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."
Club of Rome Study 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
From the original source of garbage in garbage out.
Again... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the one hand, people have been predicting the imminent collapse of civilization for quite a while now with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, our high-tech society is basically a house of cards and it has to collapse sooner or later.
Forrester's group, btw, are the same folks who produced the Club of Rome-funded "Limits to Growth" study in the early '70s, which also predicted serious trouble around 2030. You can choose to read this as consistency, good initial assumptions, or simply a pig-headed insistence on sticking to his original premises rather than admit error, as you wish.
Computer Models (Score:5, Insightful)
i can imagine the Civilization model:
World ends in 2030 when Bismarck conquers Spain!
Re:What...No technological advancement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please list below any advancements since 1994 that seriously reduced resource consumption. I can't think of any.
Insert title here (Score:3, Insightful)
The same frauds are making the same claims in the same ways for 50 years. They are physical scientists who don't understand economics, with new technology and substitutes leading to ever-increasing quality and length of life -- sans goverment intervention.
Theodore Roosevelt decried the coming "timber crisis" because rotting railroad ties would soon consume all lumber production at current replacement rates. Then someone invented using creosote coatings.
Yes, you can predict this will happen. That is Julian Simon's theory, used to make predictions which come true over and over and over again. Said computer models don't include millions of scientists and engineers in a free society working to satisfy mass wants for profits, which call into existence new tech all the time. This is just the latest in sub-sentient drooling idiocy, disproven again and again and again.
Not surprising considering our growth (Score:4, Insightful)
Our societies are now based on rampant consumerism and the freedom of the individual to do whatever they want, so long as it's not illegal and they can pay for it. As a result, we have gone from a few hundred million to seven billion people within a century. If we value our natural world, we will find some way to check this growth sooner rather than later.
The problem with these models... (Score:5, Insightful)
We tend not to deplete a resource if possible, but when it gets scarce enough we go for alternatives. If pork or cattle get to expensive we go with less resource needed chickens or turkeys.
Usually the things that us humans kill off forever, are things that at least in our short term mindset see are things that are not directly useful for us. We don't see a drop in cattle. But we see a drop in wolves, as they are in competition with us for our cattle... So we kill the wolves, they are not really a direct resource for us so they killed. As well as lot of bugs and other animals. I am not saying this is a good thing we should work hard to preserve nature for it is better in the long term. But as human nature when scarcity happens we change our behavior, and we wont change our behavior until we feel the effect of scarcity.
Re:FROSTY PISS!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing is going to change significantly in the next 18 years, so we will see whether this prediction is accurate.
My guess: It isn't accurate.
Re:Good Timing! (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah. Nothing says "sustainable welfare state" and "stable retirement" like having no children.
Re:Good Timing! (Score:5, Insightful)
So you'll be old, unable to work, and have no money? How is that "good timing" for you?
An economic collapse won't just let you alone, you know. Actually, the people with kids are more likely to survive (and prosper): they will have children willing and able to support them. You? You'll have a mostly worthless retirement fund. You may not have though this all the way through.
unlimited economic growth (Score:4, Insightful)
As soon as I read this I stopped reading.
"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."
Firstly, "unlimited economic growth" isn't possible unless we get off this rock (difficult), and even that just opens the timescale up quite a bit. Here is a great (if depressing) discussion prompted by the same book mentioned in the article. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ [ucsd.edu]
Second, the statement turns what seemed an interesting research conclusion into "the sky is falling, but give us enough money and you'll all be fine." It could be that this wording is different than what is in the actual report, but I can't find a link to it.
A focus on increasing the efficiency with which we use our resources is important, but this sounds like an unrealistic promise in order to obtain funding. This close to the wall we should be focused on how to make a transition to the steady state economy more orderly and less disruptive so that we can keep chugging towards the next breakthrough technology that will get us back into growth for a while, and perhaps eventually off earth so that we can delay the inevitable even more. Allocating large amounts of resources to finding that next breakthrough only gets us relatively little time if it succeeds, and it neglects the risk that if we fail we could have a sudden transition to steady state which would cause a great deal more suffering than is necessary.
Re:politics? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not finding fault with this study, but the conclusion seems to have stepped outside the realm of science and into politics by assuming (at least this is the impression the article gives) that government policy is the only way to limit the growth of our ecological footprint.
The good old freedom-loving alternative has inspired such movies as Mad Max 2.
It's peculiar how science is only OK as long as its conclusions are harmless to powerful interests.
These models aren't science. They are at best educated guesses, based on mathematical models that are necessarily unable to predict changes to birthrate or sustainability that occur in the future. This isn't a problem with the models or science: the problem is in granting these models more power than they have. I have little doubt that the models are correct: if the present trends stay exactly the same, collapse will happen when they say it will.
The trends never stay the same. Little exercise: create a population (or economic) model for human civilization using any time in history. It will predict a peak population (or population explosion) at some other point in history (usually a couple hundreds years from the chosen time). Yet guess what? Humanity has continued to expand well past that predicted limits, because these models are inherently unable to predict changes in the trends: they can only be based on current or historical trends, and those always change unpredictably.
It will suck... (Score:4, Insightful)
...to be old with nobody to look after you.
"Retirement" is only an option when you have savings or someone supporting you like government or family. In a situation like MIT spells out you will not be retiring. Stay healthy.
I'm sure you feel superior referring to the rest of the world as dummies and breeders. But the passion and drive of young people is a key element in making the world a better place. You have failed to renew that resource. You are a cynic. Cynics do not change the world. They just stand to the side and watch while making snide remarks.
Re:More government propaganda (Score:2, Insightful)
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Give that man a Prize!
Greece isn't in the toilet because the people with jobs and lived withing their means are consuming. It's in the shitter because the government supported those who are not by giving them free things, running up their debt and over all behaving like a teenager with a credit card.
Same in the U.S. The President's own numbers show the U.S. economy essentially grinding to a halt in about 15 years due to the crushing federal debt.
Again, it's not because I own two cars, a big house and set my AC to 74.
Re:Again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely unrelated to oil, but while skimming over the report, figure on page 30 struck me as odd. Anyone doing such an extrapolation without providing a thorough basis justifying is doing something questionable.
On the graph showing grain demand, you see a fairly linear progression between 1960 and 1990 with a slight regression 1990 onwards. There seem to be a local increase in demand just before 2010, but it seems non significant considering earlier trend deviations. But suddenly, after 2010, the extrapolation shows a strong increase in the rate, contradicting a 20 year regression trend. Added to that local variations on the extrapolated data that can hardly be attributed to any model...
I'll restrain myself to extrapolate the credibility of the whole report based on this single figure though.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll never understand so-called environmentalists who go out and have 5 or 6 kids. I can think of nothing quite so environmentally irresponsible...
-S
Just how many "environmentalists who go out and have 5 or 6 kids" are there? You sound like you made a study of this, what was the conclusion? That we are being over-run by the children of "environmentalists who go out and have 5 or 6 kids"?
Re:Good Timing! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WAY TO GO, MIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
Historically everyone who has predicted the end of the world has been wrong. Some guys twice in a row.
That really depends on your definition of end of the world. MIT is not forcasting the end of the world. They are forcasting a large population decline. Those have happened several times in history. (Black Death, Small Pox in New World) Citation needed on them never being predicted. Large economic collapses have also occured in the past.
Re:Club of Rome Study 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sure the timing was off, but it's impossible to predict the oil peak accurately given uncertainty of reserve data and technological progress."
So you are saying their prediction was right even though it was wrong?
As energy use increases, energy will get more expensive, providing pressure to use less energy or find more efficient ways to use energy. It's a self-correcting system, as long as there are no market distortions like, say, massive oil subsidies, or ridiculous regulations preventing new energy generation methods from being adopted.
Re:Good Timing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Go study population ecology. The population of many/most organisms goes in the same sort of cycles. It's most drastic in insects and micro organisms, but also applies on longer scales to larger creatures.
The population will stay mostly low and constant for a time, and then when the conditions are right, there will be an abundance of resources (food), and the population will spike. Breeding will increase exponentially until the resources aren't enough. Rather than just some of the population dying off to keep balance - the vast, vast majority starves. The population is then less than where it started, and the cycle will repeat with time.
Humans aren't immune to this! It just happens over much longer time scales.
It's not about avoiding breeding completely as a society - it's about using our intellect and breeding a lot less so that we don't all die of starvation because our resource production can't keep up. Unless we can do that, we're really not much smarter than grasshoppers, and no, I'm not an optimist.
Re:FROSTY PISS!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to make a prediction when it's so far off into the future that you know no one will remember you even making it when it doesn't come true. It's like a President promising to put a man on Mars long after his administration is gone. It's an easy promise to make when you know no one is ever going to be able to hold you accountable for it (and even if they tried, you could just blame your successors).
I can predict anything as long as it's far enough off in the future for people to forget it if I'm wrong. Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com].
Re:The year is 2012, guys... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet people still remember who Erlich is, but no one knows who Borlaug was.
This is a gross injustice, that the whiner is so much more popular than the achiever.
Re:WAY TO GO, MIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
And the one thing in common with every major pandemic, catastrophe, and economic collapse has had in common? No one ever saw them coming.
Re:The problem with these models... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since your post was certified insightful, maybe you could help me with a question that I have: what should they have assumed instead if what they wanted to do is predict what would happen if we go on like this? Eh?
The problem here is oil, not pork. There is at the moment no viable substitute for oil. People would like to believe that there is, but it is not true. The Prius, and all these other things are just a distraction. They only work in the current environment because they are the exception, and not the rule. It is simply not realistically possible to replace all internal combustion cars with battery-powered ones.
I do not think it is impossible to solve the problems humanity is facing. I just think humanity will not do it.
Re:More government propaganda (Score:3, Insightful)
Not this shit again. The US government has been giving carte blanche to companies for a decade now. Companies have a ton of freedom. The result, more oppression instead of less. We have private industries running prisons. Guess what? Elected judges have to justify any acquittals now or else they will lose their campaign donations. It isn't the USG who wants to see a pothead put away for life, it is the company who gets the bucks for warehousing the pothead who wants to keep their beds full.
Your complete platform which has been argued and modded down into oblivion more times than I can count is just plain wrong. Had a single shred of roman_mir's garbage actually hold true, the late 1800s until 1930s in the US would have been a Utopia for all, because during those times, companies ran the show, and the US government was just there to provide militias when the Pinkertons couldn't do the job.
We *need* government to intervene. Otherwise the only thing that will be looked at with populations is how much money can we milk from them, this quarter, next quarter and the future be damned. If we let companies run the show, the only energy sources our grandkids will have will be coal and oil, and they will spend most of their salaries trying to get it. However, if we bite the bullet and start making modern reactors, the oil crisis can be mitigated, something private industry does not want.
Re:Insert title here (Score:5, Insightful)
You may mock Roosevelt, but perhaps he was aware, as you seemingly aren't, of how many past civilisations have collapsed due to timber crises... Easter Island being one of the most dramatic. What if someone hadn't invented creosote coatings? Sure, technology provided a solution that time, and many other times in recent history, but there are plenty of other times it hasn't.
Our modern global/western civilisation is big and impressive, I'll give it that. But if you take the historical perspective, the number of civilisations that have collapsed is quite a long list, and some of them were quite big and impressive, too.
So yeah, we've got lots of scientists. You think we're the first civilisation to have lots of scientists? Sure, we're more advanced than our predecessors, but do you really think that our civilisation's size, or even technology like the internet makes us so different from all other civilisations to come before us, that we're immune to collapse? On the contrary, our current civilisation is so big that most efforts to make significant changes seem almost completely ineffectual. And that oil is going to run out.
I've certainly not abandoned hope, but I'd like to think I've got beyond the mindset of thinking that people in history were so radically different from us. Technology may well provide a solution to all our problems, but it also might not. Isn't it wise to prepare, at least slightly, for that eventuality? Isn't believing otherwise just placing blind faith in a deus ex machina?
Re:Again... (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>"a population and economic crash."
Which is why I think the EU and US should institute a 1-child-per-couple policy* to control population. Otherwise come 2050 Mother Nature will be downsizing our population through starvation and suffering. Better we do it ourselves.
*
*Maybe a 2 child/couple policy would meet less resistance.
Re:Club of Rome Study 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Monetary manipulation is destroying the economy, which has lead to declining demand. Real costs of production in dollar terms are rising because the world is being flooded with dollars. Price oil in gold, and you will see what I mean. If oil really was becoming scarce, its real price would be rising. http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/ [pricedingold.com]
Further, think about what you are saying here. You are denying the fact of technological progress. This flies in the face of every decade of the past 400 years. You think technological progress has peaked too? You think everything JUST HAPPENS to be shutting down RIGHT NOW, when YOU are here to make crazy predictions? You think the world is REALLY ending THIS time, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of other times people have predicted the end?
Do you see the fundamental flaw in your thinking?
Re:Club of Rome Study 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
at an exponentially growing rate, which is what the humankind has been doing to date.
No it hasn't. From past experience we know that all "exponential" natural processes are actually tracking a logistic function [wikipedia.org].
In fact population growth is already well past the inflection point (change in sign of the second derivative) predicted by a logistic function. Nowadays even the most pessimistic projections predict a drop in population at some point in the second half of the XXI century with less alarmist projections placing the start of the population drop somewhere in 2040-2050.
a finite resource
Simply stating that a resource is finite is no proof that we are about to run out of it. The ocean is finite, yet we are not in any danger of running out of sea water.
In fact, energy, which is our most pressing resource is for all practical purposes a renewable resource (think solar power) and hence not finite in any practical sense of the word.
If you look at the cold hard numbers we have turned the corner in terms of resource usage and population growth. Population will rapidly drop and together with it a much larger decrease in energy use because there will no longer be a need for new roads, schools, or houses.
To give an example of this, a few years back I happened to be in Germany during the opening of the latest autobahn. The local newspapers were talking about the distinct possibility that this could well be the last new highway to ever be built on the former West Germany, since population is rapidly declining and the country transit infrastructure on the West is fully built out.
Why it will never happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Economics, that is why.
Lets take one resource we heavily depend on: Oil. Suppose we deplete a significant amount of oil wells, what will happen? well laws of supply and demand kick in: as supply becomes shorter, the price of oil goes up. As the price of oil goes up, it will be used progressively less and less since alternatives become more and more attractive in comparison. The whole point of a prices in markets is that there the amount of buyers match the amount of suppliers. Through pricing, the market has a way to ration ALL resources efficiently. This effectively means that we WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL, that we will simply use less of it as it becomes more scarce, but there will always be some available for those willing to pay the price. In fact, we use oil today not because it is the only way to power our cars, but only because it is the cheapest (most efficient).
Another thing they ignore is advances in technology. Take fracking for example, we can extract oil and natural gas from places we never could before. As technology improves, so does our ability to get more and more resources. All these models completely ignore the fact that we will come up with better and more efficient ways to get more resources.
The only thing that can and does stop this natural and efficient rationing of resources are governments.
They put a caviat and say: "if we continue consuming resources at the current pace". Completely overlooking the fact that markets would not allow the current pace to continue when scarcity increases. That is like saying: "If I continue climbing up this mountain at the current pace, I will get to space in a month"
Re:Technology to save the day (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Liebig's Law of the Minimum. It only takes one critical resource failure to slow the entire train.
2. Ah, the 'many advancements in technology since the 1970's'. Still using fossil fuels for the vast majority of our energy production (see No. 1). Where's your personal nuclear power plant / fuel cell? Where, in fact, is your gen III nuc plant - the one with 1970's technology? Got fusion? Seen a Thorium Cycle Reactor recently?
Cornucopians always amuse me. I wonder how many of them take apart their iPhone looking for the pixie dust.
Re:Club of Rome Study 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
The Maya didn't reach peak anything--the most current thought is that they had a long drought
So, they reached peak water
And the Easter Islanders were barbarians who had no concept of land as property, so their thug chiefs took all the wood and used it
So, they reached peak wood.
It's interesting how you cherry pick the data you use. When Easter islanders waste their wood in erecting statues, they are stupid, when we waste our oil in SUVs we are civilized...
For ENERGY, there are many, MANY sources, the vast majority of which aren't economically viable because they consume more resources than they produce.
FTFY.
Thorium can run the world for a thousand years
If only we had some super alloy that can hold the molten salt without being eaten away. If thorium were that easy to use we would be using it.
I think you have been reading Popular Mechanics too much. Take a look at your back issues, those wonderful new energy sources like thorium and nuclear fusion have been right around the corner since the 1950s. Oh, and didn't they predict in the 1960s that oil shale and tar sands would be providing all our oil by now?
Re:Why it will never happen. (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with resource availability-based logic, is that it rarely makes plain the fact that human availability is just another component of the equations. The population can also rise and fall based on the ease of survival.
Saying, "We will discover and effectively implement technologies which will allow us to maintain our enormous population base" is wishful to say the least.
There are people going hungry in the USA right *now*.
That's the point of this study; to perhaps learn enough to prevent wide-spread human misery. The point is not to argue whether or not oil is actually going to vanish from existence in a purely mathematical sense.
Contrary to the popular thinking we see emerging from conservative business think tanks and universities, using human intelligence to sensibly manage resources is the very thing which makes humans great. We use our power of planning and sensibly managing resources in every other sector of human endeavor; you can't put a man on the Moon, invent a light bulb or run a farm without tapping the power of the amazing human brain. Why not apply that amazing brain power to the problem of how best to organize ourselves and our economic practices?
For instance, banks were regulated in Canada, and as a direct result, there was no housing bubble crisis as experienced in the USA, no legions of homeless and destitute. It's pretty straight forward. Why don't people get it? Why do people continually champion chaotic systems out of blind faith in a clearly false premise?
I'll tell you why:
Allowing chaotic systems to prevail because of the false and often near-religious faith in free market forces, very simply and naturally leads to the undoing of civilization. (The opposite of Civilization being the Jungle where 'survival of the fittest' reigns).
Go to a city which employs smart civic planning practices, and you'll find populations which are happier and healthier than in those which employ 'throw it to the wind' planning.
What it comes down to is that survival-of-the-fittest systems favor psychopaths. This is the result and the problem all wrapped up in one.
In our racial ignorance, we have allowed psychopaths to slip by and infiltrate all our institutions. Only a psychopath could come up with and have the charm to convince otherwise sane people that NOT THINKING is somehow a better plan of action than THINKING.
Malthusian Crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it just me or should all these Green/malthusian/progressive idiots be de-tenured and sacked so some one who wants to crate can get paid. I am so sick of Global Warming, Climate Change, weather Wierding, Club of Rome Socialist crap!
None of these idiots would know an opportunity if it bit them.
The only thing wrong is these types breed and go to good universities to tell us this never ending immature nonsense
MFG, omb