“What looks like tomorrow’s problem is rarely the real problem when tomorrow rolls around.”
— James Fallows
SO far, my favorite doomsday scenario was the one faced by the Western nations in the late 19th century: horse poop.
“The situation seemed dire,” Clemson University assistant professor Eric Morris wrote in 2007. “In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
“And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the 19th century city — for personal transportation, freight haulage and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.”
But then the car was invented which solved the horse poopoo problem while, eventually, creating new ones.
(Sane) economists call it a trade-off. The final thing to understand about economics, says economist Tim Worstall, “is that there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. Whatever action we take will have costs and benefits….”
And that’s why the version of economics that is wildly popular among the public and politicians is that one that says we can have everything. We just have to choose the “right experts/scientists/strong and/or virtuous leaders,” and do as we’re told.
The most enduring apocalyptic forecast, however, is humanity’s death sentence handed down by the English cleric and economist Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798. He declared that the “power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”
In 1968, or 170 years after Malthus’s dire prognosis, Stanford University professor Robert Ehrlich assured us that the “battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….”
The world’s population in 1970 was 3.68 billion. In 2020 it was 7.8 billion. And one of the main problems in the Western world today is not famine as Ehrlich had predicted but obesity. According to Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, in 1968, “the food supply in 34 out of 152 countries surveyed amounted to fewer than 2,000 calories per person per day. That was true of only 2 out of 173 countries surveyed in 2017. Today [in 2020], famines have all but disappeared outside of war zones.”
As for “population explosion,” “Factfulness” author Dr. Hans Rosling reminds us that world population growth has already started to slow down and is expected to keep slowing down over the next few decades. Or as the New York Times reported in May 2021, “All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.”
But what do the doomsdayers say whenever their tales of doomsday didn’t pan out?
Wait and see. Doomsday is still coming.
Dan Gardner, “Future Babble” author, noted that in 1974, Paul Ehrlich wrote another bestseller, “The End of Affluence” which predicted a worldwide age of scarcity in the last decades of the 20th century: “There will be no more cheap, abundant energy, no more cheap, abundant food, and soon the flow of cheap consumer goods will suffer increasing disruption and rising prices.”
Gardner said Ehrlich has yet to admit that his predictions were dead wrong. Ehrlich and his admirers continue to “minimize, evade and rationalize” as they try to avoid “the obvious evidence that Ehrlich’s predictions failed.” A common dodge, Gardner said, is “that the alarm raised by [Ehrlich’s books] spurred people into action and it was those actions that forestalled the predicted disasters.” You’re welcome.
However, Gardner said, an “assertion that cannot be falsified by any conceivable evidence is nothing more than dogma. It can’t be debated. It can’t be proven or disproven. It’s just something people choose to believe or not for reasons that have nothing to do with fact and logic. And dogma is what predictions become when experts and their followers go to ridiculous lengths to dismiss clear evidence that they failed.”
oOo
From the British newspaper, The Guardian, May 14, 2014:
“Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed French foreign minister Laurent Fabius to the State Department in Washington on Tuesday to discuss a range of issues, from Iran to Syria to climate change. Or, in the words of the foreign minister, ‘climate chaos.’ Kerry and Fabius made a joint appearance before their meeting, and the foreign minister warned that only 500 days remained to avoid ‘climate chaos.’ ”
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