RSS
In a review for the new installment of Mad Max Dana Stevens in Slate writes:
The way the world ends, for Miller, is not in overpopulated high-tech megacities slicked with film-noir rain, but in something like the polar opposite. Miller’s nightmare of the future posits the planet as a parched desert landscape against which the world’s few remaining humans scratch out a meager, violent existence, equipped only with the salvaged remains of mid-20th-century technology. It’s that future that, 36 years after Mel Gibson first put the pedal to the metal as Max Rockatansy, is looking more like the one we may be leaving to our own survivors….
I understand this is a movie review, and that line was probably thrown in there for artistic effect. But facts matter, and there is no way that you justify the position that the world is more like that of Mad Max today than 40 years ago. Paul Ehrlich has definitely lost his bet, and even the peak oil worry has abated. The data show that a smaller proportion of the world’s population is undernourished and and poor. The total fertility rate is declining and life expectancy is increasing. Yes, the situation of the middle class in much of the developed world has been in relative stagnation by many metrics, but enormous increases in human well being have occurred throughout what was once termed the Third World.
The Right and Left have particular hobbyhorses. Young people today are more secular and tolerant of sexual diversity in lifestyles, but they are also less sexually promiscuous (we were blogging about this at Gene Expression seven years ago by the way). Similarly, despite worries about income inequality in the developed world, billions are rising out of poverty in places like China and India. Yes. Billions. Though environmental threats exist, the world is healthier and wealthier than it was a generation ago.
It’s not very important that Dana Stevens’ editor didn’t remove a rhetorical flourish which was just factually unfounded (though I it’s insulting to the people of places like the Sahel who suffered through privation a generation ago, and no longer do so). But, it does suggest a mental weakness that these sorts of slips get through, to influence the public, and continue to distort the perceptions of the way the world is. To prepare for the exigencies of the future we need to see the present clearly.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I agree with your broader point, but not in regard to this movie review.
Here’s the key quote:
“It’s that future that, 36 years after Mel Gibson first put the pedal to the metal as Max Rockatansy, is looking more like the one we may be leaving to our own survivors….”
Yes, it is awkwardly written. But, Stevens is actually saying that “the future” (ie, our current estimate of future conditions) is looking worse environmentally than that same future would have seemed 36 years ago. I actually think this is correct. Overall, humans are thriving. However, there is one paramount environmental danger, global warming, that we seem to be powerless to prevent. Global warming does indeed look like a worse threat now than we thought it was 36 years ago because we have so much more data and our knowledge of climate science is much better now.
Liberals and conservatives, broadly speaking, are both in denial about certain areas of science. However, it seems that conservatives have chosen denial in the one area where the greatest action is needed to prevent disaster.
Here's the key quote:
"It’s that future that, 36 years after Mel Gibson first put the pedal to the metal as Max Rockatansy, is looking more like the one we may be leaving to our own survivors…."
Yes, it is awkwardly written. But, Stevens is actually saying that "the future" (ie, our current estimate of future conditions) is looking worse environmentally than that same future would have seemed 36 years ago. I actually think this is correct. Overall, humans are thriving. However, there is one paramount environmental danger, global warming, that we seem to be powerless to prevent. Global warming does indeed look like a worse threat now than we thought it was 36 years ago because we have so much more data and our knowledge of climate science is much better now.
Liberals and conservatives, broadly speaking, are both in denial about certain areas of science. However, it seems that conservatives have chosen denial in the one area where the greatest action is needed to prevent disaster.Replies: @Razib Khan
i disagree with this, though it’s a defensible position. global warming + ozone + acid rain was “all the rage” in the 1980s. i lived through it. no different than today. yes, there’s greater consciousness and public policy focus, but i’m not convinced that the expected outcome is any different (though more precise in the parameters; the confidence intervals were always huge). also, i find the idea that global warming will turn the world into a desert stupendously moronic.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/ever-changing-science-global-warming
If you can't believe Kevin Drum, the world's most reasonable liberal, who can you believe?
The reason I don't read or talk about global warming much is just that I don't find it very interesting. There seems to be very little correlation between something being interesting and being consequential (to human well-being).Replies: @Razib Khan
I’ve run into this sort of “leftist pessimism” myself.
Looking at the trends as they exist today, I believe within 50 years time (and to a some extent, even 20 years time) we will have begun to enter a post-scarcity economy. Machines will do much of what we consider to be “work” today (both white and blue collar) at a fraction of the current cost. Most people (particularly dull ones) will have essentially no productive role to play in society. In order for societies to remain stable and intact, some sort of “post-capitalist” adjustment will need to be made – likely involving both dramatic reduction of the work week and some sort of national minimum or basic income. There will of likely still be inequality, still be markets, and still be scarcity of individual resources. But the average non-productive person could have their needs met and live comfortably while having almost all of their day free to spend as they like. Which is damn close to utopia, IMHO.
When I discuss this with people on the left – friends, coworkers, even my mother – they all admit the basic trends towards automation are heading that way. But almost all of them seem to believe before we hit the post-scarcity moment global warming is going to wreck everything, grinding us down to the neo-feudal age, if not the neolithic.
I honestly don’t think the basic pessimism comes down to politics however. The right wing has their own dystopias they like to consider, as you intimate – particularly the fear of a nonwhite America. The mythos of the “golden age” is omnipresent across human civilizations – it may be a cognitive default to presume that your grandparents had it better than you (indeed, speaking historically, your grandparents always did, since the unlucky leave no descendants). The Enlightenment for the first time made it acceptable to suggest that the arc of history could bend slowly towards justice, but cynicism has never completely fallen out of style.
Karl Marx predicted similar outcome termed as `communism’.
This is of course presuming that if capitalism survives it finds some way to "buy off" the unemployed majority. I think this is likely in the longer run. Democratic governance with permanent 50%+ unemployment will be impossible to sustain after all, and I think the idea of culling the nonproductive class will (thankfully) always remain beyond the pale.
That’s the problem with re-makes, especially of Science Fiction and Fantasy works – the cultural and social context is different, and that often causes weird, jarring tone issues. It reminds me of how there’s a million descendants of War of the Worlds in the “alien invasion” genre, most of which feel somewhat empty thematically because the original allegory that H.G. Wells was making about British imperialism is gone.
Climate Change is slow enough that I’m pretty sure we can adapt, although it will be expensive. Lots of sea walls and land-fill-ins around coastal urban areas to protect them from flooding, shifts in where agriculture occurs if the Great Plains “flip” and turn back into a desert, and so forth. It definitely won’t be “World Desert”, although parts of it might dry out a lot.
Peak Oil is definitely close to a non-problem. We can mass-manufacture electric cars – we just don’t do it as much as we could because they’re still more expensive than gasoline-driven ones. At this point the Peakists tend to jump in with their favorite EROEI red herring, even though we’re not running scarce on electricity.
Indeed. If and when we end up in a post-scarcity economy where mass employment is no longer needed, the differences between capitalism and communism will break down. Or at least, for the average person, once meeting most of their material needs with minimal capital outlay becomes feasible, it will matter very little in terms of daily life if some form of market-based capitalist structure remain, or if it is replaced by a more centrally planned, command economy.
This is of course presuming that if capitalism survives it finds some way to “buy off” the unemployed majority. I think this is likely in the longer run. Democratic governance with permanent 50%+ unemployment will be impossible to sustain after all, and I think the idea of culling the nonproductive class will (thankfully) always remain beyond the pale.
IIRC, somewhere in his book, A Primate’s Memoir, Sapolsky characterizes the baboons he studied as having to spend perhaps only a couple of hours each day gathering food and eating, leaving them free the rest of the day – most of it, in fact – to torment each other and bring a little misery into each others’ lives. I am not convinced that this will not be the fate of many of us if (& when) your vision of the future comes to pass.
Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.
I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
That said, there is no reason to think that absent the need for daily toil society couldn't come up with something to keep people occupied besides bullshit social positioning. Just because someone doesn't have anything to contribute any longer to the economy doesn't mean they can't make a qualitative contribution to their local community.
Your point reminds me of this classic internet essay. More properly, this portion…
Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it’s populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don’t think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.
I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That’s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
That said, there is no reason to think that absent the need for daily toil society couldn’t come up with something to keep people occupied besides bullshit social positioning. Just because someone doesn’t have anything to contribute any longer to the economy doesn’t mean they can’t make a qualitative contribution to their local community.
I realize that this is wading into very troubled waters, but does anyone know of good books discussing the forecasted effects of climate change? I am aware that the ratio of honest, carefully reasoned accounts to ideological bullshit is extremely depressing when it comes to this topic.
The ideas concerning declining resources, ranging from cheap and easy fossil fuel to topsoil; and concerns about pollution and climate change, are hardly characteristic of any “liberal” ideological drift, rather they represent the scientific consensus in each relevant field.
“The late Dr. M. King Hubbert, geophysicist, is well known as a world authority on the estimation of energy resources and on the prediction of their patterns of discovery and depletion.
He was probably the best known geophysicist in the world to the general public because of his startling prediction, first made public in 1949, that the fossil fuel era would be of very short duration. “Energy from Fossil Fuels, Science”…
His prediction in 1956 that U.S.oil production would peak in about 1970 and decline thereafter was scoffed at then but his analysis has since proved to be remarkably accurate. See Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels by M. King Hubbert, Chief Consultant (General Geology), Exploration and Production Research Division, Shell Development Company, Publication Number 95, Houston, Texas, June 1956, Presented before the Spring Meeting of the Southern District, American Petroleum Institute, Plaza Hotel, San Antonio, Texas, March 7-8-9, 1956. …“ http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/
I don’t know about you, but I find the research scientists on climate change pretty credible: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
I also know, from my time at an agricultural research institute, that worldwide soil erosion is not exactly blown out of proportion by the scientists working on this problem: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2006/03/slow-insidious-soil-erosion-threatens-human-health-and-welfare http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/land_deg/land_deg.html
I also doubt that the scientific consensus on the accelerating rate of species extinction is some kind of liberal fantasy: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25159086 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25645-we-are-killing-species-at-1000-times-the-natural-rate.html#.VVPFVqUQgSE
http://www.seaweb.org/resources/articles/writings/safina1.php
I also do not think that the rise of antibiotic resistance is some kind of liberal conspiracy:
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/2/155.long
I also think that there is a growing scientific consensus that inequality is a growing problem in the global industrial economy. http://scholar.google.ca/scholar_url?url=http://repub.eur.nl/pub/10235/14559760.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm1aJ_ntDgdaG5OTqiPcZCAP8JhMRA&nossl=1&oi=scholarr&ei=HsdTVdy-DMHHogSZr4GQDw&ved=0CB0QgAMoAjAA
There are also some very positive ways that humans respond to emergencies and societal collapse that belie the sort of scenario you see in the Mad Max versions.. see the recent book by Rebecca Solnit: http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Built-Hell-Extraordinary-Communities/dp/0143118072/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=contbrin-20
We gain nothing by dismissing these realities as liberal hoaxes; scientific data on the state of our planet, its resources and species, and on human societies, maybe to a certain degree dismaying to those who think that everything will continue to improve through technological fixes. But reality is not responsive to the ideology of the technocratic ideals, you can have your opinions and illusions, but you cannot have your own reality. A more realistic assessment? Humans will adapt to the changes the future will bring, though there may be an uptick of mortality for the rest of this century. We will all learn to be more attentive to what our science is telling us. We might even end up with less hubris and more appreciation of the mysterious and poignant evolutionary story to that brought us to this time and place.
helga, am i stupid? you always act like i’m ignorant of all these things you know. it’s fine, but you need to get off your high horse, and sometimes wonder if see the same data and come to different conclusions. it happens. i’m a scientist and i talk to scientists. believe it or not scientists have norms and filter their inferences with those norms, and often don’t even do so in a conscious manner.
also, please don’t stuff ideas into my mouth. very annoying. this post was very precise as to what i objected too (that is, whether the threat of environmental catastrophe is more salient today than in the 1980s; i don’t think it is).
(this is not an invitation to throw a bunch of links my way, i read a lot already as it is)
The scientific consensus has become more pessimistic on global warming in recent years:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/ever-changing-science-global-warming
If you can’t believe Kevin Drum, the world’s most reasonable liberal, who can you believe?
The reason I don’t read or talk about global warming much is just that I don’t find it very interesting. There seems to be very little correlation between something being interesting and being consequential (to human well-being).
the link suggested more certain. which is what i implied above re: precision. is the expected value of change greater than before? (i have assumed there was something to global warming since the 1980s so greater probability adds little to me) that to me is more pessimistic. i'm vague on these details because global warming isn't something i've taken a deep scientific interest in. please engage with what i'm saying, not your interpretation of it ;-)Replies: @Jim W
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/ever-changing-science-global-warming
If you can't believe Kevin Drum, the world's most reasonable liberal, who can you believe?
The reason I don't read or talk about global warming much is just that I don't find it very interesting. There seems to be very little correlation between something being interesting and being consequential (to human well-being).Replies: @Razib Khan
The scientific consensus has become more pessimistic on global warming in recent years:
the link suggested more certain. which is what i implied above re: precision. is the expected value of change greater than before? (i have assumed there was something to global warming since the 1980s so greater probability adds little to me) that to me is more pessimistic. i’m vague on these details because global warming isn’t something i’ve taken a deep scientific interest in. please engage with what i’m saying, not your interpretation of it 😉
` Similarly, at last year’s annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, UC Santa Barbara’s William Freudenberg gave a presentation finding that, “New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.” 'Replies: @Razib Khan
the link suggested more certain. which is what i implied above re: precision. is the expected value of change greater than before? (i have assumed there was something to global warming since the 1980s so greater probability adds little to me) that to me is more pessimistic. i'm vague on these details because global warming isn't something i've taken a deep scientific interest in. please engage with what i'm saying, not your interpretation of it ;-)Replies: @Jim W
I’m trying; here is a quote from the link:
` Similarly, at last year’s annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, UC Santa Barbara’s William Freudenberg gave a presentation finding that, “New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.” ‘
` Similarly, at last year’s annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, UC Santa Barbara’s William Freudenberg gave a presentation finding that, “New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.” 'Replies: @Razib Khan
tx. i need to sit down and do a lot of reading on the science ta some point. i’m out of date on the details. specialization ;-(
“peak oil worry has abated” But gas is still three bucks a gallon!
According to Wikipedia “Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year periods over the last century, and if the wager was extended by 30 years to 2011, he would have won on four out of the five metals.”
Check the source in Wikipedia, it’s some environmentalist newsletter attacking GMO’s, so I wouldn’t trust it any further than I could throw it. The NYT link in article doesn’t say anything about resource prices rising since 1990, it merely rehashes the debate, in fact it concedes the the prices of most metals is down since the bet ended in 1990. I remember reading some price charts on long term prices of various natural resources back in the late-1990’s and virtually all of them are far cheaper than they were a hundred years ago, that is pretty much the long term trend in all natural resources.