Among the Intellectualoids: Globaloney 2000
Moore, Stephen
by Stephen Moore Globaloney 2000 Twenty years ago our world was on the verge of collapse. The year: 2ooo. The place: Earth, a desolate planet slowly dying of its own accumulating...
...Since then, mineral prices have continued to decline almost every year...
...Enough to make us want to join the campy chorus of that era: Stop the Planet...
...We're back to paying farmers to stop growing so much blasted food...
...Or check that...
...Whereas the pessimists fundamentally believed events on the globe -from the greenhouse effect to lost farmland to unbridled human propagation--to be spiraling out of mankind's control, Kahn advanced the humanist position that "man is the architect of his own destiny...
...It was all pretty damned depressing...
...Almost everywhere food is now cheaper and more abundant than ever in human history...
...I want to get off...
...The World Bank reports that in India, China, Indonesia, and Mexico infant death rates have fallen by half since 198o-a breathtaking triumph over death in such a brief period...
...Where Reagan in 198o envisioned America as a shining city on a hill, Carter and the environmental leftists who contributed to this multi-agency report saw the world on a one-way, congested, and crumbling freeway to hell...
...It was Carter's going-away gift to the nation and the world: a 1,600page ode to the misery and malaise of the era he had presided over...
...Growing scarcity of a commodity implies a rising price...
...Well, here we are halfway through the year 2000 and...the sky hasn't fallen...
...But rather than admit to scientific malpractice, apologists for Global 2000 explain away their malfeasance by claiming they warned us just in time-veering us off the path of environmental apocalypse...
...They argued for more price controls, more government subsidies for alternative energy, more regulation of markets, and more collective ownership of resources...
...That cheery tome explained to a world audience that lifeboat Earth had become so weighted down with humans that we were running out of food, minerals, forests, water, energy, and, well, just about everything that we depend on for survival...
...Rereading the doom and gloom of Global zooo, one is struck by how fortunate our world is that Americans had the common sense not to re-elect Jimmy Carter in 198o...
...A few years earlier the Club of Rome had published its famous primal scream: "The Limits to Growth...
...N The American Spectator " July~August 2000 69...
...It's true that world population has grown substantially over the past quarter century, reaching the 6 billion figure in late 1999-but still less than the 6.35 billion forecast of GlobaI2ooo and the 8 billion forecast by "Limits to Growth...
...the major U.S...
...But as Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, this rise in global population "did not erupt because people suddenly began breeding like rabbits...
...The report said real oil prices would rise by 15o percent from t975 to 2ooo...
...It's real life...
...In 1967 Hudson Institute founder Herman Kahn wrote "The Year 2ooo," one of the most ambitious think tank projects ever undertaken...
...Is life "more precarious" for the world's citizens today...
...The stock market has risen by more than 1,ooo percent since 198o (something the declinists never imagined possible), while commodity prices have fallen by about half...
...It was one of the most influential and expensive (tax-funded, of course) environmental documents ever published...
...It also foresaw a "too percent real increase in food prices by 2000...
...sand dunes spread where fertile lands once lay...
...The New York Times gushed that Global zooo "presents so immediate a challenge to worldwide political stability and American economic security that STEPHEN MOORE is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute...
...Global 2000 was especially gloomy about the outlook for the poorest nations, but it turns out that the most heartening gains in living conditions have generally been recorded in the most poverty-stricken countries (Africa excepted...
...To be fair, Global 2000 was merely regurgitating the conventional wisdom of the times...
...Even with the recent spike in oil prices to $25-$30 a barrel, the Global 2000 forecast was offby a gargantuan 3oo-4oo percent...
...Paul Ehrlich of The P@ulation Bomb fame sneered that all Kahn and Simon had proved is that "the one thing the world isn't running out of is imbeciles...
...The press celebrated the report...
...Global 2000 predicted more hunger and more food scarcity by 2ooo...
...the entire scientific research team of the United States government...
...So it appears that Simon and Kahn were right and the United States government was wrong--fantastically wrong...
...National Geographic recently reported that the new nutritional problem in China, since it moved away from collective farming and toward private land ownership, is obesity...
...It was translated into eight languages (unfortunately including English) and sold 1. 5 million copies...
...Where the Reaganites saw human beings as assets, the environmental crowd regarded population growth as a form of toxic pollution...
...Led by Reagan, the world has mostly moved in exactly the opposite direction: lifting price controls on energy, abandoning collectivist agricultural policies, shedding resource subsidies, and leaving technology and the price system alone in combating scarcity...
...Yet man is propagating so fast that his cities have grown as large as his nations of a century before...
...What about the claim that man is propagating out of control...
...Two "imbeciles" vs...
...This was perhaps his most prescient insight of all...
...In almost every measurable way, life on Earth has improved substantially since 198o , both in the United States and most every other place other than Africa...
...government report called Global 2000, issued in Jimmy Carter's last year in office...
...In fact, world food production per capita has risen by roughly 25 percent since the mid-t97o's...
...Nor is it from a long-lost episode of "The Twilight Zone," or the setting from the latest Star Wars prequel...
...The scourge of double-digit inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump gave credibility to the claims that the planet would soon be running on empty...
...Just for the heck of it, let's compare Global 2ooo's predictions with reality...
...He also depicted technology and in particular the microchip as man's savior-the instzument in solving problems like population growth, food supply, pollution, and international conflict...
...Simon and Kahn patiently tried to explain to the declinists that the best way to calculate the relative scarcity of these resources is to examine the change in their prices...
...The World Resource Institute has calculated that between 1975 and 199o the global index for mineral prices fell about 30 percent in real terms...
...The place: Earth, a desolate planet slowly dying of its own accumulating follies...
...This neo-Malthusian mindset-that we were living in an era of scarcity--pervaded nearly every domestic policy decision of the late 197o's...
...It's how the left twenty years ago imagined we'd be living today...
...These were the choices we were left with...
...Life expectancy has increased by lo-15 years since the mid197o's in each of these nations...
...In fact, it's not science fiction at all...
...Although written 13 years before publication of the Carter administration's anxiety attack, Kahn presented an astonishingly upbeat and accurate glimpse into the future...
...Their scathing rebuttal, The Resourceful Earth, challenged virtually every single pessimistic warning in GlobaI2ooo, right down to the punctuation marks...
...Not only have real food prices not risen, they've fallen by about 5 ~ percent...
...farm problem these days is too much food production...
...The gains are not just confined to the U.S...
...that we are robbing future generations when we use these scarce, irreplaceable, or nonrenewable resources...
...n its famous executive summary, Global 200o forecast that "If present trends continue, the world will be more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now...the world's people will be poorer...the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better...for most people on earth life will be more precarious in 2ooo...
...Carter warned that we could "very soon drill the last drop ofoil from the ground...
...The argument is laughable, precisely because the world has done just the opposite of what the declinists prescribed...
...The passage comes from a Newsweek description of the blockbuster U.S...
...There are no shortages in sight...
...even the most complacent new administration must recognize it as a priority issue...
...Not surprisingly, Simon and Kahn were dismissed as quirky and unrealistically Pollyannish by 68 July~August 2 0 o o ' The American Spectator the media and environmental leaders...
...He fumed about the "immorality" of teaching children that "we are running out of resources...
...Simon and Kahn retorted that "if present trends continue, the world will be less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now...the world's people will be richer...the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be much better...for most people on earth life will be less precarious in 2000...
...Moreover, as of 1999, the reserve levels of each of these mineral commodities was in the hundreds of thousands of tons...
...By the way, any investor who actually bought future contracts for oil, pork bellies, or industrial commodities based on Global 2ooo's projections took an absolute bath...
...N o, the above isn't taken from Stephen King's latest freaky horror novel...
...Kahn's vision was the antithesis of Global 2000...
...That would suggest a price today roughly of $8o-$1oo a barrel...
...In the industrialized nations, fertility rates have fallen from 3 to 1.6--well below replacement level...
...Nearly 2 million species of plants, birds, insects, and animals have vanished...
...Since the midq97o's the fertility rate in third-world nations has fallen from about 5 children per family to less than 3 today...
...Global 20o0 forecast that by the new millennium we'd be facing near exhaustion of major mineral resources, including silver, zinc, mercury, and sulfur...
...The inevitability of decline was not accepted by all scholars of that era...
...Shortly before his death in 1981, this fabulous futurologist teamed with another contrarian scholar, University of Illinois Professor Julian Simon, to assail the idiocy of Global 2000...
...All of this declinism is merely a "prescription for low morale, higher prices, and greater (and unnecessary) regulation...
...The TV networks broadcast its dreary forecasts into the living room of every American home...
...Fortamately, President-elect Ronald Reagan ignored the report entirely...
...The prediction of falling per capita food output due to soil erosion and shrinking farmland is almost comical, given that Kahn presented an astonishingly accurate glimpse of the future...
...He saw a world of affluence and abundance with "communism eroded" and democratic capitalism triumphant...
...Half the forests are gone...
...Global population exploded instead because people stopped dying like flies...
...In 1979 the Carter White House actually urged Americans to set their thermostats at a frosty 67 in the winter and a steamy 72 in the summer to conserve energy...
...The demographic crisis in nations like Japan, Spain, Italy, and France today is not a population bomb, but a severe implosion...
...They derisively retitled the Carter report "Globaloney zooo...
Vol. 33 • July 2000 • No. 6
