Correction: Where I wrote 1985 in my post addressed to Spindoc, I meant 1845.

Hi Andras.

Serbia and Bulgaria have their own sets of problems. Your claim that they are economic basket cases because of population decline doesn't get much mention in the economic commentary I have read, and is certainly not considered to be of much significance.

I still cannot fathom your description of Russia. Its per capita GDP seems to have quadrupled since 1999.

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=rs&v=67

Do you really think Russia a basket case?

You also mention Hungary as a basket case, yet its per capita GDP seems to have almost tripled in the same time period. How do you conclude that the economy is being destroyed by a declining population when the population is apparently becoming much more productive? As a comparison, you might note that the per capita GDP of Bangladesh is almost unchanged over the same time frame. Would you conclude from this that high population growth is not improving things in this instance?

What is important is an educated population with infrastructure and working capital. When you dont have those things you have problems, which compound themselves as these factors guarantee poor governance. Throw in a single food cultivar as you did in Ireland and you can have a great tragedy.

spindoc, you just committed your own crime: oversimplification.
You reduce the Irish famine to one factor: storage.

The fact is no political party could develop policies based on *all* possible co-factors relevant to an issue.
They must simplify and prioritise.

Politicians need to make decisions and get results, not languish in consultant-hell for eternity.

Divergence,

No one is challenging the fact that potato blight had devastating effects on agriculture, not just in Ireland but in other parts of the world.

The issue is why it had a much bigger effect on Ireland and the complex reasons behind it.

“Paddy” is right, the agricultural ownership and harsh treatment of tenants also played its part and that historical issues are largely ignored by those who seek to apply post-modernist deconstruction to either ignore or rewrite history.

The ancient Egyptians, like every other agricultural society since, created stores of perishables to protect them from drought, pestilence and plague.

Britain and much of Europe had already started to shift perishables to the consumer via carts and markets to trade for other goods. Storage became decentralized or traded for other staple items and reserves better protected.

In Ireland their reserves were not there when they needed them because of outdated storage techniques, they were much more dependent upon potatoes because they failed to diversify and this is one of the key reasons the potato famine hit them harder than other nations. (See “Tribes of Britain”)

Even your own link points this out but I don’t suppose you read beyond the bits you liked?

You were correct in pointing the impact the English the absentee landlords had, but this just introduces yet more political, social and economic complexity.

Remember you started off your response to my assertion that these issues are very complex with, << I'll give you a simple example, Spindoc, the Irish Potato Famine >>

Then your response started to draw on dozens of issues that contributed to the famine. Every one of your subsequent links then adds to this complexity?

You offered simplicity then drifted off into more and more of the very complexity you seek to deny.

Isn’t this precisely what I said in the first place? The more you investigate, the more issues you identify as having an impact and the more you are forced away from an oversimplified solution?

Well done, you’ve just gone full circle

Hi S,

While the potato famine was a complex event, its victims were poor and uneducated, and so had little with which to buffer themselves from adversity. But at least many were able to migrate and so survive, as one of my ancestors did. What is known today is that family planning programs tend to correlate with improvement the education and economic circumstances, so making those populations better able to withstand adversity.

Spindoc,

From the point of view of an individual peasant farmer in the Potato Famine, the issue was quite simple: "peak land". He suddenly needed a lot more land to be able to grow enough grain to feed his family. The land was not to be had, because he was competing with a great many other peasant farmers who also needed more land, as well as landlords who wanted to profit from export crops. If he and his friends had gotten together to use the same tactics that the Hutus used to get more land in the Rwandan genocide, the British army would have marched in and hanged them.

Would the Irish have been better off without the landlords? Certainly. Would there have been enough land to feed 8.5 million people on grain with 1840s technology? I don't know, and neither does Malcolm King. Even if it were theoretically possible, local elites can be grasping too, and the money was likely to be in the export crops. There might have also been a much larger population, because better nutrition would have led to better child survival and probably higher fertility rates.

It is simple to identify the sustainability problem, and the concept of a peak is quite legitimate. Where the complexity comes in, is with identifying the cultural and other causes, and knowing these things may help in finding a solution before Nature does it for you, as in 1840s Ireland. It doesn't mean that we throw up our hands and say that it is all too complex or that we can't talk about peak anything.

It is true that potatoes are harder to store than grain, although they freeze-dry them in the Andes. It is also true that the late blight could attack potatoes in storage as well as in the field, but this hardly matters if the crop has already been wiped out in the field and you haven't had a decent crop in years in any case.