How to Feed the World, and Shit. An Essay with Proper Referencing

 This is an essay that I wrote to try to get money from the university. I just found out I didn't get that money, sadly. The title is stupid, but I noticed that last year's winner had a long, stupid title.... Anyway, I actually spent a lot of effort on it and did a fair amount of research, plus I really wanted the money since I've temporarily given up working and have like virtually nothing in my bank account. So if I wasn't an extremely temperate and calm person, I would probably be upset. As you can find out from my old Lists post, I really enjoyed the book I draw on most heavily in the essay, The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann. Like Kant said of Hume, I felt like Mr. Mann awoke me from a dogmatic slumber as far as my strong, historic disposition towards "apocalyptic environmentalism" is concerned. Which is not at all to say that I think it rational to be join that tribe of ' "Rational" Optimists' who arguably form the core of the Wizard tribe (who tend to be much more Libertarianish than I am) or that I didn't think that the book had some flaws in the way it used the titular framework (I definitely didn't like how he tried to stuff everyone into one group or the other in the middle section of the book, since I felt and feel that the dichotomy - which I like as a framework - works best as a Platonic, i.e. essentialist dichotomy that describes the two poles of intellectual response to problems like world hunger). It's only to say that I was blinkered insofar as I wasn't aware of the consistent boosts to agricultural productivity that have been achieved since the Green Revolution (more generally, it's easy to lose sight of just how badly, absurdly wrong long-term predictors of the future are and always have been, when it comes to just about anything (also, I read The Black Swan last week, in two days, which is of course about this (a very fun book with an important thesis which deserves the popularity it received, although obviously Taleb is a bit of a cunt and often (maybe increasingly) his distate for the effeteness and fragility of traditional intellectual sobriety takes him well off the rails)), the full extent to which my disposition towards radical environmentalism and ecologicism was entangled in my emotional/moral/aesthetic dispositions more generally, and also some specific Wizardly arguments of interest, for example, the physicist Warren Weaver's never-published repudiation of the idea that the concept of "limits to growth" (that concept much discussed in the tradition of globalised ecological analysis of which William Vogt was a pioneer (for example, in Limits to Growth)) are actually truly physical limits, rather than a fuzzier notion which takes for granted that human civilisation won't ever come close to fully exploiting the totality of energy harnessable from the sun and the ground (and definitely takes for granted a moral worldview (with which I agree) that we shouldn't have any goals which necessitate treating all other life on earth merely as instruments for their success, and that wild places are often very beautiful and worthy of protection (thus, it would be wrong in principle to have as a goal maximally exploiting every square inch of fertile soil and forest for human purposes, even supposing a superlinear rate of scientific progress can forever match a superlinear rate of environmental degradation and exploitation (which, incidentally, is not a completely absurd possibility, though not, I think, probable, contra some of the extreme "rational" optimists like David Deutsch (given that when dealing with such claims, we've strayed into the far-flung hinterlands of the land of Extremistan, it would be foolish to actually have a specific credence interval in mind when one uses words like "improbable", which instead should be meant to convey the thought that no-one knows jackshit about the long-term future of the human species and as such one shouldn't have confidence in any particular narrative (especially given the infinite preponderance of such narratives))). 

Of course, it still remains true that, as far as my own politics are concerned, environmental issues are number one (which tends not to be the case with Wizardly-diposed people). I think the thing that the book did was wiggle my credences around a bit on what the world is going to be like in 20 years etc as a result of the book (mostly, I genuinely feel like I am moved towards a more epistemologically sensible position of radical uncertainty). I still feel pretty confident that environmental issues in general (like, we're talking pollution plus soil erosion plus water contamination plus national parks) are majorly consequential for the future wellbeing of humans on the planet and massively neglected in proportion to their consequentialness. That comes across here.

Honestly, it's a pretty boring essay, so sorry for that. I tried to be 'intellectually serious' for once and the combination of tight word-constraints and being intellectually serious necessitates that you don't ramble wildly in absurdly long, sprawling sentences and talk about yourself constantly like I do normally, e.g. here.

Disequilibrium, Model Uncertainty, and the Interminable War of Wizards and Prophets

             

1       Introduction

Before trying to solve future civilisational dilemmas, it would seem wise to take stock of the relevant scientific knowledge. Sadly, whilst this may sound a useful principle in the abstract, the deep uncertainty that attends predictions of the longer-term trajectory of human societies makes the idea somewhat complicated in practice. The problem of how to feed the global population over the next 50 years is no exception. As I will show, there is a high degree of uncertainty even around the global population in the nearer term, not to mention the political state of play, the unfolding of climate change or the progress of energy technologies like carbon capture.

Thankfully, I believe there are some things we can be confident about. My first aim is to demonstrate this. In particular, I draw on research in climate science, ecology and agriculture to show that the environmental issues we face are of central importance to the challenge of feeding the world of 2070, and therefore that we must find some way of dealing with them in order to meet this goal. My second aim is to defend a vision of how we can succeed—more precisely, how we can increase the probability that we can sustain tolerable living standards for the majority of future humans. To this end, I borrow the dichotomy established by a book titled The Wizard and the Prophet (2018) by Charles Mann, and argue that the archetypal attitudes of both titular characters are mistaken. In particular, I give reasons why what I call “The Radical Redesign Proposal” of the Prophets seems forlorn, and attack the “Just Keep Swimming Theory” of the Wizards for its failure to take the issues seriously. I finish by briefly defending a positive vision which belongs to neither pole: international co-operation on an aggressive pro-science and environmentalist agenda of a scale unprecedented in history. The core idea of this agenda is that, although we need radical action, we must create and invent rather than tear down.

2     The Challenge

2.1    How Many Mouths Exactly?

Perhaps the deepest uncertainty around future global food security concerns how the population will grow over the next several decades. To be sure, the hierarchical-Bayesian modelling approach used by the U.N. to develop the figures that most of us rely on is a sophisticated process worked on by hundreds of scholars with the world’s best databases at their disposal [United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017)]. But that doesn’t mean that it escapes the fundamental constraints of all relatively far-future statistical modelling of human societies.

As one might hope, some of these constraints can be found discussed in the official methodology document for the 2017 projections (which put the 2050 population at somewhere around 9.8 billion people and the 2070 population at somewhere around 10.6 billion). One is, of course, just poor data-quality on population, demographics, land use and more, particularly in Africa [U.N. Population Division (2017), 7-10]. Of more importance, there is the necessary theory-dependence of the process: we find, for example, that the embodiment of the Demographic Transition Theory in the model carries with it a number of assumptions about the persistence of demographic trends like rising female education in developing countries and low fertility in developed countries [11-16]. In my estimation, of more importance still are the implicit elements of sociological and other theory undiscussed in this document. For instance, one might claim, per the Limits to Growth researchers (see, for example, Jorgen Randers’ 2012 book 2052: A global forecast for the next forty years), that there is a kind of ‘Continuity Theory’ baked-in to the Bayesian approach. By contrast, the ecology-inspired assumptions and Systems Dynamics modelling approach of the original World3 model and its refinements lead to significantly different results. In the aforementioned book, Randers settles on an astonishingly low peak of 8.1 billion around 2040 [Randers (2012)].[1]

Evidently, the ‘centre’ of the UN Projections up to 2070 plots a path where our civilisation does not slide into the “overshoot” scenario the LTG researchers imagine. However, even if we do find ourselves in a non-catastrophic scenario in 2070, we cannot have escaped the challenge. One heavily-cited 2013 paper suggests we may have to double current food production to meet the food demand as near as 2050, a target for which we are currently well off the pace [Ray, Mueller, West, & Foley (2013)]. And even if this estimate is too high, as a 2017 paper claims [Hunter, Smith, Schipanski, Atwood, & Mortensen (2017)], the environmental threats to agricultural production and political stability I am about to review still leave a heavy pall over our ambitions.

2.2       Climate Change

Climate change is the most widely discussed environmental issue of our time, and it may be the most serious. It is potentially relevant to our food concern in two ways:

(i) Through its effect on the more specific environmental problems I will discuss, it is disposed to have deleterious effects on agricultural production overall;

(ii) These and other effects of climate change may have significance as a force of political and economic disruption that reduces the number of well-nourished humans in more convoluted ways (i.e. by creating refugees).[2]

Climate change is also a phenomenon whose dynamics are very hard to predict—and thus, in exploring it, we once again find ourselves wandering the moors of model uncertainty. As before, we are fortunate to have a fog-blasting light to guide us through the darkest sections: the reports of an authoritative, global institution which uses the work of a large number of scholars, the IPCC. But we also have esteemed climate scientists in the field who think that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment in 2013 may have been too ‘conservative’ in some respects.[3]

One of these dissidents is the decorated English ocean physicist, Peter Wadhams, who last year published a short book titled A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic. Wadhams documents the physical evidence that melting Arctic ice, combined with decaying permafrost in the Arctic circle, is beginning to cause a gigantic methane leak that may alone push global temperatures up by “0.6^◦C by 2040” [Wadhams (2017), 125]. According to the modelling on which he worked with two colleagues, this pulse of methane into the atmosphere would “bring forward by fifteen to thirty-five years the date at which the global mean temperature rise exceeds 2^◦C above pre-industrial levels to 2035 for the business as usual scenario and 2040 for the low emissions scenario” [126].

Wadhams believes that climate change is a civilisational dilemma in itself, with his own findings about methane at the centre of the picture. Pertinently, he notes that the Fifth Assessment, as gloomy as it may be in some respects, “scarcely mentions” the methane risk at all [128]. Late in the book, he again criticises the assessment for what a calls a “paradox”: the report advocates a trajectory for which emissions reductions are, in his view, totally insufficient [183]. Wadhams may well be wrong about the total inadequacy of a reductions-only approach, but then again almost no-one on the planet knows as much about the state of the Arctic as he does.

On the specific issue of sea-level rise, one can tell a similar story. The Fifth Assessment places the upper-bound of the “likely” sea-level rise by 2100 at 0.82m (a level that, though not intuitively terrifying, would likely induce massive infrastructure projects in many coastal cities around the world and large-scale migration from flood-prone regions of the world (South Asia is a particular area of concern, with two heavily populated zones at risk: Bangladesh/North-East India, and Sri Lanka)). A 2016 Nature article by Robert DeConto and David Pollard, using a model calibrated for the vulnerabilities of Antarctica in previous events of major sea-level rise, finds that “Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated” [M. DeConto & Pollard (2016), 591]. Of course, just like Wadham’s work, this model is not an oracle and there is countervailing research. As many climate scientists are keen to emphasise, the climate system of the planet is complex, potentially generating many feedback effects with different impacts. Nevertheless, the severity of the warning is unassailable.

2.3    The Other Problems (and How Climate Affects Them)

2.3.1    Water Scarcity

Whilst, overall, efficient access to water (“improved drinking water”, as the World Bank calls it) has been increasing over the last few decades [Roser & Ritchie (2018b), section 1.1], there has been a related rise in water use and loss. Using definitions of “water stress” from the World Resources Institute, several countries across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have extremely high levels of water stress, and several countries in East Asia (including China) are experiencing medium-high stress [Roser & Ritchie (2018b), section 1.8].

Although water is not a “stock” like metal ore, it is also very much unlike an archetypal renewable resource (or “flow”) like solar energy. Aquifers are as non-renewable as fossil fuels, and all freshwater sources are vulnerable to pollution—most commonly, salinisation/mineralisation from overuse or silt-dumping, eutrophication and algal bloom from fertiliser runoff, and bacterial contamination. All of these impacts are far easier to bring about than to reverse.

It’s worth nothing that, although on the World Bank definition Australia is experiencing low water stress, our country is, in fact, vulnerable to water shortage due to the fragility, overuse and pollution of our most vital agricultural water source, the Murray-Darling Basin, and a general proneness to drought created by the ENSO cycle that affects our key agricultural regions (c.f. Flannery (1994/2016)). Incidentally, as of early August, all of NSW and most of Queensland struggling through perhaps the worst drought in a generation [Woodburn (2018)].

Since climate change is likely to increase extreme weather, it may be that we see even worse droughts in future in drought-prone areas of the world. This could have great significance for food production.

2.3.2   Soil Degradation

According to the UN-sponsored 2017 Global Land Outlook Report, “approximately 20 per cent of the Earth’s vegetated surface shows persistent declining trends in productivity” [United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (2017), 8]. In large part this is due to loss of top-soil from erosion, the rate of which is likely somewhere in the billions of tonnes annually (a sophisticated analysis of European soil erosion in 2015 found a “total soil loss of 970 Mt annually”, despite far better land-management practices on this continent than in Asia or Africa [Panagos et al. (2015), 438]).

The “Green Revolution” begun in the late 1960s, characterised by the package of super-efficient mutant wheat/rice and intensive chemical fertiliser and pesticide use, allowed global crop yields to increase rapidly from the 1960s to the 1990s [Roser and Ritchie (2018c), Mann (2018)], but over that same time exacerbated soil loss by destroying the ‘humus’ which stores water and fosters microbiota and insects that are beneficial for agriculture in the long-run. Factors like deforestation, water scarcity, and overgrazing/overtilling are of equal or more significance for soil degradation [United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (2017), 41-51]. As described earlier, current yield improvements are radically out of step with future food requirements.

Increased atmospheric CO₂ will boost plant growth over the coming decades, but the other effects of climate change completely outweigh this benefit, according to all analyses I have reviewed.

2.3.3   Pollution

Nitrogen pollution from fertiliser runoff is a problem comparable in scope and significance to climate change. Along with ocean warming, it seems to be playing a very large role in the current problem of ocean deoxygenation and acidification [Breitburg et al. (2018)], and—more directly relevant for human concerns—has a large effect on freshwater contamination. Global nitrogen fertiliser use is somewhere around 115 million tonnes per year and rising [Roser & Ritchie (2018a)], of which a very large percentage ends up in waterways and oceans. In China, the effect of overuse on vital freshwater sources seems to be reaching crisis proportions, while the rest of Asia struggles with similar [Stone (2011), Pearce (2018)].

There are, of course, other disturbing pollution concerns in the world today. One is the increasingly discussed problem of plastic pollution, which seems most pernicious in aquatic ecosystems and may also be having an impact on human health and fertility [Moore (2017)]. Such general environmental concerns cannot easily be tied to food production, but they cause social and economic problems that are likely to have relevant flow-on effects.

2.3.4   Insect Decline

A recent article in The Guardian titled “Where have all our insects gone?” [McKie (2018)] summarises the evidence that insect numbers have been in sharp decline across the world since roughly the 1970s. This evidence consists in both a handful of long-term studies and anecdote (from entomologists and non-specialists alike), as well as in the awareness of several causal mechanisms active in this period disposed to cause a decline: spraying, urbanisation, light pollution, and climate change. This decline is also connected to a fall in bird populations, and, given the crucial role of insects in ecosystems generally, is likely already causing more damage than we can easily detect [McKie (2018)].

Although the full consequences for humans are yet to be seen, bee decline has already had a clear agricultural impact in at least one area of the world, causing farmers in the pear-growing region of China, Hanyuan Country, to resort to hand-pollination [Williams (2016)]. Again, the consequences for overall food-production are somewhat opaque, but there is reason to think they could be non-trivial.

3        But there is (maybe) hope!

3.1       The Eponymous War

Christopher Mann’s 2018 book The Wizard and the Prophet directly concerns the issues under discussion in this essay. Mann creates detailed portraits of two important but very different American scientists of the mid-20th Century, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whom he calls, respectively, The Wizard and The Prophet. He traces their impact on the modern world and in relation to the current environmental issues the planet faces as we prepare for a future of “10 billion people”. In so doing, he develops a useful, if imperfect, framework for classifying approaches to this grand issue of civilisational sustainability.

3.1.1      Team Prophet

Vogt, a literature-graduate turned ornithologist and ecologist, was best known for his 1948 book Road to Survival. This best-selling treatise, one of the first in the genre which Mann dubs “Apocalyptic Environmentalism”, pioneered the idea of “the environment” as a global concern, and corporate greed as a primary threat. Mann claims Vogt thereby played a central role in kickstarting the modern ideology of environmentalism and all its offshoots.

In essence, the core strategy proposed by Prophets to deal with the challenge is to ‘degrow’—to restrain the power of big corporations, to rein in industrial agriculture, perhaps to set population-reduction as a goal in itself—and to ‘regrow’ in a more localist and communistic world of green technology, public transport, organic farming, expansive national parks, and (for many) participatory democracy and worker’s co-operatives.  I call this ambitious programme The Radical Redesign Proposal. Prominent candidates (to my mind) include the environmentalist journalist, George Monbiot; the economist, Kate Raworth; the academic and activist, David Suzuki; and the political journalist, Naomi Klein.[4]

3.1.2     Team Wizard

Borlaug, a forestry graduate turned wheat-geneticist, is most significant for kick-starting the Green Revolution in the late 1960s via the creation of rust-resistant, ultra-versatile dwarf wheat—for which in 1970 he won the Nobel Prize. Mann mainly traces his Wizardly legacy onto the modern biochemists and CRISPR researchers working to make the next big agricultural breakthrough.

Wizards not in the business of such research are defined by their strong preference for such large-scale technical research projects, for large-scale technical solutions in general (for nuclear plants, desalination plants, and sometimes “clean coal”) over more holistic remedies for environmental problems, and for a more human-centred and pro-urban perspective. One might characterise the Wizardly strategy as keeping things stable, with the belief that the continuing innovations of privately and publicly funded researchers will be enough to maintain the positive global hunger trends of the last couple of decades—just so long as governments make some effort to stick to targets. I call this notion The Just Keep Swimming Theory. Prominent candidates include the economist, Julian Simon; the economist, Bjorn Lomborg; the businessperson and philanthropist, Bill Gates; the scientist, Steven Pinker; and the businessperson, Elon Musk.

3.1.3     Evaluation

When one is reviewing the issues soberly, I don’t think it is clear how we should go about resolving them. This is the obvious shortcoming of some of the more extreme Prophets and Wizards alike.

My biggest problem with The Radical Redesign Proposal is its ambition: it aims to solve a gargantuan problem of unclear scope and definition—abolishing capitalism, or maybe abolishing the rule of big corporations—which surely must involve a lot of sub-goals and cannot be expected to happen quickly, in favour of a new global economic system which surely must also take time to evolve, all in order to solve a crisis which is acting right now in the world we actually live in. Non-totalitarian social engineering projects of such a scale (presumably) take several orders of magnitude longer than physical engineering projects that could directly counteract the problems.

As already covered in part, I am meanwhile deeply sceptical of the Wizardly confidence in safety without any radical action. The climate of the planet is a complex system, our societies are complex systems, and complex systems are characterised by disequilibrium and unstable dynamics. Given the evidence that we could be in for a very rough ride indeed, my response is, All hands on deck! It’s hard for me to see how it could be sensible to think otherwise.

3.2      Synthesis

In my view, the amount of state money pouring into renewable-energy research and environmental clean-up programmes in China demonstrates a calibration of priorities that is desirable for all developed countries (c.f. Gleeson-White [2017]). For many reasons, ideological and incentive-related, I don’t see much reason for hope in this regard. On the other hand, the specific proposals I am about to suggest are not blocked by either legislative or fundamental economic constraints.

One of the simplest policies I would like to see is a considerable hike in the funding for both national research bodies (like the CSIRO in our own country), and for science research in general. The latest available statistics suggest that the Australian federal government is spending more on so-called “Defence” (2.042% of GDP as of 2017 [The World Bank 2018]) than our country’s gross expenditure on Research and Development (1.88% of GDP as of 2015-16 [Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017]), so there is clear room for improvement in this country. A more complex proposal is that governments around the world could foster direct co-operation between national research bodies by agreeing to inaugurate a series of ‘Manhattan Projects’— massive, centralised research projects bringing together world experts in specific areas. These projects could be targeted, for example, at developing more efficient methods of carbon capture, pushing the frontiers in precision/computer-monitored agriculture, improving recycling techniques, or on genetically manipulating faster-growing and more nutritious mutant crops.

It’s possible that nuclear energy’s ship has sailed, but it’s worth remembering that, unlike solar or wind technology, nuclear plants are currently efficient generators of non-fossil fuel energy for millions of people. For example, nuclear power generates roughly 70% of France’s energy currently (in 2017 it produced roughly 62% of the total, but it has been higher in previous years [R´eseau de transport d’´electricit´e (2018)]). Similarly, desalination plants, whilst harmful to aquatic life in input (life-rich water) and output (brine), have the potential to ameliorate water crises in several parts of the world.

Finally, as commonly argued, it would also be desirable if people took it upon themselves to reduce their carbon and ecological footprints by taking fewer flights, eating less energy-intensive foods, using less water, taking public transport, and recycling more. Some of these changes could be encouraged by policy also. Obviously, a heavy carbon tax is a common proposal that could be expected to have some flow-on impact on consumption habits. Infrastructure spending on public transport and improved recycling-works are two more very obvious policy options.

Sadly, I think there are game-theoretic, economic and social reasons to expect people and governments not to rise to this challenge. Nor would it be reasonable to expect that even the majority of environmentally-concerned people will soon agree with all of the above suggestions. But these proposals seem to me sensible and, in principle, rapidly implementable.

We ought to get moving as soon as possible!

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2017). Gross expenditure on research and development. Retrieved from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/8104.0Main%20Features22015-16

Breitburg, D., Levin, L. A., Oschlies, A., Grégoire, M., Chavez, F. P., Conley, D. J., . . . Zhang, J. (2018). Declining oxygen in the global ocean and coastal waters. Science, 359 (6371). Retrieved from http:// science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6371/eaam7240

Flannery, T. (1994/2016). The future eaters. Sydney: Reed New Holland.

Gleeson-White, J. (2017, September 10). “‘My job is to clean up the environment. China really wants to do that’”. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/10/ my-job-is-to-clean-up-the-environment-china-really-wants-to-do-that

Hunter, M. C., Smith, R. G., Schipanski, M. E., Atwood, L. W., & Mortensen, D. A. (2017). Agriculture in 2050: Recalibrating targets for sustainable intensification. BioScience, 67 (4), 386-391. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix010

Mann, C. (2018). The wizard and the prophet: Two groundbreaking scientists and their conflicting visions for the future of our planet. Picador.

McKie, R. (2018, June 17). “Where have all our insects gone?”, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/17/where-have-insects-gone-climate-change-population-decline

M. DeConto, R., & Pollard, D. (2016, March). Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise. Nature, 531, 591-597. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17145

Moore, C. (2017, December 15). Plastic pollution. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/science/ plastic-pollution

Panagos, P., Borrelli, P., Poesen, J., Ballabio, C., Lugato, E., Meusburger, K., . . . Alewell, C. (2015). The new assessment of soil loss by water erosion in Europe. Environmental Science and Policy, 54, 438-447. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901115300654

Pearce, F. (2018, February 6). “Can the World Find Solutions to the Nitrogen Pollution Crisis?”, Yale Environment 360. Retrieved from https://e360.yale.edu/features/can-the-world-find-solutions-to-the-nitrogen-pollution-crisis

Randers, J. (2012). 2052: A global forecast for the next forty years. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Ray, D. K., Mueller, N. D., West, P. C., & Foley, J. A. (2013, June). Yield trends are insufficient to double global crop production by 2050. PLOS ONE, 8 (6), 1-8. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0066428

Réseau de transport d’électricité. (2018). Production nationale annuelle par filière (2012 à 2017). Retrieved from https://opendata.rtefrance.com/explore/dataset/prodparfiliere/table/?sort=annee (Percentage calculated by me)

Roser, M., & Ritchie, H. (2018a). Fertilizer and pesticides. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/ fertilizer-and-pesticides

Roser, M., & Ritchie, H. (2018b). Water access, resources and sanitation. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/water-access-resources-sanitation

Roser, M., & Ritchie, H. (2018c). Yield and land use in agriculture. Retrieved from https:// ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agriculture

Stone, R. (2011, July 21). “On Lake Taihu, China Moves to Battle Massive Algae Blooms”, Yale Environment 360. Retrieved from https://e360.yale.edu/features/on_lake_taihu_china_moves_to_battle_massive_algae_blooms

The World Bank. (2018). Military expenditure (% of gdp). Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=AU

Turner, G. (2014). Is global collapse imminent? (MSSRI Research Paper No. 4). The University of Melbourne: Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Retrieved from https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/data/assets/pdf file/0005/2763500/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4 Turner 2014.pdf

United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. (2017). The global land outlook (Tech. Rep.). Born, Germany. Retrieved from https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/GLO_Full_Report_low_res.pdf

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (2017). World population prospects: The 2017 revision, methodology of the united nations population estimates and projections (Working Paper No. ESA/P/WP.250). New York. Retrieved from https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/ Publications/Files/WPP2017 Methodology.pdf

Wadhams, P. (2017). A farewell to ice: A report from the arctic. Penguin Random House UK.

Williams, C. (2016, 4 August). “These Photos Capture the Startling Effects of Shrinking Bee Populations”, The Huffington Post. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/humans-bees-china_us_570404b3e4b083f5c6092ba9

Woodburn, J. (2018, August 8). “NSW Government says entire state in drought, new DPI figures reveal full extent of big dry”. ABC News. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-08/nsw-government-says-entire-state-is-now-in-drought/10088628

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[1] It seems fashionable in certain circles to claim that the original 1972 Limits to Growth report made predictions of collapse and famine that have been falsified since. This claim correctly applies to Erlich's similar 1968 book The Population Bomb (often grouped together with LTG), but it is not, I believe, true of the sophisticated modelling project, involving multiple `scenarios', explicated in the original The Limits to Growth or the later updates. There are, to be sure, valid criticisms to be made of the project. Firstly, the utility and precision of the concept of “carrying capacity” is diminished in application to a scientific species like our own, since it is divorced from the energetic capacity of the planet that, in principle, we could keep pushing towards (see Mann's discussion of Weaver's objections to the idea in The Wizard and the Prophet [Mann (2018), 160-162)]). Secondly, there is—at least in hindsight—too much emphasis on the concept of ‘peak oil’ in these works, and other errors of priority. Nor do I mean to imply that Randers' 2012 population projection should be given equal weight to the UN's 2017 one. However, given the timeframe of the forecasting even in the original, and the striking areas of correct prediction so far, I think a total dismissal of the modelling approach is unfounded [c.f. Turner (2014)].

[2] Hence the general, rather than food-focussed, treatment of the issue in this subsection.

[3] To be sure, there are esteemed climate scientists who push in the other direction, but I don't have space for a comprehensive review. I also note that basic risk analysis tells us that we (or at least policy-makers) probably should pay more attention to the extremely bad scenarios. This is not to imply that the very fact that a logically possible scenario is extremely bad makes it worth preparing for—clearly, we shouldn't prepare for the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. The difference in this case is that we are talking about outcomes not on the far edge of the ‘probability density function’, but ones derived from projections which use the best methods of the field and plausible assumptions. In addition, there's an asymmetry in amelioration: preparing for the worse outcomes should make less bad scenarios easier.

[4] Mann becomes very profligate in applying his dichotomy in the middle chapters of the book, but I think it works best as a Platonic categorisation. Thus, largely Prophetic but politically atypical figures like Tim Flannery or Jared Diamond (who favour concrete policy discussion in their writing over exhortation to the visitation of harm upon entities like “capitalism” or “the establishment”) are not clear Prophets to my mind.

My Demarchic Utopia

A Superior Political System

Every year – or perhaps every two years (hard to say) – every major polity (i.e. I’m thinking state or nation (a polity with a population in the hundreds of thousands, let’s say), although my discussions mostly assume federal institutions) should hold a major exam as the preliminary phase for deciding the federal politicians of their polity for the next political ‘term’. This exam, held simultaneously in all major cities/settlements across the polity, would be open and free to all adult citizens, who, however, must enter with the knowledge that if they pass it (/pass some carefully chosen threshold), they will be entered into a draw (a lottery, à la the Ancient Greek practice of sortition) to become a salaried politician. Then, if they are chosen as one of the unique hundred or two hundred (maybe varying by the size of the nation or polity) from the draw of successful exam candidates, they will be expected to move to the capital and become full-time salaried politicians for the next year (or two).

I imagine the exam being written and judged by a professionally elected body of academics (not sure about the length of the term of office of this body) from many different fields (economics, political philosophy, law, decision theory/game theory, civil-engineering, ecology, climate science, maybe even mathematics and physics) representing institutions across the nation. It would feature questions on the many different subjects which the academics in the body cover, although perhaps with the largest focus (only as a proportion, though) being polity-relevant history and political information. It would feature both a multiple-choice section, short answers and a longer-form section. As I implied, I think it would actually be cool to include explicitly mathematical problems along with stuff on law and history and political philosophy. It would be long – but give examinees a lot of time and heavily-supervised breaks (i.e. they must bring lunch into the exam room, while being forced to leave electronic devices outside, and the room will have its own toilet, maybe gym equipment, maybe have some music-playing facility via earphones/headphones (you get the picture)) – and perhaps quite difficult (I would imagine requiring a polymath of genius-level intellect to actually approach full marks), but with the threshold set relatively low, so that it allows for people with relevant intellectual strengths/specialties to get by mostly just on the basis of that specific knowledge or expertise. The idea would be that quite a significant number get through to the draw stage, so that this draw approximates a random cross-section of politically engaged people with a high level of literacy and relevant education (obviously, there would be no in principle debarment of the self-educated), but with wealth and connections obviously being only incidental factors, rather than factors more directly selected for (as in our current system).

In the capital of the polity, in the houses of parliament, there would be a longer-term staff of functionaries, staffers and intellectuals who specialise in this or that portfolio. The respected figures/heads of each portfolio would be in charge of hiring new blood for their area and firing poor performers. Oversight over these ‘senior mandarins’ themselves could perhaps be achieved at least partially by internal voting mechanisms, i.e. the senior mandarins would have regular meetings and could also privately decide to vote out one of their number. Perhaps the professionally elected body of academics could exercise some oversight over the senior mandarins (though I also imagine some potential overlap between these two groups, given that I am imagining that most of the mandarins would have an academic sort of background).  

I am imagining that we keep a high court. I am imagining my hypothetical polity has only one house of parliament, but only for simplicity and I have limited confidence in that feature of the architecture. The newly minted politicians would be instructed by the judges of the high court and/or the senior mandarins that they have been vested with the responsibility of deciding amongst themselves how they are going to (more or less evenly) split themselves up into groups controlling the (let’s say) 10 to 15 possible portfolios. They would have the freedom to be slightly flexible with both the number and name of the portfolios, if the mandarins agree, although I imagine there would need to be a constitutional law mandating that the distribution of politicians by portfolio must meet a specific mathematical threshold of evenness. They would be expected to solve this problem of allocation via an internally organised system of deliberation and voting (with some supervision by the senior mandarins) within, maybe, two or three weeks (while the incumbent politicians are just finishing their term in office). If they fail to agree on an appropriate assignment of people to portfolios, then I imagine that the senior mandarins would be given the task of reviewing all the relevant information (the resumes and skills of the various politicians, on personal relations, and so on), before making a binary decision: either to solve the problem for the politicians by mandating an allocation, or by throwing the football to the high court (with an official report attached), who then have the power either to replace one or more politicians under instruction from the senior mandarins, or (in an ideally very rare crisis) to throw out the whole government and temporarily leave governance to the functionaries in the capital before a new government can be thrown together (maybe there would be two draws from the cohort of successful exam candidates (or three, just to be completely safe) in preparation for this contingency).

Once given their portfolio, these politicians would do essentially what our current politicians do, except better and with a stronger intellectual focus. Primarily, they would be expected to work hard with each other and with the permanent staffers to think hard about policy and help draft or refine bills, which they would all then vote on. Due to the absence of party divisions and dissension, it may be that the threshold for a bill that passes has to be somewhere around 75% or 80%. And, of course, the high court would have the power to strike down bills it viewed as contrary to human rights (or contrary to whatever constitution the polity has). Of course, these politicians would also attract publicity, like our current politicians do, and have media appearances. They would be allowed to go on political trips if they so choose (although the senior mandarins could submit a request for termination of office to the high court if a given politician became too lackadaisical or insouciant or too dazzled by the spotlight (or whatever)). And some of these politicians would also be expected to attend international political meetings on important issues of war and peace, the environment, etc.  

This system is very impressively secured against moneyed corruption and corporate lobbying, certainly of the massive-scale, institutionalised kind (particularly bad in the US today (see some of my old political writings, which I find a little fervent for my tastes now, for more)); it is also impressively secured against various forms of cronyism because any ties politicians have to the media or to other important institutions will be random and non-systematic (and it is partly secured against corporate media influence on politics generally, because the media won’t know much about these people’s politics until they start making decisions); this system is epistocratic to some extent, and yet also very morally pleasing (arguably, one of the main objections to “epistocracy”), because of the anti-corrupt design and because these politicians, though not elected, are, by design, a fairly representative cross-section of the educated/smart members of the polity; this system ideally selects for people who are actually interested in difficult and nuanced debate and complex intellectual problems; this system avoids the groupthink and anti-rationalist incentives of political parties and robust, long-term political coalitions.

This system has flaws. One is that a lot of power is invested in the long-term functionaries and especially the people I called the “senior mandarins” in the capital. Perhaps it’s also more likely than I think that the group of people selected won’t get along very well and will struggle to co-operate to distribute themselves across portfolios. Perhaps it’s also more likely than I think that a lot of these people will do their job poorly, be lazy etc. It’s definitely bad for long-term planning and development that the terms of the politicians are so short – but then again the long-term staff and functionaries would have some ability to bend the elected politicians to their will in terms of steering discussions and policy ideas. One major concern is that most citizens will become totally disengaged from the political process. It also is not crazy to think that, though not explicitly designed, there is potentially a huge class divide inherent to this system. It may well be that the people with the time and skills to sit the exam/the desire to spend a year or two being a politician in the capital are overwhelmingly upper-middle class people.

Anyway, still seems superior, imho. I always thought demarchy was bitchin' when I learnt about it in this wonderful unit on democracy I did at uni in late 2016. I still think that. It's true that coming up with grand political projects from the armchair is an epistemologically problematic enterprise just in general. And of course, this thought experiment belongs to a genre of political philosophy that Karl Popper rejected entirely (for pretty good reasons): Utopian political philosophy. I haven't actually made even a single suggestion for how we might 'move' towards this system. I have no such suggestions. Indeed, I have almost no confidence that anything like this system will ever be realised. But, still, worth chewing on, I feel. Props to Francois Chollet on Twitter for motivating this thought with a couple of Tweets he made today on "sortition" in Ancient Greece, which reminded me of how cool I thought that was when I learnt about it.

I'm back, baby! Did you miss me?

I'm back, so here's why I think I was gone in case you cared.. and also here are some typically rambling thoughts on matters related to the recent 'Sokal Squared' thing

Just had to update my blog for the sake of all the weird girls who stalk me. As to why I've had (by my standards) a massive break in posting, I can identify the following factors: 'external': getting into cricket again, being a little socially busier, spending a lot of time writing a long and well-researched essay on the future of the planet for a writing competition on which I'll soon get feedback (meaning I can post this essay here), and, a little more recently, obsessively playing the classical guitar, after not playing at all for nearly four years straight (and I mean obsessively); 'internal': being extremely happy and mentally relaxed (connected: being socially busier than I was), reaching a tipping point of general disgust with the amount of dogmatic and dimwitted intellectual pollution on the internet and not wanting to contribute to it with a non-excellent, non-cogent post. I've thought for a while I need to write something at some point on the early history of mathematics (in particular, how long it took 'us' to develop the notation that makes 'simple' maths so much easier) and what it tells one about the Flynn Effect, about the role of cognition-externalisation, the importance of language and notation to thought, and on the secret theory-ladenness of many things we forget are theory-laden. I think I will do this eventually. I also keep wondering if I should write reviews of things, like the books and movies I've enjoyed recently (or even not so recently), because that might be fun. The reason I didn't do that in the past with books is because I had this major pathological aversion to summarising things that I read and liked, because I realised that summary always costs nuance and information that the author included for a reason - usually, I feel like almost nothing is indispensable in books I like, so I prefer to quote chapters out of whole cloth. But maybe I should start reviewing. On the other hand, I have this disposition against which I think is a perverse manifestation of the 'sunk-cost' fallacy: my brain secretes this weird thought like, It would be wrong to start reviewing things now, because that's not your thing; you could have reviewed books and movies that you liked years ago but you didn't so you can't just go back on that now.

Anyway, I did have something non-narcissistic to say, induced by the "Sokal Squared" Hoax that just happened. I'm not really going to comment on the Hoax per se (on the ethics or intellectual 'validity' of it, or on the perpetrators (the truth is I don't actually have a strong opinion on, like, the ethics of the Hoax - I think Boghossian and Lindsay seem like massive wankers but whatever)), but I wanted to say something  on related matters.

Sturgeon's Law tells us that most of academia is total bullshit (what I mean is: that should be our default assumption). Most research, even in the harder sciences, goes absolutely nowhere, retreads old ground in a pointless way, or is unrigorous (I hesitate to write disjunctions like these, because one is wont to miss disjuncts (there are probably more failure modes)). Arguably, fundamental physics - that most reverent of scientific disciplines - has been little different from metaphysics for the last several decades (see Sabine Hossenfender's controversial new book (which I haven't actually read, I should admit, though I have read her blogposts, on her blogpost blog)). And, obviously, macroeconomics has some well-known issues with predicting shit, medical science has some serious issues with publication bias and corporate influence, and social scientists are, for the most part, fucking useless idiots who need to increase their n and stop p-hacking shit. (I could link to relevant articles but I'm happy to assume that the kind of people who read my blog are big intellectual playas who have already read such articles).
But in my humble opinion, if there's one kind of area of academia that's worse than all the others, it's specifically the unrigorous part of academia which is also completely obscurantist - the academia of long sentences and pollysyllabic verbiage (or, alternatively, as one can see, for example, in some parts of economics and probably some other disciplines, the academia of obscurantist mathematics - glyphs and runes included to dazzle rather than to give a rigorous structure to a problem). One commonly used shorthand for obscurantist academia is "Postmodern" academia. Whilst I don't really think it poses much of a problem for this term that Postmodern academics themselves think it's painfully simplistic and bigoted to use one term to encompass several decades of evolving scholarship (because I don't give a shit about obscurantist scholarship), I already implied in the preceding parenthetical interjection that there is one problem with using this term as a shorthand: namely, that obscurantist academia is bigger than the parts of academia where words/phrases like "Marx", "Foucault", "Derrida", "Barthes", "Kristeva", "Lacan", "Bourdieu", "Butler", "theory", "hermeneutics", "problematics", "hegemony", "towards a", "beyond the", "territorialisation", "post-structuralist", "meta-textual", and so on, are highly frequent, and an extraordinary degree of prolixity is commonplace (see Postmodernism Generator). 
To be sure, Postmodern academia is definitely a major bastion of such obscurantism and it's probably deserved some of the specific critiques it has gotten (like these two I have linked before; http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf, http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html). Postmodern academia is the area to which the "X studies" fields (the main target of the Hoax) largely belong, along with English literature and (to a lesser extent) sociology and history (I am sure there are some gender, race-studies and English literature academics who are not so into abstruse verbiage and the French theoreticians who perfected it to an artform but prefer to write clearly (which does not necessarily mean their scholarship has merit, but I'm sure some of it is interesting and incisive and cogent and all those other nice things)). 
However, one issue with the critique of Postmodernism that fails to link Postmodern writing with obscurantism generally is that it gives Postmodern critiques an opening to say either "You just don't understand our technical language and theoretical constructs" or "You just don't like our political conclusions". This is shitty, because, in my opinion, the important thing to point out is that Postmodern obscurantism is not really any different, from an epistemological perspective, from any other kind of obscurantism, e.g. religious obscurantism, the 'deepities' of pop-philosophy and self-help books, bureaucratese, Fascist mysticism, or the obscurantism of so much of the 'canon of philosophy' going back centuries (the part that one of a crude bent of mind might classify as "counter-Enlightenment" (e.g. the whole German Idealism thing)). It's not different, from an epistemological perspective, because it's all equally vague, non-naturalistic BS, or, as I prefer to say, bad poetry. As Chomsky points out, the difference between mathematics being used properly as part of a rigorous scientific theory and polysyllables being used in a prolix sentence is that mathematics, used properly, can allow one to give a rigorous testable structure to theories and to find precise solutions to very difficult problems that one couldn't even approach without the language (think of the analytic power and beauty of a matrix (or just think of trying to do physics problems without maths lmao)). But when you decode a typical sentence of Latinate polysyllables in the works of Derrida, Lacan or Butler, it turns out either to be a thought expressible more simply or just pure gobbledegook. 
Why can't truth be found in long, turgid sentences populated with esoteric Latinate words? Well, for one thing, humans are really bad at even parsing long sentences from a memory point of view. (So, just as a kind of abstract theoretical point, supposing you did have something really deep to say, don't you think you'd want to make more of an effort?) For another thing, fuzzy words almost necessarily mean fuzzy thought and they definitely mean ambiguity; hence why a key development of the Enlightenment was this thing called a technical term (a term you explicitly define in the context of some kind of rigorous, self-contained usually mathematical framework). More to the point, I agree with the meta-philosophy and largely with the metaphysic explicated in Ladyman and Ross' magnum opus, Every Thing Must Go. I think that philosophers and theoreticians who don't practise metaphysics in the Quinean fashion, as simply a process of making rigorous the ontological commitments of our best scientific theories, are "neo-scholastics" talking nonsense for no humanly important end. Basically, the long and short of it is that science is hard, naturalistic metaphysics has to be a very humble enterprise which pays due fealty to science, and all scholarship which talks about matters of reality and existence without a serious connection to relevant scientific inquiry is BS.
Yes, ok, I admit it, I'm a "neo-positivist" (which is very different from "logical postivism", per se, because literally everyone agrees that that is a faulty doctrine for various, largely esoteric reasons I will not get into). Which, in truth, means I can't win with Pomo people, because if the other rebuttals don't stick, "Positivist" is the one they are bound to hurl. I mean, I should clarify that I don't actually like the label "neo-positivist", even though some people with similar views to mine call themselves that. What I prefer to call myself is a "neo-pragmatist structural realist", where "pragmatist" here refers to a pragmatist attitude to metaphysics, which says that we should avoid the idea that we can actually do metaphysics 'properly' and instead just accept that we should call real whatever is a projectible phenomenon or cluster of phenomena in the fully mind-independent world (a phenomenon whose postulation allows us to make systematic predictions that help us achieve goals in our navigation in the world as organisms), most of which phenomena just have to be 'read off' scientific theories, with fundamental physics taking priority simply because of its generality (see the book Every Thing Must Go(2007) for more). Basically, this means that I think a whole lot of analytic philosophy is useless, along with virtually all of Continental philosophy and X studies stuff. (Basically, what it means in practice is that when anyone ever tries to sound profound using fancy words, my reaction is "That's some nice poetry". Writing, to me, falls into one of the following categories: poetry, prose (as in prose fiction), science, failed science, or naturalistic philosophy.)
Now, I've been reading some history books lately, and I want to make clear: this is not to imply that, like, history is a waste of time if you're not going full Peter Turchin or some shit. Archival research and analysis would be necessary even for a hypothetical fully rigorous, scientific discipline of historical inquiry, and, in any case, narrativistic history is definitely at least partly distinct from mere story-telling (I don't know if Hayden White literally thought there was no difference at all, but he's definitely wrong if so; in fact, I would go so far as to say that there's a fact of the matter as to whether Inga Clendinnen's interpretation of the spearing of Arthur Phillip at Manly is more correct or scientific than the interpretation given by the English sources on which she relies (i.e. I don't take a super radical view on the epistemological constraints of conventional narrativistic historical inquiry, though I'm also no Geoffrey Elton)).
Now, I admit that much of what I just said, especially when I started using fancy analytic-philosophy terms, would be obscure, especially to people who don't know shit about philosophy, but in my defence, what I'm really doing is saying go read Every Thing Must Go to see why I think what I do. So go do that if you really care. Otherwise, fuck off.

World Cup Fury

One of the many things in this world that really gets on my nerves is the absurd lack of awareness of hindsight bias on the part of professional football commentators. Some high-profile Australian football commentators, most notably, Craig Foster (SBS) and Robbie Slater (used to do a lot of stuff on Fox Sports for the A-League, don’t know what he’s doing currently), have come out with scathing remarks about Australia’s disappointing performance in the group stage that has just passed (at least for Australia’s group), where we bowed out with only a single point after a hard-fought loss to France, a draw with Denmark, and a loss to Peru. What’s weird is that these commentators, along with everyone else who watched the games, noted that the game against France was fairly even and that we restricted France’s ability to create chances quite severely; that we created a lot more chances than Denmark, had more possession than Denmark (54% to 46%), and only lacked finishing quality and a goal-scoring instinct in the box; and that we created a lot more chances than Peru, had more possession than Peru (55% to 45%), and again lacked finishing quality and a goal-scoring instinct in the box whereas Peru were astonishingly clinical with their paltry chances to score two goals with two great strikes. The fact that we had so many chances and failed to finish any of them (our only two goals came from penalties) is, to be sure, suggestive of a specific problem (the absence of a world-class striker), although I think there was definitely just an element of bad luck also, especially in the final game. But even if you ignore the luck part, the super weird thing about the emerging critiques is that they are not even merely specifically targeted at the fact that we lack a world-class striker. I don’t get it, because every other aspect of our performances was excellent. We punched well above our weight, in terms of rankings and player dollar-value, so far as I can see. Yes, we were Asian champions in 2015, but who’s to say that we wouldn’t have beat Japan and Korea in this world cup anyway? Just because the other Asian teams superficially did better doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have beat them. Our group was tough. It’s foolish to make these determinations. And it’s just so fucking irrational to judge a team so harshly and sweepingly by the points made in three games.

The key thing to remember is that there’s nothing remotely deterministic about football-match results. We know this with high confidence. Here’s a good piece of evidence: the world’s most sophisticated model for making such predictions just got something very badly wrong (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611397/machine-learning-predicts-world-cup-winner/).

On this subject, we shouldn’t be so harsh on Germany either. I think it’s fair to say they’ve had bad luck this world cup, too. Yes, they’ve lacked inspiration in attack, but they’ve created a lot of chances still. Shit happens.

Of course, nobody will listen to this. Everyone thinks they have something smart to say about football teams. Whenever a team fails, everyone always thinks there’s a clear reason. Nobody gives a fuck about the truth, or reality. Truly, nobody gives a fuck about reality. And it fucking pisses me off.