What do Doomers Do When their Predictions Fail?

This article is cross-posted from Al Fin Energy blog:

Many doomers -- particularly the thought-leaders of doom movements -- can be quite versatile and resourceful in the face of their many failed predictions. For those who make a living from doom, it helps to not only be clever, but to have an eye for the gullible rube, or sucker. Here is how doomer Paul Ehrlich has made a lucrative life from predicting countless dooms which never came to pass:

Ehrlich came to prominence in 1968 with the publication of his environmental blockbusterThe Population Bomb. The book’s central Malthusian thesis is that a growing population is unsustainable in a world of dwindling finite resources. As Malthus’ scenario failed to materialize, so too Ehrlich’s apocalyptic vision of hungry and dead bodies on the streets in the 1970s proved a total fiction. Not that this has deterred Ehrlich. He has continued to make a healthy living from a litany of population predictions – not one of which has come to pass.

The truth is that Ehrlich is the greatest failed prophet of our age. Yet amazingly, not only does he continue to collect his university stipend and pick up lucrative public appearance and book deals, for all his blatant failures, is still feted by the media. Take the journalistic drivel with which John Vidal’s Guardian article began at the end of April. Vidal’s interview announces Ehrlich as “the world’s most renowned population analyst”. So what track record of predictive success to date warrants such approbation? Ehrlich’s prophecies include:

That the battle to feed humanity was over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people, including Americans, were going to starve to death. (Of course, if eco-warriors butted out, GM foods could easily eradicate global hunger within a decade. But, in any event, food production is running well in excess of global population growth. To top it all, the obesity epidemic currently kills hundreds of thousands every year.)

England would not exist in the year 2000 (I just looked out of the window. It’s still here.)

“Smog disasters” would kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles in 1973.(Not only did it not happen, both cities continue to have the best air quality they have had in decades.)

In 1976, “before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity...in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” (Heard of the shale gas and oil revolutions that are set to last for hundreds of years and, beyond that, centuries of methane hydrates?)

In an Atlantic article in the late 1990s Ehrlich maintained that anyone who believed technology would provide the answers to the problem of scarcity was either a liar or a fool. (Heard of the technique of ‘hydraulic fracturing’ that has set in motion the energy game-changing shale revolution – not to mention deepwater reserves – facilitating century’s more of both gas and oil and cutting US gas prices by a quarter?)

In 1972 Ehrlich suggested adding a forced sterilization agent to “staple food” and to the water supply. (Shades of the SF movie Soylent Green? Would you trust any government who effectively ‘poisoned’ the food and water supply as part of a program of ‘forced sterilization’?)

All of Ehrlich’s solutions to his predictions are, of course, rooted in the need to overthrow democracy with a world government controlling and enforcing a global program of distribution of food and energy consumption. Ah yes, world domination – and a final solution. And if the very thought of this 1984-style one world government turns your liberty-loving stomach, consider what Ehrlich-esque policies have already achieved. In the 1950s the UN imposed a global ban on the use of DDT after environmentalists complained a few birds were accidently killed by DDT (actually through slight over-use of the chemical). DDT was singularly responsible for eradicating the world’s single greatest killer: malaria. As a direct result of the ban by the EPA in 1972, it is estimated that around a million people a year in sub-Saharan Africa alone die from the disease. The “solutions” of environmentalist visionaries should come with a global health warning attached.

No wonder Ehrlich has variously been referred to as “worse than Hitler” and “the Bernie Madoff of science”. To be fair, Ehrlich’s renewed concerns articulated in Vidal’s Guardian interview, about how the earth’s resources can sustain the 9 billion people predicted for 2050, was actually triggered by a new report from the Johnny-come-lately prophets-of-gloom at the Royal Society. Remember when the RS was the doyen of Newtonian empiricist real science? Not anymore. In a desperate bid to become appear “relevant” and justify its increasingly publicly-funded soaring price tag, the RS leadership is increasingly eschewing real science for speculative science.

Published in April 2012, the key recommendations of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet are thoroughly Malthusian. Like Ehrlich, the Royal Socity report is concerned about the Earth’s finite resources failing to keep up with population growth. It demands that developed and emerging economies (that’s everyone) “stabilise” and “reduce material consumption”. And, chiefly, that “reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership” to cut “fertility rates”. Pretty much your standard environmental doom and gloom – and based on an erroneous understanding of “finite resources”. As I have written elsewhere, the RS is developing a culture of anti-science by exchanging its empiricist soul for a mess of prophetic theory.

...No one would spend time publicly expounding preposterous prophetic theories that keep failing if there wasn’t a public appetite for them – and if there weren’t mega-bucks to be made in the speculative ‘futures’ market. Public speaking engagements, book tours, disaster movies, headline-grabbing articles majoring on apocalyptic and sensationalism and warnings are all money-spinning themes. Then there are the rewards of academia. In 1990 alone, even as the failed prophecies racked up, Ehrlich pocketed a cool $345,000 through winning the MacArthur Foundations’ “genius award” and another $60,000 being one half of an award from the Swedish Royal Academy of Science. “Genius” then, we must concede. Any butterfly specialist – which is what Ehrlich is – that can screw $400,000+ out of two international science academies must have some chutzpah. _Peter_Glover_via_GWPF_

There is a sucker born every minute. Fortunately for purveyors of doom, many of these cognitive newborns are suckers for stories of doom. From carbon hysteria to resource depletion to overpopulation to global death from pollution, many people just want to see civilisation collapse, or to see their fellow man suffer.

The purveyors of doom, such as Ehrlich, are happy to find as many suckers as they can -- individuals or institutions. Stories of doom are easy to spin -- most of them are just recycled tales of earlier failed predictions, after all. They are making good livings from selling doom vomit, in other words. What a pleasant thought.

A Pandemic of Malthusian Illiteracy?

Global economy optimists however say that "Malthusian illiteracy" lurks behind remaining adherents of Peak Oil theory - which basically says conventional oil production will stagnate and fall but demand will go on growing. _MarketOracle

As knowledgeable analysts come to understand that oil demand, rather than oil supply, is currently in the driver's seat, some of the impetus behind the peak oil panic has subsided. And yet the "Malthusian Impulse" continues to drive many observers, against their more rational proclivities. Still, global hydrocarban reserves continue to grow, year after year, and oil demand is slated to decrease in time.

New sources for transport fuels are likely to come from many directions, including new gas-to-liquids (GTL) technologies. Oxford Catalyst's microchannel GTL technology is very much in demand, as are other new varieties of GTL technologies. The market for GTL fuels may be more than 20 million barrels per day! Imagine the impact of that huge new supply on the global oil market. (Note that approximately between 5 and 10 million barrels per day could be produced via GTL from currently flared gas alone. Stranded gas could double that number.) More information at this PDF white paper download from Velocys, creator of the Oxford Catalysts microchannel technology.

A more conventional source for GTL transport fuels is the large scale technology championed by Shell.

In 2011, Shell began shipments from its Pearl GTL project in Qatar...The project is able to produce 140,000 b/d of fuel and 120,000 b/d of ethane and condensates... _Petroleum Economist

And that is just the beginning. As long as the huge price spread between the cost of natural gas and the cost of crude oil remains, more and more GTL projects will kick in to take advantage of this "easy money."

Second and third generation biofuels from biomass technologies are beginning to come on line, slowly (consult Al Fin Energy blog for updated news on this topic). Advanced biofuels technologies are not likely to take an appreciable bite out of crude oil demand for another 5 or 10 years. As long as natural gas prices stay this low, only the most efficient biofuels projects will be able to compete in the liquid fuels markets without government subsidies. But by the year 2030 if the technology continues to develop, the writing will be on the wall. This is a biological world, after all.

Advanced nuclear power technologies are likely to aid the development of new fuels technologies of all kinds, supplying safe and abundant power and heat for a multitude of energy development projects from oil sands to oil shales to biomass and aquaculture projects in cold climates, irrigation and desalination of saltwater in arid climates etc etc.

Other factors leading to a decreased demand for crude oil includes the increasing use of both natural gas and biomass as feedstock for the vast chemicals industry -- an industrial sector previously dependent upon petroleum for feedstock. (see Al Fin Energy blog for much more)

The ongoing global economic downturn and demand destruction extends from Europe to Japan to the US, and is beginning to put stress on the Chinese and Indian economies -- despite all the rah! rah! hype about the coming age of the Chindian global economy. Many nations which have maintained hefty consumer subsidies for transport fuels are being forced to reduce the subisidies. More downward pressure on demand.

Malthusian theories are appealing for their simplicity. And yet the never-ending and never-fulfilled Malthusian predictions of doom ignore the most salient and disruptive human technology of all -- the goal-oriented innovativeness of the human mind.

Despite the best efforts of energy-starvationists in the Obama administration, in the EU bureaucracy, in national bureaucracies of EU nations and advanced nations around the globe -- the prospects for abundant energy and fuels in the future are quite good, as long as the clowns in power do not destroy the economies they oversee.

If you have abundant clean energy and fuels, everything else is doable.

Peak Oil? Peak Water? Peak Lithium? Peak Everything?

"Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions....By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine" _EarthDayThenandNow

If you are a political activist whose income depends upon real people (people with real jobs who actually work for a living) believing that the world is falling apart, then peak oil doom, climate catastrophe, and peak everything are custom-made for your needs. Just keep repeating the doom-messages -- in ever louder and more strident tones -- for as long as necessary in order to maintain the proper level of panic in the herd. The news and entertainment media will happily play along, because nothing is better for advertising sales than a crisis -- real or manufactured, it doesn't matter as long as people believe it.

The "Peak Oil Idiocy" is clearly not enough to move real people into stampeding, so perhaps a bit of "Peak Everything Idiocy" will do the job?

Peak Lithium

Lithium is the element at the heart of the electric car revolution that many green energy enthusiasts are trying to foment....

Peak Neodymium

Neodymium is a rare earth metal used extensively to produce permanent magnets found in everything from computer magnetic disks and cell phones to wind turbines and automobiles....

Peak Phosphorus

In the 1840s, scientists discovered that plants need the element phosphorus to grow. The phosphorus fertilizer industry grew rapidly, initially by exploiting vast deposits of seabird guano left on oceanic islands. Today phosphate rocks are mined to produce the fertilizer....

_PeakEverything

And so on. There really is no end to the possible "peaks" of resource scarcity. And yet . . . haven't we heard all of this before, many times? It is understandable if the activists and the media never get tired of repeating the same old alarm cries, but why do "responsible" politicians and academics get pulled into the maelstrom?

The famous 20th century debate and wager between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon should have taught us something.  Julian Simon spelled things out fairly clearly in his free online e-book The Ultimate Resource.

The ultimate resource is, of course, human ingenuity.  Human ingenuity explains how humans can reduce the amount of platinum in a catalytic device by 90% -- and still achieve superior catalysis!  Human ingenuity tells how humans can resurrect depleted oil fields, discover new oil fields where least expected, and turn non-oil resources into oil -- as well as substitute other forms of energy such as nuclear electricity where oil was once used.  Human ingenuity explains why any meaningful peak oil is more likely to be " peak demand" than peak supply.

Thomas Malthus was much smarter and more honest than the neo-Malthusians of today.  Today's resource doomers are in the doom business as much for the pornographic pleasure of envisioning widescale human suffering, as they are for the profit and power mongering.  Harold Hotelling understood something about the economics of substitution,  and the smarter humans of today will take the trouble to learn to pay attention to ongoing ingenious substitutions that are taking place.

One cannot take the greens' and neo-Malthusians' predictions of doom seriously -- not when they have been chanting the same rant over and over for more than 40 years.  Rather than handing over our hard-earned resources to cynical politicians, activists, and their criminal partners, it is time to start investing in human ingenuity first of all.  That is indeed the ultimate resource.

Neo-Malthusians Haunt the Modern Zeitgeist -- Again

During the 1970s, the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth projected that, assuming consumption remained flat, all known oil reserves would be entirely consumed in just 31 years. With exponential growth in consumption, it added, all the known oil reserves would be consumed in 20 years. _Reason

Malthus was Wrong?
The spirit of Thomas Malthus roams the modern thought-ways just like back in the 1970s. Although global warming doom may be falling out of favour among more intelligent and scrupulous observers, there are plenty of other Malthusian nightmares hovering above the modern consciousness.

Once more, we are warned of a great worldwide famine approaching. Social collapse from peak oil doom appears inevitable, to large numbers. All of the multiple crises -- food, water, energy, climate, population, pollution etc -- are converging upon Earth's population like a flock of dark dementors, dooming us all to deep deprivation, disease, and impoverished misery -- unto death.

If all of this sounds somewhat familiar to those who lived through the 1970s, it is because the arguments behind this round of neo-Malthusianism are virtually identical to the arguments of the neo-Malthusianism of the 70s. Whereas the 70s Malthusians predicted that doom would fall in the 1980s and 1990s, the 2010s Malthusians are predicting doom sometime by the 2020s, 2030s -- and absolutely no later than 2050 -- or 2100 at the very latest!

You see, there is no penalty for predicting peak oil doom, overpopulation doom, scarcity doom, or doom of any kind. Any given event in the daily news can be turned to fit the theory. As long as the predicted doom is far enough into the future to give one time to adapt the theory in a plausibly retrograde manner, there is no risk.

Take Colin Campbell, one of the mythical giants of peak oil doom. Mr. Campbell is belatedly recognising -- after the 2008 oil bubble burst -- that demand for oil may be a lot more flexible than he once believed.

"I have changed my point of view about future prices," said Campbell, who used to think the peak in conventional oil production, which he believes happened in 2005, would lead to a relentless price surge.

Instead, the record rally led to a peak in demand in the developed world.

"Peak oil drives prices up in the first place. It has its own mechanism. We're sort of at peak demand right now," Campbell told Reuters from his home in the village of Ballydehob, West Cork. "I think presently the price limit is about $100."

For those who have painted alarming pictures of civil unrest as the world economy is forced to move away from conventional fuel and pay high prices for it in the interim, an inbuilt price mechanism to limit demand and move the world to other forms of energy should be a good thing. _Reuters

Not that Cambell is admitting any error, no. He is merely inserting a "fudge factor" just in case his claimed 2005 peak in oil production fails to result in a collapse of world civilisation anytime soon.

For those who are unaware of the saga of Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, read this to get up to speed. And for those who have not read Julian Simon's free online ebook The Ultimate Resource, you really need to do so ASAP.

The threat of doom hanging over our heads should certainly get our attention. But we need to be careful to distinguish true doom from faux doom. Otherwise we are likely to spend all our time and resources defending against a faux doom that never would have occurred regardless of all our efforts. In the meantime, true doom has been gathering its forces for the final assault upon our unprepared flanks.

Keep your dooms straight, so that you do not waste half your life fighting a doom that could never have been.

Source of animation via Astute Bloggers

European Nations Sign Suicide Pact

Across Europe, once-mighty and ambitious nations are singing a siren song of death and oblivion. Once great empires that spanned the globe are now dedicated to passing from the world stage without leaving a trace. A sad benediction to societies and cultures that once looked forward to an unending ascent of the human spirit.

In Britain, a government commission has drawn up plans for a "steady state economy" that forgoes future economic growth in the name of sustainability by cutting work hours and banning TV commercials (to reduce consumerism). In Germany, new bestseller called Exit: Prosperity Without Growth is just the latest in a growing body of literature pleading for Germans to learn to live with less. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy—who once came to power exhorting the French to work harder and earn more—has thrown his weight behind an expert report that declares the pursuit of GDP growth a "fetish" and strives to replace the GDP statistic with a broader measure of national contentment.

...today's no-growthers seem to make the same mistakes as their many predecessors, from Thomas Malthus—who predicted in 1798 that rising populations would inevitably starve—to the Club of Rome, a group of scientists who warned in 1972 that the world would start running out of key resources in the 1980s. Such movements extrapolate growth rates for resource use and pollution but don't take enough account of technical innovation, environmental regulation, greater efficiency, and behavioral change. Take Exit author Meinhard Miegel's claim that the world is running out of food. It largely ignores, among other things, the barely tapped potential of genetic engineering and other plant-breeding technologies.

Such faults are often overlooked because the no-growthers resonate in Europe today for intellectual and political reasons, not economic or technological ones. Critiques of growth have always been, at their core, about uneasiness with capitalism itself. That this critique becomes mainstream when capitalism seems to be failing us is no surprise. After all, the Club of Rome made its first splash in the 1970s, during a long slowdown when people were also becoming newly aware of environmental degradation.

...the no-growthers are unrealistic about how painful a no-growth reality would be. As the Harvard scholar Benjamin Friedman argues eloquently in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, a society that gives up on growth invites nasty fights over the distribution of limited resources and paves the way for intolerance and populism. That economic growth isn't everything—it doesn't measure the value of our relationships, our communities, our culture—is obvious. But so is the correlation between prosperity and quality of life, including health, longevity, and the freedom to pursue happiness. _Newsweek

Indigenous Europeans are failing to replace their own numbers through rudimentary childbirth, and are steadily being replaced -- at least in their cities -- by Muslim immigrants who may be on welfare, but can reproduce all the same.

The failure of Europeans to reproduce is part and parcel of the dying Euro spirit, the culture of the human dieoff. It is the essence of the modern green left, which is strongest and most suicidal in Europe. But it is almost as strong in Toronto, Seattle, and Sydney. The Obama - Pelosi reich is fanning the flames of the dieoff with every legislative drive and push -- in the quest to catch up with Europe.

But do Americans really want to be like Europe in that regard? Perhaps of those who voted for Obama, half do. But of those who did not vote and those who voted for other candidates, it is likely that over 80% oppose the dieoff mentality.

Certainly China, India, Brazil, and other third world nations trying to emerge into a more modern era have no wish to share the Luddite dreams of death with Euro-greens. The billions of the third world, in all of their wasteful polluting splendour, will hardly miss Europe when it is gone. They will simply move in and call it something else, something more populated and polluted, to be sure.

Cross posted at abu al-fin

The Wealth of Nations

Why are some nations rich and some poor? From Adam Smith to Jared Diamond, authors have tried to explain the discrepancy. Now Gregory Clark takes his turn--with a new book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, to explain the difference that makes a difference in the wealth and poverty of nations. The following excerpts of a review of Clark's book provide a small glimpse into the ambitious work:

In this quantitative, long-term economic history, Clark seemingly rejects the ‘institutional development theory.’ ‘Despite the dominant role that institutions and institutional analysis have played in economics and economic history since the time of Adam Smith,’ he writes, ‘institutions play at best a minor role in the story of the Industrial Revolution told here, and in the account of economic performance since then’ (10). He tells us that ‘economists, and the institutions they inhabit, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have adopted a false picture of preindustrial societies, and of the eventual causes of modern growth’ (ix). (2)

Clark writes that institutions alone are not sufficient to trigger a takeoff into economic growth. Indeed, do-gooders such as the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and UN peacekeepers all too easily cause only misery.....Clark attacks the authors of various widely accepted theories about the Industrial Revolution, and indirectly confronts many economic develop-ment theories, including institutional ones. He dismisses theories as varied as Gary Becker’s (that fewer children were being endowed with better human capital), Douglas North’s (that property rights and free markets after the Glorious Revo-lution got modern capitalism going), and Kenneth Pomeranz’s (that scale economies in a big, compact population facilitated modernisation).

....We must acknowledge that not all people are the same when it comes to fulfilling the requirements of modern economic prowess. Many societies around the world today are far behind where western Europeans were in their basic cultural attitudes in the sixteenth century (or the Chinese and Japanese in the early nineteenth). The slapdash work ethic of Indian textile workers is still a hindrance to competitiveness, and complex modern production processes require a more disciplined workforce and social climate than can be found in many parts of the third world. Recently, we were again reminded of the importance of fundamental internal institutions when the Kenyan flower export industry, once extolled as an outstanding African success, collapsed and quickly shifted elsewhere after the outbreak of tribal strife. We must therefore guard against the illusions that all third-world societies will now find it easy to transit from the Malthusian fraternity into the world’s expanding growth league, and that outside aid can do much to produce the all-important cultural changes.

...Clark has taken the magnifying glass to contemporary ‘institutional development theories,’ which have proven fruitful and influential. He shows to my satisfaction that it is naive merely to ‘export’ formal institutions such as property rights legislation, transparency compacts, and democracy to underdeveloped societies. To do so now is almost as unsophisticated as it was fifty years ago to simply send capital goods to ports in less developed countries. What really matters is the populace’s receptiveness to freedom, which is based on deep-seated cultural institutions and attitudes, and which does not grow overnight. By overlooking the cultural foundations of prosperity, development optimists and freedom apostles in Washington and Canberra are wasting resources. Do-gooders who simply offer alms may indeed cause harm if they entrench dependency and a claimant mentality among people trapped in the ‘Malthusian mindset.’ _Source

The last paragraph of the excerpt sums up the basic take-home message from the reviewer's reading of Clark's book. Quite provocative, in the light of conventional wisdom on the topic.

There seems to be at least a grain of truth in most of the "wealth and poverty of nations" hypotheses. Certainly division of labour in modern societies allows a greater productivity. But we must keep in mind that while legal and economic freedoms are important to prosperity, if the underlying society is not "prepared" to use those freedoms constructively and cooperatively, the same political and economic liberalisation that has so helped the Anglosphere to prosper, may be a deadly curse to other societies.

Finally, it is very important to understand that culture and genetics are intimately tied together. For a society to evolve from a "Malthusian" to a "Prosperity" culture, it must have the genetic wherewithal to do so. I suspect that such potential limitations to societal evolution may be more than just a step beyond what today's politically correct, post-modern, faux multi-cultural academics and think tankers are willing to brave.

Doing More with Less -- No Limits

There are two dominant themes in the western world today: the limited world view that wants to slash energy use, slash human populations, and release most of the human world back into the wild -- and there is the theme of upward evolving, and growing into a peaceful world of abundance, without limits. Julian Simon represented the latter view, par excellence.

The ultimate embarrassment for the Malthusians was when Paul Ehrlich bet Simon $1,000 in 1980 that five resources (of Ehrlich’s choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.

Buckminster Fuller was another person who believed that human ingenuity would allow humans to continue to do more -- with less.

Doing "more with less" was Fuller's credo. He described himself as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.

The key to humanity evolving (as opposed to devolving into a collectivist lifelong larval colony) is in learning to do more with less. Recent spikes in commodities prices convinced many superficial students of resource economics that Simon would finally be proven wrong. But scientists and engineers are beginning to catch the spirit of Fuller and Simon in their work. We may yet escape the collectivist larval farm.

Brian Westenhaus at New Energy and Fuel describes an Australian innovation that will allow the substitution of a cheap Teflon compound in place of ultra-expensive Platinum in fuel cell catalytic membranes. The cost savings will be immense, and should rapidly speed the transition to fuel cell applications for automobiles and stationary installations. It will also greatly extend the world's supply of platinum.

Brian Wang at Next Big Future presents several innovations that will make automobiles lighter and more fuel efficient. These include several new uses of carbon nano-fibers, ways of making titanium cheaper for use in cars, and the use of graphene enhanced plastics.

The ability to substitute cheaper, smaller gasoline engines for larger more expensive diesel engines, should introduce cost savings into many industrial applications.

Of course, the holy grail of "more with less" is molecular nano-assemblers that can manufacture an almost limitless array of products quickly, precisely, and relatively cheaply. Brian Wang presents an update on carbon nano-assemblers.

When confronted with a challenge, humans can either try to find workable solutions, or they can hide behind "limits." Whether "peak oil doom", "climate catastrophe", "overpopulation", the challenge of militant Islam to secular western ideals--a dominant refrain from modern left-limitists is "cut back!"

Instead of cutting back, however, ingenious and resourceful humans will substitute and innovate, and do more with less. The limits are in the mind. Think laterally, as well as logically.

Overpopulation Doomsday vs. Cornucopian Singularity? Has Malthus Been Oversold by Doomers?

Doomseekers--many of them journalists, authors, and celebrities--wallow in "peak oil", "global warming catastrophe", and other harrowing visions of worldwide doom. Ray Kurzweil and singularitarians, on the other hand, say the world is on the verge of widespread prosperity and abundance such as never before seen.

NYT blogger John Tierney weighs the question and decides that doomsday has been wildly oversold. Tierney points to this recent NYT article about Malthus vs. reality and decides that Kurzweil's cornucopian singularity--while not guaranteed--is more likely than the Malthusian vision of widespread famine and poverty.

Who is right--doomers or Kurzweil? It depends upon where you live. If you live in a nation or region with a very low average population IQ, you are apt to see many examples of the activity pictured in the photo above--subsisting on castoff and detritus. Generations of philanthropists, NGOs, religious charities, government aid and assistance, etc. have been lavished upon countries such as Haiti only to see them sink into violence and deprivation time and again. Below a certain point, average IQ determines what a society's destiny will be.

Nations of high IQ, such as Japan, South Korea, China, and European countries, have the potential of creating cornucopian worlds in the near future, if the political classes are sufficiently constrained. North Korea, Mao's China, the late USSR, etc. are examples of high IQ societies that allowed despotic governments to lead them into widespread misery and shortages of food and comforts.

When one looks at the margins--where reasonably high IQ societies are being swamped by lower IQ immigration--one finds that a good future is not assured. In a high IQ democracy, the deluge of low IQ voters can distort government policies away from the enlightenment Anglospheric traditions, toward more tribalistic policies that lead to societal fragmentation. When that happens, the more mobile and educated among the young will think about emigrating to greener pastures. Such emigration has the effect of speeding the transition from first world to third world, from high IQ society to low IQ society.

Tierney is right that for high IQ societies with moderate governments and controlled immigration, the cornucopia of Kurzweil is more likely than the mass starvation and overpopulation of Malthus and his modern-day disciples. But where in the world today can one find moderate governments of high IQ societies with strictly controlled immigration? The leading candidates for US President in the November elections are both seen as soft on illegal immigration from the third world.

A cornucopian first world would provide benefits to a Malthusian third world. Yet the lower the average IQ in the third world nation or region, the more difficult it will be to prevent widespread poverty, hunger, and disease within that region or country. Of course, if IQ remains the "one whose name you must not say aloud," not even think it!, then Malthus will have plenty of opportunity to laugh from his grave.

The world can support 30 billion persons of high IQ, who will behave responsibly and intelligently within the complex ecology. But just a few million low IQ persons can create a veritable hell on earth in the many urban jungles of mindless violence that the planet currently sports.

Intelligent and educated people breed significantly less than unintelligent and uneducated people. (see graphics world IQ map here and world fertility map here) But IQ is up to 80% heritable. Executive function--even more important to future success than IQ--may be even more heritable than IQ. The Flynn effect cannot change that. Advanced childhood education programs to enhance executive function and short-term memory cannot change that.

It is one thing to point out that Earth has abundant resources if humans will only act responsibly and use their innate ingenuity to do so. It is quite another thing to go on and face the problem fully, in all its dysphoric complexity. In the context of working toward a cornucopian future, widespread stupidity is a dysfunctional trait that not only individuals can possess, but also populations. That sad but critical fact must be addressed.

Fortunately, dysgenic trends can be addressed without taking unthinkably nightmarish and draconian measures. But without taking the first step of facing the issue, Malthus' chances for being right remain in play --for large parts of the world. That is what the term "a fractured singularity" means. Mere islands of post-humanity growing unevenly out of the developed world.

Anyone able to prevent large scale warfare during that sensitive transitional stage will deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, for once.

Update: This NYT article about a revolution in rice-growing appears to point at least in the general direction of cornucopia. Add to that all the other agricultural, biomedical, energy, and manufacturing revolutions, and the doomer point of view is definitely coming under siege.

[edited and updated since first published]

National Wealth and Poverty In the Age of Knowledge

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen imply in Intelligence and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that nations whose average population IQs were less than 90 IQ points could not prosper in a high technology world. This idea was a clear divergence from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations concept based on division of labour.Lynn and Vanhanen's ideas appear to be backed up by the graphic above, and by The Smart Fraction Theory of IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Still, as important as human capital is to a nation's wealth, there is more to human capital than a nation's population average IQ.
In Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, David Warsh puts a new twist on long-standing pillars of economics:

Thus instead of land, labor and capital -- the traditional inputs of economic theory -- it was "people, ideas and things" that mattered, driving technological change and entrepreneurial creativity. "No longer were the advantages of technical superiority to be understood as a case of 'market failure,'" Mr. Warsh writes. "They were part of the rules of the game." Such superiority was by its nature temporary -- i.e., nonmonopolistic. New knowledge constantly trumped old, and the law (rightly) gave ideas only limited property-protection.

More and more, economists came to see that it was knowledge that made the difference in modern societies -- e.g., in software, drugs, industrial processes, biotechnology and other parts of the economy where the upfront costs were large, the payoffs enormous and the benefits widespread. Economists inevitably turned their attention to the institutions or invisible structures -- constitutions, customs, property rights, cultural sentiments (like trust) -- that help to generate knowledge and sustain its effects.

In his admirably compelling account of economic thinking over time -- from Adam Smith to the present day -- Mr. Warsh shows a certain partiality to abstract mathematical theory. He might have given more credit to the thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, the great philosopher of freedom and opponent of central planning; or to historians such as Joel Mokyr, who has chronicled the effects (as the subtitle of one of his books has it) of "technological creativity and economic progress"; or to popularizers such as George Gilder, who has documented (and celebrated) the role of knowledge in economic growth, especially in our computer age.

Source
If knowledge determines the wealth of nations in the global economy, why does GDP correlate so well with population average IQ (with a few easily explained outliers)? Clearly, knowledge and IQ are highly inter-correlated themselves.

Still, when you look at nations with GDPs well above what would be predicted from average population IQ, an important truth about "knowledge and the wealth of nations" jumps out. Nations that economically outperform their population average IQ have a market dominant minority to thank.

According to Chua, other examples of ethnic market-dominant minorities include Chinese people in Southeast Asia; "whites" in Latin America; Jews in Russia; Croats in the former Yugoslavia; and Ibos, Kikuyus, Tutsis, Indians and Lebanese, among others, in Africa

It is suggested that the USA (and to an extent the Anglosphere, Europe, and Japan) constitutes a global "market dominant minority" in the sense of setting the economic rules, providing the market infrastructure, and militarily protecting the trading routes of the world so the market can function.

An even more intriguing twist to this dynamic: if executive function (EF) is indeed more important to the success of individuals than their IQ, and if EF can be taught (unlike IQ), is it not possible that EF can be taught to entire nations of children, thus increasing the future prosperity of the entire nation? I suspect this possiblity is real.

This concept of a minority providing extensive unacknowledged benefits to the majority can help a larger audience begin to understand how a next level civilisation would benefit the much larger between-levels civilisation with which it would co-exist on the planet. The accelerated outpouring of revolutionary scientific discoveries and technological inventions from a next level civilisation would benefit the between-levels by creating a cleaner, healthier, more affluent environment for everyone.

The same idea holds in principle for a singularity civilisation guided by a "friendly artificial intelligence." The abundance created by a FAI would be there to be enjoyed by the masses, in theory. Even without FAI's, a world where abundant nano-assemblers can efficiently and economically produce essentially unlimited numbers of consumer goods and vital infrastructure, is a world unrecognizable to modern doomseekers of Peak Oil, CAGW, population crisis, and other neo-Malthusian congregations of Luddites.

Peak Oil: The Reallity

The fashionable response to high energy prices is "Peak Oil Panic." But that is reacting to a fantasy scenario--not the reality.

As you can see, large supranational blocks are very different from individual countries. They have a tendency to plateau for extremely long periods of time. For example, North America has been on a plateau of about 14mbd for almost 20 years. Asia-Pacific has been on a plateau of 6-7mbd for almost 20 years. South/Central America has logged a couple of long plateaus, most recently a plateau of about 6.5mbd for 10 years.

The evidence suggests that the world (as the largest supranational unit) will plateau for a very long time -- even decades -- just like CERA says.

POD

Oil and coal are dirty fuels, and we would do well to move away from the pollution of fossil fuels to cleaner and more sustainable forms of energy. But "Peak Oil" enthusiasts are claiming that there is not enough time to transition. They are screeching from their blog rooftops and soapboxes that we are all doomed. They are not trying to create panic--mind you. They merely want to let us know what is coming, then sit back and watch the panic set in. But in reality, what sort of fringe-kookery are they?

Petroleum geologists are pretty sure that there is more than enough oil in the world to meet projected demand for at least the next 25 years. In other words, as I reported in my article “Peak Oil Panic” last year, geologically speaking “peak oil” is at least a generation away.

Reason

What type of apocalyptic visions do the peak oil prophets-of-doom project into our futures?

The most pessimistic of these Cassandras, like American writer James Howard Kunstler, predict nothing less than the wholesale collapse of industrial civilization. In his 2005 bestseller, The Long Emergency, Kunstler envisaged a future in which the survivors of the oil-peak catastrophe eke out a living in an 18th-century-style economy: the great cities are abandoned, almost all production is for local consumption, and the higher technologies have mostly been lost.

Kunstler's great hate is the suburbs, which are mainly an artifact of the cheap-oil era, and one gets the feeling that he would secretly welcome any catastrophe that destroyed them.

Commentary

We are seeing higher oil prices now--although if one corrects for inflation, the prices are not as high as most human-passive-news-receptacles tend to think. And while it is fashionable to say that world oil production will reach a sharp peak, then decline indefinitely down to zero--that is the fantasy of the neo-Malthusians.

Such groups as this and this actually want to see the human population forcibly reduced to about 10% or less of its present level.

But human overpopulation is not Earth's problem. Humans thrive in cities--if the cities are well designed and administered, and if the city's human average population IQ is high enough to support a high tech infrastructure. The population of Taiwan is far denser (636 per km2)--but more prosperous and better educated--than the population of China (137 per km2). China has attained the status of world's biggest polluter and greenhouse gas emitter. Rather than planning a violent invasion of Taiwan, China should be learning to imitate Taiwan's success.

The concept of the arcology--the self-contained city--is a useful one for viewing a population-dense but healthy and thriving population. But far more interesting than studying how many hundreds of billions of humans a healthy, thriving, technologically advanced planet Earth could support, is studying how many humans a healthy thriving technologically advanced Solar System could support.

The asteroid belt contains an estimated 825 quintillion (a billion times a billion) tons of iron -- enough to build shells around planets, gigantic cities in space, and starships carrying entire civilizations. How much is this iron worth? Lewis performs a fanciful calculation: At present prices of around $50 a ton, the asteroids yield $7 billion of the metal per person for everyone alive today, or an affluent standard of living for a population far larger. Moreover, iron is merely one element found in the Main Belt, which also contains gold, silver, copper, manganese, titanium, uranium, and much else.

Reason

As for peak oil, we can see from the graph above that oil production is not likely to reach a sharp peak. What will be seen for the next few decades is a long plateau with slight ups and downs. When oil production truly does peak, it will be due to a precipitous drop in demand caused by alternative sources of energy.

There may be ample reasons for a person to "plan for the Apocalypse", but peak oil theory is not one of the better ones. Still, for people lacking in logical facility and of limited imagination, peak oil belief may be better than selling crack on the street.

For others who actually care whether their thought processes are tracking in at least a rough parallel path to reality, it is important to test hypotheses against real world data points and trends. That is something that the quasi-religious CAGW believers and peak oil believers tend to avoid. For the religious and the quasi-religious, it is beliefs that matter, not reality--to our best approximation.

Peak oil and "global warming" are not existential risks. Rather, they belong to a class of "dysfunctional ideologies" which, if adopted by advanced societies on a broad scale, would contribute to the loss of vigour and resilience that a civilisation must have to survive. So rather than warning of existential risks, they become one component of a civilisational decadence and fatigue that could lead to the loss of a civilisation.

Interesting reading:

Oil Prices going down in 2008?

Why we'll never run out of oil--Discover Magazine

Confessions of Peak Oil (ex)Believer

Don't Panic written by a peak oil believer who does not see it as a problem.

Politics and Reality of peak oil scare