Globalization and Violence

Stephen Pinker shows that violence has declined over time. 
What are the three reasons he gives?  How does each one relate to globalization?  

• "About 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared with about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states."  Only about 1.28% of the world died due to violent acts in 2002 which is less than the amount of self-inflicted violence (suicide) which killed 1.53%. 

Also, here is an optional clip of Stephen Pinker @ FP magazine:

the quantitative study of history provides some pleasant surprises. Abominable customs such as human sacrifice, chattel slavery, and torture-executions for victimless crimes have been abolished. Homicide rates have plunged since the Middle Ages, and rates of battle death in armed conflict are at an all-time low. ...many destructive wars have been fought over nebulous claims to national preeminence, including World War I. At the other end of the scale, the single largest motive for homicide on police blotters are "altercation of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc."

...Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. Self-esteem can be measured, and surveys show that it is the psychopaths, street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands, serial rapists, and hate-crime perpetrators who [have extremely high self-esteem. ...violent people are narcissistic: They think well of themselves ...out of a congenital sense of entitlement. When reality intrudes... they treat the bad news as a personal affront, and its bearer, who is endangering their fragile reputation, as a malicious slanderer.

Violence-prone personality traits are even more consequential when they infect political rulers, because their hang-ups can affect hundreds of millions of people rather than just the unlucky few... Unimaginable amounts of suffering have been caused by [narcissistic] tyrants... The ...American Psychiatric Association defines narcissistic personality disorder as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy." The trio of symptoms at narcissism's core... fits tyrants to a T. It is most obvious in their vainglorious monuments, hagiographic iconography, and obsequious mass rallies. And... narcissistic rulers leave their mark in more than statuary; they... authorize vast outlays of... rapacious conquest, pharaonic construction projects, or utopian master plans.

Among the pacifying features of democracies is that their leadership-selection procedure penalizes an utter lack of empathy, and their checks and balances limit the damage that a grandiose leader can do.

Outsourcing to Robots

Farhad Manjoo asks, "Will Robots Steal Your Job?" and says, "You're highly educated. You make a lot of money. You should still be afraid."  This is a longstanding fear that increasing productivity will impoverish us all.  So far in the past century it has increased leisure time and raised living standards.  It is ironic that people are afraid that productivity growth could create massive unemployment AND that the growing future population of unemployed senior citizens is another future trend to be afraid of.  However, the fear of productivity is due to a serious potential problem: inequality.  The reason unemployment is a huge social problem is due to the inequality it creates and productivity growth does raise an important question:  Who will get the gains of the productivity increases?  Sometimes the gains of technological improvement go to labor (like in the past century), sometimes they go to the landowners (like agricultural improvements in past centuries), and sometimes they go to the owners of capital (like some kinds of industrialization which replaced skilled occupations with largely unskilled workers).  In the future, there is more potential for greater consumption to run up against inelastic natural resource constraints whether they are water, fossil fuels, or some mineral.  Then the gains could mainly go to the owners of scarce resources rather than to labor.  Intellectual property could create artificial scarcity which increases inequality. 
Productivity growth need not increase inequality.  The 1940s-1960s featured high productivity growth and high equality.  The 1970s-2000s featured lower productivity growth and higher inequality again. 

Impact of Trade W/ China On The US

“The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States” (PDF) by David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. The Wall Street Journal
wrote about this and were widely interpreted as saying that trade with China has been bad for the US, but they didn't actually say that.  This is a case where a journalist wrote a story that is easy to misinterpret.  This is how they begin the story:

For years, economists have told Americans worried that cheap Chinese imports will kill jobs that the benefits of trade with China far outweigh its costs.
New research suggests the damage to the U.S. has been deeper than these economists have supposed. The study, conducted by a team of three economists, doesn't challenge the traditional view that trade is ultimately good for the economy. Workers who lose jobs do eventually find new work or retire, while the benefits from trade, such as lower prices, remain. 

I think that the WSJ intentionally made the research look provocative to make the story more interesting and it worked.  Yglesias:

I have to say that looking at the paper I don’t totally understand the fanfare the Wall Street Journal gave it. Here’s the abstract:

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by industry to other high-income countries. Rising exposure increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets. Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. Transfer benefits payments for unemployment, disability, retirement, and healthcare also rise sharply in exposed labor markets. The deadweight loss of financing these transfers is one to two-thirds as large as U.S. gains from trade with China.

This is interesting and important work, but it doesn’t overturn David Ricardo or whatever’s in the introductory textbooks. It says that imports from China create a broad-based consumer surplus and concentrated losses for producers of import-competing goods. The interesting empirical finding here is that the scale of the impact is really large. Some countries (Iceland, Israel, Denmark) are small so it’s always been obvious that international trade is very important to them but the traditional analysis of postwar America was that international trade just wasn’t that big a deal for the United States. But China is a huge country and it’s growing rapidly, so the scale of the trade impacts is much larger than we’ve traditionally seen.

Peak Oil

Early Warning:

Following up on yesterday's post of global oil production per capita, the above graph shows oil consumption per capita for an illustrative selection of countries around the world (along with the world line in black for comparison).  You can see that the developed countries all had peak consumption in the 1970s, fell in the early 1980s, then were flat for a while and began declining again.  In Europe, that second decline began in the mid 90s and has been gradual.  In the US it started in 2005 and has been rather abrupt.

...To see the developing countries more clearly here's the same data with the y-axis blown up:

India, China, and Brazil have all been growing their per-capita consumption rapidly in recent years, unlike the West.  China and India still have considerable distance to go before reaching the world average, however.

Broadly speaking then, the developed countries have been cutting per-capita oil consumption and will be doing so further, in order to make room for consumption in the more rapidly growing economies of the developing world.  There are two ways for these cuts in consumption to happen: use oil more efficiently in the economy, or have less economy.  Since 2005, in the US, we are mainly taking the second approach.

 Econobrowser:

 Although it is true that global production did not fall between 2005 and 2010, it is also accurate to observe that it did not grow very much, rising only 2.2 million barrels/day (which represents 2.6% of 2005 levels) over these 5 years. Over these same 5 years, China increased its consumption by 2.5 mb/d. Thus, although the world did produce more, everybody in the world outside of China had to make do with less.

Total global oil production, in millions of barrels per day, annual 2002-2010 (data source: EIA).

...Suppose I was trying to convince you that you are a mortal being, and your counterargument was, "but that's what you said in 2005, and I didn't die then! You said it again in 2007 and 2009, and each time you were wrong. Why should I believe you this time?"
Perhaps acknowledging one's own mortality is a similar proposition to embracing the possibility that global oil production need not continue to rise forever.
In any case, I was not among those who claimed that the peak would arrive by Thanksgiving 2005, nor 2007, nor 2011. But I am among those who did claim, and still believe, that the slow rate of increase in annual oil production over the last 5 years has caused significant economic problems for countries like the United States.
Moreover, if having been wrong in the past were a valid reason to disregard everything someone says, it might be wise to ponder these words that Daniel Yergin wrote in 2005:

There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels a day -- from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels a day -- a 20 percent increase. Such growth over the next few years would relieve the current pressure on supply and demand.

Dissecting what went wrong with that prediction is a topic for another occasion. I believe it was based on a careful, thoughtful analysis, and provides an interesting case study in some of the challenges facing anybody who tries to make these kinds of predictions. But I do feel that the meme of "don't listen to the peak oil nuts, because they've always been wrong before" should have gotten a bit tiresome at this point. ...I submit that meeting the growing global demand for crude oil over the last five years has posed significant challenges for the world economy. And those who worry that the next 5-10 years might be like the last should not be dismissed as crackpots.

Industrial Policy Is About Picking Industries, Not Companies

Prestowitz: 
S+B: Starting with his role as an advisor to the secretary of commerce in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and progressing to his current position as founder and president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, D.C., Clyde Prestowitz has been a consistent voice on the importance of manufacturing in economic competitiveness....

PRESTOWITZ: ...There are two kinds of global companies. In the United States, the purpose of the corporation is primarily to provide optimal returns to shareholders. This leads to a focus on optimizing short-term results. In continental Europe and most of Asia, the state charters the corporation and gives it a lot of specific benefits; in exchange, the corporation provides benefits to society. This leads naturally to embracing a coherent industrial policy....

S+B: What do you mean by a coherent industrial policy?
PRESTOWITZ: There’s a lot of misunderstanding about this. It’s associated with pre–World War II Britain and France, whose governments supported particular companies as national champions. People assume it means having governments pick winners and losers.
Look instead at countries like Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, Germany, Korea, Switzerland, Finland, and China. They’re all very different; some are democratic, others are authoritarian. The Finns and Swedes have strong labor unions, whereas unions in Taiwan and Singapore are weak. But all these countries are economically successful for the same reasons. First, their governments focus on being competitive by promoting selected high-value-added industries, with a long planning horizon. Second, they have a high level of coordination among the government, labor unions, and business management, in investment decisions, wages, and inflation rates. They don’t pick winning companies; instead, they build a consensus on what each of them has to do to contribute [to building a vibrant industry]. Compared to other countries that have taken a more laissez-faire approach, their performance is far superior.

Summers memo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Read the whole thing. It is remarkable ethics.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."

Manufacturing Is Key to Growth

Economist Debates:

Take the case of the Netherlands. Unbeknown to most people, it is world's third largest agricultural exporter, despite having little land (it has the world's fifth highest population density). This has been possible because the Dutch have 'industrialised' agriculture by, for example, deploying hydroponic agriculture (growing plants in water) that uses computer-controlled feeding of high-quality chemicals—something that would not have been possible if the Netherlands did not have some of the world's most advanced chemical and electronics industries. In contrast, despite being the world's second most high-tech exporter (measured by the share of high-tech products in manufactured exports), the Philippines has only $2,000 per person income because it makes those products with other people's technologies.

Ricardo Revisited?

NewAmerica.net, Baumol and Gomory:

In a world in which productivities are often not fixed by nature but are often acquired we have shown the following possibilities:

That the economic development of a trading partner can be harmful to the home country. Although the effect of that development starts good, it ends badly.
That there is a dominant and dominated relation possible between two countries, a relation that is good for the dominant one and bad for the dominated one.
That a country can attain a dominant position only by having an undeveloped trading partner. This can occur naturally if the trading partner is simply there in an underdeveloped state, or the underdevelopment can be brought about by mercantilist actions that destroy industries.
There is inherent conflict not only between a nation in a dominant position but between that dominant partner and the interests of a two-county world.
While a country cannot gain a dominant position by building up its industries, it can avoid a dominated position and assure a good outcome by developing a particular subset of its own industries and not allowing them to be destroyed.

It is possible that the United States and China were in the dominant and dominated position some time ago. We should recognize that China’s evolution away from that state can be harmful to the United States. Furthermore we can observe that China’s gain has been accompanied by the disappearance or at least decline of a number of our industries. We need to be cautious because, as these standard models show, there is a distinct possibility that this situation can even lead to significant loss through deindustrialization in an initially prosperous economy.

 There is a grain of truth here, but It isn't time to write of the Ricardian model.  In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, the 'dominant' country benefits from trading with 'dominated' countries because the capitalists get the benefits of cheap labor.  As productivity grows in 'dominated' countries, our capitalists have less advantage over them which would simply reduce trade if everything else were homogenous (which it is not), so there is no real problem in the Ricardian and Hechscher-Ohlin models.  The real potential problem is outside of those models.  The problem would be if the US specializes in industries which do not grow in productivity and/or demand in the future and the formerly 'dominated' countries do specialize in these industries.  China in particular is specializing in manufacturing which has traditionally been the sector with the very highest productivity growth, so that is a good sector to specialize in for developing future productivity and wealth and the US may lose out by losing relative manufacturing capacity to other countries.  The oil industry has been seeing declines in productivity for decades, but demand is price inelastic and is income elastic and demand grows as global incomes grow and so that sector has a bright future despite its declines in productivity.  The US used up most of our cheap oil a long time ago, and we have been a net importer for 40 years, so this is unlikely to be a bright spot for the US. 

Not all productivity gains are the same. Here's why.

McKinsey: What Matters:

In 2000, imports of computer and electronics products from China and Mexico accounted for about 10 percent of the net supply to the US market (domestic shipments plus imports minus exports). By 2010, that percentage had risen to 37 percent. Meanwhile, the share of net supply coming from G7 countries, including the United States, fell from 69 percent to 43 percent (domestic shipments less exports, plus imports from other G7 countries).

These shifts in sourcing from high-cost to low-cost suppliers can show up as productivity growth in the United States. Let’s look at one example. Suppose a US automaker imports one million parts from a Japan-based supplier at $10 per part, for a total import bill of $10 million. Consider two scenarios:

Scenario 1: The US automaker improves its production process in its domestic factories, so it only needs half as many components. The import bill goes down to $5 million.

Scenario 2: The US automaker switches to a China-based supplier that only charges $5 per part. The import bill goes down to $5 million.

Surprisingly, these two scenarios are indistinguishable in the US economic statistics. In both scenarios, the import bill goes down to $5 million. The value-added of the US auto company goes up (sales minus the cost of materials), as does its profitability (sales minus cost of labor and materials) and measured productivity (value-added per worker).3

However, the two scenarios have very different implications for incomes and jobs. In the first scenario, the productivity gains come from an improvement in the domestic production process, which increases the value-added by each worker in its domestic factories. All else being equal, economic theory suggests this should result in an increase in the real wages of US auto workers and/or an incentive to boost the US employment of auto factories.

In the second scenario, the gains come from an improved ability of the company’s managers to identify new sourcing opportunities... All else being equal, economic theory suggests in this scenario, real wages and/or employment should rise for managers who are capable of identifying additional global opportunities to cut costs.

Eight of the Ten Largest Private Companies Produce Oil and Gas

And nine of the top ten largest private companies are dependent upon gasoline if you include Toyota. I'm not including Japan Post as the tenth biggest because it is a state-owned enterprise and it is weird because it only has 3251 employees which is the smallest number of any company on the complete list of almost 200 companies. The complete list is also interesting because it reveals industries where there are serious economies of scale and absent industries like plumbing, law, or pediatrics where they do not exist.
Wikipedia: List of companies by revenue

Rank	Company name	Primary industry	Revenue (USD Billion)	Fiscal Year	Market capitalization (Dec 2009, USD million)[1]	Employees	Primary Stock listing	Headquarters	CEO, compensation
1	Walmart	Retailing	$421.849[2]	January 31, 2011	$203,654	2,150,000	NYSE: WMT	Bentonville, Arkansas, United States	Mike Duke, $19.23M[3]
2	ExxonMobil	Oil and gas	$370.125[4]	2010	$364,035[4]	83,600[4]	NYSE: XOM	Irving, Texas, United States	Rex W. Tillerson, $10.53M[5]
3	Royal Dutch Shell	Oil and gas	$368.056[6]	2010	$186,618	112,000	LSE: RDSA	The Hague, Netherlands and London, United Kingdom	Peter Voser
4	BP	Oil and gas	$297.107[7]	2010	$181,806	97,600	LSE: BP	London, England, United Kingdom	Robert Dudley
5	Sinopec	Oil and gas	$289.774[8]	2010	$159,263	400,513	SSE: 600028, SEHK: 0386	Beijing, China	Jiming Wang
6	Toyota Motors	Automotive	$241.590[9]	March 31, 2011	$143,705	316,121	TYO: 7203	Toyota, Aichi, Japan	Fujio Cho
7	PetroChina	Oil and gas	$221.955[10]	2010	$353,140	464,000	SSE: 601857, SEHK: 0857	Beijing, China	Zhou Jiping
8	Total S.A.	Oil and gas	$212.815[11]	2010	$151,544	111,401	Euronext: FP	Courbevoie, Île-de-France, France	Christophe de Margerie
9	Chevron	Oil and gas	$204.928[12]	2010	$154,462	61,533	NYSE: CVX	San Ramon, California, United States	David J. O'Reilly
10	Japan Post Holdings	Conglomerate	$200.995[13]	March 31, 2010	-	3,251	Government-owned	Tokyo, Japan	Jiro Saito
11	ConocoPhillips	Oil and gas	$198.655[14]	2010	$97,435	29,700	NYSE: COP	Houston, Texas, United States	James Mulva

Record Food Prices

Why is grain consumption going up?  More people and particularly, richer people eat less efficiently.  The Chinese are eating lots more meat and beer:

Gas Prices Are Rising,

The New Republic:

According to research by UC Davis's Jonathan Hughes, Christopher Knittel and Daniel Sperling, Americans are now less responsive to increases in gas prices. In the late 1970s, a ten percent rise in the cost of gas would lead to about a three percent decline in the amount of gas consumed. In the early 2000s, on the other hand, gas prices would have to rise about 60 percent to provoke a similar decline in gas consumption.

The Street Light: Return to the Center of the World

The Street Light: Return to the Center of the World:

Gavyn Davies points us to a neat map created by Danny Quah at the LSE in his recent paper "The Global Economy's Shifting Centre of Gravity" (pdf). In it, Quah calculates "the average location of economic activity across geographies on Earth." Here's the map:


The westernmost black dot on the map represents where the Earth's center of economic gravity was in 1980 - somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, a bit west of the Madeira islands. Since then it has drifted eastward to its current position near Cairo. The red dots then extrapolate the motion of this point until 2050, assuming the next 40 years are characterized by similar growth patterns to the past 30 years.

One of the things I love about this map is that it reminds me (in an admittedly purely superficial way) of one of my favorite economic models: the "gravity" model of trade flows, in which the trade between two countries or regions is roughly predicted by the size of the two regions and how far apart they are, just like physical gravity.

More substantively, I also find it interesting to think about this movement of the world's economic center of gravity as really just backtracking, an undoing of the point's westward movement that took place between about 1700 and 1900. From the time of the first pyramids until perhaps the 16th or 17th century, the world's economic center of gravity consistently hovered in the Middle East somewhere. Its movement westward into the Atlantic is really a relatively recent phenomenon. (Granted, if Quah's projections are correct, we may overshoot a bit as the point moves back east to where it came from, but that remains to be seen.)

It's not a coincidence that nearly all European maps of the world until the 16th century had the Middle East (often specifically Jerusalem) in the middle of the map. To medieval European map-makers, the Middle East was, and had always been, right at the center of the world, geographically, spiritually, and economically. Note that the requirement to represent that visually is what led to the classic T-O maps of the European Middle Ages. (The T-O maps are oriented with east at the top, with the Mediterranean forming the vertical stroke of the 'T', and with the Middle East right at the center of the world where the three continents meet.)

In that context, Quah's map above - and the changes in the world economy that it so nicely distills - could be interpreted as simply the correction of a temporary global aberration.

Oil: A Commodity Traded On A Global Marketplace

Yglesias:

there’s a single worldwide price of oil that’s determined by global supply and global demand. It’s not possible for one country to unilaterally alter the price its own citizens pay at the pump by altering the quantity of oil it produces. A new well in the United States has exactly the same impact on global prices as a new well in Norway or Venezuela or Saudi Arabis and thus the exactly the same impact on the price American consumers pay.

And yet turn it into a political story and suddenly all this knowledge drops away:

“What about domestic supply?” asked Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) this week. “What about the Gulf of Mexico? What about all of our other vast energy resources that we are taking off the table and shutting down?”

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), who is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, has cataloged ways he says the administration has frustrated oil production, from suspended drilling leases to increased red tape. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) posted highlights of the list on his website.

“Since this administration has taken over, they have done everything to block energy development in this country,” Hastings said.

Well what about domestic supply? Why would it matter if the supply is domestic?

Fun With Purchasing Power Parity

Yglesias:

Richer countries have higher price levels in general. But Japan is not richer than France, Germany, and the UK which makes its high cost of living evidence of a low-productivity service sector.

See Wikipedia for a great map of PPP in 2003.

Sawing Apart Gym Shoes At The Port Of Long Beach : Planet Money : NPR

Sawing Apart Gym Shoes At The Port Of Long Beach : Planet Money : NPR:

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection testing facility in Long Beach, Calif. looks like a cross between a university science lab and a theater props department. It's full of long work benches, people in white lab coats, and piles and piles of shoes, shirts and fabric. The people who work here have a serious mission: to catch importers who are trying to game the tariff laws.... Canvas sneakers with rubber or plastic soles, for example, are assessed a duty of 37.5 percent, but if the sneakers are made of leather, the duty goes down closer to 10 percent.

These seemingly arbitrary distinctions create a huge incentive for importers to try and get around the rules, which is why this testing lab exists. The people who work here are constantly verifying that importers are bringing in what they say they’re bringing in, and that verification can get ugly:

"One of the tools they like to use is an autopsy saw," says Marian Federoff, a scientist at the lab, "It does a really nice job of cutting through the leather, textile and rubber plastic components that we are trying to separate."

In the 19th century, tariffs were the main way the government made money. But for at least 50 years now, tariffs have had fewer supporters. Pretty much every economist, left or right, says tariffs make the U.S. poorer and don’t save jobs.

Imagining America as China - James Fallows - International - The Atlantic

Imagining America as China - James Fallows - International - The Atlantic:

If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be 'strong' in the way China currently is, [Thomas Barnett] said, all we'd have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now. Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute. Seriously, reflect on this, and consider that it is China's reality now.

Shipping and World Trade : Key Facts

Shipping and World Trade : Key Facts:

Shipping trade estimates are often calculated in tonne-miles, as a way of measuring the volume of trade (or 'transportation work ', as it is sometimes referred).

World seaborne trade 1969-2010

Source: Fearnley's Review

Throughout the last century the shipping industry has seen a general trend of increases in total trade volume. Increasing industrialisation and the liberalisation of national economies have fuelled free trade and a growing demand for consumer products. Advances in technology have also made shipping an increasingly efficient and swift method of transportation. Over the last four decades total seaborne trade estimates have quadrupled, from just over 8 thousand billion tonne-miles in 1968 to over 32 thousand billion tonne-miles in 2008.

What to Expect When You’re Free Trading - New York Times

What to Expect When You’re Free Trading - New York Times:

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to? Does it create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney? Um, no. ...
Bullying and protectionism have a lot in common. They both use force (either directly or through the power of the law) to enrich someone else at your involuntary expense. If you’re forced to pay $20 an hour to an American for goods you could have bought from a Mexican for $5 an hour, you’re being extorted. When a free trade agreement allows you to buy from the Mexican after all, rejoice in your liberation — even if Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and the rest of the presidential candidates don’t want you to.

Discussions About Food Shortages and Population Growth

Varied Menus for Sustaining a Well-Fed World - NYTimes.com: "As promised, here are more reactions to this same query from a wide range of other analysts and practitioners focused on food:

Nina Fedoroff, a life sciences professor at Pennsylvania State University and visiting professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia:
Eternal Food Fight:

Here’s the long-distance back and forth between Brown and Smil (not done through direct e-mail exchanges but mediated by me):
Brown:

I don’t think this current price rise is temporary. There will, of course, be fluctuations in the grain prices, but they will be around a rising trend. Grain and soybean prices, and food prices more broadly, are moving up. There is not anything in sight to reverse this trend. If the world were to have a poor grain harvest this year, there could well be chaos in world grain markets by late summer.
You might want to take a look at the article I did in Scientific American a couple years ago, entitled “Could World Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
Next Wednesday, the 12th, I will be updating my thinking on this at a press teleconference to launch the new book, “World on the Edge.”

Smil:
There are always speculative food price currents and undercurrents but no end of days as so many of your fellow citizens, being the most scientifically illiterate people who ever lived, think. Just look at #1, China: imports less than 5% of its food and CONSUMES more food per capita than Japan!!!
Nothing has changed since I wrote that closing chapter of my 2000 feeding the world book: if China can do it, anybody (but Somalia) can [*]. Nor is India “starving.” Any food shortages are 95%+ a matter of poor or no governance, not any “extreme” climate and “gunwale inching”

Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed - WSJ.com

Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed - WSJ.com:

Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly—bang!—culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there? The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals....

Scientists have so far been looking for the answer to this riddle in the wrong place: inside human heads. Most have been expecting to find a sort of neural or genetic breakthrough that sparked a "big bang of human consciousness," an auspicious mutation so that people could speak, think or plan better, setting the human race on the path to continuous and exponential innovation.  But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. ...

We tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to invention, far more important than governments, money or individual genius. It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as well-endowed collective brains. Trade also gave way to centralized institutions...

Agriculture was invented where people were already living in dense trading societies....

Go even further back and you find the same thing. The explosion of new technologies for hunting and gathering in western Asia around 45,000 years ago, often called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, occurred in an area with an especially dense population of hunter-gatherers—with a bigger collective brain. Long before the ancestors of modern people first set foot outside Africa, there was cultural progress within Africa itself, but it had a strangely intermittent, ephemeral quality: There would be flowerings of new tool kits and new ways of life, which then faded again....

Trade is to culture as sex is to biology. Exchange makes cultural change collective and cumulative. It becomes possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not just in your neighborhood. The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex.
Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.
Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty....


This theory neatly explains why some parts of the world lagged behind in their rate of cultural evolution after the Upper Paleolithic takeoff. Australia, though it was colonized by modern people 20,000 years earlier than most of Europe, saw comparatively slow change in technology and never experienced the transition to farming. This might have been because its dry and erratic climate never allowed hunter-gatherers to reach high enough densities of interaction to indulge in more than a little specialization.
Where population falls or is fragmented, cultural evolution may actually regress. A telling example comes from Tasmania, where people who had been making bone tools, clothing and fishing equipment for 25,000 years gradually gave these up after being isolated by rising sea levels 10,000 years ago. Joe Henrich of the University of British Columbia argues that the population of 4,000 Tasmanians on the island constituted too small a collective brain to sustain, let alone improve, the existing technology.



The oldest evidence for human trade comes from roughly 80,000 to 120,000 years ago, when shell beads in Algeria and obsidian tools in Ethiopia began to move more than 100 miles from the sea and from a particular volcano respectively. (In recent centuries stone tools moved such distances in Australia by trade rather than by migration.) This first stirring of trade was the most momentous innovation of the human species, because it led to the invention of invention. Why it happened in Africa remains a puzzle, but Steve Kuhn and Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona have argued that for some reason only Africans had invented a sexual division of labor between male hunters and female gatherers—the most basic of all trades....

The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

The article also talks about Neanderthals:

Neanderthals are now known to have had brains that were bigger than ours and to have inherited the same genetic mutations that facilitate speech as us. Yet, despite surviving until 30,000 years ago, they hardly invented any new tools, let alone farms, cities and toothpaste. The Neanderthals prove that it is quite possible to be intelligent and imaginative human beings (they buried their dead) yet not experience cultural and economic progress. 

Further proof that exchange and collective intelligence are the key to human progress comes from Neanderthal remains. Almost all Neanderthal tools are found close to their likely site of origin: they did not trade. In the southern Caucasus, argues Daniel Adler of the University of Connecticut, it is the "development and maintenance of larger social networks, rather than technological innovations or increased hunting prowess, that distinguish modern humans from Neanderthals.

Our ancestors (Homo sapiens) displaced Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis) despite our competitors having larger brains and much stronger bodies.  They had tools and speech and buried their dead.  Jason Shogren argues that the only advantage our ancestors had over Neanderthal man is that Homo sapiens was much more inclined to trade:

SINCE the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, advocates of free trade and the division of labour, ...have lauded the advantages of those economic principles. Until now, though, no one has suggested that they might be responsible for the very existence of humanity. But that is the thesis propounded by Jason Shogren, ... For Dr Shogren is suggesting that trade and specialisation are the reasons Homo sapiens displaced previous members of the genus, such as Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man), and emerged triumphant as the only species of humanity.
Neanderthal man has had a bad cultural rap over the years since the discovery of the first specimen in the Neander valley in Germany, in the mid-19th century. The “caveman” image of a stupid, grunting, hairy, thick-skulled parody of graceful modern humanity has stuck in the public consciousness. But current scholarship suggests Neanderthals were probably about as smart as modern humans, and also capable of speech. If they were hairy, strong and tough—which they were—that was an appropriate adaptation to the ice-age conditions in which they lived. So why did they become extinct?
Neanderthals existed perfectly successfully for 200,000 years before Homo sapiens arrived in their European homeland about 40,000 years ago, .... But 10,000 years later they were gone, so it seems likely that the arrival of modern man was the cause. The two species certainly occupied more or less the same ecological niche (hunting a wide range of animals, and gathering a similarly eclectic range of plant food), and would thus have been competitors....  according to Dr Shogren's paper in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, it was neither cave paintings nor better spear points that led to Homo sapiens's dominance. It was a better economic system.
One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade. The evidence suggests that such trade was going on even 40,000 years ago. Stone tools made of non-local materials, and sea-shell jewellery found far from the coast, are witnesses to long-distance exchanges. That Homo sapiens also practised division of labour and specialisation is suggested not only by the skilled nature of his craft work, but also by the fact that his dwellings had spaces apparently set aside for different uses....  Only in the case of the trading and specialisation variables did they allow Homo sapiens an advantage: specifically, they assumed that the most efficient human hunters specialised in hunting, while bad hunters hung up their spears and made things such as clothes and tools instead. Hunters and craftsmen then traded with one another.
According to the model, this arrangement resulted in everyone getting more meat, which drove up fertility and thus increased the population. Since the supply of meat was finite, that left less for Neanderthals, and their population declined.... the presence of a trading economy in the modern human population can result in the extermination of Neanderthals even if the latter are at an advantage in traditional biological attributes, such as hunting ability.

Both trade and technology finally had an enduring expansion during the "upper paleolithic explosion" about 40,000 years ago. The above reading argues that it was due to population density.  Haim Ofek's book argues that this was due to the invention of money.  He argues that this was the time when there was a blossoming of symbolic expression like sculpture and cave paintings.  Money is nothing more than a symbolic representation of value and so a culture that widely engages in symbolic artistic representation may also 'get' the idea that rare beads are worth trading for food or stone blades. 

Has the Industrialized World Reached Peak Travel? | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. Miller-McCune.

Whether or not we are at peak oil, the thing that will increase gas prices is if economic growth is faster than the growth of oil production. Unless we find a backstop technology or just get a whole lot more energy efficient. Some of that is happening:

Has the Industrialized World Reached Peak Travel?

Passenger travel, which grew rapidly in the 20th century, appears to have peaked in much of the developed world.

A study of eight industrialized countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years of the 21st century, well before the recent escalation in fuel prices. It could be a sign, researchers said, that the demand for travel and the demand for car ownership in those countries has reached a saturation point.

“With talk of ‘peak oil,’ why not the possibility of ‘peak travel’ when a clear plateau has been reached?” United States, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia... motorized passenger travel grew rapidly in all eight countries as greater prosperity led to rising car ownership and domestic air travel. But after 2000, when per capita GDP in the U.S. hit $37,000, passenger travel stopped growing here.... People already spend an average 1.1 hours per day traveling from one place to another, and driving speeds can’t get much faster.

Unfortunately, air travel is extremely vulnerable to high oil prices. There are few substitutes.

"The place where airline use will actually decline is in North America where we have turned flying into 'buses with wings' mass transportation," says Anthony Perl, ...Perl believes air travel in the future will be reserved for the rich