Charles C. Mann: belief

Transcript context

…A general question: At what point can we say the pessimist views are wrong? As you know, Malthus is writing about subsistence wages and even starvation in the 1790s. There are pessimists well before Malthus. Paul Ehrlich is writing The Population Bomb. Those predictions haven’t panned out. So there have been centuries, century after century where, war aside, siege of Leningrad aside, the optimists essentially are correct. Most of the time, the relative price of food is falling; labor employed in agriculture as a percentage of the workforce is declining. So what would have to happen for us to say, “Well, we simply decided the pessimists are wrong. We can keep on doing this.” If you take the argument — the pessimists are saying there’s a finite world. We can only get so much from it. That obviously is true. The question is not so much whether they’re wrong, it’s whether they’re relevant. If the limit is so far out there that we don’t even need to bother with it, they could still be right, [laughs] it just wouldn’t matter. One of the ways, I think, of looking at it is, supposedly in the next part of this century, all the demographers believe that world population is going to roughly level off somewhere around the realm of 10 billion. The, quote, pessimists think it’ll be 11 or 12, the optimists think it’ll be 9. But basically, the population is not going to double again. Nobody seems to believe that. So if that’s the case and that stretches out as far as we can see, which is what they say — not that we can see that far — then if we can feed everybody and everybody’s in pretty good comfort by 2070 or whenever this point is, I think the optimists can declare victory, even though the pessimists could still be right in that there are limits. They just aren’t relevant. And when evaluating these issues, how much do you trust market price data? You can look at the relative price of food, the price of potatoes, the price of rice, and that’s giving you some measure of what the market thinks will be happening in the future. Will there be forthcoming supplies? If there are not forthcoming supplies, people will buy them and hoard them or speculate. Do you trust market prices enough to infer judgments from them, or do you dismiss that information?…

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