mheslep said:
Have you http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Easterly-t.html" I'm about to.
Haven't read the book (and the unkind would point out that Ridley was a chairman of Northern Rock among other things - a UK poster child for unsustainable growth models in finance) but the basic idea is clear enough.
Yes, broadly speaking, evolutionary theory would seem the natural way to model our adaptive capacity here. And we have a lot of reason to believe in our power to adapt.
But an immediate question presents itself. Is evolution is a theory about progressive advance or the maximising of entropification?
The cornucopian paradigm would seem wedded to a belief that it is all about human progress - things will keep getting better in some overall or global sense.
This could mean everyone is gets happier, or healthier, or GPD per capita rises forever, or human population keeps growing, or human social complexity keeps increasing. But to be a model, the cornucopian view would have to be able to spell out its measure of success.
And if this could be argued to be a natural goal, then we could argue that evolutionary theory is the model that predicts we will adapt and keep on moving towards this goal.
However most modern theoretical biologists (the ones I know, like Stan Salthe for instance
http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/9/2/83/pdf) argue instead that evolution is about the acceleration of entropification. The natural goal is to dissipate gradients as fast as possible. And so this being the case, the "genius" of Homo sapiens will be directed towards exactly this goal. Our adaptive capacity is in fact being used to deplete the world of its natural resources.
So if left just to the natural forces of evolution, we would predict that human culture would evolve to "progressively" towards achieving that goal. And this of course appears to fit the facts. We are driven to be wasteful consumers of the otherwise locked away energy of fossil fuels.
Thus while I agree that evolutionary theory is a way to account for adaptive capacity, the same mechanism could have two quite different goals - some handwavey and pious notion of human ascension vs obedience to the second law of thermodynamics. And thus quite different views of the likely outcome.
So the cornucopian view seems to have to not only explain an adaptive capacity sufficient to stay a step ahead of resource depletion, but how that adaptive capacity is going to be used for anything other than the purpose of achieving resource depletion.
Of course, at this point people will begin appealing to things such as the "survival instinct". Or human foresight and choice. But again, let's hear something about the model that supports a belief in such things.
If I was continuing the cornucopian argument, I would now talk about anticipatory systems. I would be looking at the kind of societies that could indeed look ahead, agree "unnatural" goals like turning down the burn rate, and avoiding hitting the buffers.
My model of such a society would look rather different from the laisser-faire economies that Micawaber-like, say keep charging ahead blindly in the safe expecation that something will always turn up to rescue the day.
But that is not the kind of model that Ridley and his like are pushing, is it? So what kind of economic/social model can be shown to have 1) rich adaptive capacity, 2) a defined metric of success, and 3) sufficient anticipatory capacity to make choices far enough ahead of time with some certainty.
Laisser-faire economics would seem to offer only 1. On 2, the metric is usually GDP growth (a measure of entropification really) and perhaps a few quality of life stats like average life expectancy. On 3, there is a faith in market signals. Which is something - though you need a market (and do we have markets for goods like ecological services yet)? And you need honest markets (the credit crunch exposed that little issue bigtime - a shadow banking system orders of magnitude larger than the official one).
Another datapoint to throw into the mix is the question of whether we really are seeing rising rates of human innovation. There is the well-know criticisms of Jonathan Huebner for instance - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Huebner
But to restate the question, a malthusian view of resource depletion seems easy to model. If a resource is finite and its exploitation exponential, the exploiting system can be predicted to hit a sudden wall. Even if the system has proven itself highly innovative in its past, there is no reason to expect it to have the kind of innovative capacity to handle the scale of disruption it must eventually strike.
The model supporting a cornucopian view is not clear to me at all. The best I can think of is that the system at question has been through enough disruptions in the past and has proved it has built up a general disruption handling capacity. But I would expect such a system to have recognisable methods for looking ahead so as to prepare for disruptions in timely fashion. And not to show a boom and bust bubble mentality when it comes to economics.
If we had a cornucopian model like this, we would be able to plug in the performance of countries and see how well designed they really are. We could say with some confidence that society is doing the right things. But I've talked to plenty of cornucopian economists who have said in a hand wavey fashion, humans are remarkably adaptive. However none so far who have been able to back this up with a formal model.
Another term for this is of course resilience. And there is a literature on that in relation to the disruptions of natural disasters. Peak oilers spend a lot of their time talking about building resilience and social capital too. But I guess that is back to the malthusian perspective.
I'm tossing around a lot of ideas here. But it is because I have not come across a robust reason to believe the cornucopian pitch. If there is a model out there, it would be great to be able to kick its tyres.
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you find the Economist.
