The Basic Psychological Structure of Our Society Does Not Work

Ian, you constantly amaze.
“Let us hope we can prove ourselves wiser than that. Or, instead of us instructing ourselves, Nature will instruct, and her lessons will be harsh.”
Nature will rule in the end, but instruct?
Never; we’re the classic example of following our meme (whatever the fuck it is) to our ultimate end.
We’re so obviously a virus model; destroying its host…

The problem seems to be that without some sort of mass mobilization where large numbers of common people have a shared experience most folks will resort to selfish, small-minded politics. You mention the Napoleonic Wars and World War II resulting in better times for people and I think that is correct.

I would even go back to Roman times and argue that the Marian army reforms that brought many poor Romans into the military eventually made the oligarchic republic impossible to maintain in the long run. Eventually concessions had to be made to Rome’s Italian allies (especially after the Social War) and to the soldiers generally in the form of colonies for veterans and other benefits. The senatorial elite was allowed to keep its wealth if it accepted the Principate and the concessions to the common people in the form of land, the grain dole and later programs like the alimenta (support for poor children in Italy).

When people must work together for some goal it builds a culture of solidarity where people understand each other and can see why their neighbor’s prosperity is important to their own lives. Unfortunately today our society is very atomized. People are encouraged to see beneficial policies for some as an attack on their own livelihood. You see this in the wave of rural resentment toward urbanites, public sectors workers and unions that has helped the Republicans win so many elections. Unfortunately the Democrats continue to support complex means-tested reforms that help to fuel this resentment, Obamacare being a good example of this tendency.

Will
March 20, 2017
“History had brought forth a great moment but the moment found a mediocre people.” – Friedrich Schiller

Will:
Perfect. It describes our present.
Thank you.

An obstacle to developing the kind of people we want to be is that it happens necessarily from the ground up. A group of people not subject to discipline and command will always be defeated by an army acting on discipline and command. Thus, Occupy was rooted out by nationally coordinated police raids, and subsequently the social growth and experiments that Occupy was making possible were derided as silly hippy failure.

Threats to the powers that be will be destroyed unless the system has gone south enough for a generational crisis.

The home-school movement started with “hippy” back to the landers. When we had kids we continued with the hippy ethos of rejecting “the establishment” and began home-schooling, or un-schooling, as many of us preferred to call it. The religious home-schoolers came later. One of the few good things the religious home schoolers did was stop the authorities from harassing and prosecuting hippie home schoolers as they were more main stream. The conservatives stopped attacking the home schoolers once the religious people started to do it. Many of us went to the obscurity of rural areas to live our counter culture life styles and raised our kids in the heart of rural conservative America.
Home schooling our kids fit with the hippie mantra “Question Authority”. I was not surprised to read that Edward Snowdon dropped out of hight school and got a GED.
Maybe what we need is a resurgence of hippie culture

Ian: good article – worth reading, reflecting on and re-reading.

The quote above of Schiller’s “On the aesthetical education of man” seems relevant – his idea was to educate the emotions to develop citizens worthy of republican government. Nor was Schiller uninfluential, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, an admirer, was a Prussian minister who undertook to reform its education system. All that good work, only to have Germany humiliate itself and finally be reduced to a vassal state within 100 years.

I’m not sure what the moral is, other than “the best laid plans of mice and men…”. I do think the Enlightenment’s de-emphasizing Christianity was a hubristic mistake, because it effectively severed Europe from its roots, and left ordinary people without transcendental ideas. There was in Schiller’s time a successful republican state in the Americas, rooted in Christianity, short of Rome maybe the most successful example of republican government. But where Prussia was destroyed by losing 2 wars, the USA was seemingly destroyed by winning them. Where Lincoln and FDR saved the nation in the short term, the aftermath proved their critics right, as they had sown the seeds of its destruction.

Is republicanism still a plausible idea? I wonder if men like Schiller would still want to abolish the nobility if they knew how the 19th and 20th centuries would unfold. Anyway, the west’s history is a gold mine of knowledge. We could maybe learn something from China with its durability that puts even the Romans to shame. With the evil empire gasping its last breath, we’re already seeming some green shoots of different ideas. Interesting times …

This theory makes a lot of sense, but in practice it doesn’t look like their is going to be a “next time.” The previous examples you cite happened in individual countries at a time when natural resources were still plentiful, the environment was not rapidly spinning out of control and the world was not massively overpopulated. Now we have all those things and a system that has become truly global. When it goes, billions will die, and I don’t see how that can happen without the survivors reverting to a pre-industrial state.

There’s a lot to be said for bureaucracy and for the efficient use of legitimate authority. There’s a lot to be said for good followers. Much of what made the modern world infinitely superior to what went before rested on the ability to formulate a rational policy in administrative terms and implement it in a regime of effective social control.

Much of what manifests as failure is the breakdown of effective bureaucracy and authority.

The most pathological ideologies are pathological precisely because they cannot handle hierarchical authority on its merits. Libertarians, of the right or left (remember them, thank you Stalin), are notorious for their bouncing back and forth between denying any authority is necessary and insisting that authority should be unconstrained and unquestioned.

I am not as worried about the effects on society of rote learning (I use the order of the alphabet, which I learned by singing in kindergarten, every day, several times a day) than I am about the absence of professional ethics in business schools and law schools.

It is the credentialed, ambitious, self-satisfied upper-middle-manager, who outsourced your job to India and the Harvard professor who elaborated policy analysis so Obamacare could be as complicated as humanly possible — these are the people I think are destroying civilization, while voting for Hillary Clinton. ymmv

no mention of the effects of the less than 100 year old independent variable hollyworld and its mass entertainment products on this society. whatever they are, they’re not negligible. and they’re not on sum beneficial.

I’d go so far as to propose a tweak on an old quote, t.v. the opiate of the masses.

We were originally “designed” to live in groups of 50-100.

Think about it.

We got past the 50 to 100 limit at least 10,000 years ago. Even before the shift to agriculture allowed sedentary settlements larger than that, we probably managed widely dispersed trade nets and clan structures spread over vast areas, with occasional gatherings of many hundreds or thousands.

Our distinctive adaptations, from at least 75,000 years ago, have scaled. Tool use scales, with both the crafts of making tools and using tools. Language and communication scales. Storytelling and science scale. Few of the characteristics that have allowed humans to survive are really of much use to a group of 100 or less in true isolation: knowledge could not be developed, applied or reproduced thru generations.

The social problem is that we are not ants or bees: obedient, selfless. We resist and there is always much to resist in both the collective and the hierarchical.

We cooperate, and sometimes great things are accomplished. But, then we turn around and propagate cruelty and superstition. We suspect and resent; the same human instincts drive great loyalty and great betrayal. We are big cheaters and slackers. We are skeptics and believers. Both our willingness to question and our willingness to believe have gotten humans into great trouble as well as found solutions to great problems. And, then allowed vast societies to founder, most of their populations more or less helplessly miserable for centuries.

The big problem, as Ian identifies it, is reproducing effective leadership. Just by chance, effective leadership may arise in response to a challenge to a society already functioning fairly well, and that leadership may succeed by means of improving the functioning of society, but subsequent generations will have not the challenge to cope with, but other opportunities, including the opportunity to turn parasite or drone. The social system initially set up will be gamed from above and from below.

I think scale plays a bigger role than we usually give it credit for. Scale and surplus enable the artisanal and scientific problem solving that make a political economy dynamic and prosperous. Exhausting the surplus deflates the potential for that “urban” activity. This is why the rise of civilizations are so often associated with an agricultural revolution and the fall or stagnation with a exhaustion of surplus in depletion, congestion, pollution or climate change.

It is not just that people have difficulty reproducing competent leadership, but the systems they set up tend to create problems as they scale, which outrun the cultural capacity to invent new systems of solutions.

The Chinese invented a fantastically productive rice agriculture that fed an urban civilisation on a vast scale, which in turn invented many things in a short period, but eventually overpopulation on the farm choked off much of the surplus, and an oppressive system of extraction was introduced to sustain the cities, miring both city and countryside in poverty and stagnation.

The ancient Greeks emerged from their Dark Age with a remarkably productive agriculture complemented by trade and a population explosion carried their city-state model through the Mediterranean. The Romans added some improvements to engineer urban life. But, it all ended in agricultural exhaustion, declining trade, depopulation.

We are not meeting the challenges of overpopulation and the depletion of resources. We at least have inkling of what the problems are that we are not solving. But, it would be strange indeed if we had answers for problems of scale only realized in the last century of human existence.

We have always had rich and elites. The scales have always been tilted in their favor, but about 40 years ago this ceased to be enough for them and they, like the rest of the world, moved on into full-blown kleptocracy. Instead of skimming they looted. Instead of taking some of the fat, they blew straight through that, through the muscle and sinew too. Now they are into the bone, grinding it up, and selling it for fertilizer.

So my first advice is not to have rich and elites. All citizens should have the basics for a decent life: decent housing, healthy food, accessible healthcare, good free education, a job that pays a living wage, and a retirement without fear. If all citizens have this, how much more does any one individual need? If you want to have some degree of inequality, that’s fine, but have a clear limit on how much is too much and tie that inequality to some useful contribution to society. And stop making wealth (the rich) and privilege (the elites) hereditary.

My second is pay attention to agency. The rich and elites duck responsibility for their actions by invoking impersonal processes. It’s globalization. It’s the markets. It’s the invisible hand. It’s inflation. It’s the budget. It’s the deficit. It’s the business cycle. It’s unavoidable dislocations. It’s bubbles that can neither be foreseen nor pre-empted. It can’t be stopped. It’s creative destruction. It’s TINA. What it is is them and what they are doing to us.

My third is that we were sold a consumer society. Now that is being taken away with the death of the middle class. What we need, and ahve always needed, is a citizen society. Both economics and politics are dead easy. They are made hard to disempower us. As I have said so many times, have a clear idea of the society you want to live in not just for the people like you but the people not like you, the kind of society you want if you were a minority in it, because we all are a minority one way or another. Do this and you have a ready measure to evaluate those you entrust to run your society.

Ian, you are a pessimist! I am an optimist. Do we still live in caves with a lifespan of 30? No. Like the stock market there are ups and downs along the way but the long term trend is up. And it is precisely because people can think for themselves that they voted for Brexit and Trump. Of course it remains to be seen if either can deliver, but that’s another matter.

Global population is now expected to peak at under 11 billion before the end of this century. Food poverty is expected to be a thing of the past by 2030. You forget how awful things were in the past because they weren’t reported. Life was cheap and expendable and conquest was glorious. People used to do indescribable things to each other and think nothing of it. In poor parts of the world they still do, but at least most of us now have a say and can object.

I think you’ll find we as a species survive. Pity we as individuals won’t be around by then, but I am quite enjoying the present!

Ah yes, JP, look how far we’ve come. This sure as hell beats living in caves, doesn’t it? Obama bin Laden lived in a cave once upon a time, didn’t he? With his dialysis machine in tow? It was better fortification than any manmade bunker since it took more than a decade to hunt him down, kill him and feed him to the sharks. Don’t knock caves. It’s an insult to spelunkers everywhere.

We a need a sequel to this excellent documentary. I think the human species, unlike ants & bees, acts both individually and as a superorganism like an ant colony or bee colony. We are terraforming the planet in ways our progenitor, nature itself, could never have conceived or intended. We have become death, the destroyer of worlds — and nature.

And JP, what do you call cutting Meals on Wheels (and so much else to those with no voice or influence) if not austerity? Or is your notion that austerity is not necessary intended to mean austerity is not necessary for The Rich (your former clients) but it’s a mandatory requirement for the increasingly impoverished (people you have no time or use for since you cannot make money off of them)?

Pruit Igoe

And the voice said unto thee and them, hear me when I sayeth, come forth out of your caves and transform this chaotic paradise into a monument of your undying love for me. Prepare it so that I, the opposite of our enemy nature, may one day come again and be with you, my children, forever and ever, amen.

Cave Free — Look What’s Inside Of Me

@ Bruce Wilder

“realitychecker permalink
March 20, 2017

We were originally “designed” to live in groups of 50-100.

Think about it.”

“bruce wilder permalink
March 20, 2017

We got past the 50 to 100 limit at least 10,000 years ago.”

I regard you to be one of the more intelligent commenters here, so no disrespect intended, but I think you completely missed my point, and that you did not heed my admonition to “Think about it.”

You focused on technological and scientific advances, which can happen very quickly, but I was trying to point out that psychological changes occur very slowly, and that rapid change breaks down the simple original response patterns in many ways that are inefficient and destructive.

Our species has only been around for about 100,000 years. I don’t think our basic emotional machinery has changed very much at all in that time. That is the aspect that I was asking readers to think about.

Your argument on this proves too much, IMO. Just consider the incredible changes that tech advances have wrought in the last 25 years alone. Do you really think it reasonable to consider that we have already evolved psychologically to where we can make sense of a world where we are constantly staring at cell phone screens?

Now, extend your thought process to consider the grand sweep of our history. We are so far from the situation we evolved to survive and succeed in as a healthy species. That is what I was asking readers to think about.

As a designated representative of the lowbrow clan, I’d say John Poynton is Chip Diller. Be cool if he’d come back to describe the circumstances behind all the optimism. Not the perceptions, but where he’s coming from personally.

Since the post is titled “The Basic Psychological Structure of Our Society Does Not Work”, maybe it’s time we noticed that the developed world appears to suffer more mental illness than the developing world. The one area I know of where the evidence is very clear is schizophrenia, where people in the developing world are less likely to suffer it to begin with and show much better outcomes when treated. This does appear to speak to the problems with the psychological structure of the developed world.

V. Arnold is correct, but J. Poynton is also correct. The technology exists to eliminate hunger worldwide and provide 11 billion people adequate shelter, clothing, water, energy, education, and medical care. The technology exists; it does not need to be developed. Obviously, we’re not using it.

Even providing all this for 11 billion people on a sustainable basis is possible. Making it sustainable is merely an engineering problem. The kicker is: elites are NOT willing to pay the extra cost it takes to do the engineering. Cheap production in China or Mexico or Bangladesh is partly cheaper labor, but the even bigger cost differential is simply ignoring environmental costs, and worker safety.

A handful of countries, notably the Scandinavian countries, and Germany, have shown how to do this in large part, including legally mandated “design for disassembly.”

So, it’s not an engineering problem. It’s a problem of political economy. We have to eliminate elites who want to maximize profits. The overriding goal of economic activity has to become doing it sustainably. So industries require a lot of redesign and reengineering, which means significant increases in end product price. In an economy of equitably distributed income and wealth, this is not a problem. I look at it this way: if USA working family wages had increased annually since Reagan by the same percentage they had increased before Reagan (and since the end of World War 2), average family income would be about double what it is now. That, in turn, would have meant much, much larger sales for Toyota Prius, Chevy Volts and even Teslas. Especially if sumptuary taxes on fuel inefficient cars were imposed. That the bright MBAs running the car companies do not see this is proof of what Veblen termed “trained incapacity.”

Wall Street has to be curbed. Hedge funds and private equity firms must be eliminated. And I mean eliminated — wiped off the face of the planet. Mass incarceration of MOUs, financial whiz kids and profit maximizing MBAs is going to become the order of the day once some climate related calamity kills a million or so people. It’s just a matter of time.

Production of food, healthcare, housing, education, etc for everyone in the world is indeed possible, at least for the time being. The problem that it is not always profitable for those who control the production and distribution of goods and services. As long as societies operate on a for-profit basis, – e.g. capitalism and greed – things won’t change by human direction and action. They will change when global warming disrupts the production of vital goods and modern life styles – and produces political and social chaos and disaster.

I grew up in a small town – cattle, mining, timber. Worked on ranches throughout my youth, without electricity or indoor plumbing. We grew most of our food except for a few basics like flour, sugar, salt and coffee. I know what it takes to survive in a post-industrial, post-consumerist world and I know I have but a fraction of the necessary skills. My kids have no skills at all and my Millennial grandchildren don’t know such skills existe. You think my great-grandchildren have any chance of a good life with we blow through 4°C warming and possibly 6 or 8°?

In addition to raising thoroughbred horses, Don Henry Ford Jr raises his own food. He and Leah freeze it, can it, make cheese, etc. He remarked, “I have way too much, as long as the trucks keep running. If the trucks stop running, I don’t have anywhere near enough.” He knows what it takes, he has and does what it takes – and he’s worried.

History is often seen as cyclical, and while I’m not a fan of “End of History”, previous cycles have simply been reruns of the same script, with different characters and scenery. They have never had to contend with a world that may become largely uninhabitable. The “end of history” may arrive, just not the way the social philosophers envision it.

I have a great faith in the ingenuity of humans and it’s quite possible, even likely, that some will survive. But billions won’t, and those who do survive won’t have the luxury of history, science, technology, or any knowledge beyond what it takes to ensure their next meal.

Tip O’Neill used to say “All politics is local”. IMO he wasn’t talking abut grassroots organization. He was talking about person-to-person communication and relationships. When we got too big to know those who affect us and whom we affect, things went downhill.

What I find unutterably sad is the huge gap between what America, the world, humanity could have done & become and what we have done and become, whether that gap is in politics, economics, or society. Nice try, Mother Nature, but we’re a failed experiment. Time to reset and start all over.

Arthur writes “There is no way 11 billion people can live comfortably on this planet.”

Sir, you may believe that now, but I seek leave to inform you that overpopulation has been the smokescreen financial and economic predators have hidden behind for centuries. Here is the greatest USA economist of the nineteenth century, Henry Carey, writing in 1851 about British economic thinking and policies, including “free trade,”:

“We thus have here, first, a system that is unsound and unnatural, and second, a theory invented for the purpose of accounting for the poverty and wretchedness which are its necessary results. The miseries of Ireland are charged to over-population, although millions of acres of the richest soils of the kingdom are waiting drainage to take their place among the most productive in the world, and although the Irish are compelled to waste more labour than would pay, many times over, for all the cloth and iron they consume. The wretchedness of Scotland is charged to over-population when a large portion of the land is so tied up by entails as to forbid improvement, and almost forbid cultivation. The difficulty of obtaining food in England is ascribed to over-population, when throughout the kingdom a large portion of the land is occupied as pleasure grounds, by men whose fortunes are due to the system which has ruined Ireland and India. Over-population is the ready excuse for all the evils of a vicious system, and so will it continue to be until that system shall see its end… (The Harmony of Interests, pp. 64-65) ”

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1851-1875/the-harmony-of-interests/v—why-is-it-that-protection-is-required.php

My worry is that beliefs such as yours prevent otherwise well-intended people (may I assume you are one?) from 1) identifying who the real problem is and 2) also prevent them from being effective in actually doing some good in this world during their brief sojourn here.

Around here people deeply care about educating the kids. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still a bunch of obedience training. However, when I speak with white Americans, it’s often ‘their children’ and the americans have little interest in investing resources in competing groups.

@willy,

waxing a bit religious, with your excessive use of emo-triggering terminology,
home schooling wingnuts ….indoctrinate their children in the ways of readin’, rightin’, and godrithmatic. … find the truth ….

you’d benefit from using some mindfulness techniques and deep – breathing to avoid falling into the judgmental habits of the religionists. and the liberals hyperventilate on their beliefs just as much as the traditionalists.

Mr. Wikrent, you are quite correct to state our present system is terrible. You will get no argument from me on that score. But are you suggesting that we engineer every piece of useable land for humans? I for one do not want to live in a world were everything in nature is gone and nothing remains but concrete and glass. On that score things are bad enough already.

replying to realitychecker

re: human evolution

I don’t think we know much of anything about the genetic foundations of behavior or human social psychology, which invites people (absolutely not accusing you of this at all) to project their prejudices into the void. A certain sort of reactionary conservatism, in particular, likes to imagine that social change is driven by genetics in a simplistic, one-to-one way that denies social responsibility or the effects of institutions. This can be simple racialism: the racist assertion that African-Americans are dumber and more violent. The historian Gregory Clark has argued an interpretation of English economic history that features the higher reproductive rates of the upper middle classes as an explanation for the decline in civil violence. The field of evolutionary psychology is full of people who think they are making serious arguments (and are mostly wrong in their assertions and in their conceits concerning their own capacity to reason).

Never mind rates of technical change, the sheer plasticity of human culture is amazing. The variety of cultures and languages is fantastic and the rates of cultural change can be amazing as well. In the last century or two, the change in the cultural regime of sexual categories and control is pretty amazing across the Western world. I don’t see how people can posit a short or straight path from alleged genes to particular forms of institutionalized behavior, but they do.

I participated a few weeks ago on Crooked Timber in a discussion of evopsychology, where one of the evopsych assertions was something along the lines of taboos on incest are nearly universal, therefore taboos on incest have an evolved genetic basis. It is kind of crazy stupid put plainly like that. A reasonable person would draw the arrow of causality in the opposite direction: if a cultural prohibition like that is nearly universal, it must be substituting for the absence of a genetic barrier. Human sexuality has evolved in a way that makes child abuse and incest serious problems to which we must have cultural remedies. Taboo probably has some genetic foundation in our emotional psychology, but what we make taboo, not so much. And, in this case, if there were a genetic foundation inhibiting incest, we wouldn’t need culture to make the behavior taboo. Ditto for child sexual abuse. Neoteny has driven so much of human evolution that it is almost inevitable that that is a weakness in human psychology.

That’s a long and winding way of saying that I don’t think human evolution reached stasis or stopped 50,000 years ago. The advantages of intelligent social cooperation in technology, imho, have put a lot of pressure on human social behavior to scale up, because the advantages of technology scale up. That pressure has been present and increasingly intense for tens of thousands of years, which is plenty long enough to induce significant changes in the genetic pool. (Compare adult lactose tolerance.)

If I think about language in Australia and how fractured the aboriginals were, linguistically, then your 150 number doesn’t look so bad. But, how many speakers of English, Chinese, Spanish are there? How important is shared language to the functioning of the economic system and the ability of individuals to reproduce? Language scales and puts pressure on society to scale and that pressure has existed for a long time, though it has gotten more intense as modernity has spread.

That doesn’t mean that humans are ready to manage societies numbering billions, even if the earth’s resources could permit such a thing. I think Ian may be right that humans are ill-equipped by their social psychology to manage economic hierarchy. Dominance-submission, in-group, out-group stuff is socially hazardous, given to pathology.

@Z – progressives are congenitally unable to see this kind of problem. They always see themselves as rightfully and imminently in power, so why would they want to put limits on power?

But it’s hard not to see the credit expansion’s fingerprints on a range of contemporary evils. Behold this hyper-intelligent progressive tackling the problem of cost disease. He hems and haws for 10,000 words and concludes: “What’s happening? I don’t know and I find it really scary”. Von Mises and the Austrian school, who may be said to have predicted exactly this problem, does not score a mention there.

This is an issue that deserves a lot more scrutiny, and so of course our famously free press and tenured academics will not touch it.

Blizzard of Oz,

Yep, instead of people being able to directly see that our rulers are stealing from them … and it being so obvious that their subjects can recognize and rally around it, and go after the folks that are looting them … now it’s a slight of the hand behind a curtain. It makes accountability a lot more nebulous when it’s part of a system, a system of soft tyranny that our rulers try to sell to us as being damn near organic, as if it just sprang up out of the ground on one fine April morning and coincidentally bequeathed to them a huge amount of power over us.

It’s a robbery/murder weapon with no fingerprints on it.

It ought to require a hundred thousand armed troops to protect that deplorable institution from the people.

Z

Arthur asks: “But are you suggesting that we engineer every piece of usable land for humans?” Well, what do you mean by “usable land”? Every square millimeter of land is usable in some way or another I would think. So, my answer is not to engineer every square millimeter of land. Can we determine what is “sustainably usable” land? I think we can. But, I have no doubt that there is much land that is “sustainably usable” that is also the host of some geological or environmental wonders and treasures. I believe we can also preserve those.

But the way you phrased your question caused me to think of something that is rarely discussed: aesthetics. I currently live in North Carolina. I generally detest the place. A couple years ago, I figured out why. The boom years of the state were in the 1960s through 1990s – the development of the sunbelt. And the architecture of that period is plain ugly. I realized this after returning from a trip in New England. Most urban areas in USA are similarly ugly. But the old downtowns, where they have been preserved, are actually quite pleasant. Because of the architecture, which embodies classical proportions. I believe that most people would be generally much happier if they spent their waking hours walking around someplace as beautiful as the Left Bank of Paris, or the old town of Montreal. Or even Greenwich Village in NYC.

It’s interesting to read about the City Beautiful movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Beautiful_movement
and the efforts of such designers as Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmstead. If they had not done what they did over a century ago, most USA cities would be irredeemable hellholes today.

James Howard Kunstler is completely on target in his critique of modern architecture and city planning. We need to redesign and rebuild most of our urban areas to be beautiful and livable, at the same time that we make them carbon neutral. Again, the engineering exists to do all this. But elites are not willing to expend resources on anything that they cannot get their cut from.

Someone brought up the notion of “enoughness.” That’s very enlightened for someone in a Western industrialized country. But I do not see how attempting to apply it to developing areas meets the standard of the Golden Rule.

The US uses about 25% of the world’s energy and has a little less than 5% of its population. Its current population is around 328 million. At energy consumption levels comparable to current US energy levels, a population of 11 billion would require 33 times the energy the US currently uses. Even if we were optimistic and factored in an unlikely 50% reduction in overall energy usage due to increased efficiencies and technological breakthroughs, this would still be 16 1/2 times current usage. At current population levels, we are already seeing global climate change, political and social instability, resource overuse and exhaustion, and habitat and species loss. Now increase the current world population by 50% and gear up its energy usage levels to US levels, and you see that the math doesn’t add up now for a happy ever after ending and will even less with these increased burdens.

As I keep saying: never bet against the math. The far greater likelihood is that world population will hit a ceiling around 2050 and crash thereafter. By 2100, we won’t be seeing a world population of 11 billion, but more like one billion, 3 billion if we are extremely lucky.

Peter and Hugh: Yes, of course: It is far easier to let six billion people die than it is to stop 100,000 psychopathic financiers and CEOs. It’s all just nature taking its course. Nothing to see here, just nature at work, move along, move along.

The question is distribution of resources. How to maintain stable populations living in healthy and safe environments. Clearly the neo-liberal-con system put in place by the Reagan – Thatcher Counter-Coup is a failure. Austerity and the influx of refugees is destabilizing the West. The new Cold War with Russia and climate change could destroy mankind. There are alternatives; Peace, Cooperation, Social Democracy, Public Education and the Rule of Law. I remember once when life was getting better. Not now. The tragedy is mankind’s innate need for green pastures seized from others.

>Frankly, Scarlett, I’ll be dead by then.

7-word short story. Here is mine
https://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2017/03/7-word-short-story.html

Lesson:
It takes a person with a considerable amount of intelligence to express the thoughts of the average person’s idea, succinctly.

In reply to Hugh:

The “math” is not settled.

http://iere.org/ILEA/leaf/richard2002.html

I will try to paste the source code for the table, and hope it does not adversely affect Ian’s site.

Human Carrying Capacity of Earth

Gigi Richard

Introduction

The carrying capacity of an ecosystem is defined as the “maximum population size of a species that an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future”1 . Biological studies of population change typically demonstrate that once the carrying capacity of an ecosystem is exceeded, a severe crash or collapse of the population follows associated with rapid environmental degradation.2 An example of the “boom-bust” cycle of population growth is found on St. Matthew Island, Alaska, where 29 reindeer were initially introduced in 1944. The reindeer population grew to 6,000, depleted the resource base, and subsequently declined to fewer than 50 deer by 1964.3

Though human population growth can demonstrate similar cycles,4 human population is also affected by more than just resource availability. We, as humans, are unique in our ability to modify the environment and to improve technology for food and energy production. These unique abilities combined with the inherent social nature of humans complicate the estimation of the human carrying capacity of the planet.

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) latest population report,5 the world population has doubled since 1960 to 6.1 billion people and is projected to increase to 9.3 billion by 2050. Along with the increase in number of people, there is an associated increase in the demand placed on the resources of the Earth. As human population increases at an unprecedented rate combined with the developed world’s reliance on non-renewable energy sources it becomes salient to look at how far the human population can continue to escalate while remaining supportable. Ecologists, economists and other scientists and policy makers from all over the world have attempted to estimate the human carrying capacity of the planet. The results vary dramatically depending on the methods used and the assumptions made. The variety of methods employed and assumptions made result in a broad range of estimates varying from as low as fewer than one billion people to as high as 1,000 billion6. This paper compiles numerous recent estimates of socially sustainable carrying capacity into a single compendium and investigates the estimates of carrying capacity resulting from methods utilizing energy consumption and production as a metric for estimation.

Biophysical vs. Social Carrying Capacity

The long-term sustainable carrying capacity for the human species on the Earth varies with resource availability as well as culture and level of economic development7. Two measures of human carrying capacity arise: the biophysical carrying capacity and the social carrying capacity. The biophysical carrying capacity is a maximum population that can be supported by the resources of the planet at a given level of technology. The social carrying capacity is the sustainable biophysical carrying capacity within a given social organization, including patterns of consumption and trade8. The social carrying capacity therefore must be less than the biophysical as it will account for quality of life and estimate the number of humans that can be sustainably supported at a given standard of living.

Currently there exists an extreme dichotomy in the level of energy consumption between the US, other developed countries and undeveloped countries.9 The amount of energy consumed per person per year is a useful measure of standard of living.10 Per capita energy consumption is measured in kW/person and includes industrial uses, transportation, home heating and cooling, clothing, electronic entertainment, vacations, food production, etc.. Table 1 summarizes per capita energy consumption from the early 1990’s. The U.S. consumed an average of 12 times more energy per capita than developing nations.11 North American per capita energy use is more than twice that of Europeans, more than 10 times that of Asians and more than 20 times that of Africans.12

In order to estimate a sustainable human population, a standard of living or level of consumption must be selected or assumed. At this point, the introduction of social issues becomes important. For instance very high global population could be supported at a very low level of food consumption, perhaps even on the brink of starvation. The result however could be a socially unstable situation. A socially sustainable carrying capacity must be based on a level of consumption that meets basic human needs of food, water and space as well as provides opportunity to enjoy socio-political rights, health, education and well-being.14 Another important aspect of social sustainability is equitable distribution of resources. Inequitable distribution of wealth can lead to social instability and disruption. As a result, some researchers propose that estimates of carrying capacity should include a downward adjustment for inevitable inequality resulting from human selfishness and short-sightedness.15

Estimating Sustainable Carrying Capacity

The basic resources of the planet, such as land, water, energy and biota are inherently limited.16 Selection of one or several of these limited resources as a metric for measuring the carrying capacity of the planet is a common method of estimating global human carrying capacity. The use of a single resource or combination of limited resources to estimate carrying capacity includes measuring how much of that resource is available globally. For instance, global wheat harvest can be estimated based on land area and water availability, then used to compute the number of humans that those quantities can support.

Resource use must also be differentiated between renewable and nonrenewable resources (Table 2) for estimation of global carrying capacity. Renewable resources are driven primarily by solar energy and are regenerated through natural processes. Non-renewable resources are those with limited quantities and very low or no renewal rates. Long-term use of non-renewable resources is generally not sustainable. A socially sustainable global carrying capacity must be based on use of renewable resources, possibly supplemented by very low consumption of non-renewable resources.17

Recent estimates by the World Energy Council18 suggests that one-third of the world’s oil reserves have been used and that the remainder will be significantly depleted by the end of the 21st century if current rates of consumption continue. Other studies19 suggest that declines in oil production will occur as early as 2010. Other non-renewable energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, will supplement as oil production potentially declines; however, these sources are also not sustainable over the long-term.
Changes in available technology for energy and food production and distribution, and waste disposal also impact the resulting carrying capacity estimate. Sir Thomas Malthus, in his famous 1798 treatise on population growth, did not account for the advancements in fertilizing agricultural land leading to increased food production, which in turn allowed for greater population growth than he estimated. Some estimates of carrying capacity account for future improvement in technology, and other estimates presume that the level of technological development remains the same.

Energy inputs

Energy availability is a useful metric that can be used to estimate carrying capacity because it can account for many different resources. Energy from the sun is the driving force of the Earth’s ecosystems. Solar energy generates atmospheric processes that provide wind energy and freshwater. Plants, trees, food crops, and animals all require energy from the sun. The balance of energy consumption and production can be used to estimate the number of humans that the planet is capable of sustainably supporting. The total amount of energy input by the sun to the earth is finite and can be estimated. When that energy is divided up among the entire earth ecosystem, it is possible to estimate at a given level of consumption, how many humans can be supported on the earth. The resulting estimate is a sustainable number because it does not rely on non-renewable energy sources. Currently, about 50% of all solar energy captured by photosynthesis is used by humans. On its own, solar energy cannot support the present human population without supplementation by non-renewable energy sources, such as fossil fuels.20

Land area

Land area can be used in different ways to estimate carrying capacity, either as a metric for other resource uses or as a measure itself. The simplest way of using land area to compute carrying capacity is to presume a population density for a given area and compute the total number of people that the region can support. Another method, the ecological footprint concept, uses land area as a metric for a combination of other factors. Ecological footprint takes many different resource uses and measures them by the equivalent amount of land area required for their production. The ecological footprint describes how much land is necessary to support a given population in terms of energy, food, and other resources at a certain level of consumption. The result is that developed/rich countries with high levels of resource consumption have much larger footprints than they actually occupy.21

Food production

Estimates of carrying capacity using food as a metric determine the total amount of food that can be produced globally and divide by a standard level of food consumption per person. The result is a global population that can be supported at a given level of subsistence assuming that food is equitably distributed around the globe. More complex methods consider changes in crop yield with increased technology, food distribution, varied world diets, and other resource supply, such as fossil fuels.

Recent carrying capacity estimates

When one considers the array of factors that must be estimated and the conditions that must be assumed, it is unrealistic to expect a unique figure defining the Earth’s human carrying capacity. Professor Joel Cohen in his 1995 book, How Many People can the Earth Support?,22 summarized estimates of human carrying capacity of the Earth beginning with estimates made as early as the 1600’s. His summary is not limited to estimates that are considered socially sustainable as he includes estimates that only consider biophysical parameters. Many studies cited by Cohen give a range of population carrying capacities with a low estimate and a high estimate. In his 1995 Science paper,23 Cohen computed the median of the high estimates and the median of the low estimates. The result was a range of medians from 7.7 to 12 billion people.

Table 3 summarizes the estimates from Cohen’s book that do consider social sustainability as well as estimates from other sources. The estimates vary from 0.5 to 14 billion depending on the metric used and the standard of living and technological improvements that are assumed. The medians of the low and high estimates provide a range from 2.1 to 5.0 billion people. With the current Earth population estimated to be 6.1 billion people,24 the median range of sustainable carrying capacity estimates suggests that the Earth’s population be reduced in order to be sustainable.

Summary & Conclusions

A sustainable population of humans on the Earth implies reliance on renewable energy sources combined with socially sustainable standards of living. Standard of living and carrying capacity are inversely related, such that as standard of living decreases, the number of people that can be supported on Earth increases.25 The current global population of 6.1 billion people exceeds the median range of socially and biophysically sustainable carrying capacity estimates shown in Table 3. Exceedance of the Earth’s carrying capacity is made possible by consumption of nonrenewable energy sources, such as fossil fuels as well as inequities in global distribution of food and energy consumption.

Energy is a useful metric for estimating carrying capacity because it can be used to estimate available renewable energy from the sun as well as standard of living based on energy consumption. Solar energy is the primary source of renewable energy on Earth as it generates atmospheric processes as well as food and forest resources. Per capita energy consumption can be used to estimate resource use that defines human standards of living, including food, transportation, manufacturing, heating and cooling, housing, etc. Using standards of living lower than the current North American average, estimates of carrying capacity using energy as a metric range from 1 to 3 billion people. This is less than half of the current global population.

Estimating the carrying capacity of the Earth is a difficult task involving value-based decisions and assumptions. Whether the future of the Earth includes a dense population of humans with reduced biodiversity and degraded environmental qualities or a smaller human population living sustainably on a diverse resource base remains to be seen. However, current levels of energy consumption and the impending depletion of non-renewable energy sources point toward the necessity for a change in either population growth or consumption trends if the human race is to survive at anything close to its current level of subsistence.

That list of carrying capacity estimates was compiled in 2002 – fifteen years ago. There have been some major scientific and technological breakthroughs since. The progress of human technology can roughly be summarized as moving ever further down 1) a spectrum of energy density and 2) molecular and atomic scale. From the rapidly diffused light and heat of burning wood twigs, we have progressed to concentrate fire in boilers, then in internal combustion engines, and are now mastering the techniques of directing and manipulating single molecules, atoms, and even photons. We can now perform surgery on genes, and arrange individual atoms. These technologies are all breathtakingly recent in the context of known human history.

You are trying to convince me that the “math” is an iron law of nature which dooms six billion people to a short, brutish, miserable life.

And I am trying to convince you that for hundreds of years now, the “math” has been promoted by TPTB to hide the effects of their policies and practices, and get us to accept that it is “natural” that our lives are short, brutish, miserable. Just look at what the foundational assumption of mainstream economics is. I will be back later this evening, curious to see if anyone knows what assumption I am referring to.

I’d think that foundational, would be an understanding of the scope and limits of genetic temperament, and understanding how and why so many ‘hump of bell curve’ median folks are so willing to remain compliant in the face of some obvious, destructive, predatory, psychopathic extreme.

Having an ubermencsh in the cave clan was acceptable as long as his dominance was limited to first dibs on food, shelter and sex, and only after proving his worth at being the best at getting those things for everybody else. But most modern humans seem completely messed up in that regard. And that’s where most of the voters are.

Almost every economics textbook I have seen – and I have acquired quite a few and looked at many, many others for just this reason – begins with some definition or other involving the allocation of scarce resources. Scarcity is central to mainstream economic thinking. Thorstein Veblen, however, argued that the level of development of an economy is best measured by humans’ use of tools, with industrial mass production actually breaking through what had been solid assumptions of classical British school economics. Under previous economic arrangements of a craft and guild economy, humanity had suffered recurring shortages of food and other goods. Now, industrial mass production made food and many other goods plentiful. There then arose a conflict between the masters of industrial mass production, typified by engineers, and the owners of the means of production. The owners could not tolerate plenty; plenitude destroyed pricing power and therefore profits. Hence, they engaged in what Veblen termed industrial sabotage to limit and retard the industrial process, and create artificial scarcity.

Now this does not mean that resources are infinite. But it does mean that making an assumption of scarcity the basis of your economic philosophy is incorrect. Even worse, it creates a philosophical basis toward accepting a Hobbesian / Malthusian view on the natural condition of humanity: human life is “short, nasty, and brutish.” Now, if you believe that most human beings are doomed to lives that are “short, nasty, and brutish” how can you possibly justify granting most human beings any share of political power? You simply cannot.

Maintaining the belief that resources are scarce thus is a crucial prop to the continuation and perpetuation of rule by pre-industrial elites. Do you know who the largest shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell are? Or Glencore Xstrata, BHP Billiton, and RTZ, the largest mining companies in the world? Why do you think BP donates millions of dollars each year to the World Wildlife Fund? You think it’s because Robert Dudley is as environmentally progressive as you are?

@ bruce wilder

If we eat, we shit, true enough. But if (when) we eat another human, he/she shits no more, not ever.

Cannibalism may be the environmentalism of the future.

The basic premise of modern economics is the concept of “scarcity” which presumes there is not and cannot be “enough” to satisfy the needs, wants and desires of everyone, ergo the necessity of competition for scarce resources, and all the moral and physical failings that ensue.

“Scarcity” is seen as a permanent condition by most economists over the last few hundred years, whereas in reality, scarcity was episodic during most of human history. It was dealt with through various strategies including moving to greener pastures, waiting out the lean periods, or conquering neighbors who had plenty. But whatever the case, “scarcity” only became a permanent condition for populations ruled by overlords who took the majority of resources for themselves leaving an insufficiency for the rabble.

Once a ruling class is deprived of their overabundance, it’s discovered that there are plenty of resources for everyone.

The job of the modern economist is to ensure that doesn’t happen.

School, as we do it, is a terrible way to raise people. What it actual teaches is “do what you’re told, when you’re told, wait to be told how to do things, don’t figure out things for yourself, and give the approved answer, not one you came up with yourself.”

Ian, just now getting to this excellent post.

I fully agree with this. For starters, just look at the results of our education system among our politicians, and not just K-12: Newt Gingrich, PhD in history, or Larry Summers, PhD in economics, given their public utterances? I have heard off-hand that children of the elite get “assistance” (i.e., cheating) to get them through so-called “elite” schools, but even if that’s not true, certainly critical thinking isn’t taught.

It’s worse today than when I was in college, given our current fascination with the “Asian” education model that puts a premium on standardized test scores and regurgitating memorized facts, possibly without any fundamental understanding. It’s also been made worse by the current emphasis on vocational education; now we’re so focused on making ‘good workers’ we neglect to make “good citizens’ and worse yet, ‘good humans’.

Teachers who teach fundamental understanding are rare. I recall a calculus class that I dropped when I was 18, for a more ‘practical’ approach, but now I wished I hadn’t. The instructor’s first homework problem? It was “prove, that given any number ‘x’, ‘x’ times zero equals zero”. Something kids are taught as being de facto true but apparently there’s a proof for it.

A similar problem for high school science would be to ask “what’s the distance between the earth and sun?” then when the smart kid raises his/her hand and answers “93 million miles” then return with “how do you know that?” (the solution is simple trigonometry, and people did it with fairly simple observations starting 300 years ago, and got values that were within 2 % of the values gotten today bouncing radar beams off planets).

@rc

Obviously you didn’t read what I wrote.

I’d say try again, but I really don’t care, as your “insight” is little more than regurgitation of standard tropes.

Keep shouting at the clouds, it’s worked so well for you so far.

@V Arnold:

JT Gatto is an interesting anomaly – taught for 30 years in the public school system, and then after he has put in enough years to get his pension, decides it’s all a waste of time and parents should home school. What an incredible hypocrite. The fact that he’s a Trump supporter says it all.