Reddit reviews The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Do you actually think that? The progress of technology has been driven by the desire to lessen the time spent on attaining the daily requirements to live since we stopped hunting and gathering. The Rational Optimist is a great read that lays all of this out. You currently leverage the equivalent of thousands of man hours through the use of technology just living a simple modern life today.

How we spend that extra time is up to the individual. Most people choose to fill that time with other activities instead of "leisure". Make no mistake that technology is working for you right now.

Factory farming actually enables us to feed more people with less land/resources and at a lower cost. (I believe I read in The Rational Optimist that) it would be impossible to sustain our global population using traditional farming techniques and technologies - it truly is technological advances that make us more productive and more efficient, especially in farming and food production.

That being said, even though factory farming can be bad, pulling the plug would be devastating; it would cause a shortage of food and prices to skyrocket, especially on cheap foods that poorer families rely on.

Instead, I think we as consumers need to demand these changes (as Gov. Johnson stated). The market will naturally respond to this demand, but we'll also need new technologies to replace factory farming in order to maintain a similar level of efficiency, production and prices.

It seems like you are getting more emotional answers, but something else to look at is quality of life. You hear about crime, disease, poverty, destruction of the environment, overpopulation and would think that overall things keep getting worse. The reality is the opposite. Quality of life keeps getting better for almost everyone (as measured, not using emotion). I strongly recommend watching this video - be a rational optimist.

Or to put it another way - even if you spend the rest of your life alone in a basement you will get continued improvements in medicine, food, travel, entertainment, culture, communication etc with ever larger increases in selection and many more cheaper or free choices.

Age 40. I don't smoke, drink or party either and as an atheist this is the one and only life I get.

Norman Borlaug was the greatest scientist of the 20th century.

His accomplishments were far, far more important than e.g. Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc.

My favorite book on him (that isn't a straight biography) is The Rational Optimist.

In a nutshell, I believe advancements in technology will make agriculture, transportation and other resource-intensive industries much more efficient than they currently are, allowing higher population growth and higher living standards.

To quote The Rational Optimist: "The amount of oil left, the food-growing capacity of the world’s farmland, even the regenerative capacity of the biosphere – these are not fixed numbers; they are dynamic variables produced by a constant negotiation between human ingenuity and natural constraints."

Consider that in 1865, a British author expressed concern that England's reliance on coal would eventually reduce living standards as population growth outstripped coal production.

However, increases in efficiency and the increased use of oil and gasoline (i.e., a different energy source) meant this did not happen.

My main point is this: the biggest problem with predictions about the future is they are made only with knowledge of today's technologies. Humanity has a long history of overcoming problems and I see no reason to think that will change.

EDIT: Also worth noting that whether the world has yet reached the point of "peak oil" is quite debatable.

>I'm not sure why I'm doing this. I guess it's because I'm a sucker for punishment and also that you are pretty obviously wrong on this point.

>Jevon was right. Britain hit Peak Coal in 1913. There is very little coal production today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal

Well, yes, that's what I told you -- and you even looked it up on Wikipedia after I did to be sure. So you weren't sure before then. :-) That's expertise in energy economics.

But of course Jevons was totally wrong in that he predicted Peak Coal would result from its depletion as a fixed resource, driving its price up, up, up to the point where the fuel that drove the Industrial Revolution would become "so very dear" as to cause "the end of the present progressive condition of the kingdom".

Pretty much the exact same argument the Peak Oilers are making today.

So he was entirely wrong about that, eh? If you want to talk about Jevons on Peak Coal, and get it right, you should really read Jevons on Peak Coal. Not take a quick look-see at Wikipedia -- which really isn't the definitive source so many web debaters like to imagine.

Now Jevons would have been right if he had predicted: "Coal production will inevitably peak in amount, probably in the suprisingly near future, as economic advancement brings vast new sources of energy to us at lower economiuc cost than coal, causing us to turn away from coal and leave most of it in the ground, it's value too low to be mined." But he predicted the exact opposite.

Hmmm... Predicting depletion of energy resources v expansion of them ... predicting falling production of coal would result from its cost rising too high rather than its value falling too low. Those seem rather significant errors!

Are you sure you want to say "Jevon was right"? That might not score so well on an exam.

>Britain was able to substitute Coal for a better quality (in the EROI sense) fuel so there was no net energy loss to the system.

Um, no. Economic advancement made available vast amounts of other fuels with lower "economic cost" (I don't think you know what that is) not better EROI. I guarantee you, not one living actor of the day switched to coal from something else thinking "better EROI". They all thought "lower economic cost".

>Probably though you are trying to say Jevon's paradox solves the problem.

Probably not. And the name is Jevons, not Jevon. At least get the guy's name right.

>Your argument in the link ignores the energy cost.

No, it does not. And you confirm that you don't know what economic cost is.

>Tar sands, while being economically profitable at about $60/barrel but it has low EROI (about 1:6 or 1:12 depending on the method of extraction).

Wow, with such terrible EROI how can it possibly be economically profitable? Hmmm .... That's so difficult.

> All other current energy sources have lower EROI than the historic values of oil (except for coal and natural gas which are also depleting) ... does this mean that the system must stop growing?

Due to "bad" EROI? Obviously not.

Let's say we had a cheap "miracle technology", like the proverbial pill that turns gasoline into water, powered by sunlight. Water + the pill + 100 units of energy from the sun produces gasoline with 1 unit of energy in it.

EROI, dreadful = 100 units of energy spent to produce a return of 1 in useful form.

Who'd care? We'd all be driving our cars around on 'sungas', prices would be lower, soicety would be wealthier, and we'd all be better off welfare-wise. Because sunlight has "no economic cost". (I admit that by the 2nd Law this might accelerate the future heat death of the universe, but the degree of accelleration discounted to current value is, in economic cost, negligible.)

When you get something with high economic value through a process with no economic cost humanity wins big. Even if EROI is terrible.

EROI, per se, means nothing.

Say, instead, gasoline is produced from oil sand, via a process fueled by burning other oil sands already in place (as is actually done) with say six units of oil sands used to generate the energy found in one unit of oil sand in the form of gasoline. The EROI is going to be worse than 6 consumed to get just 1 in usable form -- yet still, here we are doing it for economic gain right now.

How? Because the "economic cost" of the oil sand consumed is slight, while the economic value of the fuel produced is high. The net economic gain leaves us all better off.

If you ride in a car in the USA, you gain because a fair part of the gas in the car came via this process from Canadian oil sands. Do you refuse to ride and get out of the car and walk because the EROI on that gasoline is so low? I bet you haven't yet.

Canadian oil sands fields hold an amount of oil exceeding the entire world's known oil reserves. With today's prices and technology, 10% are deemed recoverable as "proven reserves" -- second only to Saudi Arabia.

Ah, but technology advances. Technological productivty increases 3% annually (steadily, since the start of the Industrial Revolution) faster in the oil industy. But take the 3%, compound by 100 years, multiply today's $60 "profitable" price, and we have all the oil sands that could be produced profitably todat at a price of over $1,150 per barrel -- a staggeringly large amount -- becoming economically available and coming on line in that foreseeable future.

And that's just Canada. Venezuela has just as much in a form that's cheaper to produce -- and the US has an amount of coal that could be turned into oil that is just immense, larger than either of them. And Russia, etc.

This is not theory. Germany has no native oil and ran its WWII economy on oil-from-coal using 1930s technology. South Africa ran a modern economy happily on oil-from-coal during the 1980s emargo years, and in good part still does.

Read all the history books you want, you will never find one that says "Germany was crippled during WWII by very poor EROI on its oil-from-coal fuel sources".

There are going to be lots of problems in the energy field over the next 100 years, no doubt -- but "exhaustion of hydrocarbon stock for fuels" is not going to be one of them. No imaginable way.

After 100 years, well .... in 100 years people went from rowing in boats to stab whales for fuel -- and worrying seriously about Peak Whale Oil -- to landing on the moon being watched on TV sets getting electricity from nuclear power. So they'll then be dealing with their own problems, and looking back at us the way we look back at all the people in the 19th century who worried about Peak Coal and Peak Whale Oil.

> Finally, I can also employ Occam's razor. Economists never dealt with a systemic loss in net energy because they didn't have to. Energy was always substitutable and usually for better quality energy sources (again in the EROI sense). Innovation always provided the answer. New problems could be solved with added complexity (and exergy destruction). But how do you solve for a systemic energy contraction with a energy intensive process?

Where's "Occam's Razor" in that? Really?? :-)

And, Dude, learn a little economics before proclaiming what the entire profession has and hasn't had to do. I mean, like at least Jevons' name.

An absolute fundamental of economics is "expectations" -- how expectations about the future affect resource allocation decisions today.

That means that anything you've ever thought about energy and the future they considered a long, long time ago (starting with Jevons -- learn from past mistaken analysis! They do, do you?).

To think that all the professional economists of the world miss this most basic expectation issue of our economic future, that you yourself are smart enough to see, with no economics education at all, requires a combination of arrogance with massive, total ignorance of economics.

>See all the things you can learn from a reasonable debate? This is why i have no problem being wrong.

Really? I haven't read the whole discussion, so maybe I've missed some stuff. Can you list a few things that you admit you've learned from this discussion that you were wrong about? Just two or three?

Because generally people don't learn anything from debating. They take it as a competion to beat the other guy. Like you did in your second sentence to me right at the top...

>you are pretty obviously wrong

That doesn't exactly sound like "the spirit of learning" does it? Or openness to admit error?

When people want to learn something, "test their confirmation bias", fill knowledge gaps, they don't "debate" -- they seek a friendly discussion with someone from whom they can learn.

Even better, they sit down and read a book -- preferably one selected to challenge their confirmation bias.

On the off chance you actually are interested in learning something, here's another book to test your very evident bias, in addition to the Simon one.

Also, you might ponder the plainly obvious fact that EROI matters to the economy only when it is incorporated in "economic cost" ... and while sometimes it matters a lot to "economic cost", and sometimes not at all, it mostly varies in the middle between mattering a lot and not at all. Can you learn why?

And here's a small but significant factoid you apparently don't know yet: You stated several times that energy consumption grows steadily with an economy. Yet in the USA, total energy consumption per real dollar of GDP has fallen 53% over the last 40 years.

Learn something new every day, eh?

>... what the imf did to the third world ...

Develop its industry? Build its infrastructure? Seed its capital markets? Bring its population from malaria-ridden jungles and into cities? Those heartless globalizing bastards!

But seriously though, get educated:

Niall Ferguson:
http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/1594201927

Milton Friedman:
http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Freedom-Anniversary-Milton-Friedman/dp/0226264211

Matt Ridley:
http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves/dp/006145205X

Hernando De Soto:
http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Triumphs-Everywhere/dp/0465016146