The return of Malthus
In his NYT column today, Paul Krugman, writing about food prices’ recent rapid climb, sounds a grim, almost Malthusian note, concluding that “cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.” Wheat prices are astronomical already, and rice stores have become so depleted in Asia that many producing countries are threatening to stop exporting the grain. (I have seen the writing on the wall. Last weekend, I went to Pacific Supermarket and bought a 20-pound bag of Nishiki brown rice. Get it while you can; that’s all I am saying.) Krugman cites a few factors contributing to the problem—oil prices, droughts—and really lays into the biofuel industrial complex.
The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.”
This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.
And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.
Alongside the theme of neutralizing the farm lobby is a hint of population-control politics that we haven’t heard much about since its heyday in the late 1960s, when widespread affluence was considered a problem in the West and books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb were being sold in drugstores in pocket-size paperbacks. The idea that food prices will remain high (i.e. that food supply will remain scarce, that we have reached some new plateau of productive capacity that caps that supply) could be seen as a harbinger of food rationing and famine, and an indicator that Malthus’s scenario is finally coming to pass—namely that food supplies can’t keep up with a population that grows exponentially. But now the problem takes a slightly different form; with so many people wanting to eat luxuriously, the resources necessary for everyone to eat at all are being hoarded and consumed by the more affluent. Krugman calls it “the march of the meat-eating Chinese” and notes “the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains.” In other words, developing countries want to imitate the standards of living that Americans have inaugurated as the prerequisites of economic maturity. National diet (as with wasteful patterns of energy consumption) can function as mark of national status and can stifle potential political unrest with luxuries, and this leaves little room for conservation.
The problem, then, is not so much a population explosion, but an explosion of those who expect middle-class comforts (and those who use those comforts for political control). Not a Malthusian issue so much as a Veblenesque one: That package of expectations and the ideology of entitlement that goes along with it, will probably come under increasing fire. Hence the cult of asceticism that has derived from the environmental movement—the way to be even more middle-class in terms of prestige, from this point of view, is to deprive yourself for a noble cause—limit your choices by viewing them through the lens of “sustainability.” (Whether that can be adequately defined to make it an operational distinction is an open question.) With this ideology, at least the status hierarchy is being leveraged to accomplish some good.
Oh, and on a related note, Jon Taplin points to Merrill Lynch analysts explaining that American households spend more on debt service than food.
Comments
Me Chinese. Me want to eat beef, drive in car and watch plasma tv like american.
Comment by Mary Jones from China — April 8, 2008 @ 7:24 am
I can’t tell if that comment was sincere or sarcastic (I’m guessing the latter), but the fact of the matter is, Malthus was as right as he was wrong, despite it being pretty grim and unpopular with humanitarians. Without natural population controls, we’re environmentally screwed no matter what problems we single out in attempts to stop global warming. We can make it about the consumption patterns if it makes us feel better, but that’s an acillary effect to the simple fact that we don’t live on a globe of unlimited resources.
Even the Green Revolution advocates believe that there’s a limit, though they believe that when we hit that green ceiling, population will limit itself by default and plateau simply because there won’t be enough supply to go around. What that means in day-to-day life is actually a drag: hunger in poor nations, waste in rich ones, astronomical prices to continue eating in the American food way, transportation limitations, etc.
Unfortunately, limiting human reproduction is considered an impinging on inalienable biological rights.
Comment by Patrick Schabe — April 8, 2008 @ 7:58 am
<i>Unfortunately, limiting human reproduction is considered an impinging on inalienable biological rights.</i>
That Mr. Schabe finds this lamentable is shocking. It reminds of recent remarks Ted Turner made on the same subject as he called for radical reduction of the population.
If reproductive rights are indeed not inalienable, it follows that they are in fact privileges, and thus an individual or institution must be invested with the power to confer or withdraw these privileges. The question becomes, then, what sort of individual or institution shall be empowered this way? What standard would it have to meet? Who would oversee he or it, and what would entitle this overseeing entity to be overseer? On what basis would this individual or institution confer or withdraw these privileges?
As I see it, the first people in need of being spayed or neutered are not the unwashed masses of the world, but the ultra-rich — folks like Ted Turner, George Soros, Bill Gates, and even Al Gore — for the simple reason that their offspring stand to inherit great status, wealth and influence, along with the outsized carbon footprint that these things entail. For instance, when yours truly travels by plane, it’s infrequently and with many other people. When, on the other hand, Al Gore or Ted Turner flies, it’s usually alone, or, at least with far fewer people. On a per-flight basis, my ecological impact is far less than, say, Ted Turner’s or Al Gore’s (the latter criss-crossing the troubled globe to tell his inconvenient truth). Add a coefficient of frequency and my impact becomes smaller still.
Mass sterilization, in other words, should be more focused and selective than the sort Mr. Schabe envisions. Begin with the hedge-fund managers, the investment bankers, President W’s “base,” so the offspring of wage slaves in Harbin or Bangalore may be spared.
Comment by EBM — April 8, 2008 @ 10:18 am
Before the polemic gets out of hand, note that I said he was right as often as he was <i>wrong</i>. I’m not an advocate of mass sterilization, and more or less precisely for the reasons you metioned, EBM. There’s no agent that could be entrusted with this ethically or morally, and I’m not getting on a soapbox in favor of some <i>Logan’s Run</i> scenario.
I don’t actually feel like I have a solution that I support, though there is fairly good evidence to show that three factors can positively effect a reduction in population growth: the education and elevation of status of a society’s women, stable access to water resources, and to some extent the availability of electrical power. Improving the conditions of life in impoverished areas frequently results in a decline in birth rate, and finding a (preferably sustainable) solution to those three issues are things I can easily get behind.
My point was that as soon as you start saying “We need to stop having so many babies”, people immediately jump to dystopic conclusions like the assumption you just made about mass sterilization.
Comment by Patrick Schabe — April 8, 2008 @ 10:53 am
I agree; I don’t think it’s a Malthusian problem of supply. As Krugman points out, it takes 700 calories of grain to produce 100 grains of beef. It’s interesting that in light of facts like these, population control instantly becomes the topic of discussion. I think consumption control is more in order.
Comment by Nate Housley — April 9, 2008 @ 5:56 pm