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Hooray, the Earth is Not Running out of Resources

By Stephen Hicks

August 23, 2015

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A scenario that is beloved of ethicists, public policy experts, and management consultants asks you to imagine yourself on a lifeboat.

Built into such scenarios are powerful assumptions with life-or-death consequences, so as we work through the lifeboat scenario try to make those assumptions explicit. Here we go:

If the lifeboat is used as a microcosm from which we can draw grand conclusions, as many ethicists and other experts want to, then the claims are that we live in a world of scarce resources and that our public policy decisions should be based on that fact.

You were flying over the Pacific, but bad weather knocked out the plane’s communications. To avoid the storm, the pilot then diverted from the plane’s scheduled route. A terrible hour or so later he lost control and crashed the plane into the ocean. You and some others survived and managed to climb into an inflatable lifeboat.

You take stock of your situation. There are ten of you in a boat designed for four people, with enough food and water for two days. Nobody knows where you are, you don’t know where you are, and your phones were lost or destroyed in the crash.

What do you do?

  1. You might assess the situation ruthlessly, point to the water and shout: “Shark!” When one of your companions foolishly looks to see — you shove him overboard. One down, five to go. Of course the rest see what’s up and begin trying to shove each other overboard. When the fighting ends, the four quickest and strongest have prevailed and the six slowest or weakest become shark food.
  2. Or you might say, “Nobody move — let’s talk this over.” Someone then suggests that, in the interests of equality, everyone share the food and water. The likely result? A big wave swamps the boat carrying ten people but designed for four; everyone dies. Or when one person gets too hungry or thirsty, she defects and shoves someone overboard. Fighting commences. The four strongest prevail and six die.
  3. Or someone suggests that, in the interests of fairness, you draw lots to decide who will live and who will die. Result? The first powerful person to draw a bad lot refuses to accept the result. In the ensuing fight to shove him overboard, the strongest prevail and the weakest lose.
  4. Or you might suggest, “Let’s see who has the most to contribute and the best chances of surviving.” On the lifeboat, it turns out, are an 88-year-old man, someone who broke both legs in the crash, an emotional basket-case, and a 95-pound woman with zero fat reserves — along with a healthy 20-year old male, a woman in the military Special Forces, a middle-aged man who is twenty pounds overweight, and several others. So as a group you identify the four strongest and, unfortunately, sacrifice the six weakest.

Other options are possible. But note that they all seem to be converging on a common result: The lifeboat is a strong-versus-weak situation, and the strong will sacrifice the weak.

How realistic is this made-up scenario? The point of using lifeboats is to help us think through the big questions of life and death by giving us a simplified model of the factors that we must attend to.

The lifeboat’s key factors are economic: the lifeboat’s supply of space, food, and water is much less than the demand for them. That is to say, scarce resources is the dominant reality.

If the lifeboat is used as a microcosm from which we can draw grand conclusions, as many ethicists and other experts want to, then the claims are, first, that we live in a world of scarce resources and, second, that our public policy decisions should be based on that fact.

So here are some real-life examples:

A nature show followed a herd of caribou on their annual migration from southern to northern Alaska where, in the short summer, they will graze. Packs of wolves also followed the caribou, picking off the old, the weak, and the injured. The narrator of the show intoned, “And this is good for the caribou,” explaining that the supply of grasses in northern Alaska was not enough to support the entire herd.

Anthropologists tell us that many Native American tribes, when a harsh winter approached and food was scarce, had a policy of expecting their elderly members to take themselves off into the mountains, the woods, or the desert to let nature take its course. The reasoning was that the eldest were the weakest and that vital food resources should go only to the strongest.

In a widely-reprinted essay, contemporary bio-ethicist Garrett Hardin extended lifeboat ethics to the human population at large, arguing that the Earth’s resource-scarcity demands that rich and strong nations stop giving to the poor and weak nations. Such charity, he argued, undercuts the survival chances of the strong and means only that more of the poor will survive and reproduce, thus making the problem worse in the next generation.

But arguing against Hardin is the equally-widely-cited line from Mahatma Gandhi: “Live simply so that others may simply live.” Those of us with more are depriving those with less, so we resource-rich should give up for the sake of the resource-poor.

And we should not forget that very realistic lifeboat scenario — the sinking of Titanic in 1912. Lifeboats were few and people were many, so a life-and-death scarcity was real. In that case, the operative principle was “Women and children first.“ In accordance with Victorian and Edwardian ethics, stronger men had a noble obligation to protect and, if necessary, sacrifice for their weaker women and offspring.

So the claim that resources are scarce is everywhere — in political debate, in environmentalism, in much of economic science, and in moral decision theory. But is it true?

So which is the more moral policy: Should we sacrifice the weak for the strong — or the strong for the weak?

For example, when revising tax policy, should we favor the rich or the poor? If the government’s healthcare budget is maxed out, should we first deny lifesaving surgeries to the elderly? Or should we prosperous nations feel guilty about our lifestyles and send more billions of dollars in foreign aid to the struggling nations?

Those who believe the scarce-resources Bad News are often explicit about the implications for ethics and politics, asking: Will you continue use up resources selfishly — or are you willing to make sacrifices? Possibly you individually are a person of selfless virtue, but how likely is it that most other people will give up their consumerist lifestyles for the good of humanity? So, you are also asked, shouldn’t we empower the government to make some tough choices on behalf of future generations?

We must, some suggest, resort to lifeboat ethics. Perhaps the claim will be that we need to reduce the population, possibly even by imposed birth-control regulation or voluntary human extinction. Or perhaps we need to ration access to the dwindling resources so that only essentials are produced and only the most worthy get to consume them.

So the claim that resources are scarce is everywhere — in political debate, in environmentalism, in much of economic science, and in moral decision theory. But is it true?

On the other side of the debate, the Good News position is that the Bad News is almost always false — and a relic of pre-modern thinking. In fact, we live in a world of plentiful resources, both actual and potential. And in those places where people sadly continue to struggle with scarcity for generation after generation, the problem always is dysfunctional culture or dysfunctional politics — or a doubly-dysfunctional combination of the two.

Bad thinking and occasional accidents can drive us into scarcity conflicts, the Good News side argues, but scarcity itself is not a fundamental or unavoidable fact of the human condition.

So we are divided into Doomsters who are convinced that the end is nigh and Boomsters who see a present and future world of plenty.

One way to assess the scarce-resources claim is to look specifically at key resources: food, water, living space, wood, iron, oil, natural gas, bauxite, and so on. Are they scarce?

Start with your own home. It likely has running water and a stocked refrigerator. If you run low, there is a grocery store nearby. Even if you live in a modern city built in a desert — like Phoenix, Arizona — food and water are plentiful. (When was the last time that Phoenix’s grocery stores were without bread, meat, vegetables, or water, and Arizonans went hungry and thirsty?) Even in our poor neighborhoods, average heights and weights are increasing, a sign of better nutrition and food availability. Production has increased dramatically, and food is now so plentiful that we have the chubbiest poor people in history.

And it’s not only in the rich countries. Food output across the world has gone up, in part thanks to giants such as Norman Borlaug, and worldwide poverty rates have fallen wonderfully.

Oil and gas? Estimated oil reserves are enough for centuries, and natural gas reserves may be even greater. And that is at current prices and with current technologies. If prices go up, other reserves become economical to develop; and as technologies improve more oil and gas can be reached, and more synthetic substitutes can be developed.

What about minerals and metals? Here is a fun pair of numbers that I first heard from economist George Reisman: the center of the Earth is 6,371 kilometers down, while the deepest mine in the world is 3.9 kilometers. Consider also that over 99% of all of the mines in human history have been on land, but 71% of the Earth is covered in water.

Or consider large-scale energy. Three centuries ago, our total available energy resources were whatever muscle-, wood-, wind-, and water-power we could harness. But scientific and technological advances in the 1700s enabled us to tap the power of coal. So the available stock of energy increased — all of the muscle, wood, wind, and water were still available, plus all of the world’s coal. In the 1800s, further advances let us extract energy from oil. The amount of available energy increased again — all of the muscle, wood, coal, etc., plus all of the world’s oil. Add natural gas in the 1900s, along with all of the fissionable materials like uranium. And of course the sun pumps huge amounts of energy into our system every day, and we continue to develop high-technologies that will help us better harness it.

The point is that the net stock of large-scale energy resources is increasing, and that increase is potentially infinite.

The Earth’s resources are limited, but those limits are the limits of the Earth not of our abilities. And there are no known limits to our abilities — we humans are not merely gatherers of a fixed supply of resources; we are discoverers and creators of a potentially unlimited supply of resources. That was the economist Julian Simon’s still-under-appreciated point about the ultimate resource: intelligence.

Our thinking about resources must take into account the transformative power of the scientific and industrial revolutions — and the political-economic revolutions that gave millions the freedom to think, discover, and act on their new knowledge and inventions. Resource scarcity is not a problem for modern, free, and rational nations.

We are smart, and our thinking about resources must take into account the transformative power of the scientific and industrial revolutions — and the political-economic revolutions that gave millions the freedom to think, discover, and act on their new knowledge and inventions. Resource scarcity is not a problem for modern, free, and rational nations.

Despite a large number of optimistic data points, scarcity thinking is a deeply-embedded mindset for many. Here is Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management: “We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight.” That was Taylor in The Principles of Scientific Management, published in … 1911. Over a century later, how many of our current Doomsters are still intoning Taylor’s lament?

So consider one more resource to make the point: wood. Depending upon where one is in the world, the world’s timber resources are plentiful or potentially scarce. Europeans have been cutting down trees for millennia, but the continent has significantly more trees now than a century ago. In North America, wood production has increased greatly while forestation rates have remained constant for the past century in both Canada and the USA.

By contrast, deforestation might be a problem in developing nations, where about half of deforestation is caused by subsistence-level farming. Subsistence-level farming is a phenomenon of the world’s poorest countries, where people do what they have to in order to scrape a living from the land. So deforestation in poorer countries only might be a problem because history shows that as nations become prosperous, they improve their habits as the Europeans and North Americans, for example, did. They think longer range; they save and re-invest more; and they develop more creative problem-solving abilities.

So can the developing nations continue to develop? Of course that is an open question, and the answer depends on politics. Relatively free nations become prosperous, and relatively unfree nations become or remain poor. That is to say, scarcity of resources is not a natural problem but a function of bad politics. (Note for example, that many places that are naturally well-endowed with resources — like Romania, Nigeria, and Venezuela — regularly experience resource scarcity.)

We are the first few generations in history to experience plenty. Doomsterism has had a long history, and no doubt many will remain stuck in its old modes of zero-sum thinking.

But Boomster optimism is the new realism — a realism based on the capacity of free humans beings to develop the science, technology, and wealth to solve scarce-resource problems. We are nowhere near reaching the limits of our potential.

So let’s confine the lifeboat ethics to the scrapbook of history.

 

 

This article was first published as EveryJoe.com split into two columns entitled “Lifeboat Ethics: How Scarcity Thinking Sets Us at Each Others’ Throats” and “Do We Really Live in a World of Scarce Resources?”

 

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