Dietrich Vollrath — Who are you calling Malthusian?

Everything you wanted to know about "Malthusian" summarized, if you wanted to know.

Growth Economics
Who are you calling Malthusian?
Dietrich Vollrath

Knoema — When will India have more people than China?

Knoema

When will India have more people than China?

Factoid: India is expected to continue to lead globally in contribution to population growth through 2050, followed by Nigeria.

Africa’s Population Boom: Will it mean disaster or economic and human development gains?

Mark Buchanan — Improve technology -- and still use more stuff overall??

The basic problem is Malthusian in a different context. As population grows, so does use of energy and stuff. Physical processes are inherently entropic.

Both biological and social processes are physical processes that run on energy flows. The world may not run out of energy, but energy use dissipates heat. Technology can increase efficiency and also recycle some of the heat as energy for more work, but there are no perpetual motion machines. The question is the tolerances in which the system is operating.

The limitation is not so much that there is not enough stuff, including energy, but rather fouling the nest. There used to be a maxim in engineering that the solution to pollution is dilution. But that only works until the sinks begin to fill up. The heat sinks, like oceans, are the big ones. 

Particulate matter in the atmosphere is also a health issue, especially nanoparticles that the human senses do not detect and do not suspect. This is especially an issue with increasing urbanization.

The question is whether technology is capable of sufficiently increasing efficiency to overcome population growth. Buchanan argues that there is no evidence for this assumption that Paul Krugman and other economists make.

Physics Perspective

Improve technology -- and still use more stuff overall??
Mark Buchanan

What On Earth Happened To All Our Ancient Tribal Methods? We Don't Practice Enough To Find What Scales.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Humans have been coordinating on a truly massive scale, for tens of thousands of years ..... without computers, without convertible currency systems, without pencil and paper, and even without agriculture.

How? By constant practice.

And along the way, incredibly useful methods were invented, and practiced, including methods for conflict mediation, among many other applications. Those many tribal methods don't all scale, unadjusted, to fit our current, supra-tribal population densities & mixing rates, but most are necessary but not sufficient steps to practice, while constantly discovering how to organize on an ever greater scale.

Yet here we are today, with nearly everyone acting as though all those finely tuned tribal coordination methods never existed, and that coordinating is a totally new invention. :(

The Theology of Consensus

For Pete's sake! Have we thrown out our cultural methods with the bathwater, not just the baby? Most neighbors today don't even know how to co-run a neighborhood meeting anymore, let alone scale up a supra-tribal democracy. They never get enough practice.

Theologists of all stripes (including the economic theologists) mean well, but they have no prior experience, and near zero practice. Heck, even car salesmen have a personal theology, made up on the spot. That doesn't mean their theology works for their aggregate. Only feedback from group practice determines what does & doesn't work.

Many biologists & anthropologists & ecologists (& other natural scientists) lament the lack of effort to select more critically from our endless list of theologies (and other aggregate habits). Natural selection is eventually coming, of course. We're just not practicing how best to respond, once the hour strikes, or at least not paying much attention to how things are going.

Would we be instantly far better off if we swapped all banksters and orthodox economists for anthropologists and "primitive" tribal leaders? I'd sure vote to give it a try. At least the latter 2 groups have lots of practice and experience at something other than looting and bamboozling.

The Campaign to Neuter Our Fiat

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson)

Neuter our Fiat?

May the gods, universe and our own MiddleClass please take pity upon these sad people for their lack of insight, and lack of situational awareness.

This is a growing, ironically "well funded" and strangely distorted campaign. These folks do NOT grasp semantics OR fiat currency operations.

Over 2000 years ago the Sophists "proved" - using a linguistic loophole since named semantics - that if you owned a cat, and that cat was a mother, that it was therefore "your" mother. Ergo, we all have a responsibility to neuter our mothers.

It took over 2000 years before Walter Shewhart noticed the depth of the resulting problem, and publicly declared that

"Without context, data has no meaning."

Seriously, I'm more than half afraid that the Neuter-The-Fiat campaigners might endorse the same faux "logic" - and start neutering their mothers.

After all, just because the process by which a nation creates it's own, sovereign fiat currency is referred to by accountants as a "nominal," fiat debt, and is an expression of Public Initiative or "fiat," .... semantic sophism dictates that the nominal fiat accounting "debt" is OUR real "debt," right? Weepin' Erbles in a Marriner Eccles trap! Is that the best we can do here in the USA, in the year 2014?

Hence, a foolish population and it's public fiat are soon neutered, and hoisted on their own semantics. Worst, the emasculating campaign is funded, ironically, by the very people most desperate to maintain the buying power of their hoarded fiat currency. They desperately want to stop the flow of what they want! What can you do with such simpletons? Send them back to highschool?

Maybe the people running the Neuter-The-Fiat campaign will fall for a dose of their own logic? Fine. I hereby suggest that they maintain their cranial blood pressure by tightening a tourniquet around their neck, one twist per day, until their middle section gives up the battle & dies. They'll succeed, by stopping the flow of what they want.

Maybe it'll werk fer thum!

Guy May Have Seen A Burning Bush, And Heard a Forgotten Voice Bubbling Out Of His Suppressed Memory?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Maybe he fell into a trance while viewing a burning economics textbook in Harvard Square?

"In the next 12 to 24 months, capital markets are going to struggle on account of... are you ready?... not enough government debt." Shah Gilani

Why, that's amazing!!! Where could he have POSSIBLY come up with such an idea ... in the year 2013? :(  

At this rate, our group brain may fatally shrink it's cultural perspective by short circuiting it's own dialectic field. :)

Given the tendency for more specialists to know more and more about less and less, until they all know everything about nothing ... maybe we really WILL all end up as Libertarians.

How do we fight that trend, and adequately manage public perspective, not just individual perspective? How did Shah finally get this far? Maybe he had a dream where he was visited by the ghosts of Eccles'/Lerner's/Vickrey's/Mosler's/Godley's/Wray's/Mitchell's/other's-publications-past .... and their chorus's too?

Not to mention that the wording itself is so precious. (Banks will be forced to hold more [fiat] treasuries.)

Given that treasury securities are expressions of group credit invested in diverse forms of private liquidity ... haven't they ALWAYS - in one form or another - been a requisite consequence of expanding human activity on planet earth?

More people to express fiat?

Each with more options, yearly, for expressing both individual AND group fiat? (Unless we REALLY screw up.)

Don't be surprised that more net fiat is expressed?

Nevertheless, "It's a miracle?"

Only on planet Dogma, where the true believers Hear No Obvious, See No Obvious, and Speak No Obvious ... until it's [again] seen as a divine revelation.

Maybe it's so obvious now that even novice thinkers can taste, smell & feel it? Even if they obviously don't yet understand it? :(

Fine. Given this latest comedic twist, let's try a strategy adjustment. Hold "Burning Tush" events in WalMart parking lots, outside Ivy League economics departments, and in front of hedge fund offices. Heck, even on YouTube. Play Mosler tapes at the burnings, from hidden speakers. For effect, periodically dub in something like Bill Cosby's voice :

  "Noah! This is the Public."

[Public:  "Build me an economy. Make it F(P,Fiat) by F(O,Fiat)" *]

[Orthodoximists**: "Right! .. uh .. What's a fiat?" ]

Anyone know how to animate a ghost of DoubleFacePalm fiat?

* function of both population and individual options

** Orthodoximist: "Specialist in extracting dogmas out of asses."

Audrey Clark — Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization

“I believe and all of my colleagues believe that we are on a straightforward course to a collapse of our civilization.”

VTDigger
Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization
Audrey Clark

Technology running ahead of our ability as a species to adapt to emerging challenges arising from it.

After an hour-long talk about all the reasons why a collapse of civilization is likely and how hard it will be to prevent, Ehrlich offered one iota of hope: “If there’s any reason for hope, it’s that we do have a history of showing that human beings, human societies, in relatively recent times can change extremely dramatically, extremely rapidly.” 

Ehrlich went on, “For some reason — we don’t fully understand it — when the time is right, you can get dramatic, dramatic changes, which indicates to me that there’s a chance that when the time is right, we can change the way we behave towards each other and towards our environment and it can happen very very rapidly. I think … your main challenge is to find a way to ripen the time.”

Jeremy Grantham — The Race of Our LIves

Jeremy Grantham continues to sound the alarm.

The bottom line is that if we put our minds to it we can overcome normal inertia and abnormally powerful vested interests that oppose necessary change. Our population is likely to start declining in a few decades, slowly but surely, and the fertility rate of 1.8% or less would allow global population to fall back more or less gracefully by 2200 to a probably sustainable level of 4 billion, particularly if we sensibly encourage its decline. Important progress in alternatives is certain. Other scientific progress, especially in computing power will also help. Whether we can move fast enough on these fronts and at the same time reduce the output of greenhouse gases to avoid going off the cliff is simply not knowable for certain, but every minute saved and improvement made, betters our odds. Let the race begin.

GMO Quarterly Newsletter
The Race of Our Lives
Jeremy Grantham

John Vidal — Experts: Millions will starve to death as climate change accelerates

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.

Frank Rijsberman, head of the world’s 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: “Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt.”

The Raw Story
Experts: Millions will starve to death as climate change accelerates
John Vidal, The Observer

Humanity may be exhausting its ecological niche, apparently related to fouling the nest, and the result will be a culling. Ironically, many of the culled will not have contributed to the problem.

Gail Tverberg — The Long-Term Tie Between Energy Supply, Population, and the Economy

Our Finite World
The Long-Term Tie Between Energy Supply, Population, and the Economy
Gail Tverberg aka Gail the Actuary

2050 predications by OECD

A new report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development paints a grim picture of the world in 2050 based on current global trends. It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today’s, requiring 80 percent more energy. And with a worldwide energy mix still 85 percent reliant on fossil fuels by that time, it will be coal, oil, and gas that make up most of the difference, the OECD predicts. 

Should that prove the case, and without new policy, the report warns the result will be the “locking in” of global warming, with a rise of as much as 6° C (about 10.8° F) predicted by the end of the century. Combined with other knock-on effects of population growth on biodiversity, water and health; the report asserts that the ensuing environmental degradation will result in consequences “that could endanger two centuries of rising living standards. 

Ars [Technica] looked in detail at the 320-page report in order to summarize its key findings.

Read the summary at Peak Oil
Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place

The message from the OECD is clear: the status quo is no longer acceptable. “Progress on an incremental, piecemeal, business-as-usual basis in the coming decades will not be enough,” it states, quite categorically. And that’s not coming from an environmental think tank, but an international body (albeit one with a Eurocentric outlook) with 34 members with the remit of stimulating economic growth and trade.

US birth rate plummets

The number of children born in the U.S. has plunged 8 percent since its all-time high in 2007, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. More alarming: population growth is at its slowest growth rate since the Great Depression, according to the U.S. Census....

There's no doubt that birth rate is an indicator of a nation's economic well-being. Typically birth rates are lower in countries with fewer jobs, according to the OECD. 

The birth rate has been falling since the housing bubble burst in 2007. 3.98 million children were born in the 12 months ending in June 2011: 8 percent fewer than the peak of 4.32 million in 2007. Nearly half of that decline has occurred since the end of 2009.

Read it at The Huffington Post
Birth Rate Plummets, Young Americans Too Poor To Have Kids
by Bonnie Kavoussi

Write it off to unforeseen consequence of financial instability.

Mish — Population: The Elephant in the Room

Read it at MISH'S Global Economic Trend Analysis
Population: The Elephant in the Room; Peak Oil Implications on Population Growth; What Level of Human Population is Sustainable?

by Mike "Mish" Shedlock

It's the population growth, stupid.

We've Entered the Age of Mass Extinction: Goodbye Fish and a Whole Lot More

Paleontologist Peter Ward talks about the threats from global warming, rising population and our own plain stupidity.

The previous post was optimistic. This keeps things "fair and balanced."