The End of Doom (6 page)

Norton persuasively argues that Hardin's fears of a population tragedy of the commons are actually realized when the invisible hand of economic freedom is shackled. Many poor countries have weakly specified and enforced property rights. Poor property rights means that many resources are effectively left in open-access commons where the incentive is to grab what one can before another individual gets it. Norton points out that in such situations, more children mean more hands for grabbing unowned and unprotected resources such as water, fodder, timber, fish, and pastures, and for the clearing of land. Lacking the institutional incentives to invest in and preserve resources, this drive to take as much as possible as quickly as possible leads to perpetual poverty.

And what about in the past? Haven't societies collapsed due to overpopulation? To the extent it is true that some societies have suffered collapses, we now know that it was because they lacked the proper social, political, and economic institutions for channeling individual striving into a process of economic growth that ultimately promotes the accumulation of human capital and lower fertility. Very few, if any, earlier societies could be characterized as either economically free or respectful of the rule of law. Throughout history, most people lived in the institutional equivalents of open-access commons overseen by rapacious elites who encouraged high fertility rates and the plundering of natural resources. It turns out that economic freedom and the rule of law are the equivalent of enclosing the open-access breeding commons, causing parents to bear more and more of the costs of rearing children. In other words, economic freedom actually serves as an invisible hand of population control.

Hope for Africa?

The United Nations' 2012 Revision forecasts that more than half of global population growth between now and 2050 will take place in Africa, rising from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion. The middle-variant trend for sub-Saharan Africa projects that total fertility rate will fall from 4.9 children now to 3.1 by 2050, reaching 2.1 by 2100. As noted above, a more worrying study published in an October 2014 issue of the journal
Science
suggested that by 2100 Africa's population would grow even faster, rising from 1.1 billion to between 3.1 and 5.7 billion, with a median projection of 4.2 billion.

But is it plausible that much of Africa and many of the other least developed countries will remain high-fertility basket cases for the next several decades while the rest of the world modernizes, with concomitant improvements in the life prospects of women? Surely it is reasonable to expect that new medicines, vastly more productive crops and farming techniques, high quality education delivered via low-cost computerized tablets, cheap decentralized energy, and 3-D printing of tools and goods will spill over from the labs and factories of rich countries. These modern tools will go a long way toward ameliorating the chaos and poverty currently afflicting the least developed nations. In addition, the continuing global abatement of violent conflict is already taking hold in Africa and in other poor countries. For example, in October 2014, U.S. Naval War College researcher David Burbach and Tulane University political scientist Christopher Fettweis pointed out that “after the year 2000, conflict in Africa declined, probably to the lowest levels ever.” While they noted an uptick in battle deaths on the continent between 2010 and 2013, those casualties were still almost 90 percent lower than the average in the last decade of the twentieth century. “Changes in external support and intervention, and the spread of global norms regarding armed conflict, have been most decisive in reducing the levels of warfare in the continent,” they concluded. “Consequently, there is no Africa exception to the systemic shift toward lower levels of armed conflict.”

Among the regions of the world, according to UNESCO, adult and youth illiteracy are highest in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, among Africans aged fifteen through twenty-four, the male literacy rate stands at 76 percent versus the female rate of 64 percent. Obviously, the more that donors from rich countries can do to promote the education of women in the world's poorest countries, the better. In addition, Africa is rapidly urbanizing, which will also push fertility rates lower. For example, a 2000 study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Tulane University reported that African urbanites had nearly two fewer children than did their rural counterparts. Demographers working for the International Food Policy Research Institute found in 2012 an even greater urban-rural differential; Ethiopian women in the countryside had a total fertility rate of 6 offspring, whereas their city sisters averaged only 2.4 children.

This process of modernization will bring dramatic improvements in health and longer lives, resulting in a steep decline in fertility rates. Consider that the life expectancy of Bangladeshi women rose from forty-four in 1970 to seventy-two today. In addition, literacy among Bangladeshi women aged fifteen to twenty-four climbed steeply from 38 percent in 1991 to 80 percent today, actually surpassing the male rate of 77 percent. Consequently, the country's total fertility rate fell in just the twenty years between 1980 and 2000 from 6.6 to 2.9 children. It is now 2.2 children. If the current high fertility countries can realize the bare elements of political stability and economic freedom attained by Bangladesh, with its $750 per capita income, women will live longer and have fewer children. If this analysis is right—and most of the evidence points to that conclusion—the latest UN population projections will turn out to be too high and the musty Malthusian specter will finally fade away.

In his 2013 book
The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet,
technologist Ramez Naam asks an intriguing question: “Would your life be better off if only half as many people had lived before you?” In this thought experiment, you don't get to pick which people are never born. Perhaps there would have been no Newton, Edison, or Pasteur, no Socrates, Shakespeare, or Jefferson. “Each additional idea is a gift to the future,” Naam writes. “Each additional idea
producer
is a source of wealth for future generations.” Fewer people mean fewer new ideas about how to improve humanity's lot.

Instead of disdaining fellow human beings as a cancer or a plague, as modern neo-Malthusians do, Naam rightly argues, “If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor, then we should welcome every new person born as [a] source of betterment for our world and all of us on it.”

 

2

Is the World Running on Empty?

IN 2010, I WAS EXCITED TO VISIT
the Great Plains Synfuels Plant near Beulah, North Dakota. Why? Because I have some small bit of personal history with it. Back in 1979, I was a low-level federal natural gas regulator and a peripheral member of the team that was guiding the plant's initial development at the Department of Energy. I functioned as a petty Igor to President Jimmy Carter's energy Dr. Frankenstein. I was eager to see up close what I helped in some minor way bring to life. Why was the plant built? Because we were in the midst of an “energy crisis,” since the world was running out of oil.

One proposed solution to the energy crisis was to turn America's vast reserves of coal into methane. So Congress created the Synfuels Corporation, endowing it with $20 billion, with its goal being to eventually build as many as twenty-two enormous coal gasification plants, each one producing 300 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Since coal gasification was an unproven technology in the United States, natural gas pipeline companies were reluctant to invest in it. The federal government rushed to the rescue with massive subsidies. To make a long story short, the oil crisis passed and the $2.1 billion plant was losing money. In 1988, the Department of Energy sold it to a local utility for 4 cents on the dollar, and even now it still barely makes a profit.

Besides its relevance to my personal history, the Great Plains Synfuels Plant stands as a very apt cautionary tale about massive energy projects promoted and financed by visionary presidents and their equally visionary helpmeets in Congress and in the federal energy bureaucracies. One other thing: Just imagine how much more massive US greenhouse gas emissions would now be if all twenty-two gigantic coal gasification plants had been built. A misguided effort to solve a spurious resource depletion crisis would have had the unintended side effect of making global warming considerably worse.

In 1972,
The Limits to Growth,
a report to the Club of Rome, was released with great fanfare at a conference at the Smithsonian Institution. In a front-page article,
The
New York Times
hailed the report describing the collapse of civilization as “a grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.'” The study was based on a computer model developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and designed “to investigate five major trends of global concern—accelerating industrial development, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.” The goal was to use the model to explore the increasingly dire “predicament of mankind.” The researchers modestly acknowledged that their model was “like every other model, imperfect, oversimplified, and unfinished.”

Yet even with this caveat, the MIT researchers concluded, “If present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.” With considerable understatement, they added, “The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” In other words: a massive population crash in a starving, polluted, resource-depleted world.

Probably the most notorious projections from the MIT computer model involved the future of nonrenewable resources. The researchers warned: “Given present resource consumption rates and the projected increase in these rates, the great majority of currently nonrenewable resources will be extremely expensive 100 years from now.” To emphasize the point, they pointed out that the prices of “those resources with the shortest static reserve indices have already begun to increase.” For example, they noted that the price of mercury had increased 500 percent in the last twenty years and the price of lead was up 300 percent over the past thirty years. The advent of the “oil crises” of the 1970s lent great credibility to these projections.

The Club of Rome analysts were not alone in their fears of imminent resource depletion. In 1980,
The Global 2000 Report to the President of the United States,
issued by President Jimmy Carter's Council on Environmental Quality, basically endorsed
The Limits to Growth
projections. “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. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today,” began the report.

Peak Everything?

Let's illustrate the temper of the time by recalling the legendary bet on the future prices of five commodity metals made back in 1980. That bet resonates powerfully in the ongoing fight between neo-Malthusian doomsters and cornucopian optimists. On one side, gambling that prices would spiral ever upward as a growing population used up the world's resources, stood arch-doomster Paul Ehrlich and his two acolytes, John Holdren and John Harte. Holdren is now President Obama's chief science adviser and Harte is a professor in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley.

On the other side of the bet stood University of Maryland doom-slaying economist and author of
The Ultimate Resource
Julian Simon. Ehrlich deeply disliked Simon, who argued that the global trend of economic data clearly showed that human ingenuity was continuously increasing the supplies and substitutes for natural resources and relentlessly lowering their prices. So the confident claque of doomsters challenged Simon to a bet on the future prices of five different metals.

In October 1980, Ehrlich and Simon drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich the same quantities that could be purchased for $1,000 of five metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) ten years later at inflation-adjusted 1980 prices. If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990. There was no note in the letter. The cornucopian Simon won.

As it happens, the dire predictions of the doomsters were seemingly being validated as the prices for a wide array of commodities including grain, oil, and various minerals soared in the early 1970s. But that changed almost as soon as the bet was laid. Most commodity prices started drifting downward over the next two decades.

By 1992, even the alarmist Worldwatch Institute admitted that “recent trends in price and availability suggest that for most minerals we are a long way from running out. Regular improvements in exploitative technology have allowed production of growing amounts at declining prices.” A 2005 report prepared for a meeting of the developing nation members of the Group of 77 nicely summarizes what happened to commodity prices. The report cited data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development indicating that “over the 24 years from 1977 to 2001, real prices declined for 41 out of 46 leading commodities.” The report further noted that according to the World Bank, “real commodity prices declined significantly from 1980 to 2002, with the World Bank's index for commodity prices down 47 percent and metal and mineral prices down 35 percent.” The five commodities for which prices had increased or stayed flat were pepper, plywood, nonconiferous logs, tropical lumber, and zinc. The prices for staples such as wheat, corn, rice, cotton, wool, iron, aluminum, tungsten, tin, copper, and even crude oil were all steeply lower than they had been in the mid-1970s.