The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [141]
For reasons I explained in chapter 4, famine is largely history. Where it still occurs – Darfur, Zimbabwe – the fault lies with government policy, not population pressure.
Resources
The history of the world is replete with examples of the extinction or near-exhaustion of resources: mammoths, whales, herrings, passenger pigeons, white pine forests, Lebanon cedars, guano. They are all, note, ‘renewable’. By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone. As has been said – the remark has been attributed to many people – the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone. ‘It is one of the safest predictions,’ wrote the economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1943, ‘that in the calculable future we shall live in an embarras de richesse of both foodstuffs and raw materials, giving all the rein to expansion of total output that we shall know what to do with. This applies to mineral resources as well.’ It is also one of the safest predictions that people will always be warning that natural resources are running out.
Consider the humiliating failure of the predictions made by a computer model called World3 in the early 1970s. World3 attempted to predict the carrying capacity of the planet’s resources and concluded, in a report called Limits to Growth, authored by the grandiosely titled ‘Club of Rome’, that exponential use could exhaust known world supplies of zinc, gold, tin, copper, oil and natural gas by 1992 and cause a collapse of civilisation and population in the subsequent century. Limits to Growth was enormously influential, with school textbooks soon parroting its predictions minus the caveats. ‘Some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminium will be used up within your lifetime,’ said one. ‘Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use,’ opined another. It was misleading chiefly because, like Malthus, it underestimated the speed and magnitude of technological change, the generation of new recipes for rearranging the world – as its godfather, the engineer Jay Forester, has acknowledged. In 1990 the economist Julian Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager from the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon had bet him that the prices of five metals (chosen by Ehrlich) would fall during the 1980s and Ehrlich had accepted ‘Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in’ (though later, while calling Simon an imbecile, he claimed he was ‘goaded’ into it).
The amount of oil left, the food-growing capacity of the world’s farmland, even the regenerative capacity of the biosphere – these are not fixed numbers; they are dynamic variables produced by a constant negotiation between human ingenuity and natural constraints. Embracing dynamism means opening your mind to the possibility of posterity making a better world rather than preventing a worse one. We now know, as we did not in the 1960s, that more than six billion people can live upon the planet in improving health, food security and life expectancy and that this is compatible with cleaner air, increasing forest cover and some booming populations of elephants. The resources and technologies of 1960 could not have supported six billion – but the technologies changed and so the resources changed. Is six billion the turning point? Seven? Eight? At a time when glass fibre is replacing copper cable, electrons are replacing paper and most employment involves