The Cruel Hoax of an Improved Lifestyle

This is a copy of a chat by a couple of friends and myself about globalization, on a different blog site.  As it pertains to both the rise of China and a common (mis)perception of China, I'm going to copy the whole thing here.Enjoy.The Cruel Hoax of an Improved Lifestyle, by Ben Hawken.The long-foreseen, but under-reported, shortages associated with globalization have arrived en masse.According to an article in the NYT, a surge in demand has led to grain shortages around the world, despite farms operating at peak output.Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is runaway demand. In recent years, the world's developing countries have been growing about 7 percent a year, an unusually rapid rate by historical standards. The high growth rate means hundreds of millions of people are, for the first time, getting access to the basics of life, including a better diet.This problem is the result of a long series of successes.Programs which have sought to modernize the cultures of third-world countries, and give them access to first-world living standards and customs, have given these densely populated countries a desire for a quality of life and consumption habits equal to those in the West.Nigeria grows little wheat, but its people have developed a taste for bread, in part because of marketing by American exporters. Between 1995 and 2005, per capita wheat consumption in Nigeria more than tripled, to 44 pounds a year. Bread has been displacing traditional foods like eba, dumplings made from cassava root.Thus, the success of globalization efforts have provided a demand that is unsustainable. Or, as Daniel W. Basse of the Ag Resource Company (a agriculture consulting firm in Chicago) puts it: "Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe, but if they do, we're going to need another two or three globes to grow it all."Many anthropologists and geographers, the eminent Jared Diamond among them, have pointed out the inherent dangers of this trend--the fact that the earth cannot, under any circumstances, sustain the consumption demands of all 6.5billion people living a first-world lifestyle.Diamond, in his landmark book Collapse, and most recently in an NYTop-ed, discusses this problem directly.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. [...] 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.This problem does not exist merely in figures and projected calculations--there are very real examples of this currently at work.Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the world's fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let's suppose they rise to our level. Let's also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China's) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China's catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase eleven fold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven't met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.We Americans may think of China's growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.Even this anticipated problem of China's drain on world resources is preceded by the aforementioned grain shortages.The successful development programs in Nigeria, for example, have resulted in the emergence of a middle class. According to the NYT, median income has doubled, and most of that increase has been spent on food.After generations spent in poverty, the Nigerian middle class is in no mood to return the foods or practices that remind them of poverty. They are dedicated to their "taste for bread.""I must eat bread and tea in the morning. Otherwise, I can't be happy," Mr. Sule said as he sat on a bench at a roadside cafe a few weeks ago. For a breakfast that includes a small loaf, he pays about $1 a day, twice what the traditional eba would have cost him.This response should not outrage us nearly as much as it might at first. Mr. Sule still hasn't insisted on driving an SUV, refused to take public transit or turned a blind eye to the dangers of clear cutting and unsustainable natural resources.There are solutions, and Diamond spends the second half of his op-ed outlining them, but they are not things that will be eagerly done by a majority of first-worlders, and it is cringe-inducing (and saddening) to consider the tragedy that will have to occur before these solutions are heeded.First Reply from Prof. Vincent James Strickler       I call bovine stool.I heard a talk given by an agricultural expert about 10 years ago in which he said if then current ag tech was applied to areas then in cultivation, there would be enough food to feed 30 billion people.  He saw no reason why, if and when we did reach 30 billion, there wouldn't be the technology available to feed 150 billion.In the Q & A session after, he was asked, if we are capable of feeding so many, why do so many go hungry?  Politics getting in the way of economics he said.  I think he is right.  As these developing countries demand more wheat, the price will go up, there will be an incentive then to produce more, and farmers will.  Maybe some of those US farms that are now getting paid by the govt to NOT raise wheat will decide they can make more money actually doing so and shipping it to Nigeria (or selling their little family farm to some big corporation that will raise the wheat and ship it toNigeria).  We just need to get bleeding heart social policies ("Save the family farmer, sob!") and protectionism out of the way.Unsustainable?  More Malthusian nonsense.  The sky is falling, the sky is falling!Whenever I hear this kind of stuff, I reminded of Michael Crichton's (please excuse the colorful language) "horseshit" analogy:"Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?"But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet, interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, Prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, super conduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, Teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS… None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about."Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it."You want hear my prediction for the future?  Two things.  Birth rates around the globe -- including in these developing countries will continue to crash. At the same time, sustainable, profitable nuclear fusion (or something even more exotic) will become workable in the next 20 years.  With these two developments, all worries about energy consumption, pollution, resource sustainability, etc. will become as dumb as worries about horse crap in the street.  Yes, there will still be new worries to replace the old, I'm sure. But the old worries won't be valid anymore.Second Reply from me, David Dayton       Way too much hype and assumptions about the rise of China.  The doomsday scenario assumes that China and India will soon reach US consumption levels for all or most of their collective 2.5 billion people.  Not going to happen.  Ever.First, China will not get to the point of having all 1.5 billion people consuming at first world rates in 50 years, let alone 15 or 25.  Inflation for the last 6 months and the strengthening RMB over the last year are already proving this case.  Even with growth and FDI China doesn't have the physical capacity (schools, roads, stores,etc.) to even provide the opportunity for all the 1.5 billion of them to consume like Americans.  You still have 900 million people here that still are living on $1 a day--you telling me that they are going to move up to $100 a day in the next two decades?  This assumption is pure hyperbole.Second, it took China 50 years to raise about 200 million people to the levels they are consuming at now--and even those 200 mill are not at levels that are equal to US levels yet.  That growth also coincided with two very important events .  First, is that China's growth was literally from 0, or starving, to the point it is today.  And most, if not all of this growth came after 1980 when the West was booming like nothing the world had ever seen, small recessions prior to this year notwithstanding.  Second, the recent recession is a correction for that growth, mostly in the US where we financed our growth on credit (and the Chinese, by the way, are the creditors) and could last for 5 or more years.  The Chinese economy is deceptive precisely because of these factors.  It is overwhelmingly reliant on exports in a world with a crashing Dollar and China has a huge cash (inflation) liquidity problem that is just beginning to be recognized and is destroying it's ability to control inflation.  China will NOT achieve 1.5 billion people consuming at the US levels.Sure we can't tell China to stop consuming, but we won't have too.Further China is both continuing their one child policy for the next twenty years, at least, and must also deal with MASSIVE and I mean really really MASSIVE environmental problems that some assume will suck 6-8% of the growth from the economy when they are finally tackled.  Not to mention the fact that they are going to have an aging population in 20 years and no social net.  By the time they get richthey'll already be old and consumption patters will not be the same--if they live long enough to even get old.India has even more issues than China, massive poverty, smaller % of usable land per capita, much poorer infrastructure, a democratic government that can't get much necessary change through (yea, there are advantages to totalitarianism).  India will not get their billion people consuming at the US levels in the next 50 years either.Any end of the world story, including Diamond's, that assumes that China will continue 10% growth for then next 50 years, or assumes that because 200 million people now get $25 a day all 1.5 billion will soon have $100 a day is just not going to pan out.