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Keith Rankin
is a political economist and economy historian |
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100 years ago, Auckland appears to have had a problem somewhat
worse than the motorway gridlock of today. We can hardly imagine
how awful Auckland might be like today if the population had multiplied
in the absence of environmental improvements. Indeed, given the
serious environmental problems, we might expect Aucklanders living
at that time to have been fearful of population growth.
In the late 19th century, as noted by Rollo Arnold (in New
Zealand's Burning: the Settlers' World in the mid 1880s, 1994),
New Zealand was burning in a rather more extravagant form of environmental
vandalism than that currently taking place in Borneo and Sumatra.
The worst damage to indigenous fauna, flora and habitats seems
to have been related to human settlement, per se, rather than
to high or growing populations. Thus it was related to ignorance,
and to values more conducive to exploitation than to conservation.
In recent years, one of the world's most highly populated countries,
Netherlands, has been restoring former wetlands to their natural
state. The Great Lakes of America have been cleaned up. London
hasn't had peasouper fogs since the 1950s. Since "Think
Big" in the early 1980s, it has been possible to fish alongside
the outflow from the Marsden Point Oil Refinery, and to transport
goods from Palmerston North to Hamilton at night using offpeak
hydroelectricity generation capacity.
While the world's populations and economies have grown rapidly
in the last 50 years, humankind has been learning to tread more
lightly on our planet. Although we still have a very long way
to go to redress all of the environmental problems of the past,
population growth, per se, has not been the principal source
of damage to our global habitat. And population growth in the
more developed panEuropean nations cannot be isolated as
having caused more damage than it has cured.
Last week, the government's population conference was held. It
was a political conference, in that it represented an acknowledgment
of the NZ First Party's antiimmigration campaign in 1996.
Media reports suggest that little was achieved by what turned
out to be an "unfocused" conference; a conference which
seems to have had little to say about the major issues relating
to the impact of population growth on the environment. The impact
of demographic change on employment seems to have taken priority
over the impact on the environment. The Coalition Government is
very much a "work ethic" government; a labourist government.
As part of the preamble to the population conference, Simon Collins
wrote an interesting article on population and sustainability
in his regular Wednesday Herald column (12 November). The
key theme of his article was that of "carrying capacity",
meaning "optimal sustainable population". Apparently
New Zealanders, on average, use resources equivalent to five hectares
of productive land; that equates to our population being at 90%
of New Zealand's carrying capacity. Collins suggests that the
world is populated in excess of its carrying capacity, and that
it is therefore not possible for all of the world's population
to live at western levels of comfort.
My main criticism of the article is that it leaves the reader
with the impression that a higher New Zealand population in the
future will continue to use the equivalent of five hectares of
productive land per person. Furthermore, the general impression
is that Collins is following a "physiocratic" paradigm.
Physiocracy means the rule of nature; "land" is regarded
as the only true source of economic value. (The Physiocrats -
the eighteenth century followers of a French doctor, François
Quesnay - were the first sect of economists. They gave us the
terms "economist" and "laissezfaire",
and they believed that all wealth is ultimately the product of
the soil, thereby making the carrying capacity of the soil and
the population size as the key determinants of living standards.)
Marxism is a direct contrast with physiocracy, in that it attributes
all value to labour.
Collins does recognise, however, that carrying capacity and population
size are not the only determinants of average world living standards.
He notes that we should "put less strain on the environment
- by walking, biking and using public transport more, so that
we use cars less, for example". The key concept here is what
I will call "lightness of tread". Treading lightly does
not mean reduced living standards, but it does mean that each
person consumes much less than 5ha of resources. We can raise
our carrying capacity if we tread more lightly. What interests
me is the converse proposition; to what extent can population
growth cause us to tread less obtrusively?
The usual assumption is that carrying capacity is fixed: each
European or American treads more heavily than each Asian or African,
implying that an additional New Zealander will be more damaging
to the world than an additional Bangladeshi. We should however
consider "carrying capacity" and "lightness of
tread" as key economic variables; not as economic
constants. The question to ask is what happens to these variables
"at the economic margin" as population increases? How
many additional resources do additional people consume? Can additional
people actually lead to reduced environmental depreciation? If
so, under what conditions can the effective marginal weight
of tread be less than zero?
We can take three perspectives on the problem: (i) shortterm
"partial equilibrium", (ii) scaleeconomy "general
equilibrium", and (iii) a historical perspective that allows
for changing technology, knowledge and values. ("Values"
tend to be called "tastes" in neoclassical economics.)
In the first perspective, we make the assumptions implicit in
Collins' article, except one. Because most of the resources we
use are tied to our infrastructure (which is fixed in the short
term), an addition of population of one person makes no additional
demands on infrastructure. If the extra person has a typical kiwi
lifestyle, the total use of resources will rise, but the average
use of resources will fall. In practice, this might translate
into a oneoff population increase of 2% leading to an increased
resource usage of 1%.
To the extent that additional infrastructure is required - eg
if that 2% increase is an annual average and not a oneoff
- then new knowledge and techniques mean that the resource cost
of the extra infrastructure should be less than that associated
with past infrastructure. So "treading lightly" means,
in part, the adoption of infrastructures that have a high "productivity
of land". And it means that new environmentally sensitive
infrastructure replaces old infrastructure, creating intramarginal
efficiency gains; ie reducing the resource cost of everyone, and
not just the additional person.
When economists talk about productivity, they usually mean "productivity
of labour", but increasingly they have come to mean "total
factor productivity", where high productivity implies treading
lightly with respect to nature, and treading lightly with respect
to infrastructure, meaning that the construction of new infrastructure
can often be delayed. Total factor productivity means economising
on land and on capital (eg infrastructure), as well as economising
on labour. One important form of treading lightly is to promote
economic growth in (and hence population inflow into) regions
with underutilised infrastructure. Thus, by following an active
regional employment policy, we can raise the carrying capacity
of our infrastructure, and therefore can devote less land to infrastructure.
Switching to a "scaleeconomy general equilibrium"
point of view, we might imagine a sudden population influx. In
a thought experiment we might simply double the NZ population,
and imagine how the New Zealand economy would adjust. We could
no more assume that the population would continue to use five
hectares of resources each than we could imagine a doubling of
Auckland's population in 1897 without some adjustments to land
use. Economies of scale can mean significant efficiency gains.
The obvious example is the one that Collins raises; namely public
transport. An Auckland with two million people would have to have
a decent public transport system, and might even have less private
traffic than an Auckland of one million.
I have recently been to Vienna, a city of 1.7 million inhabitants.
It has a brilliant public transport system, including a busy underground
railway, a wellpatronised tram system, and much less traffic
than Auckland. Living standards in Austria are 50% higher than
in New Zealand. New Zealand cities had tram systems once, but
lost them in large part because population growth was too slow
to sustain them. Austrians live better than New Zealanders, while
treading more lightly.
The historical perspective factors in changes in technology and
changes in our values. As a population grows, and experiences
economic growth, it not only chooses new techniques on account
of changing scale, but it can facilitate the development of new
techniques; techniques that help whole populations to tread the
planet more lightly, despite greater numbers.
New techniques are made possible by changing values as well as
new knowledge. A high and growing population values its scarce
natural resources much more than does a low, static or stressed
population. Economically static populations may draw down their
natural capital more slowly than growing populations, but the
historical record shows that they did draw down their natural
capital, creating subsistence crises on account of their populations'
inability to adapt.
It is dynamic populations whose values evolve. Thus it is quite
possible for a growing population to tread more lightly as it
grows. The industrial revolution has raised the carrying capacity
of the earth even more dramatically than it has raised the world's
population. Thus it has constituted a 150 year long learning curve
that has given us the capability of treading lightly in postindustrial
comfort.
Being able to tread lightly does not however mean that humankind
will tread lightly. Human society continues to contain directly
conflicting values. A sustainable future depends very much on
which value system prevails, and it depends very little on numbers,
per se. For those with little concern for the future, the
present control over and exploitation of valuable natural resources
represents a means to the achievement of very high surplus profits.
Just as rising populations can generate dynamic change conducive
to increased sustainable carrying capacity, it is quite possible
for a falling world population to coincide with or even to generate
terrible environmental crises. A world of growing inequality does
lead to rising death rates, and to intense competition for artificially
limited resources. Stressed populations care only about today,
not tomorrow, and have no incentive to conserve, to tread lightly.
Many of the worst environmental abuses this century have been
perpetrated by the stressed populations of the Third World, be
it deforestation in Amazonia, Africa, Indonesia or upriver from
Bangladesh. The biggest energy crisis on the planet is that of
a high demand for scarce firewood. There are already a number
of practical technical solutions to these problems, but a lack
of political will combined with the intense conservatism of culturally
static agrarian communities makes adaptation very difficult.
Of course, there are limits to population growth. Fortunately,
a society with a value system that facilitates lightness of tread
also facilitates other forms of cooperation. The most important
is the development of a welfare society, with the critical element
being a guaranteed retirement income. A society which uses its
economic growth to provide economic security not only treads lightly
by removing the stress of chronic insecurity, but also entirely
eliminates the principal private economic incentive to have children.
Children change from being a large set of private "goods"
into a smaller (but not too small) public good. In a welfare society,
children represent the future of that society, and not just the
separate futures of highly stressed families.
Some welfare states are better than others at achieving the lightness
of tread and a deceleration of population growth. A welfare state
that emphasises targeting creates divergent class communities,
divergent values, and mutual suspicion between social classes.
On the other hand, a society with a universally allocated social
wage discourages social stratification, and enables a sufficient
sharing of values to reach a measure of consensus on important
matters such as conserving our planet.
A welfare state that emphasises individual work as the fundamental
activity that defines selfreliance, and that sees society
as an unbound collection of selfreliant individuals, focuses
more on the increased payment of private wages through getting
more people into work, and less on the social wage. It is a society
that does not tread lightly, because it doesn't value cooperation,
and doesn't acknowledge the value of the public domain or of the
unpaid work that enhances it.
While certain forms of consumption weigh heavily on the planet,
it is activities linked to market production that weigh heaviest.
We consume more resources in work, and in getting to work, than
we do in our homes. Work, promoted for its own sake as the most
ethically virtuous of activities, negates the conservation ethic,
the ethic that virtue should be equated not with activity but
with treading lightly, with placing minimal stress on the earth's
carrying capacity.
Along with Simon Collins, another journalist whom I have much respect for is the NZ Listener's Gordon Campbell. In a recent article ("Bad Sports", NZ Listener, 13 September), he wrote:
Campbell recognises that the values of the winloselose
struggle that is adversarial capitalism is very wasteful with
respect to the losers' efforts; efforts which contribute to the
depreciation of our planet and our infrastructure. Nevertheless,
Campbell falls into the labourist trap of treating people as resources;
resources, like land, that are there to be used, and, if not used,
are wasted. The corollary of the manasresource world
view is that waste is equated with inactivity, and that treading
lightly on the planet might be sacrificed as a goal on the altar
of the presently stronger ethic of "activity".
Ruth Richardson, as Minister of Finance, expressed the "productive
activity at any cost" ethic in 1991 when she condemned "subsidised
surfing" as a lifestyle. I take the opposite view. Surfers
should be fed (see Philippe van Parijs, 1991, "Why Surfers
Should be Fed; the Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income"
Philosophy and Public Affairs.), but not on hamburgers
which create a heavy tread market for extensive cattle ranching.
Surfers, as surfers, tread more lightly than corporate accountants.
It is what they eat that matters, not whether they should be allowed
to eat.
The people of Auckland in the 1890s were pushing their environment
to its limits. Population growth turned out to be part of the
solution, forcing better infrastructure, and not part of the problem.
We still tread heavily on our environment, but not nearly as heavily,
per person, as we did then. New Zealand can grow further without
threatening its carrying capacity. On the other hand, if in the
future we do destroy our habitat, the cause is much more likely
to be conflict or ignorance than growth. The contrasting values
that propel such conflict are those of exploitation (which generates
private surpluses) versus economising (which facilitates social
profit); and the labourist ethic that values work for its own
sake and not for its net contribution to our sustenance, to our
comfort, and to our happiness.
The effective marginal weight of tread can be less than
zero if, as population rises, we increasingly value our habitat
to the extent that the product of the earth's per capita carrying
capacity and the earth's population actually falls.
{ This document is: http://www.oocities.org/Athens/Delphi/3142/krf31-popul_conf.html
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