Post-neo-Malthusianism -- a global demographic transition?

OK, all you Malthus enthusiasts out there, after a way-too-long hiatus, here are some of my latest graphs and interpretations:

First, let's look at global population levels since C.E. 0. The data are mostly, of course, from Angus Maddison (R.I.P.), with UN data spliced after 2008.

You can see a liftoff in the late middle ages, some acceleration in the early modern era, and an exponential explosion starting about the industrial revolution era and continuing until now. As I recently argue, this level growth is sufficient to claim that the correlated growth in aggregate demand is sufficient to explain many things, in particular the great growth in (and supply to) demand for capital to meet the aggregate consumer demand, all correlated with the English and later industrial revolutions.

Good. Now, lets look at the really interesting, at least to me, information somewhat buried in this first graph. The next graph is in log differences of the population levels, so showing the change in population growth rates.

Here we see, with some interesting variations that I will not comment on here, that the second derivative of population levels was mostly positive up until about 1960 (I have windowed graphs that allow this granularity). So growth rates were ever-increasing to rates significantly above two percent annually.

Since then, we see a (strong) reversal in growth rates, back to about one percent annually. This has large implications for important things economic going forward. First, should this continue, the first derivative will go  negative (population will peak then decrease - in other work, I show this could happen around 2085 2045). Second, under my nascent and evolving theory of Industrial Capitalism, the correlated fall in aggregate demand will diminish the demand for and supply of global productive capital. This implies a drop in accumulated capital, eventually including financial capital if asset values fall. There are other important implications, but these are biggies.

Should you be one among us desiring yet another crisis of capitalism, this one is a doozy since we will be pushing the demise-of-capitalism water downhill, instead of uphill as has been the case since Marx.

This is probably enough for now.

Sincerely,

Thomas post-neo Malthus Bannister

p.s. I am seriously thinking of legally changing my name to the above.

Peak everything!

Another entry in my peek at peaks series. These are (highly) contingent forecasts for the future of the macroeconomy and the planet. While there is plenty of statistical uncertainty to go around in such forecasts, the main contingency is which UN population forecast you believe in.

Most of my figures are based on the "low" forecast for two reasons. One, that is the one we are closest to. Two, that is the one we should be on, or one even lower.

Tonight's figure forecasts peak carbon dioxide flux (or flow) into the atmosphere from human-driven energy consumption.

The forecasts assume continuation of current trends, no special fiddling.

If you believe the low population forecast, the peak flux is in 2045, at a level (flow) about a third more than in 2008.

So there is good news - there is a peak - and bad news - we may fry before we reach it. We need radical energy solutions to address that. I am working on it. Really.

Here is the graph. Enjoy, question, comment.

The End of Endless Growth?

In my assigned role as the (anti) Thomas Robert Bannister (Malthus), I thought I would return to the blog after a far-too-long hiatus with this post to share recent work. Note that this work is the other main area of research beyond my dissertation interest of the role of energy revolutions in economic history. I'll return to that one given recent posts here, but for now:

This work asks many questions, the fundamental one being do we really need to radically change behaviours to attain zero growth, or, what do we really mean by zero growth?

The conditional answer is that our world can achieve zero total growth (in the expected lifetimes of some of us) while still having per-capita GDP growth. The key, wearing my anti-Malthus hat, is population-conditional. To introduce the topic, here is a figure from my model that shows GDP levels peak at about 2080. I think that is a very radical outcome, with many implications. It is based on several forecasts, including the current UN low population forecast.

The only other forecast I'll mention for now is that the per-capita real GDP increases through the forecast period. The second-largest caveat is the large forecast error bands; I'll simply note that at least I show them. Most climate models (of which this is a member) eschew error estimates. I can do so because I use empirical forecasting methods.

So, peak GDP levels in 2080 with continuing real per-capita output growth (forever). A surprising result certainly to me. The largest caveat in this method is the population curve you believe we are on. I'll discuss that in a future post. For now, just enjoy that a (credible?) model exists that allows the zero-gowth crowd and the lift-the-poor crowd to coexist on the same model path.

I will monitor questions. This will be my EEA talk; just a heads-up for those who wish to stockpile (potatoes and other) ammunition.

Urbanization and the Great Divergence

The Great Divergence between Western Europe and Asia, in particular China, according to revisionist authors like Ken Pomeranz, André Gunder Frank and Roy Bin Wong, has been a recent phenomenon, from around the early nineteenth century (and some would argue it will be a short lived one too; I expressed my doubts here). The graph below (source: Persson, 2010) shows rates of urbanization in Western Europe and China for a very long period.

Note that, by the renaissance of the twelfth century, Italy, particularly Northern Italy, shows a significant increase in the rate of urbanization, eventually returning to the levels of the Roman Empire. Chinese rates of urbanization are flat, in comparison, in this period. Mind you, the Song Dynasty period was a period of rapid growth in China. By the sixteenth century the rates of urbanization in Western Europe take off, with nothing comparable in China, until recent times.

Rosenthal and Wong (2011, p. 111) argue that "war was responsible for Europe’s urban manufacturing," while Chinese manufacturing remained eminently rural. And there are good reasons associated with the Military Revolution Theory to suggest Western European hegemonic rise was associated to guns and sails, as famously put by Carlo Cipolla.

From my perspective what is great about the graph is the suggestion that Western European growth, and eventually the Industrial Revolution, can be associated to the growth in demand. Note that urbanization goes hand in hand with the expansion and transformation of the patterns of consumption. In cities, that have to be built and all sorts of infrastructure and services must be provided, people have access to new consumption goods, and the significant expansion of demand is what forces supply to adjust. In that sense, urbanization, more than population growth, is a good measure of consumption expansion. And urbanization is certainly one way in which Western Europe was already diverging from Asia as far back as the twelfth century.

Cold Fusion and Population - Environmental Musings

The center of gravity on climate change/global warming/... on the left is pretty fairly represented by Dean Baker's recent blog saying it's lights out figuratively and literally if we don't change our profligate energy ways. And this is by far more important inter-generationally than the current aggregate-demand-deficit-led fiscal deficits. Dean's post is here.

And, given mainstream science, he's absolutely right. This leads to the growth-neutral advocates with whom I have a moral problem in that it condemns the poorer nations to less wealth than we living in advanced countries enjoy. If that is to be the outcome, we should be crystal clear sure of our environmental arguments. I do not challenge results like those from the IPCC.

However, there are a couple of mitigating things going on, one in the realm of economics, and one in the realm of heterodox science.

First, for a recent department seminar on environment, I put together some data using the Kaya model and UN population projections to project CO2 emissions. What this clearly shows is that among greening of energy sources, energy efficiency, and population growth, it's population growth, through GDP growth, that has the greatest impact on CO2, by a factor of at least three times.

And, the closer we are to the UN 2010 population low estimate of growth, the better off we are, in fact, my analysis shows we bend down the CO2 curve starting in about 2050. Fertility reduction is what we should focus on. Fortunately, it is clear in the literature that GDP per capita growth and female education both significantly correlate with reduced fertility rates, and those trends are in train around much of the world.

So the best solution for CO2 mediation in the current context is headed in the right direction; we should give it a major shove. Helicopter drops of books and family planning items. You can see my slides here. Make sure to check out the embedded motion chart to visualize the effects of GDP and education growth on fertility by country. There may be hope in the following sense.

Growth of per capita income is not necessarily that bad for the environment, and those defending De-growth (reduction of GDP) might understate the economic, social and environmental effects of their policy suggestions.

Second, I will talk a bit of non-mainstream science, and thereby prove myself crazy for doing it publicly.

Remember cold fusion? In 1989 Professors Pons and Fleischmann, right here at the University of Utah, reported experimental results for an over-unity chemical reaction in a press conference. They were immediately, viciously, humiliated and attacked by the scientific mainstream, especially those whose gored ox was pulling the generously funded hot fusion projects. The cover story was that this violates thermodynamic laws. Case closed.

Except physics has evolved theories in which such results are supported without violating thermodynamics.

And one of the many serious experimenters working in cold fusion since 1989, Andrea Rossi, has announced and shipped an over-unity megawatt heat generator that uses its modern incarnation LENR, which stands for Low Energy Nuclear Reaction. The mainstream science is still out on this, but if its commercially successful, who cares?

Well, Dennis Bushnell, the chief scientist at NASA Langley, cares, and has spoken. He thinks LENR is a revolutionary epoch-changing technology whose time has come, a true game-changer.

I have gone on further than most care to read in one blog, so will stop and not embed more word or links in this post. Depending on the interest and tolerance for these surprising ideas, I will offer to follow up on this and post more sources.

Let me finish by saying, if true, this will put us on the road to virtually unlimited, very cheap, zero pollution distributed and compact energy sources. That would change much that is wrong with our current economies on the physical (but not distributional) side. And Dean Baker would be freed of his inter-generational global warming dilemma, so can get back to creating jobs here and now.