I thought this was about Star Trek-style transporters and feel a little bit let down.
On the plus side, this piece, and the entire April 2021 issue, are probably more useful for understanding commodities than a teleportation machine. At least for now.
From Cato Unbound, April 2021 edition:
We wish to thank Dr. Giorgios Kallis for his wide-ranging response to our lead essay and for his collegiate tone. Kallis writes that “The problem now is not resource scarcity, but damage to the environment (e.g., biodiversity).” He notes that “Resource use grows hand in hand with GDP, even in service economies like the US or the UK where economists expected reductions,” and he advocates in favor of “degrowth.” Finally, Kallis believes that “satisfactory levels of wellbeing can be achieved at a fraction of the highest national incomes.”
The focus on environmental damage as a by-product of population growth, economic growth, and growth in consumption has a long pedigree. In 1982, for example, a group of ecological economists met in Stockholm and published a manifesto warning of natural limits on human activity. “Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems,” wrote one historian of this period. Their “concern was no longer centered on running out of food, minerals, or energy. Instead, ecological economists drew attention to what they identified as ecological thresholds. The problem lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse.”[1]
Four decades later, scientific debate about “ecological thresholds” remains unsettled—even when it comes to the basic question of measurement.[2] In August 2020, for example, a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal called Nature Ecology & Evolution published a study based on 36 meta-analyses of more than 4,600 individual studies covering the last 45 years of research on ecological thresholds. Nine German, French, Irish and Finnish ecologists found that
threshold transgressions were rarely detectable, either within or across meta-analyses. Instead, ecological responses were characterized mostly by progressively increasing magnitude and variance when pressure increased. Sensitivity analyses with modelled data revealed that minor variances in the response are sufficient to preclude the detection of thresholds from data, even if they are present. The simulations reinforced our contention that global change biology needs to abandon the general expectation that system properties allow defining thresholds as a way to manage nature under global change. Rather, highly variable responses, even under weak pressures, suggest that “safe-operating spaces” are unlikely to be quantifiable.[3]
Surely, such uncertainty does not warrant a dramatic departure from pro-growth policies. Let us make four additional points. First, as Ted Nordhaus from the Breakthrough Institute in California observed in 2019, pessimists assume that humans will continue to reproduce with abandon. In reality, data show that as an economy becomes more developed, birth rates begin to fall. The massive population growth in recent decades is due to rising life expectancy, not rising fertility.[4] The birth rates of the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and large parts of Latin America have actually fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman for some time. That means that their populations are actually starting to shrink. It’s likely that the rest of the world will follow that trend. What does that mean?
According to Ron Bailey, “World population will likely peak at 9.8 billion people at around 2080 and fall to 9.5 billion by 2100 in the medium fertility scenario calculated by demographer Wolfgang Lutz and his colleagues at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis. Alternatively, assuming rapid economic growth, technological advancement, and rising levels of educational attainment for both sexes—all factors that tend to lower fertility—Lutz projects that world population will more likely peak at around 8.9 billion by 2060 and decline to 7.8 billion by the end of the twenty-first century.”[5]
Considering that there were 7.8 billion humans on the planet in 2020, it is possible that the world’s population will be roughly the same size 80 years from now. If Lutz’s latter estimates are correct, then the world may actually end up facing an underpopulation rather than an overpopulation problem. That’s because, in the absence of a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence, human beings remain the sole producers of ideas, inventions, and innovations that drive technological, scientific, and medical progress.
Second, pessimists, who recognize that the human population may actually shrink in the future, worry that free enterprise will continue to drive human consumption of resources to higher and higher levels.[6] Again, the data do not agree. In our response to Katherine Trebeck and Dirk Philipsen, we already mentioned McAfee’s 2019 book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next. Sophisticated economies, McAfee found, are currently producing ever more goods and services, while at the same time using ever fewer resources. That is a result of a sustained transition in advanced countries from industry to less resource-intensive economic activities that deal with services and information.
To that process we may also add dematerialization, which refers to declining consumption of material and energy per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). According to Jesse Ausubel from Rockefeller University and Paul E. Waggoner from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, “If consumers dematerialize their intensity of use of goods and technicians produce the goods with a lower intensity of impact, people can grow in numbers and affluence without a proportionally greater environmental impact.”[7]
Why would people do that? Dematerialization replaces atoms with knowledge and makes economic sense to producers, since spending less on inputs can swell profit margins and make outputs cheaper and therefore more competitive.[8] It makes sense to consumers as well. Consider, for example, the growing use of smartphones. The product combines functions that previously required a myriad of separate devices, including a telephone, camera, radio, television set, alarm clock, newspaper, photo album, voice recorder, maps, compass, and more.
Replacement of many devices with one produces substantial efficiency gains. How substantial? In 2018, a team of 21 researchers led by Professor Arnulf Grubler from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria estimated the “savings from device convergence on smartphones … for materials use (device weight) and for its associated embodied energy use.” They found that smartphones can reduce material use by a factor of 300. They can reduce power use by a factor of 100 and standby energy use by a factor of 30.[9] That means that we use 99.67 percent less material, 99 percent less power, and 97 percent less standby energy.
To summarize, pessimists worry that future growth will mirror that seen during the Industrial Revolution: bigger and deeper mines, bigger and more polluting steel mills, and so on. But economic growth does not have to come from bigness. On the contrary, it can—and does—come from “smartness” with things like miniaturization, as in the computing industry, which saw the replacement of massive mainframe computers with smaller and much more efficient personal computers. To quote the economic historian Joel Mokyr,
The main logical issue here is that economic growth can be resource saving as much as resource-using, and that the very negative effects that congestion and pollution engender will set into motion searches for techniques that will abate them. Such responses may be more effective in democratic than in autocratic regimes because concerned public opinion can map better into public policy, but in the end the need for humans to breathe clean air is about as universal a value as one can find. Investment in soil reclamation, desalination, recycling, and renewable energy count just as much as economic growth as economic activities that use up resources. Whether or not wise policies will help steer technological progress in that direction, the basic notion that per capita income growth has to stop because the planet is finite is palpable nonsense.[10]....
.....MUCH MORE
Here's the entire issue: "Resource Abundance and the Limits to Growth":
Can economic growth continue forever? If not, what can stop it?
These questions are simple to ask, but their answers are momentous. Past answers have varied tremendously: Will we run out of fertilizer? Or timber? What about rare elements? Will we grow overpopulated and outpace the food supply? Or will climate change bring a lasting economic reversal?
What if there were no truly insuperable limits to growth in our near future? Yes, all things must come to an end, but it might still be that we’re nowhere near it. If so, failure to grow could have more to do with public policy and other social conditions, and much less to do with physical necessity.
Our lead essayists this month, the Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy and Brigham Young University at Hawaii’s Prof. Gale Pooley, are among the optimists. They suggest that we live not in an age of growing resource scarcity, but in an age of superabundance—the term that they use for a situation in which the growth in material abundance outpaces the growth in human population.
Still, it should not be forgotten that rapid economic growth is an unusual situation in the history of the world; for most of recorded time, growth was either negligible or glacially slow, and it came with frequent reverses. It might be more plausible to expect that growth will return to the mean—which would suggest that rapid growth of the type we’re experiencing now isn’t likely to last.....
If resources aren't your cup of tea, the June edition is on "The Pros and Cons of Constitutional Monarchy" and should anyone be considering establishing same, pretty much anywhere, I am throwing my hat in the ring.
Willing to travel for Monarch position. That's me, very flexible.
Previously on dematerialization:
Indian Central Bank Issues Guidelines on Dematerialized Gold in Effort to Reduce Need to Import Physical
Can Hindu Deities Open Brokerage Accounts Allowing them to Trade Securities?
UPDATE: below
In India a demat (dematerialized) account is what we call book-entry, no physical delivery.UPDATE: Bombay High Court Rules Hindu Deities MAY NOT Trade Securities
Again, a bit disappointed but encouraged by potential for "Beam me up" convo's with Indian deities.
Possibly related:Of Gods, India and Fast Moving Consumer Goods
Gotta grow a beard.
Years ago I introduced an Indian guy to a Chicago trader:
"Jerry, this is Siva Kumar...."Here's a Bhajan Siva used to sing between trades:
"Huh....Not a local, then."
Guru BrahmaFrom FT Alphaville:....
Guru Vishnu
Guru Devo
Maheshwara
Guru Sakshath Parambrahma Tasmai Shri Gurave Namaha
