June 2011 – Montessori Muddle

Malthusian Growth

I think I may fairly make two postulata.

First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.

— Malthus (1798): An Essay on the Principle of Population via The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

“Malthusian” is often used as a derogatory term to refer to alarmist predictions that we’re going to run out of some natural resource. I’m afraid I’ve used the term this way myself, however, according to Lauren Landsburg at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Malthus is being unfairly maligned. He wasn’t actually predicting catastrophe but wondering why the catastrophes don’t usually happen.

What Thomas Malthus did, in 1798, was point out that while populations grow at a geometric rate – the U.S. population, he noticed, doubled every 25 years – but resources, like food, only increase at an arithmetic rate. As a result, any naturally growing population will eventually run out of resources.

malthus-base — The red line shows geometric growth. No matter how much you start off with, the red line will always end up crossing the blue line.

The linear equation has the form:

$y = m t + b$

where y is the quantity produced, t is time (the independent variable), and m and b are constants. This should not look to unfamiliar to students who’ve had algebra.

The geometric equation is a little more complicated:

$y = a^{gt} + c$

here a, g and c are constants. g is the most important, because it’s the growth rate – the higher g is the faster the curve will rise. You can play around with the coefficients and graph in this Excel spreadsheet .

At any rate, after the curves intersect, the needs of the population exceeds how much it can produce; this is the point of Malthusian catastrophe.

malthus-cat — The intersection point is where the needs of the population exceeds the production.

The observation is, indeed, so stark that it is still easy to lose sight of Malthus’s actual conclusion: that because humans have not all starved, economic choices must be at work, and it is the job of an economist to study those choices.

— Landsburg (2008): Thomas Robert Malthus from The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

A Nefarious Application of Math

Cynical, but, if you consider the current “kinetic military action” in Libya, way to close to reality. Indeed, this highlights the question: When does it become too easy to go to war?

Jonathan Schell sums it up in the Guardian:

American planes are taking off, they are entering Libyan air space, they are locating targets, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war. Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is a war.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not a war. Why?

…, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favour of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die. When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else …

— Schell (2011): Libya: it’s not a war if Americans can’t get hurt

Surviving the Anthropocene

sc-deer-garbage-1463 — Styrofoam cup collected from the beach of Deer Island. The city of Biloxi sits in the background.

65 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth just off the Yucatan Penninsula, kicking up enough dust in to the atmosphere (and perhaps setting off supervolcanos) to lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Geologists mark this mass extinction event as the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary; it’s called the K-T boundary. Paleontologists see a rapid change in the forms of life fossilized in the rocks above and below the boundary. The element iridium, which is relatively common on asteroids, but rare on Earth, can be found in a thin layer of the fallout from the asteroid impact all around the world.

The Chicxulub Crater, believed to be the location of the K-T asteriod impact. Image from NASA: Short (2010)

Well, the Earth’s going through another mass extinction event right now. In fact, even if humans were to go extinct right now, the remains of our cities and our impact on the global chemical cycles, will leave a distinct signature that geologists millions of years from now will be able to detect.

Geologists refer to the last 10,000 years, the period starting when the Earth warmed after the last glacial maximum, as the Holocene. This time period saw the emergence of agriculture, the rise of human civilization, cities, nuclear weapons, the internet. Now, given the enormous environmental changes we’re wrecking on the planet, some say we’ve entered a new geologic epoch that they’re calling the Anthropocene.

The question is: How long will it last?

Regardless of your philosophy, the recognition that we have entered a geologic age of humanity raises the obvious question of just how long such an age will last.

In the infamous KT boundary geologists can see evidence for a rather short-lived event that also reshaped the planet. Sixty five million years ago an asteroid struck the Earth, driving one of only five mass extinctions in the planet’s history. The loss of the dinosaurs turned out to be an opportunity for our mammal ancestors and led directly to our own age.

Since the Anthropocene appears to mark a sixth great extinction, one has to wonder what it will take for us to make it out of own era with civilization intact.

— Frank (2011): The Anthropocene: Can Humans Survive A Human Age?

Biota on the Deer Island Beach

sc-deer-biota-1925 — Comb Jellies are pretty and not poisonous.

We were there to collect garbage, but we found lots of life on the Deer Island part of our adventure trip to the gulf.

sc-deer-island-1893 — Ecotones, the boundaries between different environments tend to be rich in biological diversity.

sc-deer-biota-1917 — Hermit crabs were everywhere.

sc-deer-biota-1479 — Comb jelly in the hand.

sc-deer-biota-1929 — Ospreys nest on the island.

sc-deer-biota-1462 — Barnicles on a stick.

sc-deer-biota-1489 — There were fewer actual snails than there were hermit crabs.

sc-1951-dolphin — Dolphin in the boat's wake.

What’s Needed for a Nation’s Peace

The Fund for Peace has been doing a lot of thinking about what it takes for a country to be considered peaceful, and what it takes for a state to fail. For the last seven years they’ve been putting together maps of the world with an index of how stable different countries are.

fsi-finland — Finland - the most sustainable state, at least according to the Failed State Index.

While it’s pretty in-depth and makes for rather sobering reading, it’s worth taking a look at the criteria they’ve come up with to determine a country’s stability. It may be useful to include some of this information in the cycle where we focus on peace.

Their criteria for instability include:

Demographic pressure (such as having too many young adults, as we’ve seen in Egypt)
Amount of refugees and internally displaced peoples (refugees are people who’ve crossed international borders). Both leaving or entering refugees can undermine stability.
Historical Injustice – communities can have an understandably hard time forgetting the past, just look at Isreal/Palestine.
Brain Drain – when countries start to fail, the first to leave are the ones who can afford to. Yet these intellectuals and professionals, with their college degree are vital for creating a stable and prosperous country.
Inequality – especially when driven by active discrimination (wealth inequality is something to watch out for).
Economic decline – pushes trade into the black market and increases criminality and corruption.
Illegitimacy of the state – if people don’t believe the people in government have everyone in the country’s best interests at heart, and are only looking out for themselves and their friends, then there’s probably going to be trouble.
Public Services go kaput – It’s a really bad sign when the government can meet people’s basic needs – like picking up the garbage.
The Rule of Law goes kaput – when you’re ruled by the caprice of men, and your rights under the law are not respected, you may begin to consider and agitate for other options for government.
Personal Armies – forces that are tied to individual leaders, like private militias or super-secret police for example, are very damaging to a country’s cohesion.
Fighting elites – healthy countries need robust arguments in their political class – think checks and balances – but it can go too far and lead to things like extreme nationalism and ethnic cleansing.
Invasion – both overt invasion and covert meddling in the affairs of a country are unhealthy for that state’s stability.

It’s also very nice that you can download their index data as a MS Excel spreadsheet, which you can let students analyze to answer their own research questions. For example, I was wondering what was the difference between the best, the worst and the USA, so I plotted this graph.

fsi-best-worst-usa — Comparing the best (Finland), worst (Somalia) and the USA using the Fund for Peace's Failed State Indicies.

The USA is much closer to Finland than Somalia, thank goodness, but should probably watch out for that Uneven Development (wealth inequality).

I think something like this would make a good experiential exercise for the science of geography.

Notes