http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opini ... nted=print

By JARED DIAMOND

To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.

If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.

The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.

People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy. And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Each such transfer of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in multiplying their consumption by 32.

Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the world’s fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.

Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.

If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

We Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.

The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?

No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields — even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.

The same is true of forests: we already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, we could extract enough timber to meet the world’s wood and paper needs. Yet most forests are managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields.

Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.

Fortunately, in the last year there have been encouraging signs. Australia held a recent election in which a large majority of voters reversed the head-in-the-sand political course their government had followed for a decade; the new government immediately supported the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Also in the last year, concern about climate change has increased greatly in the United States. Even in China, vigorous arguments about environmental policy are taking place, and public protests recently halted construction of a huge chemical plant near the center of Xiamen. Hence I am cautiously optimistic. The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs and Steel."

i like diamond.
i think this is a key point often missed, also:

Problem solved. Next.

I can never find much to disagree about with Diamond, mainly because he speaks from such a lofty perspective both morally and scientifically. He doesn't attempt to dictate any policy changes and his tone is never condescending. Sometimes he speaks so closely to truth I actually fear it.

But how do you keep them cold? That will require resources

I didn't actually find this article that enlightening... Americans need to stop driving SUVs and building 4000 square foot houses. Didn't we already know that?

I actually found this piece a little ridiculous:


At any rate, this is all moot. If and when we get to the point when there aren't enough resources, we'll be forced to lower consumption anyhow. Sure, it won't happen overnight, but it's already starting to happen. Just go out for a ride, and you'll find that the Prius is getting more and more common. People are already sick of paying high gas prices, so more fuel-economic cars are becoming more marketable. If lumber becomes scarse, homes made of alternative materials will become more marketable.

In bio-ethics class in college I proposed, jokingly, that if we killed every human in Africa and South America and banned people from living there or removing natural resources, most of the worlds problems would vanish... and none of us would even notice. It didnt go over too well.





I didn't know that. Why do we need to?

Well... Actually I was talking in general, I have no problem with driving your seven kids around in an SUV or towing your boat to the lake in your SUV, but it is a little wasteful to drive around town in an SUV while running your normal errands by yourself. As far as large houses, I have no problem with it if you have a large family can afford it, but most families can life luxuriously in a 3,000 s.f. or less house.

But, as I mentioned, it will all take care of itself when scarsity forces costs upward.

I definatley see what you're saying, but does it make more sense (energy-wise) to purchase another vehicle to just drive around town alone if you need your SUV for those other tasks? A lot of energy goes into making a single car.

Not really. Rising costs don't bring back depleted resources.

Not using the resource doesn't give you use of the resource, either.

Wait, why would resources not be used

Typically you conserve something by limiting your usage of it.

Right, so what was the problem with the point I made? Elaborate a little more.

I wanted to jump back to this really quickly. I reluctantly argee with this statement, though I don't think your average African farmer spends much time complaining about the 'per capita consumption' of Europeans and Americans, so much as they see largess of our cultures, see the suffering of their homelands, and make a connection between the two. People will always be jealous of someone who has $1 more than them, assume they got it through evil, and attack them with violence. Google 'market dominant minorities' for many examples of this. It's no that people don't want Americans to have 4000 sq ft homes, it's that they don't want Americans to have bg houses, if they can't. The idea that the haves can only be haves at the expense of the have-nots is the worlds most popular economic fallacy.

It's really a question of the perception of exploitation, over the reality of overconsumption. If tomorrow, the US switched to a new domesticaly produced power source called 'magic fuel', and stopped the importation of petro-resources from around the world, the perception of exploitation would persist even though our global consumption would plummet.

That article is Thirty-TOO long.

It was trivial and useless. Whether rising costs brings back depleted resources is irrelevent. All that matters is that rising costs motivates people to come up with a replacement.

Yeah, I mentioned this earlier. I don't think there's any evidence that what he's saying is true. Most, if not all, terrorist attacks are politically/religiously motivated. What makes him think Africans are all of a sudden going to start attacking us because of a discrepancy in consumption? That discrepancy has existed for a long, long time, and yet, no terrorist attacks.

They're too busy fighting each other right now, and I think if they stopped doing that, they'd be able to develop a little more economically.

i disagree there, i think its pretty naive to believe that the gross inequalities between western countries and the rest of the world don't breed extremism/terrorism.

OK, then, provide some evidence that it does.