It seems to me that one of the more interesting debates to be had around global environmental change and development is that of the nature of growth in the modern world. There are those that argue (or at least implicitly argue) that growth is effectively unlimited by the biophysical world – the real barriers to growth around the world are capacity, governance, etc. Operating from this assumption (or something near to it), the logical decision is to foster growth everywhere in the world, and to assume that the absence of growth is a symptom of problems with human capacity, attitudes and institutions that can and should be rectified. At another pole are those that argue that our growth is fundamentally pinned to the biophysical world – this is the implicit assumption behind ecological footprint calculators, that we draw upon natural resource for growth in a manner that is fixed and measurable -and the measurements suggest, rather strongly, that growth is highly constrained by the biophysical world.
Like most people, I exist somewhere in the middle of this continuum. Ecological footprint calculators, imperfect though they may be (for example, converting our resource use into acres of land is a problematic and weak process/proxy), demonstrate rather clearly that if we are to get everyone in the world up to the average standard of living in the United States, we would need the natural resources from around three Earths. Many of the arguments about future policy built on these footprint calculations end up discussing rather steep resource and wealth redistribution curves if we want to see a more equal world. However, there is a significant flaw in this reasoning – these measures (let’s just assume that they are reasonably accurate for the purposes of this argument) and the resultant policy prescriptions assume the per capita intensity of use to be a constant going forward into the future. This discounts future technological developments that will, no doubt, lower the per capita resource use of those in the advanced economies, such as the US.
On the other hand, the news here isn’t all good – while the intensity of use might decrease over time, such decreases typically translate into the market in the form of reduced prices, which tend to spur increased production. Put another way, 5 years in the future we may only use 75% of the resources we do today to make a shirt, thus lowering the footprint of that shirt and the person who buys that shirt. However, the price of that shirt will likely decrease to remain competitive in the market, encouraging consumers to buy more shirts than they used to. If the price drop of the shirt is such that the consumer who typically buys four shirts a year decides to buy five, we’ve already lost the decreased footprint created by increased efficiency to a larger footprint created by greater consumption. In other words, improved resource efficiency related to growth won’t do us much good if it spurs the growth of consumption such that the per capita resource uptake remains constant or rises.
There is another bit of bad news here – even if those of us living in the advanced economies decided to freeze our amount of consumption, locking in our current standard of living while allowing increased resource use efficiency to translate into greater availability of goods and services in the Global South, I don’t see a point any time in the near future where these benefits will be of a scope that will allow for a real closing of the gap in the material standard of living between the developing and the developed. We’re looking at differences of orders of magnitude right now, accrued over several centuries of differential political economic activity when the Earth’s population and total resource uptake was much, much smaller. So if we want a truly equal world, those of us in the advanced economies are going to have to give something up.
While I am an indefatigable optimist (hey, I am writing this post but I still work in development), this doesn’t absolve me from a serious consideration of reality – so maybe I am a constrained optimist. The size of the global population today, coupled with our current regimes of resource use, have taken most, if not all of the slack out of the global resource/growth equation. No, we are not yet at a zero-sum world where growth in China means loss somewhere else, like the US – it is still possible to see growth in multiple sites, as technological advances create a bit more space for growth via increased efficiency. But there will come a day where we will cross this curve – where our inability to make things more efficient as quickly as our increased demand on resources rises will finally come to a point where the resources themselves become the restrictor plate on growth – the world will effectively become a zero-sum economy.
In my work on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, I saw trends that make the math above a lot more pressing. The rates of resource degradation around the world are astonishing. Not everything is getting worse, of course – temperate forests, for example, are doing pretty well – but an astonishing percentage of the resources we rely upon for our standard of living are under threat right now, not in some distant future. So our current use of the environment (much of this use in the name of growth, incidentally), with its various impacts, is hastening the day when we cross the curve into a zero-sum economy. Some might argue (or hope?) that we will generate enough wealth and capacity between now and then as to come up with some sort of a solution for this – or to put back the damage that we have done to our environment, thus uncrossing the curve for a while longer. This strikes me as a hell of a gamble*, where the stakes on a bad bet are getting larger and larger. Meanwhile, the nature of this bet has been shifting from betting one’s house on red to betting one’s house on red 16 . . .
No, we are not there yet. But, barring a remarkable revolution in our ability to generate energy and food (I won’t rule these out, but the sort of revolution we need is on the order of fusion, which isn’t all that close right now), zero-sum is coming. But what should we call this not-quite-zero-sum world we are living in? Surely someone has a name for this already . . .
*in the case of extinctions, this is a pointless gamble – there is no putting back extinct, and anything that goes extinct will have effects (some obvious, others difficult to discern) throughout ecosystems . . . and often there will be one or more impact parts of that ecosystem that humans see as useful. or necessary.
Good post. I can see you’ve been thinking about this.
There are several things I might say about it, but I’ll limit myself to just one. I’m a bit short of time for essays, at the moment.
You say that if we want a truly equal world, we’ll have to give something up.
But do we really want a more equal world? Wouldn’t we rather have a world where nobody starved, nobody went short everybody lived long and healthy lives, but where some people were a lot, lot richer than others? Do I really *care* about Bill Gates, when I have food to eat and a comfortable home and even a computer to play on?
The reason a lot of people think a more equal world is necessary is that zero-sum business. The poor can only become rich if the rich become poor. But what if the poor became rich while the rich became richer? Is that *worse*? What is it that we actually want?
So, the zero-sum question is crucial. Over the past few decades the population has doubled, life expectancy expanded, calories per capita increased, the number of starving reduced, technological prosperity has spread, environmental concern and conservation have bloomed, and all with exactly the same natural world, with its fixed resources, that we started with. The poor have immeasurably more than they once did. And yet we are arguably a lot less equal now than we were before.
Where did it all come from?
Ah, the brutal question nobody wants to ask – credit to you for having the courage to raise it. Do we really want a more equal world? Well, I think that depends on your definition of “more equal”. I am a realist – I have no belief that any sort of egalitarian society is coming soon, or that it is even a desirable state. However, I deplore a world in which the poor are allowed to go hungry and cold while others grossly overconsume (and we would have to define “overconsume”, but I think virtually any reasonable definition of the term would net us a depressing amount). So, the world I would like to see before I go is one in which most people have their basic needs covered – they don’t need to worry about food, shelter and at the very least basic healthcare, more or less (yes, they should have to work for it, but people should know where these two needs are coming from) – and where they have the time to enjoy companionship, free time, whatever. After that, I think all bets are off – if you want to work 70 hour weeks and make a ton of money, have at it – that money should be yours. If you want to work the minimum required to meet your basic needs, that’s fine too – but don’t expect anyone to take care of more than your basic needs.
I must admit, though, that I do not think that economic growth and increasing standards of living can go on forever. We just hit the biophysical wall sooner or later – yes, people have been calling for the crash for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that they are wrong in principal, just wrong in their timing. And note that the way growth is taking place, the measures you cite require geographic disentanglement – for example, while there is more food/calories per capita globally, in sub-Saharan Africa food/calorie availability has gone backward over the last two decades. Not everyone is eating more, or able to eat more, under existing economic regimes. The same might be said for environmental conservation – sure, there are areas of great success (like afforestation and reforestation at the mid-latitudes, in advanced economies) – but this is not happening everywhere, and the overall trends in our environment are disturbing as hell (the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s report on State and Trends, available online, is a great resource). And finally, I would argue that we do not have the same natural world – we’ve burned through a hell of a lot of resources in a very unsustainable way over the past few decades, meaning those resources are no longer there for others to use for growth or any other purpose. Again, sooner or later we hit the wall – maybe later, but eventually, I think (again, leaving open the door for technological changes that alter this equation dramatically).
And you are right – we are living in the period of greatest wealth in human history, but also the greatest inequality. And not all boats are actually rising on this tide, even at uneven rates. There are countries in Africa headed backward. There are regions within many countries headed backward. There are neighborhoods in cities headed backward. This is a key argument in my book – we are measuring the wrong things to actually see what is happening in the developing world, and as a result we are overgeneralizing our data. I live in South Carolina (right now) – a state where the per-capita income is well below the national average. And there are counties in SC that really help define the term “dirt poor”. But if we average all of this data across the country, it looks like everyone in SC (and the US) makes $44k/year (hell, households in SC average $10k less than that). You know this sort of analysis is crap. I know this is crap. But that is what the data says, and this is what people run with. Same problem in Ghana. Same problem in Malawi. Same problem in India, the only place I have been in the world where I have seen stuff that rivaled the deprivation of West Africa. I worry we are missing the early warnings – the many sinking ships that could turn into a drowned armada soon . . .
You make some good points.
I deplore a world in which the poor are allowed to go hungry. I prefer to stop the sentence there. I’d still deplore it if *everyone* went hungry – more so, in fact. I expect you’d agree, if it’s put like that; but still, people can’t seem to resist adding on the comparisons.
You make a very good point in pointing out that averages are not the whole story. You can get the average go up, while the bottom end drops. I agree.
But the point I was making was that in *total* we have got extra food, so where did it come from? In a (near) zero-sum world, somebody would have to be giving something up. But the few countries going backwards cannot be supplying all the food for the much larger number going forwards, (especially with expanding populations as well). Is it the richer countries?
And with those going backwards, is it all for zero-sum reasons? Or because of wars and governments? If sub-Saharan Africa applied advanced agricultural techniques, or industrialised, would somebody else have to give up agriculture or industry to compensate?
We mustn’t confuse ‘weather’ for ‘climate’ here. With noisy data, short intervals and small areas going backwards are inevitable. And I have already agreed that we are still a long way from being able to fix our problems. But is the world as a whole going in the right direction, food-wise? In principle, is an end to starvation possible?
I also agree that there are limits, and we cannot expand forever. But the question is, are we close to those ultimate limits, or are we still a long way off? Suppose the carrying capacity of the Earth is actually a trillion people. (Some optimists have calculated it as such.) We would all agree then that the bounds are finite and we cannot expand forever, but does that *necessarily* imply that we ought to panic now?
The environment has problems and I agree that we ought to fix them. But I think that in the course of normal business, we can, and we will. It’s just a matter of time.