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.

 

Engineering, society and politics

One question that has been around at least since the time of the ancient Greeks -- and still not answered -- is how best to organize society.   The Greeks decided that the best way is to find a good leader & let him make the decisions, but this is the problem of belling the cat.  How can a society continually produce such people, especially given that power corrupts?

 

I like the idea of using science to guide us, of understanding how the world works & then using that understanding to build systems that work.  However, the world is hugely complex.  How do we know what decisions are arbitrary, where we can decide based on what we like, and which are constrained by the laws of nature?

 

In engineering, the answers to these questions are more obvious, at least to some extent.  Gravity provides a known force, materials have more or less known properties -- if you want to build a bridge, you can figure out the forces and the available materials and have a good idea if the thing will stand up.   There are still many free choices, where the physics doesn't constrain the choice, but the engineer has a good idea of what they are.

 

In politics, I think there is a tendency to think that almost all choices are free, when in fact, there are many constraints.  Nature, both human and not, imposes limits, which de facto we obey, but we don't necessarily realize why things work out as they do.

 

For example, I think there is a centripetal force to power.   In the absence of countervailing forces, those that have power tend to accumulate more.    One of these brakes is that those that have power tend to accumulate more, but in the modern age, the main thing that has produced somewhat more flat societies is the frontier.   People have been literally able to get up & move away when the powerful step on them too badly.    We are running out of frontiers, so the centralization of power is accelerating again.

 

 

Happy Halloween ...

Peak oil, peak food, peak population

I ran across a couple of interesting posts in the last few days. This one:

According to the World Bank, over a billion people around the world are now chronically hungry.

From Hungry World: A Silent Crisis Calls for Urgent Action

and also:

Fresh population projections put the number of humans over seven billion in 2011, just 12 years after humanity passed the six billion mark.

From A Billion Teenagers, for Better or Worse

Now, there is good reason to think that the world is at peak oil. There is also good reason to think the world is at peak food right now. [I'm not going to go find the quotes, I shall just assert it for the purposes of this thought experiment.]

Given peak food, that implies that food to feed the 200 million or so new people to be born in the next 2 years will come from that being eaten by those already here. Most likely, it will come from those who are already poor, so that people who are now getting by barely will move into the category of hunger. [The world population now is about 6.8 billion.]

Just for the heck of it, let me assume that each new person represents two new hungry person -- the person just born & someone else who moves from having just enough food to not eating enough.

This would mean that the 200 million new people added in the next two years means 400 million more hungry people -- or 200 million more each year.

Thus, in 2011, we would expect to have 1.4 billion hungry, or about 20% of the world population. In 2016, another 5 years, there would be 7.5 billion people, of which 1.9 billion would be hungry, or about 25%. By 2018, we would be looking at something on the order of 30%.

People who are hungry tend to be angry, quarrelsome, scared and all sorts of unpleasant things like that, and arguably for good reason. I think that when the percent of hunger gets into the 30% and climbing range we are going to see widespread conflict.

Scientific goverment

A decisionmaker may make decision x, thinking it will produce effect X, Nature. cats its vote -- nature decrees that decision produces effect Y, totally different and possibly quite undesirable.

The problem here could be described as a disconect between the model the descison maker is using and the relevant reality.

It doesn't matter if the decision makers in question are dictators, monarchs, an oligarchy, a democracy or a group of clowns standing on their heads. In principal, any of these could make decisons that have the expected effect or not (though if the clowns make good decisions, it might be surprising, since I doubt they would have much attention to put to the task). In general, it is more likely to make a decision that produces the desired outcome if the mental model behind it is sufficiently accurate.

A case in point is the discussion on the health care reform which is being proposed. Krugman makes a cogent argument why it is needed, which makes sense. Other people just say "This would cost money" and want it to fail:

The much-feared Obama healthcare initiative seems to be stalled. Markets are relieved, because this initiative, as it was presented, amounted to a huge transfer payment that would be funded by future tax increases.

Personally, I think Krugman is making all kinds of sense and is right (leaving aside Malthus). However, my point here is that Krugman has a meaningful economic model he is using, while David Kotok seems to be parroting the conservative line, which seems to basically consist of "we don't like it, so it is bad".

I am coming to the conclusion that we would be far better off being governed by some kind of scientific process, one that in effect, consults the natural world on the effect of decisions rather than prejudice and preference only.

Questions of value are not answerable by scientific processes, these must continue to be decided by people. However, the question of how to implement policies that produce the outcomes that are valued can meaningfully have scientific inputs, which if followed have a hope of leaving we the people better off.

Scientific models can only go so far and they are of limited accuracy, of course. However, with research and feedback they can be improved.

Energy bottleneck?

I was reading Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (which I recommend as interesting, at least to those interested in complex systems and/or biology).

Along the way, when he was talking about the evolution of plants and the way that chloroplasts manufacture plant material and energy from sunlight, he said something to the effect that when we figure out just a few more details, we'll have the solution to the energy crisis.

This points up something interesting. The commentators on energy seem to fall into these main groups:

1. There isn't any problem, what peak oil? And anyway, if oil gets scarce, we'll invent something else.
   
2.  OMG, oil is running out and we are all doomed. We must give up driving, water in bottles and all sorts of extravagance to survive. Everyone should sit in sackcloth and ashes and do penance for the sins of the recent past.
   

So far as I can tell, each of these has a hold of some part of the elephant for their facts. Peak oil is real and in the short run, it is going to be of great importance and produce a huge bottleneck. The world has a huge amount of infrastructure that is tied to oil and, even more important, it has no alternative that is able to bridge the gap over the next decade or so. That is, there isn't any other source available that could inject enough energy into the system to replace the oil shortfall. Even if there were, the existing infrastructure could probably not manage an alternative form -- e.g. there is no way to power 18-wheeler trucks on electricity, even if there were a distribution system to deliver from, say, a wind farm, to them.

However, there is lots of energy that is potentially available and, given the resources, people are able to figure out technology to extract it from our environment and make it useful. Artificial chloroplasts are one idea, solar thermal is another. Wind power, solar panels, whatever. It can be done, but there is a form of activation energy, as it were, that is needed to develop such systems and build the infrastructure. It is apparent that this won't happen until peak oil is staring us in the face, and then it will take time to develop and deploy them.

Thus, there is a bottleneck in energy availability, which is coinciding with a time in which the population growth rate combined with population size is producing a rapid increase in absolute population size -- hence "interesting times".

Constraints

It seems to me that when people put on their thinking hats and start devising ideas of how political life should be organized, they act almost as if human nature and human society are tabula rasa, something they can form into any shape they want.

In fact, there is every reason to think that both human nature and human social organization have deep internal structure. While it is certainly admirable to set goals to organize them into ways that will be good for all the inhabitants, these goals can only be met if the methods, the structures that are set up, work according to the rules of human and social nature.

At a practical level, we don't know what these natural laws are and we must have some structure. However, it seems to me that this should be a very active field of research, with much input from mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, biologists, evolutionary theorists and people of that nature that study complex systems. In our complex social world, we have only the faintest understanding of what effect any action will have at a macro level. Doing experiments on the real system is dangerous, plus there are a very limited number of scenarios that can be explored.

Epidemics

The virulence of pathogens is related to how quickly they can move from one host to another. The more quickly they jump, the more virulent they are.

In the 3rd world, so I am told, the population density is high and the sanitation is low. Why don't they have epidemics? They do have endemic disease -- malaria, TB and so on. They don't have the reruns of the black death. Why not?

I now have a guess at an answer. Having high population densities and poor sanitation doesn't by itself mean that pathogens move quickly from one host to the next. It is the job of the immune system to protect the individual against invasion, with endemic disease, the immune systems have had a chance to develop defenses against the prevailing diseases going around. Some people will get sick, sure, but many will not and the velocity will still be fairly low, low enough to keep the virulence in check.

It follows, then, that if a novel disease, one that immune systems are not familiar with, were to get loose, then an epidemic could follow. This could be caused by evolution, some new disease evolves from the existing ones (e.g. the new flu) or it could be caused by population movement, diseases that are endemic in one area moving to a new area in which they are unfamiliar.

This might be how the plague developed in the 14th century. I read, if I remember correctly, that one of the things that happened in the early 14th century was increased trade between Europe and the far east. It is fairly well agreed that the plague came from the east, perhaps it became an epidemic due to increased population densities (making transmittal easier) and having a novel pathogen introduced from some distance away.

An imaginary future

I read recently that in Pakistan, about 20% of the population is hungry -- presumably as defined by the UN, which is less than 1800 calories/day for an adult. The population growth rate is is 1.99% (according to google just now). That implies that they'll add on the order of 3 million people a year (starting from 150 million, again from google).

It is reasonable to think that peak oil happened last year & that peak food will happen at about the same time. In all probability, as the world population grows, richer countries (and people) will get more food while poorer countries get less.

Thus, as a first approximation (and this post is in hugely round numbers) let us assume that as the population of Pakistan grows over the next few years, the amount of food available to the country stays constant. Also, the new people get fed something, which takes food away from people already there. Another wild approximation -- each new person added means that an existing one moves from adequate nutrition to being underfed.

By that logic, Pakistan will add 15 million people in the next 5 years and another 15 million people will move to being underfed, taking the percent of the population that are hungry to about 36% (60 million out of 165 million).

When enough of the population is malnourished, society is likely to become unstable. The options are famine, civil war or external war or some combination of these. The most politically popular is likely to be external war, by the logic that someone is going to die, but better them than us.

What are Pakistan's options for external war? Going against India may be attractive, but perhaps suicidal. Also, India is crowded with people, as is China. There isn't a lot of room for Pakistanis to move in and set up shop. Afghanistan is already seen as part of themselves. Iran has lots of people and is ethnically Persian, plus it's on the bad side of the US - a possiblity. Then there are the northern 'stans ... Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhastan. These areas are lightly settled and the al Quada doctrine says they should be "liberated". The problem, of course, is that Russia would object.

Suppose they do decide to go north. They cut a deal with India, that Pakistan will quit fighting with India over Kashmir if India will support them in moving against the central Asian states. They cut a deal with China, that it can have part of Russia and/or Kazakhastan if China helps them out against Russia.

So, now there is Pakistan, India & China, moving into central Asia. Russia objects & the US and Europe back them up. Saudia Arabia backs the US and the government is overthrown, then the new one comes in on the Asian side (giving Asia lots of oil at the expense of the west). Africa & the rest of Asia, except Japan & Australia (western side) come in one the Asian side. It's the West against the East ...

Aux barricades

Ethnic Uighurs waited with sticks behind a barricade in their neighborhood in Urumqi on Wednesday.

It's 1848 again, or something like that.

China & the high tech society

When I posted recently about the troubles of having an authoritarian high tech society, one of the examples that came to my mind was modern China. Another actually is pre-revolutionary France -- not as high tech, I'll admit, but one in which the populace had rising, but unmet, expectations.

I am reading a book now on modern China -- China: Fragile Superpower: How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise. The commentary describing the book remarks

She sets out to explain why it is not a mere fantasy and why we, basically, need to be nice to China to keep the nightmare at bay.

["It" is war between the US & China.]

When I read the tea leaves, I doubt that anything can prevent breakage in China. It's an authoritarian country that is trying to turn itself into a modern, high tech society, which seems impossible enough on the surface. Then add in:

Inside China, she argues, the party leadership is hemmed in by threats to its stability: a rapidly aging population, the rise of the Internet, privatization of the economy, a widening gap between urban rich and rural poor, a restive population fed up with corruption, pollution that not only sickens but kills, mounting unemployment in an economy that needs to grow 7 percent annually just to provide jobs for 25 million new people entering the workforce.

In other words, even if China did not have an authoritarian government, it would have trouble. Does it look like the government can square this circle?

"All around them," Shirk contends, "the leaders see new social forces unleashed by economic reforms that could subvert the regime." Moreover, Shirk describes a regime -- half Mafia, half corporate board -- so obsessed with staying in power that it is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges. In a country where communist ideology is dead and a dog-eat-dog form of capitalism is ascendant, you'd think economic interests would be supreme. That's not the case, Shirk argues. After the crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the military and security services gained even more power than they already had in a society built on Chairman Mao's maxim that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

The headlines today read: China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes Does this mean that things have gotten so bad the government can't prevent the news from getting out or that they are becoming more open?

The big question though, is how much longer will China be stable & in what way will it explode?

All models are wrong, but some are useful

It seems to me -- and I realize that there are many would would disagree violently -- that this applies to the idea of God.

To start with, I (unlike most people it seems) distinguish the idea of God from religion. Religion, I claim, is a social phenomenon. God is (and I speak loosely here) a mystical one. Religion trades on the idea of God, but it's really about people.

The ideas that people have about God (including the things that religion claims) are, in essence, models. The best of them say "there is something there, but we can't describe it or say what it does or how it works". This, of course, doesn't give much to work with. :-)

People go on to flesh out these ideas, with what they believe about God. Being as how God is something that can't really be described, these ideas -- which are mental models -- must be wrong in some way. However, the models themselves do have effects on people and thus, are more or less useful to the people that hold them.

The models people hold about God don't affect what it is (so I claim), but they do affect the people that have them. Thus, while they are wrong (God being ineffable and all), some are useful. Also, I will add, the models that are useful to one person may or may not be useful to another.

People that believe in an angry or vengeful God will find the world a fearful place (or perhaps it is the other way round, frightened people will believe in an angry God), while people who believe that God is on their side, however hard it may be to understand how that happens, will have a reason to reject fear. Angry and frightened people will foment strife, peaceful and secure people will work for peace. Thus, what people believe to be true of God matters, independent of the nature of the deity itself.

High tech societies

It has occurred to me that in a high tech society, there must be a large population of people that use their own good sense to make significant decisions.

For example, the way that my job works is that people come to me & say something to the effect of "We have this vague idea of something that needs to be done. Go do it." My task then, is to make something sensible of that vague idea & then implement what I come up with.

This general pattern is the norm for most of the people that I know. It isn't, of course, the way that everyone's job works, but my kind of job is essential to keeping the technology running. [My particular job is actually about making new technology, but new technology is required for wealth creation.]

The point here is that a high tech society requires a large supply of people who have almost complete freedom to do anything sensible in their jobs. In short, it trains people to think and act for themselves.

An authoritarian (much less totalitarian) government requires people to follow instructions, to do as the government decrees. This is incompatible with having people make decisions for themselves.

It follows that a society with a large amount of advanced technology is incompatible with an authoritarian regime. As people learn the habit of thinking for themselves in their jobs, they are likely to continue that behaviour to the rest of their lives and in particular, start to have independent thoughts about the way the government organizes their society. These people have de-facto power, since they keep the technology working -- they keep the lights on & the economy running. Sooner or later, there will be change. It may be peaceful, but it is more likely to be violent, a la the French Revolution.

Somebody's Gotta Do It

I ran across this sentence buried in a post, entitled Somebody's Gotta Do It the other day:

Yet I can’t tell you how often I’ve sat down with an activist whose latest policy paper is all about solutions, and in heart-to-heart conversation they reveal that they don’t really think our species has much of a chance of avoiding major catastrophe, maybe even extinction.

Ok, so we are heading to disaster. I'm not going to worry about extinction. If it happens, c'est la vie, or c'est la morte, but there isn't anything to concern myself with after that. :-)

In the meantime, this is my big three list of things to look for:

1. A way (or some ways) to organize society that is humane, sustainable and attainable. I know there are people who offer solutions, but I have yet to hear one that I believe would be both good & could actually happen. The ones that sound good usually seem to require a population made of saints, which I think has no more chance of happening than an ice sculpture of Notre Dame being around the morning after a big party in Hades.
2. Population control and/or reduction
3. Sustainable and abundant energy

The last of these strikes me as the most tractable, but I don't see any major progress happening.

In the meantime, I think I'll watch out for the disaster.