Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Herman Daly

Herman Daly has a graph explaining his concept of “uneconomic growth”.

From the graph it is evident that increasing production and consumption is rightly called economic growth only up to the economic limit. Beyond that point it becomes uneconomic growth because it increases costs by more than benefits, making us poorer, not richer. Unfortunately it seems that we perversely continue to call it economic growth! Indeed, you will not find the term “uneconomic growth” in any textbook in macroeconomics. Any increase in real GDP is called “economic growth” even if it increases costs faster than benefits.

 

meat

Here is the BBC raising the alarm about meat consumption:

Global consumption of meat needs to fall to ensure future demand for food can be met and to help protect the environment, a study says.

Research from two universities estimates greenhouse gases from food production will go up 80% if meat and dairy consumption continues to rise at its current rate.

Meanwhile National Geographic has a long, interesting article about what our ancestors actually ate. The answer: pretty much everything and anything they could get their hands on. Some societies ate a lot of meat while others did not. Some made a big deal of meat, but filled up on a steady diet of twigs and berries in between successful hunts.

In other words, there is no one ideal human diet. Aiello and Leonard say the real hallmark of being human isn’t our taste for meat but our ability to adapt to many habitats—and to be able to combine many different foods to create many healthy diets. Unfortunately the modern Western diet does not appear to be one of them.

my favorite non-fiction books

Somebody asked me recently for a list of my favorite non-fiction books. It was tough to come up with a short list, but I came up with one based on two criteria – they had to have a significant effect on my mental model of the world, and more importantly they had to be a thoroughly enjoyable read. So, understanding that not everyone has the same taste in books and would love the books I love, here are some of my all-time favorites in no particular order:

How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Anchor Library of Science)

 

Endogenous technological and population change under increasing water scarcity

This article in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (which is open access) is a great simulation-based study of how natural resource scarcity, the economy and technological change interact. First, they take an economic production function and add water to it as a factor of production. Then, they simultaneously allow population growth, increasing water scarcity, and technological innovation. Technological innovation is driven by scarcity, the level of investment the society chooses to make in innovation activities, and an assumed success rate. To invest more in innovation activities, the society has to save more, which means incomes have to decline in the short term.

So, this model answers the criticism economists often make that other models have ignored the effects of scarcity on innovation. With reasonable inputs the simulation always ends in declining water consumption, declining incomes, and eventually declining population. They relate this to real case studies from Australia where drought did drive innovation (for example drip irrigation), but ultimately it was not enough – agricultural output declined, incomes declined, and eventually population declined (they didn’t die of thirst, they just moved away).

the latest in non-lethal weapons

Harper’s fills us in on the latest in non-lethal weapons for crowd control (which, ironically, are generally considered illegal in warfare):

It is a need for discretion rooted in one of the oldest fears of the ruling class — the volatility of the mob — and speaks to rising anxieties about crowd control at a time when global capitalism begins to run up against long-predicted limits to growth. Each year, some 76 million people join our current 6.7 billion in a world of looming resource scarcities, ecological collapse, and glaring inequalities of wealth; and elites are preparing to defend their power and profits. In this new era of triage, as democratic institutions and social safety nets are increasingly considered dispensable luxuries, the task of governance will be to lower the political and economic expectations of the masses without inciting full-fledged revolt. Non-lethal weapons promise to enhance what military theorists call “the political utility of force,” allowing dissent to be suppressed inconspicuously…

Flush with success, Taser International is now moving more directly into crowd control. Among its new offerings are a “Shockwave AreaDenial System,” which blankets the area in question with electrified darts, and a wireless Taser projectile with a 100-meter range, helpful for picking off “ringleaders” in unruly crowds. In line with the Pentagon’s growing interest in robotics, the company has also started a joint venture with the iRobot Corporation, maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, to develop Taser-armed robots; and in France, Taser’s distributor has announced plans for a flying drone that fires stun darts at criminal suspects or rioters.

Second-generation non-lethal weapons already appear to have been tested in the field. In a first in U.S. crowd control, protesters at last September’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh found themselves clutching their ears in pain as a vehicle mounted with an LRAD [Long Range Accoustic Device] circled streets emitting a piercing “deterrent tone.” First seen (but not used) at the 2004 Republican Convention, the LRAD has since been used on Iraqi protesters and on pirates off the Somali coast; the Israeli Army has used a similar device against Palestinian protesters that it calls “the Scream,” which reportedly causes overwhelming dizziness and nausea. The 2009 Pittsburgh G20 protests also produced another U.S. first when a New York social worker was arrested for posting details of police movements to a Twitter feed; when Iranian protesters made similar use of Twitter during the contested elections last summer, U.S. elites had nothing but praise.

It may be “tactical pharmacology,” finally, that holds the most promise for quelling the unrest stirred by capitalist meltdowns, imperialist wars, and environmental collapse. As JNLWD research director Susan Levine told a reporter in 1999, “We need something besides tear gas, like calmatives, anesthetic agents, that would put people to sleep or in a good mood.” Pentagon interest in “advanced riot-control agents” has long been an open secret, but just how close we are to seeing these agents in action was revealed in 2002, when the Sunshine Project, an arms-control group based in Austin, Texas, posted on the Internet a trove of Pentagon documents uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act. Among these was a fifty-page study titled “The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives for Use as a Non-Lethal Technique,” conducted by Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory, home of the JNLWD-sponsored Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies.

Penn State’s College of Medicine researchers agreed, contrary to accepted principles of medical ethics, that “the development and use of non-lethal calmative techniques is both achievable and desirable,” and identified a large number of promising drug candidates, including benzodiazepines like Valium, serotonin-reuptake inhibitors like Prozac, and opiate derivatives like morphine, fentanyl, and carfentanyl, the last commonly used by veterinarians to sedate large animals. The only problems they saw were in developing effective delivery vehicles and regulating dosages, but these problems could be solved readily, they recommended, through strategic partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry.16

Following the Sunshine Project’s revelations, the JNLWD quickly issued denials, and subsequent Freedom of Information Act requests have been refused on national security grounds — and also, no doubt, because such research is prohibited by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, signed by more than 180 nations and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1997. Little more was heard about the Pentagon’s “advanced riot-control agent” program until July 2008, when the Army announced that production was scheduled for its XM1063 “non-lethal personal suppression projectile,” an artillery shell that bursts in midair over its target, scattering 152 canisters over a 100,000-square-foot area, each dispersing a chemical agent as it parachutes down. There are many indications that a calmative, such as fentanyl, is the intended payload — a literal opiate of the masses.

“how plagues really work”

This article from Aeon argues that we shouldn’t worry so much about some random mutation of an animal virus coming out of the jungle and destroying us. Instead, it is the conditions in human society that allow new diseases to evolve and adapt to us that we should be more concerned about.

According to this argument, new germs that erupt into our species will be potential triggers for pandemics, while germs that have a long history in a host species will have evolved to be relatively benign.

Many health experts take the notion further, contending that any coming plague will come from human intrusion into the natural world. One risk, they suggest, comes when hungry people in Africa and elsewhere forge deep into forests and jungles to hunt ‘bushmeat’ – rodents, rabbits, monkeys, apes – with exposure to dangerous pathogens the unhappy result. Those pathogens move silently among wild animals, but can also explode with terrifying ferocity among people when humans venture where they shouldn’t. According to the same line of thought, another proposed risk would result when birds spread a new pandemic strain to chickens in factory farms and, ultimately, to us.

But there’s something in these scenarios that’s not entirely logical. There is nothing new in the intimate contact between animals and people. Our hominid ancestors lived on wildlife before we ever evolved into Homo sapiens: that’s why anthropologists call them hunter-gatherers, a term that still applies to some modern peoples, including bushmeat hunters in West Africa. After domesticating animals, we lived close beside them, keeping cows, pigs and chickens in farmyards and even within households for thousands of years. Pandemics arise out of more than mere contact between human beings and animals: from an evolutionary point of view, there is a missing step between animal pathogen and human pandemic that’s been almost completely overlooked in these terrifying but entirely speculative ideas.

According to the evolutionary epidemiologist Paul W Ewald of the University of Louisville, the most dangerous infectious diseases are almost always not animal diseases freshly broken into the human species, but diseases adapted to humanity over time: smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, typhus, yellow fever, polio. In order to adapt to the human species, a germ needs to cycle among people – from person to person to person. In each iteration, the strains best adapted to transmission will be the ones that spread. So natural selection will push circulating strains towards more and more effective transmission, and therefore towards increasing adaptation to human hosts. This process necessarily takes place among people.

It goes on to talk about some major plagues in history, including the 1918 influenza which is “the rod by which all other pandemics are measured”.

We could take some comfort in all this – the diseases that cause the most suffering are the ones that evolve within and amongst people, suggesting that there should always be sub-groups of people who develop immunity to them. This suggests that despite terrible suffering, they shouldn’t represent an existential threat to the species. There is a plague in history that I find even more horrifying that 1918 or the Black Death, and that is the almost complete ravaging of Native American populations after 1492. That was a case of diseases that evolved in and amongst human populations, that were then unleashed on another isolated population (possibly a very large one) that had no resistance to them. So as much as we worry about international travel spreading germs, maybe it means it would be harder for some germ to completely sneak up on us, since there are virtually no human populations that are truly isolated anymore.

There is still the worst possible scenario though – somebody taking one of the ugly human-adapted diseases mentioned in this article, and purposely modifying it into something that the population has no immunity to.

backyard wildlife projects

This Permaculture Research Institute article has some interesting videos about projects to attract more backyard wildlife. I don’t think I could convince my urban neighbors that these are a good idea (a “hotel” for centipedes and bees?) They need some adaptation and scaling for urban areas. It could be done though. I especially like the idea of girls playing with bugs – it is natural for children to be covered in bugs most of the time and modern society has gotten away from that.

the “greater depression”

This article from Project Syndicate is very pessimistic about prospects for the global economy. It focuses mostly on low inflation:

Draghi began by acknowledging that, in Europe, inflation has declined from around 2.5% in mid-2012 to 0.4% today. He then argued that we can no longer assume that the drivers of this trend – such as a drop in food and energy prices, high unemployment, and the crisis in Ukraine – are temporary in nature.

In fact, inflation has been declining for so long that it is now threatening price stability – and inflation expectations continue to fall. The five-year swap rate – an indicator of medium-term inflation expectations – has fallen by 15 basis points since mid-2012, to less than 2%. Moreover, as Draghi noted, real short- and medium-term rates have increased; long-term rates have not, owing to a decline in long-term nominal rates that extends far beyond the eurozone…

A year and a half ago, those who expected a return by 2017 to the path of potential output – whatever that would be – estimated that the Great Recession would ultimately cost the North Atlantic economy about 80% of one year’s GDP, or $13 trillion, in lost production. If such a five-year recovery began now – a highly optimistic scenario – it would mean losses of about $20 trillion. If, as seems more likely, the economy performs over the next five years as it has for the last two, then takes another five years to recover, a massive $35 trillion worth of wealth would be lost.

When do we admit that it is time to call what is happening by its true name?

This discussion doesn’t really get at potential root causes (a valid criticism of most economic and financial reporting, I think) – is it just a lack of confidence feeding on itself? Is it lack of innovation causing productivity to fall? Is it automation causing productivity to rise but lining too few pockets? Is it climate change or some other manifestation of environmental degradation?

The reference to falling food and energy prices wouldn’t seem to support that last hypothesis. But I don’t quite get it – Brent crude is at $102 a barrel compared to its historic inflation-adjusted level of $20-40 for most of the last century. Meat and grain prices in the U.S. are definitely up due to one of the worst droughts ever in some key farming states. And that’s the U.S., not the tropics where the bulk of humanity now lives and the bulk of food needs to be grown in the future. So if I am right and there are serious pressures on water, energy, and food, we better hope that we are innovating at the same time to do something about it.

12 “sustainable” countries

This post from Alternet says we should admire the following 12 countries for their sustainable policies:

  1. Iceland
  2. Switzerland
  3. Costa Rica
  4. Sweden
  5. Luxembourg
  6. Germany
  7. Cuba
  8. Colombia
  9. Singapore
  10. France
  11. Norway
  12. Finland

Now all these countries definitely have progressive policies that other countries can learn from. But with the possible exceptions of Costa Rica, Cuba, and Colombia, all these countries have a lot of heavy industry and finance. They have large carbon emissions. They have replaced a lot of their original natural habitat with ecologically sterile urban development and factory farming. They house corporate headquarters and investors that exploit natural resources and export urbanization and heavy industry abroad. It simply won’t work to take these best-of-business-as-usual, relatively-low-footprint models and copy them in developing countries on a much larger scale. The resulting footprint will still be much too large, and lead to collapse. So what we need to do is take bits and pieces of what they do well, but come up with a completely new, truly sustainable model.

more on drought in California

From the BBC:

For many years rainfall, reservoirs and irrigation canals have allowed this sunny expanse in California to produce half of America’s fruit, nuts and vegetables.

But after three extremely dry years, the farmers are turning to groundwater to keep their crops and their precious trees alive.

There’s a water-rush as drilling companies are burrowing ever deeper – and there’s no restriction on how many wells can be sunk underground…

In some parts of the Central Valley, the water level has dropped more than 20m in less than a year…

This year, for the first time, farmers in many parts of the Central Valley have received no rainwater or runoff allocation for their crops from the water district…

“If this drought situation is the new normal we are going to have to completely re-think how much food we can grow – and a lot of people depend on California for growing food,” he said.

It can be hard to separate the long-term signal from the short-term noise, but still this seems like it may be climate change finally coming to bite us. That’s what happened in Australia and it took them a decade to accept their “new normal”.

Water, energy, and food supplies (and prices) all fluctuate constantly and affect one another. Here’s NPR talking about a few of these fluctuations but ultimately coming back to, yes, drought.

Across the country, the virus killed several million piglets, adding up to a lot fewer hogs at market. So tighter supply means Lewis gets paid more per pound, per hog.

“It’s been remarkable what the price has done,” says Lewis. “The last couple of years, hog farmers dug a real deep equity hole. And so it’s really nice to have that hole start to get filled up.”

He’s referring partly to the cost of feed — a major expense here on the farm. After record high corn prices in 2012, feed has now gotten cheaper, and Lewis can raise bigger hogs.

It’s a different story with cattle, which take much longer to bring to market. When feed prices skyrocketed two years ago, many ranchers sold off more cattle than they might have otherwise.

That extra beef is long gone, and ongoing drought in the Plains states means herds aren’t growing fast enough to meet demand.

The headline suggests that higher meat prices “aren’t scaring consumers”, but later they say that “Shoppers who can may spend more to eat the same amount of meat. Others will spend just the same, but get less.” That’s how it works in this economic system of ours – those who can pay more, do, and those who can’t, do without.