MIT Institute's Gloomy Prediction: 'Global Economic Collapse' By 2030 816
suraj.sun writes "A new study from researchers at Jay W. Forrester's institute at MIT says that the world could suffer from 'global economic collapse' and 'precipitous population decline' if people continue to consume the world's resources at the current pace. The study's researchers created a computing model to forecast different scenarios based on the current models of population growth and global resource consumption, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control and environmental protection efforts. Most of the computer scenarios found population and economic growth continuing at a steady rate until about 2030. But without 'drastic measures for environmental protection,' the scenarios predict the likelihood of a population and economic crash."
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Nevermind, I just lost all faith in the story:
However, the study said "unlimited economic growth" is still possible if world governments enact policies and invest in green technologies that help limit the expansion of our ecological footprint.
Re:Again... (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, but the Joint Forces Command (aka the US millitary) even said that we hit peak oil in 2010.
No, really. Click this link and skip ahead to page 24
http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf [jfcom.mil]
Re:Again... (Score:4, Informative)
Err sorry, jumped the gun. It's been a while since I looked at the document. It's on page 29:
P.S. "shortfall in supply" == skyrocketing prices as consumers compete with their dollars to fuel their farm tractors and war tanks
Re:crappy difference-equation mathematics (Score:5, Informative)
politically motivated (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the computer scenarios found population and economic growth continuing at a steady rate until about 2030.
Well then, they're bullshit. Every single country in the world that has ever industrialized has experienced steep declines in population growth as its citizens become wealthier and more educated. This trend is already very noticeable in the up-and-coming Asian and BRIC countries. There is no reason, none whatsoever, to assume that the trend will not apply (gradually) to every other country as they find their way to productive governments and growth--in fact, really, only Africa and the Middle East are left at this point, and thing there are starting to change.
There can be only one reason to base models on such a startlingly unlikely assumption...
Re:Good Timing! (Score:0, Informative)
So why don't you just kill yourself now? It sounds like no one will miss you.
Re:Club of Rome Study 2 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good Timing! (Score:5, Informative)
That is why the Christians don't see any point in conservation for the future because they pray for their evil god to destroy the world, so it does not matter if they leave nothing for the next generation.
Wow. Massive generalization much?
Yes, I probably do generalize a bit much. That does not change the fact that the political arm of American Christianity is rabidly anti-conservation for the reason that I stated. They believe that their god will destroy the world before it matters.
forget it (Score:4, Informative)
20 year predictions are generally little more than glorified guessing.
Think back 20 years. That's 1992. That means no Facebook, no Google, no Slashdot either. You'd run Windows 3.1 or if you are amongst the geekiest of the geeks, Linux 0.1 or so. But you had to roll it on your own because there are no distributions (Slackware started in '93).
Yugoslavia had just started breaking apart. The war in Afghanistan just ended. I'm talking about the soviet invasion.
That's for context. Now on the long-term "visions". We had the Earth Summit [wikipedia.org], so climate change was already on the agenda.
Economically, there was no Euro. The economical collapse of Russia was yet to come, as was the economic crisis of the Asian nations. Had you asked people what the future would bring, they would have likely extrapolated from Black Wednesday [wikipedia.org] the way we would extrapolate from the current financial crisis. Chinas rise to power was just beginning and most people, including experts, wouldn't have predicted it, because it was in late 1992 that the government turned towards even a bit of capitalism.
In healthcare, we didn't yet have bird-flu and pandemics, AIDS was the scare of the day. We also didn't have LASIK, stem cells or any of the other recent advantages. Antibiotics were considered undefeatable by many.
And so on and so forth. There's a lot of big events that a prediction made in 1992 would've missed completely. Yes, we can extrapolate population growth somewhat, but we can't account for inventions in agriculture, for example.
Re:FROSTY PISS!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FROSTY PISS!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FROSTY PISS!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Malthus again??? (Score:4, Informative)
Read Tainter's [wikipedia.org] "Collapse of Complex Civilizations".
Yes, it's happened and yes, it will happen again.
Re:Again... (Score:5, Informative)
Er, have you looked at the numbers? US fertility rate among native-born US citizens tends to be at below the replacement rate of 2.1. Immigration tends to drive US population growth rates.
Europe is already below replacement rates in their fertility levels. 1.59.
Numbers and sources can be found at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
If you want to downsize the US or EU's population, you could do it through preventing immigration, and the population would drop naturally. But there are some pretty severe downsides to closing off immigration, and it only pushes the problem to somewhere else.
p
Survivors wrote history (Score:5, Informative)
History is an excellent guide. Plenty of societies have been faced with existential challenges. Some of them died. Others fell under the domination of societies that coped better or did not face the same limitations[1]. A very few survived (you can probably count them on your fingers).
History is written by the survivors. Our history is that of the societies that survived. In North America, that recent history is exceptional: over a hundred years of peace within our borders. If by "history" you mean living memory, you are correct. Though if you back just a little farther and consider history from a native perspective, many societies died or fell under domination here. People adapt - but that's no guarantee that our society will be among the survivors.
Market societies are extremely recent, arising only in late 18th century England, before which point the vast majority of the population lived from subsistence agriculture[2]. Market society was then deliberately constructed through government action. How markets are constructed matters very much: they do fail, particularly when it comes to public goods and the environment.
Nor do markets somehow escape the limitations of nature. The rise of industrial capitalism corresponds to the exploitation of fossil fuels. Markets did not create coal and oil: they only discovered them. Would capitalism have been successful if they were not there to be found? One thing capitalism does extremely well is to replace one resource for another. When a resource grows scarce or expensive, something else is substituted. An efficient capitalist economy may not run out of anything: until it runs out of everything[3]. The problem-solving efficiency of markets can actually make the economy more fragile, not less.
[1] Jared Diamond's Collapse examines numerous examples.
[2] See Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation for a fascinating account of this. For a broader view of capitalism before this point, see Fernand Braudel's The Wheels of Commerce (Capitalism & Civilization 15th-18th Century Vol. 2).
[3] Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies argues that a societies develop they realize diminishing marginal returns from adaptation and innovation. When the marginal returns turn negative, they collapse. The only solution he sees is an external energy subsidy - which is where our problem lies.
The Club of Rome saw it coming (Score:5, Informative)
And the one thing in common with every major pandemic, catastrophe, and economic collapse has had in common? No one ever saw them coming.
Only people who put fingers in their ears and say "LALALA, I can't hear you!".
The Club of Rome made a prediction forty years ago that's coming pretty close to reality. RTFA and take a look at the comparative plots.
Re:WAY TO GO, MIT! (Score:4, Informative)
What you mean is, the people who saw them coming weren't listened to. Many forecasters saw the recent real estate bubble collapsing, e.g. It's true that nobody picked the exact hour, but that's rather irrelevant.
If you say nobody saw the previous disasters coming, I'll ask "How do you know?". I expect they did. (Well, not smallpox in the new world, that was largely germ warfare, and only foreseen by those practicing it.) As to why you don't hear about them, how often to you hear, even now, about those who foresaw the housing bubble? Then why would you expect to find it easy to find prior accurate "prophets of doom"? People don't like to hear bad news, and they also don't like to be reminded that they were wrong. This is a powerful force suppressing historical records of those who gave warnings previously, as well as recently.
P.S.: That the collapse of the Holland "Tulip mania" bubble was foreseen is denoted by the name given to the event in English. I suspect that you would find few references in Dutch that predicted it's collapse.
Re:Club of Rome Study 2 (Score:4, Informative)
In terms of home power, nuclear power is insanely cheap. Specifically Thorium power. There is not much reason we could not power cars with miniature nuclear generators if we put enough research into it so that crashing into them doesn't leak radiation everywhere, but right now that is not feasible, so mobile power would still be an issue.
The biggest reason it isn't used internationally is mainly because every government is scared of a meltdown even though any modern Nuclear engineer would build a reactor which has a non reactive default state, that even if catastrophic failure happens it can not melt down.
Very few of those reactor designs have ever been put in practice (I don't know of any that have) because of the perpetual banning of new reactors in many parts of the world.
The other reason is the massive up front costs, mainly because we have had this international armistice against it for two decades, nobody has the manfacturing tech to make these reactors in a rigorous patterned way.
So it is a perpetual failure, but if we had sustainable nuclear power with the modern safe reactors, specifically Thorium power, energy costs would probably drop in the long run because a single reactor can last a hundred years and the fuel costs nothing compared to the costs of maintaining the plant or building it in the first place or staffing it properly. But modern designs would not require as much oversight if their failure state is to power down.