Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper

by Robert Bryce

  12

  DENSITY AND THE WEALTH OF CITIES

  We humans are unusual in the animal kingdom in that we are eusocial. Only a handful of species—including bees, ants, termites, and us—like to live in large colonies.1 For millennia, our innate eusociality, our desire to divide the chores among a large group of individuals and cooperate for the common good, has been driving us to cities.

  Cities, said Descartes, provide “an inventory of the possible.” And for about 7,000 years, we have been escaping the cloister of isolated farms and organizing ourselves into colonies not of dozens of people, or hundreds, but of thousands. By about 3000 B.C., the city of Ur in Mesopotamia likely had about 24,000 people.2 Today, the world’s largest cities have a thousand times as many residents. Tokyo alone has some 37 million people.3 Cities have been built all over the planet, from Cape Town, on the southern tip of Africa, to Anchorage, which sits about 400 miles from the Arctic Circle.

  Our future lies in density. That’s true for all kinds of human activities, from energy and food production to computing and communications. And few trends are more illustrative of our quest for density than the never-ending procession of people into cities.

  As more people move into cities, we are moving more closely together. In 1950, the world had a population density of about nineteen people per square kilometer. Today, we have about fifty-three people per square kilometer, and by 2100 we may have as many as seventy people per square kilometer.4 Of course, those numbers reflect the world’s growing population, but it’s equally obvious that people are moving to cities because that’s where the opportunities are.

  Market Street in San Francisco before the earthquake of 1906. Note the tangle of electric wires and poles in the foreground. Source: Library of Congress: LC-USZ62–98494.

  In his 2011 book, Triumph of the City, Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser wrote that “the world isn’t flat; it’s paved.” Cities “have been the engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace.” What allows that innovation? Density. “Cities are expanding enormously because urban density provides the clearest path from poverty to prosperity.”5

  Cities mean density. Density means prosperity. Density means innovation. A few years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West did an analysis of cities and innovation, and by looking at inventions and patents, he found that a city that was 10 times as large as its neighbor wasn’t just 10 times more innovative than the Smaller one; it was 17 times more innovative. And a city with 50 times the population of a small town was 130 times more innovative.6

  West’s findings—that higher population density results in more innovation—were corroborated in 2005 by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. In a report on the “inventive output of cities” the authors, led by economist Gerald Carlino, found that “the nation’s densest locations play an important role in creating the flow of ideas that generate innovation and growth.” The report concluded that the number of patents per capita is “20 percent higher in a metropolitan area with an employment density (jobs per square mile) twice that of another metropolitan area.” The report also concluded that there is an “optimal employment density” for maximizing patent output. That number: 2,150 jobs per square mile, or roughly the level of Philadelphia or Baltimore.7

  There is an even simpler way to describe the conclusions reached by West and Carlino. Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and several other books, says cities are where “ideas go to have sex.”8

  Ideas will keep shagging, and innovation will thrive because people keep moving into cities. In his 2009 book, Whole Earth Discipline, environmentalist, publisher, and author Stewart Brand writes, “In 1800 the world was 3 percent urban; in 1900, 14 percent urban; in 2007, 50 percent urban. The world’s population crossed that threshold—from a rural majority to an urban majority—at a sprint. We are now a city planet.” Brand continues, “Every week there are 1.3 million new people in cities. That’s 70 million a year, decade after decade. It is the largest movement of people in history.”9 Brand adds that “cities are probably the greenest things that humans do.”10

  Cities are green because each city resident generally requires less stuff—concrete, steel, glass, gasoline—than their suburban counterparts. Not only are cities green, they are also powering the global economy. In 2012, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that through 2025, about 65 percent of all global economic growth will occur in cities.11 It also predicted that by 2025, urban consumers are “likely to inject about $20 trillion a year in additional spending into the world economy.”12 And if there was any doubt about the outsized economic impact of cities, the McKinsey study says that the world’s top six hundred cities, which are home to about 20 percent of the world’s population, account for about $34 trillion, or more than half, of all global GDP.13

  Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institution, estimate that in the United States, the one hundred largest metropolitan areas contain about two-thirds of the population but generate 74 percent of America’s GDP. “In fact,” they wrote in 2011, “metro areas generate the majority of economic output in 47 of the 50 states, including such ‘rural’ states as Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Arkansas.”14

  The triumph of the cities—to borrow Glaeser’s title—comes from their ability to raise the living standards of their inhabitants. There is a clear correlation between population density and prosperity. The world’s most populous regions also tend to be the most prosperous. Sure, we have the wealth of nations (as Adam Smith duly noted back in 1776), but what we really have is the wealth of cities. Sure, we have lots of countries, but we are really a world of cities. We don’t visit Brazil or China; we visit Rio and São Paolo, Shanghai and Beijing.

  World Bank data show that highly urbanized countries are, on average, richer than ones that aren’t. This makes sense. As countries industrialize and their economies expand into new sectors, they develop new technologies. This process is usually centered in cities because that’s where the workers are. In turn, people flock to cities for the new opportunities created by industrialization. They want to learn new skills, and, in the process, make more dough than their rural cousins. The United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, and other developed countries exemplify this trend. By contrast, countries with low population densities tend to miss out on the benefits of such economic growth.

  While cities offer higher incomes, better restaurants, and more culture, they can also be crowded, noisy, and in some cases, plagued by squalor. Cities are also targets for terrorism. And while terrorism remains an infinitesimally small risk for the average person, the bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2013, the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, and the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 are all examples of terrorists targeting city dwellers. Cities are never perfect, but as demographer Joel Kotkin writes in his 2005 The City: A Global History, “Humankind’s greatest creation has always been its cities. They represent the ultimate handiwork of our imagination as a species, testifying to our ability to reshape the natural environment in the most profound and lasting ways.”15

  Denser Means Richer: Highly Urbanized Countries Are Wealthier

  This graphic shows the strong correlation between rates of urbanization (and therefore, population density) and GDP-per-capita. The economic powerhouses of the world, countries like Japan and the United States, are clear examples. However, this even holds true in the case of a “transitioning” country like Mauritius. An island nation off the southeast coast of Africa, Mauritius is widely considered one of the most successful African countries, both economically and politically. Not coincidentally, it also has one of Africa’s most urbanized populations. Source: World Bank Development Indicators Database.

  But we must also acknowledge that our ultimate handiwork, the city, has been made possible by the farm and our ability to get food products from the farm to consumers Faster than ever before. Faster Cheaper food makes cities possible. A
nd Cheaper food has been the result of innovation that is allowing Denser food production.

  13

  DENSER CHEAPER FOOD PRODUCTION

  In 1968, Paul Ehrlich grimly declared, “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.”1

  When Ehrlich made his dire prediction, the global population was 3.5 billion.2 Today, the world has more than twice that many people (about seven billion), and yet the death rate today is lower than it was when Ehrlich made his claim.

  What happened? Better farming happened.

  What Ehrlich overlooked, and his fellow catastrophists continue to overlook, is our capacity for innovation, and in this particular case our ability to produce more food with less land. The result of that Denser food production: Cheaper food. In 2013, Keith Fuglie, an analyst for the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service pointed out that in the advanced economies of the world, “people now spend 15 percent or less of their disposable income on food. It has never been lower.” Fuglie further points out that Thomas Malthus published his famous “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” in 1798.3 Just nine years earlier, in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, “it took nearly the entire daily wage of an unskilled worker to buy two loaves of bread, enough to feed a family of four. Today it takes a Parisien about 15 minutes working at minimum wage to do the same.”

  Denser farm production—meaning the amount of food (or fiber) that can be produced from a given area of land—can easily be seen in the numbers. Since 1950, the food supply per capita has increased by about 30 percent, even though the amount of land per capita has fallen by about half.4 In 1950, the world had about 2.5 billion people. Today, we have seven billion. Thanks to better agricultural production methods, we have been able to dramatically increase food production while adding only small amounts of new cropland. Hybrid seeds, more powerful farm equipment, wider use of fertilizers, and other technologies have allowed the world’s farmers to dramatically increase the volume of food they can produce from their acreage.

  There’s no question that organic food has surged in popularity in recent years. Grocers like Whole Foods Market (market capitalization about $23 billion) that sell organic products are seeing huge increases in their market share.5 Meanwhile, industry groups like the Organic Trade Association point out that sales of organic food and beverages are soaring. Between 1990 and 2010, in the United States alone, sales of organic products rose from $1 billion to nearly $27 billion.6 The US Department of Agriculture has claimed that organic agriculture is “one of the fastest growing segments” of domestic farming.

  All that may be true, but it doesn’t mean that organic production is the best way forward. Many studies have shown that organic agriculture lags far behind conventional farming when it comes to productivity. Among the most prominent is a report by Verena Seufert, Navin Ramankutty, and Jonathan Foley that was published in Nature in May 2012. The report examined published literature on yields from farms around the world. While the yields depend on geography and farming methods employed, the authors concluded that “organic yields are typically lower than conventional yields.” They found that the results “range from 5 percent lower organic yields (rain-fed legumes and perennials on weak-acidic to weak-alkaline soils), 13 percent lower yields (when best organic practices are used), to 34 percent lower yields (when the conventional and organic systems are most comparable).”7

  James E. McWilliams, a history professor at Texas State University, has written extensively about food production. A vocal advocate for animal rights and veganism, he’s also a prolific and fearless debunker of the hype over organic food. In a March 10, 2011, essay in Slate, he pointed out that global population is likely to increase by some 2.3 billion over the next four decades. That increasing population, combined with the emerging middle class in developing countries like China and India, will require the world’s farmers to grow “at least 70 percent more food than we now produce.” Add in the latest projections from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which show that there’s very little arable land left to expand production, and the conclusions, says McWilliams, should be obvious to everyone. “Barring a radical rejection of the Western diet, skyrocketing demand for food will have to be met by increasing production on pre-existing acreage,” he wrote. “No matter how effectively we streamline access to existing food supplies, 90 percent of the additional calories required by midcentury will have to come through higher yields per acre.”8

  McWilliams’s point is essential: farmers must be able to produce more food without increasing the size of their farms. In other words, the density of their production must increase. To bolster his thesis, McWilliams points to a 2011 analysis of US Department of Agriculture data that was done by Steve Savage, a San Diego–based plant pathologist who has more than thirty years of experience in agricultural technology.

  Savage found that organic farming produces about 29 percent less corn and 38 percent less winter wheat than the same acreage that is conventionally farmed. In his summary, Savage concluded that if the United States had relied on organic agriculture to match the full output of all US crops in 2008, “it would have been necessary to harvest from an additional 121.7 million acres of cropland . . . That additional area would represent a 39 percent increase over current US cropland.” To put that in perspective, Savage points out that the additional cropland needed for organic production would be about 190,101 square miles (492,363 square kilometers), which would be about the size of all the “current cropland acres in Iowa, Illinois, North Dakota, Florida, Kansas, [and] Minnesota combined.” He adds that on a land-area basis that much additional territory would be nearly as large as Spain, or about three-quarters the size of Texas.9

  Given these facts, a full-scale transition to organic production makes no sense at all. In fact, any wide-scale effort to enforce agricultural techniques that will decrease the density of production could be a recipe for higher prices, increased deforestation, and possibly even mass starvation. Better farming methods not only mean Cheaper and more abundant food for people living in cities, they also mean better livelihoods for farmers. As the International Food Policy Research Institute noted in a recent report on poverty reduction efforts, “agricultural growth has a high poverty reduction payoff . . . A one percent per annum increase in agricultural growth, on average, leads to a 2.7 percent increase in the income” of the poorest populations in developing countries.11

  Denser Farming: Global Grain Production Is Keeping Pace with Population Growth

  Source: Earth Policy Institute.10

  Between 1950 and 2011, the world’s farmers tripled the amount of grain they produced per hectare of land under cultivation.12 But some influential environmentalists continue to advocate policies that will have the opposite effect. They have been particularly vociferous when the subject is genetically modified organisms (GMOs). For instance, Greenpeace is adamantly opposed to genetically engineered crops. The group says that “GMOs should not be released into the environment since there is not an adequate scientific understanding of their impact on the environment and human health.”13

  Greenpeace has made that claim even though numerous studies have found that GMOs are safe. In 2012, the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded that foods containing GMOs are “no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.” The report goes on: “The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the US National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion.”14

  Not only are GMOs safe to eat and produce, they could also provide a big boost to nutrition. Thanks to work done by Swiss plant biologist Ingo Potrykus, the world now ha
s Golden Rice, a type of rice that has been altered by the introduction of genes that express beta-carotene, a substance that when ingested, is converted by the body into vitamin A, which plays a critical role in vision, the immune system, and bone growth.15 The World Health Organization estimates that some 250 million preschool children around the world are deficient in vitamin A and that as many as 500,000 children per year become blind due to vitamin A deficiency.16

  But don’t bother Greenpeace with these facts. In 2012, the environmental group declared that Golden Rice is “environmentally irresponsible, poses risks to human health, and compromises food security.”17

  In summary, Greenpeace is opposed to GMOs like Golden Rice, even though they are more nutritious, help reduce fertilizer use, and help increase yields and therefore preserve forests. They can also help feed the poor. And yet, Greenpeace claims that it is defending “the natural world.”18

  Although it has taken more than a decade, a decade marked by controversy and anti-GMO campaigning, Golden Rice is finally making it into production. The first crops of the new strain were planted in the Philippines in 2013.19

  Whether the technology is GMOs, more effective use of fertilizer, or more precise planting, it is readily apparent that Denser food production is a net positive for both humans and the environment. In 2012, Jesse Ausubel, the head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University—along with two coauthors, Paul Waggoner and Iddo Wernick—published a remarkable paper that predicted a “peaking in the use of farmland.” Thanks to better technologies, over the next five decades “humanity is likely to release at least 146 million hectares” of farmland, an area that would be one and a half times the size of Egypt, two and a half times the size of France, or about ten Iowas. Ausubel and his coauthors call this reduction in the need for farmland “sparing land for nature.” They concluded their paper by writing that in fifty years or so, the Green Revolution, “may be recalled not only for the global diffusion of high-yield cultivation practices for many crops, but as the herald of peak farmland and the restoration of vast acreages of nature . . . We are confident that we stand on the peak of crop land use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for nature.”20