Food fight

I read this post a bit ago & when it had rattled around in my mind for a while, I decided that the difference between the optimist & the pessimist isn't really in what they think the facts are.

 

Nor is it really in whether they each think that magic has to happen to avoid disaster.

 

Brown says:

I don’t think this current price rise is temporary. There will, of course, be fluctuations in the grain prices, but they will be around a rising trend. Grain and soybean prices, and food prices more broadly, are moving up. There is not anything in sight to reverse this trend. If the world were to have a poor grain harvest this year, there could well be chaos in world grain markets by late summer.

 

Speaking of which, consider the floods in Australia:

Heavy rain across eastern Australia, the fourth-largest wheat exporter, in recent months had already cut much of the grain quality to feed grade, according to analyst estimates.

 

From elsewhere, I have read that the Australian wheat exports are about 11% of the global exports & that up to half of it could be lost.

 

The optimist, Smil, says:

Just look at #1, China: imports less than 5% of its food and CONSUMES more food per capita than Japan!!!

Nothing has changed since I wrote that closing chapter of my 2000 feeding the world book: if China can do it, anybody (but Somalia) can [*]. Nor is India “starving.” Any food shortages are 95%+ a matter of poor or no governance, not any “extreme” climate and “gunwale inching”… Queensland does not grow wheat in any quantity, just check the wheatland map of Australia, and as always you newsie guys have exaggerated the story, both south and north of the state are open for business; no end of Australia.

 

I would say that 11% of global exports for Queensland does amount to important quantity.   It may be that China consumes more food per capita than Japan, what that mainly suggests is that China is a place where a lot of people still do strenuous manual labor.

 

Brown wrote a book entitled "Who will feed China?" in which he pointed out that as the Chinese move up in the income scale, they are likely to increase their total consumption of agricultural products, even if their per capita calorie consumption goes down, because one of the first things people do as they get more money is to eat better.

 

Smil feels that people really shouldn't eat meat when they get richer, because, well, they just shouldn't.   It would make it harder to feed everyone, so they should not do it.   But will India somehow get a good government that provides food to everyone?   Will the Chinese not eat meat because Smil thinks they should not?

 

I think the main difference between the optimist and the pessimist is how sure each is that magic will happen.  :-)

 

BTW, The blog poster starts out by saying:

Experts who repeatedly, and less sexily, note that humanity, on the whole, has always overcome shortages and found ways to produce ever more food even as mouths multiply and rising incomes move families up the food chain from grains to meats and dairy.

 

Or, you know, not always.   There is a reason we remember Malthus.

 

 

 

The cause of the civil war

I started reading a book containing a set of essays on the American Civil War.   The first one is on why the war happened.   It claims that the reason was (as the popular idea has it) slavery, but makes a comment that I was looking for -- why the North decided to oppose slavery.

I can understand why and that the South was sufficiently attached to slavery to succeed in response to a threat.   What is less clear to me was why the North needed to oppose it and why it would fight to stop it.   I understand the idea that the people of the North were so moral that the idea that slavery would continue in this country was abhorrent -- it's a nice idea, but I doubt most people in the North would die for this ideal.   Certainly some would (e.g. John Brown), but the ordinary person -- I have a harder time imagining this.

However, the fight was not only about the morality of slavery, but also about the difference between "free labor" and slavery.   This is a big deal.   The idea was (probably correctly) that slavery and "free labor" were incompatible.   I think what they mean by free labor is what I would call working for wages (more learning to come).

This was the time of the factories, in which people were working 12+ hour days from early ages to produce goods for (miserable) wages.   I read once that these people were actually less expensive for the factory owners than slaves would have been.   They worked for very little money, but the owners had no capital tied up in hiring (versus buying) them, plus the owners did not need to provide for their room and board.    There was a large supply at the time, since Europe had a sizable excess population, many of which decided it was better to come up with the price for the trip across the ocean for the chance at a better life in the new world.

This "free" labor -- free in the sense of not being slaves -- would move into an area and take jobs if there were jobs to be had.   If the possible jobs were held by slaves, they would not move in.   If they had no jobs to go to, this immigrant population would be a liability, rather than assets, to the new country.    Thus, the management class of the North, who were making fortunes from this immigrant labor, had a motive to want to encourage this to continue and grow.

This was also the time when Britain decided to stop the African slave trade.   It was indeed morally right, but the same kind of analysis applies.  Britain had a large population of people it had no ability to employ.   Stopping the slave trade would have the effect of providing jobs --- in the colonies -- for this lower class.

I am totally on board with the idea that slavery is bad, but less so with the idea that the average person would feel as passionately about it as John Brown did.   One's economic opportunities, otoh, are much more existential.

 

Technology, wealth and equality

It seems to me that a wealthy society will tend to be an egalitarian one.   The reason runs through technology.  For a society to be wealthy, it needs sophisticated technology.   Sophisticated technology implies specialized knowledge.   To keep the society running, individuals need to be able to come together to bring their individual knowledge and intelligence to bear on solving problems.   For these conversations to be productive, each individual needs to be able to take a role that is commensurate with their level of knowledge, not with their position in a hierarchy.

 

Malcom Gladwell, in one of his books, told the story of how a Korean airplane was flown into a mountain because the rules of conversation in Korea is that the people lower in the hierarchy could not correct the superior -- so the person who knew there was a problem could only hint to the lead pilot about it.   This is a pretty graphic example of why the opposite of an egalitarian society doesn't work well in a high tech environment.

 

 

Inclusion vs exclusion

One thing that I feel like I see in history is that societies that tend to include outgroups tend to be the winners in conflicts.  If this is actually so, I can think of a couple of reasons why it could be so.

 

One is common cause.   Societies that are richer tend to be more inclusive.  I put this down to human nature -- when life is going well for people, they tend to be more likely to be nice to people.   Societies that are richer also tend to win conflicts.

 

Another possible cause is that societies that are more creative tend to win conflicts.   When there are more different cultures and world views being brought to a problem, the odds of finding a creative and better solution go way up.

 

The first reason isn't in & of itself a reason to welcome strangers, but the second reason is.   Even without conflict, a society that is more creative is more likely to do well.

Yet another idea of what might happen ...

So this is my latest prediction ...

 

2012 -- Republican is elected president.

To see how this could happen, consider this article:  It’s Always the Economy, Stupid

 

For decades now, political scientists have been building election models that attempt to predict who will win in November without making any reference to candidates or campaigns. They can get within 2 points of the final vote, and they don’t need to know anything about the ads and the gaffes and the ground games. All they really need to know about is the economy.

2014 -- The US attacks Iran

The oil supply takes a hit, causing the global economy to lurch into a tailspin.   The Chinese economy falls over, so the CCP attacks someone (e.g. Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Kazakhstan).   The US responds, at which point it is at war in 4 countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran & China).   Overextended much?

Pakistan and India go to war (and remember, they both have nuclear weapons).

Global trade falls over, leading to food shortages in, for example, Egypt and the middle east and Africa.

The US finds itself short of oil, so the economy falls over, plus shipping stuff and growing food takes a hit.

And so on ...

 

Return to the middle ages

I came across this article -- Maximize your EROEI, which starts with

We may love our machines, but they don’t love us.

 

And ... we need our machines to love us, why?

 

It ends with

Let us be careful not to commit vast quantities of our limited resources to high tech adventures that are likely to make matters worse, not better. We are more likely to survive and prosper if we return to being tool users and minimize our reliance and addiction to machines. We can set our personal and societal design criteria to rejoin the community of life on this planet. Rediscovering our own metabolic energy can be the key to our survival; it would address the causes of both the compost conundrum and the greenhouse effect.

 

Now, one remark is -- what does he think a machine is, if not a tool?   I expect that what he means by "tool" is "hand tool", something that works using only kinetic energy with an animal, usually human, source.

 

The thing that people are uniquely good at is thinking.   It is, however, hard to do much that is meaningful in intellectual activity when one is spending ones time being a source of kinetic energy & doing manual labor.   For myself, I think that a future in which people spend their time behind a horse drawn plow isn't worth wanting.

 

Also, there is an upper limit on how much energy can be harvested using animal power.   This sets an upper limit on the human population, which I would bet, is much less than 7 billion, more like 1 billion or less.   The transition from here to there is not likely to be a pleasant experience.

 

I think it is very likely that we will transition to a future, and soon, in which there are many fewer people on the earth.   However, the question is, are we going to transition to a future in which a small percent of the population has most of the wealth and power, which most of the rest live as virtual or actual slaves?   Or are we going to find a way to build a future in which it is possible for all people to live in reasonable comfort and there is a greater degree of equality and the hope that life can become better -- the famous "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?    History suggests that the natural life is harsh for the majority of the people, so to have a life that is good for the masses, we need technology.   We may need better technology and to use it much more wisely, but the way to a bright future is forwards, not back.

 

I suppose he thinks that all would be much the same as it is now, except that people will spend their days farming instead of working in offices or factories.   However, we should expect that the Pareto principle will continue to hold, in which a few have much and most have little.   Until we lose the ability to make medicines and to store food (which may well happen quickly), there will be a relatively large number of people around to share what is left, which will make it easy for the rich to buy the services of the poor for very little.   After a while, famine and disease will kill most people, so the world would settle down to a more or less stable situation, like as not -- in which a few have lives of some comfort & most others have lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

 

I think it would turn out that his utopian fantasy is both utopian (that is, nowhere) and a fantasy.   We have reason to love our machines.

 

 

Marx and nature

I was watching a course on modern western history:   A History of the Modern Western World

 

One of the lectures is on the radical response to the misery caused by the industrial revolution -- in particular, the writings of Marx and Engles.

 

In the industrial societies, a few were very rich, while many were miserably poor.   M&E claimed that this is neither natural or fair.

 

It may not be fair, but I would claim that it is natural.    In effect, I have already claimed by, by saying there seems to be a centripetal attraction to power.

 

There are two things that I think give support to this claim -- observation and logic.  The observation is that it appears that in relatively large, complex societies, it appears that a small fraction of the population tends to hold most of the wealth and most of the power.   I don't actually have a list of all complex societies, with a ranking of wealth vs percent of the population holding it, but in the examples I do know of, one percent of the population holding about 30% of the wealth seems to be pretty typical.   Something that happens spontaneously, over and over again, can reasonably be considered the effect of some kind of natural force.

 

The other support is logic, e.g. the Pareto principle.  It is easier for the rich to make money, therefore those who are rich will tend to become richer, whether they make new wealth de novo (actually from natural resources) or take it from others.   In the latter case, the divide widens more quickly, but even in the former, there can still be a growing gap.

 

Of course, even if it is natural for the rich to be very rich, that doesn't mean it is fair or good or that we are stuck with it.   However, while it may be possible and from our point of view, good on the whole, to create an environment that is artificial in many ways, it is also true that the law of unintended consequences remains in force.  It may be good to build a society with a more equal division of wealth, but it is probably something better done with subtle tools and attention to the effects of the tools, rather than with some kind of blunt instrument.

 

BTW, wikipedia says of the Pareto principle:  [It was named] after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population

and adds ...

Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy's wealth was owned by 20% of the population.^[4] He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.