New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears
Thanks to Jim Baird, Jim Brous, Tony Cassils, Bob Engelman and Steve Kurtz for sending the link to this article in the Wall Street Journal. The original will be at http://online.wsj.com for one week past the date of publication (March 24). Below is a copy of the article. There is a video on India at the website. One has to wonder what has become of the Wall Street Journal editors who wrote their January 24, 2003 editorial, “Global Baby Bust.”
See Paul Krugman’s comments on this article at http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/.
———————–
Although a Malthusian catastrophe is not at hand, the resource constraints foreseen by the Club of Rome are more evident today than at any time since the 1972 publication of the think tank’s famous book, “The Limits of Growth.” Steady increases in the prices for oil, wheat, copper and other commodities — some of which have set record highs this month — are signs of a lasting shift in demand as yet unmatched by rising supply.
For full article, visit:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120613138379155707.html
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Dear Members of the PMC community,
It is not at all clear that some colossal ecological wreckage or global economic collapse is not in the offing.
What could be happening?
Perhaps powerful people and huge human institutions are driving the relentless, and soon to become unsustainable, expansion of the global political economy by requiring unbridled increases of economic production/distribution capabilities, conspicuously unrestrained per-capita consumption of resources and the continuous growth of absolute global human population numbers.
But why?
As we having been observing in recent months, another huge “bubble” has been ‘manufactured’ by economic powerbrokers and allowed to grow ominously within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, the sub prime “bubble” is doing now what bubbles eventually do. Bubbles burst. We can readily observe how the credit markets of the world banking system are seizing up and trust in the monetary system is eroding. Who knows, a financial meltdown of the economic system worldwide could be close at hand.
How could this be happening?
For a moment, let us consider that the organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy (and the unraveling of the worldwide sub prime swindle) are running the artificially designed economy of the human community as a pyramid scheme. This is to say straightforwardly that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth rises pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated endlessly. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with resources of very little value. In the 1980s, this global financial operation was called a “trickle down” economy. We have been told over and over again how this economic scheme “raises all ships.” From my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources in 2008 appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ’ships’ carrying these billions of people do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Could anything be done to beneficially change these unfair, inequitable and, in billions of instances, intolerable circumstances?
Of course. There is plenty to do. The global economy is undeniably a manmade construction. Because the world’s economy is a product of human activity, our economic system is known to one and all to be imperfect. Afterall, human beings can better themselves and their imperfect products can be ameliorated. Only works of God are perfect, I suppose. If it is so that the human economy is imperfect, it is just as obvious that the global economy of the family of humanity can be re-designed, modified and otherwise changed, as necessary. The system of economic globalization can be reorganized, “downsized” and “powered down” so that the global economy meets the primary needs of majority of people. In this way, the economy of the human community could be sustainably reconstructed so as to realize more fully and more equitably the principles of democracy.
What of our children?
Perhaps making necessary changes now that restructure the patently unsustainable global political economy into many small-scale, sustainable enterprises will make it possible for us to help our children avert the occurrence of some sort of calamitous environmental catastrophe resulting from the current huge scale and anticipated growth of seemingly endless economic globalization within our relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably frangible planetary home.
Sincerely,
Steve