Thesis #4: Human population is a function of food supply.
by Jason GodeskyThomas Malthus was one of the most influential thinkers of all time. His father knew Hume and Rousseau, and his own paper–An Essay on the Principle of Population–forever changed the way we think about populations and food supplies. It has informed food security policies worldwide, and provided the basic underpinnings of our modern concern with overpopulation. In The Origin of Species, Darwin called his theory of natural selection an application of the doctrines of Malthus in an area without the complicating factor of human intelligence. Yes, Malthus’ work has been a major underpinning and influence on everything since. It’s a shame he was so incredibly wrong.
Malthus’ case is simple: population grows “geometrically” (exponentially), but food supply only grows arithmetically. So Malthus warned of a coming crisis where we would not be able to feed our burgeoning population–the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Of course, the failure of such a catastrophe to come to pass took a lot of wind out of Malthus’ sails. Malthusianism was declared dead after the 1960s and 1970s saw the greatest increases in human population ever seen, accompanied with higher calories per capita, thanks to the abundance of the Green Revolution. Cornucopians rejoiced as they saw the evidence come in that increasing population meant increasing prosperity for all: the realization of Jeremy Bentham’s credo, “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Even Bentham knew that the two factors needed to be balanced against one another, and that increasing one necessarily meant decreasing the other. As Garrett Hardin refuted it in his classic article, “The Tragedy of the Commons“:
A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham’s goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number” be realized?
No — for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern, but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D’Alembert (1717-1783).
The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day (”maintenance calories”). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by “work calories” which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art…I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham’s goal is impossible.
So why were the Cornucopians so right, and Malthus so wrong? Because Malthus got the entire problem almost completely backwards–and it has remained backwards ever since.
Science has never been as unbiased as it would like to be–how could it? Skewing results is easily noticed, and rightfully condemned–as happened with such forgeries as Piltdown Man. Much more insidious is a lack of curiousity. We do not question recieved wisdom, and what we do not question we cannot understand. From Genesis 1:28 to the present day, we’ve viewed population growth as an inherent property of human nature. It has gone unquestioned. Certainly an Anglican country parson like Malthus would not question it. Malthus’ problem was how to feed so many people–a problem that could only be solved by misery, vice (i.e., contraception) or moral restraint (i.e., abstinence). The country parson, naturally, favored the same kind of abstinence programs in favor by the United States’ current conservative regime.
This is entirely backwards. What are all these people made of, fairy dust and happy thoughts? No, they are made of proteins–of food! Without a sufficient food supply, such a population cannot be achieved. We understand this as a basic biological fact for every other species on this planet, that population is a function of food supply. Yet we continue to believe that the magic of free will exempts us from such basic biological laws.
The usual counter-argument goes something like this: Humans are different from other animals. We can think. We can rationally observe the situation, and decide for ourselves how many children to have. While this is certainly true of individuals, groups are governed by much more deterministic criteria. For every individual who decides to be responsible and only have 2.1 children, another will take advantage of the space that individual has opened by having seven. The variation in values, thought patterns, beliefs and feelings of social responsibility ensure that the fertility rates of a group will rise to the carrying capacity possible, regardless of the intelligent, responsible choices of others in the community. Charles Galton Darwin, the grandson of that Charles Darwin, said, “It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus.”
Education is often proposed as a solution, but Garrett Hardin already offered the best counter-argument to that strategy, again in “The Tragedy of the Commons”:
The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but it has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist “in the name of conscience,” what are we saying to him? What does he hear? — not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: 1. (intended communication) “If you don’t do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen”; 2. (the unintended communication) “If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons.”
Every man then is caught in what Bateson has called a “double bind.” Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia. The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. “A bad conscience,” said Nietzsche, “is a kind of illness.”
We can see this problem of overpopulation and education as a case of the Prisoner’s Dilemna. The best case scenario is cooperation; if neither prisoner confesses, both go off free. If we are all responsible, then we can save ourselves from self-destruction. But this is not what usually happens. The fear of abandonment prompts players to pre-emptively abandon the other. The question becomes a simple one of game theory, and the challenge to stop overpopulation by education, a contradiction of human nature.
All of this, however, is theoretical. This hypothesis is easy to test: calculate carrying capacity, and compare it to actual human population numbers. This is precisely what Russell Hopfenberg of Duke University did in his 2003 study, “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.” [PDF] As you might imagine from such a title, he found that the numbers lined up almost perfectly.
There is a significant complication in this, however, which critics of this stance are eager to point out. The First World is facing a population growth decline–the world’s richest nations are growing by the smallest percentages. Italy has been very concerned with its low growth rate, only 0.11% according to a 2003 estimate. Italy has the 201st highest population growth, and the 100th highest agricultural growth. Meanwhile, Singapore has the sixth highest population growth rate, and the 147th highest agricultural growth rate–out of 147.
If population is a function of food supply, why is the most significant growth taking place in those areas producing the least food?
The answer, I think, lies in globalization. How much of what you ate today came from your own bioregion? Unless you do a significant amount of your grocery shopping at Farmers’ Markets or eat only USDA-certified organic food, probably not a lot. In 1980, the average piece of American fresh produce was estimated to have traveled 1,500 miles before it was consumed. Interestingly, those same countries which produce so much food but don’t see it translate into their population, are also the heaviest exporters, and the impoverished countries with significantly rising growth rates are often the recipients. When the First World rushes in with foreign aid, food, and humanitarian aid to a desert area in the midst of a famine, we serve to prop up an unsustainable population. That drives a population boom in an area that already cannot support its existing population. The result is a huge population dependent on outside intervention that itself cannot be indefinitely sustained. Eventually, that population will crash once outside help is no longer possible–and the years of aid will only make that crash even more severe. In the same way that the United States’ policy of putting out all forest fires in the 1980s led to an even worse situation in its forests, our benevolence and good intentions have paved the way to a Malthusian hell.
Another part of the answer lies in our ecological footprint. In the passage above, Garrett Hardin made the distinction between the calories it takes to maintain a human body, and the “work calories” humans use to do anything else. While it is certainly true that population is a function of food supply, standard of living–how many work calories we recieve, in addition to mere maintenance–is an important factor in that equation. Not only how much food is available, but how much food each individual demands. The dwindling First World has the largest ecological footprint; the growing Third World has the smallest. Italy comes in at #25 with 5.51 hectares per person (1996); Somalia is #114 with 0.97.
This is ultimately why education appears to have an effect on population: because higher education raises the standard of living, increasing the ecological footprint so that fewer people can live off the same amount of food, reducing the population. However, the problem we face is not one of Malthusian catastrophe. If we could not feed our population, we would not have such a population in the first place. The problem is the ecological consequences of such resource exploitation. Expanding ecological footprints do nothing to lessen this. Also, this trend can only continue so far, because the First World needs the Third. Our prosperity comes from the triumph of the corporate model, but the corporation itself runs on externalized costs. Our economy could never function if we had to pay the full and total cost for the luxuries we enjoy. Consider simply our oil costs–never mind the way it is built in to, say, our food. The Arab population oppressed under Saudi rule pays the balance for our cheap oil. Low prices at WalMart are made possible by cheap Third World labor. It is a grim economic reality that, given ten apples and ten people, for one person to have nine apples, the other nine must split one between them. In the conclusion to their 1996 study on ecological footprint, Wackernagel and Rees stated, “If everybody lived like today’s North Americans, it would take at least two additional planet Earths to produce the resources, absorb the wastes, and otherwise maintain life-support.” Since we have but one earth, this conclusion can also be spun around in the form that each of us essentially has three slaves whose existence is one of constant misery for our benefit.
Intelligence does not exempt us from basic biological laws–just as it has not exempted dolphins, crows or chimpanzees. Groups reproduce to the best of their ability, and the carrying capacity–their food supply–creates the ceiling of that ability. Populations will rise to their carrying capacity, and no further–even human populations. So Malthus has the problem entirely backwards. The problem is not how to feed so many people; of course we have the means to feed them, because if we didn’t, the population would not exist. The problem is the implications of so many people.
Every year, there is a certain amount of energy generated by the sun. This energy radiates in all directions, so there is only a small given percentage of it that falls on the earth. The total amount of solar energy available to our planet per time unit has a hard limit–what is called the photosynthetic capacity of the planet. This energy can be used in any number of ways. Plants turn solar energy into sugar; animals turn plant sugar into kinetic energy. Animals can eat other animals, and obtain the energy stored in their bodies, which they obtained from plants, which they obtained from the sun. But none of these conversions are perfect, and some energy is lost in each one; this is why an animal that eats other predators is almost unheard of. Also, each individual likely used some of the energy, before it was taken by the next link in the chain. As animals, we are always at least one step removed–and as omnivores, we’re just as often two steps removed. Also, we’re only one of millions, if not billions of species, all sharing the same, set amount of energy from the sun.
With the agricultural revolution, we found a way to convert biomass into human flesh, by reducing biodiversity in favor of our own foods. We increased the percentage of the planet’s photosynthetic capacity that we recieved. Solar energy that fell on an acre of forest would be divided amongst all the creatures, plant, animal and otherwise, that lived there. Solar energy that fell on an acre of wheat would go exclusively to humans. Our carrying capacity increased; not just that we had more food, but in more abstract terms, we were helping ourselves to more energy. Our population increased, so we cultivated more land. We had more people, so obviously we needed more food. We cultivated more land, and occasionally improved our technology to increase our yields per acre, but more food simply led to more people. Who required more food … the Food Race. But lurking high above our heads was an absolute limit: photosynthetic capacity.
In the 1960s, we saw the latest, greatest “win” in the Food Race: the Green Revolution applied the potential of petroleum to farming, allowing for vastly increased yields. We found a bit of a “cheat” to the natural order in fossil fuels. Now, we can burn through decades of solar energy every day to escape the limits of photosynthetic capacity. Essentially, we burn our past and take credit against our future in order to ensure our continued, exponential growth.
The Green Revolution set our carrying capacity to–well, whatever we wanted it to be. The population responded accordingly, with a huge initial jump, slowing as it reaches its asymptote. The scientists say that asymptote lies at 9 billion, and who am I to disagree? It seems like a perfectly reasonable figure. The population growth curve fits exactly what you would expect for a population adjusting to a suddenly raised carrying capacity–a huge jump, peaking relatively early, and extinguishing as it reaches the new “stable.”
Of course, it’s unlikely that this will remain the case for long. The Food Race goes on. 9 billion people will leave millions–billions, even–starving. Those people need to be fed. We need another “win” in the Food Race!
But 9 billion people is not sustainable. 6.4 billion is not sustainable. There is no sustainble solution for so many people. Only the Green Revolution can feed that many, and the Green Revolution is inherently unsustainable, because it relies on the consumption of a non-renewable resource.
The human race currently consumes some 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. This monopoly on the earth’s resources is having a devastating effect. We are seeing the extinction of some 140 species every day, some thousands of times higher than the normal background rate. Today, right now, we are seeing extinction rates unparalleled in the history of the earth. We are undeniably in the midst of the seventh mass extinction event in the history of the earth–the Holocene Extinction. Unlikely previous extinction events, however, this one is driven by a single species.
This is the true danger of overpopulation, not our inability to feed a growing population. As much as we would deny it, we depend on the earth to live. Dwindling biodiversity threatens the very survival of our species. We are literally cutting the ground out from under our feet.
Increasing food production only increases the population; our current attitudes about food security has locked us into what Daniel Quinn called a “Food Race,” by comparison to the Arms Race of the Cold War. Garrett Hardin began his famous article with this dilemna, and I’ll close with his assessment:
In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase, “It is our considered professional judgment….” Whether they were right or not is not the concern of the present article. Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called “no technical solution problems,” and more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.
It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, “How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?” It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no “technical solution” to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word “win.” I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I “win” involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game — refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)
The class of “no technical solution problems” has members. My thesis is that the “population problem,” as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem — technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.
It is incredible to me - and will always remain so - that many people, having seen what the thoughtless use of technology can do to the world insist that the proper way to solve the problem is to simply use more technology.
Technology and a conquering mindest MADE the problem, so if we just apply MORE of the same, an answer will readily present itself. Right?
Right?
Comment by Chuck — 26 July 2005 @ 7:46 AM
Jevons paradox.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 July 2005 @ 10:01 AM
Like the cotton gin and slavery.
“Look guys, if we subvert the natural way of things and allow only one type of plant to grow in a given area, look how much less land we have to use!”
Creepy.
Comment by Chuck — 26 July 2005 @ 1:26 PM
Good essay. Have you read Henry George? He discusses and dismisses Malthus and appears to prefigure Julian Simon. I was afraid you were going in the same direction — but you weren’t, so I agree with your argument. Let what will come come. Morituri te salutant!
Comment by sr — 10 August 2005 @ 9:13 PM
I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with George, but dismissal of Malthus is pretty wide-spread. This is because Malthus is so easy to refute. We don’t have populations out-stripping their food supply. Of course, from my perspective, this is to be expected. The sorry fact of the matter is, that Malthus and his enemies are both operating within the realm of exceptionalism: they agree on the foundational premise that human population is not bound by the same principles as other species. Of course, if I were to set these numbers in front of any biologist and hide the name of the species, there would be no disagreement whatsoever. It would fit nicely and easily into our understanding of animal populations, and all data available would fit quite easily into the model. The only reason that this is an issue at all is because the species in question is us, and we refuse to admit the idea that we might be subject to the same biological laws as everything else on the planet.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 August 2005 @ 2:42 PM
Chuck says:
July 26th, 2005 at 1:26 pm Like the cotton gin and slavery.
“Look guys, if we subvert the natural way of things and allow only one type of plant to grow in a given area, look how much less land we have to use!”
Creepy.
Very creepy indeed - Rational planners diverted many of the river flows in Central Asia to provide irrigation for cotton, and within less than a couple of generations almost completely dried up the Aral Sea, causing horrendous environmental problems. Now I believe the cotton has gone, too.
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 16 August 2005 @ 12:28 AM
And in my seaside Philippine island town, the lagoon used to be full of fish - the older generation talk about having to have a carabao (buffalo) down to haul out their catches. Now there’s hardly any fish left in the lagoon, and fishermen go out 10-15 miles into the open ocean to catch skipjack tuna.
Until about 20-30 years ago, the local people used only dugout canoes, in the lagoon. It was then that somebody introduced ‘new-fangled’ boats with outriggers and engines that could handle the open ocean in any other circumstances than almost flat calm. This was a big surprise to me - I’d thought that the ‘traditional’ outrigger boats dated back to time immemorial.
Now, one of the most well-stocked imported foods in the local shops (tiny things) are canned sardines.
I wanted to write a page on my website (www.coconutstudio.com) about the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ but now I think I’ll just save the time and provide a link to Jason’s article.
Comment by Richard Parker — 16 August 2005 @ 12:40 AM
With the progress of the human genome project and the search for everlasting life, it should be inherent that everlasting exstinction shall provide itself as a useful tool towards many tribal species of Homo sapien. Generally speaking, if it is “tic-tac-toe”, then which species has the club? Will the power elite choose to use it with an aptosis mechanism such as HIV? If so, Which tribe to select as a work bearing gradient while the remaining rescend upon themselves?
Typically, the most efficient would be chosen by natural selection; while the tribes who lack the ability to provide a sustainable homoestasis would demise. Thus leaving a healthy collection of primitive human life to provide the energy harvesting workload, while a more advanced tribe distributes it to their advantage.
A form of religion or counterbalancing system of a sort would provide an adequate measure to circumvent the transfer of energy through culture so that the higher order remains at a level of conditioning to take the next evolutionary step. All the while the less primitve tribe of Homo sapien remain behind to contemplate their own inevitable fate as they watch it rescend upon itself. Leaving but a few to start it anew. I read once that at some point, everyone’s DNA can be linked back to arguably (of course) approximately a few dozen humans just a few thousand years ago. Maybe its just another cycle…
Also, give Malthus his respect. He had a good thought, but how was he to know about bio-genetically engineered kentucky-fried-chicken-substrate?
Comment by Huffy — 1 October 2005 @ 1:18 AM
“Eventually, that population will crash once outside help is no longer possible–and the years of aid will only make that crash even more severe. In the same way that the United States’ policy of putting out all forest fires in the 1980s led to an even worse situation in its forests, our benevolence and good intentions have paved the way to a Malthusian hell.â€?
This is only benevolence if you feel the “developed� world has a right to the resources it is using. This thesis states the problem well. Of course the “developed� world is headed for the same hell as it continues its rate of depleting resources.
A human society that distributed resources equally would necessarily reach equilibrium as other species do, where the death rate due to insufficient food, with periodic variations, equaled the birth rate. This would again be the Malthusian hell.
After the collapse the surviving human population, even if they were hunter-gatherers would eventually be faced with this same problem. This dilemma is true for most species with the exception that for some predators control their death rate. Humans often compensate for the lack of predators with war. I believe it is only humans, and only some of us, that are aware of this dilemma.
For me this brings to mind Marx’s 11th “Theses on Feuerbach�: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.� It seems that an attempt to overcome the “prisoners dilemma� is warranted. This of course will require a social rather than a technical solution.
We might follow the example of the coyote. Their population is also limited by their food supply. Rather than allow their numbers to be decreased by starvation, they (or their genes) control the birth rate so that the number of births is proportional to the food supply.
“In one study, before control, coyotes had 3-4 pups per litter and only 32% of the females bred. After control started, 90% of the females were breeding and litter sizes doubled. This is called density dependent reproduction.� http://www.geocities.com/DesertCoyote_99/predcon.html
Comment by Bob Harrison — 11 November 2005 @ 3:21 PM
Hey Bob –
I see this assumption frequently — that cycles of plenty and famine are common and normal in ‘wild’ populations (humans included).
In fact, barring cataclysmic events, wild populations flux through birth rate more than through death rate just like the coyotes you mentioned.
There is a huge difference between ’scarcity’ and famine. In cases of scarcity (which hunter gatherers experience) there is generally a reduced birth rate as a natural biological response, plus some cases( I would assume) of greater death rates for the old and infirm. But not through starvation, rather as a subtle result of reduced nutrition, increased work load etc. (Analogous to the increased susceptiblity to common diseases found in AIDS patients) So people don’t starve as a result of scarcity, but the overal population does decline.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 11 November 2005 @ 4:03 PM
The population problem is most certainly not one with ‘no technical solution’
Correct me if I’m wrong but the solution is and always has been exceedingly simple and is totally reliant on our capacity for technology. If we outgrow the food supply or photosynthetic capacity of earth we must move beyond earth. There are far greater energy sources out there than the sun why should we limit ourselves to it. In this resepct we are totally unique and superior to all other creatures with who we share this planet as we alone (at least so far) have the capacity to move beyond a limited energy supply to the theoretically infinite energy supply of the universe which as yet has no proven ‘hard limit’. We only need to focus our technological advances in the right places to ensure that the limited energy we are able to harvest from this earth is best put to use discovering and cultivating larger extra-terestrial sources of energy.
Comment by technologist — 19 January 2006 @ 12:49 AM
The universe is finite in matter and energy, if not in volume. But colonizing space is not a solution of any kind–technical or otherwise. It is a “win” in the Food Race, and thus, nothing more than an escalation. If this generation is sufficient to consume an entire planet, the next will need two; then four, then eight, then sixteen … the “best case scenario” outside of collapse is that we become the alien invaders from Independence Day, and devour all life in the universe before we, ourselves, die. Like all other schemes to postpone collapse, this one, too, escalatates the cost of collapse–instead of just one planet at risk, that scheme jeopardizes untold numbers of worlds.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 10:10 AM
From Jason Godelsky’s Thesis #4:
The usual counter-argument goes something like this: Humans are different from other animals. We can think. We can rationally observe the situation, and decide for ourselves how many children to have. While this is certainly true of individuals, groups are governed by much more deterministic criteria. For every individual who decides to be responsible and only have 2.1 children, another will take advantage of the space that individual has opened by having seven. The variation in values, thought patterns, beliefs and feelings of social responsibility ensure that the fertility rates of a group will rise to the carrying capacity possible, regardless of the intelligent, responsible choices of others in the community. …
Education is often proposed as a solution, but Garrett Hardin already offered the best counter-argument to that strategy…
This hypothesis is easy to test: calculate carrying capacity, and compare it to actual human population numbers. This is precisely what Russell Hopfenberg of Duke University did in his 2003 study, “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.” [PDF]
I tried to download hopfenberg2003.pdf but it doesn’t seem to exist. Even if I could find it, I don’t know if I would believe that human population figures or food availability figures are truly, precisely known. History seems very murky to me.
I put great weight on several points. Godelsky knows but dismisses the first point: the fact that highly educated and highly civilized populations have trouble breeding.
The second point is that payoffs from complex social structures are different for different populations within a society — thus even if complexity does not work well for “us,” it often works well for the priests, the landowners, and the cops — and those populations suffice for stability. Cops may not be rational enough to rein in the reproduction of folks they like, but they are rational enough to rein in the lower classes.
(Consider, for example, the totalitarian measures taken in medieval Japan to conserve wood. The rulers valued forests more than poor people — the poor suffered, but the forests were nursed back from the brink.)
Possibly groups are deterministic. However, not all populations are created equal. Not all humans have the same abilities, not all food has the same qualities.
The First World is suffering a severe population crash of natives, especially in the middle class and well-educated elites. They are partially compensating by allowing immigration of less-educated poor folks.
If a country with technical infrastructure requires a highly educated elite to keep it running, immigrants who have seven illiterate kids per family will be less influential than a pair of Ph.D.’s who marry and have a single near-autistic kid whom they educate.
So the country may appear to be one country, but it really becomes an apartheid territory, with the numerically tiny educated class hiding from the numerous illiterate poor.
In such a situation, I submit that the outcomes are chaotically non-linear. One cannot make sweeping predictions because too many things could get crazy. Even simple laws like Jevons’ Paradox could get complicated. (My naive understanding of Jevons’ Paradox applied to food is that food technology becomes efficient, food consumption will increase.) I submit that “efficient” might be hard to analyze.
E.g. suppose the literate educated class allows the poor to eat lots of junk food. The poor are afflicted with malnutrition and disease, even though they can stuff themselves to the point of obesity. Possibly the poor will continue reproducing, but the variation in human health will be of strategic importance. The typical poor person will be too sickly for effective revolt. In one sense, widely available junk food spurs the consumption of junk food, but malnutrition impairs reproduction and health.
In the example above food technology is “efficient” for the junk food shareholders and gluttons, but “inefficient” for health. Of course I decry totalitarian and classist measures which promote human suffering, but in situations like medieval Japan’s wood conservation, these inhumane measures are effective.
So I think I’ve proven that qualitative differences in populations (of humans, animals, artifacts, resource samples) can make Godelsky’s analysis a bit more wrinkled. Quite possibly Godelsky has foreseen these wrinkles or could accommodate them.
To my mind, we are currently seeing the emergence of societies which have plenty of food but cannot breed. Families in these societies become less and less fertile. Combined with pollution and decreased ecosphere viability, this could mean that even a population crash could lead to extinction, not relatively happy horticulturalists or hunter-gatherers.
So to tip my hand, I’m open to much more pessimism than Jason Godelsky. I’m willing to give higher odds than humans will drive themselves into extinction, even though totalitarian conservation measures are likely.
Comment by Rick — 31 March 2006 @ 12:29 AM
Update on Hopfenberg:
I still haven’t found the original paper, but a Reason editorial seems to have the same objection that I was trying to voice above: taking a global view can conceal critical mechanisms and produce incorrect answers:
Source:
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb072804.shtml
So has the Malthusian case finally been proven? No. Hopfenberg’s analysis makes the mistake of considering only global numbers. This hides a great deal of information. If we look on the regional level we see a very different picture than one of a relentlessly rising tide of human babies. Fertility does not correlate with food availability.
The countries with greatest access to food are, in fact, the countries with the lowest fertility rates. As the United Nations reports, 14 developed countries have fertility rates lower than 1.3 children per woman. (Replacement fertility is 2.1 children per woman.) The fertility rates in practically all developed countries are below the replacement rate. Clearly, food availability does not mean more children. More generally, as food security has increased around the world, instead of increasing as Hopfenberg’s theory would suggest, global average fertility rates have dropped from 6 children per woman in 1960 to 2.6 today. And the rates continue to plummet. Sadly, in Africa, which has the highest current fertility rates, food production per capita has been declining for nearly 30 years.
If food availability really determined human reproductive capacity, Illinois farmers should have the highest fertility rate in the world. Instead, they have one of the lowest. Hopfenberg would reply that excess food produced in North America and Europe fuels population growth in the rest of the world. In some sense that is trivially true, but the strictly biological model that he says applies to people does not account for such phenomena. For example, deer in Virginia don’t sacrifice their chances to produce fawns and ship their food to deer in Arkansas, nor do sparrows in New York forego nesting in order to supply food to Floridian sparrows. Individuals, not populations, reproduce.
The notion that capping food supplies will halt population growth is also trivially true, but not by the gentle means which Hopfenberg and Pimentel suggest, e.g., reducing human birth rates. Food shortages no doubt reduce fertility, but they also shrink population much more quickly by simple starvation.
Finally, Hopfenberg and Pimentel’s projection that world population will reach 12 billion by 2050 is off. They simply extrapolate current levels of fertility, yet as we’ve seen, fertility rates are rapidly declining. The 2002 revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects’ median variant trend projects a world population of 8.9 billion by 2050. Given the rapidly falling global fertility rates, the low variant trend is more likely—and that projects a world population topping out at 7.5 billion by 2040, then beginning to decline. Perhaps Malthusianism will finally decline along with fertility rates.
Comment by Rick — 1 April 2006 @ 8:23 PM
Hey Rick –
That article explains why Malthus was wrong.
This is the Opposite of Malthus.
A freind of mine over on IshCon has a good analogy. Imagine a box filled with tennis balls. Each ball represents a unit of population.
Now take the same box and fill it with golf balls.
Lo and behold, a whole lot MORE balls fit. Why? Because as the diameter of the ball is reduced, the amount of EMPTY SPACE is also reduced. The diameter of the balls represents standard of living.
Most important of all, in order to get another golf ball into the box, you only have to reduce that standard of living slightly (again, basic mathematics). By contrast, in order to fit another tennis ball, a much more significant reduction is required.
In this analogy, The US and Europe (etc) are bowling balls, while India and much of Africa are marbles. Do the math. It does not matter where the food is produced it only matters where it is eaten, plus the economic cost/benefit ratio of more children. When you’re talking marbles, children are an asset. When you are talking bowling balls… not so much.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 1 April 2006 @ 8:33 PM
A freind of mine over on IshCon has a good analogy. Imagine a box filled with tennis balls. Each ball represents a unit of population.
When you say “unit,” do you mean a group of standard size, such as 1 million persons?
The US and Europe (etc) are bowling balls, while India and much of Africa are marbles. Do the math. It does not matter where the food is produced it only matters where it is eaten, plus the economic cost/benefit ratio of more children.
Well, I’m doing my math and you’re doing your math, but our calculations don’t seem to be using the same definitions.
If the “bowling ball” represents all useful resources, I think the Americans might be bowling balls but Europe might be cantaloupes and Japan might be a tennis ball. However, resource depletion is very, very hard to measure.
Resource collapse and resource wars have been extensively simulated by the Pentagon. The problem is not new to military science. But they come up with very different answers. This is not to say that they can offer realistic hope of surviving, much less preserving civilization.
http://www.climate.org/topics/climate/pentagon.shtml
The 2003 Schwartz/Randall report at the link describes a scenario where famine and drought become major motivators while there is still enough oil to transport food and fight wars. This influences my belief that peak oil is not just one inevitable scenario.
I don’t deny that the earth’s condition is grim: I *do* deny that it is easily planned for and that a plan of primitivism is very likely to succeed.
Comment by Rick — 2 April 2006 @ 9:21 PM
Hey Rick –
Nice links, but resource wars have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, do they?
I was simply trying to provide another tool that might help you understand the relationship between food and population.
A ‘unit’ is whatever standardized number is agreed on.
And the Balls represent no ‘useful resources’ but standard of living. IE, how much resources the average person in that culture uses. Europeans may use slightly resources than Americans… but at the end of the day the cost-benefit ration is nearly identical and for the same reasons… it cost a LOT of money to bear and raise a child in the first world. I’ve heard US $1 Million. Considering what I have spent on my son so far, that does not surprise me at all.
What are you coming up with? The above article fails to dispute the thesis, because it addresses a different set of issues. Likewise, resource wars are unrelated to population dynamics. So what calculations are you coming up with, and how?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 3 April 2006 @ 8:17 AM
Fertility rates are a red herring in this argument. The argument is that population increases with increased food production. Last I checked the population of the US hasn’t been shrinking. Population has 4 sides: Birth, death, immigration and emigration.
And what are all of these new people eating? The fact is that they are eating food. If they aren’t producing the food, that food is still being produced. And thus the Illinois farmers.
You can’t sit around and say that there are more people, but less food. People are made of food. If there are more people there MUST be more food.
Capping food production would not cause starvation. If there was enough food this year, then the same amount of food is enough for next year.
Comment by JimFive — 3 April 2006 @ 9:11 AM
available land = footprint * population
Footprint is measured as (average individual production / resource extraction efficiency) + (average individual waste / waste reclamation efficiency)
Increase your land while maintaining your footprint (i.e. expand your operation without changing it as in farming more land next year) and your population increases.
Increase your extraction and/or reclamation efficency and your footprint will decrease causing an increase in your population.
The smaller your footprint the more people you’ll have. The larger your footprint the less people you’ll have. Assuming that your land remains constant. The bowling balls have huge footprints and cannot have too many people (very few can fit into the box (available land)). But Africans have small footprints and you can have a lot of them.
Foragers have huge footprints, larger than any civilization. And so have a spread out, and small, population.
An increase in food production (without increasing land use) would be an increase in extraction efficency, which, as previously discussed, increases population.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 April 2006 @ 10:56 AM
Godesky. No “L.”
You mean this one?
It’s not dismissed, so much as explained. Higher education and lower birth rates are positively correlated, I readily admit that. But correlation is not the same as causation; this is a common logical error. In this case, both higher education and lower birth rates are results of a third variable: increased complexity. That’s why they’re so tightly correlated, but it’s important to understand that higher education is not causing lower birth rates, any more than a higher incidence of people wearing shorts makes flowers bloom.
Funny–that’s one of my main points in the Thirty Theses.
No system like that can long endure. The masses must be incorporated somehow, or else the system begins to splinter apart. See France’s Arab community. They can be incorporated as an underclass and exploited–which is precisely what we have done–but greater complexity requires the integration of, ideally, all populations. If a population falls out, it must be re-absorbed.
But now we’re talking about the internal dynamics of the system, rather than the qualities of the system itself. How food is apportioned within a population is meaningless if the population’s growth as a whole perfectly matches the food supply available to it. In that case, we can see clearly that the population is a function of food supply. The only remaining question is how that food supply is distributed throughout the population, and the mechanism by which food supply determines population.
That may be, but I think Hopfenberg’s study is pretty open-and-shut insofar as showing that population is set by food supply. It may or may not be chaotic, but the higher level is quite determinative.
I don’t think you’ve done any such thing. You’ve mentioned many of the several ways in which food can be apportioned within a population; you have not said anything concerning the relationship between the population itself, and its food supply. I agree, there are many ways to distribute food, some more equitable than others. But the essential fact remains that population is, was, and ever shall be a function of food supply.
Frankly, I think it is anything less than the global view that conceals the critical mechanism and produces incorrect answers. Missing the forest for the trees, and all that. Focusing on the details of how food is distributed misses the point that global population rises in lock-step with our rising food supply. How the food supply is distributed, and how the population growth is distributed, those are things we can configure any way we please, or so it seems. But we cannot escape the fact that if we increase our food supply (regardless of where we increase it), then we also increase our population (regardless of where that population growth takes place).
Whatever. “1 millions persons” is an arbitrary unit. You could make it 20. You could make it 324.6. It doesn’t matter; it always works the same.
Whatever. You’re nitpicking. You get the idea. Not all countries consume alike.
In fact, a great deal of the crops those Illinois farmers produce is shipped to Third World countries, to farmers who produce cash crops like cotton and coffee, to sell to Americans, in return for money to buy American foods which can be bought more cheaply than just growing the food yourself.
And vice versa, it appears that if you have more food, you will have more people. Where those people will be is another question, but you will have more people somewhere.
Except that then the economy stalls, and the expected value for any investment approaches zero. Investment stops; infrastructure crumbles. Then capping food production has caused starvation. The system is too unstable to exist in a steady state.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 2:17 PM
Jason wrote:
Godesky. No “L.”
Sorry about that, and thanks for the link to the Hopfenberg paper. Since the Hopfenberg claim is so central, I’ll spend some time analyzing that and do a literature search — it ought to be cited by other publications.
So the country may appear to be one country, but it really becomes an apartheid territory, with the numerically tiny educated class hiding from the numerous illiterate poor.
No system like that can long endure. The masses must be incorporated somehow, or else the system begins to splinter apart. See France’s Arab community. They can be incorporated as an underclass and exploited–which is precisely what we have done–but greater complexity requires the integration of, ideally, all populations. If a population falls out, it must be re-absorbed.
Well I agree in general, but between the general notions and the specific predictions is a vast gulf of estimation. In the course of making those estimates, our value judgements have conflicts, and we predict different eventualities.
But now we’re talking about the internal dynamics of the system, rather than the qualities of the system itself. How food is apportioned within a population is meaningless if the population’s growth as a whole perfectly matches the food supply available to it. In that case, we can see clearly that the population is a function of food supply. The only remaining question is how that food supply is distributed throughout the population, and the mechanism by which food supply determines population.
So how food is apportioned is meaningless, but how food supply is distributed remains as a question? I would like to see a specific analysis that can describe distribution without considering apportionment.
But the essential fact remains that population is, was, and ever shall be a function of food supply.
That is very notable rhetoric. The editors of Reason definitely are not swayed by it, but perhaps they’re all wrong. Now that I have a copy of the Hopfenberg paper (thanks again) I’ll be reading it more closely.
We seem to be talking back and forth without really connecting on specifics. Perhaps I can find details in the Hopfenberg paper.
But we cannot escape the fact that if we increase our food supply (regardless of where we increase it), then we also increase our population (regardless of where that population growth takes place).
So if a mad dictator demands that storehouses of grain and smoked fish be set aside, that food is automatically eaten by humans, producing more human biomass.
You’re nitpicking.
I had thought this forum was for science nitpicking. Someone mentioned the peak oil forums — possibly they, or some science-specific forums, would be better suited to my nitpicking.
Except that then the economy stalls, and the expected value for any investment approaches zero. Investment stops; infrastructure crumbles. Then capping food production has caused starvation. The system is too unstable to exist in a steady state.
I apologize if I’m misreading you, but I think your prediction is that system contraction will result in sudden collapse, a total loss of high-technological capacity, starvation, etc. My prediction is that system contraction will result in numerous problems, the loss of some subsystems, and the survival of high-technology using the redundancy of the current system until a more efficient system emerges.
Comment by Rick — 4 April 2006 @ 7:11 PM
“the survival of high-technology using the redundancy of the current system until a more efficient system emerges.”
What redundancies? Redundancies are too expensive. We don’t have them. Just look at what happened to gas prices after Hurricane Katrina. They shot up because there were no redundancies to make up the shortfall in refining capacity.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 4 April 2006 @ 9:08 PM
It is. I’ve seen it.
They’re the same question, as far as I can tell. But it is a very different question from the one we’re addressing here, which is whether or not population is a function of food supply. It is. We know this. Now, the fact that it doesn’t seem to translate directly suggests that the mechanism is more complicated, there’s more variables involved. But that’s a different question entirely. It doesn’t say anything about the original question, “Is population a function of food supply?” The answer is, “yes.”
I disagree with the editors of Reason on very nearly a daily basis.
Obviously not–and yet, the human population goes up by the same amount as if that food had been eaten. How does that work? Obviously, the function in question is not fully understood. What we do know is that human population, like any other animal’s population, is a function of food supply. The specifics of that function remain very much open to debate, but that is a different question.
The best thing I got from John Michael Greer’s paper (linked in the Vault) was an understanding of how catabolic collapse is a self-reinforcing cycle. Any contraction that last too long will initiate that self-reinforcing cycle, which will not stop until we reach the next highest level of sustainable (at least in the short term) complexity. Having destroyed all previous bases for complexity on our initial ascent, the next highest level that now exists is something along the lines of the Upper Paleolithic.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 9:34 PM
Obviously not–and yet, the human population goes up by the same amount as if that food had been eaten. How does that work? Obviously, the function in question is not fully understood. What we do know is that human population, like any other animal’s population, is a function of food supply. The specifics of that function remain very much open to debate, but that is a different question.
Well, there you have succinctly stated the question which fascinates me. How does that food function work?
I’m still looking over the literature of population ecology. I haven’t forgotten about Greer’s essay in the Vault — I’ll be reading it over and thinking. You’ve given me a lot about which to think.
I’m looking into acquiring a copy of “How Can People Can the Earth Support?”
http://www.environmentalreview.org/vol03/cohen.html
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/sitb-next/0393314952/002-1227231-3512811
Comment by Rick — 6 April 2006 @ 8:01 AM
I have no idea what the function is–I’m not sure anyone does. What I do know is that it doesn’t set human population numbers according to food supply (just like any other animal), then it’s just wishful thinking.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 April 2006 @ 9:12 AM
I agree that there is no technological solution to the human overpopulation problem, but that does not mean that there is no solution. Most of the organizations involved with population issues (such as Population Connection and the Sierra Club) emphasize education for women and women’s rights as the key. (This includes family planning education, and easy access to affordable birth control.) The idea is that if women are educated and have careers, they tend to have babies later in life, and thus have fewer babies. There is certainly a lot of data to support that this.
In general, I found that the article was too pessimistic about the power of education. I don’t think that “the tragedy of the commons� really applies here. Is it true that most women—if given the choice—think that having a large family (but no career other than homemaker) is really a better life than having a career and a smaller family? I doubt it.
Comment by Ben Jacobs — 15 April 2006 @ 10:14 PM