Stultitia Delenda Est

Stolen from Sean Nelson’s tumblr, Take Down Your Art

From Indur Goklany’s The Improving State of the World, pg. 21 in the paperback edition, citations and figures omitted:

Concerns for the world’s ability to feed its burgeoning population have been around at least since Malthus’s Essay on Population 200 years ago. Several 20th century Neo-Malthusians confidently predicted apocalyptic famines in the latter part of that century in developing countries. But today, although the world’s population has never been larger, the average person has never been better fed.

Since 1950, the global population has increased by more than 150 percent and [Per Capita Incomes], as measured by global economic product per capita, by more than 190 percent. Both those factors increase the demand for food. Yet the real price of food commodities has declined 75 percent. Greater agricultural productivity and international trade have made this possible. As a result, …, average daily food supplies per capita … increased 24 percent globally from 1961 to 2002. The increase for developing countries, at 38 percent, was even larger.

Mark Steckbeck of Liberal Order, as quoted over at Cafe Hayek:

A couple of weeks ago I was watching a football game on my 46-inch flat panel HD television set with surround sound, all fully remote. I didn’t really need the sound because I was listening to music through my iPhone, with access to over 5,000 songs on my computer’s server on the other side of the house. This was through the Apple Airport Express I had attached to an amp on my stereo speakers in the same room. I have a two other Airport Extremes connected to speakers around the house on which I can play these 5,000 songs from my computer in different rooms. No getting up to turn the record over.

Read the whole thing, as well as the WSJ article it’s in response to.

We hear a lot these days about the collapse of the middle class. I’m happy to report that the vast majority of the hand-wringing over it entirely unwarranted. Not only are goods cheaper on a per-hour-worked basis, but they are of much higher quality. We also have access to goods and technologies that were unthinkable even a few decades ago. And despite some impressively fallacious numbers being bantered around, inflation-adjusted median income is near its all-time highs. Take into account the fact that such incomes are almost always reported at the household level and the fact that households are smaller than they used to be, and the picture gets even better.

I really like that he focuses on the complexities of social statistics and international comparisons. Excellent, cogent points, well expressed.

And hey, Things Are Better Than You Think: violent crime rates have dropped by half in the US in the past 20 years. In contrast to what the fear mongers in the media and congress would have you believe.

I recently got linked to a great post by A Very British Dude. It begins:

It is tempting, writing on New Year’s eve when the West is mired in the fourth year of a persistent slow-down to be pessimistic about the future. But I am not a pessimistic about the future. The reasons are many, but here are a few.

The scourge of war is receding from human experience. Though they are still going on, they involve fewer combatants and kill fewer people. As people get richer, and pass through the dangerous middle-income phase, they have too much to lose by fighting.

Several states in the US have signaled the abandonment of the war on Drugs (well Marijuana at least). Sense is starting to become mainstream in this futile area of Government policy. Former UN secretary Generals, US presidents and heads of state from countries afflicted by the trade in illegal narcotics are starting to advocate a different approach.

The giant emerging economies are creating wealth at a rate unprecedented in human history, by the simple expedient of abandoning the socialist choke-hold on creative economic endeavour. Billions of people who just a few short decades ago were using ox-ploughs and suffering regular famine are now struggling with the problems of plenty: traffic congestion and obesity. Different, smaller problems for people who are vastly better off, enjoying much greater human potential.

Hear hear! Please do read the whole post, but these opening points are excellent ones and bear repeating. The world is more peaceful and more prosperous than it’s ever been. And while liberty has been under threat in some countries, there are hopeful signs that freedom is increasing in some ways. (Cf. also the slow, unsteady, but tangible freeing of Chinese and Indian societies and markets.)

I sincerely wish all of my readers, friends, and relations a safe, happy, and prosperous new year. And no matter how glum things may seem, take heart. Things Are Better Than You Think, and that our species’ future looks to be very bright indeed.

This article’s a couple weeks old, but I didn’t want it to go by without remark. From the BBC:

“The number of children dying before the age of five has fallen significantly over the past 20 years, the UN children’s agency Unicef has said.

Some 6.9 million children died before the age of five last year, compared to 12 million such deaths in 1990. Almost 19,000 under-fives died daily in 2011.”

This trend is closely related to several factors, including wider-spread inoculation against common childhood diseases (despite the efforts of the monstrously irresponsible anti-vax crowd), better access to food and potable water globally, and the stunning reduction in global poverty over the last 30 years. After all, the absolute number of global poor is declining sharply, despite global population increasing. From the World Bank’s February 2012 report on global poverty (PDF):

“The overall percentage of the population of the developing world living below $1.25 a day in 2008 is 22%, slightly more than half its value in 1990, while 52% lived below $1.25 in 1981.”

The three biggest factors in that last trend, in my estimation, are Globalization, Urbanization, and Capitalism. Around the globe people are getting together, sharing information and resources, getting rich, and more kids are living to adulthood because of it.

Matt Ridley, writing in Wired, highlights something that I’ve often marveled at:

This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. “super volcanos? pestilence and disease? asteroids? comets? antichrist? global warming? nuclear war?” the site’s authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that is coming at 11:11 pm on december 21 this year. but they have no doubt it will happen. after all, not only does the Mayan Long Count calendar end that day, but “the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years.”

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following—from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.

No matter how often doomsday predictions (both religious and secular) fail to come true, the pessimists and fraudsters never apologize or reconsider their premises. They simply change the timeline, the form the of the destroyer, or both, and forge on ahead as before.

Even on a small scale, the pre-logical pessimism that many people in our society embrace seems almost impossible to shake. We are living a decade after Y2k, forty years after the explosion of the population bomb, seventy years into the age of nuclear weapons. And yet none of our survival, success, or downright prosperity can convince people that things are probably going to be okay.

Life is good and getting better, both domestically and globally. And yes there are social and international challenges to be had and crises to be handled, but that’s the nature of life. None of them are beyond our abilities to solve and mankind has proven to be pretty good and handling such crises in the past.

Admittedly we often solve in round about, ad hoc ways, but that’s because human societies, like human beings themselves, are messy things that will never plan ahead half as well as they improvise in a panic.

So buck up. The world’s not going to end any time soon. Life is getting better, our air and water in the Western world are cleaner than they were forty years ago. The world (despite recent events) is tending to get more peaceful thanks in large part to globalization, global poverty is falling and we’re leading longer, healthier lives.

No matter what the doomsayers might tell you today, tomorrow, or on December 22, 2012.

From the Associated Press, via the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.

Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.

And as a result, a lot less of it is getting stolen. From BBC News:

According to the British Retail Consortium, last year saw the lowest level of thefts per 100 stores over the last seven years. Customer thefts fell to 2,833 per 100 stores, from 3,490 the previous year.

The number of cars stolen has also dropped every year since coded keys were introduced, making it near impossible to drive a car without a key.

In 2010-11, 106,228 cars were stolen, down from 117,687 the previous year and massively down on the 587,856 a year which were taken 20 years ago.

On this side of the pond, property crime rates are down across the board from their most recent peak, circa 1991:

Property Crime per 100,000 US Residents. Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Graph: Wikipedia user Theanphibian

So rest a little easier; your material life is much safer today than it was just a few years ago.

I’ve written before about my views on Malthusianism. But lately I’ve encountered some particularly good arguments to the effect that Malthusianism isn’t just wrong, but actively dangerous. Bryan Caplan, writing at EconLog, raises some good points about the role that Malthusianism played in the rise of Nazism. In short, Malthusianism, and more particularly the belief that there wasn’t enough room and resources on the planet for everyone, was one of the driving forces behind Hitler’s crimes. As Caplan put it, “[Malthusianism] told them that millions had to die; [eugenics] told them who the victims ought to be.”

This, to me, highlights one of the reasons why it’s so important to speak out against gloom and doom and to be a voice of anti-Malthusian optimism. The idea that scarcity of land and resources demands the restriction of human populations isn’t just flawed, but it can and has caused real suffering. At the bare minimum, it can lead to unnecessary worry. It can also lead to prolonged misery through retarding economic growth and the advancement of prosperity. And at its worst it can, and has, lead to forced sterilizations and mass exterminations.¹

The wonderful writer Robert Zubrin has a new book out about the dangers of doomsayers. I haven’t had a chance to read it, yet, but it’s high on my list. Zubrin recently did an interview about the book with Reason TV, and I think he makes his case well:

I like the way Zubrin frames his argument by saying that the dangers from “Merchants of Despair” (his words) actually far outstrips the dangers we face from the evils they’re “warning” us about.

One counter-argument is that Caplan’s article and Zubrin’s interview make Malthusians out to be almost cartoonishly villainous in their plans for the human species. As such, I understand skepticism about whether or not anyone actually believes in the brand of anti-humanist Malthusianism that Caplan and Zubrin describe. One proof of the existence of real-life Malthusians comes by way of the Azizonomics blog which posts excerpts from Finnish writer Pentti Linkola who says, among other things, that:

“Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.”

If this were the ravings of a lunatic or a Bell Street trustfund hipster they’d be easy to ignore. But this man is an influential writer and a key figure in the Deep Ecology movement. His views aren’t just considered, but embraced by a segment of the population that would rather see the human race eradicated than see it flourish and who unapologetically embrace dictatorial governance in pursuit of that end.

I think anyone who desires a dictatorship with the explicit goal of murdering people and completely curtailing economic growth is, at best, a moral cripple. And yet we live in a world where people like Linkola are given a serious hearing. Indeed, Bryan Caplan’s essay that I linked to above would be easy to dismiss as its own brand of fear mongering, if it weren’t for the fact that there are people out there today who are actually calling for Nazi-style dictatorial governments for the express purposes of satisfying their anti-humanist urges. And those pro-dictatorial types are using explicitly Malthusian arguments, just as the Nazis did almost 80 years ago.

Meanwhile, thankfully, the human species continues to flourish. Global poverty is declining; global health is improving. Our understanding of the world continues to advance and, with it, the power of the tools we use to shape it. Life is good and getting better. And it is doing so in spite of the Merchants of Despair and their despicable anti-humanism.

Disclosure Notice

¹And lest you think that things like forced sterilization are a thing of the past, UN economic aid is often contingent on a country having some method of population control in place. This means that taxpayers in the US and Europe are helping to fund and encourage the forced sterilization of Indian women.