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.
mpainter says:
January 2, 2013 at 8:39 pm
No, most of the controversy stems from the fact that his postulates were wrong. We went through this upthread. His postulates were that population increased geometrically, and food supply only increased linearly. Both were wrong. Both have been repeatedly demonstrated to be wrong. A few years on a farm would have shown him he was wrong. Had he actually observed, not theorized about but observed the increase in population and the increase in food supply in the centuries before the time he lived, he would have thrown his postulates in the trash can.
Then you come along to tell us that his postulates were fine and he was a “profound thinker”.
This is a combination of the “appeal to authority” and the “guilt by association” logical fallacies. I don’t care who Malthus fooled, mpainter. I already know, it was lots of people, plus you. Color me unimpressed.
Regarding the comment on Darwin and Wallace crediting Malthus, lots of people credit their reading of the Bible for providing “the germ of their ideas” … so what? Does that make the Bible somehow scientific, or somehow correct?
Look, he wasn’t an idiot. He did some interesting stuff. But the one thing that he was known for, the thing that inspired a whole range of thought called by his name, “Malthusian”, has been completely discredited.
If so, then I’m wrong, he was an idiot. A few years on a farm would have shown him that his Malthusian ideas were garbage.
Yep. If that is the quality of his observations, he reminds me of a blind man.
Nonsense. His problem was not the industrial revolution or any kind of “agronomic transformation”. His problem was, he let his love for mathematics get in the way of his real-world observations. Even a kid on a farm knows that
1) food production increases the more kids you have, and
2) population of your animals never goes up anywhere near geometrically, no matter how hard you try.
Any farmer can tell you that. Your claim that he was “correct insofar as his observations informed him” merely reveals that you, like Malthus, might have looked at farming, but you never observed farming …
Yep. And those ideas were wrong. His bogus ideas have even driven modern scholars round the twist, folks like Paul Ehrlich. He, like you, mpainter, believes that Malthus was a profound thinker. On the basis of that profound thought, Ehrlich has twice, not once but twice, predicted mass starvation and food riots in our time.
Now, the fact that you don’t remember that starvation and food riots (predicted by Paul Ehrlich for 1980 and 2000) hasn’t affected Paul in the slightest. He is now once again beating his tin drum and shouting that WE’RE ALL GONNA RUN OUT OF FOOD AND DIE, EVERYONE PANIC!!!, but now the show has been postponed, I don’t know why, they couldn’t get the stage lights to work or something, but anyhow the famous production called “The Food Death of the Planet“, the long-advertised extravaganza from the famous Ehrlich/Holdren Malthusian Production Company, has been put back for a few years …
Malthusians like Ehrlich are astounding to me. No amount of logic, or experience, or failed doomcasts, or lack of starvation, or centuries of contrary evidence, will ever get them to change their minds. They persist in believing that Malthus was a “profound thinker”, despite all evidence to the contrary …
Remind you of anyone?
w.
“No amount of logic, or experience, or failed doomcasts, or lack of starvation, or centuries of contrary evidence, will ever get them to change their minds”
One could draw a similarity between them and biblical end-of-the-worlders – they shrug off missed end-dates as mere timing issues. The Malthusians will never be convinced of the error of their main premise, and will meet the failure of their predictions with the refrain: “Ah, but nobody could have predicted what Borlaug did, or GM crops, or shale oil, or shale gas, or …”
The list of excuses will last as long as the human race, but the Malthusians will continue to insist that Malthus was right – it is only these unknowable historic contingencies that has momentarily bought mankind a little time.
MorningGuy says:
January 2, 2013 at 8:13 am
@Owen in GA
Don’t need batteries, just feed in tariffs, in Oz they were quite generous at one stage, up to 68c/kWh, now less so but the cost of solar has drop like a brick, all I know is that I’ve paid for my install recently and now it’s FREE for what I’m generating, for the next 20 years, those electricity suppliers can kiss my lily white arse!
…………
I’m going to be flamed here for suggesting it but electricity suppliers are screwed, the writing is on the wall, solar will do the same to big electricity what gasoline did to steam power. Big electricity will be relegated to supplying base load, whereas solar will take the more lucrative peak, at that stage big electricity will lose market share and become expensive, then it’s just down hill fast for them.
you keep comparing MaybeWatts with MegaWatts and you fail to understand the difference.
starvation and disease do limit population.
innovation and increased productivity raise the limit.
where’s malthus’ error?
how is it reasonable to rant against malthus because one doesn’t like erlich?
would it be reasonable to rant against darwin because one doesn’t like (godwyn strikes!)?
reason is dispassionate. the more pitched the passion, the more suspicious the motive.
@ur momisugly Gail
I enjoy your posts, but I have to nitpick a little.
About adding to your carbon footprint by exhaling…
No, doesn’t happen, even if you live next to a coal plant. Here is why:
Take the leaky bucket analogy (which has been posted on this site a number of times; see “the lives and times of carbon”).
Consider a leaky bucket. Water drips in from a faucet and escapes through a crack. The faucet supplies, say, 100 ml per minute, but the crack drips out only 50 ml per minute. With that, the water level in the bucket will rise. With rising water levels, there is more pressure on the crack and the leak rate will increase. Eventually you reach a water level where outflow = inflow. This is a dynamic steady state. The bucket stands for the atmosphere, the water from the dripping faucet represents anthropogenic CO2, and the water leaking through the crack represents CO2 being permanently removed from the system by sequestration into sinks.
So far so good. Now picture that the system is more complicated, in that water is constantly added and subtracted in such a way that it has no effect on the water level. An example would be a pump that recycles say 200 ml per minute (pumps 200 ml out and 200 ml in). The water going through the pump would represent CO2 that cycles through natural systems ( e.g . plants absorbing CO2 via photosynthesis and animals exhaling CO2 from food). These cycles, while enormous in size, don’t add to or subtract from the water level in the bucket.
Now, to make things even more complicated, assume that the pump becomes more efficient as water levels rise. Say the pump now handles 300 ml per minute. This represents enhanced photosynthesis due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. The pump will also pump more water back into the system (more people eat).
In reality, vegetation has acted as a net sink, but this does not matter for the question at hand: Does exhaling CO2 contribute to CO2 rise in the atmosphere? My vote is no. As long as we regrow the amount of plants that we consume, the net effect of exhaling is zero.
w
I am glad to exchange thoughts with you on that profound thinker, Malthus. I see that his postulates have affected you profoundly, for why else would you hold forth so cogently on the man and his ideas. I can truly believe that you are “Sick of Malthus”. Well, perhaps you had better not read what follows.
I urge you to read up and educate yourself a bit on population dynamics, an aspect of the life sciences but also of demographics. You say Malthus postulated “that population increased geometrically”. Not so, read carefully. As I commented upthread, Malthus put that population had the innate *capacity* to expand geometrically, but he observed that it did not, in fact. You ignored this when you parsed my comment. Malthus discussed the reasons why population was held in check, in other words, he examined the causes of why population did not increase geometrically. His discussion of the *checks* against population growth was in support of the central theme of his thesis. Malthus wrote his essay as a counter to the ideas of the Frenchman Rousseau, whom he knew. He meant his essay as a healthy dose of reality for the idealistic followers of Rousseau. No biologist would argue against the proposition that population has innate capacity to expand geometrically. No biologist would argue against the proposition that there are checks that act against such innate capacity. So, contrary to your assertion that Malthus held that population increased geometrically, Malthus indeed held the opposite view, and proceeded to examine why it did not. Perhaps this distinction is too fine for some.
Concerning food supply. Malthus based his ideas on historical circumstance, i.e., he took his lessons from history, and he was a profound student of history. He observed that historically, food limits put pressure on population and limited its growth. In his day, famine was a reality, and in this observation he certainly was correct. Now, Malthus did not foresee the agronomic developments which greatly expanded food supply. This does not mean that he was entirely wrong, only that he failed to foresee advances in agronomy; indeed, population growth today still has its *checks*. This includes the various means of birth control practiced today, and Malthus recognized this particular *check* and referred to it as “vice”. In his view, however, food was the ultimate arbitrator of numbers and he was certainly correct, according to the circumstances of his day.
“Then you come along to tell us that his postulates were fine and he was a “profound thinker”.”
I am not alone. Those who wish to decide for themselves will find a comprehensive article on Malthus in Wikipedia.
“This is a combination of the “appeal to authority” and the “guilt by association” logical fallacies. I don’t care who Malthus fooled, mpainter. I already know, it was lots of people, plus you. Color me unimpressed.”
Yes, I can see that you are not impressed. You are so unimpressed that you have not the slightest bit of interest in the source of the insights of Darwin, of Wallace, of Keynes, and others. This is nothing but a closed mind as in locked and barred. Interesting that those scientists were “fooled” (your word, not mine) so badly by that miscreant Malthus. Are the rest of us now “fooled” by the “fooled”? Maybe you should rethink that comment.
“Regarding the comment on Darwin and Wallace crediting Malthus, lots of people credit their reading of the Bible for providing “the germ of their ideas” … so what? Does that make the Bible somehow scientific, or somehow correct?”
Who’s talking about the Bible? You are, not me.
“Look, he wasn’t an idiot. He did some interesting stuff. But the one thing that he was known for, the thing that inspired a whole range of thought called by his name, “Malthusian”, has been completely discredited.”
See above.
“If so, then I’m wrong, he was an idiot. A few years on a farm would have shown him that his Malthusian ideas were garbage.”
“Even a kid on a farm knows that 1) food production increases the more kids you have, and 2) population of your animals never goes up anywhere near geometrically, no matter how hard you try.”
“ Any farmer can tell you that. Your claim that he was “correct insofar as his observations informed him” merely reveals that you, like Malthus, might have looked at farming, but you never observed farming …”
Malthus grew up on his father’s farm, a country manor in Surrey. He was a farm boy, of the affluent sort of those days. Also, see above.
“Remind you of anyone?”
Nope. Paul Erhlich, I have heard of, but I never have read him or paid any attention to anything concerning him. Holdren- I don’t know who this is, the Malthusian Production Company I have never heard of, and what are Malthusians?
I think that your ire is misdirected at me. I don’t subscribe to any sort of doomsday scenario and opinion leaders never led me. My ideas are not of the popular media variety, nor of the best seller variety, and I couldn’t you tell who the latest guru/philosopher is, because I don’t need any of them. However, there is one thing that I can tell you: Malthus was a profound thinker.
Thank you for your attention. mpainter
Gail Combs said @ur momisugly January 3, 2013 at 6:04 am
And we should accept this because?
“Ian H”, my experience is that adult Greens claim to be nice but are hypocrites who turn nasty when they realize they cannot win by calm debate. Short of that, you’ll find they support violent people.
You correctly point to examples of the reality that collectivists always end up oppressing people while not being able to feed them.
British Columbia has a sort of regressive carbon tax, low income people are given a few bucks every year to lessen impact.
That’s the BC whose promise to hugely increase use of transit to reduce carbon dioxide emission is not being met. Significant increase but nowhere near promised, and the Victoria BC operation of BC Transit together with the drivers’ union is trying to eliminate those gains by squabbling. (The lower mainland, as in Vancouver BC, is a different operation, but it had to scale back its plans – they’d need to increase service even further to increase use of transit, but that is expensive since transit usually operates at a loss.)
As for few engineers in the UK Parliament, most engineers and business people think they have better things to do with their time than elected office, but they get hurt by politicians. There’s a good dramatization in Part I of the novel Atlas Shrugged, now a movie, still the biggest selling non-religious book in the English language.
@ur momisugly mpainter. Thanks. Important to always read the original rather than interpretations.
The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly January 3, 2013 at 3:42 pm
Gail Combs said @ur momisugly January 3, 2013 at 6:04 am
The problem is the word “sustainable” like so many others has been taken over and twisted to mean something else entirely.
And we should accept this because?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I gave you one link but if you want I can give you the rest. Please look at the link I gave you since it outline the actual progress being made by a government bureaucrat.. Also look at the Wildlands Map and the list of laws to make it happen. Humans get to occupy the tiny green dots. All else is off limits for the peasants including my farm. I am in a core wildlife buffer. The Future Visioning Plan I got from my county confirms this.
When you read this think of feudalism where every aspect of your life is controlled and you have no real right to own property. It says so right in these statements.
I say one of these plans. It was the draft for the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge and included all of the state of Massachusetts except the city of Boston and surrounding area.. You could not plant a crop, put in a fencepost or chop down a tree without filling papers and getting permission from the government. I have a copy of it in the attic. It is the reason my husband and I pulled up roots left his family and mine and moved to North Carolina.
This is the actual attitude of the United Nations towards land ownership. The document is not on the internet in the original, which is not surprising since it is from 1976. Habit II is on the internet. link
gnomish says:
January 3, 2013 at 1:22 pm
As is my habit, let me quote from Malthus directly:
This is the claim that is distinguished by the name “Malthusian”—that in order to keep things in balance, a bunch of people need to starve. This starvation is described by Malthus as a “check on population”, meaning people dying. It is this same claim which is at the root of Ehrlich’s claims.
What Malthus never seems to realize is that the amount of food produced is in many respects a function of the number of people who are producing the food. Food doesn’t just appear, it is produced by human effort. If you have a big family you can produce more food than if you have no kids, they help with the production.
As a result, Malthus disregards the way humans have actually solved the problem of population growth—through a corresponding growth in the food supply. That is why the doubling of the global population from 1960 to 2000, where we went from 3 to 6 billion people, didn’t lead to the food riots so confidently and unsuccessfully predicted (twice!) by Ehrlich.
Ehrlich is a Malthusian, that is, he agrees with Malthus that there must be widespread starvation to balance out geometrical population increases, that they can’t be balanced by increased production. As one judges the effects of Marx by looking at the actions of Marxists, so with the effects of Malthus and the actions of Malthusians.
I don’t know who Godwyn Strikes is or what he has to do with Darwin.
Are you channeling Spock here? Me, I’ll take a passionate man of reason over a cold reasonable fish any day. Not sure why you’ve adopted the Vulcan philosophy …
Regards,
w.
mpainter says:
January 3, 2013 at 2:12 pm
With an introduction of such insight and eloquence, it would seem almost churlish to refuse your advice to not read the rest of your missive … so I’ve done just that.
One question. Does the advice that I “better not read what follows” involve not reading just what follows in your comment, or did you mean to advise me that I had better not read anything that follows from you?
w.
@ur momisugly Willis Eschenbach:
I know you know: But for reference1kWh = 860 calories, which need to be made up to sustain the life of the person performing the labor. So we would need to add in the extra cost of 860 calories of food, which for the poor is substantial –in America, where food is plentiful, Americans would lose weight with this regimen. That is, their basic metabolic rate would increase! However, in poor countries people would need to spend a lot more money to support the work equal to 1kWh of energy.
This is a fascinating perspective and I agree with your excellent perspective here. A liberal engineer friend of mine is trying to say that energy prices have not gone up over the past several years – and says it’s proof green is NOT increasing costs. I point to fracking as reducing costs, and those reductions of cost being negated by the increases due to so called renewables. The increases are from subsidies, feed in tarrifs, cap and trade and general energy prices being forced higher than they otherwise would have been by requiring renewable energy to supplement otherwise cheap energy to the grid.
Willis Eschenbach said @ur momisugly January 3, 2013 at 8:22 pm
I believe mpainter averts here to social Darwinism, aka Nazism hence Godwin’s Law. Just as the Nazis appealed to Darwin for validation of their racial extermination program, the Erlichs of this world appeal to the Reverend Malthus for theirs. This does not mean that Darwin explicitly endorsed the Nazi racial purity program, nor that Malthus would have explicitly endorsed Erlich’s analysis of world affairs in the late 60s. Mpainter’s interpretation of Malthus fits well with the philosophical Principle of Charity, i.e. we should not attribute malice to the proponent of an idea. In any event, the Nazis and Erlich came well after the time of death of those they appeal to, so we can hardly ask them for their opinions about such.
Willis Eschenbach says: January 3, 2013 at 8:31 pm
One question. Does the advice that I “better not read what follows” involve not reading just what follows in your comment, or did you mean to advise me that I had better not read anything that follows from you?
====================================
I meant it for that comment. Really, I wanted no argument over Malthus, but I decided to put some light on the topic for the sake of others. I read your posting on the link that you provided and it seemed to me somewhat skimpy on Malthus.
mpainter
people do starve – by the millions, annually. do you suppose that has no effect on population? what presently limits the world population – or do you think the population is increasing unchecked? do you think it can double every 40 years indefinitely?
do you think war has nothing to do with resources?
and do you conflate the german dictator (godwyn’s law- his name is filtered – get it?) with charles darwin because the principles of evolution constitute the basis of eugenics?
i think mpainter is too innocently generous. you do get the nuances but pretend you don’t. you have higher priorities. it’s obvious what they aren’t.
as much as i sometimes admire your wit and insight, willis, it doesn’t mean every word you utter is valuable or even true.
by all means, flaunt it if you got it but learn to tell when you don’t. faking it is so… rommulan.
mpainter:
Yes, you are right, Malthus was “a great thinker” and his observations are applicable to much of the natural world.
But Malthus’ observations are NOT applicable to human population and/or human activities.
Simply, Malthusianism views population development as being like the growth of a bacillus in a Petri dish. The population expands to consume available resources until the resources are exhausted and then the population collapses. But humans are not constrained by resources in that manner.
People ‘make’ new resources by obtaining new sources of resources and finding alternative resources. This is why the Club Of Rome was wrong when its 1972 publication ‘Limits To Growth’ predicted mass starvation – with resulting population collapse – by year 2000. Agricultural developments enabled more food so there are now more people than in 1972 but fewer starving people now than in 1972 (n.b. fewer starving in total number and not merely in proportion).
A variant of Malthusian predictions of population growth is ‘peak oil’. All such predictions are plain wrong because they extrapolate present trends and ignore that human ingenuity responds to problematic trends and so alters the trends. Other creatures do not possess human ingenuity.
I see no reason to suppose that in the foreseeable future human nature will alter to stop the process of all human history. Hence, I consider Malthusianism to be irrelevant to any rational discussion of human activities (except in small, isolated communities which are now very few).
Richard
gnomish says:
January 4, 2013 at 3:46 am
gnomish, if I wrote something you don’t like, quote my words. That way, you won’t sound like the village idiot, wandering around muttering abour rummulans, uttering vague platitudes like “flaunt it if you got it but learn to tell when you don’t”, and not making sense at all.
Here’s the bad news. I haven’t the slightest clue what it is that I did that you are talking about. None. Consider that the next time you are convinced you are speaking clearly. From this side, it’s meaningless babble. Seriously. I don’t have any idea what you are upset about.
w.
S.Meyer says:
January 3, 2013 at 1:54 pm
@ur momisugly Gail
I enjoy your posts, but I have to nitpick a little.
About adding to your carbon footprint by exhaling…
Speaking of nitpick…
If we ignore all the carbon “used” to produce that food, but even then eating fossil fuels is possible – here the first link I found at a search in Google, don’t be confused by the… intermittent photos:
[snip – this video is inappropriate, and pointlessly presented – Anthony]
So exhaling or not exhaling is the question.
richardscourtney says: January 4, 2013 at 4:07 am
But Malthus’ observations are NOT applicable to human population and/or human activities.
=========================================
Malthus in a nutshell (in his words):
“That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,
that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase”
Who could dispute these principles?
Up to the time of Malthus, food was scarce in the sense that there was seldom a surplus and often there was a scarcity. History affords innumerable examples. The history of France can be cast in terms of the history of its famines. The era known as the High Middle Ages coincided with the MWP, and was followed by a general contraction, i.e. shorter growing seasons. This diminished the means of subsistence severely, and the Norse of Greenland disappeared. Retrospect confirms the principles of Malthus.
But can the principles of Malthus be applied to the present era of food surplus?
Again, Malthus:
“The population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase”
Enough said. It is true that Malthus was a great thinker
Malthus should not be held responsible for the application, or misapplication, of his ideas by the
various catastrophists. Nor should I.
richardscourtney says:
January 4, 2013 at 4:07 am
“This is why the Club Of Rome was wrong when its 1972 publication ‘Limits To Growth’ predicted mass starvation – with resulting population collapse – by year 2000.”
Perhaps you realize that the first COR publication on limits was in the 1950s – I recall they had a list of metal and the “ore reserves” of these indicated vast shortages in coming decades. They were totally ignorant of two aspects of these reserves:
a) it costs money to delineate ore reserves so a company only drills off what they need for planning – 10 to 20 years. When, finally, additional drilling doesn’t expand reserves sufficiently, they have a time frame for replacing these reserves with a new deposit – exploration and development, buying an undeveloped discovery, mergers and aquisitions, etc.
b) they mentioned the dire shortage of zinc – three quarters of which is used for galvanizing steel for culverts, barn rooves (that’s how it used to be spelt?) ducts, etc. Like all linear thinkers among ideologues, it never occurred to them that we could use other coatings or even different materials for culverts, rooves, etc.
So the COR took another crack at predicting disaster and failed. Are they still around?
Gary Pearse:
Thankyou for your post at January 4, 2013 at 10:04 am.
Yes, I was aware of those matters.
The Club Of Rome was still in existence this time last year so I suppose it is “still around” now.
And I implied the other resource issues which you splendidly illustrate when I said that ‘Peak Oil’ is another example of the Malthusiian fallacy.
Richard
mpainter:
re your post at January 4, 2013 at 9:31 am.
I did not intend to imply you were responsible for any “misapplication” of the principles of Malthus, and I apologise to you if my words made any such implication.
Richard
mpainter says:
January 4, 2013 at 9:31 am
That would be me, they are simplicity itself to dispute. All you need is a counter example. To take just one among many, Japan has plenty of food, but the population, rather than increasing as Malthus foolishly says “invariably” happens, is dropping. Malthus says it is impossible, that if there’s enough food population has to rise … but there sits Japan, lots of food, population dropping.
So, who you gonna believe, painter … Malthus, or your own lying eyes?
There’s dozen of countries that are counter-examples to Malthus’s foolishly all-encompassing claim. You really need a “red team”, someone to challenge your more wilder statements before they hit the electronic airwaves …
Since that claim about population increase is demonstrably wrong, the idea that the man making the claim was a “great thinker” is perforce wrong as well.
In animals, sure, population is often food-limited. He’d be right about animals. But for humans? There are a host of other things, from customs to contraception, that limit human population. Malthus paid no attention to any of them, he assumed we were just like the animals, food-limited.
Only Malthus and his modern followers are foolish enough not to have noticed that humans do things differently from the animals, and that, of course, means that neither he nor his modern followers could possibly qualify as “great thinkers” …
w.