Jeremy Grantham: commitment

Transcript context

…You’ve written about the loss of topsoil in the Midwest and other places and why that’s a serious problem. What’s the current status of that issue? Is anyone paying attention? The ability of Homo sapiens to avoid long-term, slow-burning issues is truly profound, as I noticed 15 years ago with climate change. Climate change has now caught fire, but other issues, including soil erosion, water shortages, toxicity, loss of insects — there’s some really profound and dangerous things going on, and the drop of fertility rate in the developed world. We show no interest in these things at all, even though they may be burning on a fuse that’s only 20 or 30 years out. The reserves of topsoil in the Midwest have gone from at least a foot to an inch or two. We still have plenty of soil in most of the prime land, but the safety margin has dwindled to next to nothing. If we do not change Big Ag to be less conducive to erosion, we will start to lose productivity pretty soon. In the next decade, it will start. I understand that global warming takes place in the commons — the Earth’s atmosphere — but topsoil is essentially private property. If a lot of other farms were losing topsoil and you maintained yours, there’d be a high privatized, pecuniary return to doing so. Why does short-term time horizons prove to be a problem there? Why doesn’t the market internalize the gains and costs?…

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