De-Development Lecture Materials - HSS14

Threads Related To The UMich File

“Collapse Inevitable” — Ahmed

Their Card — 1NC Collapse Inevitable

Economic collapse is inevitable – peak oil, climate change, food and water scarcity – continued growth leads to widespread instability – transition now solves quality of life and inequality

Ahmed 6/4

- Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development (IPRD), an independent think tank focused on the study of violent conflict, and taught at the Department of International Relations, University of

Sussex (2014, Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The Guardian, “Scientists vindicate 'Limits to Growth' – urge investment in

'circular economy'”, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/scientists-limits-togrowth-vindicated-investment-transition-circular-economy // SM)

According to a new peer-reviewed scientific report, industrial civilisation is likely to deplete its low-cost mineral resources within the next century, with debilitating impacts for the global economy and key infrastructure s within the coming decade.

The study, the 33rd report to the Club of Rome, is authored by Prof Ugo Bardi of the University of Florence's Earth Sciences Department, and includes contributions from a wide range of senior scientists across relevant disciplines. The Club of Rome is a Swiss-based global think tank consisting of current and former heads of state, UN bureaucrats, government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders. Its first report in 1972

, The

Limits to Growth

, was conducted by a scientific team at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), and warned that limited availability of natural resources relative to rising costs would undermine continued economic growth

by around the second decade of the 21st century.

Although widely ridiculed, recent scientific reviews confirm that the original report's projections in its 'base scenario' remain robust.

In 2008

, Australia's federal government scientific research agency CSIRO concluded

that The Limits to Growth forecast of potential " global ecological and economic collapse coming up in the middle of the

21st Century" due to convergence of "peak oil, climate change, and food and water security", is "on-track."

Actual current trends in these areas "resonate strongly with the overshoot and collapse displayed in the book's 'business-as-usual scenario.'" In 2009, American Scientist published similar findings by other scientists. That review, by leading systems ecologists Prof Charles Hall of State University of New York and Prof

John W Day of Louisiana State University, concluded that while the limits-to-growth model's "predictions of extreme pollution and population decline have not come true", the model results are

: "... almost exactly on course some 35 years later in 2008

(with a few appropriate assumptions)... it is important to recognise that its predictions have not been invalidated and in fact seem quite on target.

We are not aware of any model made by economists that is as accurate over such a long time span.

" The new

Club of Rome report says that: "The phase of mining by humans is a spectacular but very brief episode in the geological history of the planet… The limits to mineral extraction are not limits of quantity; they are limits of energy. Extracting minerals takes energy, and the more dispersed the minerals are, the more energy is needed… Only conventional ores can be profitably mined with the amounts of energy we can produce today." The combination of mineral depletion, associated radioactive and heavy metal pollution, and the accumulation of greenhouse gases

from fossil fuel exploitation is leaving our descendants the "heavy legacy" of a virtually terraformed world:

"The Earth will never be the same; it is being transformed into a new and different planet." Drawing on the work of leading climate scientists including James

Hansen

, the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the report warns that a continuation of

'business as usual' exploitation of the world's fossil fuels could potentially trigger runaway global warming that

, in several centuries or thousands of years, permanently destroy the planet's capacity to host life.

Despite this verdict, the report argues that

neither a

"collapse" of

the current structure of civilisation, nor the "extinction" of the human

species are unavoidable.

A fundamental reorganisation of the way societies produce, manage and consume resources could support a new high-technology civilisation

, but this

would entail a new " circular economy" premised on wide-scale practices of recycling

across production and consumption chains, a wholesale shift to renewable energy, application of agro-ecological methods to food production, and

with all that

, very different types of social structures.

In the absence of a major technological breakthrough in clean energy production such as nuclear fusion – which so far seems improbable - recycling, conservation and efficiency in the management of the planet's remaining accessible mineral resources will need to be undertaken carefully and cooperatively, with the assistance of cutting-edge science. the report says,

Limits to economic growth

, or even "degrowth", do not need to imply an end to prosperity, but rather require a conscious decision by societies to lower their environmental impacts, reduce wasteful consumption, and increase efficiency

– changes which could in fact increase quality of life while lowering inequality.

These findings of the new Club of Rome report have been confirmed by other major research projects. In January last year

, a detailed scientific study by

Anglia Ruskin University's Global Sustainability Institute

commissioned by the Institute and

Faculty of Actuaries, found "overwhelming" evidence for resource constraints:

"... across a range of resources over the short (years) and medium (decades) term…

Resource constraints will

, at best, increase energy and commodity prices over the next century and, at worse, trigger a long term decline in the global economy and civil unrest."

The good news, though is that "If governments and economic agents anticipate resource constraints and act in a constructive manner, many of the worst affects can be avoided."

According to Dr Aled Jones, lead author of the study and head of the Global Sustainability Institute: "Resource constraints will, at best, steadily increase energy and commodity prices over the next century and, at worst, could represent financial disaster, with the assets of pension schemes effectively wiped out and pensions reduced to negligible levels." It is imperative to recognise that " dwindling resources raise the possibility of a limit to economic growth in the medium term."

In his 2014 report to the Club of Rome, Prof Bardi takes a long-term view of the prospects for humanity, noting that the many technological achievements of industrial societies mean there is still a chance now to ensure the survival and prosperity of a future post-industrial civilization: "It is not easy to imagine the details of the society that will emerge on an Earth stripped of its mineral ores but still maintaining a high technological level. We can say, however, that most of the crucial technologies for our society can function without rare minerals or with very small amounts of them, although with modifications and at lower efficiency." Although expensive and environmentally intrusive industrial structures "like highways and plane travel" would become obsolete, technologies like "the Internet, computers, robotics, long-range communications, public transportation, comfortable homes, food security, and more" could remain attainable with the right approach - even if societies undergo disastrous crises in the short-run. Bardi is surprisingly matter-of-fact about the import of his study. "I am not a doomster," he told me. "Unfortunately, depletion is a fact of life, not unlike death and taxes. We cannot ignore depletion - just like it is not a good idea to ignore death and taxes… "If we insist in investing most of what remains for fossil fuels; then we are truly doomed. Yet I think that we still have time to manage the transition.

To counter depletion, we must invest a substantial amount of the remaining resources in renewable energy and efficient recycling technologies - things which are not subjected to depletion.

And we need to do that before is too late, that is before the energy return on investment of fossil fuels has declined so much that we have nothing left to invest."

Response to Ahmed

Reject their Ahmed evidence — it’s junk science.

The highlighted portion of this evidence internally cites:

1. Joseph Tainter — Professor in the Department of Environment and Society in the College of Natural Resources at Utah

State University, holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University, author of the book The Collapse of Complex

Societies (cited by the article Ahmed is describing)

2. Mark Sagoff — Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, former Pew

Scholar in Conservation and the Environment, former Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Rochester, author of the books The Economy of the Earth and Price,

Principle, and the Environment

Kloor 14

— Keith Kloor, Faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, Adjunct Faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, former Fellow at the Center for Environmental

Journalism at the University of Colorado, former Editor of Audubon magazine, holds an M.A. in Environmental Policy from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 2014 (“Judging the Merits of a Media-Hyped ‘Collapse’ Study,” Collide-a-

Scape—a Discover magazine blog, March 21 st , Available Online at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/03/21/judging-merits-media-hyped-collapsestudy/#.U9hmLoBdXXx, Accessed 07-29-2014)

As I discussed in the previous entry, a recent Guardian blog post

(structured loosely as a news article) made worldwide headlines. It was trumpeted

by the Guardian blogger as an “exclusive”

; he was given a copy of a paper soon to be published in the journal Ecological Economics. Because he didn’t provide any context for the paper

(the authors were not interviewed, nor were any independent experts), I thought I’d jump into this vacuum.

Let’s start with the first paragraph of the study’s abstract:

There are widespread concerns that current trends in resource-use are unsustainable, but possibilities of overshoot/collapse remain controversial. Collapses have occurred frequently in history, often followed by centuries of economic, intellectual, and population decline. Many different natural and social phenomena have been invoked to explain specific collapses, but a general explanation remains elusive.

Anthropologists are loathe to make sweeping generalizations about the dissolution and/or reorganization of prehistoric cultures. This hasn’t stopped popular narratives about carrying capacity from taking hold and remaining immune to mounting evidence that challenges prevailing views.

Let’s return to the study’s abstract:

In this paper, we build a human population dynamics model by adding accumulated wealth and economic inequality to a predator-prey model of humans and nature. The model structure, and simulated scenarios that offer significant implications, are explained. Four equations describe the evolution of Elites, Commoners,

Nature, and Wealth. The model shows Economic Stratification or Ecological Strain can independently lead to collapse, in agreement with the historical record.

In other words, overconsumption by elites and/or resource depletion lead to societal collapse, the authors assert.

Early in the paper, they walk us through the historical record, citing, among other examples, the fall of the Roman Empire and the crumbling of ancient societies from Southeast Asia to the American Southwest as case studies that suggest “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” The question this raises, they write, is

“whether modern civilization is similarly susceptible” to a crash.

One of the questions nagging at me when I read this study was whether prehistoric societies are appropriate analogues for our 21st century world. Oxford’s Steve Rayner, an anthropologist I contacted, provided valuable context:

Whether historical empires were fragile or robust depends on your time perspective and how you divide up historical epochs.

But the authors insist in their paper:

The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.

Rayner counters:

But China as a civilization dates from at least 2070 BCE, that makes it 4000 years old at present. Just because it has been eclipsed by the west for a mere couple of centuries should not blind us to this. The first Egyptian dynasty began around 3000 BCE and the Ptolemys collapsed in 30 BCE when Egypt was incorporated into the

Roman Empire, which lasted another 400-500 years, before itself morphing into the Holy Roman Empire and

Byzantium respectively, the latter morphing into the Ottoman Empire. These seem to me to be pretty long epochs in human terms, if not in geological ones. Nothing lasts for ever and arguably while individual human societies come and go humanity seems to be better off in general today than ever before.

He also said that “the very idea of collapse is ideologically loaded” and offered a suggestion:

For a much more balanced approach to the issue of technological innovation and sustainability I recommend you take a look at the final chapter of Joseph Tainter’s book “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”

As it happens, I’m very familiar with Tainter’s work, that book in particular. And since Tainter, a Utah State University anthropologist, was repeatedly cited by the authors, I already thought it would be good to get his thoughts. His first response was curt:

Overall I found the paper to be trivial and deeply flawed. It is amazing that anyone would take it seriously

, but clearly some people do (at least in the media).

You are correct that they cite my work a lot, but they seem not to

have been influenced by it, or even to understand it

. I suspect they were strongly influenced by the work of Peter Turchin— for which, please see the attached (short) review.

He then promised to send a more detailed response, which he emailed several days later. Here it is in full (emphasis mine)

It is interesting how collapse theories mirror broader societal issues. During the

Cold War, we had theories ascribing collapse to elite mismanagement, class conflict, and peasant revolts. As global warming became a public issue, scholars

of the past began to discover that ancient societies collapsed due to climate change. As we have become concerned about sustainability and resource use today, we have learned that ancient societies collapsed due to depletion of critical resources

, such as soil and forests.

Now that inequality and “the 1%” are topics of public discourse, we have this paper focusing largely on elite resource consumption

.

Models depend on the assumptions that go into them. Thus the first four pages of the paper are the part most worth discussing.

The paper has many flaws. The first is that “collapse” is not defined, and the examples given conflate different processes and outcomes. Thus the authors are not even clear what topic they are addressing

.

Collapses have occurred among both hierarchical and non-hierarchical societies, and the authors even discuss the latter (although without understanding the implications for their thesis). Thus, although the authors purport to offer a universal model of collapse

(involving elite consumption), their own discussion undercuts that argument

.

Contrary to the authors’ unsubstantiated assertion, there is no evidence that elite consumption caused ancient societies to collapse. The authors simply have no empirical basis for this assumption, and that point alone undercuts most of the paper

.

The authors assert that there is a “two-class structure of modern society,” and indeed their analysis depends on this being the case. The basis for this assertion comes from two papers published in obscure physics journals

.

That’s right, this assertion does not come from peer-review social science. It comes from journals that have no expertise in this topic, and whose audience is unqualified to evaluate the assertion critically

.

In other words, there is no empirical or substantiated theoretical basis for this paper’s model

.

In modeling, once one has established one’s assumptions and parameters, it is a simple matter to program the mathematics that will give the outcome one wants or expects. For this reason, models must be

critically evaluated. Unfortunately, most readers are unable to evaluate a model’s assumptions. Instead, readers are impressed by equations and

colored graphs, and assume thereby that a model mimics real processes

and outcomes. That seems to be the case with this paper, and it represents the worst in modeling

.

Others I queried, such as the Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil, and George Mason University’s Mark Sagoff, noted the model’s Limits to Growth echo.

Sagoff was bluntly dismissive:

I skimmed the article

yesterday and saw that it was the Club of Rome all over again — the computer that cried wolf

.

I have no doubt that many empires fell as others rose. Now the average man lives better than the ancient emperor. We have seen creative destruction before and we will see it again. But what destroys improves.

There is nothing

here [ in the paper

] that was not presented in the

19

60s and

19

70s by

Paul

Ehrlich and other “Cassandras”

as they called themselves.

Their views, repeated in this [Guardian] article and study, have been completely discredited

.

Sagoff ended on a down note:

I am sorry to have seen the paper you sent — it is discouraging. Nobody learns anything or bothers to try.

So what do the authors of the study think of this harsh criticism? (I’m still waiting to hear back from additional social and environmental scientists. I’d like to know if others have a more charitable take on the paper). I’ve contacted two of the three co-authors repeatedly this week, asking to interview them about their paper–including how it’s been characterized in the media and the critiques lodged in this space. But they have declined. They say they would rather wait to speak to the press until their paper is published in several weeks.

If that’s the case, then I think they will come to regret giving a Guardian writer an advance peek for a story ahead of publication. A second wave of media interest is unlikely to be triggered by the paper’s official publication.

Perhaps the authors are fine with that. One of them, Eugenia Kalnay, a University of Maryland atmospheric scientist, did convey to me, via email, her approval of the Guardian article:

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed wrote an excellent discussion based on a pre-publication draft of the paper.

Ahmed wrote an uncritical appraisal of the study. He didn’t bother to inquire about the merits of the model or its results

. If Kalnay and her colleagues would like to engage in actual discussion of their paper, I encourage them to visit this space. I will gladly post their responses.

Reject evidence quoting or citing the Ahmed article — it is bad journalism.

Kloor 14

— Keith Kloor, Faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, Adjunct Faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, former Fellow at the Center for Environmental

Journalism at the University of Colorado, former Editor of Audubon magazine, holds an M.A. in Environmental Policy from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 2014 (“About that Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial

Civilization,” Collide-a-Scape—a Discover magazine blog, March 21 st , Available Online at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/03/21/popular-guardian-story-collapse-industrialcivilization/#.U9hlHIBdXXw, Accessed 07-29-2014)

The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted:

[Tweet omitted]

If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I want to know more about that.

Click.

The piece cuts to the chase in the opener:

A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

What follows is a straightforward summary of the paper, which the Guardian writer tells us has been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal called Ecological Economics.

I’m going to discuss the actual paper separately in the second part of this post. First, let’s talk about the Guardian writeup, its author, and how his piece went global, the latter of which is a sad commentary on journalism today.

Technically, the story appears on a blog in

the environment section of the Guardian. The blog’s host is

Nafeez

Ahmed

, who in his Guardian bio describes himself as “a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar.”

Since joining the Guardian’s blogging network

in 2013,

Ahmed has carved out

what I would call the doomsday beat. He highlights

individuals and academic papers that reinforce the thesis of his

2011 documentary,

“

The Crisis of Civilization

,” which is about

how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

In a post last year, I briefly mentioned him, saying, “

If you want a tour guide to the apocalypse,

Ahmed is your guy

.” Understandably, he didn’t appreciate this backhanded compliment.

In fairness to him, there is a seemingly never-ending supply of journal papers with apocalyptic themes to choose from.

A good example

, of course, is the collapse paper he disingenuously hyped as being

“NASA-sponsored.”

(You’ll soon understand why that was deceptive.) Evidently, Ahmed was shown the paper by its authors ahead of publication, which he turned into an article/post with this headline:

Nasa-funded study: Industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

Ahmed thinks of himself as a journalist, so he writes

many of his blog posts in a superficial news story format

. He even refers to some of his posts as “exclusives,” which is how he characterized his write-up on the supposedly funded NASA study.

Journalistic gloss

, however, doesn’t mask fundamental journalistic shortcomings

.

In the collapse paper

Ahmed

wrote about last week, he explains how the authors came to their conclusions, sprinkling in quotes from the paper. But he provides no reaction to the study from independent experts

. If he questioned the three co-authors themselves, you wouldn’t know, since they are not quoted in his piece.

To Ahmed, getting an exclusive apparently means not having to do any actual reporting

.

On twitter, Ahmed was challenged to respond to rebuttals of the study he uncritically accepted. He demurred: “I’m just the reporter- ask the study authors.”

Chew on that for a second.

Ahmed’s summary

of the soon-to-be published Ecological Economics paper at his Guardian blog–which he thought of as a big scoop– wouldn’t pass Journalism 101

. Nonetheless, it was picked up by many other outlets around the world and became a sensation on social media. He was thrilled:

[Tweet omitted]

Naturally, the Daily Mail jumped all over it, as did the New York Post, which headlined its piece, “NASA Predicts the

End of Western Civilization.”

Other headlines included: The National Journal: “Here’s How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse”; The Times of India:

“NASA-Funded Study Warns of Collapse of Civilization in Coming Decades”; and Popular Science: “NASA-Sponsored

Study Warns of Possible Collapse of Civilization.”

Do you notice anything familiar about those headlines?

NASA

did and was pretty steamed. It recently issued a statement saying that the collapse paper was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity

. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions

.

So much for the sexy NASA angle that was undoubtedly a big selling point

. Not that it matters anymore. The marginal NASA connection was played up and successfully dangled as click bait. Mission

Accomplished, Guardian editors and Ahmed.

So what else fell through the cracks on this story? Well, if you bother to read through all the herdlike media coverage of the study, you’ll notice that every piece essentially duplicates what the Guardian published

. As far as I can tell, all the other similarly sensationalist articles did was reproduce or restate what appeared in the

Guardian

. And we know how much reporting went into that big exclusive!

Nobody from these other outlets talked to the study’s authors or solicited

opinion from independent experts. Everyone willingly ceded the story to the

Guardian

. After teasing its readers with a few excerpts, PopSci gushed:

You should really head over to the Guardian for the full story; it’s worth reading.

This was not an isolated sentiment. Many people retweeted the story, including journalists in my twitter feed. There were a couple of skeptical outliers, some folks who know about mathematical models and were incredulous after reading both the study and the Guardian story. One is Robert Wilson, a UK Mathematical Ecology PhD Student who wrote up his impressions at his personal blog. Another is the U.S. science journalist David Appell, who offered his thoughts on the study’s model and (like Wilson) also took note of Ahmed’s conspiracy theorist leanings.

The huge, uncritical pick-up of the Guardian story perturbed me

. Why was everyone so quick and seemingly content to parrot a story that contained no actual reporting?

After all, it was just a blogger’s interpretive summary of an unpublished journal paper

. Why didn’t anyone reach out to the paper’s authors or bother to call a few sources to examine the merits of the study?

Their reading of the study is wrong — it radically oversimplifies. Ahmed is a discredited hack.

Wilson 14

— Robert Wilson, Ph.D. Candidate in Mathematical Ecology at the University of Strathclyde, holds a

Masters in Research in Mathematics in the Living Environment from the University of York, 2014 (“No, NASA Does Not

Think Civilization Is About To Collapse,” Carbon Counter—a blog about climate change and environmentalism, March

16 th , Available Online at http://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/truly-inane-apocalyptic-journalism-at-theguardian/, Accessed 07-29-2014)

I cannot claim to know how much the Guardian pay their in house apocalypse merchant Nafeez Ahmed, but I hope it is not much.

Not

really a regular journalist,

Mr.

Ahmed runs the Earth Insight blog

“hosted”

(does “hosted” mean the Guardian get the stuff for nothing?) by the Guardian.

If your idea of journalism is someone waking up each morning and then doing a Google Scholar search and credulously reporting every piece of half-baked research that backs up that journalist’s prejudices then

Mr.

Ahmed is your guy

.

Mr.

Ahmed spent a large part of the 2000s

going around concocting conspiracy theories about September 11th

[update: the link to Mr. Ahmed's crackpot conspiracy theories has been removed from his website in the day since I posted this (you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to draw a conclusion).

Fortunately you can still read it using the archive.is website here.], telling us that the US government was partly behind the whole thing

. Back then he was doing the rounds of 9/11 truth conferences, today, sadly, the Guardian has been foolish enough to give him a platform

.

However he has since moved on to all things environmental, and he has two key themes: civilization is about to collapse and we are running out of everything

. On the latter it is best to picture a man who if asked to write about TV talent shows would take the “we are running out of 18 year olds with enough talent to appear on X Factor” angle.

So we are running out of oil, coal and uranium. And Mr. Ahmed has the research to back himself up. Here he is in 2010 telling us that a study in “Science” (the quote marks are used because it wasn’t Science) that peak coal would have occurred by now. Well, this bizarre prophecy has been shown to be nonsense by China’s still booming coal mines. The same piece also claims that global oil production was in “inexorable” decline since 2008. Well, the numbers are clear on that prophecy. As Vaclav Smil remarked “Is it too much to hope that even some catastrophists and peak-oil cultists will find it impossible to ignore those numbers?” In Mr. Ahmed’s case the answer is almost certainly no.

But normally I would just ignore this type of crackpot, however this week he has dived into theoretical ecology (which is my day job), and made an even bigger fool of himself.

A “Nasa funded study” apparently shows that industrial civilization is on the verge of collapse. (sidenote: anyone familiar with Mr. Ahmed’s approach will note that he likes to put high emphasis on credentials, in this case Nasa, as

Christopher Hitchens delightfully mocked here.)

So far this piece of journalism has been tweeted over 6,500 times and shared on Facebook 100,000 times. Social media needs more bullshit checking. (And these are statistics I have updated since I first wrote this. Originally it was 3,500 and

40,000.)

Let’s get first things out of the way. There appears to be no evidence that the paper in question has been peer-reviewed.

Mr. Ahmed claims it has been accepted for publication by Ecological Economics. Yet, the paper is not on the Ecological

Economics website, although it is in submission.

This kind of thing should be unacceptable from a reputable newspaper like the Guardian. If a journalist says a study has been peer reviewed, then an editor should make damn sure that it has been peer reviewed. Otherwise no shortage of nonsense could appear in newspapers.

Given that Mr. Ahmed does not link to the paper or give its name a Google search is necessary. This throws up a paper called “A Minimal Model for Human and Nature Interaction.” The lead author name is correct, and that Nasa funded part that Mr. Ahmed so delights in is there.

So should we now worry about the imminent collapse of industrial civilization?

Well, the word “minimal model” in the title should give us a hint. All of the complexities of humanity appear to be reduced to eight equations. Yes you read that correctly, eight equations

.

Now, I do not model human civilization as my day job. Instead I model plankton. If you want to do a half adequate job of modelling plankton populations you will probably need more than eight equations. And I think humans are more complex than plankton, but some times I have doubts.

A model with this few equations will always provide egregious predictions about “industrial collapse”.

Anyone who spends more than two minutes looking on Gapminder will recognise that inter-country differences are so vast that using eight equations to accurately model humanity is like replicating the Sistine Chapel using a crayon

.

The model also assumes that birth rates are fixed

. Again spend some time on Gapminder and see how meaningful this assumption. Most problematic is that they only model renewable resources. Modern civilization is fundamentally dependent on the provision of non-renewable resources on a huge scale.

It also assumes that there is a fixed carrying capacity for populations. Carrying capacity itself is a deeply problematic concept

. Think about Britain prior to the Industrial

Revolution. If Britain had attempted to power the Industrial Revolution with wood it would have rapidly run out of trees.

As Tony Wrigley argued in his fine book on the subject the transition to coal allowed Britain to escape the limits of a purely organic society. This makes it clear that this model, in its current form, offers limited insights into whether civilization will persist over the twenty first century.

Not that this means the research in question is rubbish. They aren’t aiming to model human civilization, but are aiming to provide some general theoretical insights into how civilizations might collapse.

Models start simple and over time complexity is added in, and so you cannot criticize scientists for this, unless they make grand claims on the basis of simple, crude models

.

And this

of course is what

Mr.

Ahmed does. And this is what he always does

.

The authors themselves concede our arguments.

Motesharrei et al. 14

— Safa Motesharrei, Research Assistant at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis

Center and Ph.D. candidate in Applied Mathematics/Public Policy at the University of Maryland-College Park, et al., with Eugenia Kalnay, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Science at the

University of Maryland, and Jorge Rivas, Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Global Environment and Society, interviewed by Kitty van Hensbergen, 2014 (“Q&A: when a theoretical article is misinterpreted,” Elsevier Connect, April 15 th , Available

Online at http://www.elsevier.com/connect/q-and-a-when-a-theoretical-article-is-misinterpreted, Accessed 07-29-2014)

Recently, a research paper was written about in the media before it was published. The coverage spread

around the world with some misinterpreting the

article's findings as a doomsday prediction of the collapse of society

.

The paper – "Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies" – was published this month in the journal Ecological Economics.

The authors

– Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas and Dr. Eugenia Kalnay – have described their study as

"a thought experiment," explaining that it is not intended to make specific predictions about a particular current society

. They build upon an existing model: the predatorprey model. A similar approach was taken in the 1998 article by Drs. James A. Brander and M. Scott Taylor for The

American Economics Review, "The Simple Economics of Easter Island," which attempts to solve for the equilibrium of renewable resources and population, indicating that once off balance, a society may collapse.

However, for this new paper, the authors introduce inequality and accumulated wealth into the equations to signal how unequal wealth distribution could lead to different outcomes, running the model to reflect different situations.

To put their research in perspective, we emailed the authors questions. Here they are with the authors' written response:

Q: Can you summarize the main findings of your research?

In this paper, we show that two factors can independently lead to collapse: Ecological Strain and Economic Stratification.

We also show that there are two routes to such collapses, which we call Type-L and Type-N collapses. Type-N starts with exhaustion of Nature but Type-L results from the disappearance of Labor because Elite consumption does not leave sufficient resources to meet the needs of Commoners. These two distinct routes to a collapse show over-exploitation of

Labor, not just of Nature, can cause a societal collapse.

We also show that a sustainable steady state, with the population equal to the Carrying Capacity, is reachable in different types of societies. This requires making rational choices for population, depletion, consumption, and stratification. Very importantly, the experiments show that if population does not overshoot carrying capacity by too much, it would still be possible to eventually converge to it. However, if the overshoot is too large, a full collapse would be hard to avoid.

The HANDY model shows us that Carrying Capacity (the long-term sustainable level of population at a given level of consumption) is the level of population at the time Accumulated Wealth starts to decline, which makes it easy to estimate it in the model. This is because, if the population at a given level of consumption is below the Carrying Capacity, the total consumption is lower than the level of depletion that Nature can maintain, and therefore Wealth can continue accumulating. However, if the population (at a given level of consumption) is above the Carrying Capacity, the total consumption is not covered by the level of depletion that Nature can maintain, and the Accumulated Wealth decreases.

Since we live in an era where we are primarily relying on non-renewable resources, which are by definition unsustainable, the population and its consumption can grow beyond the Carrying Capacity level while still being able to accumulate wealth, because we are rapidly drawing down the natural resources accumulated by Nature over hundreds of millions of years (i.e., fossil fuels).

In further modeling we have done, where we model the use of non-renewables, we find that these non-renewables allow population to rise by an order of magnitude higher than with renewables alone. Thus, the use of non-renewables postpones the collapse, but then when the collapse happens, it is much deeper. (Rivas, Motesharrei and Kalnay, 2014, in preparation).

Furthermore, as we point out in the article, the consumption of natural resources has both depletion and pollution effects, both of which have to be taken into account on the carrying capacity of the natural system, as the HANDY model does.

When non-renewable resources (e.g., fossil fuels) are consumed rapidly over just a short time, as we are doing now, this can introduce a quantity of pollution (e.g., the stored carbon accumulated over hundreds of millions of years) large enough to affect the entire global system (e.g., causing climate change). Thus, the rapid release of vast quantities of previously stored carbon is creating changes in the world's climate system that are in turn impacting back on the human system. In addition, these changes to the global climate can create additional positive feedbacks leading to greater climate change, such as the release of previously stored methane in the now melting permafrost, or the decreasing albedo due to the melting of polar sea ice. So the consumption of non-renewables does not occur without significant effects on the entire system.

Carrying Capacity depends on two sets of parameters encompassing properties of both the human system and the natural system. On the socio-economic side, depletion rate, consumption rate, rate of change of population, and degree of inequality can influence the Carrying Capacity. All of these factors can be adjusted by various policies that societies may choose to implement. On the natural system side, Nature Capacity (maximum size of a natural resource) and Nature regeneration rate (rate at which a renewable natural resource can be replenished) can influence the Carrying Capacity.

Although these parameters are properties of the natural system, humans can, and do, change them. For example, by replacing parts of a forest with a city, or by over-depleting rivers flowing into a lake and subsequently drying out the lake, we reduce the Nature Capacity.

A few media outlets interpreted the article as a prediction for the collapse of society. Did you envision any of the outcomes to be likely in reality?

In the introduction of our article, we give a brief empirical description of the repeated recurrence of the real historical phenomenon of rise and collapse throughout the world. We built a mathematical model and investigated two of the potential mechanisms that can explain this cycle of real historical rises and collapses. While this paper focuses on variations in depletion and inequality, the HANDY model can also simulate the effects of other factors that can affect sustainability, such as birth rates, consumption rates, and variations of nature's capacity and regeneration rate.

The model is not intended to describe actual individual cases

, but rather to provide a general framework that allows carrying out "thought experiments" for the phenomenon of collapse and, importantly, to test changes that could avoid it.

Of course we recognize that, as with any complex system, many mechanisms were involved in the real historical cases

, but the model is meant to represent the dynamics of two of these mechanisms (depletion and inequality). The model can have implications for the reality of the modern world. Thus our model structure is supported by both theoretical and empirical arguments.

The paper introduces a new method of studying coupled human-nature systems. We build a minimal mathematical model that can capture repeated historical patterns. We test our model by comparing the behavior we find in our experiment results to the general trends seen many times in the past societies.

Our article does not make a "doomsday prediction of the collapse of society."

In fact, we state in multiple locations in the article that our model shows that a sustainable outcome is possible, including right in the abstract, where we state that the model shows that "collapse can be avoided, and population can reach a steady state."

Ahmed has no answer to our arguments.

Wilson 14


Masters in Research in Mathematics in the Living Environment from the University of York, 2014 (“The Guardian

Deserves Better Than Nafeez Ahmed,” Carbon Counter—a blog about climate change and environmentalism, March 22 nd ,

Available Online at http://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/i-do-not-understand-what-i-am-talking-about/,

Accessed 07-29-2014)

Nafeez

Ahmed appears to have jumped the shark, if such a thing is possible in his case

. On Friday Keith

Kloor provided a thorough critique of both

Mr.

Ahmed’s journalistic methods and of his story claiming that a “NASA funded study” found that civilization may be about to collapse

. You would think that Mr. Ahmed would have taken a step back when NASA publicly distanced themselves from the claim they supported the study, but no.

Instead Mr.

Ahmed comes out with guns blazing claiming NASA did fund the study.

This is truly bizarre behaviour. He quotes NASA saying they “did not solicit” the research. This should end the debate

. What does he imagine NASA means by “did not solicit”?

Mr.

Ahmed however persists in claiming NASA was behind the study. At this point someone at the Guardian should step in and stop this man from damaging its reputation, hand him a dictionary, and require that he take s basic journalism training

.

Everything else in the piece is little but an appeal to authority

. This is all rather curious.

A man who spends half of his time concocting conspiracy theories about authorities spends the other half appealing to authority

. (He also seems to be spend part of his time removing 9/11 conspiracy theories from his website, as I documented here.)

In his piece he also refers to me as an “obscure student”, who “does not understand what they are talking about.” This may or may not be true, but the evidence he presents is non-existent. I provided a number of specific criticisms of the applicability of the HANDY model to modern civilizations, and he has responded by quoting a general statement about the model by Rodrigo Castro. This makes it clear that it is Mr. Ahmed who does not understand what he is talking about.

If he did he could very easily address my specific criticisms. Instead he dangles quotes in front of the reader in the hope that this will convey some impression of understanding. Anyone familiar with Mr. Ahmed’s writings will recognise the approach.

And I should also point out that the lead author of the paper he cites is also a fellow PhD student. Perhaps he too should be called an “obscure student.”

“New paper by PhD student” certainly lacks the pizazz of “NASA funded study”

, does it not?

And it would be a much more accurate reflection of reality than that presented in

Mr.

Ahmed’s “journalism.”

Similarly he is incapable of responding to any of the criticisms made by the scientists in

Keith

Kloor’s piece

. For example he responds to remarks made by

Joseph

Tainter by pointing out that Tainter is not always correct. Is this an argument?

Again, Mr.

Ahmed’s complete unwillingness to address specific criticisms is telling

.

Things get worse when he essentially libels Keith Kloor by claiming that he is a closet climate change denier. Mr. Ahmed then rapidly switches from being an upholder of scientific consensus to someone who denigrates it, quoting a group of scientists who challenge the scientific consensus that GM crops are safe. Mr. Kloor’s upholding of the scientific consensus on the safety of GM crops is absurdly held up as evidence that he is a “junk” journalist.

I guess this kind of thing can be expected of someone who believes the US government had a role in

flying two planes into the World Trade Centre on

September 11th

2001.

Anything goes for the average conspiracy theorist, and we should neither demand or expect intellectual and moral coherence from them

.

Factually, NASA disavowed this study.

Wall 14

— Mike Wall, Senior Writer at Space.com, 2014 (“NASA Clarifies Its Role in Civilization-Collapse Study,”

Space.com, March 20 th , Available Online at http://www.space.com/25160-nasa-statement-civilization-collapsestudy.html, Accessed 07-29-2014)

NASA is distancing itself from a new study

that investigates how unsustainable resource exploitation and rising income inequality could potentially lead to the collapse of human civilization as we know it.

NASA officials released this statement on the study

today (March 20): "

A soon-to-be published research paper

, 'Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of

Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies' by University of Maryland researchers Safa Motesharrei and

Eugenia Kalnay, and University of Minnesota's Jorge Rivas, was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers

utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions

."

The study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Ecological Economics, received a lot of attention recently. For example, a story about it that ran last Friday (March 14) in the British newspaper The Guardian had been shared more than 113,000 times on Facebook as of today (March 20) and was picked up by Gizmodo and other media outlets. Many of the media reports about the forthcoming paper have made much of NASA's involvement.

The

Guardian's story

, for example, sports the following headline: "Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?" Such accounts motivated the space agency to issue the statement as a clarification

.

Yes, Ahmed is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

Wilson 14


Masters in Research in Mathematics in the Living Environment from the University of York, 2014 (“Missing Links. Nafeez

Ahmed Tries To Cover Up His 9/11 Trutherism,” Carbon Counter—a blog about climate change and environmentalism,

March 17 th , Available Online at http://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/missing-links/, Accessed 07-29-2014)

I wrote a piece about

Nafeez

Ahmed

yesterday, drawing attention to the questionable nature of all of his journalism and why the Guardian

newspaper is giving him a platform. Part of my piece referenced his long history of conspiracy theorist

ranting about September 11th, with him frequently implying that the US government had a hand

in on the whole shameful business.

To provide evidence that

Mr.

Ahmed is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist I linked to apiece he wrote, entitled “Interrogating 9/11.”

This piece was published on his website on the 11th of September 2006.

In the day since I linked to it he has removed the piece from his website

. If you search Google for “Nafeez Ahmed Interrogating 9/11” you can still see the piece prominently located at the top of your google search, but click and you find that the page no longer exists.

However the web is written in ink

, as a character in The Social Network observed. Mr.

Ahmed’s conspiracy theorist ranting is still available for all to read via archive.is

here. Mr.

Ahmed obviously wants people to take him seriously, and not recognise that he is a crank with a conspiracy theorist bent

. This explains why he would remove this article from his website.

Behaviour like this should be unacceptable for someone who claims to be a journalist

.

That

Mr.

Ahmed is given a platform by the Guardian is bad enough, that he is allowed to continue behaving in this fashion is far, far worse

.

“Collapse Good/Transition” — Lewis

Their Card — 1NC Transition

Econ collapse creates a mindset shift towards small local civilizations – this solves the environment and war globally

Lewis 2K

Chris H. Lewis, Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder (Chris H, “The Coming Age of Scarcity:

Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-First Century” p.44 – p.45)//Roetlin

With the collapse of global industrial civilization, smaller, autonomous

, local and regional civilizations

, cultures, and polities will emerge.

We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely accompany this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional polities

. John Cobb has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is working in

Kerala, India.

After the collapse of global industrial civilization, First and Third

World peoples won't have the material resources, biological capital, and energy and human resources to re-establish global industrial civilization.

Forced by economic necessity to become dependent on local resources and ecosystems for their survival, peoples throughout the world will work to conserve and restore their environments.

Those societies that destroy their local environments and economies, as modern people so often do, will themselves face collapse and ruin.

The Broader Context of Lewis’s Argument

Economic collapse is inevitable. Growth can only delay the collapse of modern industrial civilization, not prevent it.

Lewis 98

— Chris H. Lewis, Instructor in the Sewall American Studies Program at the University of Colorado, 1998

(“The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Modern Industrial Civilization,” The Coming Age of

Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor

Wallimann, Published by Syracuse University Press, ISBN 0815627440, p. 45-46)

Thus, the rapid expansion of modern industrial civilization

since the 1600s, which modern peoples understand as progress, is destroying the earth and threatening the human future

(Hauchier and Kennedy 1994).

Since the birth of the modern world, we have witnessed

accelerating global population growth, air and water pollution, destruction of

forests, farmland, and fisheries, depletion of nonrenewable natural resources,

loss of biodiversity, and increasing poverty and misery throughout the nonmodern world

(Brown and Kane 1994). In Worldwatch’s State of the World 1995, Hilary French (1995, 171) concludes: “The relentless pace of global ecological decline shows no signs of letting up. Carbon dioxide concentrations are mounting in the atmosphere, species loss continues to accelerate, fisheries are collapsing, land degradation frustrates efforts to feed hungry people, and the earth’s forest cover keeps shrinking.” And in his introduction to State of the World

1995, Lester Brown (1995) warns that

eroding soils, shrinking forests, deteriorating

rangelands, expanding deserts, acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, the buildup of greenhouse gases, air pollution, and the loss of biological diversity threatens global food production and future economic growth

. How could this rapid growth in wealth, population, science and technology, and human control over the natural world have produced such catastrophic results?

Progress is proving to be a dangerous delusion, which modern peoples continue to support despite the overwhelming evidence that it has led to an escalating war against the earth

. Ironically, the modern world’s relentless pursuit of victory in this centuries-old war against nature will be the principal cause of its defeat and collapse

. In The Vanishing White Man, Stan Steiner (1976, 277) argued: The ruins of the Roman Empire, and the Mayan and Byzantine and Ottoman and Inca and Islamic and Egyptian and Ghanaian and Nigerian and Spanish and Aztec and

English and Grecian and Persian, and the Mongolian civilization of the great Khans are visible for all to see. Is it heresy to say that the civilization of the white man of Western Europe, which has dominated much of the earth for four hundred years, is about to become one more magnificent ruin? Not because it has failed to accomplish its goals, but because it has succeeded so well, its time on earth may be done.

The paradox of development is that the tremendous success of modern industrial civilization will be the cause of its

[end page 45] collapse and ruin

. To understand this paradox, we need to understand how modern economic and political institutions are creating both the so-called developed and underdeveloped worlds, which I will refer to as the

First and Third worlds (Escobar 1995).

Collapse now is better than collapse later because it spurs a transition to sustainable societies.

Lewis 98





I will argue that we are witnessing the collapse of global industrial civilization. Driven by individualism, materialism, and the endless pursuit of wealth and power, the modern industrialized world’s efforts to modernize and integrate the world

politically, economically, and culturally since World War II are only accelerating this global collapse

. In the late-twentieth century, global development leaves 80 percent of the world’s population outside the industrialized nations’ progress and affluence

(Wallimann 1994).

When the modern industrialized world collapses, people in the underdeveloped world will continue their daily struggle for dignity and survival at the margins of a moribund global industrial civilization

.

With the collapse of the modern world, smaller, autonomous, local and regional

civilizations, cultures, and polities will emerge. We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely accompany this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional polities

. John Cobb has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is working in

Kerala, India.

After the collapse of global civilization, modern peoples will not have

the material resources, biological capital, and energy to reestablish global civilization. Forced by economic necessity to become dependent on local

resources and ecosystems for their survival, peoples throughout the world will work to conserve and restore their

[end page 44] environments. For the societies that destroy their local environments and economies, as modern people so often do, will themselves face collapse and ruin

.

Transition is our only hope for collective survival. Even the worst-case impacts of economic collapse pale in comparison.

Lewis 98





The only alternative we now have is to recognize the very real imminent collapse of global industrial civilization. Instead of seeing this collapse as a tragedy, and trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, we must see it as a real

opportunity to solve some of the basic economic, political, and social problems created and exacerbated by the development of modern industrial civilization.

Instead of insisting on coordinated global actions, we should encourage selfsufficiency through the creation of local and regional economies and trading networks

(Norgaard 1994).

We must help political and economic leaders understand that the more their countries are tied to the global economic system, the more risk there is of serious economic and political collapse

.

In the case of the collapse of Mayan civilization, the city-states and regions in Central America that were not as dependent on the central [end page 58] Mayan civilization, economy, and trade were more likely to survive its collapse. The citystates that were heavily dependent on Mayan hegemony destroyed themselves by fighting bitter wars with other powerful city-states to maintain their declining economic and political dominance (Weatherford 1994).

Like the collapse of Mayan and Roman civilization, the collapse of global civilization will cause mass death and suffering as a result of the turmoil created by economic and political collapse. The more dependent nations are on the global economy, the more economic, political, and social chaos they will experience when it breaks down

.

Once global civilization collapses, humanity will not have the material,

biological, and energy resources to rebuild it. This must be the real lesson that nations and polities learn from this global collapse. If they try to rebuild unsustainable regional or even international economies, it will only cause more suffering and mass death

.

In conclusion, the only solution to the growing political and economic chaos caused by the collapse of global industrial civilization is to encourage the uncoupling of nations and regions from the global economy. Efforts to integrate the underdeveloped countries with this global economy through sustainable development programs

such as Agenda 21 will only further undermine the global economy and industrial civilization

.

Unfortunately, millions will die in the wars and economic and political

conflicts created by the accelerating collapse of global civilization. But we can be assured, on the basis of the past history of the collapse of regional civilizations such as the Mayan and the Roman empires, that, barring global nuclear war, human societies and civilizations will continue to exist and develop on a smaller, regional scale. Yes, such civilizations will be violent, corrupt, and often cruel, but, in the end, less so than our current global industrial civilization, which is abusing the entire planet and threatening the mass death and suffering of all its peoples and the living, biological fabric of life on earth

.

The paradox of global economic development is that although it creates massive wealth and power for modern elites, it also creates massive poverty and suffering for underdeveloped peoples and societies. The failure of global development to end this suffering and destruction will bring about its collapse.

This collapse will cause millions of people to suffer and die throughout the

world, but it should, paradoxically, ensure the survival of future human societies. The collapse of global civilization is necessary for the future, long-term survival of human

[end page 59] beings. Although this future seems hopeless and heartless, it is not. We can learn much from our present global crisis. What we learn will shape our future and the future of the complex, interconnected web of life on earth

.

Even if they’re right that economic decline causes war, these wars are good: they won’t cause extinction but they will ensure that global industrial society collapses.

Lewis 98




Wallimann, Published by Syracuse University Press, ISBN 0815627440, p. 56)

Most critics would argue

, probably correctly, that instead of allowing underdeveloped countries to withdraw from the global economy and undermine the economies of the developed world, the United States, Europe, and Japan and others will fight neocolonial wars to force these countries to remain within this collapsing global economy. These neocolonial wars will result in mass death, suffering, and even

regional nuclear wars. If First World countries choose military confrontation and

political repression to maintain the global economy, then we may see mass death and genocide on a global scale that will make the deaths of World War II pale

in comparison. However, these neocolonial wars, fought to maintain the developed nations’ economic and political hegemony, will cause the final collapse of our global industrial civilization. These wars will so damage the complex economic and trading networks and squander material, biological, and energy resources that they will undermine the global economy and its ability to

support the earth’s 6 to 8 billion people. This would be the worst-case scenario for the collapse of global civilization

.

Neocolonial wars are inevitable in a world of growth. The third world will refuse to be incorporated into the first – delaying the transition only makes these conflicts worse.

Lewis 98





Whether we call it civilizing, progress, modernization, development, or now sustainable development, modern peoples have imagined that it is the developed world’s “manifest destiny” to teach the rest of the world that modernity is the only course open to them. But this is simply not true. There are just too many diverse cultures, religions, and ways of life for modernization and global development to finally triumph. By refusing to disappear into history, despite innumerable attempts to civilize and teach them to be modern, nonmodern peoples demonstrate the resilience and strength of their cultures and societies to survive and adapt in a complex and chaotic world

.

The First World’s failure to modernize and civilize the world should not be seen as a tragedy, but as an opportunity. With the increasing recognition of the inability of development to resolve the economic and political contradictions it creates, whether you call it sustainable or not, peoples and communities will be once again forced to draw on their own cultures, histories, religions, and intimate knowledge of their local environments to improve their lives and ensure a

“reasonable life” for their children. For most of history, successfully adapting to changing local and regional environments was the fundamental challenge facing human societies

.

But how will First World political and economic elites react to these efforts by Third World peoples and others to withdraw from the global economy and to create a society and future not based on modernization and development?

Third World peoples’ refusal to pay their debts, to sell their resources to the developed world, and their refusal to allow the First World and TNCs to dominate their economies, societies, and politics will not come without global conflict and struggle

. [end page 54]

There will be neocolonial wars, political and economic subversion, widespread suffering and turmoil, and social and political chaos

. We witnessed some of this during the cold war, when the United States and Europe found more often than not that they had to force Third World people to accept development and the neocolonialism and tremendous poverty, suffering, and political unrest it created. The Somalis and Balkan nations’ ability to use force to prevent continued First World domination are models for this future conflict.

The process will not be easy. It

will be like the wars and conflicts that brought the fall of the Mayan and Roman empires

(Ponting 1991).

Helpful Aff Threads vs. De-Dev

Economic Growth Good

Economic growth makes the world better for everyone — it’s a moral imperative.

Noell and Smith 13

— Edd S. Noell, Professor of Economics and Business at Westmont College, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Louisiana State University, and Stephen L. S. Smith, Professor of Economics and Business at Gordon

College, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, 2013 (“Want A Better World? Let's Work On Boosting

Economic Growth,” Forbes, April 23 rd , Available Online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/04/23/want-abetter-world-lets-work-on-boosting-economic-growth/, Accessed 07-29-2014)

If we

as a society want

to live in a better world, we must start taking economic growth seriously

. It’s easy for economists to understand why growth is so important—but too often, economists fail to explain why it matters.

With increased economic growth, the lives of millions of people around the world

—in countries both rich and poor— can be transformed

.

Both authors of this column have witnessed growth’s power in person. One grew up in 1960s Hong Kong. While today

Hong Kong is a wealthy financial capital, in the early 1960s it was engulfed in poverty. His earliest memories include images of the flood of over one million refugees into his city from Mao’s China. But by the time he reached high school much had changed. Children born in shanty towns now lived in apartments with electricity and running water. Each morning, crossing Victoria Harbor with its glittering view of Hong Kong’s burgeoning skyline, he could see the trade, construction, and growth that provided jobs, increased wealth, and lifted families out of poverty. Since then, in our frequent professional travel to Asia, we have both seen first-hand the fantastic poverty reduction triggered by growth in

Korea, China, and much of Southeast Asia.

The immense power of economic growth is easy to see in dramatic surges like Hong Kong’s, but the transformative power of growth is not limited to poor countries.

In wealthy countries like the U nited

S tates growth and the prosperity that it brings allow us

, as a society, to afford to do many good things. It is quite remarkable that someone such as

the climate activist Bill

McKibbin argues that growth is

“ the

one big habit we

finally must break

.”

When he looks at growth, he sees a malevolent force driving our desires to consume ever more fossil fuels. We could not disagree more. With greater growth our economy can afford to buy green products, offset our carbon footprint, and conserve and replenish the renewable natural resources we consume

.

Growth means, literally, the increase in the production of goods and services in an economy

. Since production of goods and services requires that workers and firms’ owners be paid, the value of production is basically the same as the value of households’ income.

So growth measures the increases in a country’s ability to take care of itself. With growth, families are better able to purchase goods and services. A cynic may only think of

the purchase of another 80”

TV, but economists understand that the “goods” a society gets from growth go

far beyond the ones you can pick up at Best Buy. With greater growth we could invest even more in basic research to help find cures for diseases like

Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Greater growth would allow us to avert the coming intergenerational fight over how to pay for

trillions of dollars of entitlement promises

we have made to the needy among us, and to our parents and grandparents in the form of Social

Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These are profoundly moral concerns

.

In short, the supporters of growth

—who usually make their case in economic terms, about tax and spending policies— are on to something. They understand growth’s potential to ease economic problems

. Right now the United States is growing at about two percent per year—but to get the U.S. unemployment rate down to a healthy level (under six percent) within four years will take approximately four percent growth per year. That is not just a number on a press release—it’s the dignity of a paycheck and the security of an income for millions of families across America. So if you care about long-term human wellbeing—in

rich and poor countries alike—you must care about economic growth

. Before we as a society can consider how to achieve such growth, we must recognize that getting growth right matters.

Not every instance of economic growth in every country is beneficial. But time and again, hard data documents its positive impact on the things that ultimately matter: education, environmental care, physical health, political freedom, and

healthy culture. Failure to realize the transformative power of growth would be

a failure of our moral imaginations. We would risk leaving a world for our children in which diseases persist, rivers remain polluted, and the elderly and

sick receive inadequate care. Growth must not be sold short. Growth is not just morally defensible; it is a moral imperative for achieving lasting human flourishing

.

Doomsaying about economic growth is wrong — we need more growth, not less.

Lomborg 13

— Bjørn Lomborg, Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Director of the Copenhagen

Consensus Centre, former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen, holds a Ph.D. in Political

Science from the University of Copenhagen, 2013 (“The Limits to Panic,” Project Syndicate, June 17 th , Available Online at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-growth-and-its-critics-by-bj-rn-lomborg, Accessed 07-29-

2014)

We often hear

how the world

as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse

. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The

Limits to Growth

, its basic ideas are still with us. But time has not been kind

.

The

Limits to Growth warned

humanity in 1972 that devastating collapse was just

around the corner. But, while we have seen financial panics since then, there have been no real shortages or productive breakdowns. Instead, the resources generated by human ingenuity remain far ahead of human consumption

.

But the report’s fundamental legacy remains: we have inherited a tendency to obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.

In the early 1970’s,

the flush of technological optimism was over, the Vietnam War was a disaster, societies were in turmoil, and economies were stagnating

. Rachel

Carson’s 1962 book

Silent Spring

had raised fears about pollution and launched the modern environmental movement;

Paul

Ehrlich’s

1968 title

The Population Bomb said it all. The first Earth Day

, in 1970, was deeply pessimistic

.

The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much

. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution.

The only hope was to stop economic growth itself

, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilizing society at a significantly poorer level

.

That message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong

. For example, the authors of

The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc

.

Instead, despite recent increases, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago

. Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings, and thermometers: mercury consumption is down 98% and, by 2000, the price was down 90%.

More broadly, since 1946, supplies of copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc have outstripped consumption, owing to the discovery of additional reserves and new technologies to extract them economically.

Similarly, oil and natural gas were to run out in 1990 and 1992, respectively; today, reserves of both are larger than they were in 1970, although we consume dramatically more. Within the past six years, shale gas alone has doubled potential gas resources in the United States and halved the price.

As for economic collapse, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world.

The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest

resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960’s.

Food supply has not collapsed

(1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve).

Malnourishment has dropped by more than half

, from

35% of the world’s population to under 16%.

Nor are we choking on pollution

. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.

In 1900,

when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost three million people – roughly one in 500

– died each year from air pollution

, mostly from wretched indoor air.

Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people

. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising

.

Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking.

Consider recycling, which is often just a feel-good gesture with little environmental benefit and significant cost. Paper, for example, typically comes from sustainable forests, not rainforests. The processing and government subsidies associated with recycling yield lower-quality paper to save a resource that is not threatened.

Likewise, fears of over-population framed self-destructive policies, such as China’s one-child policy and forced sterilization in India

. And, while pesticides and other pollutants were seen to kill off perhaps half of humanity, well-regulated pesticides cause about 20 deaths each year in the US, whereas they have significant upsides in creating cheaper and more plentiful food.

Indeed, reliance solely on organic farming – a movement inspired by the pesticide fear – would cost more than $100 billion annually in the US. At 16% lower efficiency, current output would require another 65 million acres of farmland – an area more than half the size of California. Higher prices would reduce consumption of fruits and vegetables, causing myriad adverse health effects (including tens of thousands of additional cancer deaths per year).

Obsession with doom-and-gloom scenarios distracts us from the real global

threats. Poverty is one of the greatest killers

of all, while easily curable diseases still claim 15 million lives every year – 25% of all deaths

.

The solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost a billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life

.

The four decades since The Limits of Growth have shown that we need more of it, not less

. An expansion of trade, with estimated benefits exceeding $100 trillion annually toward the end of the century, would do thousands of times more good than timid feel-good policies that result from fear-mongering. But that requires abandoning an anti-growth mentality and using our enormous potential to create a brighter future

.

Technological Civilization Good

Extinction is inevitable without technological civilization—it’s try-or-die for growth.

Bostrom 2

— Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and Director of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford, recipient of the 2009 Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement, holds a Ph.D. in

Philosophy from the London School of Economics, 2002 (“Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and

Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and Technology, Volume 9, Number 1, Available Online at http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html, Accessed 07-04-2011)

We should not blame civilization or technology for imposing big existential risks.

Because of the way we have defined existential risks, a failure to develop technological civilization would imply that we had fallen victims of an existential disaster

(namely a crunch, “technological arrest”).

Without technology, our chances of avoiding existential risks would

therefore be nil. With technology, we have some chance

, although the greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself.

Technological civilization is the only way to resolve existential risk.

Stolyarov 12

— Gennady Stolyarov II, freelance philosophy writer and blogger, Lead Actuary in Property and

Casualty Insurance for the Nevada Division of Insurance, holds a B.S. in Economics, Mathematics, and German from

Hillsdale College, 2012 (“Technology as the Solution to Existential Risk,” Rational Argumentator, April 3 rd , Available

Online at http://www.rationalargumentator.com/index/blog/2012/04/technology-existential-risk/, Accessed 07-29-

2014)

What is the relationship between technology and existential risk?

Technology does not cause existential risk, but rather is the only effective means for countering it

.

I do not deny that existential risks are real – but I find that most existential risks exist currently

(e.g., risks from asteroid impacts, a new ice age, pandemics, or nuclear war) and

that technological progress is the way to remove many of those risks without introducing others that are as great or greater

. My view is that the existential risks from emerging technologies are

quite minor (if at all significant) compared to the tremendous benefits such technologies would have in solving the existential risks we currently face

(including the biggest risk to our own individual existences – our own mortality from senescence).

My essay “The Real War – and Why Inter-Human Wars Are a Distraction” describes my views on this matter in greater depth.

In short, I am a techno-optimist, one who considers it imperative to restore the Victorian-era ideal of Progress as a guiding principle in contemporary societies.

The problem

, as I see it, is not in the technologies of the future, but in the barbarous and primitive condition of the world as it exists today, with its many immediate perils

.

As a libertarian, I believe that the entrepreneurship and innovation in even semi-free markets can address existential risks far more effectively than any national government – and bureaucratic management of these efforts would only hamper progress while incurring the risk of subverting the endeavors for nefarious objectives. (The National Security Agency’s recent attempt at a total surveillance state is a case in point.)

But fears of technology are our greatest existential risk. They have a real potential of halting progress in many fruitful areas

– either through restrictive legislation or through the actions of a few Luddite fanatics who take it upon themselves to “right” the wrongs they perceive in a world of advancing technology. I can point to examples of such fanatics already exploiting fears of technologies that are not even close to existing yet. For instance, in a post on the LessWrong blog, one “dripgrind” – a sincere and therefore genuinely frightening fanatic – explicitly advocates assassination of AI researchers and chastises the Singularity Institute for

Artificial Intelligence for not engaging in such a despicable tactic. This is the consequence of spreading fears about AI technology rather than simply and calmly developing such technology in a rational manner, so as to be incapable of harming humans.

Many among the uneducated and superstitious are already on edge

about emerging technologies. A strong message of vibrant optimism and

reassurance is needed to prevent these people from lashing out and undermining the progress of our civilization in the process. The Frankenstein syndrome should be resisted no matter in what guise it appears

.

The World Is Getting Better

The world is getting better. Technological civilization is winning the war against death and suffering — we control uniqueness.

Beauchamp 13

— Zack Beauchamp, Editor of TP Ideas—a Think Progress project, Reporter for Think Progress, former writer for Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish at Newsweek/Daily Beast, has written for Foreign Policy and Tablet magazines, holds an M.S. in International Relations from the London School of Economics and B.A.s in Philosophy and

Political Science from Brown University, 2013 (“5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History,” Think

Progress—the Center for American Progress blog, December 11 th , Available Online at http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/, Accessed 07-29-2014)

Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and massive inequality, it’d be easy

to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been

an awful

one.

But you’d be wrong. We have every reason to believe that 2013 was

, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind

.

Contrary to what you might have heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things that determine how long

they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an

extremely happy direction. While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed

by something like runaway climate change, the effects will have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the world a better place

.

Here’s the five big reasons why.

1.

Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer

.

The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest: we’re winning the fight against death

. “

There is not a single country in the world where infant or child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950

,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who works on global health issues.

The most up-to-date numbers on global health

, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO) statistical compendium, confirm

Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.

In short, fewer people are dying untimely deaths. And that’s not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up

between 1990 and 2011 in every WHO income bracket

. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the

British Empire had reached its apex — was 40.

The average person today should expect to live

almost twice as long as the average citizen of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850

.

In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms

imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive

— “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.

What’s going on?

Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the most important drivers have been

technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the

scientific method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us

modern medicine and the information technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster rates. Scientific discoveries

also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism, giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-

saving technologies. And the global spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their health needs or pay the electoral price

.

We

’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of

these two forces, technology and democracy

, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress

. But when talking about improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.

Even Deaton, who wrote one of 2013’s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.” That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the

President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.

So we’re outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That alone should be enough to say the world is getting better

.

Economic growth has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty and dramatically increased global quality of life. The world isn’t perfect, but it’s better than it’s ever been.

Beauchamp 13

— Zack Beauchamp, Editor of TP Ideas—a Think Progress project, Reporter for Think Progress, former writer for Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish at Newsweek/Daily Beast, has written for Foreign Policy and Tablet magazines, holds an M.S. in International Relations from the London School of Economics and B.A.s in Philosophy and

Political Science from Brown University, 2013 (“5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History,” Think

Progress—the Center for American Progress blog, December 11 th , Available Online at http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/, Accessed 07-29-2014)

2.

Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty, and the world is getting happier

.

There are fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human

history, and middle class people enjoy their highest standard of living ever

. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this isn’t a call for complacency

about poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria.

But make no mistake: as a whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before

.

721 million fewer people lived in extreme poverty

($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study

from October.

That’s astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject want.

And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket

: even in low income countries, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in

1981 to 44 in 2010.

We can be fairly confident that these trends are continuing

. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession

in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing

: global GDP grew by

2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9 percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.

The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has

been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981 (population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).

But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not shunted aside.

The poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods

.

Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why largepercentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with

higher levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free

.

Global economic growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced

poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off

.

(Neo-) Malthusianism Bad

Reject the Malthusian foundation of their argument — it sanctions mass murder.

Caplan 12

— Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Research Fellow at the Mercatus

Center, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, 2012 (“Eugenics,

Malthusianism, and Trepidation,” EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty, May 9 th , Available Online at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/eugenics_malthu.html, Accessed 07-29-2014)

The Nazis were eugenicists and Malthusians

(see Mein Kampf, chapter 4).

They wanted to murder "the inferior" because they were convinced there wasn't enough food to go around. The Malthusianism told them that millions had to die; the eugenics told them who the victims ought to be

.

Strangely,

though, the Nazis' crimes discredited only eugenics, not Malthus. After the Holocaust, you'd think that anyone muttering, "There are too many people running around," would be an instant pariah. But that's not how things worked out

.

This is especially strange because there's nothing intrinsically misanthropic about eugenics. As I've explained before, eugenics plus the Law of Comparative Advantage leads to trade, not barbarity:

Suppose we have an isolated society in which everyone is a genius. Let's call them the Brains. Who takes out the garbage?

A Brain, obviously. Who does the farming? Again, Brains.

Now what happens if the geniuses come into contact with a society where everyone is of average intelligence at best?

Let's call them the Brawns. If the Brains allow the Brawns to join their society, the average genetic quality of the Brains' society plummets. But everyone is better off as a result! Now the Brains can specialize in jobs that require high intelligence, and the Brawns can take over the menial labor. Total production goes up.

Malthusianism

, in contrast, is intrinsically misanthropic. By hook or by crook, population has to go down. Sure, they'd prefer voluntary sub-replacement fertility. But if that's not in the cards, the next steps are government pressure to discourage fertility, then caps on family size, followed by forced sterilization, mandatory abortion, and finally mass murder

.

An hysterical straw man? Hardly. Malthusianism was Hitler's official argument for his greatest crimes

. Germany's problem, in Hitler's own words:

The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000 souls. The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and hunger.

After considering all the viable solutions within a Malthusian framework, Hitler picks his favorite: Seizing more land in Europe

.

Of course people will not voluntarily make that accommodation. At this point the right of self-preservation comes into effect. And when attempts to settle the difficulty in an amicable way are rejected the clenched hand must take by force that which was refused to the open hand of friendship. If in the past our ancestors had based their political decisions on similar pacifist nonsense as our present generation does, we should not possess more than one-third of the national territory that we possess to-day and probably there would be no German nation to worry about its future in Europe.

As I sum up:

When someone says "There are too many Jews," we suspect that he wants to

kill Jews. Similarly, it turns out that at the root of Hitler's propensity to kill people was his belief that there are too many people

.

My claim is not that, "Malthusianism is false because Hitler believed it." Hitler presumably believed that the sky is blue. My claim

, rather, is that Malthusianism is

a more dangerous doctrine than eugenics. If the whiff of eugenics leads you to say, "We should be very careful here, because these ideas can easily lead to

terrible things," the whiff of Malthusianism should inspire even greater trepidation

.

Their argument relies on misanthropic assumptions about humanity. Reject their

Malthusian doomsaying and embrace our collective capacity to make civilization better.

Furedi 6

— Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, holds a Ph.D. from the

School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, 2006 (“Confronting the New Misanthropy,” spiked, April

18 th , Available Online at http://www.frankfuredi.com/articles/misanthropy-20060418.shtml, Accessed 07-29-2014)

Discussions about the future increasingly tend to focus on whether humans will survive

. According to green author and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable' (1).

More and more books predict there will be an unavoidable global catastrophe

; there is James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First

Century, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change:

Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations. Kunstler's book warns that 'this is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of

World War II' (2). In the media there are alarming stories about a mass 'die-off' in the near future and of cities engulfed by rising oceans as a consequence of climate change.

Today we don't just have Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but an entire cavalry regiment of doom-mongers

. It is like a secular version of St John's Revelations, except it is even worse - apparently there is no future for humanity after this predicted apocalypse. Instead of being redeemed, human beings will, it seems, disappear without a trace.

Anxieties about human survival are as old as human history itself. Through catastrophes such as the Deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah, the religious imagination fantasised about the end of the world. More recently, apocalyptic ideas once rooted in magic and theology have been recast as allegedly scientific statements about human destructiveness and irresponsibility. Elbowing aside the mystical St John, Lovelock poses as a prophet-scientist when he states: 'I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news….' (3) Today, the future of the Earth is said to be jeopardised by human consumption, technological development or by 'man playing God'. And instead of original sin leading to the

Fall of Man, we fear the degradation of Nature by an apparently malevolent human species.

All of today's various doomsday scenarios

- whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability

. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'.

Human activity is continually blamed for threatening the Earth's existence

. Scare stories about the scale of human destruction appear in the media and are promoted by advocacy groups and politicians.

For example, it was recently claimed that human activity has reduced the number of birds and fish species by 35 per cent over the past 30 years. That story was circulated by the environmentalist news service Planet Ark and picked up by the mainstream media, and widely cited as evidence that human action causes ecological destruction. Our engagement with nature is frequently described as 'ecocide', the heedless and deliberate destruction of the environment. In short, humanity's attempt to domesticate nature is discussed as something akin to genocide or the Holocaust. The title of Franz

Broswimmer's polemic Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species captures this sense of loathing towards humanity. According to Jared Diamond, 'ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as the threat to global civilisations' (4).

Increasingly, the term 'human impact' is associated with pollution, wanton destruction and the stripping bare of the

Earth's assets. Former US vice president Al Gore is concerned that the 'power of technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the impact each individual can have on the natural world', causing a 'violent destructive collision between our civilisation and the Earth' (5). Over the past 400 years, the human impact on the world, which led to the humanisation of nature, was celebrated by Western culture - these days, human ingenuity is regarded ambiguously or even suspiciously.

Indeed, the very idea of civilisation is presented as a force for ecological destruction

.

'Civilisations have been destroying the living systems of the Earth for at least 5,000 years', says one misanthrophic account

(6). According to some environmentalists, humans are a 'foreign negative element', even a 'cancer on the environment' (7).

For radical environmentalists, the degradation of nature stems from our species' belief in its unique qualities. Such a belief

- dubbed 'anthropocentrism' - is openly denounced for endangering the planet. Human-centred ideology, which views nature from the perspective of its utility for people, is said to be destroying the environment. And this tendency to depict humans as parasites on the planet is not confined to any small circle of cultural pessimists. Michael Meacher, Britain's former minister for the environment, has referred to humans as 'the virus' infecting the Earth's body.

Western culture's estrangement from its humanity

The rising popularity of a term like 'ecological footprint' shows how much resonance the association of normal human activity with destruction has today. This term, which implies that having an impact on the environment is necessarily a bad thing, is rarely criticised for its misanthropic assumptions. On TV and in film and popular culture, the development of civilisation, and particularly the advance of science and technology, is depicted as the source of environmental destruction and social disintegration.

The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today depicts the human species as the problem, rather than as the maker of solutions

. And the most striking manifestation of this anti-humanism is the belief that, if the Earth is to survive, there will have to be a significant reduction in the number of human beings

.

The Malthusian objective of reducing populations is alive and kicking

. For deep ecologists, the issue is straightforward - their starting point, as spelled out by leading ecologists Arne Naess and George

Sessions in 1984, is that a 'substantial reduction in human population is needed for the flourishing of non-human life'.

Numerous commentators embrace these Malthusian sentiments. 'The current world population of 6.5 billion has no hope whatsoever of sustaining itself at current levels, and the fundamental conditions of life on Earth are about to force the issue', warns Kunstler (8). The Australian academic David McNight has tried to reconcile neo-Malthusianism with his version of 'new humanism', arguing that 'creating a sustainable society based on human values will necessitate stopping the growth of human population and accepting limits on human material desire' (9).

If anything, today's neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the original thing

. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of imagination, Thomas Malthus believed in humanity far more than his contemporary followers do. He argued, in his book On The Principle of Population, that although 'our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish…they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was the object of rational expectation' (10). Malthus' reservations about the human potential were influenced by a hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual opponents, including Condorcet and Godwin. Nevertheless, despite his pessimistic account of population growth, he said 'it is hoped that the general result of the inquiry is not such as not to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair' (11).

Over the past two centuries, Malthus' followers often disparaged people who came from the 'wrong classes' or the 'wrong races' - but despite their prejudices they affirmed the special status of the human species. In some instances, such as the eugenic movement, rabid prejudice against so-called racial inferiors combined with a belief in human progress (12).

Today's neo-Malthusians share the old prejudices

, but

in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself

.

It's worth recalling that Malthus justified ringing the alarm bells about demographic growth on the basis that the human race lacked the capacity and ingenuity to feed itself. Today, the anti-natalist lobby decries the fact that humanity has become all too successful at reproducing itself - and human ingenuity and development are depicted as the greatest threat to the wellbeing of the planet.

The loss of faith in humanity is strikingly expressed in the stigma attached to speciesism. Speciesism is the sin of elevating humanity above other species. Those who invented this Orwellian-sounding word think humans do not possess any morally unique qualities and people are no better than other lifeforms. They argue that those who claim a special or a higher status for humans are no better than those who talk about racial or male superiority. Animal rights activist Peter

Singer defines speciesism as 'a prejudice or attitude of bias towards the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species'. Although speciesism has not yet entered the vernacular, the assumption that it is wrong to prioritise humans over animals has become mainstream. Animal experimentation is increasingly seen as a crime and the boundary dividing humans from animals has become more and more porous. As Josie Appleton has pointed out on spiked, many people take DNA as 'their measure of moral value' (13). And since studies indicate that people share some 98.4 per cent of their DNA with chimpanzees, they claim that as proof of moral equivalence between humans and apes.

The new misanthropy

Our declining faith in humanity might be most clearly expressed in apocalyptic thinking about the environment, but it pervades everyday life

. So it is frequently assumed that people have emotional deficits. We are described as having addictive personalities, or we're seen as 'damaged' or

'scarred for life'. Human relations come with health warnings. We don't simply pollute the environment, it seems, but also one another. We talk about 'toxic relationships', 'toxic parents' and 'toxic families'. Indeed, scare stories about the risks of human relationships are often very similar to discussions about the environment.

Susan Forward, author of Toxic Parents, compares the effects of bad parenting to 'invisible weeds that invaded your life in ways you never dreamed of'. Apparently parents emit poisonous substances which contaminate their kids in much the same way that humans pollute the environment. There is virtually a new genre of literature on the apparently poisonous nature of human relationships. There are books titled Toxic Bachelors, Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who

Make Your Life Miserable, Toxic Relationships And How To Change Them, Toxic Friends, Toxic Coworkers: How To

Deal With Dysfunctional People On The Job and Toxic Stress - all of which send the same misanthropic message about relationships as neo-Malthusians spread about population and the environment. And the metaphor is not confined to relationships. Public institutions also come with the toxic-warning label; consider these book titles: Toxic Churches:

Restoration from Spiritual Abuse, Toxic Work, The Allure of Toxic Leaders and Toxic Psychiatry.

This reinterpretation of human relations as toxic is driven by a moralising impulse. Pollution traditionally involved an act of defilement and desecration; in previous times, to pollute was to profane, to stain, to sully, to corrupt. But when moral defilement is anticipated and depicted as being normal, pollution becomes a routine form of behaviour - with important implications for how we view humans.

Misanthropy has a profound influence on public policy and political debate

.

Back in the Fifties sociological research found that there was a clear correlation between how society viewed people and the prevailing political attitudes. One study of individuals' views of human nature suggested they were shaped by political attitudes in general (14). So attitudes towards the democratic ideal of free speech are directly influenced by whether we believe people are capable of making an intelligent choice between competing views. 'The advocate of freedom of speech is likely to believe that most men are not easily deceived, are not swayed by uncontrolled emotions, and are capable of sound judgement', noted this 1950s study. This implied a high level of faith in humanity. In contrast,

'the individual with low faith in people tends to believe in suppression of weak, deviant, or dangerous groups'. The study concluded that the 'individual's view of human nature would appear to have significant implications for the doctrine of political liberty' (15). People who viewed human nature positively tended to be more tolerant towards free speech and social experimentation. People who saw humans as being driven by narrow self-interest, greed and other destructive passions were inclined to support measures that curbed freedom.

Today, the growth of censorship, the criminalisation of thought by the enactment of so-called hate crimes legislation and speech codes, and the widespread frowning upon causing offence to individuals and groups is underpinned by the idea that people cannot be trusted to make up their minds about controversial subjects. Today's censorious imperative is driven by a paternalistic and negative view of human nature, and by a lack of faith in people's capacity to discriminate between right and wrong.

Not since the Dark Ages has there been so much concern about the malevolent passions that afflict humanity

. Panics about Satanic abuse have erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, and throughout the Western world there is a morbid expectation that virtually every home contains a potential abuser.

Predatory monsters are seen everywhere. People regard others with a suspicion that would have been rare just a few decades ago. Parents wonder whether the daycare centre workers looking after their children can be trusted; in schools, children with bruises arouse teachers' suspicion about their parents' behaviour, while parents wonder whether any physical contact between their child and his or her teacher is permissible. In Britain, any adult employee who might come into contact with children has to undergo a police check, and sections of the child protection industry believe this police vetting should be extended to the university sector, too.

The obsession with abuse is not confined to relationships between adults and children. All interactions that involve emotions, physicality or sexuality are labelled as potentially abusive. 'Peer abuse' is seen as one of the key problems of our time; others demand action against 'elder abuse'; and for good measure alarms have been raised about 'pet abuse' and

'chicken abuse'.

Renewing our faith in people

How we view humanity really matters. If we insist on seeing humans as morally degraded parasites, then every significant technical problem

from the millennium bug to the avian flu will be feared as a potential catastrophe beyond our control. Today's intellectual pessimism and cultural disorientation distracts the human

imagination from confronting challenges that lie ahead. All the talk about human survival expresses a crisis of belief in humanity

- and that is why the real question today is not whether humanity will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our belief in humanity can survive it

.

Despite Western culture's profound sense of estrangement from its human sensibilities, individuals possess an unprecedented potential for influencing the way they live their lives. It is only now that significant sections of the public have real, meaningful choice and control.

We must reinvigorate the belief in autonomy and self-determination, and recognise that we have moved from the Stone Age to a time when people's transformative potential is a remarkable force

.

We also know that history does not issue any guarantees. Purposeful change is a risky enterprise. But whether we like it or not, taking risks in order to transform our lives and ourselves is one of our most distinct human qualities. That is why, instead of worrying about our 'ecological footprint', we should take all the steps necessary for moving towards a better future

.

Misanthropy threatens to envelop us in a new Dark Age of prejudice where we become scared of ourselves

. In such conditions, we have two choices: we can renounce the human qualities that have helped to transform the world and resign ourselves to the culture of fatalism that prevails; or we can do the opposite. Instead of abandoning faith in humanity we can turn our creative energies towards taking control of our futures. Instead of being preoccupied with 'what will happen to us' we should search for answers to the question: 'What needs to be done to humanise the future?'

Human beings are not angels; on a bad day they are capable of evil deeds. But the very fact that we can designate certain acts as evil shows that we are capable

of rectifying acts of injustice. And on balance we aspire to do good. Contrary to the fantasies of romantic primitivism, civilisation and development have made our species more knowledgeable and sensitive about the workings of nature.

The aspiration to improve the conditions of life

- the most basic motive of people throughout the ages - is one that has driven humanity from the Stone Age through to the twenty- first century

.

If believing in the human potential is today labelled 'anthropocentrism' and

'speciesism', then I wholeheartedly plead guilty to subscribing to both of those views

.

Transition Bad — Lots of People Die

Alternatives to growth kill hundreds of millions and cause global conflict. We can’t

“turn off” the economy.

Barnhizer 6

— David R. Barnhizer, Emeritus Professor at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, 2006 (“Waking from Sustainability's ‘Impossible Dream’: The Decisionmaking Realities of Business and

Government,” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review (18 Geo. Int'l Envtl. L. Rev. 595), Available Online to

Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)

The scale of social needs, including the need for expanded productive activity, has grown so large that it cannot be shut off at all, and certainly not abruptly. It cannot even be ratcheted down in any significant fashion without producing

serious harms to human societies and hundreds of millions of people. Even if it were possible to shift back to systems of local self-sufficiency, the consequences of the transition process would be catastrophic for many people and even deadly

to the point of continual conflict, resource wars, increased poverty, and strife.

What are needed are concrete, workable, and pragmatic strategies that produce effective and intelligently designed economic activity in specific contexts

and, while seeking efficiency and conservation, place economic and social justice high on a list of priorities. n60

The imperative of economic growth applies not only to the needs and expectations of people in economically developed societies but also to people living in nations that are currently economically underdeveloped. Opportunities must be created, jobs must be generated in huge numbers, and economic resources expanded to address the tragedies of poverty and inequality.

Unfortunately, natural systems must be exploited to achieve this; we cannot

return to Eden. The question is not how to achieve a static state but how to achieve what is needed to advance social justice while avoiding and mitigating the most destructive consequences of our behavior

.

The transition is impossible, but attempting it causes disaster. Their argument is wishful thinking.

Barnhizer 6

— David R. Barnhizer, Emeritus Professor at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, 2006 (“Waking from Sustainability's ‘Impossible Dream’: The Decisionmaking Realities of Business and

Government,” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review (18 Geo. Int'l Envtl. L. Rev. 595), Available Online to

Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)

Some advocates of sustainability think they can slow the world down to a point of elegant stasis

. n48 Because such people are invariably humane, I conclude they simply do not

understand the consequences to human societies and the ordinary residents of those societies that would flow from their positions if the nightmare that they mistake for a dream were accomplished. The naive attitudes underlying

[*614] such positions are similar to the "deep ecology" movement where nature is accorded only benign intentions

. n49

The fact that we inhabit a savage and unheeding natural world in which species consume each other, earthquakes destroy, tsunamis overwhelm, and volcanoes spread ash, creating years without summers, is conveniently ignored

.

Sustainability represents a wide and diverse variety of functions, methods, and values that on many levels are incompatible. On the idealized plane this includes the values of ecological, economic, social, and political harmony. These values are used to support an argument in favor of a form of economic and social stasis writ large on the global stage

. As an ideal, this form of sustainability stands for such principles as the precautionary principle and embodies the warnings about overuse of resources found in Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, or Lester Brown's Twenty-Ninth Day, where Brown argued that an exponential progression in abuse and overuse of natural resources will generate a catastrophic collapse of systems. n50

These

predictions of disaster are well worth heeding, but there are countervailing social disasters that can result if we take too aggressive a stance in our efforts to prevent the ecological harm s.

These trade-offs include the need to generate wealth sufficient to sustain existing social justice and equity obligations and the need to create jobs and opportunities to alleviate the tragedy of abject poverty and denial of fair opportunity

.

Transition Bad — Risks Extinction

Either humanity will rebuild and de-dev doesn’t solve or de-dev condemns humanity to permanent stagnation.

Bostrom 13


Philosophy from the London School of Economics, 2013 (“Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority,” Global Policy,

Volume 4, Issue 1, February, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Wiley Online Library, p. 20-21)

We can distinguish various kinds of permanent stagnation scenarios: unrecovered collapse—much of our current economic and technological capabilities are lost and never recovered; plateauing—progress flattens out at a level

perhaps somewhat higher than the present level but far below technological maturity; and recurrent collapse—a never-ending cycle of collapse followed by recovery

(Bostrom,

2009).15

The relative plausibility of these scenarios depends on various factors. One might expect that even if global civilisation were to undergo a complete collapse, perhaps following a global thermonuclear war, it would eventually be rebuilt.

In order to have a plausible permanent collapse scenario, one would therefore need an account of why recovery would not occur

.16 Regarding plateauing, modern trends of rapid social and technological change make such a threat appear less imminent; yet scenarios could be concocted in which, for example, a stable global regime blocks further technological change.17 As for recurrent-collapse scenarios, they seem to require the postulation of a special kind of cause: one that (1) is strong enough to bring about the total collapse of global civilisation yet (2) is not strong enough to cause human extinction, and that (3) can plausibly recur each time civilisation is rebuilt to a certain level, despite any random variation in initial conditions and any attempts by successive civilisations to learn from their predecessors’ failures. The probability of remaining on a recurring-collapse trajectory diminishes with the number of cycles postulated. The longer the time horizon considered (and this applies also to plateauing) the greater the likelihood that the pattern will be ruptured, resulting in either a breakout in the upward direction [end page 20] toward technological maturity or in the downward direction toward unrecovered collapse and perhaps extinction (Figure 4).18

Permanent stagnation is an existential risk — it destroys astronomical numbers of lives.

Bostrom 13



Volume 4, Issue 1, February, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Wiley Online Library, p. 20)

Permanent stagnation

Permanent stagnation is instantiated if humanity survives but never reaches

technological maturity—that is, the attainment of capabilities affording a level of economic productivity and control over nature that is close to the maximum that could feasibly be achieved

(in the fullness of time and in the absence of catastrophic defeaters). For instance, a technologically mature civilisation could (presumably) engage in large-scale space colonisation through the use of automated self-replicating ‘von Neumann probes’ (Freitas, 1980; Moravec, 1988; Tipler, 1980). It would also be able to modify and enhance human biology—say, through the use of advanced biotechnology or molecular nanotechnology

(Freitas, 1999, 2003). Further, it could construct extremely powerful computational hardware and use it to create wholebrain emulations and entirely artificial types of sentient, superintelligent minds (Sandberg and Bostrom, 2008). It might have many additional capabilities, some of which may not be fully imaginable from our current vantage point.14

The permanent destruction of humanity’s opportunity to attain technological maturity is a prima facie enormous loss, because the capabilities of a

technologically mature civilisation could be used to produce outcomes that would plausibly be of great value, such as astronomical numbers of extremely long and fulfilling lives

. More specifically, mature technology would enable a far

more efficient use of basic natural resources

(such as matter, energy, space, time, and negentropy) for the creation of value than is possible with less advanced technology. And mature technology would allow the harvesting

(through space colonisation) of far more of

these resources than is possible with technology whose reach is limited to Earth and its immediate neighbourhood

.

Transition Bad — Conventional War Bad

Conventional war is an existential threat — advanced weapons.

Dvorsky 12

— George Dvorsky, Chair of the Board for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, cofounder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association, 2012 (“9 Ways Humanity Could Bring About Its Own

Destruction,” io9, December 12 th , Available Online at http://io9.com/5967660/9-ways-humanity-could-bring-about-ourown-destruction, Accessed 07-29-2014)

9. World War III

At the close of the Second World War, nearly 2.5% of the human population had perished. Of the 70 million people who were killed, about 20 million died from starvation. And

disturbingly, civilians accounted for nearly 50 percent of all deaths

— a stark indication that war isn't just for soldiers any more.

Given the incredible degree to which technology has advanced in the nearly seven decades since this war, it's reasonable to assume that the next global

‘conventional war' — i.e. one fought without nuclear weapons — would be near

apocalyptic in scope. The degree of human suffering that could be unleashed would easily surpass anything that came before it, with combatants using

many of the technologies

already described in this list, including autonomous killing machines and

weaponized nanotechnology. And in various acts of desperation (or sheer malevolence), some belligerent nations could choose to unleash chemical and

biological agents that would result in countless deaths. And like WWII, food could be used as a weapon; agricultural yields could be brought to a grinding halt

.

Transition Bad — Option Value Good

Preserving humanity’s option value is the best way to prevent existential catastrophe.

De-dev reverses the sustainability error — collapse is bad because it forecloses other possibilities.

Bostrom 13



Volume 4, Issue 1, February, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Wiley Online Library, p. 24-26)

Keeping our options alive

These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.

Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused.

We may not now know

—at least not in concrete detail— what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are

indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognise that there is a great option value in preserving—and

ideally improving—our ability to recognise value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe

.

We thus want to reach a state in which we have (1) far greater intelligence, knowledge, and sounder judgment than we currently do; (2) far greater ability to solve global-coordination problems; (3) far greater technological capabilities and physical resources; and such that

(4) our values and preferences are not corrupted in the process of getting there

(but rather, if possible, improved).

Factors 2 and 3 expand the

option set available to humanity. Factor 1 increases humanity’s ability to predict the outcomes of the available options and

[end page 24] understand what each outcome would entail in terms of the realisation of human values. Factor 4

, finally, makes humanity more likely to want to realise human values

.

How we, from our current situation, might best achieve these ends is not obvious

(Figure 5). While we ultimately need more technology, insight, and coordination, it is not clear that the shortest path to the goal is the best one.

It could turn out, for example, that attaining certain technological capabilities before attaining sufficient insight and coordination invariably spells doom for a civilisation. One can readily imagine a class of existential-catastrophe scenarios in which some technology is discovered that puts immense destructive power into the hands of a large number of individuals. If there is no effective defense against this destructive power, and no way to prevent individuals from having access to it, then civilisation cannot last, since in a sufficiently large population there are bound to be some individuals who will use any destructive power available to them. The discovery of the atomic bomb could have turned out to be like this, except for the fortunate fact that the construction of nuclear weapons requires a special ingredient—weapons-grade fissile material—that is rare and expensive to manufacture. Even so, if we continually sample from the urn of possible technological discoveries before implementing effective means of global coordination, surveillance, and ⁄ or restriction of potentially hazardous information, then we risk eventually drawing a black ball: an easy-to-make intervention that causes extremely widespread harm and against which effective defense is infeasible.28

We should

perhaps therefore not seek directly to approximate some state that is

‘sustainable’ in the sense that we could remain in it for some time. Rather, we should focus on getting onto a developmental trajectory that offers a high

probability of avoiding existential catastrophe

. In other words, our focus should be on maximising the chances that we will someday attain technological maturity in a way that is not dismally and irremediably flawed

. Conditional on that attainment, we have a good chance of realising our astronomical axiological potential.

To illustrate this point, consider the following analogy.

When a rocket stands on the launch pad, it is in a fairly sustainable state. It could remain in its current position for a long time, although it would eventually be destroyed by wind and weather. Another sustainable place for the rocket is in space, where it can travel weightless for a very long time. But when the rocket is in midair, it is in an unsustainable, transitory state: Its engines are blazing and it will soon run out of fuel. Returning the rocket to a sustainable state is desirable, but this does not mean that any way to render its state

[end page 25]

more sustainable is desirable. For example, reducing its energy consumption so that it just barely manages to hold stationary might make its state more sustainable in the sense that it can remain in one place for longer; however, when its fuel runs out the rocket will crash to the ground. The best policy for a rocket in midair is

, rather, to maintain enough thrust to escape

Earth’s gravitational field: a strategy that involves entering a less sustainable state

(consuming fuel faster) in order to later achieve the most desirable sustainable state

. That is, instead of seeking to approximate a sustainable state, it should pursue a sustainable trajectory

.

The present human condition is likewise a transitional state. Like the rocket in our analogy, humanity needs to pursue a sustainable trajectory, one that will minimise the risk of existential catastrophe

.29 But unlike the problem of determining the optimum rate of fuel consumption in a rocket, the problem of how to minimise existential risk has no known solution.

Don’t sanction the death of millions based on probabilistic thinking. Cognitive biases make it hard to make the right call. Err on the side of caution.

Yudkowsky 8

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Co-founder and Research Fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial

Intelligence—a non–profit research institute dedicated to increasing the likelihood of, and decreasing the time to, a maximally beneficial singularity, one of the world’s foremost experts on Artificial Intelligence and rationality, 2008

(“Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks,” Updated Version of a Chapter in Global Catastrophic

Risks (edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. C irkovic ), Available Online at https://intelligence.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf, Accessed 07-29-2014, p. 24-25)

Thinking about existential risks falls prey to all the same fallacies that prey upon thinking-in-general. But the stakes are much, much higher

. A common result in heuristics and biases is that offering money or other incentives does not eliminate the bias. Kachelmeier and Shehata (1992) offered subjects living in the People’s Republic of China the equivalent of three months’ salary. The subjects in these experiments don’t make mistakes on purpose; they make mistakes because they don’t know how to do better. Even if you told them the survival of humankind was at stake, they still would not thereby know how to do better. It might increase their need for closure, causing them to do worse. It is a terribly frightening thing, but people do not become any smarter, just because the survival of humankind is at stake

.

In addition to standard biases, I have personally observed what look like harmful modes of thinking specific to existential risks.

The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people. [10-to-the-eighth] is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity’s written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking

—enter into a

“separate magisterium.”

People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, “Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive.”

There is a saying in heuristics and biases that people do not evaluate events, but descriptions of events—what is called non-extensional reasoning.

The extension of humanity’s extinction includes the death of yourself, of your friends, of your family, of your loved ones, of your city, of your country, of your political fellows. Yet people who would take great offense at a proposal to wipe the country of Britain from the map, to kill every member of the

Democratic Party

in the U.S., to turn the city of Paris to glass—who would feel still greater horror on hearing the doctor say that their child had cancer—these people will discuss the extinction of humanity with perfect calm

. “Extinction of humanity,” as words on paper, appears in fictional novels, or is discussed in philosophy books—it belongs to a different context than the Spanish flu. We evaluate descriptions of events, not extensions of events. The cliche phrase end of the world invokes the magisterium of myth and dream, of prophecy and apocalypse, of novels and movies.

The challenge of existential risks to rationality is that, the catastrophes being so huge,

people snap into a different mode of thinking. Human deaths are suddenly no

longer bad, and

[end page 24] detailed predictions suddenly no longer require any expertise

, and whether the story is told with a happy ending or a sad ending is a matter of personal taste in stories.

But that is only an anecdotal observation of mine. I thought it better that this paper should focus on mistakes welldocumented in the literature—the general literature of cognitive psychology, because there is not yet experimental literature specific to the psychology of existential risks. There should be.

In the mathematics of Bayesian decision theory there is a concept of information value—the expected utility of knowledge. The value of information emerges from the value of whatever it is information about; if you double the stakes, you double the value of information about the stakes. The value of rational thinking works similarly—the value of performing a computation that integrates the evidence is calculated much the same way as the value of the evidence itself

(Good 1952; Horvitz, Cooper, and Heckerman 1989).

No more than Albert Szent-Gyo rgyi could multiply the suffering of one human by a hundred million can I truly understand the value of clear thinking about global risks.

Scope neglect is the hazard of being a biological human, running on an analog brain; the brain cannot multiply by six

billion. And the stakes of existential risk extend beyond even the six billion humans alive today, to all the stars in all the galaxies that humanity and humanity’s descendants may some day touch. All that vast potential hinges on our survival here, now

, in the days when the realm of humankind is a single planet orbiting a single star.

I can’t feel our future. All I can do is try to defend it

.

De-Development Lecture Materials - HSS14

Threads Related To The UMich File

“Collapse Inevitable” — Ahmed

Their Card — 1NC Collapse Inevitable

Response to Ahmed

“Collapse Good/Transition” — Lewis

Their Card — 1NC Transition

The Broader Context of Lewis’s Argument

Helpful Aff Threads vs. De-Dev

Economic Growth Good

Technological Civilization Good

The World Is Getting Better

(Neo-) Malthusianism Bad

Transition Bad — Lots of People Die

Transition Bad — Risks Extinction

Transition Bad — Conventional War Bad

Transition Bad — Option Value Good

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De-Development Lecture Materials - HSS14

Threads Related To The UMich File

“Collapse Inevitable” — Ahmed

Their Card — 1NC Collapse Inevitable

Response to Ahmed

“Collapse Good/Transition” — Lewis

Their Card — 1NC Transition

The Broader Context of Lewis’s Argument

Helpful Aff Threads vs. De-Dev

Economic Growth Good

Technological Civilization Good

The World Is Getting Better

(Neo-) Malthusianism Bad

Transition Bad — Lots of People Die

Transition Bad — Risks Extinction

Transition Bad — Conventional War Bad

Transition Bad — Option Value Good

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