I struggled to come up with a web development angle for this one. I had a brief hope of executing some dazzling metaphorical sleight of hand when I read Thomas DeGregori’s discussion of the “usability” of rocks among proto-humans, but in the end I gave up and decided just to roll with it…
The world’s resources are limitless. I’m not joking. In a world of finite materials – and a finite 88 keys on a piano – resources are no more limited than are melodies and harmonies. Even if we stick to the Western musical scale, we will never run out of tunes. This is because tunes are not raw materials, somehow just there, waiting to be discovered: they come into being with the creativity of people.*
The same is true of resources. I’ve just discovered this wonderful phrase:
Resources Are Not, They Become
It was coined by economist Erich Zimmermann and has since been taken up in argument against the persistently rearing ugly head of Malthus (e.g. brilliantly by Thomas R. DeGregori [1]). No matter how many times Malthus has been disproven – by humanity’s ingenuity, and famously in more recent times in the Simon-Ehrlich wager – still he keeps popping up in various forms, currently in the guise of environmentalism. It’s boring to have to keep on defending humans from this conservative, misanthropic idea, but it’s all the rage at the moment, so I guess we have to.
The difference with today’s Malthusians is that they do not target the poor and the Africans and the Indians, as Malthusians once did. At least, they pretend not to. Their main target is the Western lifestyle, with its supposed over-consumption. But this leads them to attack the poorer countries’ efforts to develop too, for example in their opposition to the construction of dams to control the effects of monsoons in India or the use of GM crops in Africa. In their view of the world, people are better kept in their place, in small numbers at the mercy of nature. People are always the problem.
My Cat’s Electric Blanket Once Belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace’s Grandmother
I believe that people are not the problem, but the solution. People are not drains on society but contributors to it, and the more people there are, the more ideas we generate. The concept behind Resources are not, they become is that resources are not found but created, by the application of ideas. Petroleum was not a resource for the people of the neolithic. It only became one when we learned how to get it and use it, and when we had a need for it. Likewise, it will no doubt cease to become one when we work out how to use something better.
Like music and language, human society is open-ended. There will always be new music; in language there will always be novel phrases that make sense (I submit this: “my cat’s electric blanket once belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace’s grandmother”); and there will always be new resources. The ever-changing ideas and techniques of people continue to remake the world and society. It is simplistic and ahistorical to see the world’s resources as an ever-dwindling cake.
I think the big problems are under-development and poverty. And this of course means that policies are partly to blame. In the decades following Malthus India was seen as a lost cause, with a population growing so fast that it could not possibly sustain itself. Indeed, famine was celebrated by many in Britain as a natural check on over-population (incredibly, that odious idea lives on here and there even now). In the event, after suffering seven famines under British misrule, it was technology and complementary policy that ensured that, today, India has been famine-free since independence in 1947, even while the population has grown unimaginably.
I conclude from all this that policies seeking to prevent development – for example, calling a halt to the Gibe III dam in Ethiopia or banning GM crops – are, potentially, profoundly bad for humanity; and therefore that ideas and campaigns promoting such policies should be vigorously challenged.
Note: I’d like to provide some context here by adding that, by most measures, things are getting better for people throughout the world, as summarized in this collection of graphs from New Scientist.
*If you’re inclined to pick apart the analogy, how about this: the keys represent chemical elements, chords represent raw materials (there is a certainly a sense in which basic harmonies were discovered), and melodies and chord sequences (thus incorporating time) represent resources. I think that works, even without bringing in microtones.
[1] Resources Are Not, They Become: an Institutional Theory, Thomas R. De Gregori, Journal of Economic Issues 21, 1987, included in Evolutionary theory in the social sciences, Volume 4 by William M. Dugger and Howard J. Sherman.
Further reading:
The Simon-Ehrlich Wager on Wikipedia
The Doomslayer by Ed Regis, Wired 5.02, February 1997
The Post War Intellectual Roots Of The Population Bomb by Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer in The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development
No to Neo-Malthusianism at Spiked Online