The End of Doom

by Ronald Bailey

  Banning Garrett, founding director of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, asserts that additive manufacturing “is likely to play a significant role in dramatically increasing the efficiency of resource use and in lowering overall carbon emissions, from the process of manufacturing and to delivering products to the end user. As only the material needed for parts is used, there is nearly zero waste.” The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office noted, “Additive manufacturing has the potential to vastly accelerate innovation, compress supply chains, minimize materials and energy usage, and reduce waste.” Additive manufacturing is also known as 3-D printing; machines build up new items one layer at a time. The Advanced Manufacturing Office suggested that additive manufacturing can reduce material needs and costs by up to 90 percent. And instead of the replacement of worn-out items, their material can simply be recycled through a printer to return it to good-as-new condition using only 2 to 25 percent of the energy required to make new parts. In addition, 3-D printing on demand will eliminate storage and inventory costs, and significantly cut transportation costs.

  Sustainable Development

  “The current global development model is unsustainable.” That was the conclusion of the High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, appointed in 2012 by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon to outline the economic and social changes needed to achieve global sustainability. The panel urged world leaders to embrace “a new approach to the political economy of sustainable development.”

  The panel’s report, Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing, specifically cited the definition of sustainable development devised in Our Common Future, another UN report from an expert panel headed by former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, issued in 1987. “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” declared the Brundtland report.

  It turns out that the only form of society that has so far met this criterion is democratic free-market capitalism. How can that be? Let’s take a look at the two terms, sustainable and development. With regard to most of human history, there has been precious little in the way of development. The vast majority of people lived and died in humanity’s natural state of disease-ridden abject poverty and pervasive ignorance. For example, as British economic historian Angus Maddison shows, economic growth proceeded at the stately pace of less than 0.1 percent per year in Western Europe between AD 1 and 1820, rising in constant dollars from $425 in AD 1 to $1,200 in 1820. World per capita GDP rose from $467 in AD 1 to $666 in 1820.

  And what about the other term, sustainable? Again, looking across history and the globe, we know for a fact that there have been until now no sustainable societies. All of the earlier civilizations in both the Old and New Worlds collapsed at various times—for example, Babylonia, Rome, the Umayyad Caliphate, Harappan, Gupta, Tang, Songhai, Mayan, Olmec, Anasazi, Moche, just to mention a few. Of course, collapse in this context doesn’t mean that everybody died, but that their ways of life radically shifted and often much of the population migrated to other regions. In other words, history provides us with no models of sustainable development other than democratic capitalism.

  Every one of these earlier ultimately unsustainable societies was what economics Nobelist Douglass North and his colleagues call, in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, “natural states.” Natural states are basically organized as hierarchical patron-client networks in which small, militarily potent elites extract resources from a subject population. The basic deal is a Hobbesian contract in which elites promise their subjects an end to the “war of all against all” in exchange for wealth and power.

  Natural states operate by limiting access to valuable resources—that is to say, by creating and sharing the rewards of monopolies. One fundamental downside to this form of social organization is that innovation, both social and technological, is stifled because it threatens the monopolies through which elite patrons extract wealth. But why don’t extractive elites encourage economic growth? After all, economic growth would mean more wealth for them to loot.

  In their 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, MIT economist Daron Acemoğlu and Harvard economist James Robinson largely concur with the analysis of North and his colleagues. They too find that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most societies have been organized around “extractive” political and economic institutions that funnel resources from the mass of people to small but powerful elites. The economic and political institutions that produce economic growth are inevitable threats to the power of reigning elites. “The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people,” they explain. Thus throughout history, reactionary elites have predictably resisted innovation because of their accurate fear that it would produce rivals for their power.

  So while natural states do succeed in dramatically reducing interpersonal violence, they have one appalling consequence, as Maddison’s data show: persistently low average incomes. Again, as history teaches, civilizations organized as natural states are not sustainable in the long run.

  Lots of thinkers have pondered what causes the collapse of civilizations—that is to say, why they are unsustainable over the long run. Let’s take a brief look at three recent theories of unsustainability: climate change, complexity, and self-organized criticality cascades. In the January 26, 2001, issue of Science, Yale University anthropologist Harvey Weiss and University of Massachusetts geoscientist Raymond Bradley asked, “What Drives Societal Collapse?” They concluded, “Many lines of evidence now point to climate forcing as the primary agent in repeated social collapse.” Basically they argue that abrupt and long-lasting droughts caused the downfall of civilizations in both the Old and New Worlds.

  Utah State University anthropologist Joseph Tainter, author of the 1988 classic The Collapse of Complex Societies, asserts that societies fall apart when their problem-solving institutions fail. Tainter argues, “Confronted with problems, we often respond by developing more complex technologies, establishing new institutions, adding more specialists or bureaucratic levels to an institution, increasing organization or regulation, or gathering and processing more information.”

  Tainter maintains that this strategy of building complex institutions ultimately fails as the result of diminishing marginal returns to the social investment in them. Collapse occurs when an accumulation of unaddressed problems overwhelm a society. Interestingly, Tainter notes, “In a hierarchical institution, the flow of information from the bottom to the top is frequently inaccurate and ineffective.”

  In a 2002 article, “Why Do Societies Collapse?” published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics, independent political scientist Gregory Brunk argues that societies are self-organizing critical systems. The usual example of self-organizing criticality is a sandpile to which grains of sand are constantly being added. Many land and simply find a place in the pile; some grains land and cause small local avalanches, which soon come to rest; and eventually a grain lands that causes a huge avalanche that changes the shape of the whole pile. In a 2009 article, “Society as a Self-Organized Critical System,” in Cybernetics and Human Knowing, researchers Thomas Kron and Thomas Grund suggest the example of the start of World War I as a social avalanche. In that case, an unlikely series of events involving a lost driver gave Serbian nationalist assassin Gavrilo Princip the opportunity to kill Franz Ferdinand, the archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie. And as the phrase goes, the rest was history.

  Brunk suggests the main mechanism by which societies reach a critical point where collap
ses are realized was outlined by economist Mancur Olson in his 1982 book The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. Olson argued that over time interest group politics produces overbureaucratization, essentially re-creating the patron-client networks characteristic of natural states.

  These three theories of societal collapse can complement one another. Long duration intense local droughts would no doubt constitute a problem that complex hierarchical institutions would have difficulty solving, thus producing a criticality cascade that results in social collapse. It’s important to stress that all of the social collapses cited by these authors occurred in natural states—that is, societies organized as patron-client networks. In fact, the more recent social collapses—for example, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the Congo, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Iraq—all also occurred in residual natural states that had persisted into the modern era.

  The plain fact is that development (rising incomes, health, and education) occurred only after what North and his colleagues identify as a new form of social organization, open-access social orders, arose during the past two centuries. Open-access social orders are basically democratic free-market capitalist societies and are characterized by the rule of law; the proliferation of private economic, social, religious, and political institutions; and civilian control of the military. In all of history, the only kind of development has been capitalist development, along with parasitical versions of development that some remaining natural states can attain for a while by imitating aspects of open-access social orders, especially by deploying their modern technologies. By 2008, average per capita income in Western Europe was $22,200 and in China $6,800.

  Is free-market development sustainable? After all, it’s only been around for two hundred years. Clearly, the folks on the United Nations High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability don’t think so. In September 2012 a UN-sponsored activist conference issued a declaration, Sustainable Societies, Responsive Citizens, that urged the replacement of “the current economic model, which promotes unsustainable consumption and production patterns, facilitates a grossly inequitable trading system, fails to eradicate poverty, assists in the exploitation of natural resources to the verge of extinction and total depletion, and has induced multiple crises on Earth” with “sustainable economies in the community, local, national, regional and international spheres.”

  Perhaps free-market capitalism will prove itself unsustainable in the long run. But I don’t think so. Brunk suggests that humans don’t just take complexity cascades (avalanches) lying down; they attempt to foresee and dampen them. “From this perspective, the fundamental reason that civilization has advanced is because societies have become more adept in addressing the problems caused by complexity cascades [emphasis in original],” claims Brunk. The chief way in which modern societies have “become more adept in addressing the problems caused by complexity cascades” is free markets. Free markets are the most robust mechanism ever devised by humanity for delivering rapid feedback on how decisions turn out. Profits and losses discipline people to learn quickly from and fix their mistakes. Consequently, markets are superb at using trial and error to find solutions to problems.

  What about the Brundtland report criterion? There is only one proven way to improve the lot of hundreds of millions of poor people, and that is democratic capitalism. It is in rich democratic capitalist countries that the air and water are becoming cleaner, forests are expanding, food is abundant, education is universal, and women’s rights respected. Whatever slows down economic growth also slows down environmental improvement. By vastly increasing knowledge and pursuing technological progress, past generations met their needs and vastly increased the ability of our generation to meet our needs. We should do no less for future generations.

  Top-down bureaucratization of the sort favored by many environmental activists moves societies back in the direction of natural states in which monopolies are secured and run by elites. Innovation would thus stall and the ability of people and societies to adapt rapidly to changing conditions, economic and ecological, via free markets and democratic politics would falter. “Ironically, instead of eliminating all complexity cascades, what the increasing bureaucratization of mature societies may do is increase the impact of the really big cascades when they overwhelm a society’s barricades,” argues Brunk. That’s entirely correct.

  What well-meaning activists and UN bureaucrats are trying to do is centrally plan the world’s ecology. History suggests that that would work out about as well for humanity and the natural world as centrally planned economies did.

  Economists Lucas Bretschger and Sjak Smulders argue that the decisive question isn’t to focus directly on preserving the resources we already have. Instead, they ask: “Is it realistic to predict that knowledge accumulation is so powerful as to outweigh the physical limits of physical capital services and the limited substitution possibilities for natural resources?” In other words, can increasing scientific knowledge and technological innovation overcome the limitations to economic growth posed by the depletion of nonrenewable resources? And, according to Paul Romer, an economist and founding director of the NYU Stern Urbanization Project, the answer is yes.

  Romer has observed, “Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.” While the production of some supplies of physical resources may peak, there is no sign that human creativity is about to peak.

  There is one way to make sure that humanity runs out of resources—by slowing down the rate of technological progress. As it happens, lots of environmentalists advocate a policy that could in fact drastically slow down the rate of technological change—implementing the precautionary principle.

  3

  Never Do Anything for the First Time

  I HAVE FRIENDS WHO TOOK THE PRECAUTIONARY STEP of not having their daughter vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. Based on the widely reported results of a very small study in The Lancet, my friends worried that vaccinations might harm their child by making her autistic. During the past two decades, study after study has found absolutely no link between vaccinations and autism. Naturally, I have plied them with information about the safety and health benefits of vaccines, but so far as I know, their daughter, now a teenager, is still unvaccinated against those childhood scourges. My friends’ choice shows that taking a precautionary approach actually provides no sure guidance on what to do when it comes to the risks and benefits of modern technologies.

  Never do anything for the first time. The strong version of the precautionary principle much favored by many environmentalists can largely be summarized by that maxim.

  Environmentalist advocates of the principle will deny that that is what they are proposing. Instead, they claim that when it comes to evaluating technological risks they merely want society to be guided by the wisdom of the ancient aphorism “Better safe than sorry.” But as we shall see, the precautionary principle as formulated by environmentalists goes much further and presumes that better safety lies in banning or restricting the development of new technologies. Consequently, implementing the strong version of the principle will instead make us “more sorry than safe,” as Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler has cogently argued. Why? The central issue is that proponents of the precautionary principle tend to focus on hypothetical dangers while generally failing to consider fully the power of new technologies to reduce risk.

  The closest thing to a canonical version of the precautionary principle was devised by a group of thirty-two leading environmental activists meeting in 1998 at the Wingspread Center in Wisconsin. The Wingspread Consensus Statement on the Precautionary
Principle reads:

  When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

  In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

  The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.

  Why was this new principle needed? Because, the Wingspread conferees asserted, the deployment of modern technologies was spawning “unintended consequences affecting human health and the environment,” and “existing environmental regulations and other decisions, particularly those based on risk assessment, have failed to protect adequately human health and the environment.” As a consequence of these unintended side effects and the supposed regulatory inadequacy, the conferees insisted, “Corporations, government entities, organizations, communities, scientists and other individuals must adopt a precautionary approach to all human endeavors [emphasis added].” Contemplate for a moment this question: Are there any human endeavors of which some timorous person cannot assert that it raises a “threat” of harm to human health or the environment?

  Unfortunately, parsing the precautionary principle is not a mere academic exercise. Versions of it have been incorporated into numerous international environmental treaties, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, and the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) treaty. Other renderings are explicitly integrated into European regulatory law.