The Depopulation Bomb

Last week I downloaded a Long Now Foundation talk by Phillip Longman. It was fascinating listening. Longman is the author of several books, but is best known as a demographer and author of a book with the provocative title of The Empty Cradle. Longman's talk was about what effects depopulation would have on the economic and social fabric of the world. That's right, depopulation. Even though world population is increasing precipitously, birth rates are actually falling all over the world, even in places you least expect it like the Middle East, much of East Asia, and even Latin America.While we worry a lot about overpopulation, Longman talks about the effects that shrinking birthrates and lengthened life spans will have on world economies. Essentially, it leads to a graying population - the population continues to increase, but it's the elderly who are driving the increase. There are less children than old people. Just as the rise in population is a feedback loop because you have more breeding pairs, the decline also feeds upon itself, since you have less breeding pairs with every iteration if you have a lower than replacement birth rate. Longman goes through a laundry list of concerns about this, some expected, some not (such as fundamentalists outbreeding the 'normal' population).

David Brooks covered much of the same ground in a recent column - The Fertility Implosion:

Usually, high religious observance and low income go along with high birthrates. But, according to the United States Census Bureau, Iran now has a similar birth rate to New England — which is the least fertile region in the U.S.

The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.

The Iranian regime is aware of how the rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the work force could lead to long-term decline. But there’s not much they have been able to do about it. Maybe Iranians are pessimistic about the future. Maybe Iranian parents just want smaller families.

As Eberstadt is careful to note, demographics is not necessarily destiny. You can have fast economic development with low fertility or high fertility (South Korea and Taiwan did it a few decades ago). But, over the long term, it’s better to have a growing work force, not one that’s shrinking compared with the number of retirees.

If you look around the world, you see many other nations facing demographic headwinds. If the 20th century was the century of the population explosion, the 21st century, as Eberstadt notes, is looking like the century of the fertility implosion.

Already, nearly half the world’s population lives in countries with birthrates below the replacement level. According to the Census Bureau, the total increase in global manpower between 2010 and 2030 will be just half the increase we experienced in the two decades that just ended. At the same time, according to work by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, the growth in educational attainment around the world is slowing.

This leads to what the writer Philip Longman has called the gray tsunami — a situation in which huge shares of the population are over 60 and small shares are under 30.

Some countries have it worse than others. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has managed the trick of having low birthrates and high death rates. Russian life expectancy is basically the same as it was 50 years ago, and the nation’s population has declined by roughly six million since 1992.

Rapidly aging Japan has one of the worst demographic profiles, and most European profiles are famously grim. In China, long-term economic growth could face serious demographic restraints. The number of Chinese senior citizens is soaring by 3.7 percent year after year. By 2030, as Eberstadt notes, there will be many more older workers (ages 50-64) than younger workers (15-29). In 2010, there were almost twice as many younger ones. In a culture where there is low social trust outside the family, a generation of only children is giving birth to another generation of only children, which is bound to lead to deep social change.

Here's a Canadian columnist saying pretty much the same thing:

The world is on the threshold of what might be called “peak people.” The world’s supply of working-age people will soon be shrinking, causing a shift from surplus to scarcity. As with “peak oil” theories – which hold that declining petroleum supplies will trigger global economic instability – the claims of the doomsayers are too hyperbolic and hysterical. These are not existential threats but rather policy challenges. That said, they’re very big policy challenges.

About 11 per cent of the world’s people are over 60 at the moment. In the next 25 years that will double, to almost a fifth, and one in six of those people will be over 80, according to a forthcoming book, Global Aging in the 21st Century, by sociologists Susan McDaniel of the University of Lethbridge and Zachary Zimmer of the University of California.

While this is affecting every country and region – even sub-Saharan Africa is now seeing a very fast rise in its proportion of seniors – some countries are being hit very hard. While 12 per cent of Chinese are now over 60, in two decades, there will be more than 28 per cent. Brazil faces a similar blow. It will be very difficult for countries that are only just emerging from poverty to suddenly face huge elder-care costs.

Peak people will be an age when jobs compete for workers rather than vice versa. The cheapest labour will vanish. We’re already seeing this: Because China is aging very fast, its dwindling working-age population is turning down the lowest-paid jobs and pushing up the minimum wage sharply, as well as the once-minimal costs of social services: Stuff from China will stop being cheap, because the Chinese aren’t young.

Here is another pro-growth take on this trend:

Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.

The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones - some of them in bestsellers like "The Population Bomb," which predicted that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now" - have never come to pass. That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset - the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love.

True, fewer human beings would mean fewer mouths to feed. It would also mean fewer entrepreneurs, fewer pioneers, fewer problem-solvers. Which is why it is not an increase but the coming decrease in human population that should engender foreboding. For as Phillip Longman, a scholar of demographics and economics at the New America Foundation, observes: "Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation."

And depopulation, like it or not, is just around the corner. That is the central message of a compelling new documentary, "Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family." Longman is one of numerous experts interviewed in the film, which explores the causes and effects of what may be the most ominous reality of 21st-century life: the fall in human birth rates almost everywhere in the world.

In 1965, the population of Italy was 52 million, of which 4.6 million, or just under 9 percent, were children younger than 5. A decade later, that age group had shrunk to 4.3 million - about 7.8 percent of Italians. By 1985, it was down to 3 million and 5.3 percent. Today, the figures are 2.5 million and 4.2 percent.

Young children are disappearing from Italian society, and the end isn't in sight. According to one estimate by the UN's Population Division, their numbers will drop to fewer than 1.6 million in 2020, and to 1.3 million by 2050. At that point, they will account for a mere 2.8 percent of the Italian nation.

Italy isn't alone. There are 1.7 million fewer young children in Poland today than there were in 1960, a 50 percent drop. In Spain 30 years ago, there were nearly 3.3 million young children; there are just 2.2 million today. Across Europe, there were more than 57 million children under 5 in 1960; today, that age group has plummeted to 35 million, a decline of 38 percent.

The world's population is still growing, thanks to rising longevity. But fertility rates - the average number of children born per woman - are falling nearly everywhere. More and more adults are deciding to have fewer and fewer children. Worldwide, reports the UN, there are 6 million fewer babies and young children today than there were in 1990. By 2015, according to one calculation, there will be 83 million fewer. By 2025, 127 million fewer. By 2050, the world's supply of the youngest children may have plunged by a quarter of a billion, and will amount to less than 5 percent of the human family.

Even in the United States, where birth rates are still (barely) at replacement level, there are hints of the dislocations to come: In Pittsburgh, reports The New York Times, deaths now outnumber births and hospitals are closing obstetrics wards or converting them to acute care for the elderly. Pittsburgh's public school enrollment was 70,000 in the 1980s. It is 30,000 today - and falling.

By mid-century, according to one UN estimate, there will be 248 million fewer children than there are now. To a culture that has been endlessly hectored about the dangers of overpopulation, that might sound like welcome news. It isn't. No society gains when it loses its most precious resource, and no resource is more valuable than the human mind. The coming demographic winter will chill us all.

The Coming Population Bust - Jeff Jacoby (Boston.com)

A World Without Children - Jeff Jacoby (Boston.com)

Here's Longman himself:

It's true that the world's population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years, from 6.9 to 9.1 billion, according to the U.N. Population Division. But this will be a very different kind of population growth than ever before -- driven not by birth rates, which have plummeted around the world, but primarily by an increase in the number of elderly people. Indeed, the global population of children under 5 is expected to fall by 49 million as of midcentury, while the number of people over 60 will grow by 1.2 billion. How did the world grow so gray, so quickly?

One reason is that more people are living to advanced old age. But just as significant is the enormous bulge of people born in the first few decades after World War II. Both the United States and Western Europe saw particularly dramatic increases in birth rates during the late 1940s and 1950s, as returning veterans made up for lost time. In the 1960s and 1970s, much of the developing world also experienced a baby boom, but for a different reason: striking declines in infant and child mortality. As these global baby boomers age, they will create a population explosion of seniors. Today in the West, we are seeing a sharp uptick in people turning 60; in another 20 years, we'll see an explosion in the numbers turning 80. Most of the rest of the world will follow the same course in the next few decades.

Eventually, the last echoes of the global baby boomers will fade away. Then, because of the continuing fall in birth rates, humans will face the very real prospect that our numbers will fall as fast -- if not faster -- than the rate at which they once grew. Russia's population is already 7 million below what it was in 1991. As for Japan, one expert has calculated that the very last Japanese baby will be born in the year 2959, assuming the country's low fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman continues unchanged. Young Austrian women now tell pollsters their ideal family size is less than two children, enough to replace themselves but not their partners. Worldwide, there is a 50 percent chance that the population will be falling by 2070, according to a recent study published in Nature. By 2150, according to one U.N. projection, the global population could be half what it is today.

That might sound like an appealing prospect: less traffic, more room at the beach, easier college admissions. But be careful what you wish for.

Think Again: Global Aging. Phillip Longman, New America Foundation

So are we talking about the wrong problem? Is the problem too few people? Is that a good thing or a bad thing, or both?

I think saying that birthrates are too low is a bit silly. Birthrates have to shrink sometime. They cannot go on increasing forever, as this article points out:

Back in “Fruits of Philosophy,” Knowlton used grade-school math to demonstrate the problem with sustained population growth. He imagined what would happen to the number of people on earth—at that point, around a billion—if it continued to increase “without check.” By the nineteen-thirties, it would reach eight billion. A century later, it would reach sixty-four billion.

Global population is expected to hit eight billion around 2025, which is to say about ninety-five years later than Knowlton predicted. No one in his right mind supposes that it could reach sixty-four billion without horrific consequences, except perhaps a few economists.

So we have to stop growing birthrates sometime. Why not now? If not now, when? It seems to me that now, with the earth's population already projected to head up to ten billion in a world of depleting resources, climate change, and mass extinctions it seems to me like now's is the perfect time to slow the birth rate. My question to Mr. Longman would be: if not now, when? And it's being accomplished without coercion, which is wonderful. People were envisioning some sort of draconian Chinese-style program to limit population growth. Instead, it's happening of it's own accord, and accompanied by things like women's rights, better education and prosperity. Increasing living standards should theoretically occur for shrinking populations, since there is less competition for resources. What's not to like? Imagine asking a five-year-old if they want to share a cake with five other kids or twenty. Then you've just figured out what any five year old knows but no economists can seem to grasp: there's more to go around for everyone.

Another rather silly objection is that the earth will depopulate and the human race will vanish. This is just plain silly. At any time we can increase birthrates very easily, and begin the upward curve again if the situation were to become so dire as to lead to an extinction of the human race.

Let's look at some of the false assumptions at play here. Let's start with this one about Japan:

"In Japan, where the fall in fertility rates began early, the working-age population has been a diminishing share of the nation for 20 years. Yet for much of that period, unemployment has been up, not down, and an economy that for a while was the envy of the world -- the Japanese Miracle, it was called -- ran out of gas more than a decade ago."

It seems we're damned if we do, damned if we don't. If you have more children, there's more competition for jobs and unemployment goes up. If there's less children the economy shrinks and there's more unemployment. Some of the wealthiest countries in the world have tiny populations: Luxembourg, Iceland, Norway. Some of the poorest have enormous populations: Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh. Wasn't Japan's stagnant economy supposedly triggered by a housing bubble? Isn't that more common with lots of people and limited land? Is the Japanese miracle going to recur if one of the world's currently most crowded counties starts producing more children? Why? During the Edo Period, Japan maintained its living standards while keeping population steady for a hundred years. And relative to the whole world, the Japanese still have a very high standard of living.

Can we at least say that the relationship between prosperity and population is hardly as simple as the author makes it out to be?

"Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics who appears in the same film, emphasizes that nothing is more indispensable to growth of any society than "human capital" -- the knowledge, skills, and experience of men and women. That is why baby booms are so often harbingers of economic expansion and vigor. And why businesses and young people drain away from regions where population is waning."

Population growth has only coincided with rising prosperity since the advent of the use of fossil fuels. Prior to that, it has always accompanied a decline in the standard of living, even in the face of better technology. See this fascinating Wikipedia article on Medieval demography. And the use of fossil fuels fed both "innovation" and population growth, so the connection between population growth and prosperity is not what it seems. I think there's a "correlation does not equal causation" fallacy here somewhere. Living standards would have risen drastically even if population growth had remained steady, perhaps even moreso.

“Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation.”

Patently untrue. Related to the above, Andrew Leonard takes this one on:

I am reminded of a startling section from Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke’s “Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium,” concerning the consequences of the Black Death for the European economy. Drastic depopulation in Western Europe appears to have led to a dramatic improvement in the living standards of the surviving working class. Total production, is is true, declined overall, but there was a significant rise in “per capita real income and wealth, since land and physical capital remain unchanged and the livestock population was apparently unaffected by the plague.” With less labor available, surviving workers were able to command a premium.

… The data suggest a sharp rise in English real wages from the middle of the fourteenth century. Real wages continued rising for about a century, so that by the middle of the fifteenth century laborers were earning more than twice as much in real terms as they had been doing on the eve of the Black Death…

I will concede that there is some cognitive dissonance to be mined in the concept of the Black Death having an upside. It’s not exactly a strategy one would recommend to labor organizers, for example. But the fundamental premise is provocative: a world with fewer people competing against each other could mean a better life for the workers who do end up getting born.

Which is not to say that depopulation is necessarily desirable, only that they are not always connected. Economist Mark Thoma comments:

I don't know world demographic history all that well, but in the cases where depopulation is correlated with falling prosperity, what caused the population declines? War, disease, famine, something like that? Were population declines the result of falling prosperity, or were population declines the cause of declining prosperity? In the present case, the (anticipated) population decline appears to be an individual or societal choice, it is not being driven by some other factor such as those listed above. For that reason, the correlation between prosperity and population could be quite different than other cases in the historical record.

"The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones - some of them in bestsellers like "The Population Bomb," which predicted that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now" - have never come to pass. That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset - the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love."

"In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before...True, fewer human beings would mean fewer mouths to feed. It would also mean fewer entrepreneurs, fewer pioneers, fewer problem-solvers. Which is why it is not an increase but the coming decrease in human population that should engender foreboding."

In other words, increased population means more "problem solvers". We'll produce more Einsteins and Edisons, or someone who'll invent a miracle way to make electricity flow from thin air or circumvent the laws of thermodynamics.

First of all, people living better lives is untrue: some are living better lives, many are living worse. A recent study found out that medieval European peasants were better off than the poorest of today's Africans, many of whom live in crowded cities and lack running water and basic sanitation. Many people around the world live on less than a dollar a day and are being kept alive and malnourished by cheap carbohydrates. They are hardly thriving. Wanting everyone to have an extremely high "American" or even "European" or "Japanese" standard of living and continuing population growth are mutually exclusive - Western lifestyles are dependent upon others being poor. This is not only because the teeming third world masses are a source of cheap labor, but because it would take several planet earths to secure such a standard of living for the people already extant today, never mind population growth.

And believing that we will permanently outrun a Malthusian catastrophe no matter what is more faith than fact. It like the jumper who says "so far so good" as he passes each floor.

Not to mention we already have more than enough tools to solve every problem we face right now. We just can't implement them. Already many of our "solutions" are being obviated by none other than population growth! When you propose alternative, sustainable agricultural methods like organic agriculture and Permaculture, you're told "we have to feed ten billion!" When you propose reducing carbon emissions by using wind and solar power, you're told "it can't provide enough power for everybody!" When you say that we need to move to a degrowth economy not based around debt, you're told "we need to provide jobs for a growing population!" When you suggest biofuels as an alternative to gasoline, you're told "it can't scale - we can't keep all the cars currently on the road running on them." In other words, we're already developed the damn solutions, it's just that our constant need for growth makes them impossible to implement. Yet more growth is supposed to solve them?! Insane!

Population increase is the very reason we've turned to fossil-fuel based fertilizers, pesticides, factory farming, deforestation, and pumping aquifers dry. I don't think that trying to come up with potential solutions to our problems by randomly producing more people who might come up with solutions is a winning strategy. In fact I think the "solution" that these future humans are liable to come up with is "stop population increase."

As for all those wonderful human qualities named above, they have a nasty habit of receding as people fight over scarce resources. For an extreme example, see the Ik people of Uganda. Scarcity of resources nearly always engenders war and conflict, which tends to put a damper on "ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership," and especially, "love." Here's Andrew Leonard again:

Never mind that by mid-century, there will also be about 2.5 billion more people in total on the planet than there are now, which some people think will probably be quite sufficient to provide all the problem-solvers we’re likely to need. If Thomas Malthus really was wrong, as Jacoby confidently asserts, we’ll find out soon enough. How the World Works doesn’t rule out the possibility that human ingenuity will find ways to squeeze continued prosperity out of a shrinking planet, but I am also unconvinced by the argument that just because a couple of hundred years of technological progress have allowed us to escape the consequences that befall every other biological population that expands too quickly, we are guaranteed unlimited growth and prosperity, ad infinitum.

In fact, we know we've been able to outrun the Malthusian catastrophe by our use of fossil fuels. I think the global decline in population can best be explained by this chart:

It's a blunt calculation, but illustrative. Fossil fuel use per capita has been declining since the 1970's. The 1970's was also the last great population boom, engendering the vaunted "youth bulge" of the Arab spring and the ant tribes that make Chinese factories hum. Yet not only are fuel supplies not increasing as quickly as population anymore, they may actually start to decrease. Certainly the EROEI is set to decrease, along with the flow rate; that is, the actual energy readily available to world economies. With much of the world industrialized or industrializing, it is impossible to imagine increased living standards and increased population coinciding, even with improvements in efficiency. The current soaring population levels and economic growth both coincided with the use of fossil fuels. It is difficult to believe they can be magically decoupled, and we will enjoy ever-higher living standards in a "knowledge and service" economy divorced from energy considerations where we walk each other's dogs and write iPhone apps. If living standards are to be maintained the population has to decline. In fact, a shrinking population may be the only thing that will head off a catastrophe. Here's John Michael Greer:

... Still, it's important not to jump to the conclusion that this means current global population levels are sustainable. What William Catton, in his classic work Overshoot, called "ghost acreage" - the vast boost to the means of subsistence that comes from the unsustainable use of fossil fuels in growing, storing, and distributing food - has allowed the world's human population in the last few centuries to balloon to between three and four times what the earth can support over the long term. As the industrial age winds down, the surpluses of food and other resources and the infrastructure of public health that made this expansion possible will wind down as well, with predictable impacts on the size of the human population.

So far, this supports the catastrophist model, but there's a catch. The winding down of the industrial age isn't a fast process. The peak of worldwide conventional oil production may well have already happened - the best figures I've seen show that production rates reached in the fall of 2005 have not been equalled since - and the overall peak, including nonconventional sources such as tar sands and natural gas liquids, probably isn't far away. What too few people seem to have noticed, though, is that the Hubbert curve is shaped like a bell, not like a sawtooth.

That bell-shaped profile means, among other things, that about as much oil will be pumped out of the ground on the downside half of the curve as was pumped on the upside. It also means that production rates along the downside will be roughly commensurable with production rates at points on the upside the same distance from the peak. If peak production comes in 2010, in other words, the amount of oil produced in 2030 will likely not be far from what was produced in 1990; production in 2060 will be somewhere near production in 1960, and production in 2100 will be around production in 1920. Even after the peak comes and goes, in other words, there will still be a great deal of oil in circulation for many years to come. The same will likely be true of most other energy resources, and of energy as a whole.

Does this mean peak oil is nothing to worry about? Not at all. The fact that the "ghost acreage" that supports our huge global population is going away gradually, rather than all at once, does not change the fact that it's going away. Historically speaking, both a slow decline and a fast collapse produce population loss; the difference is that in a slow decline, depopulation tends to be a much more complex process, subject to major regional and temporal variations.

It actually doesn't take that much to change an expanding population into a contracting one. Modest changes in birth and death rates will do the trick, and such changes are predictable consequences of the twilight of the industrial age. We've already had a preview in the former Soviet Union, where the implosion of Communism launched a classic cycle of catabolic collapse in the 1990s followed by partial recovery in this decade.

It seems to me that this poses a challenge to our economic system more than anything else. Much of our economy is designed around the pyramid model, in which you have a larger population of young, and the amount of people of succeeding ages shrinks as you head toward the apex of the pyramid. But if that model changes, then things fall apart. Everything seems tied to that, economic growth, increased consumption, debt repayments, and of course, social programs (e.g. Medicare, Social Security in the U.S., pensions in Europe). Health "insurance" is certainly predicated upon that - and that's a topic I want to explore in more depth in the future. But of course, the problem is never assumed to be in the way we've structured our economic systems, it is always we who must conform to it, not the other way around. Missing in all this is any discussion of the effects on the planetary ecosystem. You always hear "yes, this is good for the environment but..." But? Come on now, really, why is this a tradeoff? The real problem is setting up an economy where you require constant population growth and an ever larger cadre of young workers in perpetuity. Because you won't always have that. Period. See this article from The New York times: Are The Good times Never Coming Back?:

The paper, entitled “Disentangling the Channels of the 2007-2009 Recession,” will be posted on the general conference Web site Thursday afternoon. The authors argue that the slow pace of recovery reflects a long-term deterioration in economic prospects. Specifically, they estimate that the trend growth rate of gross domestic product fell by 1.2 percentage points between 1965 and 2005. The economists who wrote the new paper, James Stock of Harvard and Mark Watson of Princeton, contend that the key reason for the faltering pace of growth is that the work force is expanding more slowly. Population growth has slowed, and so has the pace at which women are entering the labor market. “These demographic changes imply continued low or even declining trend growth rates in employment, which in turn imply that future recessions will be deeper, and will have slower recoveries, than historically has been the case.”

Indeed, recent growth has actually outpaced their expectations. “The current recovery in employment is actually faster than predicted,” they write. “The puzzle, if there is one, is why the recovery was as strong as it has been.” This general theory about the power of women has been propounded before, notably by the economist Tyler Cowen in his recent book “The Great Stagnation.”

In the current context, however, it is also deployed as a rebuttal to the many economists who regard the slow recovery as a consequence of the unusual nature of the recession. One such view holds that financial crises are particularly traumatic. Another common theory holds that high levels of debt are restraining growth. Both of these views carry the implication that the good times will return.

To which this comment made the most sense:

It is still striking to me that economists never consider the price of energy in their analysis.

From 2000 to 2003 the global price of oil (Brent) was between $24.5 and $28.8. The climb then began:

2004 - $38.25 2005 - $54.57 2006 - $65.16 2007 - $72.44 2008 - $96.94.

In 2011 it was $111.

So from 2003 until 2011 it went up by a factor of 3.8

And it never seems to occur to them that the price of energy could be strangling the economy. Look at these prices and then re-look at the first graph in this analysis.

Economic growth requires cheap energy. Liquid fuels are especially important due to their use in transportation and construction. Standard measure of such fuels - the EIA Crude and Condensate for instance - show little growth over the last 8 years. Is a flat economy culling demand for oil? Or is a plateau in oil production choking economic growth? Interlocking feedbacks, its tough to untangle.

Seems to me that both theories are true. We will not in this generation get back to the debt dueled halcyon days of the massive worldwide credit bubble... It just isn't possible. There is no doubt that 2003 to 2008 was a freak anomaly. But also there are demographic reasons why we will have slow future growth including less women entering the work force, an eviscerated middle class with continued pressure due to global wage arbitrage and US policies that favor capital over labor, and worst of all an aging baby boom generation that will soon retire, needing to draw down their savings (I.e investments) putting a crushing load in our safety net. That said, it is not surprising that we see these demographic issues combined with a credit bubble. The fed encouraged the bubble precisely to hide these symptoms from the average American. Without the bubble Americans would have revolted 10-20 years ago. The bubble allowed the greatest transfer of wealth (away from middle class to the hyper wealthy) ever imagined in the history of earth. The transfer is almost complete. Now they raid Medicare and the two prizes... Social security and 401k plans.

In addition to the common culprits - Urbanization, industrialization, better education and rights for women, and the need for decades of schooling to secure employment, here are some of the other major reasons population is declining:

1.) Lack of jobs. This is the big one. In the Middle East, a slang term based on the Arabic word "wall" has been applied to youth who have nothing else to do but lean against walls all day. In China, the massive amounts of graduates are compared to a tribe of ants and sleep several to a bedroom to make ends meet. In Europe, unemployment is endemic - as high as fifty percent for youth in some places. The same is true for the United States. The Japanese have seen their employment prospects dwindle for a generation already. Nowhere on earth is there a surplus of jobs. This is especially true for males, whose traditional tasks have been displaced by machines and computers.

2.) Declining Living Standards. When people see that their children will no longer be better off than they were, they are less likely to have them. It's finally sinking in after a generation that most Americans can look forward to nothing more than falling living standards, and working ever harder to keep what little they do have. Such trends are happening worldwide, even in "expanding" economies where people are working ever harder and there is no safety net.

3.) Extreme Inequality. People at the bottom see how the game is rigged against them and their children. The wealth is being hoarded at the top, and the benefits of increasing wealth accrue to an ever-smaller number of "owners" in the winner-take-all economy. Since the rich can set up their children never to fail and take up the few remaining good and rewarding jobs, the poor realize that their kids have no way to get ahead, so they don't have any.

4.) Temporary and uncertain employment. If your job could disappear in a puff of smoke anytime, how can you justify having an expensive child that you will need to take care of for possibly decades, no matter what? How can you be assured you can take care of a child, much less ensure his or her future success? By some measures, the cost of raising a middle class child has risen by 40 percent over the past ten years. Who doesn't want their children to be middle class?

5. Poor Social Services. Only true for some countries. Americans (and most third-world countries) get no support for daycare, child care, scant maternity leave, nonexistent paternity leave, little paid time off, etc. A tax credit for children is the extent of support, and this is less and less of an incentive. The opportunity cost of having a child is high, and if people decide they need that money just to survive, they will not invest it in a child whom they believe has no future thanks to all of the above. Even though social services in many industrialized countries are excellent, it is still not enough given the above factors.

6.) Lack of time. Monster hours on the job, the long commute, scant vacation, paying the bills keeping up the house, who has time for kids?

7.) Diversions. With so many other potential things to do with one's time, and so many other outlets for one's energies, there is less incentive to have kids.

So we see that people are doing the right thing - responding exactly as you would expect given the economic conditions in which they find themselves. In addition, we see that all of the above are caused by conservative policies! No amount of exhortation is going to change the trend, minus a change in the above conditions. In the age of "austerity", that seems increasingly unlikely. And maybe that's how it should be. Here's one commentator to the Brooks article.

Conservatives have the tendency to blame the individual for sweeping global trends. No one decides to jump on the low-birth-rate bandwagon. It's not a movement; it's a response to a perceived uncertainty about the future. Conservative governments are in large part responsible, as oligarchs hoard wealth while the rank and file worker gets little. There have been recent reports that Iran has an epidemic of un- and under-employed young men, many with higher education but no job prospects. How are they to marry and afford to raise children?

And another commenter:

It's possible that, in a finite world where we have long assumed limitless growth was forever possible, the world economy is trying to level off. No one controls this complex system we live in, and its behavior may be independent of our intentions on the level of policy decisions. If it's occurring, the leveling off of economic activity will not be painless or easy, but it may be the only viable option. Infinite growth in a finite world makes little sense.

Humans modulate their birthrates according to the environment and circumstances, and they know when those circumstances are not good. Depopulation always accompanies a collapse (e.g the end of the Western Roman Empire). Does anyone think the Russian economy will magically improve if people start producing more kids? No, most likely the other way 'round: people will have more kids if the economy improves. There are theoretically more than enough people in Russia now for that to happen. Without that simply exhorting people to reproduce will be to no avail. It's one of the paradoxes of capitalism - one of the many internal contradictions that cause its breakdown. It needs an ever-larger pool of workers and consumers to exploit, but it creates conditions nonconducive to having children. This is caused by increasing urbanization, automation, overproduction, and a "race to the bottom" in wages. Since children are a liability rather than an asset as they would be in agricultural societies, there is less incentive to have them. Extended family units are broken up by the need to move around the country or to other countries in search of work. Finally, with the entry of women into the workforce, there is no time to care for children. The novel method method of paying strangers to take care of your child seems to be receding, as few people can afford it anymore. Deteriorating economic conditions accelerate all these trends.

So to sum up, slower population growth will give some relief to the planet, eventually. Overall, populations will not shrink for some time yet. In the meantime it will present economic challenges our Ponzi-oriented economy in dealing with a high ratio of aging people who require expensive medical care with a smaller working-age population. This is a situation which logic dictates we would have to face at some point. I think this trend is one of the few pieces of good news we've had in a while.

And see this: Population growth isn't really our problem (BoingBoing):

Global population is going up, Pearce writes, but that's not the same thing as saying that birth rates are going up. And, in the long run, that distinction matters. Around the world—not just in the West—human birthrates are decreasing. And they've been decreasing for a really long time.

What I really like about this essay, though, is how well Pearce articulates the real problem, which is over-consumption. Population and consumption might appear to be intrinsically linked, but they're not. As Pearce points out, global consumption is increasing far faster than global population and the average American family of four uses far more land, far more water, far more energy and produces far more emissions than an Ethiopian family of 11.

This is important. I've heard many, many Americans express their fears about population growth over the years. Pearce's essay makes it clear that, when you do that, you're pretty much being a concern troll. The population problem, while still real, is well on its way to solving itself. The consumption problem, not so much. Population growth is a problem of the poor. Consumption growth is a problem of the rich (which, from a global perspective, includes pretty much everyone in the United States). So when you ignore consumption and pin the blame for global sustainability issues on population, what you're doing is blaming the 99% for the mistakes of the 1%.

Money and the Power of Symbols

I just listened to this podcast talking with professor David Hawkes about money, finance, and the power of symbols. Highly recommended. Here are some of the main points:

1. Because people sell their time in exchange for a symbol of the work performed during that time (money), they begin to see themselves as a commodity.

2. When we give money the power to reproduce, it becomes “alive”. When money is ascribed the characteristics of a living thing it consequently gains its own needs, desires, values, interests etc., which may conflict with the needs, desires, wants and interests of real people and things. By giving the behavior of living things to a dead object, people assume powers that should only be granted to God, which is why all the major religions prohibited usury. The subjective is assigned an objective existence, with everything that entails.

3. Money is a collective delusion, so there is no way any one single person can make it go away by refusing to believe in it. It has no material existence outside of the human mind, yet it is the most powerful force in the modern world. We destroy the real world of human relationships and the natural world for these symbolic tokens which have no real objective existence.

4. All capital is alienated labor in external symbolic form.

5. In a system of wage labor what the worker is selling is his time, rather than his labor. Time is indistinguishable from life, so what we are really selling is our lives. Selling one’s life piecemeal gives one a materialist outlook essentially indistinguishable from that of a slave.

6. Societies newly introduced to the workings of money often experience witchcraft panics (medieval Europe, modern sub-Saharan Africa, etc.) because people are achieving power by nontraditional means. The rich seem to make money out of thin air, which is why in African societies "big men" are thought to be practicing a sort of witchcraft (e.g. Duvalier in Haiti). The money economy takes a medium of symbolic representation and causes it to influence the actual physical world of objects and people. In this way, it is exactly analogous to traditional ceremonial magic.

7. The Economy is a relatively recent invention. The idea of something called “An Economy” as distinct from the larger society was invented by political philosophers in the eighteenth century as a way of rationalizing certain self-interested, avaricious and greedy behaviors that take place in a market economy which were formerly sanctioned by ethical and moral systems. A totally arbitrary distinction is made between behaviors that are “economic” and hence outside all other spheres of human relationships - political, social, ethical, religious etc. where naked self-interest is expected and justifiable.

8. Aristotle distinguished between use value and exchange value. The use value is inherent in the material of the object itself – a pen for writing, a watch for telling the time. Exchange value is symbolic, not material. Aristotle believed that the purpose of economic activity was to produce use value. Exchange value is simply a means to an end – the end being the use value. When economic activity is divorced from any use value: making money from money with no ultimate beneficial purpose, it is unnatural. (i.e. financial profits). This is why usury is unnatural. In market economies exchange value completely dominates the economic system.

9. The distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in traditional Marxism is no longer valid in modern society – nearly all workers receive some sort of unearned “investment” income in addition to their wages, whether it be a mortgage, a pension, bonds, etc., and most people who receive income from investments also sell their labor power as well.

10. The central idea of Marxist revolution was one of workers of taking up arms against the bourgeoisie and seizing control of the means of production in advanced capitalist economies to expropriate their own alienated labor power. Attempts to overthrow capitalism by socialist politics universally failed. Where Socialist revolutions did take place, they were peasant rebellions in pre-capitalist societies (Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam).

11. Our society is completely based on usury. Because of usury, Capitalism is committed to unceasing growth. If you borrow at interest you have to pay back more than you borrowed, that is, you must grow. But you cannot grow forever since you have limited resources. This will make capitalism psychologically untenable. Will we do away with it before it does away with us?

12. The use of money has caused Postmodern philosophers see the world as just symbolic, divorced from any hard and fast concrete reality. There is no ultimate truth, everything is fluid with no inherent identity. To some this is exciting, to others troubling.

13. It took a long, persistent ideological campaign to make people see usury as anything other than unnatural. Every previous system of thought in human history has claimed that usury is the tool of the devil and usurers are evil. People are naturally inherently resistant to the idea of usury.

I find  number 7 to be particularly interesting. We're told Adam Smith "invented" economics in 1776. Really, there were no economies before then?  What he really invented was a way to justify self-interest. Adam Smith was actually a professor of moral philosophy. In his lifetime he was much more known for his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which tried to explain the origins of human morality, than he was for The Wealth of Nations. In fact, the first person to hold the "official" position of an economist was none other than Thomas Malthus, whose conclusions have been soundly rejected by mainstream economists ever since!

Adam Smith's central question was how self-seeking behavior could lead to positive outcomes. In theory, according to all known moral codes, people acting out of selfish reasons should lead to only negative outcomes. To explain this discrepancy, he invented the "economy" through which works the famous "invisible hand." As Wikipedia puts it, "by trying to maximize their own gains in a free market, individual ambition benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions."

And once "The Economy" was invented, all other human endeavors became subsumed by it. Now there is nothing but "The Economy." And what is the purpose of "The Economy?" To grow eternally, by any means, full stop. The needs of society, and of the natural world, became subsumed to the needs of money, and naked self interest became not an abomination, but a laudable goal for everyone. Turning moral sentiments on their ear, Ayn Rand proclaimed that altruism was harmful, and that people should act for no other motivation than pure selfishness. Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed that there is no such thing as society, only individuals. This philosophy has now become the guiding ideology of the capitalism.

Over time, economists decided that all people were were merely atomized individuals seeking to benefit themselves. They made complex mathematical models of symbolic abstractions like prices and interest rates and assumed it told them something about the actual underlying world of physical objects. Even now politicians of all persuasions turn to their favorite economists to tell them what's going on while at the same time muzzling scientists.

I also like the concept that money serves to mystify human relationships. Because we no longer see any relationship between money and what it does, it allows myths like the ownership class creates all our wealth and that workers are merely parasites sponging off of their greatness to go unchallenged. It creates the idea that money can be made without some sort of work being done or value being created. We buy a house or a stock, and we magically get back more money than we put in, like a slot machine that always works. No wonder we're awash in magical thinking. It even infiltrates our language when we say things like a hedge fund manager "earned" twenty million dollars last year. By doing what, exactly? Since money mystically reproduces itself and obscures all the blood, sweat and tears that make the real economy work, we are convinced that the rich "earn" their money, rather than collect it. And of course they need ever more tax breaks and less regulations to keep it coming. Abracadabra!

In Praise of Discomfort

“People think I'm crazy to put myself through such torture, though I would argue otherwise. Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness. Dostoyevsky had it right: 'Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.' Never are my senses more engaged than when the pain sets in. There is a magic in misery. Just ask any runner.”

― Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner

I normally never read sports books and I've never been an avid runner, but for some reason I picked up "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall. I saw a short clip when I was in Portland about a book about some sort of hidden running tribe and an extreme race across the desert (at the time, I didn't even know it was called). I thought that sounded interesting and something about it stuck in my head, and when I found out what the book was called, I ordered it from the library and gave it a read. Despite being outside of my normal subject matter, I couldn't put it down. I read it in a week (although my running habits have atrophied considerably since then) . It's a terrific read - good storytelling and a fascinating exposition of the human relationship to running. As the book pointed out, humans are the only animals that run for pleasure.

The ultimate running phenomenon is fascinating to me. In a world where we are told that comfort and convenience is the ultimate justification for just about every atrocity around today, and where these two factors seem to be the impetus behind every new product from fast food to 3G broadband, how is it that so many people seem to want to push themselves to the limit, that is, to make themselves uncomfortable, so much so that now even a marathon is not enough? That now people are pushing themselves to run thirty, forty or a hundred miles? Or run for twenty-fours hours straight or multiple marathons back-to-back? It seems almost a natural counter-reaction - in the age where we need to drive everywhere for even the smallest things and some Americans even scuttle around permanently on little golf-cart like scooters, we need to go even more extreme lengths the other direction, especially when physical work is no longer necessary in our daily lives as it was for our ancestors.

Comfort seems to be almost antithetical to happiness. Not only happiness, but to enlightenment. The Japanese have a practice called Misogi in which they make themselves extremely uncomfortable in order to seek enlightenment. This is also practiced by martial artists. The Stoic philosophers also had similar ideas. We seem to have lost touch with this wisdom. It seems like when a society gets ever-more comfortable and convenient, depression seems to go up, not down. Then, why do we pursue this with such intensity? I think it boils down to what a lot of positive psychology researchers have said: we're terrible at predicting what makes us happy. Maybe we should all get a bit more uncomfortable.

I thought of all this due to the recent death of one of Born To Run's central, and most mysterious characters:  Caballo Blanco, alias Micah True, alias Michael Randall Hickman. His death is still a mystery, but McDougall penned a nice article about him for the BBC:

He was an ex-professional boxer, I discovered, who was recovering from a broken heart with long, rambling runs across the Colorado trails. When the Tarahumara needed someone to guide them for the last 50 miles of the race, he volunteered. Something about that night - about the experience of whisking silently through the dark by the side of a stranger from another century - must have affected him deeply, because soon after the Tarahumara left, Michael Randall Hickman went after them. He'd be reborn - first as Micah True, self-named seeker of ancient wisdom, and then, to the Tarahumara children he entertained by snorting and stomping, as Caballo Blanco.

His life is as far apart from the American McDream as you can get. He lived a hand-to-mouth existence with no steady job in one of the poorest and most inhospitable areas of Mexico alongside a relatively poor, reclusive tribe with very few of our modern conveniences. It was hardly a life of cubicles, attached garages and time schedules:

The mysterious thing about the disappearance last week of Micah True - better known as Caballo Blanco, the White Horse of the Sierra Madre mountains - was that for once, we knew where he was. He wasn't bushwhacking a secret new route through the Mexican outback because he heard a bandit was lying in wait for him on the old one. He hadn't set off at sunrise to run all day through Mexico's Copper Canyons to visit the hidden homes of his friends, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians. He wasn't clattering across the Mojave in an ancient pickup truck, hoping to earn a few more months of food as a vagabond furniture mover.

Was he unhappy? Hardly:

Caballo's dream was to let the rest of the world know there was ancient wisdom worth protecting down there in the canyons, and his method was to create a wild, multi-day running festival in the heart of Tarahumara territory. Nine months after he'd shown me how to transform my technique, I was able to return to the Copper Canyons in 2006 with ace runners like Scott Jurek and Luis Escobar for the 50-mile Ultramaraton de Caballo Blanco. Since then, the race has grown beyond even Caballo's wildest expectations - this year on 4 March, more than 400 Tarahumara and nearly 100 outside runners participated, including past New York City marathon champion German Silva. "He was the happiest I'd ever seen him," Will Harlan, one of Caballo's friends, told me. "He seemed to have a tranquillity and centeredness, even as record numbers of Tarahumara descended on Urique to run the race."

And he seemed to have spiritual harmony too. The advice that transformed McDougall's running techniques sounded like something out of a Zen master:

"Don't fight the trail. Take what it gives you," he began. "Lesson two - think easy, light, smooth and fast. You start with easy, because if that's all you get, that's not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don't [care] how high the hill is or how far you've got to go. When you've practised that so long that you forget you're practising, you work on making it smooooooth. You won't have to worry about the last one - you get those three, and you'll be fast."

I'd point out that the reason Kung-Fu was said to originate in the Shaolin temple was because the exercises were designed to use movement to "forget oneself" and bring about enlightenment. Many physical exercises are designed this way, including Hatha Yoga (the real practice) and walking meditation. I think the ideas above can be applied to just about any endeavor. It similar to the psychological idea of Flow.

And no matter how "successful" you are, you can't take it with you. How do you want to go?:

On Monday, he went for a six-hour run with Guadajuko, a Mexican mongrel he'd adopted and called "the ghost dog". On Tuesday, he decided to do a quick 12-miler before hitting the road. Guadajuko's paws were sore, so Caballo left him on the porch and told the innkeeper he'd be back in two hours.Five days later, he was finally discovered by the side of a cool mountain stream not far from the lodge. His death is still a mystery. One of the running buddies who found him said Caballo looked peaceful - as if he'd stopped for a nap at the end of a long, glorious ramble through the woods, and never woken up.

This ties in with two things. As author John Michael Greer has pointed out, we've come to rely on external machines and technologies so much that natural human abilities have atrophied. Relying on computers and other mechanical aids outside ourselves, we have no reason to develop our own hidden potential. In The Recovery of the Human, he says:

[...] Thus one of the greatest challenges ahead of us as the age of abundance ends is nothing less than the rediscovery of the possibilities of our own humanity. The work that needs to be done—and in an epoch of decline, there will be plenty of that—will have to be done with the capacities woven into the human body and mind, along with those additional capacities that can be developed in both by training and practice. The effort that nowadays gets poured into teaching people how to manipulate machines will need to be redirected into teaching them how to bring out the creative and productive capacities in themselves.

Less than a hundred years ago, the sort of awareness I’m suggesting here was a common response of people across the industrial world to the mechanization of everyday life, and less than forty years ago a revival of that same approach—the human potential movement of the Seventies—achieved a not inconsiderable success before it was stomped by the same backlash that flattened the industrial world’s last real attempt to turn aside from the mess it’s made for itself. The recognition that the potential within the individual human being is the industrial world’s most thoroughly wasted and neglected resource has surfaced at intervals straight through the history of industrialism, and been hurriedly swept back under the rug time and again. Go back to the origins of contemporary industrial society in the scientific revolution, in fact, and you can trace the same opposition in the tangled conflicts by which the first versions of modern science seized the cultural conversation of their time from the remnants of Renaissance humanism and set our civilization on the path to its current predicament.

There are immense issues involved in a recovery of the human, a refocusing of attention toward what human beings can do with their own innate possibilities and potentials for learning and away from the quest to replace as many human functions as possible by this season’s crop of computerized gimmickry. I’ve touched on a few of those issues in the sequence of posts on magic that appeared here in the last months of 2011, and plan on bringing up others here and there in the months to come. For now, what I hope to get across is the core idea that the most important resources we have left at this point, the most promising potentials for a response to the end of the age of cheap abundant energy, are not machines, or potential sources of fuel, or anything else outside the individual human being.

Greer uses the art of memory as one example, but the ability to traverse fifty to one hundred miles in a day by continuous running that the Tarahmara have developed is another prime example. And to think according to city planning experts, anything beyond 1.5 miles is not walkable! It's a paradox of our times that even in the age of mechanical comfort, it seems that other human abilities are becoming more developed. Once the four-minute mile was considered impossible, now it's run even by amateurs in high school. Olympic and other sports records are broken all the time. And marathons have become passe in the age of the ultramarathon (competitive eating proves that not all of these trends are beneficial, however).

The other ties in with the Grammar of Happiness article, about living with primitive tribes in the Amazon. The Amazonian tribes and the Tarahumara are "primitive" people that have survived into our present time. They live with a level of technology we would think of as stone age. They run from place to place and catch all their own food. they must be miserable, right?

By the time I tracked him down, he'd spent nearly 15 years living among the Tarahumara. Their secret, Caballo told me, was simple - the Tarahumara remember that humans are creatures of constant motion, and if we forget that we survived and thrived for most of our existence as long-distance runners, we'll suffer the same consequences as any other caged animal - disease, mood swings, eating disorders, all-around misery. "The Tarahumara aren't smarter than us. They've just got better memories." Learn the fine art of running, Caballo told me, and you can change your life.

I think there's a lesson here, and it's about more than running. It's not just the art of running, it's the art of living we've forgotten. The quote at the top of the page is one of my favorites - why do we consistently confuse comfort with happiness? So many of these human potential things seem to be all about our mindspace. And what is our mindspace like in the modern world? Here's a great quote posted on Of Two Minds recently:

Last year you wrote an essay about what you called the "often-wrenching process of change." (Change and the Process of Transformation August 15, 2011). I think there is a marketing/consumerist aspect to our fears. I think the fear of "being yourself" and wanting to retain that fantasy viewpoint is all about the fear that your real self is NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

Most of the country feels this way - not good enough. But we've had help getting there - a million commercials by age 35, lovingly scripted by experts focused on motivating us to consume, often based on improving status or looking better. How could your real self be good enough if you need all those products? Most people are terrified to be stripped of all their things that prop them up, not because they are intrinsically lame people, but because that's how they've been programmed to think. Its very hard to avoid this programming. I mean, really. One MILLION commercials. And I'm certain more time, effort, energy, and creativity went into those commercials than the actual programming - especially given today's reality TV crap. And parents and friends help to reinforce. Its one of the hardest things ever to have a healthy level of detachment from all the stuff.

I once read an almanac (don't ask me why) from the 1950s and in the back, there was this table that I'll never forget. It was a stress table, and it rated each stressful event. Obvious ones like death of a spouse, divorce, getting fired, but JUST AS STRESSFUL were the so-called positive changes - getting promoted, getting married, birth of a child. What I drew from this is that all change (positive OR negative) is inherently stressful. Which ties in completely with what you wrote. Transformation is stressful, even when nominally positive.

One million commercials! Imagine if instead we had one million messages telling us what we could achieve? Or to be kind, generous, thoughtful and forgiving? Instead the messages we receive are: "you are incomplete," "buy this product to make up for your shortcomings," "you deserve it," and "who dies with the most toys wins." As I've often said, we're living in the single largest psychological experiment ever performed, except instead of volunteers in a lab it's being performed on the whole of society without our consent, and there are no controls or supervision. If this were an experiment in a laboratory, the plug would have been pulled long ago on ethical grounds.

Change is stressful, as the article points out, even so-called "beneficial" change. There is very little change in the lives of the Tarahumara and the Pirahã. Yet we keep being told by the people on the top of the pyramid that innovation is the answer to all our problems, and that we need "creative destruction." Really? maybe what we need is little less innovation, a little less destruction, a little less comfort, and the recovery of our own abilities and self-reliance. We need the recovery of the human.

So take a lesson from the life of the late Micah True. Live a life less ordinary. Suffer. Refuse to be spoon-fed. Develop your own abilities, whatever they may be. Go where your heart takes you. Don't fall into the comfort and convenience trap. We were meant to suffer, because that's what makes us human, and paradoxically, it's what makes us happy. What you think will make you happy probably won't. It doesn't have to be running, it can be anything. Don't let someone else tell you what your dreams should be.

“Struggling and suffering are the essence of a life worth living. If you're not pushing yourself beyond the comfort zone, if you're not demanding more from yourself - expanding and learning as you go - you're choosing a numb existence. You're denying yourself an extraordinary trip.”

― Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner

Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.

― Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor

What If The Peak Oil Movement Isn't About Peak Oil At All?

blogger note: I am proud to have this as my 300th post.

1. What You Think You Know About Agriculture Is Wrong

I was surprised to see this item on Grist's list of environmental stories: Industrial Agriculture Is Booming. From Bloomberg News (emphasis mine):

Corn will lead the planting surge because it is the most profitable row crop. U.S. mandates for alternative fuels have led to an increased use of the grain to make ethanol, and rising worldwide incomes are boosting meat consumption, increasing requirements for livestock feed. Global production of beef, veal, pork, chicken and turkey will reach almost a quarter of a billion metric tons this year, 62 percent more than two decades ago, the USDA estimates.

An acre of corn will earn as much $150 more than soybeans at current prices and normal weather, said Mike Wagler, 30, who farms about 7,000 acres with his father in Montgomery, Indiana.

“Farmers have the capital to plant a big corn crop this year,” said Wagler, who plans to sow 85 percent of his family’s land with the grain compared with 70 percent last year. “We can make more money raising corn than soybeans.”

In North Dakota, the largest producer of spring wheat, farmers probably will plant record corn and soybean acres this year as they use most of the 5.6 million acres that couldn’t be planted in 2011, said Frayne Olson, an agriculture economist at North Dakota State University in Fargo. Spring-wheat acreage will remain steady, he said.

David Kopseng, a fourth-generation grower on 4,700 acres in Harvey, North Dakota, said he will boost corn planting by 17 percent to 1,400 acres from a year earlier. in 2006, he didn’t sow any of the grain. Improved seeds have boosted yield by about 40 percent in the past decade, making corn at least $50 more profitable than wheat or soybeans, he said.

“We’re going to plant the most corn acres ever,” said the 47-year-old Kopseng. “I’ve been buying some more land and renting more because of corn’s profitability. It’s a great time to be a farmer in North Dakota.”

Indeed, industrial agriculture is booming, and profits are high six years after the declaration of Peak Oil by the IEA and with dramatically rising oil prices around the world. This seems to contradict the conventional wisdom of many Peak Oil writers that the high cost of oil will cause industrial agriculture to become unprofitable, with unemployed city workers streaming out of the cities into the fallow fields and abandoned farms ringing urban areas to become yeoman farmers, living off the land and selling their surplus to city dwellers who can no longer afford supermarket food trucked and flown in from California and South America. This is considered something of an article of faith by the Peak Oil community. Peak Oil blogs such as Energy Bulletin are full of stories of horse-drawn plows, farmer's markets and urban gardens providing food for city-dwellers.

It's easy to see the logic of why this thinking is so common among the Peak Oil community. Industrial agriculture was made possible by extreme mechanization which was in turn made possible by plentiful cheap oil. Such mechanization drove farmers off the land and into the cities to seek work. The oft-quoted statistic is that only about two percent of the nation is currently engaged in food production, from over thirty percent at the dawn of the twentieth century. Also, the fertilizers and pesticides that allow industrial agriculture to take place are also produced almost exclusively via fossil fuels, especially natural gas which is used as a feedstock. Thus, as fossil fuels become more expensive, this model of farming will become increasingly economically untenable in the face of low-tech, labor-intensive methods on smaller farms. Here's one of the most enthusiastic proponents of this view, James Howard Kunstler in 2009:

2009 may be the point where we begin to understand what kinds of places will be more hospitable to human society further ahead. I maintain that our giant urban metroplexes have way overshot their sustainable scale and will contract severely. With all the economic hardship, we ought to expect a lot of demographic churning, people leaving hopeless places and moving on to something more promising. I believe we will see them move to smaller towns and smaller cities. The reorganization of the rural landscape into smaller-scaled farms has not begun to occur -- though 2009 might be very hard on agribusiness, given the shortage of capital and if oil begins to march up in price by late winter. Eventually, the rural landscape will require the labor of many more people than is currently the case.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2008/12/forcast-for-2009.html

But is this really the case? In a long, controversial post on The Oil Drum from 2008, Stuart Staniford took a contrarian position from the majority of the Peak Oil commentariat, arguing that rather than pointing to a return to small-scale local agriculture, high oil prices would actually help industrial agriculture. Staniford's argument can be summarized as follows: if the high costs of fuel were to lead to more labor-intensive, smaller-scale agriculture, we would expect to see this trend as oil prices rise. Instead, we're seeing exactly the opposite effect. The profitability of large-scale mechanized agriculture is increasing, while small-scale family farmers continue to struggle, often falling victim to foreclosures. He looks at the trends and comes to the conclusion that there really is no evidence that rising energy prices will cause a flight back to small-scale local farming the way it was practiced at the dawn of the twentieth century, or lead to a vast increase in the number of farmers and laborers. From his post (all emphasis mine):

If it's the case that agriculture is going to revert to a manual low-energy process in the face of peak oil, then that should show up in the profitability data. Here are some natural predictions we might make:

• Industrial farming is less profitable at high oil prices than at low oil prices.
• Now that we are at, or close to, peak oil, industrial agriculture is beginning to show signs of strain, indicating it may break down in the future, allowing alternative approaches to take over.
• Industrial farmers use more labor in the face of high oil prices.
• Farms are starting to get smaller now that peak oil is nigh.
• In developing countries, where the farmers never unlocalized in the first place, the dynamics are changing to favor small subsistence farmers over larger mechanized operations.

As we shall see, the evidence doesn't provide any support for any of these propositions, and in fact it tends to provide at least some evidence for the opposite view: the industrial agricultural system appears to be strengthened by peak oil, and is likely to get stronger still in the near future. Rather than industrial farms losing money, land prices dropping, and desperate farmers loooking to throw in the towel and sell out to the hordes of neo-peasant reversalists, we find farm incomes rising, average farm sizes increasing, and no sign of greater use of labor in the production of the core arable crops in the US.

Now that it seems increasingly likely that Peak Oil occurred in 2005-2006 and oil prices are permanently over 100 dollars a barrel, what are we seeing? Large industrial farms going broke, and small-scale local farmers filling the void? No, quite the opposite. Just as Staniford predicted in 2008, currently industrial farming is booming thanks to high fuel and food prices:

Farms in the US have been getting steadily bigger for a long time. The reasons are very simple: there are substantial economies of scale in industrial farming - it's desirable to keep the expensive machinery and administrative labor working at maximum capacity, which means spreading it out over as much land as possible.Small farms lose money at a great rate, and only large operations make a profit. This is a recipe for larger farms as the small ones sell out to their wealthier neighbors. As the share of energy in the cost structure grows, this graph may moderate a little (since fertilizer and fuel usage are likely directly proportional to acreage). However, there is nothing in high energy costs that will make it reverse - it will still be beneficial to spread the non-energy costs over more acreage. Thus although the trend of increasing farm size may slow, there is nothing to put it into reverse.

And in the developing world, another important factor comes into play. As we discussed last week, over half of all households in rural areas in developing countries are net food importers, even though the vast majority are involved in agriculture somehow. Thus, rising food prices will place tremendous stress on very poor households that grow some food, but not enough to live on. They may be forced to sell their land to larger landholders that produce a surplus. Thus, we may see the exact opposite of what the relocalization movement might predict - farm sizes in developing countries may increase in the face of peak oil.

Staniford concludes:

I've argued in this piece that industrial agriculture is likely to be stronger and more profitable when oil prices are high, not weaker. So the reversalist future of local food production on smaller farms with higher labor input will not come to pass as a result of peak oil. The industrial agricultural sector owns most of the land, and will be in an excellent position to increase their land holdings as remaining subsistence farmers fail or consolidate in the face of high food prices. Industrial farmers will have no reason to sell out to improverished urban dwellers. Thus the industrialization of the land is not a reversible process any time soon - it is a fallacy to think so. The reversalists are expressing wishful thinking and nostalgia for the past, not a reasoned analysis of how the future is likely to play out. And urbanites worried about their future should not be looking to buy or rent a smallholding as a solution to their problems - industrial farmers are extremely efficient, and there is no way to compete with them except by becoming one.

If you think about it, Staniford's argument makes sense. Small-scale and organic farmers and ranchers may produce better food, but any trip to the supermarket will reveal that it is more expensive. It would be better if healthy food were cheaper than processed junk, but it's hard to imagine how this will be possible given the workings of the money economy. If energy prices rise, costs for small producers will rise as well as those for big producers, with smaller producers less able to absorb the shock without going under. As people get poorer, they will want to buy cheaper food, which industrial farming can provide but small scale farmers have more difficulty doing. And in the "developing" world, farmers are still being driven to bankruptcy by imported grain and continuing to head to quickly expanding "arrival cities." The world is continuing to become more urban, not less. High oil prices have not reversed this trend; they have just made food more expensive, causing instability but hardly leading to more local or labor-intensive food production. Peak Oil is certainly causing food prices to rise (as is speculation, to which degrees is a matter of debate). But the fundamental economic realities are not making small-scale labor-intensive agriculture competitive again.

As the economy contracts and people become poorer, they have not been eating healthier by-and-large, nor have they eschewed big-box stores even as gas becomes more expensive; McDonalds and Wal-Mart have, perhaps tragically, done quite well in the contracting economy. With agriculture thoroughly mechanized, it will not de-mechanize, food will just get more expensive. As gas becomes more expensive, it will also drive the use of biofuels, which will further increase the profitability of large-scale industrial agriculture, despite the illogical energy calculus. Factor in the subsidies put in place by a political culture in thrall to deep-pocketed special interests, and this distorts the picture even further in favor of industrial agriculture. As once commenter to Staniford's article put it:

Stuart is probably correct about the continuing growth of industrial agriculture. The merging of the energy markets with the food markets means that the price of both shall move upwards in lockstep. Both our engines and our bellies will face progressive starvation. This is even now being played out in the third world. Their farms are industrializing and growing food, fiber and energy for export, leaving the billions living on less than $5 a day to be priced out, with little chance of gaining access to cultivable land. There are several questions: will those hundreds of millions quietly starve? At what point will there be revolution? What form will that revolution take; nihilism and suicide vests? retro Maoism? I suspect that, at least in the first world, massive bankruptcy, combined with massive foreclosures and rising food and energy prices, will force democracies to turn to increased redistributionist policies, protectionism, and possibly fascism. So you and me and 100 million others can afford food on the table. The other 6.4 billion (plus interest) can all go to hell.

I wonder if those "others" will let me enjoy my meals in peace....

2. The Reversalist Fallacy.

The quote from James Howard Kunstler above is typical of much of the commentary about a local farming-based coming out of the Peak Oil community. In his fiction novels he depicts a twenty-second century America remarkably similar to the 1880's America of Mark Twain, with small rural towns, cottage industries, physical labor, religious tent-show revivals, railroads, canals, animal transport, herbal medicine etc., with nary an electronic device or television screen to be found. Even the names and mannerisms of the characters seem to portray the future as some sort of reversion to the nineteenth century (especially odd considering white Americans will be a minority by 2050).

And those are the more optimistic commentators. Some of the more extreme commentators have predicted a massive dieoff and a total collapse of industrial civilization resembling an apocalyptic scenario more like Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, advising their followers to move to remote areas, stock up on food, hunker down with a shotgun, and buy gold. Such fantasies appeal to the anti-social nature of a country where the idea of the totaly self-sufficient frontiersman is part of the founding myth of the nation. Others have predicted a reversion to earlier social forms, like slavery and feudalism. One commentator pithily described a possible future as "Amish with Internet." Some have even predicted that humans will abandon agriculture altogether, and return to a hunting and gathering mode of life devoid of any technology whatsoever.

Staniford christens such people reversalists, which he considers to be a fallacy. He believes it is more based on a nostalgia for the past, rather than realistic predictions of how the future will actually unfold in an era of increasing costs for fossil fuels. He believes that some processes are irreversible and the future will not simply be like a videotape run in reverse. His criticism is worth quoting at length, as it applies to more than just agriculture (emphasis mine):

Here are some examples of irreversible processes. If you let grape juice ferment into wine, there's no way to get grape juice back. If you bake a cake in the oven, there's no way to turn it back into cake dough. If you ice and decorate the cake, but then accidentally drop it on the floor, there's no way to pick it up and have anything approaching the same cake as if you hadn't dropped it.

So when you industrialize a society, is that a reversible process? Can you take it on a backward path to a deindustrialized society that looks in the important ways like the society you had before the industrialization? As far as I can see, the "second wave" peak oil writers treat it as fairly obvious that this is both possible and desirable. It appears to me that it is neither possible or desirable, but at a minimum, someone arguing for it should seriously address the question. And it is this failure that I am calling the Fallacy of Reversibility. It is most pronounced in Kunstler, who in addition to believing we need a much higher level of involvement in agriculture also wants railways, canals, and sailing ships back, and is a strong proponent of nineteenth century urban forms.

I am going to christen this general faction of the peak oil community reversalists. This encompasses people advocating a return to earlier food growing or distribution practices (the local food movement), folks wanting to bring back the railways and tramcars, people believing that large scale corporations will all collapse, that the Internet will fail and we need to "make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers."

This mode of thinking is rife within the Peak Oil community. Author and blogger John Michael Greer, one of the most intelligent, erudite and thoughtful commentators of the Peak Oil community, has advised his readers to take up trades such as farming, blacksmithing and leather working to prepare for the coming age of oil scarcity. He has argued that radio will provide a backup to an Internet sure to fail in the coming years, with vacuum tubes as a substitute for silicon chips. More oddly, he has argued that as fossil fuels become more expensive, the trend over the entire age of industrialism to replace human labor with machines will reverse, and that human labor will become more cost-effective compared to machines:

One of the major mental challenges of the near future, in turn, will consist of letting go of this image of the future and retooling our expectations to fit a very different reality. Behind the clever robots who populated the collective imagination, and the less clever but more tangible bits of household automation marketed so obsessively to the middle classes in recent decades, lies the replacement of human energy by mechanical energy derived mostly from fossil fuels. During the age of cheap abundant energy, this made economic sense, because the energy – and the machines needed to use it – were so much cheaper than the skilled labor they replaced. In the decades to come, as energy stops being cheap and abundant, that rule will no longer hold. What looked like the wave of the future, here as elsewhere, might well turn out to be a temporary adjustment to a short-term phenomenon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/07/trailing-edge-technologies.html

As with agriculture, the evidence points in an entirely different direction. The trend since Peak Oil in 2006 has been increasing automation, not increasing labor, and the current recession has accelerated the replacement of labor with machines in a bid to shore up declining profits. In the United States, more and more supermarkets are moving to automated checkout lines, sidelining service workers who are already among the lowest-paid workers in the economy. If these workers are not competitive on salary, how far can we expect salaries to fall to make it more competitive to use labor instead? Online sales, a neglected feature of automation, are increasing, not decreasing, leading to less brick-and-mortar stores, and less need for workers to operate them. And it's not just low-wage workers who are being sidelined, according to The New York Times:

...Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

Armies of expensive lawyers, replaced by cheaper software (New York Times)

Are lawyers ever going to be cheap enough to be competitive with this software after all the education and training they must acquire? What about chip designers? Software is also being used to scan x-rays, replacing medical technicians. If even low-wage service workers are being replaced, what chance do these professions have?

Even if manufacturers move production back onshore, they will be employing a far smaller fraction of the workforce than before. There is no sign that factories are returning to more labor-intensive modes of production; it makes no economic sense to do so. Falling wages may make America more attractive for manufacturing again, but factories continue to be more efficient and automated. Many even use less energy, thanks to efficiency savings. In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third, while factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction.[1] Even in China, wages are rising, not falling, leading to more automation. Here's a story in Britain's The Guardian from last August about Foxconn, the now-infamous maker of Apple computer products in Asia:

The electronics manufacturer Foxconn has been accused of treating its workers like machines as they toil on assembly lines, particularly after a spate of suicides among its Chinese employees in recent years. Now the company, best known for producing iPhones and other hi-tech gadgets, has found a solution: use robots instead.

The Taiwanese company has vowed to expand automation in its plants, with Chinese state media reporting plans to use a million robots in the next three years.

"I don't think this is a one-off. Foxconn is often seen as a bellwether of global manufacturing in China," said Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight, suggesting other companies would follow suit. "Workers can command higher wages and are less willing to settle for lower ones. You can no longer just double your workforce to double your output."

Wages in the region have risen by around a third over the past year, experts estimate, as the proportion of young workers shrinks and their expectations rise.

Taiwan iPhone manufacturer replaces Chinese workers with robots (The Guardian)

Human labor is not going to be 'price competitive' with automation anytime soon. It's easy to see why this is a fallacy: As energy prices rise, the costs of all of the things a worker must pay for - food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and medical care, rise as well. No matter how far wages fall, employers still need to pay workers a bare minimum to keep them alive and reasonably effective. Since even the most threadbare wages must rise in tandem with energy prices, it's doubtful that energy will be so dear in the near future that a machine, which needs no food, shelter, transportation, pension, recreation, medical care, or sleep will be more costly to employ than a human worker. The cost of automation comes down as more of it is implemented, and it is becoming more powerful and sophisticated every day as the science advances. Also, wages are what economists call "sticky" that is, resistant to change. Workers do not easily accept lower wages and standards of living, even under declining economic conditions. It's doubtful that a dozen laborers with shovels will ever be cheaper than one man with a backhoe, even at third-world wage levels. Our problem is going to be too much surplus labor, not a lack of it.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the trends are clear. With energy prices increasing due to increased demand around the world and elasticity disappearing from the market in line with the predictions of Peak Oil, we're seeing big agriculture become more dominant, along with outsourcing automation accelerating. In addition, in contrast to conventional wisdom about local economies, there is no sign of globalism reversing or big box stores folding in place of smaller, local merchants. Again the trend is reversing, with stores like Target and Wal-Mart now commanding an ever-larger share of the grocery business. The reasons are exactly the same - these stores are able to command vast economies of scale that smaller producers cannot. As people get poorer, people will be looking for cheaper goods that such stores provide. For example, Dollar Stores which rely on ultra-cheap goods from China are not shutting down, they are expanding:

Family Dollar Stores announced Wednesday that it plans to open 450 to 500 new stores in fiscal 2012, a 50% jump compared with the number of openings in fiscal 2011, and will renovate, relocate or expand over 1,000 locations. The discounter also reported that its fiscal fourth-quarter net income rose 8%.

http://www.retailingtoday.com/article/family-dollar-q4-profit-boosts-store-expansion-plans

Indeed, many organic and alternative products are controlled and distributed by big food producers. Look at soy milk, almond butter, yogurt and coconut oil and you'll see the names of ConAgra, General Mils, and other corporate conglomerates. Small farmers have to deal with such businesses; there is no way most small farmers can earn enough money by selling exclusively to customers directly. Similarly, around the world, Internet access continues to expand, not contact, even with high energy prices:

LONDON, 18 October 2010: The results of the third annual study of the quality of broadband connections around the globe reveals continued improvements worldwide, with more countries already prepared for the applications of tomorrow than in previous years and two thirds of the countries analyzed meeting or surpassing today's needs. Overall, thanks to a range of investments in infrastructure, global broadband quality has improved by 50% in just three years and penetration of broadband continues to improve, with about half of the households (49%) of the countries investigated now having access to broadband (up from 40% in 2008)

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_101710.html

It's not due to oil, it's due to economies of scale. The reasons have to do with the structure of the economy itself - in capitalist economies, those who can produce the most output with the least amount of labor can always undersell those who need more labor, due to the salaries and benefits they must pay. This trend has driven commercial consolidation and expansion since ancient times. Although the elimination of farm labor in America was due largely to fossil-fuel based mechanization, the trend of smaller farmers being kicked off the land and selling out to larger landholders predates the use of fossil fuels. It was endemic in the Roman Empire, where vast latifundia plantations produced export crops using slaves in place of machines. During the British Agricultural Revolution, farming became much more efficient, causing land consolidation and driving small farmers and laborers into the cities to seek wage labor in factories, which were just beginning to use coal. In fact, small cottage producers had already been supplanted by factories long before this: the first factories in England, Arkwright's cotton mills, were powered by water wheels, not coal. The advantages produced by economies of scale predate the use of fossil fuels - fossil fuels simply allowed these trends to occur on a scale never before seen. It is unlikely that rising price of oil will reverse this trend.

3. Is The Peak Oil Movement Really About Peak Oil?

So why is the view so widespread among Peak Oil writers that a reversion to nineteenth-century modes of living are in the offer, contrary to the evidence? Well, one one hand, it makes sense that the way of life before the onset of cheap oil provides a model of how to live without it. But I think the real reasons have to do with something else entirely. To see why, let's take a closer look at the renewed interest in agriculture.

Despite the continued dominance of large-scale industrial monoculture, it is undeniable that there is a surging interest in farming among young people not seen since the 1970s. More people than ever are trying to buy farmland in an attempt to go back-to-the land. Interest in food production is at an all-time high, with artisan food production making a comeback. Alternative agriculture methods like Permaculture, and movements like Slow Food are gaining in popularity. City-dwellers are converting their lawns to gardens and raising backyard chickens. Urban lots are being converted into community vegetable gardens, and sales of organic produce are growing. If Peak Oil isn't causing this, then what is? Here are some non-Peak Oil related reasons I can think of:

1.) Health: People are justifiably alarmed at the consequences of an American diet produced by a combination of big agriculture along with processed food companies and fast-food outlets. These are ubiquitous - fast food joints are everywhere, and processed junk food lines the shelves of supermarkets, with both heavily flogged by advertising. The realization that diets based on these foods are behind the explosion of chronic illnesses is causing people to seek out healthier alternatives, especially more vegetables produced in healthy soil. People don't trust the chemicals used by the big producers, who are not above suppressing research that is at odds with their profit model, so they turn to organic, pesticide-free foods instead. Every year produces more health scares about food from big producers contaminated by harmful, even deadly, bacteria.

2.) Environmentalism: Industrial agriculture is an environmental disaster. Massive amounts of topsoil are lost every year due to erosion around the world. Mechanized agriculture has all but eliminated good stewardship of the land. Pesticide runoff has caused massive algae blooms in the gulf of Mexico, resulting in "dead zones". Underground aquifers are being depleted at an alarming rate. Industrial monocultures are vulnerable to pests and eliminate biodiversity. Smaller-scale sustainable agriculture methods like Permacuture can produce food sustainably without the environmental destruction produced by industrial agriculture, and even renew the landscape.

3. ) Compassion: the "factory farming" methods of meat production are almost unimaginably cruel. Many become vegans or vegetarians in response to this. Others turn to earlier methods of ranching, which combine natural "free-range" behavior of animals with diets more in line with animals' needs, instead of artificially cheap corn. Meat produced in this way is more nutritious and flavorful than that produced in factory farms. Factory farmed animals are also given high doses of antibiotics as a matter of routine due to overcrowding, not only causing health concerns for consumers of the products, but concerns about the rise of antibiotic resistant "superbugs" that may eventually become transmissible to humans.

4.) Taste: Many products produced by small-scale methods have superior flavor. Tomatoes produced out of season via chemicals and shipped across the country are notoriously bland. Heirloom varieties of vegetables grown in healthy soil can provide a variety of produce not seen on supermarket shelves, and are highly sought after by gourmets and restaurants. Naturally raised meats are also considered more flavorful.

5.) Control: People are uncomfortable that a small group of producers control nearly the entire food production system. When they buy food from the supermarket, they know that money is flowing to these big corporations to pay dividends to wealthy absentee owners who then rig the system to their advantage. They also know that such big corporations like to cut corners and mistreat labor. People feel better when they know where their food comes from and they have a relationship with a farmer. They want their money to go to people they know and trust who are engaged in sound, honest environmental and business practices, rather than furthering corporate greed and rapacity.

6.) Satisfaction: People feel alienated from their labor, unable to see any kind of end result or benefit from what they do all day. Such people feel that a day engaged in good, honest, physical work in fresh air and sunshine is better than sitting in a cubicle all day under fluorescent lights staring at a screen to make profits for tyrannical bosses, despite the often meager financial rewards.

7.) Jobs: With so many gainful employment opportunities closed by lack of access to education, automation, downsizing and outsourcing, farming as seen as one of the few lines of work where you can work for yourself without your job being eliminated by some distant manager. For inner-city areas that have been hollowed out by deindustrialization, community gardens provide opportunities to work, community cohesion, and self esteem.

At base, I think a lot of the attention towards locally produced foods and farming careers has more to do with with the cratering of the economy than the economics of farming. People are rejecting the dependance on Wall Street corporations for everything, along with the hollowing-out one-by-one of communities across America in the name of "globalism". Food is seen as the fundamental necessity that we cannot live without, and taking control over it as the first step to independence from a global system run amok. Detroit's car companies have moved the factories, and hence the jobs, to Mexico and China, but they can't move the ground beneath people's feet. Land is the only means of production that can't be outsourced. With the commanding heights of the economy almost exclusively in the hands of a small wealthy investor class, people feel powerless over the overall economy. But empty land is something they can control. People want to create their own jobs and value rather than be dependent on corporate "job creators" who demand ever more tax cuts and subsidies, while moving jobs abroad and outsourcing them to third-world countries.

Similar reasons can also be seen behind concepts like Transition Towns and economic movements such as Occupy Wall Street. These are all as valid reasons as Peak Oil in my book. Self-reliance, job creation, and taking back economic control from corporate behemoths are valid reasons for all of these things. But if we keep pretending that it's only about protecting against empty supermarket shelves or lights going out, the Peak Oil movement runs the risk of looking like The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Similarly, if we imagine the farms and factories once again filling up with people because combines and robots are too expensive to power, I think we're in for a disappointment. We need to be realistic about the future prospects for these things.

What "reversalist" authors like Kunstler and Greer and others represent is a long-standing criticism of industrial culture as progress at all. These authors believe that the way things were done in the past, before the widespread use of fossil fuels were more humane, rewarding, and appropriately scaled to fundamental human needs for community, trust, and sociability. They see the vast complexity, fragility, and alienation produced by technology as a step backward, not forward. Many people share these feelings and resonate with them. They know things aren't right, and that we aren't moving in the right direction, even if they cannot exactly articulate why.

But here's the thing: their criticisms would be just as valid even if the most optimistic fantasies of the cornucopians were correct. In my opinion, their criticisms are dead on. Discontents of modern society tend to gravitate towards these authors because of their disgust with the world technological "progress" has made: dead-end jobs, ugly and alienating suburbs, dumbed-down entertainment, long commutes, sedentary lifestyles, wall-to-wall advertising,"consumer" culture, fast food, medicated children, overflowing jails, lack of empathy, the commercialization of life, car dependency, militarized police, costly education, exploding debt levels, rampant overwork, throwaway products, environmental destruction, the list is almost endless. If this is progress, you can keep it, they say. Many of these criticisms long predate even the notion of Peak Oil [2]. The tendency is to view Peak Oil as a panacea, the harbinger of a collapse where all of this will go away and we'll return to the halcyon days of yore (but only the best parts). Hence the appeal of the reversalist narrative. Peak Oil has become a magnet for criticisms of the more-is-better, bigger-is-better, productivist, technophilic, greed-driven, consumer economy and lifestyle. The widespread use of fossil fuels is seen as a root cause of many of the ills of industrial society, and to a larger extent, civilization itself, and thus the Peak Oil community is a magnet for many of its discontents. But unfortunately this discontent often causes people to engage in wishful thinking about the future. They naturally tend to assume that Peak Oil will allow the world of their fantasies to once again come into being.

And can you blame them? Who wouldn't prefer an economy of small-scale yeoman farmers respecting the land, industrious small businessmen putting in a day of honest labor, self-sufficient communities with webs of interdependence, vibrant small towns and bustling main streets, live entertainment, Sundays off, one-room schoolhouses, unsupervised children fishing in the nearest river, and being able to walk to the corner store to get your groceries? Where money is circulated in the local community rather than being sucked out by Wall Street for the already obscenely wealthy to invest in the latest bubble? Where people interact with their neighbors face-to-face instead of passively staring at a television screens watching advertisements, shows filled with smut and violence, and corporate controlled "news" all night long? Who wouldn't want an economy where everyone weren't working longer and longer hours, and yet falling further and further into debt? Where ordinary people could create value rather than being in competition with every other worker on the planet? Who cares whether America can become "energy independent," do we really want a country full of nothing but drooling, drugged-up, barely literate "consumers" with nothing else to look forward to but a lifetime of drudgery and debt repayments to buy the latest electronic gadget? Looking at the ugliness, dysfunction and alienation modern society has caused, it's easy to give in to the hope that we're going back to an earlier, simpler time as the oil runs out. But we have to ask ourselves, just because we want this, is it really likely to be so? I think many people unthinkingly embrace reveralism as the antidote to an increasingly depressing future.

My central point is simply this: counting on Peak Oil alone to bring that world back is a fallacy. The evidence just isn't there. People have every reason to hate large-scale factory farming. Similarly, you do not need Peak Oil to criticize the wastefulness, ugliness, and soullessness of suburban sprawl. But let's fall into the reversalist folly that the future is going to be chock full of opportunities for blacksmiths, cobblers, thatchers, chandlers, coopers, tanners and bakers. That we can disengage from the political process and be left alone to build a nineteenth century society to replace the twenty-first. That globalized corporations and big-box stores are just going to whither away without any sort of regulation or tariffs. That farming will once again employ thirty percent of us. That empty strip malls will automatically be replaced by local shops. That our empty factories will be reactivated. Unless you tackle certain underlying facets of the economy, including the advantages of scale and the workings of money, it is unlikely for any of this to come about.

In the near future, gas will still be flowing and from pumps, water from the tap and electricity from the sockets. It's just that less and less people will be able to afford them. Our economy will break down long before we face empty shelves and brownouts. Peak Oil activists need to pay more attention to economic disintegration, rather than trying to become self-sufficient, which is a fallacy anyway. Indeed, raising vegetables is not a path to self sufficiency for an individual or community. No matter what, you need meat, carbohydrates, durable goods, manufactured products, and the like that only a modern interdependent economy can provide. Coming up with alternative economic structures is a good idea, but it should not be assumed that Peak Oil will make such alternatives the only way. In many ways, Peak Oil is actually makes the future we want harder to bring about, not easier. As people become poorer, they can't afford to buy organic food, solar panels or home insulation. Walkable neighborhoods become gentrified and prohibitively expensive for the poor. Loans to start green businesses will be harder to come by. When money and profits are tight, the tendency is for ever-larger firms to survive and consolidation to occur as smaller firms go under, and there's no reason to believe that this won't hold for agriculture as well. Politics will become increasingly extreme, with people flocking to politicians making futile promises to bring back the "good times" - indeed we're seeing this already. Dealing with this reality will present challenges for the Peak Oil community. Engagement, not a wishful return to the past, is the only way to bring about the kind of future society we want. As the economy breaks down, there will be a hunger for change. This provides enormous opportunities as well as challenges. But the future will not be a tape run in reverse.[3]

4. Conclusion

The English author L.P. Hartley famously wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Who hasn't looked at the architecture of the City Beautiful movement, listened to old big-band or traditional folk music, watched movies from Hollywood's Golden Age, or looked at the elegant and dignified dress of people in old photos and felt a sense of all we we've lost in the name of "progress?" Similarly who hasn't wanted to "get away from it all" by going back to the land? After all, it's nicknamed "the rat race" for a reason.

It is certain that someday the last well deep under the ocean floor will have run dry, the last tar sands scooped from the Alberta plains, the last methane-filled underground rock torn open by fracking, and the last low-grade coal burned in a Chinese power plant. In such a world, we may very well go back to hunting and gathering, or scratching a bare living from the soil. Who knows? But this is so far in the future that very little constructive can be derived from it for the coming few decades. So many "Black Swans" could occur between now and then that make such a future impossible to predict with any accuracy. It belongs to the realm of science fiction more than serious economic analysis.

The yeoman farmer ideal has a hold on the American imagination, and it's inherently more appealing vision that one where millions of acres of America's precious landscape are planted with corn sewn in denuded soils awash in fertilizers and pesticides, devoid of animals, and harvested by gigantic combines to be processed by distant factories into junk food. Peak Oil or not, there's a better way, and we have the power to choose it. Yet let's not let either nostalgia or wishful thinking cloud our judgements about what effects Peak Oil will have on the economy, or constrain us in coming up with ways to deal with it. Let's not let nostalgia or wishful thinking cloud our judgement. Let's keep a clear head with eyes wide open - we're going to need it even more desperately in the years ahead if we are mitigate the effects. Let's not ignore data or let our expectations of how the future should unfold cloud our analysis of ways to deal with the changing conditions. Yes, the past is a rich source of information; a store of knowledge to draw upon to help us navigate the troubling times ahead. It also provides inspiration to those of us who don't believe that society gets better just because technology gets more sophisticated, and that anything "old fashioned" is inferior.

Let's keep that criticism of society, and realize that oil scarcity is not necessary to point out concerns like corporate control over our politics, the unhealthy effects of industrialized agriculture on people and the planet, the rapacity of banking, the wastefulness of our living arrangements, the irreversible damage carbon is doing to the climate, and the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. Just because these are under the rubric of Peak Oil does not mean that these criticisms are about Peak Oil at all. Nor do they have to be.

We do not need peak oil to promote local economies, walkable communities, civic engagement, cooperative businesses, low-carbon energy, regenerative agriculture, or composting. These ideas are valid for their own sake. Just because I question whether Peak Oil will naturally force us to adopt such concepts does not mean I don't think they are a good idea. I emphatically do, and I would actively promote them as the best way forward even if we had a thousand years of oil left in the ground (which we certainly do not). I worry that engaging in reversalist fantasies causes more harm than good when trying to get people on board with these ideas. The future will not look like the past, and I don't think it will look like the future the status-quo elites and techno-triumphalists imagine, but it will be something both better and worse and completely different than we ever could imagine.

The bottom line is: If we want things to change, we cannot sit back and think that high energy prices will magically change the economy back into the one that we want. We need to actively make it happen by looking at the underlying structure of the economy itself. We cannot go home again. We need to make a new home that works for everyone.

*****

1. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/?single_page=true

2. See people like Wiliiam Morris, Lewis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, John Zerzan, et al. Primitivists have pointed out that hunting and gathering communities with no technology at all, even writing or the wheel, work only twenty hours a week to fulfill their needs. They also point out that despite the fact that technology is invented to reduce human labor, we in fact work more and more in industrial societies. By most measures, medieval peasants worked fewer hours per year than a modern office drone armed with a computer and seventy energy slaves apiece. Similarly, when hunter-gatherer societies switched to agriculture they inevitably became smaller, weaker, and more disease-ridden.

3. Ironically, wishful thinking and viewing the future as a tape run in reverse have both been criticized by none other than Kunstler himself. None of us are free of cognitive blind spots when it comes to our opinions.

The Crisis Is Moving The World Rightward

It's common to think that as populations get poorer, they will move to the left. History shows otherwise; World War One saw the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, while the Great Depression ushered in Fascism to Italy and Germany, and military dictatorship to Spain, Argentina, Japan and elsewhere.

In fact, history shows that economic disintegration leads to right-wing authoritarian reactionary regimes more often than not. It's true that America largely avoided this fate (barely, there was talk of a coup against Roosevelt by some industrialists), but it's difficult to imagine today how an America that's been getting steadily more reactionary and extremist for the past thirty years, even as downward mobility becomes endemic will escape this fate again. With the rich enjoying unprecedented power thanks to their absolute control over major media organs and both political parties, the American public is putty in their hands. It's doubtful that any resistance is possible. Rather, as the Tea Party showed, the rich can stir-up reactionary sentiment with a few well-placed phone calls to hold onto power and crush any reform movement in its crib.

As I've stated before, we're entering the era of authoritarian capitalism, and one piece of proof is the capture of almost the entire world by right-wing governments. See this map from The Guardian:

Left, right, left: how political shifts have altered the map of Europe. With 20 EU member states now under varying degrees of rightwing government, Europe has rarely been more blue (in contrast to the United States convention, The Guardian uses blue as a symbol for right-leaning parties).

If one slides all the way to the right, we see that almost all of Western Europe is in the hands of right-wing governments. Of course, this is relative - most European right-wing parties are to the left of our Democrats, but nonetheless, it's still instructive. Not really indicated on the map is that two countries - Italy and Greece, have essentially forfeited sovereignty for direct rule by the banking establishment, while Hungary seems to be moving towards something approximating a revival of 1930's-style Fascism. And extreme right-wing fringe parties are becoming more popular, not less (European right-wing parties tend to want to preserve the safety net for citizens by restricting immigration, in contrast to American right-wing parties which want to eliminate the safety-net entirely).

All this is prelude to this story in The Atlantic: Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative. Even as America sinks to the status of a third-world country, Americans keep getting more sympathetic to the Republican message, in contrast to those who think Americans will somehow wake up and start voting in their best economic interests. Sadly, that seems to be wishful thinking.

The article makes the standard points that are familiar by now: places in the United States were people are poorer, more religious, and less educated are far more conservative. I should point out that the term "conservative" is terribly misleading here. Places that are poorer, less-educated and religious are exactly the places where we would expect right-wing reactionary authoritarian politics to be flourishing; as I've pointed out many times, this is what the Republican party is today: a radical right-wing authoritarian reactionary movement, not a political party in the traditional sense. Thus, the word "conservative" has been incorrectly applied to this philosophy. "Conservative" in America really means "reactionary." And reactionary movements are the best way to understand things like Bolshevism, Fascism, dictatorship, etc. It should also be pointed out, as Paul Krugman did in his latest column, that these bastions of antigovernment sentiment receive far more in funds from the Federal Government than they pay in, whereas more "liberal" areas receive less back than they pay, even though antigovernment sentiment is less pronounced. But it is a key feature of the modern American reactionary movement to ignore inconvenient facts.

The essentially authoritarian nature of modern "conservatism" has been well articulated by Mike Lofgren, a former Republican operative who realized the altered nature of the modern Republican party and walked away, penning an excellent article entitled "Goodbye To All That", a must-read for anyone interested in what the modern Republican party has become. In an article titled, "The Right-wing Id Unzipped", Lofgren cites Robert Altemeyer's work on the authoritarian personality to understand the current republican party.

Robert Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist, has done extensive testing to isolate and describe the traits of the authoritarian personality. His results are distilled in his book "The Authoritarians." He describes religious fundamentalists, the core of the right-wing Republican base, as follows:

They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.

There are tens of millions of Americans who, although personally lacking the self-confidence, ambition and leadership qualities of authoritarian dominators like Gingrich or Sarah Palin, nevertheless empower the latter to achieve their goals while finding psychological fulfillment in subordination to a cause. Altemeyer describes these persons as authoritarian followers. They are socially rigid, highly conventional and strongly intolerant personalities, who, absent any self-directed goals, seek achievement and satisfaction by losing themselves in a movement greater than themselves. One finds them overrepresented in reactionary political movements, fundamentalist sects and leader cults like scientology. They are the people who responded on cue when Bush's press secretary said after the 9/11 attacks that people had better "watch what they say;" or who approved of illegal surveillance because "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear;" or who, after months of news stories saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, nevertheless believed the weapons were found. Altemeyer said:

Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result.... And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.

Twenty to 25 percent is no majority, but enough to swing an election, especially since the authoritarian follower is more easily organized than the rest of the population. As for Altemeyer's warning that such personality types "are not going away," the rise of the Tea Party after 2008 showed that he was a better prognosticator than Max Blumenthal, who thought the radical takeover of the GOP during the Bush presidency had "shattered the party."

Altemeyer cites clinical data to show us how certain people score high on psychological tests measuring authoritarian traits and that these high scores strongly correlate with right-wing political preferences. What Altemeyer is lacking is a satisfactory explanation as to why a significant percentage of human beings should develop these traits. 

The connection between the modern Republican party and past authoritarian movements is too striking to ignore. Most of the hard-core Republicans I know fit the above profile exactly (but not all conservatives, remember, these are in actuality two different philosophies). There are the, in James Howard Kunstler's memorable (and accurate) phrase, "corn-pone Nazis". Once we distinguish between Republicans and conservatives, we will have a much clearer picture of the political situation in America (in fact, true conservatives should be Democrats today).

While technically America is now governed by it's "leftist" party (again, keeping in mind the relativity of these terms), as this article from the Independent points out that the majority of governorships are right-wing, and it is at the state level where they are implementing their agenda in force: stacking courts with supporters, attacking unions, slashing the safety net, lowering taxes on wealth, disenfranchising voters and removing regulations. And the Republican party has shown a remarkable ability to control the terms of the debate in Washington, forcing Obama to cave in time and time again in negotiations over issues of taxation and legislation (we must 'shrink' government and pay down the debt).

...The states turned alarmingly red during the 2010 elections, and they continue to throb an ominous shade of crimson. There are 29 Republican governors and 20 Democrats, and the former are all pursuing radical right-wing agendas, nigh-on unchecked. Even a governor as unpopular as Scott Walker, who is currently in the throes of a historically unprecedented recall election for his union busting attempts, still clings fairly handily to power.

The fact that these red governors, and their red state assemblies, are still in power shows that the right is not losing the argument on the ground, no matter how wacky their marquee guys may be. They still get voted in and they are still empowered to enact all manner of destructively ideological far-right policies.

The House of Representatives has a huge Republican majority, which they use to thwart all progressive policies. It would take a massive turnaround and significantly higher poll numbers for Obama to even dent this majority. Meanwhile they’ll vote in near lockstep on anything that will hurt their foes and keep the economy faltering on the president’s watch.

The Senate may enjoy a slim Democrat majority, but rightwing obstructionism has choked it into uselessness. Without a ‘supermajority’ of 60 senators, the minority party can and does filibuster with impunity, making it another major thorn in the side of the liberal cause. More blue seats are in play in 2012 than red ones, and many of them are potentially vulnerable – because the GOP still retains credibility in the states that it lacks on a federal level.

On top of all that, the third branch of government, the Judiciary, is also hamstrung by an obstreperous Senate. Obama is struggling to appoint judges at any level in the face of an activist conservative bloc willing to put a filibuster-shaped kibosh on any of his nominations.

He’s not helped by the 5:4 conservative-liberal split in the Supreme Court, which puts a cherry on the eye of this perfect storm. The majority of the court is now openly hostile to liberal democratic aims and lawmaking, making another huge obstacle in the left’s already treacherous path.

As someone living under Scott Walker in Wisconsin, I can attest to the veracity of this.

Canada is also in the grip of one of the more extreme right-wing governments in its history under Stephen Harper; legislators have recently introduced domestic spying bills, and have been accused of muzzling scientists who come to conclusions the business community does not want to hear. Australia seems to be an exception for now, and I do not know enough about Japan to comment accurately. The other major world economic powerhouse, China, is of course ruled by a one-party authoritarian system. Russia, while not strictly one-party, is politically very similar to China - essentially a lawless autocracy under the thumb of Vladimir Putin and his ruling party, where elections are largely a sham.

This we see North America, Europe and China all in the grip of right-wing governments determined to impose 'austerity' on their peoples, and dismantle their societies to pay off the banking class. These societies are also willing to use lethal force on citizens who resist and implement widespread domestic spying on their citizens. Who would have thought that only a relatively short time after the death of Communism when "liberal democracy" was seen as the final phase of human evolution, that it would be entirely vanished from the world's major industrial powers, replaced by absolute rule by economic elites under the false guise of pretend democracy?

We seem to be repeating history - an economic depression, right-wing reactionary parties becoming ever-more extreme and a world increasingly on the verge of war.

...in a recent address here before the liberal John Reed club said that Hearst and Coughlin are the two chief exponents of fascism in America. If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any "shirt" movement, nor with an "insignia," but it will probably be "wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution."
- James Waterman Wise, Jr.