Timing and Dynamics - Towards the Collapse of Several Socio-economic Balloons

One of the comments I have received concerning my blog concerns issues of timing (Dr. Blake Poland, at the University of Toronto). Although Dr. Poland agrees that, in the long term, my views may be correct, he argues that the absolute numbers of population are continuing to increase, and that inequalities between nations, for example, the rich and the poor, are widening, not decreasing.

There are several points I want to take up in response to these arguments... indeed, this provides the opportunity to bring these issues into the discussion earlier than I had originally planned. First of all, my primary argument is that the main driver of socio-economic organisation is not population numbers, but population growth and the rate of change of population growth. Clearly the numbers are also part of the picture, but the population growth has always been the primary driver of economic growth. The numbers are important in the sense that, within our current management strategies, we are near the limits of growth that the planet can support - many more people, and society will collapse due to catastrophic failure of our ability to feed everyone. The collision with our environment is also largely mediated by the total population numbers, combined with our current socio-economic organisation, which has been singularly ineffective in changing how we pollute the atmosphere and hence led us into the growing environmental crisis that is developing around us. The numbers are also important in terms of density of people on the Earth - I claim that one of the reasons why local population dynamics becomes important in a globally convergent world is because of the density of people in our cities, which is where the 21st century population is living.

So having pointed out the importance of the absolute numbers of population, let us examine in more detail the issue of population growth rates and the rate of change of such growth. Of course, it is this rate of change that has taken a nosedive, from a high positive rate to a substantive negative value. This change is confirmed by several studies, although different researchers give different dates and reasons for when it occured. Using statistics available on line, we may note several studies in the mid-1990's noted that the rate of change was still increasing (Pimentel et al, 1996). However, the discussion presented by J. Kimball, dated September 2006, indicates that the rate of population growth peaked in the early 1990s. On the other hand, Wikipedia assigns the peak in growth rate to the year 1963, and the peak growth rate doubling time to have been 31 years. Hence, although different sources provide different dates, there is agreement that the change occured same time ago, but wasn't yet clearly measurable.

Within system dynamics, there is a distinction to be made between the rate of population growth, and the rate of change of population growth. Let me illustrate. Today, the total world population is about 6.5 billion. The growth rate, as I indicated earlier, has declined from its peak value but is still very high . The rate of growth is usually expressed as the number of years it would take to double the population numbers at the current rate of growth. This number is presently close to 60 years - in 60 years, the population of the planet, if the rate of growth were to continue, would be 13 billion. In another 60 years, it would be 26 billion, and so forth. At it's peak, it was closer to 30 years. A doubling rate of 60 years is still very, very high, and the world's economy will continue to be driven by this rate of growth for some time.

My argument, however, is that our socio-economic organization is predicated, at least in part, upon the rate of change of the growth rate, and not only on the growth rate itself. Hence the growth rate has steadily increased for the past hundred years, indeed, the past several hundred years. The doubling rate has been shortening for a long period of time. It has been the shortening of the doubling time that has dramatically exacerbated many of our socio-economic difficulties. The extreme stress on the environment is a result of this shortening doubling time, but so also are a number of more subtle aspects of social organization.

When the doubling period is shortening, what this means is that a population unit (i.e. a city or a country) never gets the chance to "catch its breath" before the next stage of growth overtakes it. Stability in socio-economic structures in not possible under such circumstances. Each time society adjusts to a given rate of growth, developing social mechanisms for introducing new production elements, society is forced to readjust again and develop yet other social mechanisms. This was the characteristic feature of the 20th century, of change spiralling ever faster, and each generation forced to reinvent its ways of functioning. This is often attributed to the development of technology, but this, too, is driven by the shortening of the doubling period in the population.

In the 20th century, as each developed country's population growth flattened out, however, the growth rate changed its nature. Economic growth shifted from production for internal markets to production for external markets, and also the economy went through several retoolings, resulting in the emergence of new products for both internal and later external markets. Let there be no mistake, however, even though a particular country's population growth may stabilize, the country's economic development remains dependant on the global population dynamics. Hence, countries such as the United States, whose population demographics are nearly flat, benefit from high growth rates because of exports and retooling.

Jane Jacobs, in her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations, argued that the natural economic unit for human communities is a city, and that our current organizations into nations is artificially maintained and counterproductive in the long term. One of the possible ways that nations, as they are currently organized, are maintained likely follows from the shortening doubling time of population growth. Several studies (e.g. Rosenau, 1999; Godfrey, 2004) underline the fact that today's nations are organized in ways that are different than, say, a hundred years ago. To hold countries together, they need powerful legal and constitional frameworks, but they are also held together either by high growth rates (in the case of developing nations), or high levels of exchange with foreign economies (in the case of the developed world), especially high levels of export. Essentially, there are social and economic dynamics that keep everything in movement, and hence prevent the collapse that might occur naturally in the absence of such movement. High levels of export depend on the existence of countries with lower levels of productivity, the so-called developing nations. The latter, in turn, rely on even poorer nations for export markets.

However, countries whose ability to contribute products to the global marketplace is too low, will not be able to use imports from the richer nations and hence will become poorer over time.

This analysis highlights several points:

1) high economic growth rates are ultimately linked to both high population growth rates at the planetary scale, and to the shortening of the doubling time, although there may be several intermediate linkages in the causal chain;

2) high growth rates exacerbate inequalities in the system, which tend to grow over time, because for a time these inequalities generate additional economic growth;

and, following from these two premises:

3) the change to a lengthening of the population doubling time means that economic growth must begin to slow on a global scale;

4) with the slowing of economic growth, several artificially maintained "balloons" will start to collapse.

As long as the global economy was growing, and growth was accellerating, the poorest nations had a hope of one day crossing the threshold to a level of productivity that would allow them to "buy in" to the system ... much as happened with the Asian economies in the closing years of the 20th century. But once economic growth begins to slow, their hopes of crossing this threshold will also start to dwindle. It has likewise been pointed out that many of the poorest nations are saddled with a geographic context which makes it very difficult to develop a sustainable economy - they tend to be landlocked and in regions where climate in inhospitable (Sachs, Jeffrey D., 2005, Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?, in Scientific American, September edition.). Without a renewed effort on the part of developed and developing nations to provide direct assistance to these countries, the world will be headed for a major crisis of poor versus rich nations, a crisis for which there have been warning signs for decades.

At the same time, however, perhaps not for a few decades yet, nations themselves as political and economic entities will feel a pressure towards collapse, as the global drivers of internal movement start to drop out. This won't happen tomorrow, the growth rate is still too high, but as the growth rate sinks below some as yet unknown threshold value, consequences of this order of magnitude will start to appear in our social structures. The system will start to fracture. Some pundits predict an international economic crisis in the 2030's, based on similar arguments. It would be nice if we humans were smart enough to avoid such a crisis, but it is unlikely. To do so would mean acting now, and as we have seen with the environmental crisis, until the signs are all about us and "in our face", we do very little. Once the symptoms become clear enough to see them all around us, it is too late to be able to stop a crisis, it is only possible to diminish its effects and try to avoid system collapse.