Malthus Lite

Robert Bailey:

“The most notoriously wrong modern prophet of Malthusian doom is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. My public crusade against Malthusian stupidity began with my 1990 Forbes article, “Doomsday Rescheduled,” in which I reviewed Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book The Population Explosion.

“One thing seems safe to predict: starvation and epidemic disease will raise death rates over most of the planet,” they asserted in the book. I pointed out that this was a follow-up to Paul Ehrlich’s failed prediction made 22 years earlier in his 1968 The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now.

At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

That didn’t happen.

The Club of Rome’s New Malthusianism-Lite Report

Tech Giants, Richest Countries

In the last decade and a half the world has witnessed the greatest surge of wealth creation in human history.

Not only have we created more wealth than ever before, we have created different kinds of wealth.

Physical wealth, stuff made out of molecules, still makes up most of our economic output.

But knowledge and data wealth – digital assets – have grown faster than physical assets and now constitute the most part of the economy.

We are leaving physical shortages and scarcity behind, Today’s challenges are those of abundance – of a cornucopia.

Visual Capitalist.

Differences Between the Economies of Scarcity and Abundance

digitalreality.ieee.org

The Scarcity Economy

The theory of scarcity refers to a mismatch between limited resources and consumer demand. If a resource is scarce, but demand is high, not everyone can get what they want. There is a mismatch between the desired goods and the supply.

Scarcity keeps prices high and helps drive profitability.

The Economy of Abundance Unlike the economy of scarcity, the economy of abundance is built on the availability of near unlimited resources.

The economy of abundance is almost always present in the digital world—digital products and content are easy and cheap to copy, store, and transfer to millions. Digital products do not rely on scarce resources.

This can be incredibly disruptive to a traditional scarcity economy.

Read the analysis here.

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Sydney, Melbourne in Top 10 Safest Cities

Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland have been included in a list of the top ten ‘safest’ cities produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The EIU’s biennial Safe Cities Index, for the first time included environmental security metrics.

In a study of five pillars of urban security — digital, health, infrastructure, personal and environmental — Copenhagen topped the charts, scoring 82.4 points out of 100.

The Danish capital was just ahead of Toronto with 82.2 points. Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo, regular fixtures in the list’s top tiers, rounded out the top five.

The World’s 10 Safest Cities

1. Copenhagen
2. Toronto
3. Singapore
4. Sydney
5. Tokyo
6. Amsterdam
7. Wellington
8. Hong Kong
9. Melbourne
10. Stockholm

The EIU’s Safe Cities Index this year ranked 60 cities across 76 indicators of security, to get a better picture of global urban safety.

The addition of the new environmental security pillar reflects the increased importance of sustainability issues and climate adaptation measures following the coronavirus pandemic. Toronto and Copenhagen performed noticeably better in the new environmental security pillar than did any of the top-three cities from earlier years.

Covid-19 hurts global safety

Indeed, alongside health security, the coronavirus had an impact across all security metrics, the report’s authors noted.

Digital security, for instance, has become a higher priority as work and commerce have moved online, while infrastructure safety has had to adjust due to changes in travel and utility consumption.

Elsewhere, personal safety has been impacted by a shift in crime patterns during lockdowns, and environmental safety has come to the fore as the pandemic served as a stark warning of unexpected crisis.

Among the least safe of the 60 cities measured were Lagos, Cairo, Caracas, Karachi and Yangon.