Coyote Blog

I had not seen this feature before, but I wanted to give the New York Times some kudos for its "retro report" which apparently looks at past news articles and predictions and wonders what happened to those issues since.  This report is on the failure of Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb predictions.  It is the kind of feature I have wanted to see in the press for a long time.  Good for them.

Sort of.  They fairly ably demonstrate that this 1970's-era doomster prediction was overblown, but then simply substitute a new one: over-consumption.  Ironically, the "over-consumption" doom predictions are based on the exact same false assumptions that led to the population bomb fiasco, namely an overly static view of the world that gives little or no credit to market mechanisms and innovation combined with an ideological bias that opposes things like technological progress, increased wealth, and free exchange.  The modern "over-consumption" meme shares with the Population Bomb the assumption that the world has a fixed carrying capacity, that we have or will soon exceed this capacity, and that actions of man can do nothing to change this capacity.

In essence, the over-consumption doom scenario is essentially identical to the Population Bomb.  In essence, then, the New York Times ably debunks a failed prediction and then renews that prediction under a new name.

I just finished reading Dan Brown's new novel Inferno.  Dan Brown novels tend to be love-it-or-hate-it things for me.  They are structured exactly like computer adventure games, with a series of quests and puzzles that lead to the next quest or puzzle which eventually reveal a larger story line and a final confrontation.  Just as this sort of adventure game can be engaging or tedious and repetitive, so too can be Dan Brown books.  The Da Vinci Code is excellent, the others are meh, just overly-convoluted snipe hunts.

So I had expected to either love or hate Inferno.  It turns out it was awful, but for an entirely unexpected reason:  for some insane reason, Dan Brown seems to have come under the spell of Paul Ehrlich doomsters, and has crafted a book with a deep fear of population growth that is right out of the 1970's.

Mild spoilers follow (mild meaning most of this is revealed in the first third of the book)

It is clear from almost the beginning of the book that Brown's hero, Robert Langdon, is on the trail of some sort of mad genius who is convinced that the Earth is headed for a horrible collapse due to human population growth.  This character is enamored of the medieval black death and believes that the best thing for modern man would be some sort of repetition of this kind of plague.

The exhausting part for any rational person trying to read this book is that it is clear that the author Brown mostly agrees with this character.  We know this because all of the arguments characters marshal against the villain are so lame and half-hearted.  In general, the tone of the response to this man is "yes, you are absolutely correct that human population growth will inevitably lead to a complete catastrophe but your idea of a plague is a bad solution."

By the end of the book, everyone formerly opposed to this scientist have come around to reluctantly agreeing with his point of view.  If you ever read Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6, where an environmental group tries to kill off most of the world's population, this is essentially the same plot written, incredibly, by an author that seems to agree with the basic idea.  If you are not convinced that Dan Brown himself agrees with the terrorist, I will also provide one more convincing piece of evidence -- though since it is a much bigger spoiler I will leave it for the end below the fold.  If you have read the book or don't intend to, skip below the fold and then come back.

This idea of catastrophic population growth is idiotic.  Accelerating population growth is a trend that is not a trend.

There is absolutely no trend towards out of control population growth.   In fact, the trends actually run in the opposite direction, with birth rates and population growth rates falling such that most demographers foresee an Earth stabilizing around 9-10 billion people and possibly falling in population after that.  Since Dan Brown uses senior UN officials in the book to agree that population growth will result in disaster, I will use UN figures.  These are from a 2005 UN population report.

First, population growth rates have been falling for decades and will continue to fall.  They are falling in every part of the world.

A cynic might argue that this is due to death and disease, but in fact birth rates are falling everywhere

This data is about 10 years old but Wikipedia summarizes the most recent UN data and shows this trend has continued (TFR is total fertility rate):

People focus on the amount the world population has increased over the last 60 years to produce shock numbers, but the real stunner is the drop in fertility rates -- nearly in half, which is really astounding.  I still have my treasured first edition of Ehrlich's Population Bomb.  It is hilarious reading, all the more so because he gets everything so wrong, yet the media still tends to take him seriously.

The recurring theme in Inferno is that man's greatest problem is that he has successfully tackled many diseases and thus increased life expectancy, and it is this longer life expectancy that will be the roots of mankind's Malthusian downfall.

However, exactly the opposite is true.  There is a ton of scientific work that says that longer life spans lead to lower fertility rates  (the other thing that most contributes to lower fertility rates is economic growth).  Here is a chart right out of the UN study linked above showing a clear inverse correlation between life expectancy and birth rates.   Correlation is not causation, but this is backed by a ton of other empirical evidence to support causation.

Wow.

There is no trend towards accelerating population growth -- the trend is in the opposite direction, to deceleration.  And folks who have underestimated man's ingenuity in feeding larger populations have always turned our to be wrong.  Ehrlich said there was no way --- absolutely no way -- India could feed an additional 200 million people by 1980.  Well, in 2013 it feeds an additional 800 million people to a better standard that the country was fed in Ehrlich's time.  Hell, we could probably feed an additional half billion more just by repealing laws that put a significant amount of America's food production into automotive fuels.

PostScript / Large spoiler and more discussion below the fold 

Continue reading ‘Trend That Is Not A Trend: Dan Brown is an Idiot Edition’ »

Fred Pearce has a nice article (in Grist of all places) about how the Population Bomb essentially defused itself.

For a start, the population bomb that I remember being scared by 40 years ago as a schoolkid is being defused fast. Back then, most women round the world had five or six children. Today's women have just half as many as their mothers -- an average of 2.6. Not just in the rich world, but almost everywhere.

This is getting close to the long-term replacement level, which, allowing for girls who don't make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. Women are cutting their family sizes not because governments tell them to, but for their own good and the good of their families -- and if it helps the planet too, then so much the better....

And China. There, the communist government decides how many children couples can have. The one-child policy is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more. Chinese women round the world have gone the same way without compulsion. When Britain finally handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility in the world -- below one child per woman. Britain wasn't running a covert one-child policy. That was as many children as the women in Hong Kong wanted.

This is almost certainly one of those multiple-cause things, and we have always had the hypothesis that wealth and education reduced population growth.

But the author makes an interesting point, that urbanization, even in poorer countries, may a big driver as well.  After all, in the city, food and living space for children are expensive, and there are fewer ways children can support the family (I hadn't thought of this before, but I wonder if industrial child-labor restrictions, which mainly affected cities, had an impact on birth rates by making urban children less lucrative?)  In fact, urban jobs require educations which are expensive  (even if they are free, non-productive family members must be fed and housed for years).

The media in the 1970's was filled with Club-of-Rome, the world is over-populated and running out of everything, Paul Ehrlich Population Bomb, end of the world stuff.  We know they were wrong on resources and pollution, but it turns out they were wrong on population too.  Again, the power of growth and wealth:

"When people got richer, families got smaller; and as families got smaller, people got richer. Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places"” such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India"”that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less"”the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called "˜the replacement rate of fertility'. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world's fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate."

Norman Borlaug, the founder and driving force behind the revolution in high-yield agriculture that Paul Ehrlich predicted was impossible, has died at the age of 98 95.  Like Radley Balko, I am struck by how uneventful his passing is likely to be in contrast to the homage paid to self-promoting seekers of power like Ted Kennedy who never accomplished a tiny fraction of what Borlaug achieved.  Reason has a good tribute here.  Some exceprts:

In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, they had begun a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. By 1968, when Ehrlich's book appeared, the U.S. Agency for International Development had already hailed Borlaug's achievement as a "Green Revolution."

In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. Last year, India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich's dire predictions in 1968, India's population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. Soon after Borlaug's success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia.

The contrast to Paul Ehrlich is particularly stunning.  Most folks have heard of Ehrlich and his prophesies of doom.   But Ehrlich has been wrong in his prophesies more times than anyone can count.  Borlaug fed a billion people while Ehrlich was making money and fame selling books saying that the billion couldn't be fed -- but few have even heard of Borlaug.   Today, leftists in power in the US and most European nations continue to reject Borlaug's approaches, and continue to revere Ehrlich (just this year, Obama chose a disciple of Ehrlich, John Holdren, as his Science czar).

Continuing proof that the world moves forward in spite of, rather than because of, governments.

Update: More here.

Update #2: Penn and Teller on Borlaug

It is good that doom mongers like Paul Ehrlich have been so thoroughly discredited.  But could anyone have imagined that not only are we not facing "Population Bomb" style famines, but we are in fact spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money to promote burning food in cars?

I am not sure how anyone thought this was a good idea, since

1. Every scientific study in the world not conducted by an institution in Iowa have shown that corn-based ethanol uses more energy than it produces, does not reduce CO2, and creates new environmental problems in terms of land and water use.
2. Sixty seconds of math would have shown that even diverting ALL of US corn production to ethanol would only replace a fraction of our transportation fuel use.

Apparently, Nebraska has reached a milestone of sorts: (HT Tom Nelson)

With three new plants
added in November, annual corn demand for ethanol production in
Nebraska passed the 500-million-bushel mark for the first time, using
37% of Nebraska's corn.

How much fuel has this produced?

"Today, that ambitious
directive has become a reality." Sneller says "At current rates,
Nebraska plants will use 514 million bushels of corn annually to
produce 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol. By the end of 2008, Nebraska
plants will process 860 million bushels into 2.3 billion gallons of
ethanol. Distillers grain, a co-product of ethanol production, is
widely accepted and marketed as a superior livestock feed."

This is enough ethanol to replace about a billion gallons of gasoline (since ethanol has less energy content than gasoline).  This represents about  0.7% of US gasoline usage.  The cost?  Well, I don't know how many billions of subsidy dollars have flowed to Nebraska, but there is also this:

Corn prices have
remained virtually unchanged since World War II. Increased demand from
ethanol production has raised average corn prices by 70% and is driving
an economic resurgence in rural Nebraska, according to Todd Sneller,
administrator of the Nebraska Ethanol Board.

So we have spent billions of taxpayer dollars, have diverted about 40% of Nebraska's corn output, and we've raised prices on corn 70% all to replace less than a percent of US gasoline usage.  If we could really do the fuel balance on the whole system, we would likely find that total fossil fuel usage actually went up rather than down through these actions.

Never have I seen an issue where so many thoughtful people on both sides of the political aisle united in agreement that a program makes no sense since... well, since farm subsidies.  Which, illustratively, have not gone away despite 80 years of trying.  As I wrote here:

Companies are currently building massive subsidy-magnets
biofuel plants.  Once these investments are in place, there is going to
be a huge entrenched base of investors and workers who are going to
wield every bit of political power they can to retain subsidies forever
to protect their jobs and their investment.  Biofuel subsidies will be
as intractable as peanut and sugar subsidies and protections.

Reason's Hit and Run points to this article by Chirstopher Hayes that helps connect the dots.  The founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA, both prominent conservative anti-immigration groups, is John Tanton.  Apparently, Tanton's roots are in Ehrlich style population bomb limits-to-growth zero-sum fearmongering.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich made these ideas mainstream
with his book, The Population Bomb. With terrifying certainty, Ehrlich
argued that the exponential growth in population and the incremental growth in
food could only mean one thing: mass famine. "The battle to feed all of humanity
is over," the book begins. "In the 1970s "¦ hundreds of millions of people are
going to starve to death."

It was an instant sensation, turning "overpopulation" into a hot topic and
landing Ehrlich repeatedly on "The Tonight Show." Tanton had been ahead of the
curve. As early as the '50s, he avidly read reports from the Population
Reference Bureau, and by the time Ehrlich's book was published, he and Mary Lou
had already started work on the first Northern Michigan chapter of Planned
Parenthood. "I believed in the multiplication tables," says Tanton. "Since I was
a physician and could do something about birth control, it struck me that this
was where I could make my contribution to the conservation movement."...

Tanton, whose worldview was forged in this intellectual milieu, is haunted by
the spectre of an apocalypse just over the horizon, and the thought that he is
one of a select few who see it coming. Sitting at his desk during one of our
interviews, he reaches into a drawer, withdraws an electric metronome and flicks
it on. As the device pulses at 135 beats per minute, he explains that each beat
is a new birth (at the 1969 rate), and each new birth requires resources: food,
clothing, education. It's a trick he used when he gave talks on population in
the '70s, and it's effective. His voice barely rises over the percussive
onslaught, and after just 30 seconds you want to yell: "Make it stop!"

I never really realized this connection or Tanton's roots (for reasons outlined below, his public message has moved on from environmentalism and overpopulation).  Tanton's real reason for being anti-immigration is this:

He explains that reducing immigration will force countries like Mexico to
confront their own population growth rates. "Each country," he says, "ought to
try to match its population to its resource base."

Whatever the hell that means*, since the amount of population the
world's "resource base" is able to support has grown exponentially over
the last 100 years.  But the really, really nutty part, the part that
separates him from the just-plain-wrong Ehrlich types, is the fact the
he thinks this resource matching has to proceed country by country.  No
global markets for this guy, I guess.  Somehow people crossing an
immaginary line in the Sonoran desert makes the population less
sustainable?  On the south side, things are OK, but move 100 miles
north and suddenly the world is doomed? 

In fact, the reality is just the opposite, for the same reasons that
Ehrlich's population bomb theory went bust -- which is that increasing
wealth and technology always tend to lower birth rates.  So I would
argue that immigration from Mexico to the US, with the wealth creation
potential that provides the immigrants, is  likely to result in a net
reduction of world birth rates.

Of course, Tanton has moved on, because the immigration movement could
not get excited about his environmental message and environmental
groups couldn't make heads or tails of his immigration message.

Crisscrossing the country, Tanton found little interest in his
conservation-based arguments for reduced immigration, but kept hearing the same
complaint. ""ËœI tell you what pisses me off,'" Tanton recalls people saying.
""ËœIt's going into a ballot box and finding a ballot in a language I can't read.'
So it became clear that the language question had a lot more emotional power
than the immigration question."

Tanton tried to persuade FAIR to harness this "emotional power," but the
board declined. So in 1983, Tanton sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of a
new group he created called U.S. English. Typically, Tanton says, direct mail
garners a contribution from around 1 percent of recipients. "The very first
mailing we ever did for U.S. English got almost a 10 percent return," he says.
"That's unheard of." John Tanton had discovered the power of the culture
war.

The success of U.S. English taught Tanton a crucial lesson. If the
immigration restriction movement was to succeed, it would have to be rooted in
an emotional appeal to those who felt that their country, their language, their
very identity was under assault. "Feelings," Tanton says in a tone reminiscent
of Spock sharing some hard-won insight on human behavior, "trump facts."

I have never, ever understood why Americans get so unbelievably bent out of shape when they encounter a language other than English, but unfortunately this bizarre brand of xenophobia is fairly prevalent in this country, and Tanton has taken to tapping into it.  The article continues on to describe how Tanton has been very successful in making common cause with a broad range of people, from liberal activists to outright racists.

I found the article interesting as much for the descriptions of all the tactics and campaigns that failed to motivate the anti-immigration base in the past.  My sense from the article is that Tanton understands full-well that if the illegal immigrants were actually 12 million Canadian English-speaking Anglos, he would not be having near the success in getting people riled up about immigration.

* its amazing how many people talk about the world approaching some resource limit, but in fact no one has ever offered any shred of evidence as to where the world's population is vis-a-vis some mythical "carrying capacity".  Every prediction that we are approaching the limits of growth have been wrong.  Julian Simon pointed out that the only resource that matters is the human mind, and it never runs short.  He used commodities prices to prove his point, and beat Ehrlich in his famous bet. 

Below in my first post on the old 1968 edition of The Population Bomb, I said one of the key mistakes of these doomsayers was static analysis, which I described as:

blind projection of trendlines without any allowance for individuals
actually doing something to alter those trends, particularly in
response to pricing signals.  This leads not only to predictions of
disaster, but to the consistent conclusion that only governments
coercing individuals on a massive scale can avert dire consequences for
humanity

A great example of the static analysis fallacy in action today in in the debate on school choice.  School choice opponents often bring out some or all of these arguments:

• Private schools are often more expensive than public schools, so even with vouchers set at the state per pupil spending, many won't be able to afford private schools
• Private schools have admissions requirements and testing, such that many students will not be able to meet the cut
• Private schools are disproportionately religious, leaving few options for secular parents
• There are no where near enough private schools for the potential demand

Do you see the consistent fallacy?  All the arguments assume that private schools, in terms of pricing, mission, supply, etc., will remain static and unchanged after a voucher program is instituted.  I hate to waste electrons stating the obvious, but the private schools that exist today did not evolve in a vacuum.  They evolved in a world of monopoly public schools, and their nature is based on that reality.  Change that backdrop, and the schools will change.

For example, take the cost issue.  Sure, many private schools are expensive.  The main reason is that private schools have been created in an environment where their customers must have the ability to pay for their kid's education twice.  My kids go to private school, and every month I pay their bill to go to a public school they don't attend (via my property taxes) and then I pay a second bill to the private school they do attend.  As a result, many private schools have high prices, because their customer base can pay.  If the government instituted a special tax so that everyone received a government-funded Yugo, don't you think that the number of inexpensive cars sold by private companies might dry up some?

But private schooling does not have to be expensive.  My kids go to a fantastic school here in Phoenix.  We have moved around a lot, and we have been lucky enough to be able to send our kids to some very good and sometimes very expensive private schools, and I can say with confidence that their school here is both the best and the cheapest!  In fact, the tuition I pay for an education far, far superior to the local public schools is less than what the state of Arizona spends as an average per pupil in the public schools.

The same type of rebuttal can be made to all the other arguments.  Private schools often have tough admissions requirements because the public schools have already staked out the niche for the lowest-common-denominator education, so private schools differentiate themselves by serving an intellectual elite.  But does anyone doubt that if millions of average kids suddenly had $6000 vouchers in their hands, someone would step up to serve the heart, rather than the tail, of the normal distribution?  And I addressed here the huge potential for private school to evolve to serve a diverse range of viewpoints.

Arizona Watch has a nice post on this same topic, including similar thoughts in response to criticisms of school choice:

The statist arguments against HB 2004 are more clearly spelled out in Mike
McClellan's blog
on AZCentral in which he calls HB 2004 "tuition tax fraud." Mike is (surprise
surprise) a public school teacher. Indicative of the quality of public school
education in Arizona, Mike's arguments against HB 2004 are weak, but I'll
briefly refute them here.

1. Private schools can choose who they take "“ many have entrance exams that
will block some students from entering the school.

Mike's correct: private schools can choose the students they accept. Some
students may not qualify for their first choice school. The real point he's
making here is that some students may not have access to private schools even
with the corporate funding "“ that the bill would create a class divide in
education. That's absolutely incorrect. If private schools become affordable to
a significant portion of the population, then more private schools will emerge.
These schools will assuredly serve different market segments. There will be prep
schools, technical schools, art schools, religious schools, atheist schools, and
schools that just provide a decent basic education. There will even be schools
that specifically serve challenged students "“ those students who Mike claims
won't have access to private schooling. The opposite is true. Schools will be
better able to serve a variety of students in a manner far more effecting than
the current one-size-fits-all public school system.

2. Even if they can attend the school, the tuition might not cover all the
costs the student will incur "“ books, uniforms, other fees. If the schools won't
waive those costs "“ and many can't afford to do that "“ the student's family
might not be able to make up the difference.

Certainly some private schools will be more expensive than the tuition grants
can cover. However, many more will design their tuition structure specifically
to stay within the limits covered by the tuition grants. It is absurd to think
that schools would deliberately price themselves out of the market. If the
demand exists, private schools are going to find a way to meet that demand and
earn those tuition dollars.

3. And here's the big one: Republicans apparently believe there are quality
private schools everywhere. They oughta take a more careful look. While Phoenix
and Tucson have plenty of private schools "“ some far too expensive for the
Republican plan, by the way "“ that is not the case in the rest of the
state.

Do you see a trend here? The answer to this last argument is the same as the
answers to the previous two. Tuition grants will create demand for private
schools. New private schools will emerge to meet that demand and collect that
grant money. This is basic economics.

The one concern I have is that statists and choice opponents have many ways to block private schools.  Even with vouchers, zoning and land use laws in many areas have provided a powerful tool to block private school expansion.

By the way, here is one way to test whether people who make these arguments against choice really mean them or are using them to hide the true reasons that they object to school choice:  If they are right, then what are they worrying about?  No new schools will open, no publicly educated kids will be able to afford or meet the admissions standards of those schools that do exist, so nothing will change.  But they seem really worried about school choice, which makes me think that they don't even believe their own arguments.

I was excited this week to find a copy of the original 1968 version of Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb."  I have been itching to find such a copy so I can demonstrate just how wrong and wrong-headed his zero-sum limits-to-growth thinking is. 

Now, one may ask, why even bother?  You could argue that thoughtful folks have dismissed Paul Ehrlich and his ilk for years, particularly after Julian Simon owned him in their famous bet.  However, I find two compelling reasons to take the time to fisk a forty-year-old book:

• Paul Ehrlich and his brethren actually have not been disowned by much of the intelligentsia.  The media still breathlessly reprints Ehrlich's and his cohorts' predictions of disaster, despite the fact that all their past predictions have utterly failed to come true.
• The fundamental mistakes he makes in his analysis are constantly repeated today.  These mistakes include:
• Static analysis - blind projection of trendlines without any allowance for individuals actually doing something to alter those trends, particularly in response to pricing signals.  This leads not only to predictions of disaster, but to the consistent conclusion that only governments coercing individuals on a massive scale can avert dire consequences for humanity
• Zero confidence in humanity - every analysis implicitly contains the assumption that we will never know how to do more than we know how to do today.  Kind of an anti-Kurzweil mentality
• Zero-sum economics - the common misconception that wealth can only come at the expense of poverty elsewhere.

I have not had a chance to dig into it, but I will leave you with this tasty teaser from the back cover:

MANKIND'S INALIENABLE RIGHTS

1. The right to eat well
2. The right to drink pure water
3. The right to breathe clean air
4. The right to decent, uncrowded shelter
5. The right to enjoy natural beauty
6. The right to avoid regimentation
7. The right to avoid pesticide poisoning
8. The right to freedom from thermonuclear war
9. The right to limit families
10. The right to educate our children
11. The right to have grandchildren

Well, that seems to cover it.  Anyone want to bet I don't find anything about property rights in this book?  Gotta go read the book now, since I have so many questions now:  Is it OK if someone kills me with a conventional bomb rather than a nuclear one?  Can I sue McDonald's on the basis that yesterday's lunch was a violation of my right to eat well?  And just how do I force my kids to have sex and procreate?  I can't wait to find out.