Friday, May 21, 2004 :::
Paul "Chicken Little" Ehrlich has a new book out, with his wife. Reason's Ron Bailey takes it on:The "prospective collision with the natural world" is supposed to happen when human population, economic growth and technological progress reach some horrible point of intersection on a chart of global doom. In the Ehrlichs' simplistic summary, environmental Impact equals Population x Affluence x Technology, the notorious I=PAT identity. Impact is, of course, always negative. One notes that the three factors aren't merely added together; their allegedly deleterious effects are multiplied. It's a simple model, but I think multiplication makes more sense than addition. But, as Bailey goes on to point out:History shows that the I=PAT identity largely gets it backward. Population is at worst neutral, while affluence and technology, far from harming nature, actually promote its flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams clearer, the forests more expansive. While the Ehrlichs put forward a few good ideas--such as replacing income taxes with consumption taxes and eliminating government subsidies--most of their analysis consists of antimarket screeds and hackneyed corporation-bashing.
The Ehrlichs also underplay the good news. Globally, women are having fewer and fewer babies, so the world's population will likely peak at around eight billion in 50 years or so. The agronomist Paul Waggoner has argued that if farmers around the world can raise their productivity to current U.S. levels--even using current technology, nothing newer--they can easily feed 10 billion people, with better diets. And they can do so, according to his projections, using half the land they now farm, thus sparing more land for nature. The chief hope for that result is precisely the market that the Ehrlichs decry, and the economic dynamism that comes with it.
The clincher:Of course, there are environmental problems, although not the global warming the authors fear. (Satellite data now suggest that such warming will be mild over the next century--about a degree Celsius.) But the depletion of fisheries and tropical forests is real enough. Alas, the Ehrlichs and most of their ecological confreres miss the central reason for it: the tragedy of the commons, where nobody owns a resource--forest, fish, water--and thus no one has a reason to protect it. By contrast, enclosing the commons, by assigning owners, internalizes costs and benefits, and allows markets to determine the value of any given resource. With characteristic wrongheadedness, they advocate instead eroding property rights, thus enlarging the commons and tending to make environmental problems worse. Incidentally, Bjorn Lomborg is less dismissive of global warming than Bailey is, and I tend to trust Lomborg's judgment on this over Bailey's, but I'm pretty ignorant myself.
::: posted by Steven at 12:27 PM
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