It will lead to exactly the doom they wish to avoid.
We can, easily, give every woman on the planet a college level education, make sure every person has decent medical care and more than enough food and heck, given them all a computer, with TV sites, and internet feeds. At that point, demographics ‘top out’ at steady and we have a glorious happy wealthy world.
That we have idiots demanding we all ‘suffer’ and toss out our wealthy life style dooms the world to a Maltusian solution of too many children, famine, wars, and pestilence…
Right Now, we could be building seawater greenhouses with nuclear powerplants nearby (Saudi has this, but with oil power plant) and live in glorious cities in the desert wastelands. Net productivity of more wealth than consumed. But the Doom & Gloomers want to stop prosperity. Which means poverty, poor health, MORE population growth, and the road to a Malthusian end.
Sigh. The incredible power of stupid…
E.M.Smith says: January 7, 2013 at 10:23 pm
=================
Malthus still has the power to set people off, just as in his day. I see that we agree in the main on Malthus, except for a few small points; first, I copy myself from above:
Malthus: “That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase”
mpainter puts:
“The present level of food production would be unobtainable without the improvements in agronomy of the past 150 years” – hardly any dispute with this
“Without the agronomic improvements of the last 150 years, populations worldwide would be much lower.”- hardly any dispute this
Malthus, again: “That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase” – For some reason, people dispute this vehemently.
E.M.Smith: “No, it isn’t death that limits population, it is education and wealth and health.”
mpainter: Malthus postulated “preventative checks” which limit birthrate and enumerates these, which see, and “positive” checks- death by various means and these together limited population.
What has he missed? This is not to dispute your assertion that Malthus has been improved on or that society has changed.
E.M. Smith: “Fecundity is a function of the individual status. Not of the collective”
Fecundity (Wikipedia): In demography,[1][2] fecundity is the potential reproductive capacity of an individual or population.
@MPainter:
Malthus was correct in what he laid out as bounds inside his time. He was wrong in his conclusions about what would come, and wrong about what future technology would do. He was wrong about “invariably increase” (just ‘almost always increase in his day’) as he didn’t have experience of a population with >50% women with college degrees and living a ‘modern middle class’ level of wealth. So he missed the “wealth and education” aspects. (The times being more in tune with ‘moral drivers’ and all..)
Can’t really fault him for not seeing the world of today. It was still wrong.
You quoted a wiki definition at me. Fine. Now put “is a function of” after it, and follow that with “the individual status”. That’s what I said. The population fecundity will be a function of the individual status on health, wealth, education. It can be no other way as only the individual becomes pregnant, or not. (And those are women only. Guys do not become pregnant. No matter how un-PC it is point it out, that’s the rules of demographics…)
put another way: Two populations, both average 2nd grade education. One all 8th grade, The other population as zero in one half, BA in the other. Very different demographic result.
Oh and “means of subsistence’ is the wrong measure. Mostly because very few of us are anywhere near the limit of ‘subsistence’. Our “subsistence level” today includes central heat, and color TV, and not working in the field… It is likely that the population growth curve was much more ‘subsistence’ driven then due to near zero education and wealth levels, and he just had no clue that “subsistence” was not the major driver and would be insignificant now. Maslows’ Hierarchy of Needs and all not being around yet… In any case, he pushed this one big and missed the others. Why is a different question…
I probably ought to add that “death” isn’t nearly as important as he made it out to be. Like getting your Tom Cat neutered just doesn’t make a difference. It’s how many women choose to have children. Now he didn’t have the “Single mom” morality (nor the notion a single woman could be a school principle and support 3 kids and 2 dogs…) so again, can’t fault him for not seeing the world of plenty of today and what choices our wealth lets us make… So one Tom ends up very happy, and the demographics don’t change. Nor did he foresee what things like vaccination would achieve. It’s that kind of ‘error’. On Specifics and the results of them.
So “right on the big lumps”, wrong on the result. And not a seer of the future.
I see Gnomish can’t tell the world “fecundity” from “contraception”. Oh Well. It is the behaviour that matters, not the tool. What people choose to do and why. All the “French Ticklers” in the world do nothing if left on the store shelf. Abortificants and various preventative ‘washes’ have been around forever. (Some apes have been observed apparently using abotificant plants ‘for effect’… ) http://www.sisterzeus.com/Abortif.htm
Hopefully the text above is sufficient to be a ‘wall’. One can only hope..
Then again, I’ve completely failed the ‘deliberate obfuscation’ on every post I’ve made…
There may be no hope… 😉
the point i made, that birthrate is a population limiting factor just as is famine, disease or war, has been fully accepted after much ado.
if something is not the only factor and not a necessary factor nor a sufficient factor, then there’s not much of a claim for causality. correlation is not causation.
that really doesn’t require further elaboration. too bad if it doesn’t fit somebody’s utopian narrative. poor tinkerbelle…lol
E. M. Smith: Correct if I am wrong, but it seems that we agree essentially concerning the Right Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus:
1) That he was a profound thinker.
2) That he laid the foundation for the study of population dynamics, demography, and made notable contributions to the study of economics; and that our understanding of these subjects has progressed accordingly from his foundation (or contributions).
3) That Malthus failed to foresee developments in technology, science, society, etc. that would fundamentally change aspects of life, but this does not void his accomplishments.
From my own point of view, I would add to the above that modern day catastrophists distort the postulates of Malthus to achieve sensationalism, and this sensationalism has shaped the general view of Malthus, who does not deserve the antipathy that has been directed toward him.
Finally, for better or for worse, I think that we are stuck on this planet.
gnomish says:
> the point i made, that birthrate is a population limiting factor just as is famine, disease or war, has been fully accepted after much ado.
This point is irrelevant (even if valid), because there is no such thing as “a population”. We can have distinct sub-populations with different modes of behaviour and different generation times even among the progeny of a single cell in a Petri dish. With humans, we observe wildly different birth rates in various populations, and yes, they vary with wealth in a predictable way. Whether there is a simple causality or not is immaterial for this argument, which was, I understand, precisely that Malthus and followers kept thinking of “a population” where there is indeed a continuum of varied populations; among them, wealth and birth rate vary in predictable ways. And it is not only birth rate and wealth show such a strong covariance, check out suicide rate, for example.
for J.W.
as long as the fine examples are on the table for dissection, look what semantic analysis reveals:
the subjunctive tense is employed for discussing ‘that which is not’, i.e., unreality.
to say ‘if pigs had wings’ is to admit that they do not have wings.
an argument laden with subjunctives, e.g. ‘would’, ‘could’, ‘should’, is dealing with fantasy.
figurative use of the third person plural (waving the ‘we we’) is the hallmark of a collectivist.
a wall of text saturated with 3rd person plural subjunctives is, therefore, eassily recognizable as a collectivist fantasy.
Gene:
you said:
“there is no such thing as “a population”
and then proceed to say
“we observe wildly different birth rates in various populations”
i’m not making sense of that. should i?
@gnomish:
Sorry, I was clumsy. I meant to say “there is no such thing as a global population”. Idealised population dynamics can’t be used to model humans on a global scale.
I like your characterisation of collectivist fantasies, and with your permission, I will use it when given a chance, but I still want to say that we humans are not a homogenous population. You can, in theory, model us as an assembly of separate populations, but that sounds like a tall order to me; very much like climate modelling.
Gene Selkov says: January 8, 2013 at 7:59 am
This point is irrelevant (even if valid), because there is no such thing as “a population”.
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“no such thing as a ‘population’ ” Poor census takers, all of that work for nothing.