In tonight’s IQ2 debate, Professor Steve Keen will be speaking on the “For” team, alongside Dick Smith on the topic “If we keep populating we will perish”: while some wish to grow the nation to spur economic development, others fear that the national population has already exceeded the “carrying capacity” of our land. Should humanity work actively to reduce its numbers, or leave nature to restore the balance? The following is an extract of Professor Keen’s speech.
Two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus argued that the masses faced a future of starvation, because “population, when unchecked, increased in a geometrical ratio; and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio”.
We know today that Malthus was wrong. Food production rose geometrically (or rather exponentially) along with population, as technology increased yields.
Malthus’s belief that “the passion between the s-xes will remain nearly in its present state” was also false. In modern parlance, Malthus got his “feedback effect” wrong: rather than rising incomes resulting in more children per family, it resulted in less — from seven per family in Malthus’s day to about two today.
The consequence of these trends was the opposite of what Malthus predicted. Rather than misery rising, the middle class and mass consumption did — at least in the West.
But what are still called “Malthusian” concerns are still with us today, because of a third factor that did not even figure in his reasoning: the physical limits of planet Earth. Human population today is 10 times what it was when Malthus wrote, and energy use per person is one hundred times as high. While Malthus was wrong about the causes, could Malthus times a thousand be right about the symptoms?
The 1972 Club of Rome Report said so, but as everyone knows, their predictions were wrong too.
Everyone, that is, who hasn’t read the Report itself. Few publications have been as demonised, derided, and misunderstood, as the “Limits to Growth”. For starters, the report concluded that it was possible to have indefinite economic growth. Indefinitely improving living standards weren’t ruled out.
What the report did reject was the possibility of indefinite “laissez-faire” growth — or more accurately, “Devil-May-Care” growth. In reaching that conclusion, they were careful not to make Malthus’s mistake of ignoring feedback effects. The approach they used is known as systems engineering, and while it was novel then, it dominates how engineers design new products today.
They modelled the world as a system with five key factors — population, technology, pollution, food production and resource depletion — where each factor interacted with the others. Rising population depleted resources, for example, but improved technology increased living standards and reduced population growth, thereby reducing the rate of resource depletion. Working from data before 1970, they derived trends in these five factors, and then modelled what this implied could happen in the next 130 years.
Their prediction was that at some time in the early 21st century, food and industrial output per head would peak and then decline; sometime later, pollution would peak and then fall, and by the mid-to-late 21st century, population would also fall. Average living standards would fall back to those of the mid-1800s.
This is the bleak result for which the Limits to Growth is known, but there was also a rosy scenario with average living standards three times higher than those of 1970. So it wasn’t all bad news.
There’s just one catch: their rosy scenario involved achieving zero population growth by the beginning of the 21st century. Unless population growth was, to use Malthus’s word, “checked”, they concluded that ultimately a crisis would occur.
It wouldn’t help merely to reduce pollution, or increase technology, or improve food yields, or even find five or even ten times as many resources as we can currently muster. If we didn’t also deliberately stabilise the human population, then interactions between population, resource depletion and pollution would ultimately do it for us.
Four decades after the Limits report, we’re still a long way from zero population growth. Though some wealthy countries like Japan and Germany have falling numbers, total global population is still growing as quickly as it was in the 1970s. If it continues to grow at this rate, there will be more than ten billion people by the end of the 21st century.
Only there won’t be, according to the Limits argument: feedback effects from the other key global factors will cause an ecological crisis well before then that will cause population to plummet.
This pessimistic conclusion is something that the anti-carbon tax lobby would doubtless reject, but ironically it has a sting for the pro-carbon tax lobby as well. The raison d’etre of a carbon tax is to prevent a crisis caused by rising pollution, but the feedback analysis in Limits argues that this isn’t enough. Unless we also end population growth (and increase food production, and improve technology, and reduce resource depletion), humanity will still experience an existential crisis sometime in the 21st century.
Given our failure to control just one of the factors that affects the sustainability of human civilisation, the odds that we’ll control the other four are negligible.
Two and a half centuries later, the Reverend Malthus may have the final, hollow laugh.
*Tonight’s debate is part of the Sydney series of the IQ2 debate, at City Recital Hall, Angel Place … Professor Steve Keen is Associate Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Western Sydney. He was one of the handful of economists to warn of the impending great financial crisis as early as December 2005. Keen won the Revere Award for being the economist whose work is most likely to prevent a future financial crisis. His is the author of Debunking Economics.
The limits to growth in this universe are so utterly vast that it makes the question utterly redundant. We don’t live in a closed system – the Sun is an external energy supply to our planet and supplies all the energy we need to make, extract, fashion all the resources we will ever need.
The only reason the human population will eventually fall is that – from an economic perspective – we will become redundant and the need for so many people will fall away.
Keen is usually a sensible economist – so I am very surprised to find him appearing on a panel with a fruit cake like Dick Smith and some silly Green senator from Queensland who thinks there’s votes in sucking up to farmers who only last year were complaining they couldn’t clear the land anymore and are now upset about Coal Seam Gas mining.
The world really has gone crazy this July. One can only hope that come August 2 we will emerge from the twilight zone and return to standard incremental change and growth.
Brave man, Steve, dusting off Malthus…. excellent piece.
I’ve been having a bit of a tinker with the hoary old Labor Theory of Value and the transformation problem … looking at the substitution effects of fossil energy to increase and substitute for labor power. Eating the past and the future simultaneously.
Marx missed that bit I think…. less so Fred Engels.
Brave appearing on the platform with Dick Smith too … you won’t have any friends Left at all soon.
Regards.
Solar energy is effectively fossil energy as well – it just lasts for billions of years and comes from ancient elements rather than decomposed life forms. Can be also quite dangerous in certain circumstances. Everything is fossil energy – you know the big bang and all that stuff. Coal and oil are just transitional fuels and will have a much smaller impact on the planet than an asteroid strike or an ice age for that matter.
Simon:
Well yes arguably – at least by your criterion – any and all energy available in the universe is fossil – as indeed the universe itself… and in the end it was all fizzle out… as the 2nd law of thermodynamics puts it – things fall apart.
But not quite so quickly as the oil and coal will run out and bugger the place up.
Besides it’s actually really handy stuff this coal and oil – and one day we might want to do something better than just burn it as if it was rubbish.
And yes asteroids and iceages can really mess up a planet but slow creeping desertification, rising sea levels and the rest will really mess things up for us and our our descendants.
Surely the sensible thing to do is play the long game and try and keep away from stuffing the place up too much while we wait for the apocalypse.
The principles that Thomas Malthus espoused are essentially correct in that notwithstanding changes in the rate of reproduction, if population growth continues without constraint, eventually population would outstrip the capacity the environment to sustain it.
What is often overlooked is that the exponential growth in food production in the last hundred years or so is substantially due to absorption of fossil fuel energy in the production and distribution of food including farming, fertilisers and long-distance transport. The invention of the steam engine, the steam locomotive the steamship and its derivative technologies of motorised transport and shipping have facilitated the global reach of food production and distribution, but also created a critical dependency.
The presumption of that the universe can absorb the excesses of the world’s population is a lunatic concept which displays no understanding whatsoever of energy absorption required for such a transition.
Whilst developed nations may reduce their birth rates, underdeveloped nations are not following this trend and the world’s population is rapidly increasing. If global warming is correct, dependency on fossil fuel will have to be curtailed with substantial economic effects including significant rises in the price of food’, diminished crop production, and possibly even a complete breakdown in some elements of existing foodproduction and distribution networks. The economics of farming is critically dependent on the costs of transportation from the farm gate to the consumer, and if energy costs continue to increase then food production will become less economic and large areas of existing farmland will no longer be viable.
If one looks forward 1 billion years or so, the debate becomes academic because the Earth will be fried to a cinder as the sun transitions to its ultimate fate as a red giant whose atmosphere will eventually absorb the earth before of ultimately collapsing into a neutron star a billion or two years so years further on.
In the meantime, we should be curtailing our population growth to live within available long run energy sources, the major one being solar energy which has effectively sustained the majority of life forms on earth for the last 3 to 4 billion years or so.
Our critical dependence on fossil fuels, developed over the last 200 years or so is unsustainable and we must shift away from this energy source. In so doing, there are some very serious questions in relation to population, and the allocation of much more expensive renewable energy resources to satisfy economic needs. This and would be much easier if the population is smaller.