Technology, Innovation, and the Blowback Principle

A new USGS report is the latest in a growing body of documentation tying the unusual increase in earthquakes in locales across the country to the processes associated with oil and gas drilling by hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Fracking has also been implicated in the contamination of groundwater supplies with benzine, a known carcinogen. In other news, several studies have shown a new link between the use of neonicotinoid pesticids and colony collapse disorder - the widespread deaths of pollinating bees. Pesticides usually work by disrupting the chemical metabolism of insects that feed on the plants. New federal data indicate that 1 in 88 U.S. children had autism or other autism spectrum disorders in 2008, up from 1 in 110 kids in 2006 and 1 in 150 in 2002. In Utah the reate is as high as 1 in 32. Higher rates of autism have been associated with greater exposure to flame retardants, plasticizers like BPA, pesticides, endocrine disruptors in personal care products, heavy metals in air pollution, mercury, pharmaceuticals like anti-depressants, and increased age of fathers. Others merely blame increased awareness of the condition. Puberty for girls is coming earlier, as early as 10 years old in some cases. Suspected culprits include obesity, endocrine disruptors like BPA, hormones in food, and family stress. The increased use of psychiatric drugs has been posited as a cause of the dementia epidemic. And a new Swedish study linked exposure to phthalates with diabetes in seniors. Previous studies linked phthalates, which are major components of plastics, to everything from low sperm counts to birth defects. The inhabitants of the Gulf Coast of the United States and Fukushima prefecture Japan continue to suffer ill effects of the massive oil spill and nuclear meltdown, respectively.*

All of these are examples what I call The Blowback Principle. The blowback principle states that any new technology is going to have unanticipated negative consequences. The point is not to demonize all science and technology, rather it is merely to point out that no new technology when introduced into a society is free of these unintended consequences. Yet this seems to be one of the biggest cognitive blindspots of technology boosters, who see technology as the solution to every problem, full stop. In fact, technology often seems to give rise to a whole new set of problems which must then be solved by inventing even more technology, ad infinitum. Meanwhile the problems seem to never get solved, and in some cases, often metastasize or accelerate. I always want to ask those who posit a technological solution to every problem, what do we do about the subsequent problem that the solution will cause? The above examples are just a few drawn from the news in just the last few weeks. I’m sure there will be many others in the near future.

Now to be clear, my point is not that we should all just abandon all technology and go back to living in the stone age, although I’m sure that’s how my technophilist friends will interpret it. Technology often does improve our lives.  My point is that blindly trusting in some new technology or innovation to solve our fundamental problems is foolish. And not considering all the effects is also foolish. If technology is invented to solve problems but causes as many problems as it solves, can it really be said to solve anything?

In one sense, technology boosters are the ultimate optimists. For example, they look at the internet and see all the wonderful things caused by mass communication among people – the ease and immediacy of communication, the dissemination of information, the elimination of gatekeepers, the variety of expression, the social connectedness, the democratization of content, efficiency, online shopping, crowdsourcing, etc.. They don’t talk about robo-trading, cyber-attacks, child pornography rings, online stalking, identity theft, compartmentalization of media, video game addiction, fraud, viruses, spam, worms, bots, spyware, malware, and a host of other maladies that could fill volumes. Many have expressed concern that loneliness and alienation are actually being enhanced by the use of the internet. Others worry that people who do not have access will be left behind. Some have even gone so far as to suspect that staring at screens all day is causing a rewiring of our brains. Our attention spans are getting shorter and our comprehension shallower, they argue. And the internet has allowed capital and information,and subsequently work, to be moved anywhere in the world leading to major winners and losers, and we've only just begun to feel the negative fallout from that.

It’s hard to imagine a piece of technology that hasn’t been corrupted by the base desires of a species whose mind is fundamentally still on the African savannah. The biggest use of the internet isn’t intellectual discourse, it’s marketing, pornography and spam. Things like Facebook give rise to bullying; "cyber-bullying" has caused several tragic suicides, as it allows social ostracism to become even more intrusive and pronounced. Cell phones lead to ‘sexting’ and accidents caused by distracted drivers (not to mention loud, obnoxious conversations with nobody). There was an iPhone app that used new media technology like Facebook and Foursquare to allow people to track nearby single women that caused such a stir it was taken down. Already, governments allied with big corporations are seizing control of the internet and determining what we see and hear, in contraversion to the idealistic and anarchic vision of the  Web’s early founders. Unrealistic images foisted upon us in our media-saturated environment have caused entirely new psychological diseases like anorexia to emerge. Insecurity, inadequacy and status anxiety are all fomented by an advertising industry to hector the public to continually spend on new products to keep economic growth going.

Doing physical work is considered “a thing of the past” and something for people to avoid at all costs. It’s been eliminated in the name of “progress.” What are the consequences? A host of health maladies including obesity and heart disease. Was that expected? So now we're tying to invent new drugs that cure obesity and heart disease. Simply bringing back physical work, working less hours, building walkable communities, or regulating unhealthy foods are not considered viable solutions. Gee, I wonder what the “side effects” of the anti-obesity pill will be. Also, it’s increasingly thought that “clean” environments that children are raised in today contribute to allergies, since children who grow up farms are much less likely to have them. Good thing we got rid of farming along with physical work. Fortunately we've got allergy pills, with only a few side effects. Hopefully you won't get drowsy while driving. And there’s even evidence that spending time in nature heals depression and boosts mood. But we’ve got a pill for that too, only 150 dollars a bottle. One piece of innovation almost universally seen as  “good” is the search for cures for illnesses like cancer and diabetes. Yet Weston Price and others have documented that these diseases were virtually unknown in pre-agricultural societies. So even that is solving an earlier problem. Mankind's first technology, agriculture, led to sicker populations, new diseases emerging (thanks to confined animals) salinization, depleted soils, desertification, deforestation, and possibly many other ills (like despotism, war, and slavery). Even the discovery of antibiotics, considered an unmitigated success, has had the blowback effects of new drug-resistant strains emerging, factory farming, and overpopulation.

*****

When television was introduced, people imagined all sort of benevolent, even utopian outcomes. Anyone could watch the inauguration of a president, the latest scientific breakthrough, or the dropping of bombs on civilians. It was thought that this would lead to an end to war. That it would enhance politics by making the public more informed and our political dialogue more constructive. That people would become more intelligent as educational programs taught even the lowliest laborer science, history, and mathematics. How has that worked out for us? Are we more intelligent or better informed? Is our political dialogue more enlightening? Has war stopped because we can see its effects on TV (when it's not being controlled or censored)? Turned on a TV lately? I think Dancing With The Stars is on.

Similarly utopian predictions were made for the automobile. At its base, the internal combustion engine is merely a way of moving people around using fuel instead of animals. Liberated from distance for the first time in history, it was thought, a golden age would occur as people were no longer confined to the small town they were born in or the farm they grew up on for their whole lives. Even a country farmer could now travel faster and farther than the crowned heads of old Europe in their carriages. People imagined It would end class distinctions, nationalism, military conflict, and even lead to a universal language by annihilating distance. And, indeed, the automobile has been liberating and beneficial in many ways. The internal combustion engine solved many pressing problems, like where to go with all the horse excrement. It made cities cleaner in the short run. It allowed food to be transported from anywhere. It has transformed society, as its proponents claimed. But has it been exclusively beneficial? And were the knock-on effects considered, or even imagined?

In fact, an entire book could be written about the consequences. Engines in tractors allowed less people to work on farms than ever before causing vast consolidation, since now just a handful of people could farm more land than ever before. Agriculture vanished almost overnight as a way of life for most people. Unemployment and bankruptcy soared. Consumer credit was introduced to allow people to purchase automobiles, causing banking to grow and debt to increase. Prosperous people moved away from cities and into the countryside, causing a bifurcation of society. Mechanized warfare due to the internal combustion engine caused the slaughter of millions. After the war, massive sums were spent on suburbanization to boost the economy and consumption. Policies like local funding of schools, redlining, “drive until you qualify” and the bussing of minority students transformed education and urban patterns. This in turn, caused political changes such as the removal of the commons which is still playing out. Pollution and smog became epidemic. Air pollution caused asthma cases to soar, and leaded gas caused a variety of maladies before its effects were identified. Public transportation vanished in America and people stopped walking causing obesity rates to soar. Housing bubbles formed and popped, eventually causing worldwide economic crises. Automakers consolidated and then went bankrupt, asking the public for bailouts. And enormous amounts of the nation's resources were devoted to maintaining a vast and expensive driving infrastructure that needed constant maintenance and paid for by taxes. More people are killed on the world's roadways in a typical year than in all the world's wars. And I haven’t even mentioned Peak Oil and climate change. Will more technology solve all of these problems caused by technology?

I could go on. Has air conditioning caused a political realignment of the United States as people moved to the sunbelt? Has television caused the murder rate to increase? Do video games make people more violent? Have digital effects ruined the ability to tell a good story? Does living in high rises in crowded cities increase mental illness? Is artificial light destroying our circadian rhythms? Do cell phones cause brain cancer? Jet air travel and urbanization cause pandemics to quickly spread around the world. An unintended consequence of efficiency is the increased use of whatever you make more efficient. Entire books could be written, and probably have been, about these effects.

Considering all the effects above,my question to the singularitarians and other technophiles is: what makes them so sure that future technology will not give rise to these same unintended effects? To the same blowback? Kant once said "out of  the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." Why do they assume that suddenly our technology will all of the sudden make things straight when it never has before?

Probably the most extreme current example of technophilia are proposals to "geoengineer" the biosphere. Proponents of “free markets” like to point out that no single entity or institution has enough knowledge or wisdom to manage the complexity of a modern economy. Yet somehow people believe we have the knowledge and wisdom to engineer the entire planet to our whim and not suffer unintended consequences. That we can “manage” causing artificial changes to the environment on a planetary scale that will allow us to continue the damage caused by earlier technology. What happens if we shoot chaff into the atmosphere to cool things down and a major volcano erupts? I find it supremely ironic that often the very same people who argue against central planning of the economy will advocate geoengineering the planet itself to meet the needs of the economy.

And furthermore these technophiles claim that soon we’re going to interface our consciousness with machines, plug our brains into the internet, become cyborgs, design our DNA, travel through time, and even make ourselves immortal! They claim that not only do we have the knowledge and wisdom to do this, but that there will be no unintended consequences. Really? To cite one specific objection, geneticist Spencer Wells points out in Pandora's Seed that many of our most brilliant artists, scientists and thinkers have suffered bouts of mental illness. What happens if we gain the ability to "engineer" mental illness away? Will we lose some essential part of our minds, of our selves? And clearly having people who never die on an already overcrowded planet opens up such a host of problems as to make your head spin. The bigger and more ambitious the technology, the bigger and more irreversible are the consequences. Are we too smart for our own good?

*****

The ends to which a technology will be put are largely determined by the type of society into which they are introduced. Francis Bacon claimed that three innovations changed the world of his time - gunpowder, printing and the magnetic compass. Although he did not know the origins of these inventions, they all came from China. Obviously they had very different effects when introduced into Europe than they did in China. The same is true considering the effects of the steam engine in the classical and modern worlds. The nature of the society dictates how technology will be used, and who will benefit. Thus when you introduce television into a capitalistic society, you get wall-to-wall advertisements, pandering, manipulation by elites, and lowest common denominator forms of entertainment. Similarly, in a society of wealthy against poor where the ruling class sees people as cows to be milked for money, it is certain new technology will be used to negative ends. For example, using digital cash: there’s currently a push to eliminate all paper money in favor of virtual money. Who controls the virtual money? Banks and the government, that's who. What happens if you run afoul of one of these institutions? What if you visit the wrong website, buy the wrong book, or contribute to the wrong cause? They’re already tracking your online movements and assigning you a "credit score" that determines what you can buy, and even where you can live or work. What happens when the elites who own the banks and run the government can zero out your balance or credit score with a few keystrokes. When all records are electronic, can they just make you into a nonperson? What happens when we get chip implants? Will they be able to read your thoughts? Will they screen for subversive thoughts? Will you be denied health insurance, or even a job because of a genome scan? Will workers' DNA be engineered for docility and pliability? Couldn't we argue that some of these technological "innovations' will make the masses easier to control and might, just might, make things worse for a lot of people?

Technology is in some sense neutral - it can make things better or worse, depending on the society it is introduced into. Technology like machines that replace workers can lead to higher profits for the the few, and higher unemployment and destitution for the many, or it can lead to higher productivity, higher wages, and more leisure for everyone. In both instances the technology is exactly the same, it is only the social and economic arrangements that have changed. You can think of society as the software that runs the hardware of technology. The hardware can behave very differently depending on the software installed. An unhealthy society will use technology in unhealthy and oppressive ways. A healthy, well-adjusted society will use it positive, life-enhancing ways. If we are not using technology in healthy, life-enhancing ways, shouldn’t we be asking whether the problem is technology at all? Technology doesn’t create such societies, people and institutions do. If society isn’t fixed, adding new technology won’t make it better, in fact it will proably might make it a whole lot worse. The internet, supposedly the great equalizer, is already being taken over by governments and corporations who use it to spy on their citizens and control what they see and hear. Will nuclear technology light schools or build bombs? Will plants be built safely or for the lowest possible cost? How will the waste and pollution be dealt with, and who will pay for it? Is it safe? Are we sure? Who is telling us? Currently we just introduce technology into society with no oversight or control, like running an experiment every time, with all of us as participants.

Permaculture, agroforestry and organic agriculture are innovative enough, but we tend to only see innovation in terms of high-tech measures like genetic engineering or new chemical pesticides. Instead of waiting for the next Facebook or something like it to put people back to work, why not just put people back to work? Shortening working hours or government job creation are considered impossible to implement because we're told that such measures will actually somehow stifle innovation. Yet that's impossible - they are innovations, just not technological ones. They're social innovations, and they solve problems directly, instead of waiting for some future technological innovation that on one can quite specify. Instead of a way to keep tractors running at all costs, why not put people back to work as organic small farmers? It solves three problems at once - our unemployment problem, our obesity problem ,and out food/environmental problem (and might even help depression, too). Instead of trying to invent a carbon-harvesting machine, try biochar, or just plant a tree. Instead of frantically coming up with enough energy to keep everything running, why not use less of it? We already waste so much with no real boost in happiness or living standards. Yet none of these innovations are considered "progress." All these innovations all have two things in common - they're not predominantly technological, and they don't boost the profits of the already wealthy. Thus we have to ask, is innovation truly what the elites are after at all? Or are they after more control power and profits in the guise of innovation? There are numerous more innovations today than we had in 1950 (no cell phones or personal computers!) Yet unemployment is much higher, and well-being lower than it was then. We’ve already created innovations like the iPod and iPad, hybrid cars, MRIs, and genetic sequencing, but they haven’t changed the overall direction of the economy toward lower-paying service jobs and un/underemployment. In fact, many such innovations have done a better job at creating jobs for China’s economy than for ours. What makes us think this won’t be as true for future innovations? People have benefited from the use of the products, but not by more jobs, better pay, more free time, etc. We've never pinned more hopes and placed more focus on growth and innovation than we do today, and yet a pervasive sense of doom hangs over society. Why do we insist that future innovation will automatically make our lives better and cure our social ills?

Science is understanding. Technology is application. Yet it seems we ignore the conclusions of science, in favor of technology. Science tells use that we're permanently and irreparably damaging the environment by our industrial and agricultural output, that oil is running out, that the climate is changing, that mass extinctions are occurring, that many chemicals are poisonous, that the world has limits, and that we cannot grow exponentially forever. Science tells us that materialism doesn't cause happiness, that inequality harms societies, that lifelong social ties are essential, and that modern lifestyles are wrecking our health. It's even showing us that gene expression can change based upon such things as prenatal nutrition and social class! Yet the only science we are allowed to implement is that which produces more technology to increase the profits of the already wealthy. Technology has already made it easier to control populations and concentrate wealth. More technology will probably not fix these problems. The only thing that will solve them is solving them. And that’s the point - Innovation is used an an excuse to let problems fester and as a miracle cure. We've already solved most of the basic vexing human problems with our technology. We have indoor heat, hot and cold running water, sanitation, antibiotics, refrigeration, adequate food and nutrition, cooking fuel, entertainment and diversions, communication at light speed, and transportation to anywhere in the world in a day. What new innovation are we truly lacking? The problem is distribution - most people still don't have access to many of these things. Or we don't have time to enjoy them. Do we need future technical innovations to solve that? And why haven't they been solved already? After all, what is the end goal of all this technology? Is there one?

*****

All that being said, here are my 10 rules of technology:

1. If one of the assumptions behind the adoption of a technology is human infallibility, then it's probably a bad idea.

2. Just because we can, doesn't mean that we should. Will the adoption of a technology will make society better, or worse? The Amish are not anti-technology, they are just pro-choice (no pun intended). They actively decide what to adopt and what to reject based upon the effects the technology will have. If the technology conflicts with their values, they reject it. Of course, this assumes a society has values. Predictably, every social malady we find in technological societies are much less pronounced or nonexistent among the Amish. That doesn't mean we should all become Amish, just that there may be a lesson here.

3. Every benefit has a cost. What is the cost? What is the benefit? Is the cost worth the benefit?

4. Cui bono? To who's benefit is the adoption of a new technology? Who are the losers, if any? The Luddites were upset not at technology, but at the loss of their livelihoods. If the benefits and profits of the new technology had been broadly shared, would they have smashed the machines? I doubt it.

5. Does it really meet a need? If we're putting massive resources into inventing new antidepressants, shouldn't we be wondering why we're so depressed in the first place? What does it say about the world we've created for ourselves that many of the long-awaited future innovations cited by technology boosters - virtual worlds, immersive games, cybernetic bodies, etc., are all pretty much ways of fleeing from reality.

6. Is there another simpler, low tech way to accomplish the same thing? One with fewer negative consequences? With fewer side effects? With less environmental damage?

7. With apologies to Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. What are the ends to the technology you are introducing? Health? Happiness? Convenience? Profit? It seems like we're inventing new needs just to find some technology to satisfy them, rather than the reverse.

8. Don't think of innovation as just technology. Let's look at other types of innovation - political, economic, social, and ask if that solves our problem better than some techno-fix.

9. If a person cannot articulate exactly why they are using a technology or how it makes their life better, or if it even makes them unhappy, it is merely a status symbol, an addiction or a fetish.

10, If you think the invention of [insert technology here] will bring about a utopia, then you're probably wrong.

When people from technologically advanced societies visit primitive Amazonian tribesmen and remark that they are the happiest people they've ever seen, you've got to wonder how good technology really is at making us any happier. We feel we would be absolutely miserable without out television sets, our DVD players, our iPods, our cell phones, our cars, our computer games, our books. Would we be? If they went away, we'd miss them, but that's different. That's missing something you're accustomed to, and even that would fade in time. The human psyche is resilient and can accustom itself to nearly anything; even people who lose limbs return to the same set point of contentment. How can we say a primitive existence will make us permanently unhappy? If if a even primitive existence won't, certainly giving up a small thing or two here and there won't either. Isn't it all relative to what's around you? How can we miss what we don't know exists? Who says "I'm unhappy today because I don't have something that's going to be invented a hundred years from now?"

Consider me a techno-skeptic. A skeptic isn't anti, he's just skeptical. I'm really a fan of technology as well as a user (this is on the Internet, right?). I like DVD's, indoor heat and anesthetics. I just think we're fooling ourselves if we think that more technology and innovation is the best, or even the only solution for many of our most pressing problems. And I think we do ourselves a disservice if we think of innovation purely in terms of new technology. Do you really need that solar-powered electric coffee grinder? Technology is a teriffic servant but a poor master. Keven Kelley wrote a book called What Technology Wants, contending that technology has wants and needs of its own accord. Isn't it time to stop giving technology what it wants, and start having it give us what we want?

* SOURCES:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/puberty-before-age-10-a-new-normal.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.treehugger.com/health/phthalates-increase-risk-of-type-2-diabetes.html
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-12/earthquake-outbreak-in-central-u-dot-s-dot-tied-to-drilling-wastewater
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/339646/title/Autism_rates_rise_again
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/53862628-82/autism-utah-autistic-environmental.html.csp
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/10/are-drugs-behind-dementia-epidemic/
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/doctors-call-for-fracking-moratorium.html
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/06/459711/shale-shocked-increase-midcontinent-earthquakes-almost-certainly-manmade-usgs-report/
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/guest-post-the-gulf-ecosystem-is-being-decimated.html
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/japanese-trying-to-stabilize-radioactive-fuel-pools-but-are-moving-too-slowly-by-a-decade.html 
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/02
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/29/crop-pesticides-honeybee-decline

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