"Last night, CBS decided to start the new year with a 60 Minutes segment on overpopulation. That’s not really all that surprising. In recent months, many left-leaning media outlets profiled advocates of depopulation (here is The New York Times and here is The Atlantic), thereby helping to normalize their message of anti-humanism and anti-natalism. What is surprising is that CBS thought it wise to interview none other than the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ninety years old, looking healthy and sounding as self-assured as ever, Ehrlich revisited the main thesis of his 1968 book The Population Bomb. The book’s beginning will be familiar to many readers:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”
In fact, the world’s crude death rate per 1,000 people fell from 12.9 in 1965-1970 to 8.1 in 2020-2025. That’s a reduction of 37 percent. Famines, which were once common throughout the world, have disappeared outside of war zones. The world produces (or produced before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) record amounts of food. Hundreds of millions of people did not starve to death in the 1970s or thereafter. Quite the opposite happened; the world’s population rose from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8 billion in 2022. That said, some 400 million people were prevented from being born in China because of the misbegotten one-child policy (1978-2015), which the writings of Paul Ehrlich helped to inspire.
I realize that CBS has no time or space for the authors of Superabundance – a book showing that resources are getting more, rather than less, abundant. But why not interview Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Romer, Angus Deaton, and Michael Kremer, who never bought into the overpopulation nonsense? And if that’s a stretch, why not interview smart Democrats, like Lawrence H. Summers (Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury) or Jason Furman (Barack Obama’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers)? They, too, argue that we do not have an “overpopulation problem.” Or was 60 Minutes only looking for scholars willing to confirm the pre-determined narrative of doom and gloom?
CBS claims that the world has too many people consuming too much stuff, which threatens the biosphere (a.k.a. human life-support systems). Once again, remember that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, human life expectancy was rising, and the death rate was falling – even though the world’s population grew by 129 percent between the publication date of The Population Bomb and the present. So, humans are doing just fine, thank you very much! What about the biosphere? Let’s consider three trends that Ronald Bailey from Reason magazine and I looked at in our 2020 book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting.
- The World Database on Protected Areas reported that 15 percent of the planet’s land surface was covered by protected areas in 2017. That’s an area almost double the size of the United States. Marine protected areas covered nearly 7 percent of the world’s oceans. That’s an area more than twice the size of South America. Plans are afoot to increase the size of the protected areas substantially.
- The world is urbanizing. By 2050, 80 percent of humanity will live in cities. In other words, we are withdrawing from land, thereby increasing, not decreasing, the space available to plants and animals.
- The Rockefeller University environmentalist Jesse H. Ausubel estimates that due to the continued improvements in the efficiency of farming practices, including rising crop yields, the world will see “a net reduction in use of arable land (i.e., land used for farming) in about 50 years totaling 10 times the area of Iowa, and shrinking global cropland to the level of 1960.”
Finally, the world has never been as wealthy and as determined to protect the environment. We have the technology to reintroduce species at the risk of depletion and, perhaps, even to resurrect long-extinct ones. Just last year, thanks to knowledge and investment from a wealthy country, humanity deflected a small asteroid for the first time. If wealth is allowed to grow, we may one day save the biosphere from a true mass extinction. Economic development, in other words, is the key to environmental protection, which is why all the environmental ranking tables are topped by economically advanced nations. To stress: rich countries are better stewards of the environment than poor ones. Just compare the quality of the environment in Denmark with Papua New Guinea.
None of the above is a license to be wantonly cruel to animals or careless about our surroundings. Living on a beautiful planet teeming with wildlife is a part of human flourishing. But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress (for a more academic discussion, see this article). Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming. The way forward, therefore, is to find a balance between environmental concerns and human flourishing – understanding that humans are not only destroyers, but also creators and protectors of the planet and that which thrives on it."
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
Still Wrong! New Year’s Paul Ehrlich Interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes
The Rise of Specialized Firms
By Lorenz K.F. Ekerdt & Kai-Jie Wu. They are both with The University of Rochester.
Abstract
"This paper studies firm diversification over 6-digit NAICS industries in U.S. man- ufacturing. We find that firms specializing in fewer industries now account for a substantially greater share of production than 40 years ago. This reallocation is a key driver of rising industry concentration. Specialized firms have displaced diversi- fied firms among industry leaders—absent this reallocation concentration would have decreased. We then provide evidence that specialized firms produce higher-quality goods: specialized firms tend to charge higher unit prices and are more insulated against Chinese import competition. Based on our empirical findings, we propose a theory in which growth shifts demand toward specialized, high-quality firms, which eventually increases concentration. Our theory indicates that one should expect rising concentration in a growing economy."
Conclusions
"This article advances an alternative view of the much-discussed shift in activity toward large firms observed in the average U.S. industry over the past 50 years. Rather than reflecting structural changes in the nature of competition, we argue that this development reflects shifts in demand toward higher-quality products that inevitably occur as national income grows. Because industry concentration naturally changes on the growth path, any changes of this measure should be viewed relative to this secular trend.
Our interpretation is based on the observation that there has been a marked shift in activity toward more specialized firms that coincides with the rise in the average industry revenue share of large firms; this shift can be reconciled with growing relative demand for higher-quality products as long as more specialized firms tend to produce higher-quality products.
To support this view, we first study firms’ unit prices within narrowly-defined product cat- egories. We find that, conditional on firm size, more specialized firms tend to charge higher unit 51 prices, while they do not seem to face higher distortions in the input or product markets. Secondly, we study firms’ responses to the rapid rise in Chinese import competition beginning in the early 1990s. The results of this analysis are stark: more diversified firms shrink dramatically relative to specialized firms when faced with the same exposure to Chinese import competition. Noting that developing countries export low quality products to developed countries, we inter- pret this finding as favoring our posited link between specialization and product quality.
We construct a model to show that the average industry revenue share of large firms is naturally increasing over a growth path. Because quality is a luxury, relative demand increasingly favors more specialized firms as income grows. We can thus generate an increasing path of average industry concentration which is not driven by structural changes in the nature of competition, but instead simply reflects income growth."
Monday, January 2, 2023
Pandemic learning loss could cost students $70,000 in lifetime earnings
Study by Stanford University economist projects the losses could total $28 trillion over the rest of this century
See By Ben Chapman & Douglas Belkin of The WSJ. Excerpts:
"Learning loss could shave $70,000 off the lifetime earnings of children who were in school during the pandemic, according to a new study by a Stanford economist.
The sobering forecast is based on an analysis of the sharp declines in the scores of eighth-graders on national math tests taken between 2019 and 2022.
If the learning losses aren’t recovered, K-12 students on average will grow into less educated, lower-skilled and less productive adults and will earn 5.6% less over the course of their lives than students educated just before the pandemic, said Eric A. Hanushek, a Stanford University economist who specializes in education. He said the losses could total $28 trillion over the rest of this century.
"The economic costs of the learning losses will swamp business cycle losses," said Dr. Hanushek."
"Dr. Hanushek’s analysis echoes a study released in October by researchers from Harvard and Dartmouth Universities, which estimated that if the learning loss isn’t reversed, it would equate to a 1.6% drop in lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student.
That study also found learning loss leads to lower high school graduation rates and college enrollment as well as higher teen motherhood, arrests and incarceration."
A Quiet Refutation of ‘Net Zero’ Carbon Emissions
Two energy reports show the U.S. is burdening and dismantling its grid to achieve an impossible goal
By Steve Milloy. He is a senior fellow with the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. Excerpts:
"In September, the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the U.S. electric utility industry, released a report titled “Net-Zero 2050: U.S. Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis.”
The EPRI report concludes that the utility industry can’t attain net zero. “This study shows that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency . . . are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions.”
"In other words, no amount of wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, nuclear power, battery power, electrification of fossil-fuel technologies or energy-efficiency technologies will get us to net zero by 2050.
Even to achieve “deep decarbonization”—which isn’t net zero—by 2050, EPRI says, “a broad portfolio of options that includes low-carbon fuels and carbon removal technologies will be required.”
But “low-carbon fuels”—efficient biofuels—don’t exist. “Carbon removal technologies” aren’t possible to scale up, and if they were, it would cost about $1 quadrillion—a million billion dollars—at today’s prices to remove the 1.6 trillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said needs to be sucked “out of the atmosphere even after we get to net zero.”
There’s more. The EPRI report states: “This study does not include a detailed assessment of factors such as supply chain constraints [and] operational reliability and resiliency” of a net-zero electricity grid."
"The other recent report is “2022 Long-Term Reliability Assessment” from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a government-certified grid-reliability and standard-setting group. NERC concluded that fossil-fuel plants are being removed from the grid too fast to meet continuing electricity demand, and that is putting most of the country at risk of grid failure and blackouts during extreme weather. The U.S. just got another taste of this during the Christmas electric-grid emergency."
Charles W. Calomiris reviews The Myth of American Inequality by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early
"Has the average standard of living grown substantially since the 1960s? Has inequality shrunk over that period? Did post-1960 redistributive policies reduce the percentage of families living in poverty?"
"Average living standards have improved dramatically. Real income of the bottom quintile, the authors write, grew more than 681% from 1967 to 2017. The percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32% in 1947 to 15% in 1967 to only 1.1% in 2017. Opportunities created by economic growth, and government-sponsored social programs funded by that growth, produced broadly shared prosperity: 94% of households in 2017 would have been at least as well off as the top quintile in 1967. Bottom-quintile households enjoy the same living standards as middle-quintile households, and on a per capita basis the bottom quintile has a 3% higher income. Top-quintile households receive income equal to roughly four times the bottom (and only 2.2 times the lowest on a per capita basis), not the 16.7 proportion popularly reported.
What explains the disconnect between reality and belief? Government statistical reports exclude “noncash” sources of income, which excludes most transfers from social programs. Taxes (paid disproportionately by high earners) are also ignored in official calculations. Furthermore, even the government’s “cash” income numbers are reported in a way that understates improvements in real (inflation-adjusted) income over time because government inflation measures fail to use the appropriate chained price indexes or take account of new products and services.
Increased earned-income inequality is the natural consequence of redistributive policies: if one can enjoy median household consumption without earning any income, the incentive to work is substantially diminished. This largely explains the growing distance between earned and total income for poor households (transfers to those households have gone up dramatically). Ironically, it is the very success of redistribution in reducing poverty and inequality that has led mismeasurement to create the false perception of increasing inequality.
The equality of consumption between the bottom quintile (in which only 36% of prime-age persons work) and the middle quintile (in which 92% of prime-age persons work) is a striking finding."
"What makes this book an invaluable new resource for public policy and economic education is its focus on how the experiences of Americans of different living standards evolved over time and how earned income and consumption diverged for the poorest households. It traces improvements in the living standards of the poor to transfer programs, shows how taxation of the rich has flattened the distribution of consumption across households, and documents how measurement errors have distorted general beliefs about economic inequality."
"it measures not only differences in consumption by households across quintiles, but also the more meaningful per capita consumption across quintiles, and adjusts those per capita calculations to capture consumption synergies within households using standard methods."
Sunday, January 1, 2023
The Christmas Electric Grid Emergency
Strain caused by climate policies left too many Americans shivering over the weekend. Worse is coming
"As temperatures plunged this weekend, Americans in much of the country were told to turn down their thermostats and avoid using large appliances to prevent rolling blackouts. The cascading grid stress came at an awful time but was all too predictable to anyone paying attention.
The interconnected U.S. grid is supposed to be a source of resilience, but the government’s force-fed green energy transition is creating systemic vulnerabilities that politicians don’t want to acknowledge. Utilities and grid operators weren’t prepared for the surge in demand for natural gas and electricity to heat homes, which occurred as gas supply shortages and icy temperatures forced many power plants off-line.
The PJM Interconnection, which provides electricity to 65 million people across 13 eastern states, usually has surplus power that it exports to neighboring grids experiencing shortages, but this time it was caught short. Gas plants in the region couldn’t get enough fuel, which for public-health reasons is prioritized for heating.
Coal and nuclear plants can’t ramp up like gas-fired plants to meet surges in demand, so PJM ordered some businesses to curtail power usage and urged households to do the same through Christmas morning. Rolling blackouts were narrowly averted as some generators switched to burning oil. Americans in the southeast weren’t so lucky.
The Tennessee Valley Authority and Duke Energy in the Carolinas ordered rolling blackouts as demand for heating surged. Two-thirds of the South relies on electricity for heating. While gas-power generation doubled in the TVA and tripled in the Carolinas, this wasn’t enough to keep the lights on and homes heated.
The climate lobby wants to force all homes and buildings to shift to electric heating even though it is less efficient than gas furnaces in frigid weather. When temperatures fall below freezing, heat pumps consume more and more power. “With a generation fleet that is more nat gas heavy than ever before, we are using twice as much gas to heat homes through electricity as we do with gas furnaces,” former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Pat Wood told Bloomberg.
Population growth in the Sun Belt has increased the strain on the grid—even as large numbers of coal and nuclear plants that provide baseload power have shut down owing to competition from heavily subsidized renewables and cheap natural gas. The Texas grid has become especially dependent on wind and gas.
Natural gas is usually a reliable power source that can ramp up when demand increases or wind power flags. But in very cold temperatures pipes can freeze and gas is diverted for heating. On Friday morning, wind power and temperatures in Texas both plunged. As electric demand hit a winter record, gas power generation doubled.
Worries about a gas shortage spurred the U.S. Department of Energy on Saturday to declare a grid emergency in Texas and ease emissions standards to allow gas plants to burn oil if necessary. Don’t tell hapless Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, but oil comes to the grid’s rescue during extreme weather—not lithium-ion batteries, which can’t discharge power for more than a few hours.
New England leaned on oil to generate 40% of its power this weekend even as its grid operator pleaded with customers to conserve power. New York’s embargo on gas pipelines limits supply to New England, which depends on gas for heating and increasingly electricity as coal and nuclear plants have closed. But the region can’t import enough liquefied natural gas in a pinch.
***
While there wasn’t a single cause for the power shortages, government policies to boost renewables snowballed and created problems that cascaded through the grid. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned about these system-wide grid vulnerabilities in a report last month, as did a study commissioned by the Trump Department of Energy in 2017.
The climate lobby dismisses such warnings and blamed the weekend’s power outages on the “bomb cyclone” supposedly caused by climate change. But storms happened before climate change became the default political explanation for everything. The Christmas emergency was a near-run disaster, and unless the political class wakes up, next time may be worse."
The Evidence on School Choice in Rural Areas
Choice and competition have a positive effect on public-school performance
"Several red states appear poised to adopt expansive school-choice policies this year, prompting the teachers unions and their allies to claim that the sky is falling, especially in rural areas. Corey DeAngelis is right to call out the Chicken Littles for their scaremongering (“The Little Red Schoolhouse Could Do With a Little Competition,” op-ed, Dec. 17), pointing to copious evidence that choice and competition have a positive effect on public-school performance.
Arizona, a longtime leader in school choice, is the perfect example. It was the first state to enact tax-credit scholarships in 1997 and K-12 education savings accounts in 2011. More students in Arizona exercise school choice than in any other state. If school choice destroys rural public schools, as opponents claim, then Arizona should be ground zero.
The opposite is true. Arizona’s rural students have improved much more than rural students nationwide have over the past decade. From 2007 to 2019, Arizona rural students’ fourth and eighth grade reading and math scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress increased by a combined 21 points, while scores in rural schools nationally decreased by two points. Postpandemic, Arizona’s rural students were still up a combined nine points while rural students nationally dropped 17 points from 2007.
As we detail in a forthcoming Heritage Foundation report, school-choice policies have greater potential to benefit students in rural areas than ever before, including those who remain at their local public schools. Rural residents and the policy makers who represent them have nothing to fear from school choice—and students have much to gain.
Jason Bedrick and Matthew Ladner
Heritage Foundation and ReimagineED
Phoenix"