Getting Better Part 2: Scarcity or Abundance? Place Your Bets By Max More, Ph.D.
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n the first part of this series of articles, I looked at the beliefs of people around the world about progress. Despite clear data showing improvements in all the trends about which people were surveyed, in every country unwarranted pessimism was rife. I looked at some causes of falsely pessimistic beliefs. In this article, I’m going to look at past predictions and forecasts that turned out to be excessively pessimistic. I’ll especially pick on butterfly ecologist Paul Ehrlich since he has been so influential, so wrong, and so persistent in his errors. We will look at a famous bet between Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon and extract some lessons from it. Finally, I’ll examine the Simon Abundance Index – an excellent measure of the improving state of the world. Faulty Forecasts Pessimism has been with us for a long, long time. Some of it is understandable given the context of the time. In the early Industrial Revolution, England was rapidly burning its way through forests for fuel. It must have seemed inevitable that wood supplies would be exhausted. An apparently safe prediction would be to foresee the end of the iron industry as England was mostly stripped of forestland in the first half of the eighteenth century. Wood for charcoal fuel was running up against the need for wood for shipbuilding. But along came coal. And the steam engine. And so on. Pessimism can easily co-exist with recent major progress. Consider Northern Europe and North America in 1830. Enjoying the longest period of peace in a generation, they benefited from a flow of inventions, discoveries, and technologies. Matt Ridley notes that the term “technology” was coined in that year. [Ridley, 2010, 283] He points out some of those innovations: steamboats, cotton looms, suspension bridges, portland cement, the Erie Canal, the electric motor, the first photograph, Fourier analysis. Surely, a time for optimism! And yet, around 1830, opponents of the Liverpool to Manchester railway “forecast that passing trains would cause horses to abort their foals. Others mocked its pretensions to speed: ‘What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling as fast as stagecoaches!’ cried the www.alcor.org
Quarterly Review. ‘We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.’” Remarkable progress was experienced from 1875 to 1925 in Europe including an unprecedented rise in living standards. This time saw the spread of electricity, cars, typewriters, universities, movies, vaccines, and indoor plumbing. Despite this, many intellectuals obsessively worried themselves and others with thoughts of imminent decline, degeneration, and disaster. The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 A 125-year-old example may seem amusing today, but it was taken extremely seriously in the day. It is also notable because the logic behind the fear is the same as that behind many more recent supposed crises. Around the time that the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the streets of London were trafficked by over 11,000 hansom cabs, plus several thousand horse-drawn buses, each using 12 horses per day. Altogether, the city was traversed by over 50,000 horses daily. That doesn’t even count the other horse-drawn conveyances delivering goods. An average horse would produce 15 to 35 pounds of manure daily along with 2 pints of urine. (New York could boast of 100,000 horses and about 2.5 million pounds of manure a day.) The manure drew in vast numbers of flies which spread typhoid fever and other pathogens. As if large quantities of poop and pee weren’t enough, working horses live only about three years. Dead horses were hard to move so it was common to let them rot until they could more easily be sawn into handy-size pieces to carry away. In 1894, The Times newspaper predicted: “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” This became known as the ‘Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’. Now, I haven’t checked the volume calculations, but have no reason to doubt that prediction given its simplistic straight-line projection. The situation seemed so dire that it was debated at the world’s first international urban planning conference in New York. No solution was offered. Urban life was surely doomed. As we all know, “peak poop” was soon reached, and nobody was buried in it over their head. Henry Ford figured out how to build cars (automobiles) affordably and electric trams and motorized buses
Cryonics / 3rd Quarter 2021
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