Efficiency, Collapse, And Elisabeth Shue In A Bathing Suit

“Maybe I’ll see if the reindeers like meat this year” – Aqua Teen Hunger Force

A herd of cows, a flock of sheep, a treason of Democrats.

I’ve been writing a lot about efficiency recently, and this is probably my last discussion about it for a while.  The reason I’ve been focusing on it is because it explains much of what is falling apart in the world in 2021:  the efficiency that made the world economic machine run is sputtering and it appears that our economy, as well as our culture, are headed for a cold, dark winter.  Thankfully that’s okay for the koala bears – they can still eat apocalyptus.

If I am right, the economic winter will do nothing get colder in the coming months, perhaps catastrophically.  Let me (again!) point out some of the consequences of efficiency.  I’ll pick something that used to be relatively inefficient:  a farm.

I said that farming used to be inefficient.  I never said that farming was ever easy.  There are several television series where modern folk in Britain recreate farm life in the Edwardian Age (the age of Edward Snowden, I think), the Victorian Age (Victor Van Doom, probably) and the Elizabethan Age (named after either Elizabeth Warren or Elisabeth Shue, not sure which).  They show that farming (for the farmer) has always been filled with risk and generally not really very lucrative unless you knew how to hustle.

You’re thanking me right now that I didn’t look for a picture of Elizabeth Warren in a bathing suit. 

Why do British people do this?  I don’t know.  They collect vintage toothbrushes and old tweed jackets and seem to spend most of their lives giving each other crumpets.  But the television shows from watching these modern British folk LARP as farmers from times when actual Samurai roamed the Earth are, well, fascinating.

They illustrate nicely how farming is different today than it was in 1600 when Elizabeth Warren (Indian Name:  Princess Who Tells Many Lies And Gets Not Many Votes) was teaching the Pilgrims how to farm by burying 1,000 calories of fish to get 500 calories of corn (her people call it maize).  There have been an amazing number of technological improvements during that time, all of which have allowed the maximization of yield on farms:

  • Use of standard, high yield hybrid seed instead of hundreds of varieties of grain,
  • Use of finely tuned amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur fertilizer instead of Elizabeth Warren’s stinky dead Pocahontas fish,
  • Use of computer-controlled moisture sensors driving optimum water delivery, instead of rain or whatever water that might be in the ditch,
  • Use of pesticides instead of extremely active cats,
  • Use of herbicides instead of extremely active children, and
  • Use of computerized mechanical planting and harvesting technology instead of human and animal power.

I still try to avoid hoes, though.

Each of these is an amazingly powerful technology.  Together, they allow amazing amounts of calories to be grown.  Current mechanical farming sensors match the grain yield in particular locations in a field to the amount of fertilizer and seed used in those locations the next year.  Some of these “tractors” nearly drive themselves using GPS while the “driver” Facebooks® in a comfortable air-conditioned cab.

Cool, right?

Absolutely.  We couldn’t support the billions of people here on Earth without this tech.  But each part of this tech leads to a vulnerability.  Hundreds of varieties of seeds?  Not a disease on Earth takes ‘em all out.  One variety of seed?  We’re one disease away from an “eat your neighbor” level famine.

The rest of the vulnerabilities brought about by the technologies bullet-pointed above is left to the reader.  N.B.:  there are more vulnerabilities than bullet points.  Many more.

There are more fat people (on-board calorie preppers) than hungry people in 2021.  40% of people in the world are overweight, so, we’ve effectively solved world hunger.  Most years in the last decade have been devoted to solving “world hungry” which can be solved with nachos at midnight.

For now.

Feeding the hungry is a silly charity.  I mean, if they’re full, are you going to force them?

The Western World (along with Japan, and I think even China gets roped in here) is stuck with a crack habit:  efficiency.  They don’t just want those high-yield farms, they need them like Nancy Pelosi needs her vodka nightcap and breakfast Bloody Mary*.

The result of all of this efficiency is that the carrying capacity of the world is increased.

What’s carrying capacity?

It’s how many critters a place can hold.  The funny thing about carrying capacity is that it can be exceeded, at least for a time.  A classic example is here (LINK) about the introduction of reindeer to St. Matthew Island up near Alaska in the Bering Sea in 1944.  What could go wrong?  The island had no problems, so the 29 reindeer made more reindeer.

And then those reindeer made more reindeer.  And so on.

Finally, there were 6,000 reindeer living on the 128 square mile island in 1964.  In 1966, after a particularly hard winter?  There were 42 reindeer left.

All females.

The problem wasn’t the food available in the summer – although that resource was being stressed as well.  But when winter hit?  The reindeer starved to death by the thousands.

What really makes the Soylent Green Corporation run?  It’s the people!

It’s obvious that the island could support more deer than 42.  If the population was managed (by turning some of them into tasty, tasty reindeer sausage, for instance) it’s probable that the island could have had a year-round population that flourished.  It would probably number several thousand.

But when that hard winter hit after a tough summer with too many deer grazing?  It wasn’t fat and sassy reindeer going into winter, but hungry reindeer who had to make do with even less food when a hard winter hit.  The result was mathematically predictable.

Collapse.

Sheepdogs love jokes about flocks.  They won’t stop until they’ve herd them all.

Think of the slow collapse of technology as the beginning of a very, very hard winter.

The Soviets faced their own hard winter back in the day.  I recall reading Dmitri Orlov’s theory that because the Soviets were always horribly inefficient, they didn’t have very far to fall.  They had already built up systems to get around the systems so that they could survive in the cumbersome Soviet empire.  It’s similar in many places around the world.  Orlov has noted that it won’t be so nice in the West.

Not so nice?  It took from 1986 to 2010 for the life expectancy peak during the Soviet years to be matched again.  24 years.

And that was for what Orlov called a “mild” collapse.

Give a commie a plane ticket and he’ll fly for a day.  Push a commie out of a plane and he’ll fly for the rest of his life.

If New York City lost electricity for a week, it would look like a place where Mel Gibson in a leather jacket would flourish.  The damage that would be done by violent rioters would take decades to fix, and would make our exit from Kabul look like a graceful military triumph.

But what if, say, Haiti lost power for a month?  They’d call it “August” or any other name you would call a month.  Haiti wouldn’t fall far, because Haiti in 2021 is already the next best thing to not having civilization at all.  And with places that are a bit shy on efficiency, you’d think Africa, which has 60% of the land in the world that can be farmed would be a great place.

Nope.  They’re so inefficient that they’re a net food importer.  Africa, like Haiti, and like Afghanistan, and like Pakistan, would feel a collapse not because they’re super-efficient, but because they rely on imported food and other “stuff” from efficient economies to run theirs.  They don’t have as far to fall, but there is still a cliff.  Afghanistan went from 19 million in 2000 to 36 million today.  It’s not double, but it’s close.  To get down to “real” post-technology carrying capacity numbers in Afghanistan probably only requires 80% of their population to die off.

Technology has created a far greater carrying capacity on Earth for people than has ever existed.  It’s estimated that around 1 Anno Domini that the world could only support between 170,000,000 and 400,000,000 people.  Oh, sure, it would suck to make that many pairs of underwear.  But there are roughly 170,000,000 people in Bangladesh alone, which reliable sources inform me all live on acreage roughly the size of a ping pong table.

A collapse in carrying capacity, even a small one, would have an impact greater than the disappointment that was the last season of Game of Thrones.

Understand this:  being prepared for the absence of the things that make your life convenient and easy now is something I’d recommend.  If even a small number of the things that I’m hearing are true, we may be on the brink of a hard winter, indeed.

I feel bad for all of those parents that named their kid Daenerys before they got to the end of Game of Thrones.  I’m going to sit down with my son Judas this afternoon and finish the Bible.

Let’s hope that this one ends better than Game of Thrones.

And try to be one of the 42, and not the rest of the 6,000.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

43 thoughts on “Efficiency, Collapse, And Elisabeth Shue In A Bathing Suit”

  1. Great article John! In that last picture, a prepper would realize that the toilet no longer works, and he needs a safe privy. You nailed it on the agricultural threat, and that scenario can be repeated in most areas of life in the US today. Electricity, fuel, communications, medicine, etc.

    It makes me wonder if Deagle’s forecast of a 70% drop in the US population by 2025 was maybe optimistic. I might need more ammo after all.

    1. Re. horseless. As someone who grew up without running water, toilet paper was a very convenient thing. As was a pan of ashes saved over from winter. When the maggots started hatching, a few handfuls of wood ash dried them right up, almost.

      We dug a new hole for the toilet every few years. I guess “privy” and “outhouse” were genteel words for “toilet.”

      Running water is a blessing beyond measure.

      1. Sam, I read an interview years ago that was with a Pastor who lived in the Hebrides; this was in the ’90s if I recall. He was 100 years old, and when asked about the most astonishing thing he’d seen in all those years, he said “sudden light” – the simple act of walking into a room, flipping a switch…
        Most folks in the U.S. – and most of the ‘modern world’ – are ignorant and oblivious to how easy they have it…

      2. Sam – True. Most people have no idea where the ‘base setting’ for survival is. They assume too many things that they are used to will still work. It’s a steep learning curve.

    2. Exactly! How many people look around and see that the top of the pyramid . . . is all facing downward.

      Maybe a lot more ammo.

  3. Carrying capacity is an interesting question, I need to finish a post I was working on that looks at that in some detail as it pertains to conservation.

    1. Carrying capacity is an interesting topic, especially when applied to humans. One of the key issues is that once the carrying capacity is breached, the carrying capacity itself is decreased. With grazing animals, it is due to overgrazing. With predators, it is due to killing too many prey animals such that they can’t breed back effectively. Once they die off though, the decreased pressure on food sources allows those food sources to grow back to the usual carrying capacity.

      With humans, it is much more severe. Human carrying capacity relies to a massive extent on law and order. Farming and ranching is essentially putting some food in or on the ground so you get a lot of food in a few months. When there is little guarantee that you’ll be the one getting that food later, there is more incentive to eat or hide what you already have rather than investing it to produce more.

      This explains the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse: first comes aggression and war, which destroys law and order, which ends food production for the above reason, which leads to famine which leads to disease due to a weakened immune system.

      This also explains much of the problem with Africa: with little law and order, there is little incentive to invest in productivity.

      When animals exceed the carrying capacity, it leads to a large population drop, then an increase in carrying capacity that allows for the population to recover. The problem with humans is that law and order doesn’t naturally increase after a die-off, if anything it decreases. And the difference in carrying capacity between “farming with law and order” and “eating dog food out of a tin can Mad Max style” is hard to conceive of. The carrying capacity for North America if everyone were hunter-gatherers is something like 5-20 million people. Current population: 494 million. Furthermore, hunting won’t be a viable method of survival as game animals will be hunted close to extinction very quickly.

      My grandpa told me about the first time he saw deer tracks; it was a big deal and people came from miles around to look at them. They had been hunted to extinction in many areas during the Great Depression. They were protected and restored by game departments, but when hunting was opened most game animals almost disappeared again. This is why such restrictive rules about hunting were introduced. In my rural state of WI about 1/8 of the herd is killed in 9 days, when hunting is only allowed by day, with a license, no shining, no baiting, with only about 8% of the population participating…

      For these reasons I don’t think we can calculate human survival rate using percentages based upon animal data. The number of humans surviving in a steady-state will be equal to the holding capacity, and the holding capacity without law and order will be close to zero. Therefore the question is where will law and order be maintained such that food production will be able to continue. If the governor of Iowa acts quickly, blows bridges across the Miss and Missouri rivers, putting the state police and NatGuard on the border with shoot to kill orders, millions could survive in Iowa alone. This seems highly unlikely, but it illustrates the point that it is a human question rather than a question of statistics alone.

      https://medium.com/panarchy-101-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and/not-too-many-not-too-few-how-to-understand-ecology-carrying-capacity-346c69b192cb

    1. I just wish he hadn’t chosen the photo from Leaving Las Vegas. Shue was smokin hot several years back, but that movie was extremely depressing.

  5. Sir,
    Stop me if you have heard this… the very best primer on things like carrying capacity, abundance-at-a-distance, and Liebig’s Laws is OVERSHOOT, by William Catton. It was published by University of Illinois Press in 1982. I found it in college, all my professors bought a copy, and together we read with horror the modern expression of Malthus (but with more math).
    A most fascinating book, and well worth your time if you haven’t already read it.

    Thank you for shedding at least a bit of light on this subject; this is the sort of thing that those in the know consider when the subject of the latest famine in Ethiopia comes up. In fact, those parts of Africa receiving Western aid are in a similar boat; we are feeding populations that their local carrying capacity could not, and should we encounter a problem (as in the current year), those populations are in a serious circumstance.

    These concepts do not receive the attention they merit; they are of awesome importance.

    2. Yeah, good book. I read it many years ago, and even got the Mrs to read it as well.

    3. One of the tragedies of foreign food aid is that the flow of “free” food into the market destroys profits for anyone able to bring in a crop locally. They learn not to plant, eventually. We could send cash, but it’s too easily skimmed (10% for the big guy, at every level).

      1. Free food also allows the local population to overshoot. The inevitable outcome of providing free food is famine.

        1. Yet damn right, I don’t wanna see Elizabeth Warren anywhere, far less lounging poolside in a bikini. You did however get a Shue-shot I didn’t need to see. Leaving Las Vegas was a seriously depressing movie. She was so extremely smokin hot 10-15 years ago.

  6. “But each part of this tech leads to a vulnerability”

    It’s weird how I 12 or so years ago I joked about getting a mule and a plow. Not so funny now but when in the country I make note of the manual equipment I see laying around. Couple a years ago I passed on buying a cross cut saw at an estate sale. Oops. I have my Grandfathers skinning knife made from that kind of steel, I can shave with it when I have an edge on it. Funny I was pricing a bison manual well pump today. I don’t have a well but I know people who do. Found bison from a blog comment, thank you.

    I thank my lucky stars that POS pocahontas left my great state of Oklahoma many years ago. She probably knew she could never get elected around here. We had 77 of 77 red counties I believe both times when obummer was elected.

    “I feel bad for all of those parents that named their kid Daenerys before they got to the end of Game of Thrones. I’m going to sit down with my son Judas this afternoon and finish the Bible”. -That’s some funny shit right there.

  9. One thing your article emphasizes is the reliance we have come to have on technology – not just local technology in our lives but the technology to move everything – that makes the increased carrying capacity possible. All the local technology in the world to make things and grow things will not do a bit of good if the only way to transport it is by ship (sailing – although even transporting it by ship is no guarantee, see Port of Los Angeles) or animal backs (or I guess, people backs). Everything else depends on technology to move it from one place to another – freighters, airlines, trucks, cars, trains, electric mopeds). And assumes infrastructure to accommodate that. Remove all of that and one is rapidly left with small islands of production amidst a sea of food and industrial deserts

    1. Exactly!

      A farmer in 1840’s Iowa was that island. He produced food for his family first. Then, with whatever he had left over?

      He made money to pull precious items from distant sources. He lived in a desert. He could only bring the most precious things over.

      Great comment.

  10. But muh magic soil and muh democracy?
    If we believe it hard enough we can be like gods of the earth, after a few bong loads in the faculty lounge.
    Everything that worked for millennia is wayciss and now the 500 pound purple haired yass kweens will build the golden utopia with an overflowing cornucopia of free underwear and tacos for all comrades of the Benetton unity collective.
    Yes we can!

  11. There’s an article that a few people have linked to from Zero Hedge by Jim Quinn, about us going into the next “Fourth Turning.”

    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/quinn-its-fourth-turning-what-did-you-expect

    I’ve been reading people talking about that for a while, maybe the last decade, and while the obvious criticism about that whole theory is that the timing and effects are never exactly right, the wider angle view (or 35,000 ft view – if you prefer) is that history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, and events like fourth turnings aren’t duplicates but rhyme in lots of ways.

    I’ve been saying for quite some time that we might be heading for a next dark age. There are rhymes for that all over. The denial of objective reality, like “men can get pregnant, too” or “math is racist” is a big warning sign. Even worse is our increasing reliance on high technology that is so specialized that if a tiny handful of companies lost the ability to make parts, it would make today’s “chip shortages” impacting car makers a minor hiccup. How tiny? There are four companies in the world who can make today’s smallest chip geometries.

    You could fit all of the engineers in the world who are able to understand and design today’s most advanced chips, analog or digital, from system-level down to individual transistors into a modestly sized conference room.

    Five years ago, I retired from one of the world’s largest, best known avionics companies. You’d be lucky to find one or two engineers in the company that understood both the hardware and the software of the products. Both domains had become too specialized to be understood in the depth required to design them.

    Specialization is great. The complexity it brings is a double-edged sword. It really optimizes things and drives down costs, which helps everyone. The other side is a lack of resiliency.

    1. SiG, thank you. There are various forms of stability, but I see 2021 as a marble balanced on a pinhead. At the top of Everest.

      We could very well see the New Dark Ages soon. Walter M. Miller, Jr. would approve.

  12. Speaking of new technology, we just ordered a freeze drier. I know they’ve been around for a few years now. But, I figure if inflation runs rampant and/or these assholes try to stop me from grocery shopping because I don’t have my “covid passport”, in the next year or 2 we should be able to store enough food to keep us going along with our other food preps.

      1. Agreed. These are only the opening stages… we have yet to see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.

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