Have you ever noticed that there are some ideas which, no matter how thoroughly they are discredited, manage to resurrect themselves like Dracula rising from his grave? Lately we’ve been hearing a lot from two of those, centralized planning and Malthusianism.
I would have thought that the manifest failure of the Soviet economy would have disabused everybody of the effectiveness of centralized planning. Apparently, it isn’t so. The “MedPAC on steroids” that’s the presumed cost-saving mechanism in the House’s healthcare reform bill looks for all the world to me like another attempt at centralized planning. No matter how smart or well-informed the people on the committee may be they aren’t going to be able to manage the healthcare system from their offices in DC. Lots of the worst ideas of the Obama Administration, e.g. the Auto Czar, are based on the idea of centralized planning. And don’t get me started on the idea of Management (in the abstract).
And this afternoon I heard an interview with a chap named Richard Heinberg, author of a book called Peak Everything which sounds to me like re-hashed Malthusianism. Malthusianism is the theory, first advanced by Thomas Malthus, that the growth in the population will inevitably outstrip the increase in the food supply and we’ll all starve to death. Malthus first proposed his theory two hundred years ago. It hasn’t happened yet.
Now I realize that the fact that something hasn’t happened yet doesn’t absolutely positively prove that it won’t happen in the future. But it’s a lot better evidence than the other way around.
Mr. Heinberg was a positive font of misinformation. Example: he stated rather bluntly that the reason that people moved from the countryside to the city was preference. Malarkey. People have been moving from the countryside to the city for more than 300 years all over the world not because they like the cities better but because the cities are where the jobs are and they can keep from starving to death. I’ve spoken with any number of people who’ve grown up on farms and who dearly wish they could return but simply can’t afford to and I believe that accounts for most people who’ve done that. Jobs first, population later. Unless jobs are created out in the countryside except for a handful of Utopianists, artists colonies and the like, I expect that the trend towards concentrating populations in the cities and their surrounding suburbs will continue.
I’ve heard of Peak Oil, which basically states that at some point, we’ll have used more than half of the available oil supply, and the result will be adjustment problems as we start sliding down the slope. They usually point to how US oil production peaked in the early 1970s, and has largely gone downhill ever since.
Heinberg apparently isn’t aware how dangerous cities could be before modern sanitation. One interesting factoid I heard once was that until about 200 years ago, cities actually had significantly higher death rates than birth rates, and kept growing due to waves of migrants from the hinterlands.