The End of Doom (12 page)

So while natural states do succeed in dramatically reducing interpersonal violence, they have one appalling consequence, as Maddison's data show: persistently low average incomes. Again, as history teaches, civilizations organized as natural states are not sustainable in the long run.

Lots of thinkers have pondered what causes the collapse of civilizations—that is to say, why they are unsustainable over the long run. Let's take a brief look at three recent theories of unsustainability: climate change, complexity, and self-organized criticality cascades. In the January 26, 2001, issue of
Science,
Yale University anthropologist Harvey Weiss and University of Massachusetts geoscientist Raymond Bradley asked, “What Drives Societal Collapse?” They concluded, “Many lines of evidence now point to climate forcing as the primary agent in repeated social collapse.” Basically they argue that abrupt and long-lasting droughts caused the downfall of civilizations in both the Old and New Worlds.

Utah State University anthropologist Joseph Tainter, author of the 1988 classic
The Collapse of Complex Societies,
asserts that societies fall apart when their problem-solving institutions fail. Tainter argues, “Confronted with problems, we often respond by developing more complex technologies, establishing new institutions, adding more specialists or bureaucratic levels to an institution, increasing organization or regulation, or gathering and processing more information.”

Tainter maintains that this strategy of building complex institutions ultimately fails as the result of diminishing marginal returns to the social investment in them. Collapse occurs when an accumulation of unaddressed problems overwhelm a society. Interestingly, Tainter notes, “In a hierarchical institution, the flow of information from the bottom to the top is frequently inaccurate and ineffective.”

In a 2002 article, “Why Do Societies Collapse?” published in the
Journal of Theoretical Politics,
independent political scientist Gregory Brunk argues that societies are self-organizing critical systems. The usual example of self-organizing criticality is a sandpile to which grains of sand are constantly being added. Many land and simply find a place in the pile; some grains land and cause small local avalanches, which soon come to rest; and eventually a grain lands that causes a huge avalanche that changes the shape of the whole pile. In a 2009 article, “Society as a Self-Organized Critical System,” in
Cybernetics and Human Knowing,
researchers Thomas Kron and Thomas Grund suggest the example of the start of World War I as a social avalanche. In that case, an unlikely series of events involving a lost driver gave Serbian nationalist assassin Gavrilo Princip the opportunity to kill Franz Ferdinand, the archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie. And as the phrase goes, the rest was history.

Brunk suggests the main mechanism by which societies reach a critical point where collapses are realized was outlined by economist Mancur Olson in his 1982 book
The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities
. Olson argued that over time interest group politics produces overbureaucratization, essentially re-creating the patron-client networks characteristic of natural states.

These three theories of societal collapse can complement one another. Long duration intense local droughts would no doubt constitute a problem that complex hierarchical institutions would have difficulty solving, thus producing a criticality cascade that results in social collapse. It's important to stress that all of the social collapses cited by these authors occurred in natural states—that is, societies organized as patron-client networks. In fact, the more recent social collapses—for example, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the Congo, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Iraq—all also occurred in residual natural states that had persisted into the modern era.

The plain fact is that development (rising incomes, health, and education) occurred only after what North and his colleagues identify as a new form of social organization, open-access social orders, arose during the past two centuries. Open-access social orders are basically democratic free-market capitalist societies and are characterized by the rule of law; the proliferation of private economic, social, religious, and political institutions; and civilian control of the military. In all of history, the only kind of development has been capitalist development, along with parasitical versions of development that some remaining natural states can attain for a while by imitating aspects of open-access social orders, especially by deploying their modern technologies. By 2008, average per capita income in Western Europe was $22,200 and in China $6,800.

Is free-market development sustainable? After all, it's only been around for two hundred years. Clearly, the folks on the United Nations High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability don't think so. In September 2012 a UN-sponsored activist conference issued a declaration,
Sustainable Societies, Responsive Citizens,
that urged the replacement of “the current economic model, which promotes unsustainable consumption and production patterns, facilitates a grossly inequitable trading system, fails to eradicate poverty, assists in the exploitation of natural resources to the verge of extinction and total depletion, and has induced multiple crises on Earth” with “sustainable economies in the community, local, national, regional and international spheres.”

Perhaps free-market capitalism will prove itself unsustainable in the long run. But I don't think so. Brunk suggests that humans don't just take complexity cascades (avalanches) lying down; they attempt to foresee and dampen them. “From this perspective,
the fundamental reason that civilization has advanced is because societies have become more adept in addressing the problems caused by complexity cascades
[emphasis in original],” claims Brunk. The chief way in which modern societies have “become more adept in addressing the problems caused by complexity cascades” is free markets. Free markets are the most robust mechanism ever devised by humanity for delivering rapid feedback on how decisions turn out. Profits and losses discipline people to learn quickly from and fix their mistakes. Consequently, markets are superb at using trial and error to find solutions to problems.

What about the Brundtland report criterion? There is only one proven way to improve the lot of hundreds of millions of poor people, and that is democratic capitalism. It is in rich democratic capitalist countries that the air and water are becoming cleaner, forests are expanding, food is abundant, education is universal, and women's rights respected. Whatever slows down economic growth also slows down environmental improvement. By vastly increasing knowledge and pursuing technological progress, past generations met their needs and vastly increased the ability of our generation to meet our needs. We should do no less for future generations.

Top-down bureaucratization of the sort favored by many environmental activists moves societies back in the direction of natural states in which monopolies are secured and run by elites. Innovation would thus stall and the ability of people and societies to adapt rapidly to changing conditions, economic and ecological, via free markets and democratic politics would falter. “Ironically, instead of eliminating all complexity cascades, what the increasing bureaucratization of mature societies may do is increase the impact of the really big cascades when they overwhelm a society's barricades,” argues Brunk. That's entirely correct.

What well-meaning activists and UN bureaucrats are trying to do is centrally plan the world's ecology. History suggests that that would work out about as well for humanity and the natural world as centrally planned economies did.

Economists Lucas Bretschger and Sjak Smulders argue that the decisive question isn't to focus directly on preserving the resources we already have. Instead, they ask: “Is it realistic to predict that knowledge accumulation is so powerful as to outweigh the physical limits of physical capital services and the limited substitution possibilities for natural resources?” In other words, can increasing scientific knowledge and technological innovation overcome the limitations to economic growth posed by the depletion of nonrenewable resources? And, according to Paul Romer, an economist and founding director of the NYU Stern Urbanization Project, the answer is yes.

Romer has observed, “Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.” While the production of some supplies of physical resources may peak, there is no sign that human creativity is about to peak.

There is one way to make sure that humanity runs out of resources—by slowing down the rate of technological progress. As it happens, lots of environmentalists advocate a policy that could in fact drastically slow down the rate of technological change—implementing the precautionary principle.

 

3

Never Do Anything for the First Time

I HAVE FRIENDS WHO TOOK THE PRECAUTIONARY STEP
of not having their daughter vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. Based on the widely reported results of a very small study in
The Lancet,
my friends worried that vaccinations might harm their child by making her autistic. During the past two decades, study after study has found absolutely no link between vaccinations and autism. Naturally, I have plied them with information about the safety and health benefits of vaccines, but so far as I know, their daughter, now a teenager, is still unvaccinated against those childhood scourges. My friends' choice shows that taking a precautionary approach actually provides no sure guidance on what to do when it comes to the risks and benefits of modern technologies.

Never do anything for the first time.
The strong version of the precautionary principle much favored by many environmentalists can largely be summarized by that maxim.

Environmentalist advocates of the principle will deny that that is what they are proposing. Instead, they claim that when it comes to evaluating technological risks they merely want society to be guided by the wisdom of the ancient aphorism “Better safe than sorry.” But as we shall see, the precautionary principle as formulated by environmentalists goes much further and presumes that better safety lies in banning or restricting the development of new technologies. Consequently, implementing the strong version of the principle will instead make us “more sorry than safe,” as Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler has cogently argued. Why? The central issue is that proponents of the precautionary principle tend to focus on hypothetical dangers while generally failing to consider fully the power of new technologies to reduce risk.

The closest thing to a canonical version of the precautionary principle was devised by a group of thirty-two leading environmental activists meeting in 1998 at the Wingspread Center in Wisconsin. The Wingspread Consensus Statement on the Precautionary Principle reads:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.

Why was this new principle needed? Because, the Wingspread conferees asserted, the deployment of modern technologies was spawning “unintended consequences affecting human health and the environment,” and “existing environmental regulations and other decisions, particularly those based on risk assessment, have failed to protect adequately human health and the environment.” As a consequence of these unintended side effects and the supposed regulatory inadequacy, the conferees insisted, “Corporations, government entities, organizations, communities, scientists and other individuals must adopt a precautionary approach to
all human endeavors
[emphasis added].” Contemplate for a moment this question: Are there any human endeavors of which some timorous person cannot assert that it raises a “threat” of harm to human health or the environment?

Unfortunately, parsing the precautionary principle is not a mere academic exercise. Versions of it have been incorporated into numerous international environmental treaties, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, and the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) treaty. Other renderings are explicitly integrated into European regulatory law.

Against critics of the principle, Chris Mooney, author of
The Republican War on Science,
asserts that it “is not an anti-science view, it is a policy view about how to minimize risk.” That's clearly wrong. Beliefs about how much risk people should be allowed to take or to be exposed to are based on value judgments expressing moral views, not scientific facts.

Proving That Roaming Minotaurs Do Not Really Threaten Virgins

The strong version of the precautionary principle requires that the creator of a new technology or activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof with regard to allaying fears about threats of harm allegedly posed by a new technology. “Assume that all projects or activities will be harmful, and therefore seek the least-harmful alternative. Shift the burden of proof—when consequences are uncertain, give the benefit of the doubt to nature, public health, and community well-being,” explained Peter Montague from the Environmental Research Foundation in 2008. Boston University law professor George Annas, a prominent bioethicist who favors the precautionary principle, clearly understands that it is not a value-neutral concept. He has observed, “The truth of the matter is that whoever has the burden of proof loses.”