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Whale Oil
A really good comment from a thread at Crooked Timber about the economic validity of whaling in the nineteenth-century:
My latest column at “Whale Central Station” is up, exposing the leftist myth of finite whale supplies.
1. Whales breed. Therefore, the potential supply of whales is unlimited.
2. As whaling technology improves, our ability to exploit this limited supply of whales becomes ever-greater. A few years ago, 40 whales in a four year trip was regarded as good going. Modern Norwegian whalers capture and process 40 whales a month. All of the estimates of the “sustainability” of the whale-based economy were put together before such inventions as exploding harpoons. And remember that the supply of whales is self-replenishing. Leftists seem not to understand that whales have sex.
3. Reducing whaling would cost vast amounts of money and destroy our economy; credible estimates would suggest that without whale-oil lamps we would all sit around in the dark until we die. This money would better be spent on providing aid to the Inuit.
4. We can’t give the Inuit property rights over their whales to help them manage the speed of whaling, because that’s just politically impractical.
5. Arrrrr!
OK here is the more, quite a bit later…
I have just finished reading Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse — which I heartily recommend as much for its eminently readable prose and the author’s engaging voice, as for the extraordinary research effort behind it and the small phonebook of footnotes and references. For those who enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel, all I can say is that this is an even more compelling read.
Here are a few relevant excerpts:
I have often asked myself, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”? […]
Contrary to what Joseph Tainter and almost anyone else would have expected, it turns out that socieites often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.
Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what economists and other social scientists term “rational behaviour,” arising from clashes of interest between people. That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behaviour harmful to other people.[…]
Scientists term such behaviour “rational” precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behaviour, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn’t effectively enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect or reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals. That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back, because each loser loses only a little and would receive only small, uncertain, distant profits even from successfully undoing the minority’s grab[…]
At current rates most or all of the dozen major sets of environmental problems discussed at the beginning of this chapter will become acute within the lifetime of young adults now alive. Most of us who have children consider the securing of our children’s future as the highest priority to which to devote our time and money. We pay for their education and food and clothing, make wills for them, and buy life insurance for them, all with the goal of helping them to enjoy good lives 50 years from now. It makes no sense for us to do these things for our individual children, while simultaneously doing things undermining the world in which our children will be living 50 years from now.
This paradoxical behaviour is one of which I personally was guilty, because I was born in the year 1937, hence before the birth of my children I too could not take seriously any event (like global warming or the end of the tropical rainforests) projected for the year 2037. I shall surely be dead before that year, and even the date 2037 struck me as unreal. However, when my twin sons were born in 1987, and when my wife and I then started going through the usual parental obsessions about schools, life insurance, and wills, I realized with a jolt: 2037 is the year in which my kids will be my own age of 50 (then)! It’s not an imaginary year! What’s the point of willing our property to our kids if the world will be in a mess then anyway?[…]
The acknowledged interdependence of all segments of Dutch society contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people increasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to create their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those amenities as services to everyone else. Those private amenities include living inside gated walled communities, relying on private security guards rather than on the police, sending one’s children to well-funded private schools rather than to the underfunded crowded public schools, purchasing private health insurance or medical care, drinking bottled water instead of municipal water, and (in Southern California) paying to drive on toll roads competing with the jammed public roads. Underlying such privatisation is a misguided belief that the elite can remain unaffected by the problems of society around them: the attitude of those Greenland Norse chiefs who found that they had merely bought themselves the privilege of being the last to starve.[…]
In my experience of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Africa, Peru, and other Third World countries with growing environmental problems and populations, I have been impressed that their people know very well how they are being harmed by population growth, deforestation, overfishing, and other problems. They know it because they immediately pay the penalty, in forms such as loss of free timber for their houses, massive soil erosion, and (the tragic complaint that I hear incessantly) their inability to afford books, clothes, and school fees for their children. The reason why the forest behind their village is nevertheless being logged is usually either that a corrupt government has ordered it logged over their often-violent protest, or else that they signed a logging lease with great reluctance because they saw no other way to get the money they needed next year for their children. My best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but they can’t afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. government to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs. […]
The whole world today is a self-contained and isolated unit, as Tikopia Island and Tokugawa Japan used to be. We need to realize, as did the Tikopians and Japanese, that there is no other island / other planet to which we can turn for help, or to which we can export our problems. Instead, we need to learn, as they did, to live within our means.
It is notable that Easterbrook’s silly review in the NYT invokes just exactly that “Star Trek Solution”, suggesting that all our problems will be solved if we can just get into space (and pillage other planets and solar systems for resources, or perhaps emigrate en masse?) Given that our most threatening shortfalls are biotic (potable water, topsoil, species diversity, forest cover) not mineral, the likelihood of remedying those shortfalls by insanely expensive ventures into space seems to me to approximate zero. But the fantasy of simply discovering vast new supplies of — e.g. — whales seems perennial, and the vested interests of the whaling lobby can always make a convincing attempt to control the government and muzzle the academy.
These few brief excerpts hardly do justice to the scope and sweep of Diamond’s book — which ranges comfortably from the South Pacific to Greenland, lingering in present-day Montana, taking a tour of Rwanda and China, visiting Australia, and everywhere studying how societies make the right, or the wrong, decisions about their long-term survival. His most detailed surveys are of the failed Norse colonies on Greenland and the present-day economy of the State of Montana. He discusses the extractive industries — with first-hand experience — and whether (and how) they may become better global citizens. His message is essentially one of cautious hope: most of our most pressing and dire problems are self-inflicted, therefore we could solve them if we wanted to (and if we could get past the “march of folly” mindset that tends to infect human elites). He cautions us that for most “high cultures” that collapsed in the past, the collapse came within a decade or two of the peak of the society’s power, wealth, sophistication and population; the pattern of human life is a brief prime and a long senescence, but the pattern of our failed complex cultures is a showy resource-intensive flowering followed by an extremely rapid decay. Food for thought (as I look around me at the undeniably showy flowering of late industrial capitalism).
Posted by: DeAnander | Feb 6 2005 4:31 utc | 6
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