| Wednesday, August
8. 2007
I am returning to the two page system while I think things out. I still
think I would like to combine these pages, but this didn't do it.
With luck the old system is restored. I think I have caught all the
bookmarks and such. This should fix the atom feed. At least I hope so.
Now back to work.
I will give some thought to a way to make this into a single page. I am
inclined to put the mail and view in on day, call it view, and be done with
it, with some bookmark adjustments. That is, View comes first, then a
section divider, and then mail. I do wonder what that will do to the atom
feed, but perhaps the experts can find a way to adjust to that.
================
I am having a discussion with John McCarthy on
decivilization. He thinks it is not very likely anywhere; that once the
technology of the Industrial Revolution becomes widespread, it won't be
reversed.
What got me thinking on this (and speculating in another conference) was
the Darwinian speculations in this article:
Jerry,
Dr. Clark makes some interesting arguments at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/
07indu.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=
b687b5b6f4a28423&ex=1186632000&pagewanted=print
Phil
<Snip> The basis of Dr. Clark's work is his
recovery of data from which he can reconstruct many features of the
English economy from 1200 to 1800. From this data, he shows, far more
clearly than has been possible before, that the economy was locked in a
Malthusian trap _ - each time new technology increased the efficiency of
production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the
surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.
This income was pitifully low in terms of
the amount of wheat it could buy. By 1790, the average person's
consumption in England was still just 2,322 calories a day, with the
poor eating a mere 1,508. Living hunter-gatherer societies enjoy diets
of 2,300 calories or more.
"Primitive man ate well compared with one
of the richest societies in the world in 1800," Dr. Clark observes.
The tendency of population to grow faster
than the food supply, keeping most people at the edge of starvation, was
described by Thomas Malthus in a 1798 book, "An Essay on the Principle
of Population." This Malthusian trap, Dr. Clark's data show, governed
the English economy from 1200 until the Industrial Revolution and has in
his view probably constrained humankind throughout its existence. The
only respite was during disasters like the Black Death, when population
plummeted, and for several generations the survivors had more to eat.
Malthus's book is well known because it
gave Darwin the idea of natural selection. Reading of the struggle for
existence that Malthus predicted, Darwin wrote in his autobiography, "It
at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations
would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. ...
Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work."
Given that the English economy operated
under Malthusian constraints, might it not have responded in some way to
the forces of natural selection that Darwin had divined would flourish
in such conditions? Dr. Clark started to wonder whether natural
selection had indeed changed the nature of the population in some way
and, if so, whether this might be the missing explanation for the
Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution, the first escape
from the Malthusian trap, occurred when the efficiency of production at
last accelerated, growing fast enough to outpace population growth and
allow average incomes to rise. Many explanations have been offered for
this spurt in efficiency, some economic and some political, but none is
fully satisfactory, historians say.
Dr. Clark's first thought was that the
population might have evolved greater resistance to disease. The idea
came from Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel," which argues
that Europeans were able to conquer other nations in part because of
their greater immunity to disease.
In support of the disease-resistance idea,
cities like London were so filthy and disease ridden that a third of
their populations died off every generation, and the losses were
restored by immigrants from the countryside. That suggested to Dr. Clark
that the surviving population of England might be the descendants of
peasants.
A way to test the idea, he realized, was
through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection
between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, , but in
quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.
Generation after generation, the rich had
more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant
there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor
failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over
their occupations. "The modern population of the English is largely
descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages," he
concluded.
As the progeny of the rich pervaded all
levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for
wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several
aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed
significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work
hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of
interpersonal violence dropped.
Another significant change in behavior, Dr.
Clark argues, was an increase in people's preference for saving over
instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in
interest rates from 1200 to 1800. <snip>
I wondered whether the complete change in cultures in England will allow
the maintenance of First World Civilization there, given that the people who
built the civilization aren't having kids, emigrate often, and generally are
being absorbed into an entirely different culture -- indeed with the
enthusiastic cooperation of the Crown and government.
McCarthy thinks industrialization is irreversible.
I haven't thought this through; but the enormous crop yields of the past
decades, over 160% more food grown on essentially the same land, require
intensive fertilizers; this is a very high energy industry; can the energy
and transportation grid be maintained? High energy civilizations look to me
to be more fragile than most suppose. I did a good bit of work on that in
studying for Lucifer's Hammer and some of the High Justice stories; and like
Jane Jacobs I think Dark Ages are easier to come by than one may think.
In a Dark Age it is not that we have forgotten how to do something: it is
that we have forgotten that it ever was done. As for instance we no longer
remember that even in the legally segregated Old South over 90% of all
school children, black or white, learned to read.
I hope John is right; but I am not sure I agree that civilization is
irreversible. There used to be a country called Rhodesia. Are we not moving
in that direction in all of the West, beginning with Europe. Are we not
moving toward instant gratification, contempt for deferred rewards,
rejection of savings, decline of literacy and numeracy? All over Europe?
With the enthusiastic assistance of the bureaucracy? Or have I misread the
situation?
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