[Oz-envirolink] Are you ready for a zero-sum world?

[hugh spencer]

Hi all

An excellent, if very chilling article (below), which only re-inforces my
dread of the possible paths of the future.

One way of avoiding it - is of course rapid ramp-down of population - the
"one-child-after-35" approach.

Dell is absolutely correct to wave the I = PAT* flag

"Population is the critical component of the Holdren-Ehrlich I = PAT
sustainability formula.This most basic ecological equation has been
truncated by the ESA from I = PAT to I = AT. The implication is that
the current ESA believes all populations (U.S. notably) can continue
to grow without limit as long as living standards are ratcheted down
.... and down. "

The problems are, of course, that no country is going to pursue a negative
population growth approach - as they will be looking over their shoulders
at the neighbours who are getting bigger - who wants to be the roast pig?

I have raised this issue with ESA several years ago - "not part of the
platform", "too divisive" and evidently several senior (= influential)
members in Ca were very hostile to discussion of the issues.

Ironically - reduction of population by natural attrition is a positive sum
exercise - in fact, as the populations really started to reduce - there
would be enormous reserves of highly accessible materials and other
resources becoming available as cities contracted. ("more than the riches
of Croceus")

I suspect that a world population of 1/2 billion could be maintained -
maybe even sustained, into the forseeable future - at quite a high level of
technological and democratic activity. The big problem would be how to
enforce the clamp on population numbers (nuke the breakaways??) - when
nature no longer has the controlling hand - shades of Brave New World??

Strewth - World Government!  (just what the Fundamentalists predicted!)

As Thomas Homer-Dixon says in Upside of Down (www.homerdixon.com/) - we
must start to develop scenarios for the future - or we'll have no models to
guide our  decisions.

Hugh


*  Human Impact (I) on the natural environment equals the product of
population (P), affluence (A: consumption per capita) and technology (T:
environmental impact per unit of consumption).





>The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy
>By Martin Wolf
>
>
>We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about
>two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a
>political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and
>serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost
>everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one
>in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real
>incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely.
>
>How long might such a world last, and what might happen if it ends?
>The debate on the connected issues of climate change and energy
>security raises these absolutely central questions. As I argued in a
>previous column ("Welcome to a world of runaway energy demand",
>November 14, 2007), fossilised sunlight and ideas have been the twin
>drivers of the world economy. So nothing less is at stake than the
>world we inhabit, by which I mean its political and economic, as well
>as physical, nature.
>
>According to Angus Maddison, the economic historian, humanity's
>average real income per head has risen 10-fold since 1820.* Increases
>have also occurred almost everywhere, albeit to hugely divergent
>extents: US incomes per head have risen 23-fold and those of Africa
>merely four-fold. Moreover, huge improvements have happened, despite
>a more than six-fold increase in the world's population.
>
>It is an astonishing story with hugely desirable consequences. Clever
>use of commercial energy has immeasurably increased the range of
>goods and services available. It has also substantially reduced both
>our own drudgery and our dependence on that of others. Serfs and
>slaves need no longer satisfy the appetites of narrow elites. Women
>need no longer devote their lives to the demands of domesticity.
>Consistent rises in real incomes per head have transformed our
>economic lives.
>
>What is less widely understood is that they have also transformed
>politics. A zero-sum economy leads, inevitably, to repression at home
>and plunder abroad. In traditional agrarian societies the surpluses
>extracted from the vast majority of peasants supported the relatively
>luxurious lifestyles of military, bureaucratic and noble elites. The
>only way to increase the prosperity of an entire people was to steal
>from another one. Some peoples made almost a business out of such
>plunder: the Roman republic was one example; the nomads of the
>Eurasian steppes, who reached their apogee of success under Genghis
>Khan and his successors, were another. The European conquerors of the
>16th to 18th centuries were, arguably, a third. In a world of
>stagnant living standards the gains of one group came at the expense
>of equal, if not still bigger, losses for others. This, then, was a
>world of savage repression and brutal predation.
>
>The move to the positive-sum economy transformed all this
>fundamentally, albeit far more slowly than it might have done. It
>just took time for people to realise how much had changed. Democratic
>politics became increasingly workable because it was feasible for
>everybody to become steadily better off. People fight to keep what
>they have more fiercely than to obtain what they do not have. This is
>the "endowment effect". So, in the new positive-sum world, elites
>were willing to tolerate the enfranchisement of the masses. The fact
>that they no longer depended on forced labour made this shift easier
>still. Consensual politics, and so democracy, became the political
>norm.
>
>Equally, a positive-sum global economy ought to end the permanent
>state of war that characterised the pre-modern world. In such an
>economy, internal development and external commerce offer better
>prospects for virtually everybody than does international conflict.
>While trade always offered the possibility of positive-sum exchange,
>as Adam Smith argued, the gains were small compared with what is
>offered today by the combination of peaceful internal development and
>expanding international trade. Unfortunately, it took almost two
>centuries after the "industrial revolution" for states to realise
>that neither war nor empire was a "game" worth playing.
>
>Nuclear weapons and the rise of the developmental state have made war
>among great powers obsolete. It is no accident then that most of the
>conflicts on the planet have been civil wars in poor countries that
>had failed to build the domestic foundations of the positive-sum
>economy. But China and India have now achieved just that. Perhaps the
>most important single fact about the world we live in is that the
>leaderships of these two countries have staked their political
>legitimacy on domestic economic development and peaceful
>international commerce.
>
>The age of the plunderer is past. Or is it? The biggest point about
>debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back
>the question of limits. If, for example, the entire planet emitted CO
>2 at the rate the US does today, global emissions would be almost
>five times greater. The same, roughly speaking, is true of energy use
>per head. This is why climate change and energy security are such
>geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to
>emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are
>indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world
>fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge -
>indeed, they are already emerging - within and among countries.
>
>The response of many, notably environmentalists and people with
>socialist leanings, is to welcome such conflicts. These, they
>believe, are the birth-pangs of a just global society. I strongly
>disagree. It is far more likely to be a step towards a world
>characterised by catastrophic conflict and brutal repression. This is
>why I sympathise with the hostile response of classical liberals and
>libertarians to the very notion of such limits, since they view them
>as the death-knell of any hopes for domestic freedom and peaceful
>foreign relations.
>
>The optimists believe that economic growth can and will continue. The
>pessimists believe either that it will not do so or that it must not
>if we are to avoid the destruction of the environment. I think we
>have to try to marry what makes sense in these opposing visions. It
>is vital for hopes of peace and freedom that we sustain the positive-
>sum world economy. But it is no less vital to tackle the
>environmental and resource challenges the economy has thrown up. This
>is going to be hard. The condition for success is successful
>investment in human ingenuity. Without it, dark days will come. That
>has never been truer than it is today.
>
>*Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, Oxford University Press
>2007
>
>martin.wolf at ft.com
>



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