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.
gnomish says:
January 4, 2013 at 3:29 am
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?
…….
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.
yes, there is hunger, however:
“The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase.” (worldhunger.org)
On the other side very interesting to see is that the population is not increasing in almost all countries that achieve a certain level of development.
The absolute increase in world population (about 70 million per year) is now equal to what it was mid 20th century (1960s) when total population was about half the current numbers. By then about the same number of people were suffering of famine.
Meet Julian Simon the Doomslayer:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
see also:
By Julian L. Simon and Sheldon L. Richman
November 11, 1996
In 1980 the Global 2000 Report to the President began by stating that “if present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now.” The introduction to The Resourceful Earth (edited by Julian Simon and the late Herman Kahn) revised that passage: “If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded (though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now.”
There was a post about Simon here at WUWT not long ago:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/25/the-simon-erlich-wager-at-seven-billion-people/
gnomish says:
January 4, 2013 at 3:29 am
No.
A variety of things, from customs to contraceptives to food shortages to later marriages to people choosing not to have more kids.
And? Is there a point?
Depends on what you mean by “checked”
Perhaps I look like an idiot, but I do know that nothing can double indefinitely.
No.
Ah, yes. This is your explanation of your statement, viz
Perhaps if you spelled “Godwin” correctly people might understand the cryptic humor … or not. However, onwards to the question, which is:
What are you smoking? I haven’t mentioned either one of them, have no plans to mention them, don’t think about either of them more than once in a long while. What do they have to do with me?
So your accusation now is that I’m smarter than I appear? I believe that you are right … but not in the way that you intended it.
Finally, since my priorities are “obvious” to you, perhaps you could let me know what they are. My gorgeous ex-fiancee accuses me sometimes of not having any priorities at all, so if you could give me a quick list of some of my more obvious ones, next time I could wave it in her face and say “See! I do have priorities!” …
w.
Lars P.:
At January 4, 2013 at 11:03 am you say
Yes, indeed,and there are good reasons for this. For example, people in rich countries do not need large families as ‘insurance’ for times of illness and old age, so their having many children becomes a net cost and not a benefit.
And the decline of population with achieved affluence is why all forecasts of human population suggest the human population will peak then start to fall at some time near the middle of this century (i.e. well within the life-time of many people now alive).
If these forecasts are right then the foreseeable problem is the economic effect of population decline.
Sustained economic growth requires a growing population but the developed countries now have declining indigenous populations. Therefore, developed countries are importing people from poorer countries. This immigration will not be available if the poorer countries develop affluence so they stop producing surplus population.
In other words, the Malthusian fear of overpopulation is – like so many other scares – probably the opposite of reality. Declining human population is the problem which is more likely to be addressed in future.
Problems are addressed when they occur. And the desire of some to address problems they forecast may exist in the future is a severe mistake.
Each generation needs to address its existing problems so the effect of those problems is not continued into the future. Failure to address existing problems means their effects diminish abilities to solve whatever the problems in the future turn out to be.
The existing major problem is the world-wide economic crisis. Failure to solve it will compound whatever difficulties confront the future world population whether that population is grows or shrinks.
Richard
richardscourtney says: January 4, 2013 at 10:58 am
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
=========================
Please, not you, Richard, your words made no such implication and I did not take them so. The point was directed elsewhere.
And the point missed by a mile, as can be seen.
richardscourtney says:
January 4, 2013 at 12:12 pm
…..
Yes, indeed,and there are good reasons for this. For example, people in rich countries do not need large families as ‘insurance’ for times of illness and old age, so their having many children becomes a net cost and not a benefit…
Exactly. The population “check” is not done as per the Malthusian model as explained by mpainter above:
mpainter says:
January 3, 2013 at 2:12 pm
…..
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. ….”
it is not famine and wars that must “check” the human population. Higher living standard does it efficiently and if the improvement in living standard continues the human population stabilises itself soon – unless some countries do not manage to come out of the underdevelopment morass.
I agree with your statement that Problems are addressed when they occur. And the desire of some to address problems they forecast may exist in the future is a severe mistake.
Indeed, focusing on imagined problems whilst not addressing real ones binds resources, aggravating real problems.
I personally do not think that Sustained economic growth requires a growing population but the developed countries now have declining indigenous populations. is an issue.
The increase in productivity can compensate for declining population, at least to ensure increase in living standard even in the case of an absolute decline in economic output. Why should this not be a viable option?
The common Malthusian fear that we will just keep breeding till our population collapses, like a mouse-plague or a flock of locusts, is nonsense. Even the UN, which is not a source I would usually quote, agrees that by mid century the global population will most likely move towards stabilisation:
http://esa.un.org/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_overview.htm
The evidence of history is that as societies get richer, they have less children per family. That has been further facilitated by birth control. Given a choice, not many women want to be pregnant and/or nursing every year between the ages of 18 and 40.
Well, societies are getting richer, in some cases (like Japan) to the point where their populations are set to decline if they don’t do something about it.
The population-bomb fanatics just don’t like people – especially the wrong kinds of people – reproducing and multiplying. They ignore the fact that the environment in cities was much worse 100 years ago with a lot less people. Look at London, where the Thames was a filthy sewer and the air was often a brown, choking fug when Conan Doyle wrote his Sherlock Holmes stories. He didn’t even mention the horse piss and poo all over every street, probably because it was taken for granted. The population was about 6.5 million. Today, it is over 8 million and the air, water and streets are dramatically cleaner, plus people’s standard of living is very much higher.
The promoters of Malthusian overpopulation scenarios and the promoters of CAGW tap into the same seam of superstitious fears. These world destruction and species destruction fantasies have always been around, in one form or another. They are fun in comic books and movies, but we need to crush them anytime someone tries to sell them as reality.
The 100 watts electrical output requires more than 100 watts of mechanical power. Say 125 mechanical watts. Very few people can maintain that level for more than an hour. In most medical research, 75 watts is the level of mechanical work a healthy human can maintain for 8 hours, ie about 1/10 of a horsepower. The muscles then have to dump the waste heat. Pro athlete bike riders have this info, mountain climbers, etc.
A large adult male has a basal (thermal) metabolism of about 100 watts. Thats just sitting and maintaining body temperature. So the 100 watts mechanical work requires 400 watts of waste heat, thats 500 watts on top of the basal metabolism for a total of 600 watts. Your 100 watts of basal metabolism approximates to 2000 food calories per day. The average adult male diet is 2700 calories per day. That includes all average activity, walking around, etc. Assuming it takes 100 watts of mechanical work to produce 75 watts of electrical power, then the total food cost for that work is 5 times the basal metabolism, thats 10 thousand food calories per day on top of the basal metabolism for a total of 12 thousand food calories per day. Even if the athletes metabolism is a little more efficient than most adults, that still means at least 10000 food calories per day.
Thats why people don’t use farm animals on treadmills, the cost of food exceeds the value of the electricity produced.
For the CO2 exhaled, the rule of thumb is about 1 kg per person per day. So at least 5 kilograms CO2 is exhaled by the human generator. Compare that to the nuclear plant of 1 gigawatt electrical power with zero CO2 emissions.
Lastly, say one person exhales 365 kg CO2 per year, thats 0.365 tonnes. For 6.5 billion people, thats 2.4 gigatonnes CO2 per year. Human biological respiration is a tiny fraction of the total global biological respiration. Now, accountants say the annual fossil fuel usage results in around 30 gigatonnes CO2 produced. Estimates of total natural global biological respiration is probably 25 times that number. Therefore fossil fuel use has increased the total carbon cycle by about 4 percent, at most.
Lars P.:
At January 4, 2013 at 1:13 pm in your reply to me you ask me
I am not an economist and reported what economists have told me. My very limited understanding is as follows.
The difficulty derives from the desire of an increasingly affluent population to all share in the growing affluence. This makes it difficult to fill “menial” jobs (i.e. jobs that provide low pay). An imported ‘poor’ population overcomes this difficulty.
I can understand the cause of the difficulty.
Every member of a poor family needs to work to obtain income or the entire family suffers. But
a ‘rich’ family can afford to support some of its ‘unemployable’ members who are not really unemployable but are merely unwilling to do ‘menial’ work. Not all families will support such ‘drones’, but the proportion of families that will support ‘drones’ increases with growing affluence of the society. (Upper classes have always supported such ‘drones’ and historically payed to put them into politics or the clergy.) Hence, an already affluent society reduces its ability to fill necessary ‘menial’ jobs as the society gains more affluence.
But I don’t know why the importation of ‘poor’ people is the only way to solve the difficulty. Which is not to say that I know how to solve it: I don’t.
Richard
—Gee, I hate to tell you this, Willis, but Malthus, that profound thinker, is way ahead of you. He has anticipated all that you touched on.
You think that you are refuting Malthus by citing aspects of population dynamics that you imagine that Malthus had overlooked. But what you cite has been addressed by Malthus in his writings. You see, Malthus was a profound thinker. Really, you should do yourself a favor and acquaint yourself with the writings of Malthus before you post anymore sitting ducks.
You say “There’s dozen of countries that are counter-examples to Malthus’s foolishly all-encompassing claim” Wrong, again, Willis: there are countries that have such low birthrates that population is declining, it is true. Japan is one. But the profundity of Malthus encompasses more than you imagine: he recognized that population growth was held within the limits of available resources by two types of “checks”, what he called “positive checks” and “preventative checks”. Positive checks increased the death rate and preventative checks lowered the birth rate. The preventative checks he listed as celibacy, birth control, postponement of marriage, and abortion. So we see that it is the “preventative checks” that contains the population of these countries like Japan, Russia, and other Asian countries, as foreseen by that profound thinker, Malthus. Demographics, the discipline that incorporates the principles of Malthus, can examine these phenomena in better detail and give account for it.
You say: “So, who you gonna believe, painter … Malthus, or your own lying eyes?”
Well, you are inviting the world to choose between yourself and Malthus, that profound thinker. You might want to reconsider that.
You say: “You really need a “red team”, someone to challenge your more wilder statements before they hit the electronic airwaves …”
Talk about “more wilder statements”; no, I have no intention in competing with you there. You really should try some visine.
You say: “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.”
See above. Really, Willis, you need to read Malthus before you make these kinds of statements. It will save you a lot of embarrassment.
A few quotes:
Darwin referred to Malthus as “that great philosopher”, and wrote
“In October 1838… I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population… it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.”
—Charles Darwin
“But perhaps the most important book I read was Malthus’s Principles of Population… It was the first great work I had yet read treating of any of the problems of philosophical biology, and its main principles remained with me as a permanent possession, and twenty years later gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species.
—Wallace, Alfred Russell 1908. “My life: a record of events and opinions”
“So, who you gonna believe, painter … Malthus, or your own lying eyes?”
—Willis Eschenbach, 2013
Regards, mpainter
If Malthus was completely mistaken in his argumentation against Condorcet, then Condorcet presumably was correct, and we now live in a Golden Age of Equality (aka Utopia) where everyone shares the lack of prejudice of the French. Also, if Malthus was no great thinker, then the acknowledged sources of his ideas must also stand condemned of being small minded: Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, & Robert Wallace. How odd…
@ur momisugly Richard Courtney
I possess a number of “slaves” for menial work: a vacuum cleaner, a high pressure sprayer for cleaning the outside of the house, a hi-fi and TV set rather than my own jongleurs, an internet and telephone service to convey my messages, a Subaru rather then a sedan chair… The rate at which we have replaced menial workers with machines has been rather high lately.
I note that the beginning of this trend came during the High Middle Ages (aka the MWP). Wind and water mills began to be widely used to grind corn. The plough was much improved and that had its impact on the quantity of food grown per farm worker. That said, my neighbour has some film taken in the 1960s of an Eastern European peasant using a breast plough because such could not afford a horse or ox, let alone the lack of prejudice of the French.
@ur momisugly mpainter
Many thanks for stimulating me to reread Malthus and also discover the first edition of his essay. I note that this was severely criticised and that the later editions incorporated changes in his thought resulting from that criticism.
“So your accusation now is that I’m smarter than I appear? I believe that you are right ”
You admit to playing dumb and indeed, that’s one way to dodge a point.
“Finally, since my priorities are “obvious” to you, perhaps you could let me know what they are. so…, next time I could wave it in her face and say “See!”
You answered your own question. You have also explained the nature of the ‘ex-‘ in ‘ex-reader’. Buh bye, bully boy.
mpainter, you explained a whole raft of things. What you didn’t explain was the problematic statement I actually pointed to and quoted. Malthus:
See, the nettle you refuse to grasp is, the population DOESN’T invariably increase like he claims. That’s plain old, flat out, simply not true. Japan is one of many examples.
Nor are his most fundamental claims true, the idea that population increases geometrically and food supply arithmetically. If those were true, we’d have been dead long ago. Neither one is how the world actually works.
Now, you can claim that well, he understood that it really wasn’t arithmetically, blah, blah, blah. What Malthus missed entirely is that in many ways food production is a function of the number of people. This means that it has no inherent rate of increase, whether arithmetical or not. In other words, if the number of people goes up geometrically, then so does the food supply. Not arithmetically. Geometrically. But if the number of people goes up arithmetically, then so does the food supply. Not geometrically. It has no inherent rate of growth, it is a product of human labor and ingenuity.
Now, you claim above that Malthus saw all of this stuff … but if he did, why does he think that it is some kind of law of nature for population to invariably, not sometimes but invariably, increase if food is available? Why does he think that food production increases arithmetically, when it has no inherent rate of increase? Look, population doubled in my lifetime. But food production more than doubled. You show me where Malthus talked about that situation.
Your citations of Darwin etc. prove that Malthus was influential. And I will gladly grant you that he was influential, has been for a long time. In fact, his nonsense about population growth always outstripping food supply continues to be retailed by alarmists to this day. In fact, we call that particular flavor of serially failed doomcasters like Ehrlich by the man’s name, “Malthusian”. That’s unbelievably influential after all these years.
But influential doesn’t necessarily mean that he is any more right than any other 18th century doomcaster, my friend … all it means is that humans love apocalyptical stories and predictions of catastrophe.
w.
gnomish says:
January 4, 2013 at 5:06 pm
gnomish, have I been bullying you? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was being so heartless. It must be terrible to be trapped like a rat and unable to escape some big bully. Perhaps you could share with us how that made you feel … or if you’re not ready to face the public after your pain and suffering, perhaps you’d prefer that I privately call the grief counselor?
My opinion? We should be so lucky as to have you actually leave us. But I suspect that like many of life’s recurring irritations, you’ll show up in one of my threads again. Heck, maybe it will even be this one. You are too enamored with the sound of your own theories to leave me alone forever.
Plus which, even though I have to admit that I’m obviously a jerk, you have to admit that I’m an interesting and entertaining and wicked-smart and unpredictable and sometimes funny jerk … so people keep coming back, near as I can tell they read me just to find out what my current mental problems might be, plus what scientific insights my somewhat demented climate research has given me.
But at least there should be a short interval of peace before your return.
My best to you in your travels, don’t hurry back, write if you find work,
w.
PS—Before anyone jumps up to tell me how horrible it is for me to talk to poor gnomish like this, that I’m being krool to the lad, that I’m destroying the lovely harmony of the WUWT spheres, stop right there. Thats the wrong path.
Instead, try this path. I want you to reconsider my words in the light of a very different question—what are you assuming that I want gnomish to do? Serious question, which people often ignore to their cost. I don’t pick words at random. I always, always am crafting them and assembling them with some particular end in mind. So which way am I trying to move gnomish here? Metaphorically, do I want him to have a “come-to-Jesus” experience or take a “go to the Devil” path? Do I want him to respect me? Reject me? Dissect me? Neglect me? Lots of possibilities out there.
Once you understand what someone is striving to accomplish, only then is there a chance of a profitable discussion regarding why they’ve chosen the particular tone and words they used. Until then … not so much.
Willis, our population explosion of tenfold (or whatever) since the time of Malthus was only possible because of the contemporaneous expansion of the food supply. This is consistent with his premises. Others can see that, and they can also see that you can’t. You have made that plain enough. You seem to have a thing about Malthus.
“food production is a function of the number of people”
Again you were anticipated by Malthus, who certainly recognized that increase stimulated food production, but within certain parameters. But his postulates here failed with the agronomic transformation. Gail Combs has just posted on another thread figures that show how the number of people engaged in farming in the US has declined to a tiny fraction of those engaged one hundred years ago, or so, and food production has multiplied, of course.
Once again, you argue from an uninformed point of view. Go read Malthus, and then I can better help you understand.
The Pompous Git says: January 4, 2013 at 4:42 pm
@ur momisugly mpainter
Many thanks for stimulating me to reread Malthus and also discover the first edition of his essay. I note that this was severely criticised and that the later editions incorporated changes in his thought resulting from that criticism.
===================================
Most welcome, and yes, Malthus generated controversy since day one. Many objected in the same terms as Willis: “18th century doomcaster”. So it goes. Malthus reacted against the pollyannas of his day and they reacted against him. The truth is that Malthus was a profound thinker, yet he was capable of accepting criticism and recasting his thoughts to deal with valid objections to his premises.This is the sign of greatness.
@Robert of Ottawa says:
January 2, 2013 at 4:47 am
Willis, how much CO2 was produce by the cyclist to output an additional 1kW-Hour? Breathing is still part of a combustion process.
1kWh = 860 calories. at 5 calories per gram for starch/sugar and protein – this equals 2.6 pounds of sugar burned. I am too lazy to figure out the molar mass of CO2 released…
mpainter says:
January 4, 2013 at 6:08 pm
mpainter, I’ve asked the same simple question twice. When you work up the courage to stop nattering endlessly about extraneous things and ANSWER THE QUESTION, at that point I’ll believe you are serious about this. Until then, you are just flapping your gums and avoiding the issues.
In fact, let me repeat my previous post, since nothing has changed at your end:
So was Malthus right? Does population invariably increase as long as there is food? Or could there possibly be places where there’s plenty of food and the population is decreasing … like maybe Japan?
You gonna deal with that, mpainter, or are you gonna continue focusing on non-essentials and wasting everyone’s time?
w.
Willis Eschenbach said @ur momisugly January 4, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Willis, why don’t you give an example of a place where population decreased and food increased that Malthus could have known about. Your example occurs in the second half of the 20thC whereas Malthus died in 1834, more than a hundred years prior. The dramatic improvements in 19th century European agriculture occurred following Malthus’ demise, so you will need to find an example from the high medieval period during the earlier agricultural revolution.
Goodness gracious, Willis I thought that I had and, in fact, I know I answered that question, and more than once. Apparently it just didn’t sink in, so here I go again. Maybe the third time is the charm. The answer is yes, and the few exceptions to be found only prove the rule. The overall premise that population increases as food supply increases can be shown with innumerable examples, as I have previously stated. The era since the days of Malthus is the most obvious example of this. I’m surprised that you can’t see that. You should have. The exceptions that prove the rule will right themselves as natural balance is restored, obviously. The demography of such situations, when explored and explained, certainly will give some rational account as to why such aberrations occurred. This situation might be compared to the ravages of the plague wherein whole towns were depopulated and fields went unharvested because there was no market for the produce, there being a glut of foodstuffs available with markets obliterated. Here is an instance of depopulation and food surplus that seems to refute the premise of Malthus, but in fact does not really because Malthus addressed such exceptions and accommodated these in his postulates. Malthus addressed these exceptions and in fact, wrote notably on the subject of surpluses and their economic significance, profound thinker that he was. You see, Malthus made his mark in several fields, including economics. Now, I want to ask you to do something, something that I have asked before. Go read Malthus, and this time I insist. I am somewhat wearied of having to spoon-feed Malthus to you, especially when you refuse to do your homework. When you have done that, and you want me to explain something that you don’t understand, well maybe.
regards, mpainter
Malthus, operating within the context of the then current body of knowledge, was probably right ? Large parts of the world do seem to operate along Malthusian lines even today ? Obviously he could not, as we cannot, foretell progress, so rendering his idea’s flawed. It’s likely that the ire that his works are apt to produce today, is in no small measure, provoked by the long line of Hucksters who may have utilised ‘Malthusian’ type scenario’s to raise a fraudulent bob or two from the Gullible. Even so, it could be that he may warrant, along with Hobbes, some perusal, even if only to see how progress can mess up the best thought out theories 🙂
mpainter says:
January 4, 2013 at 10:32 pm
Let me put it to you again. Malthus said:
Now, “invariably” means always. Without exception. No contrary examples. 100% of the time. That’s called “invariably”. Obviously, if there are exceptions then it is not “invariably”, it is “mostly” or “almost all the time”, but it’s not “invariably”.
In addition, you misunderstand the old adage of “the exception proves the rule”. “Prove” in that adage is used in the same sense as in the term “proving ground”, meaning a testing ground. The meaning of the saying is that the exception tests the rule. And indeed, that’s the only way it makes sense. A rule is tested when you find an exception, but finding an exception certainly does not and cannot prove the rule is right. It proves nothing about the rule at all … well, save for the fact that an exception proves that the rule is not true “invariably” as Malthus claimed, only “mostly”
Look, the meaning of the words is clear. Invariably means always. Japan alone proves Malthus was wrong and there are many more examples. Stop trying to twist his words, stop trying to pretend that Malthus said anything but what he said. He said “invariably”, which turned out not to be true.
Nor is this a minor point. It is this same insistence on inevitability, on invariability, on inescapability that is made by the “Malthusian” alarmists in their claim that population will inevitably outstrip food production. Ehrlich was totally convinced that the “population bomb” was going to lead to food riots in the 1980s. Why? Because he believed, like Malthus, that the population would invariably increase to the point of starvation. That was the “population bomb”.
But events proved once again that both he and Malthus were wrong. Let me return again to his original logic:
As it turns out, however, the power of population was NOT greater, much less “indefinitely greater” that the power to produce food.
A clue to why Malthus was wrong can be seen in his very formulation of the sentence. He speaks of “the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man”, as though the amount of food were a function of “the power in the earth”. But food production is not a function of the earth, or the power of the earth, as he claimed. It is a function of humans, and of the power and imagination of the humans.
And this fundamental misconception, this mistaken paradigm that food production is a function of the power in the earth and not a function of human imagineering, kept him from ever envisioning the possibility that the population could double, and that at the same time the food production could more than double. Read his words above. He believes that the power of population is “indefinitely greater” than our ability to produce food. It is not.
I’m sorry, mpainter, but events have overtaken both him and Ehrlich. Our ability to produce food has proven to be greater, not “indefinitely greater” but absolutely greater than population growth. It is one of the premier achievements of my lifetime, the fact that after going from 3 to 6 billion people from 1960-2000, at the end almost everyone ended up better fed, clothed and sheltered than at the start. Malthus said that couldn’t happen, because the power of population was so dang strong, and I believed it in the 1960s too, I thought Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” was prescient, until nothing of the sort happened … because as events turned out, population isn’t that strong. We’ve proven conclusively that population is not stronger than food supply, the direct opposite of Malthus’s words in the quote above.
That’s why I say Malthus was wrong, painter. I’ve quoted his exact words, and shown exactly where they were in error. I’ve given the evidence.
I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide for themselves.
Finally, my point of view. Was Malthus ahead of his time? Assuredly. Did he think long and deep about the subject? Sure, wrote the book on it. Was he influential on other thinkers? Absolutely, his ideas have been much discussed right up to this very day. Hugely influential, for good or for bad.
And with all of that, yes, he can still be wrong. When he says that the power of population increase is “indefinitely greater” than our power to feed ourselves as quoted above, events of the last 40 years have proven him 100% wrong. When he says that populations “invariably” expand as long as there is excess food as quoted above, countries like Japan have proven him 100% wrong.
The crazy part is, no matter how many false alarms of Armageddon are issued by failed Malthusian serial doomcasters, that doesn’t dent Malthus’s followers in the slightest. No matter how many of Malthus’s statements have been shown to be clearly wrong, he’s still revered. No matter what evidence of the power of humans to feed ourselves is demonstrated, the belief persists that Malthus was right, that the population is just about to outstrip the food supply, and there will be food riots and mass starvation. Heck, Ehrlich is totally unrepentant. Twice he’s predicted global food riots and mass starvation. In the sixties he said it would happen in the eighties. In the eighties he said it would happen around the turn of the century.
Now? He hasn’t changed his tune in the slightest, still intoning the Malthusian chants and spells. Now, he says that actually he was right all along. He just got the date a little bit wrong, he says now, but he was right that there will be mass starvation and food riots. They just didn’t happen quite yet. Yes, they’re a third of a century late, but that just means they’ll be worse when they get here … same old Malthusian song and dance, sorry, not interested.
w.
You didn’t read Malthus, did you? like I asked you to. You still seem to expect me to spoon-feed you on Malthus. Well, I have better things to do. Go read Malthus, I say for about the sixth or seventh time. You reject out of hand the works of the man who inspired Darwin, Wallace, Keynes, John Stuart Mill and others, men whom you claim were “fooled” by Malthus, and you justify this rejection with harangues about Erlich and other catastrophists whom I have never paid any attention to, Malthus never heard of, and who may or may not have understand what Malthus intended. And it is clear that you have imbibed the whole of your “Malthus” from them. You should know better, because here you come to regurgitate those types which regurgitation you present as Malthus, and thus show your unfamiliarity of his writings. Apparently you don’t give a hoot about how you are perceived.
And why did you fill your skull with the effusions of these ”opinion leaders” if you so hate what they have put? Another mystery, because it gave you a case of red-eye that you have carried ever since. And, believe me, it shows.Your whole argument comes on like a diatribe against catastrophism and Erhlich, throwing in Malthus for good measure. Go read Malthus, the profound thinker. It’s like a smart pill.
Willis and mpainter:
I respecfully suggest that your discussion has devolved into an ‘angels on a pin’ debate.
You are both right.
As I tried to say in my post at January 4, 2013 at 4:07 am, Malthus was a ‘great thinker’ whose observations are directly applicable to the natural world, but his principles do not apply to human populations because human ingenuity acts to alter problematic trends.
Indeed, as I said, Malthus is completely irrelevant to human activity because humans can generate affluence such that for resource constraints are not limiting for humans. This unique lack of a limit makes human behaviour unique in the natural world.
This uniqueness was almost irrelevant when Malthus wrote his treatise. Very few people – and no society – had the affluence which the industrial revolution has provided the developed world. Hence, when Malthus wrote there could not have been counter-examples such as the Japanese example cited by Willis.
So,
1.
Malthus was completely right about the natural world, and he still is.
2.
Malthus was mostly right about the human population of agrarian civilisations prior to the industrial revolution.
3.
Malthus was wrong about the human population of developed civilisations following the industrial revolution.
But Malthus could not have known about industrialised civilisation because it did not exist when he wrote.
And he was only partially right about the human population of agrarian civilisations because even at his time applications of technology were separating the direct relationship of human population from resource dependence; e.g. a water-powered mill increases the grain production possible for a society.
The problem we now face is that modern-day Malthusians assume the principles of Malthus are applicable to industrialised civilisation, but they are not.
Humans have escaped from the limitations of the natural world which Malthus described. The escape was enabled by human ingenuity obtaining industrial civilisation mostly by replacing the little power of humans and animals with the much greater energy supply available from use of fossil fuels.
As mpainter says, Malthus is still right about the natural world and was mostly right about the human population up to his time.
As Willis says, Malthus was wrong about the human population following the industrial revolution.
Modern-day Malthusians dislike industrial development and deny its benefits. Indeed, many of them desire a return to agrarian civilisation with its poverty disease and starvation.
Richard