Why does the Neo-Malthusians’ dystopian worldview — that human and environmental well-being will suffer with increases in population, affluence and technological change — fail the reality check? Why has human well-being improved in the Age of Industrialization despite order-of-magnitude increases in the consumption of materials, fossil fuel energy and chemicals?
I offer some reasons in the last of a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) at MasterResource.
I note that although population, affluence and technology can create some problems for humanity and the planet, they are also the agents for solving those problems. In particular, human capital and greater affluence have helped the development and adoption of new and improved technologies, which empirical data show have reduced risks faster than the new risks that may have been created — hence the continual improvement in human well-being in the era of modern economic growth.
A corollary to this is that projections of future impacts spanning a few decades, but that do not account for technological change as a function of time and affluence, more likely than not will overestimate impacts, perhaps by orders of magnitude. In fact, this is one reason why many estimates of the future impacts of climate change are suspect, because most do not account for changes in adaptive capacity either due to secular technological change or increases in economic development.
Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Most analysts recognize this. They know that just because one can explain and hindcast the past, it does not guarantee that one can forecast the future. Neo-Malthusians, by contrast, cannot hindcast the past but are confident they can forecast the future.
Finally, had the solutions that Neo-Malthusians espouse been put into effect a couple of centuries ago, most of us alive today would be dead and those who were not would be living poorer, shorter, and unhealthier lives, constantly subject to the vagaries of nature, surviving from harvest to harvest, spending more of our time in darkness because lighting would be a luxury, and spending more of our days in the drudgery of menial tasks because, under their skewed application of the precautionary principle (see here, here and here), fossil fuel consumption would be severely curtailed, if not banned.
Nor would the rest of nature necessarily be better off. First, lower reliance on fossil fuels would mean greater demand for fuelwood, and the forests would be denuded. Second, less fossil fuels also means less fertilizer and pesticides and, therefore, lower agricultural productivity. To compensate for lost productivity, more habitat would need to be converted to agricultural uses. But habitat conversion (including deforestation) — not climate change — is already the greatest threat to biodiversity!
Read the whole post here.
