Humans have a magnificent brain, one that even while at rest churns through more information in 30 seconds than the Hubble space telescope has processed in thirty years. In fact the brain absorbs so much data it also has to decide which is relevant and which to ignore, a feature that makes us terrible witnesses.
Unfortunately humans are highly gullible not to only false information but even material that is blatantly false. While this sounds alarming it is paradoxically good news for the economy because our gullibility supports industries like advertising, travel, fashion and it is vital for economics, fringe religions and politics. But for those with skin in the game gullibility must be carefully matured lest common sense get a foothold and expose the absurdities being proposed.
In order to do this they use the expertise of human behavioral scientists who are able to provide the right mix of human frailties like fear, greed and vanity that bolster their message. Coupled with this is the unhappy reality that a falsehood repeated long enough becomes believable while even a wildly inconceivable lie can be believed simply because it is so extreme.
One would think that in our highly technical society where great scientific advances have raised our living standards at an unprecedented rate, any argument between science and economists would be declared a no contest. We would do this for the same reason we would not listen to plumbers opinions on heart transplant procedure. In fact given the low esteem of economists compared to scientists and their extraordinary ignorance of climate change consequences its a matter of great concern that the media give them so little criticism for their failings. As an example the top economic prize (not a Nobel prize) went to William Nordhaus for his paper "Rolling the Dice," which claimed that GHG warming would only have a modest economic impact on the economy compared to the high cost of trying to mitigate it. He even pointed out that the US agriculture - a sector highly at risk from warming - only contributes 3% of GDP - suggesting that its demise would not be of great concern, unless of course people got hungry.
Another falsehood that is almost universally accepted is that growth is sustainable. Its such an absurdity that the message has been softened to one where sustainable has been replaced by the word essential. In this way the absurdity of the deception has been softened without any change in its concept making it more difficult to be challenged by logic. Much the same approach is used to discredit any publication that dares to cast doubt about the growth fetish that has become the economic obsession.
Thomas Malthus, while not the first to raise concerns about resource scarcity from population, (Giovanni Botero an Italian priest said much the same 200 years earlier) has been ridiculed as being overly pessimistic, as has Paul Ehrlich who wrote the Population Bomb in 1968. But most of the pro-growth vitriol has been directed at the Club of Rome's 1972 "Limit to Growth" treatise, which predicted that human numbers would begin to fall before the 2050's because of a decline in food production per person.
Critics were quick to point out that food production had continued to increase despite the worlds population increasing, and that most of the increase was from higher yields. However this increase was based on crops that provide two-thirds of humanity’s calories ; wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, barley, and cassava all of which are threatened by diseases, and does not take into account food waste (India and China together waste 186 million tonnes per year), meaning it is not the actual food intake.
More alarmingly, dependency on these basic crops has created a paradox where malnutrition has become the new normal ,according to the WHO, afflicts one in three people, many of whom are also overweight or obese, and is linked to almost half the deaths of children under five.
Even if we manage to produce enough food to feed the worlds population, many people will still go hungry, because food prices have increased faster than the incomes of those most at risk, and most are reliant on food imports, which suffer from inefficient distribution or curtailment.
You can't have a decent war without cannon-fodder
Recently we have been subjected to a new spiel - Pronatalism - that attempts to reinforce that message. This has been the long standing fetish of some religious groups, rogue states, and of course the military, because you can't have a decent war without cannon fodder. The theme being propagated harps on the loss of workers and an ageing population, and hinting that this could be the end of human life on earth. However, declining birth rates are not occurring universally throughout the world, and are a mix of declining fertility from health issues and economic and environmental considerations that cause potential parents to remain childless.
One such pronatalistic outburst on this theme, came from the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) which quoted a report from KPMG, a firm that has vested interest in growth and was found to be dishonest by a senate report, an alarming outcome which hints at the level of influence business groups have with government bodies. But if the authors had looked out the window they would have seen that plants, insects and animals all undergo swings in population with booms invariably followed by crashes because of environmental collapse. Humans have managed to temporally stall this process but at the expense of even greater stress on our environment and an even more horrific collapse in the future. If you want more thoughts on our precarious future you could read, Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp published in the UK on 31 July by Viking Penguin.
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