Dagget,

You seem to dismiss any evidence that doesn’t suit your preconceptions.

If real wages, consumption or GDP won’t do as indicators of material well being, how about life expectancy? Not only is a longer life a good thing in itself, it captures a lot of other welfare variables – diet and nutrition, access to shelter and fuel, public infrastructure and services, health and safety, wars, disasters and diseases, medical services, technology etc. And it’s egalitarian – if the rich are living longer but the poor are dying younger, life expectancy will fall.

Here are Maddison’s estimates of life expectancy in England up to the early industrial revolution, and in the UK for the past 100 years or so:

England:
1300-1425 _ 24.3
1541-1556 _ 33.7
1620-1626 _ 37.7
1726-1751 _ 34.6
1801-1826 _ 40.8

UK:
1900 _ 50
1950 _ 69
1999 _ 77

There was slow and uneven progress through the middle ages and renaissance (the drop in the late 17th century was probably due to plague) but in the early industrial revolution at the start of the early nineteenth century, life expectancy rose above 40 for the first time. The improvement accelerated over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the end of the 19th century life expectancy was double its rate in the high middle ages. By the end of the 20th century, it was more than triple the rate.

Maybe those “dark satanic mills” did some good after all!

(incidentally, many scholars Blake’s phrase was a metaphor for the church and educational establishment and not an attack on the industrial revolution)

Well MOs posts are about as crazy as the newspapers put out by
the CEC, so he could well be away with the fairies, supporting them.

Sounds more like a bit of a cult to me. They throw in the bible
there somewhere too.

That could well explain it.

The Kanksters latest release from Unsustainable Pops.

“The extension of Plimer's view is that ultimately nothing matters and that would be a justification for never caring for anyone. We could recklessly grow our population for a few more brief years, and really go out with a bang as humanity confronts the four horsemen of the apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine and death.

"It’s a slippery slope and before long you wind up with a world that is dog-eat-dog...."

Dogs eating dogs on slippery slopes. They had better be quick, what with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!

Clownfish,

If Lester Brown is such a flake, why would the Norwegian government fund his institute or the editors of Scientific American be willing to publish his rantings? I find it interesting that you dismiss Lester Brown, but rely on Julian Simon, who was a mathematical ignoramus. Here is a review of his book by the economist Herman Daly, which points out the very basic mathematical fallacy that underlies his work

http://www.mnforsustain.org/daly_h_simon_ultimate_resource_review.htm

Rhian,

My position is not that fewer people are always better, just that for a given level of technology, there is an optimum population that allows ordinary folk to enjoy decent living standards without destroying the environment or oppressing other people. If there is severe depopulation, then living standards are likely to fall. Villages that were hard-hit by the Black Death were sometimes abandoned altogether. By the same token, it is possible for people to outbreed their resources. This clearly happened in Rwanda, where the population tripled from 1950-1990 and arable land per person was reduced to 0.03 hectares, well below the UN FAO minimum for an adequate diet.

I find it curious that people would migrate in large numbers over centuries to places where they would be poorer. It certainly doesn't happen now. One reason why those Italian average wages dropped so much more than in Northern European cities may be a lack of colonies to loot and use as sinks for surplus population.

Lester Brown, whose work has been described as "audacious and seriously misleading", gets his funding because some European governments are in thrall to Jeremiad "green" doom-obsessions. To even question the dogma of environmental apocalypse is to invite a veritable auto-da-fe upon oneself. Just ask Bjorn Lomborg.

But, like the congregation of a fundamentalist preacher who gets caught doing drugs with male prostitutes in his hotel room, the faithful just steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their emperor has no clothes.

Twerps like Brown only get the traction that they do by trading on their assumed aura of virtue. Just as so many people assume that Mother Theresa really did work to reduce suffering in the developing world, despite all evidence to the contrary, because to say otherwise risks approbation for questioning the virtue of a supposed "saint".

In fact, reading Lester Brown's work, his dodgy and selective use of data, and his endless list of failed predictions, one has to wonder whether, like the Creationist leaders, he is actually so colossally inept, or just a plain liar.

It's fair to acknowledge that Julian Simon made mistakes, nonetheless, his general thesis has still held up well. I do love how the neo-Malthusians like to dredge up the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Just as Umberto Eco observed that every bizarre conspiracy theory inevitably ropes in the Knights Templar, Creationists and their ilk inevitably abuse the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Still, if I was a betting man, I'd stick with Julian Simon.

Yes, there was a pun there.

Rhian's figures which purport to prove increased life expectancy as a consequence of industrialisation have massive gaps in them. These include:

1425-1540 (115 years)
1557-1619 (58 years)
1627-1725 (98 years)
1752-1800 (48 years)
1826-1999 (73 years)

... fairly substantial gaps, particularly the last one I would have thought if we are to conclusively establish that the destruction of rural society and the drafting of people, who were consequently landless, into the Satanic Mills and mines, was to their benefit.

On the face of it, it seems highly unlikely given what we know of working conditions in the mines and pits were like, so I would need to see a more complete set of figures and I would need to look more closely at how those figures were derived.

Barbara Friese in "Coal - a human history" (2003) writes on pages 81-82 "An 1842 government report on the sanitary conditions of the working class ... stated that 'it is an appalling fact that, of all who are born of the labouring classes in Manchester, more than 57 percent die before they attain five years of age.' The report makes it dramatically clear that the high death rates were a function of both poverty and urban surroundings. The childhood death rates gave the poor of Manchester an average life expectancy of 17 years; the professionals and gentry of the city could expect 38 years. By contrast, the rural poor (taking as an example one region where wages were reported as half of those of Manchester) had an average life span of 38 years (the same as the well-off in Manchester), and the well-off in the country side had an average life span of fifty-two."

Note that the year is 1842 and that only the well-off in rural England had life expectancy higher than the 40.8 years average life expectancy of 40.8 estimated by Maddison from 1801-1825 would most likely work out Everyone else has lower life expectancies. So, if we are to accept Maddison's figures as accurate, life expectancy went down and not up after 1826.

(tobecontinued)