A2 DeDev

Dowling @ TOC Phil KerpenDedev Answers

DEDEV ANSWERS PAGE 1 OF 5

1. THE COLLAPSE IS NOT INEVITABLE.All of their impact framing claims assume that the global industrial system will inevitably collapse--that's just ain't true--we'll turn every warrant they have for it.

2. GROWTH IMPROVES THE ENVIRONMENT.Bjorn Lomborg, director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute and associate professor of statistics in the Department of Politital Science at the University of Aarhus, 2001, The Skeptical Environmentalist, p. 32-33.In general we need to confront our myth of the economy undercutting the environment. We have grown to believe that we are faced with an inescapable choice between higher economic welfare and a greener environment. But surprisingly and as will be documented throughout this book, environmental development often stems from economic development - only when we get sufficiently rich can we afford the relative luxury of caring about the environment. On its most general level, this conclusion is evident in Figure 9, where higher income in general is correlated with higher environmental sustainability.

3. GROWTH CLOSES THE RICH/POOR GAP.Indur M. Goklany, an independent scholar and the author, August 22, 2002, Policy Analysis No, 447, URL: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa447.pdfDuring the last half century, as wealth and technological change advanced worldwide, so did the well-being of the vast majority of the world’s population. Today’s average person lives longer and is healthier, more educated, less hungry, and less likely to have children in the work-force. Moreover, gaps in these critical measures of well-being between the rich countries and the middle- or low-income groups have generally shrunk dramatically since the mid-1900s irrespective of trends in income inequality. However, where those gaps have shrunk the least or even expanded recently, the problem is not too much globalization but too little. The rich are not better off because they have taken something away from the poor; rather, the poor are better off because they benefit from the technologies developed by the rich, and their situation would have improved further had they been better able to capture the benefits of globalization. A certain level of global inequality may even benefit the poor as rich countries develop and invest in more expensive medicines and technologies that then become affordable to the poor.

4. GROWTH SOLVES RESOURCE SHORTAGES THROUGH INNOVATION.Julian Simon, professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, 1996, The Ultimate Resource II, URL: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR03A.txt Now I'll restate this line of thought into a theory that will appear again and again in the book: More people, and increased income, cause resources to become more scarce in the short run. Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices present opportunity, and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to search for solutions. Many fail in the search, at cost to themselves. But in a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. That is, prices eventually become lower than before the increased scarcity occurred. It is all-important to recognize that discoveries of improved methods and of substitute products are not just luck. They happen in response to an increase in scarcity - a rise in cost. Even after a discovery is made, there is a good chance that it will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. This point is important: Scarcity and technological advance are not two unrelated competitors in a Malthusian race; rather, each influences the other.



5. a. GROWTH DECREASES FERTILITY RATES.U.S. Agency for International Development, 2002, "Foreign Aid in the National Interest," URL: http://www.usaid.gov/fani/Full%20Report--%20Foreign%20Aid%20in%20the%20National%20Interest.pdfSecond, economic growth is a key factor in causing fertility to decline because it generally leads women to believe they are better off with fewer children. Without economic growth, an important rationale for hav-ing large families does not change.15 Rather, changes in fertility are driven by parents weighing economic and personal choices in the face of falling infant mortality.

b. THE FERTILITY DECLINE MEANS WORLD POPULATION WILL STABILIZE AND DECLINE--WE CONTROL UNIQUENESS.Ben J. Wattenberg, a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, March 13, 2003, URL: http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.16549/pub_detail.aspThe United Nations has finally changed its demographic predictions. Instead of foreseeing population growth or even explosion, the new estimates acknowledge that world population is on course to shrink --with significant social, economic, and strategic implications. Remember the number 1.85. It is the lodestar of a new demography. It should change the way we think about the environment, economics, geopolitics, culture, our current Middle East dilemma-and about our-selves. Demographers have typically worked on the assumption that human population would level off by achiev-ing a "Total Fertility Rate" of 2.1 children per woman. Why 2.1? Two parents have two children. Sooner or later the parents die and are "replaced" by their two children. (The .1 accounts for children who die before their own age of reproduction.) Were the projection substantially higher, the result would be wall-to-wall people. If substantially lower, before too long there would be no people at all. Either trend moves in a rela-tively rapid geometric progression. So 2.1 it was. Very nice, the base line of a symmetrical, perpetual, and ordered universe. But no longer useful. For the last five years UN expert meetings have examined a trend that has been ever-more apparent for several decades: Never have birth rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, so surprisingly, for so long, in so many places. Now the United Nations has made it official, breaking demographic crockery everywhere. Its 2002 World Population Prospects uses 1.85 children per woman as the point to which hu - man population is tending in this century.

6. NO ESCALATION--None of their terminal impacts have occurred during periods of strong economic growth. Major power wars have only occurred after depressions--growth wars have never escalated.

7. NO MINDSET SHIFT--It's empirically denied by every economic decline ever. And it just doesn't make sense. People suffering economic deprivation want to get jobs and get back on track. They don't want to die off or join a commune.

8. GROWTH WARS TURN THEMSELVES--They all assume the fast growth coming out of a depression which is uniquely destabilizing.



TIME FOR SOME EXTERNAL OFFENSE--

9. a. GROWTH IS KEY TO US HEGEMONY.Zalmay Khalilzad, US SPECIAL ENVOY TO THE IRAQI OPPOSITION AND DEBATE LEGEND, The Washington Quarterly, 1995 Spring, Vol. 18, No. 2; Pg. 84The United States is unlikely to preserve its military and technological dominance if the U.S. economy declines seriously. In such an environment, the domestic economic and political base for global leadership would diminish and the United States would probably incrementally withdraw from the world, become inward-looking, and abandon more and more of its external interests. As the United States weakened, others would try to fill the Vacuum.

To sustain and improve its economic strength , the United States must maintain its technological lead in the economic realm. Its success will depend on the choices it makes. In the past, developments such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions produced fundamental changes positively affecting the relative position of those who were able to take advantage of them and negatively affecting those who did not. Some argue that the world may be at the beginning of another such transformation, which will shift the sources of wealth and the relative position of classes and nations. If the United States fails to recognize the change and adapt its institutions, its relative position will necessarily worsen.

To remain the preponderant world power, U.S. economic strength must be enhanced by further improvements in productivity, thus increasing real per capita income ; by strengthening education and training; and by generating and using superior science and technology. In the long run the economic future of the United States will also be affected by two other factors. One is the imbalance between government revenues and government expenditure. As a society the United States has to decide what part of the GNP it wishes the government to control and adjust expenditures and taxation accordingly. The second, which is even more important to U.S. economic wall-being over the long run, may be the overall rate of investment. Although their government cannot endow Americans with a Japanese-style propensity to save, it can use tax policy to raise the savings rate.

b. HEGEMONY PREVENTS NUCLEAR WAR.Zalmay Khalilzad, US SPECIAL ENVOY TO THE IRAQI OPPOSITION AND DEBATE LEGEND, The Washington Quarterly, 1995 Spring, Vol. 18, No. 2; Pg. 84Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange . U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.

c. SOLVES BACK ALL THEIR WAR SCENARIOSWe'd just keep everyone in check.



10. a. GROWTH IS KEY TO SPACE.Robin Hanson, assistant professor of economics, George Mason University, Oct. 18, 2001, URL: http://hanson.gmu.edu/wildideas.htmlIf our growth does not stop, it must continue. And it cannot continue this long without enabling and encouraging massive space colonization. Spatial/material growth requires it, technical growth enables it, and economic growth induces technical growth.

b. SPACE KEY TO SURVIVAL.MARK CARREAU, The Houston Chronicle, October 19, 2002, Saturday 3 STAR EDITION, SECTION: A; Pg. 01With Apollo astronaut John Young leading the charge, top aerospace experts warned Friday that humanity's survival may depend on how boldly the world's space agencies venture into the final frontier.

Only a spacefaring culture with the skills to travel among and settle planets can be assured of escaping a collision between Earth and a large asteroid or devastation from the eruption of a super volcano , they told the World Space Congress.

"Space exploration is the key to the future of the human race," said Young, who strolled on the moon more than 30 years ago and now serves as the associate director of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "We should be running scared to go out into the solar system. We should be running fast." Scientists believe that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago, and are gathering evidence of previously large collisions.

"The civilization of Earth does not have quite as much protection as we would like to believe," said Leonid Gorshkov, an exploration strategist with RSC Energia, one of Russia's largest aerospace companies. "We should not place all of our eggs in one basket."

11. GROWTH PREVENTS EXTINCTION.Michael Zey, business professor at Montclair State University, 1994, Seizing the Future, p. 34.

Having reached its current lofty state of development, the species will not choose to regress. The fact that the species is forging its way en masse into the Macroindustrial Era proves that our need to grow is almost a genetically based predisposition. The species ultimately understands there can be no turning back on the road to progress.

However, no outside force guarantees the continued progress of the human species, nor does anything mandate that the human species must even continue to exist. In fact, history is littered with races and civilizations that have disappeared without a trace. So, too, could the human species. There is no guarantee that the human species will survive even if we posit, as many have, a special purpose to the species existence.

Therefore, the species innately comprehends that it must engage in purposive actions to maintain its level of growth and progress. Humanity's future is conditioned by what I call the Imperative of growth, a principle I will herewith describe alone with its several correlates.

The Imperative of Growth states that in order to survive, any nation, indeed, the human race, must grow, both materially and intellectually. The Macroindustrial Era represents growth in the areas of both technology and human development, a natural stage in the evolution of the species' continued extension of its control over itself and its environmental. Although 5 billion strong, our continued existence depends on out ability to continue the progress we have been making at higher and higher levels.



12. JUST FOR FUN, HERE'S MEAD 92Walter Russell Mead, 1992, New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer, p. 30.The failure to develop an international system to hedge against the possibility of worldwide depression- will open their eyes to their folly. Hundreds of millions-billions-of people around the world have pinned their hopes on the international market economy. They and their leaders have embraced market principles-and drawn closer to the West-because they believe that our system can work for them. But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates, or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia. China. India-these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the 1930's.


MALTHUS EMPIRICALLY DENIED

EMPIRICALLY DENIED SINCE CONFUCIUS,David Osterfeld, Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph's College, The Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., September 1993, Vol. 43, No. 9, URL: http://www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrentevents/environmentalismorconservation/overpopulation.shtml"What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us.... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race. " This was not written by professional doomsayer Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968). It is not found in the catastrophist works of Donella and Dennis Meadows (The Limits to Growth, 1972; Beyond the Limits, 1992). Nor did it come from the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State's pessimistic assessment of the world situation, The Global 2000 Report to the President (1980). It did not even come from Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on Population (1798) in the late eighteenth century is the seminal work to which much of the modern concern about overpopulation can be traced. And it did not come from Botero, a sixteenth-century Italian whose work anticipated many of the arguments advanced by Malthus two centuries later. The opening quotation was penned by Tertullian, a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century, when the population of the world was about 190 million', or only three to four percent of what it is today. And the fear of overpopulation did not begin with Tertullian. One finds similar concerns expressed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., as well as in the teachings of Confucius as early as the sixth century B.C.

Documents

A2 DeDev