The great leap backward
17 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, development economics, environmental economics, growth disasters, population economics Tags: Deirdre McCloskey
The importation of socialism into the Third World, even in the relatively non-violent form of Congress-Party Fabian-Gandhism, unintentionally stifled growth, enriched large industrialists, and kept the people poor. Malthusian theories hatched in the West were put into practice by India and especially China, resulting in millions of missing girls. The capitalist-sponsored Green Revolution of dwarf hybrids was opposed by green politicians the world around, but has made places like India self-sufficient in grains.
State power in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa has been used to tax the majority of farmers in aid of the president’s cousins and a minority of urban bureaucrats. State power in many parts of Latin America has prevented land reform and sponsored disappearances. State ownership of oil in Nigeria and Mexico and Iraq was used to support the party in power, benefiting the people not at all. Arab men have been kept poor, not bettered, by using state power to deny education and driver’s licenses to Arab women.
The seizure of governments by the clergy has corrupted religions and ruined economies. The seizure of governments by the military has corrupted armies and ruined economies.
Everything you know about teenage pregnancies is wrong
04 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in labour economics, population economics Tags: teenage pregnancies, The fatal conceit, The pretence to knowledge
Most people look upon teenage pregnancies from the perspective of their class.
Middle-class parents horrified that their daughter might not go to university and all the benefits that entails, including a better class of husband.
But look at what a teenage pregnancy is for a young woman was not destined for the University and the fast lane.
You go from being an extra on the stage of life to being a mother. Instant respect.
Everyone’s cheering for you. No matter how far your fall, now matter how badly you screw up, there are people ready to help you find your way back for the sake of the children.
Ethnographic studies show that teenage mothers looked down on their contemporaries that delay having a child into their 20s.
Teenage mums to be start to clean up their act, they get off drugs, they get off alcohol.
Most of all for the first time in their lives, these teenagers have a purpose – to be a mother.
They don’t marry the father because they do not look upon him as husband material.
In many cases, the young mothers hope that becoming a father might turn him into husband material.
The reason why they don’t in the end marry the father is the persistent antisocial behaviour of the fathers, and most of all, their persistent infidelity.
Teenage mums know what they’re doing.
All too many do-gooders and busy bodies will look upon teenage pregnancies as a mistake – an accident – somehow the product of a lack of knowledge of contraception or access to the same.
This myth persisted despite the invention of the Internet by Al Gore and the considerable amount of information you can find out about the facts of life on the Internet with the help of those cell phones most teenagers have.
It’s far easier to explain behaviour you think is foolish from your own perspective rather than that the perspective of the teenager concerned and the options that they have before them.
It’s no coincidence that a large number of teenage mums did not finish high school and don’t have much to look forward in their working life. The biggest thing in their life will be being a mother. Why wait?
David Friedman “Global Warming, Population, and the Problem with Externality Arguments”
01 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
Paul Ehrlich–still going after 40-years of wrong, wrong, and wrong again
23 May 2014 Leave a comment
in population economics, technological progress Tags: Paul Ehrlich, population bomb
We will soon be asking is it perfectly okay to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry?
…In other words between now and 45 years from now, 2.5 billion people will be added to the planet. …We are moving towards resource wars
“Will overpopulation drive us to eat our own DEAD?” The Daily Mail, 23 May 2014
Paul Ehrlich is widely known for his 1968 book ‘The Population Bomb’ which he called for population control to prevent global crises from overpopulation. In his 1968 book, he predicted.
Plainly, he got that wrong. In 1970, Ehrlich predicted that Americans would be subjected to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by the end of the 1970s. He got that wrong too.
Julian L. Simon and Ehrlich entered in a widely followed scientific wager in 1980.
Simon had Ehrlich choose five commodity metals. Simon bet that their prices would decrease, while Ehrlich bet they would increase. Between 1980 and 1990, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history.
Ehrlich lost the bet with Simon. All five commodities bet on declined in price from 1980 through to 1990.
Ehrlich was more than a sore loser. In 1995, he told the Wall Street Journal that
If Simon disappeared from the face of the Earth, that would be great for humanity.
Ehrlich calls those who disagree with him “idiots,” “fools,” “morons,” “clowns” and worse. His righteous zeal is matched by viciousness in disagreement and utter imperviousness to contrary evidence
Individual tradable birth licences – ecological economics’ finest hour?
02 Apr 2014 1 Comment
in economic growth, environmentalism, labour economics, population economics Tags: birth credits
A mate suggested that I look into ecological economics. The self-appointed visionaries of ecological economics were so concerned about the population bomb that they proposed a “choice-based, marketable, birth license plan” or “birth credits” for population control. The Earth’s carrying capacity is a central issue in ecological economics.
Birth credits were promoted by urban designer and environmental activist Michael E. Arth since the 1990s and earlier by economist Kenneth Boulding (1964) and ecological economist Herman Daly (1991). I am not making this up.
Birth credits would allow any woman to have as many children as she wants, as long as she buys a license for any children beyond an average allotment that would result in zero population growth (ZPG). Birth credits are similar to individual tradable quotas for fishing.
- If the allotment was determined to be 1.1 children, then the first child would be free, and the market would determine the cost of the license or birth credit for each additional child.
- The units could be sold in units of 1/10th of a credit with each of us getting 1.1 credits each for free, under some proposals.
Being nice members of the middle class, the penalty proposed for an illegal baby would be community service for the parents. I am sure most parents would welcome the time out of the house and the free child care. Obviously, these nice family unfriendly educated middle class ZPG types do not seem to appreciate the seas and oceans that some with cross to have a child.
Arth, Dally and his fellow prophets were smug enough to think they could see the future and a looming population bomb and food riots, but plainly they got the sign of the demographic crisis wrong.
Sub-replacement fertility is now the demographic crisis. Over half of the world’s population lives in countries with fertility rates at or below replacement level, and nearly all countries will reach low fertility levels in the next decade or two.
A larger population can, as Gary Becker has pointed out, increase the rate of technological progress by increasing the number of creative people working away at inventing new products and ideas. More people means more markets that will reach a critical mass for which people can then profitably invent new products, which further increase innovation and economic growth.
The price of these birth credits would be now lower than an EU carbon credit. You could not give them away.
HT: Steady-State Economics: Second Edition With New Essays – Herman E. Daly – Google Books.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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