To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.
To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.
If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.
[blockquote]Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts.[/blockquote]
This is a political statement, not a scientific one. It’s also the statement of a man without a clue of sound economics. There is so much ignorance to unpack in this single paragraph.
I am told that Diamond got his head handed to him early on, and so now refuses to participate in open debates to defend his hypotheses.
i am curious reactionary if you believe that the earth could sustain the populations if everyone shared our consumption levels? i don’t know if his figures are accurate but it would seem that his overall theory is logical. also, i am be curious who gave this person his head and which debates has he refused to participate in? who is he anyway?
magnolia,
When consumption lowers supply, prices increase and consumption is reduced. Diamond, not being an economist much less a good one, works with static models that bear no relation to the real world. In the real world, demand creates supply: tree farms, salmon hatcheries, etc. If Diamond were right, world population would be plummeting along with the dwindling number of people actually employed in agriculture.
I am told by a friend who moves in such circles that Diamond has been called by numerous people over his nonsense in Guns, Germs and Steel, and will not participate in open debates to defend the book. Take it for whatever it’s worth.
the irony, #3, is that the population is plummeting in the one area, Western Europe, that Diamond so lauds. Europe is certainly not the rose garden that he claims it is, they have largely lost any confidence in the future of their socities, which is reflected in their low birth rate. See Mark Steyn for more…..steynonline.com
chris, i read an article a few years ago how the birth rate in an overpopulated country in asia plummeted(sp?) to nearly nil because women were becoming much more educated and independent-in addition the government had helped to push this trend through public awareness. they are now reversing themselves because the situation has become so dire. don’t you think that may have something to do with it along with the fact that children cost a great deal of money in developed countries? in third world countries people rely on their many children to help to bring income and assistance in old age- in the west we dote on our children and rear them to be independent.
reactionary, what you say makes sense however in my limited view of china i can only see that they are buying more cheap cars and motorbikes and planting more and more cheap and polluting coalfired powerplants. i truly believe that they will end up a cheaper but no less consumptive version of us. but then again i am no economist. has your theory been proven in any practical way? i would be really interested to see results. thanks.
Consider #3’s proposition, that when consumption lowers supply, prices increase and consumption decreases. This is what my economic text told me in Ec 101 all those years ago. And yet, this is far too simplistic and isn’t born out by evidence to be a general rule. Consider the present can of oil. The rise in prices should lower consumption, regardless of supply. This simply hasn’t happened in this country, nor has it happened in China, whose oil consumption is steadily increasing.
In a country as haplessly rich as ours, mere cost is for a large portion of the population an inconvenience at most. It is precisely that that makes Diamond’s declaration correct. Waste, for the wealthy, is a necessity; this is what conspicuous consumption means, after all. Does all of America need the endless cell phone?
Does it need HUmmers? I hardly need to continue such a list. What is the end point of such consumption? Will increasing cost at last lower consuption? Or will it mean that, for those who have the money, waste will continue unabated precisely because they chose to do so, while other societies, who have not the money, will simply go without at an increased rate?
Incidentally, his remark is political but it is also scientific. SCi Am has spoken about all these issues often over the last ten years, and the data bears out his declaration. We just don’t WANT to believe that heath care is better elsewhere. And it was only recently, as I recall, the SCI Am wrote about vacation time; the point being, in part, that America is driven to the point where it is unable to see the damage such obsessiveness causes.
CAn Diamond’s arg uments be tendentious? To be sure, but your citation is not where he is weakest.Finally, you imply that, this being a political statement, it is therefore without merit for belief. But America is obviously rolling in the kind of wealth that would destroy a dozen Romes, and may destroy this one, if credit card debt is any measure. LM
I read [i] Germs, Guns, and Steel. [/i] Mr Diamond took a reasonable proposition – that the natural resources of an area influence the culture of the people living there – and expanded upon it to make resources out to be the dominant factor in determining all of human history. Silly me, I had thought that a nation’s beliefs, political philosophy, religion, customs, etc., had an influence at least as important as the topography of the coastline or what plants grew there. But in Mr Diamond’s deterministic view, history follows a sort of inevitable, pre-destined course, set up by geography & climate. It seemed to me, his view was that the differences between the USA & the USSR, as well as those between Athens & Sparta, were ultimately caused by…differing climate?
His ideas are interesting, but I think a real scholar would be able to demolish this thesis in a debate.
magnolia and Larry,
An externality needs to be considered: the flood of artificially cheap credit that makes houses look like investments instead of what they are–depreciating assets–and makes debt look smarter than saving. Thus, in an inflationary economy, the signals to producers and consumers are to buy a house with six bedrooms and a one hour commute in your Chevy Tahoe. This delusion was nice while it lasted, but it is coming to an end. The market is responding with Coopers and hybrid Toyotas.
I agree that it is theoretically possible for humankind to consume itself to death. Easter Island [i]may[/i] be a micro-example, but it’s a bit like trying to identify an example of successful monopoly pricing (i.e., pricing wholly inelastic to supply and demand): theoretically it’s possible but in reality it can’t be found. Rome is not an apt example. A multicultural empire simply devolved into its constituent nations; it did not consume itself into extinction.
Here is where Diamond gets it really, really wrong. He looks at four week mandatory vacations, socialized medicine and municipal orchestras and assumes the Europeans are getting the most bang for their buck. But these activities all extract a cost and consume resources, and as it turns out, these activities are not sustainable either, which is why Europeans have to resort to immigration to keep the Ponzi scheme going. The errors arise because the European elite uses government power to allocate resources rather than consumer preference.
Wilfred also makes an important point: ideas, not resources, are what generate wealth. If the reverse were true, Nigeria and Russia would be dividing the world between them and Hong Kong would be a lonely rock in the sea.
Again, there is just too much to unpack in Diamond’s writings. He just starts wrong. I am not even sure he is a geographer. IIRC, his bio in Guns, Germs describes him as a physiologist.
Anyhoo, you two ask very trenchant questions. You are my favorite posters on this site.