45. Maximising value - If value is life, how many of us should there be?

OK, I exaggerate slightly. In previous posts, I have argued that value is a combination of life and improvement. But focusing on the former, adding more people could be seen as a good thing. According to the Blur song, There are too many of us, but just how many is too many? Or can we see the continued expansion of human numbers as an unalloyed success?

In a familiar theme in these posts, the first major work on the subject was written in the eighteenth century and had a broad socio-economic focus. Now, we feel that we need to include environmental concerns. The first major modern work to say there are too many of us was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by Thomas Malthus, first published in 1798. The writers in the mid- and late-eighteenth century had gradually become more optimistic about people and governance and some, like Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet had published books putting forward forms of modern utopia. Malthus’ Essay poured icy water over their optimism and was one of the writers Carlyle wrote about when referring to economics as “the dismal science”.

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Malthus pessimism is based on the discrepancy between the ability of humans to procreate and the cultivable earth required to supply the growing number of mouths:

“… the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall some where; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the feeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room, and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The terms of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants, and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of feed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice. The former, misery, is an absolutely necessary consequence of it. Vice is a highly probable consequence, and we therefore see it abundantly prevail; but it ought not, perhaps, to be called an absolutely necessary consequence. The ordeal of virtue is to resift all temptation to evil.

This natural inequality of the two powers of population, and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.”

You could argue that Malthus has been proved wrong - to date. If value is based in surviving and surviving better, the human race has done well at survival, although in part by sequestering death to the weaker and less powerful. It has also done well at surviving better, if that is measured in such things as expected length of life and of healthy years of life. Other measures give less support to this idea of inexorable progress. We may not be sure whether Covid-19 was a natural escapee or not but we can say that modern life hastened its spread and almost certainly its total impact. Modern lifestyles are also responsible for increasing deaths associated with obesity and increases in other risk factors. Wars and the mass displacement of people continue. Suicide rates are slowly declining but mental health problems are declining patchily, if at all. And I haven’t mentioned the impact of pollution yet. To use the language of economics, I have only shown you the profit and loss account, where we have been. What about the balance sheet? What about the state of things now and our prospects?

Human population exploded. From 1/4bn in 500, it took 1000 years to double to 1/2bn but the next doubling occurred in 300 years, the one after that in 80, then 50. We are expected to hit 8bn next year, in 2023 - another 50 year doubling. In the UK, there were about 1.75m people after the Norman Conquest, just under 5m by before the Black Death in 1348. It took almost 300 years for the population to recover to the 1348 level, reaching just under 6m in 1750. But then the population took off, with over 8.5m in 1800, 16.8m in 1851, over 30m in 1901, 41m in 1951, and almost 50m in 2001, sitting at 67m at the 2021 census. When Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, there were fewer than 1bn people on the planet and fewer than 7m in the UK. In both volume and rate of increase, humans have been staggeringly successful. The rate is expected to slow. It is to be hoped that any decline is not terminal. Not only have we increased in numbers, we have increased in longevity. The global average life expectancy for 2019 was 72.6 years; the global average today is higher than in any country in 1950. The average in 1776 was 29 years, 32 by 1900, and in 1950, 49. The only countries in which life expectancy at birth in 2019 was below 62 were in Africa. The lowest expected rate was in the Central African Republic at 53.3 years. Even with more complicated measures that include an estimate of the quality of life based on health, improvements have been dramatic. At 2013 prices, GDP per head in England reached ￡1,000 around 1360. It took 400 years to reach ￡2,000, while the US was still (just) a colony of the UK. It doubled again around 1870, doubling again in 1953 and again to ￡16,000 per head in 1983. Material progress increased tremendously, although the rate of increase is now slowing: by 2016, GDP per head had risen to ￡29,000. The worldwide estimates from 1870 are even more impressive than in the UK. It appears that, insofar as GDP measures material success, Malthus was wrong. Our productivity has increased faster than our fecundity.

So, can we all relax, then?

In the time of Adam Smith, it was completely justifiable to seek more. Now it is not. We need to know what is enough. Especially when we consider those in poverty. The rich want more while most people in the world live in poverty. 85% of the world’s people live on less than $30 per day, two-thirds live on less than $10 per day, and one person in every ten lives on less than $1.90 per day. And, collectively, the earth is showing clear signs that it is struggling to keep up with our voraciousness. The Lancet’s Commission on pollution and health sets out what I believe to be this generation’s biggest challenge of all. Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today. Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015, 16% of all deaths worldwide, and three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. It is 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. In the most severely affected countries, pollution-related disease is responsible for more than one death in four.

Ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. Most of these extinctions had natural causes such as volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts. Extinctions are neither new nor, in themselves, biologically troublesome, unless something like an asteroid collision was so great as to undermine all life. However, the rate of extinctions has increased at least 100-fold as a result of relatively recent human activity. Human beings have great skills in increasing the scale and speed of activity but not necessarily in controlling the impacts. The problem remains the same: complex problems do not necessarily respond to human interventions in predictable ways. It is the complex, interwoven nature of ecosystems that is their natural strength and that provides a barrier to complete human understanding. It is not that we are stupid; it is that we can never know enough. The main causes of recent extinctions are the destruction, over-exploitation or pollution of environments that support life or of the living things themselves, and the greater spread of predators (invasive species) and disease. Some of the causes are the result of intentional human action; others are unfortunate side-effects. At present, there are 26,500 species are on the Red endangered list. And most of these are organisms we can see with the naked eye. And most of the ones that make the headlines are the cute and cuddly or the apex predators. Think of a polar bear. If we consider microscopic life, we have a far from complete understanding of what exists, let alone those we may have lost and those are we are threatening.

And so, back to Malthus and the original question of: How many is too many?

The big figures are fascinating. Comparing 1970 with 2023, we have the following round estimates: population has increased from 3.7bn to 8.1bn, an increase of 219%; but, over the same period, income per head (GDP/head) has increased from $3,010 to over $100,000, an increase of over 3320%. Doesn’t this confound Malthus and his modern-day “doomsters”?

Well, no. Not really. The most important measure now appears to be the Global Footprint, a measure of the earth’s ability to regenerate its resources each year. It is calculated by dividing the planet’s biocapacity (annual world ecological supply), by humanity’s demands on it (annual demand). And the figure has been rising from 1 in 1970 to 1.75 today, that is, we are consuming more than the earth is capable of regenerating. Not only that, we are doing so at an increasing rate. While the methods of calculation are disputed, the measure gives a very broad indicator of what we may mean by too much.

There may be “too many of us”, but the problem is also how voracious we are, how greedy we are. Had we continued to take $3,000 per annum, we could probably have afforded, in Global Footprint terms, the population increase to 8bn. You may also argue that our ingenuity and innovativeness? have given us the prosperity we have today and solved the problems of yesterday. You may further argue that we will do so again. My answer is that the variables that put too much pressure on the earth’s resources act together in complex and to some extent unpredictable ways. We know that unlimited population growth is unsustainable but we’re not sure of the limits (see the many predictions for evidence of this). We know that our greed, and especially the impact of the super-rich on the planet’s biosystems is already problematic but, collectively, we haven’t agreed at a high enough level that this is a problem yet alone offered any solutions to it. We also know that the nature of our growth is causing us major problems; pollution is poorly defined in nature, scale and reach. And, of the tools to accommodate greater population, innovation has been the saviour to date but, as I have argued in previous posts, in doing so it creates a new set of problems.

It is not just that there are too many of us (there may not be). It is the combination of population, our ever-increasing demands and our lack of humility regarding our knowledge and our status on earth that causes the problems. And trying to equate value to the volume of life is not enough; it is the sustainability that matters, that is, the existence of life and the inter-relationships between the different living things. And any “improvements” must be viewed systemically. In the next post, I’ll look at innovation and value.