My audience is the "Grandparent's Camp Kids" now in, or soon to be in, college.
It is you, you singers and musicians, you economists and anthropologists and paleontologists and "yet to decide what you want to be high schoolers", I have in mind as I blog.
I want us to think out loud, as it were, about the consequences of the improvement in the standard of living of the "average" world citizen during the last couple of centuries. I want us to ponder the consequences, positive and negative, of the growth in our income which has permitted us to live the life of luxury we do. I want us to think deeply about our future growth and its probable effects.
Grow. Increase and Multiply. Subdue the earth. Never have we been more successful in following those directives from the God of Abraham. Never has the human race grown faster in numbers and in consumption (income) than we have in the last half of the 20th century. Nature lies prostrate before us. Americans are the apotheosis of that success. We bestride the earth like a colossus. We live in the land of milk and honey.
We live in the most exciting, the most challenging, the most dangerous, and the most promising of times in human history. It is fitting we should now hold a mirror to our world and reflect on our future trajectory.
How should we conduct ourselves? Should we plan to continue our exponential growth? Do we want to? Is it possible? What are the consequences? Are we near the limits of our increasingly fragile world?
In this new century perhaps we will find a new challenge. Perhaps, to continue as a successful species, we will need to replace our apparent need for consumption, competition, and growth, with a less aggressive focus on community and cooperation.
But "touchy feely" stuff is not what this blog is about. I want to examine hard, data to help us determine the probable consequences if we continue on our current growth trajectory, and the alternatives open to us if we determine we cannot. No one can be certain about the future, but sound science, logical thinking and appropriate policies can reduce the likelihood of us stumbling into dead ends, or perishing in a holocaust of our own making.
I want to meditate on the growth of human consumption and waste, and the burden we have already placed on our finite world. I want to quantify what our, understandably vague, political leaders are telling us about their growth plans for our future.
To understand the future we must know something about how we got to where we are. I want to start by examining our past consumption, and cogitate on its effects on our history, and how it has shaped the world in which we now live. But how do we measure "consumption"?
GDP is the only universally accepted, routinely reported, reasonably uniform, closely analysed and frequently forecast measure of human "income", and therefore "consumption". To repeat, GDP is the measure of our "income", or our "consumption" or our "demands", our "standard of living", whatever you want to call it -- all measured in "money". GDP/Year is the amount we consume in one year.
Population is the second universally accepted measure. Although the world's population is not counted and reported as frequently as GDP, nevertheless population is counted frequently enough, and population trends change sufficiently slowly that we can be reasonably confident of the accuracy of population counts in the recent past and the population numbers forecast for the near future -- say about three or four decades out.
GDP per capita (GDP/Population) provides us with a measure of the world's "average individual" consumption, and provides us with a metric to compare the "average individual" consumption across centuries, and across geographical regions.
Every world leader espouses the concept of "growing our way out of the current financial crisis". All the bank bailouts and all the fiscal stimulants injected into the economy depend on future GDP growth to succeed. Maximizing GDP growth is the holy grail of all politicians now in office. I want to look at the detailed macroeconomics of this GDP growth, and the mathematics of slowing growth.
I want to ruminate on how we relate our consumption, denominated in money, to our consumption of the most critical natural resources necessary for our survival. In addition to the Greek elements of "earth, air, fire and water", on which we clearly depend, it may turn out that this slippery man made thing we call "money" is one of the "resources" we require for continuing GDP growth. We shall see.
Unfortunately, the natural resources on which we depend have no routinely measured and universally accepted metrics for their current, past or future rate of consumption, nor for their current quantity "available". We operate on the belief that as the price of a scarce resource rises, we will find an equivalent or better and cheaper alternative. As you well know from your high school and college text books, our economic system rests on the paradigm that the natural resources critical to our welfare are limited only by price, and therefore only by human ingenuity.
This belief system has worked well for the last couple of hundred years, but there are a few voices pointing to disturbing data which threaten this creed. The metrics for proving or disproving these discordant ideas are not yet established. The measures of our survival are only now slowly and painfully being derived, usually at the derision of the world's main stream economists, and the obstructionist tactics of the world's most powerful legislative body, the US Congress.
I want to understand the limitations of nature's resources and man's money.
Although GDP is a 20th centruy concept, world and regional GDP's of previous centuries and geographical regions have been deduced by economic historians. The granddaddy of all these economists is Professor Angus Maddison now retired. I'll use his work and the work of various other experts like Professor Bradford de Long of UC Berkeley, as appropriate, in this area.
I think best in pictures, and I detest statements which cannot be backed up with data. I expect this blog to be littered with charts and graphs!
