Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

“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.

“Enjoy it while it lasts, I have a feeling there’s going to be a shortage of cold beer this summer.” – The Stand

Well, well, well.

“Pop, what was your first car?” Pugsley asked.

“Do you mean the first one I owned?  Or . . .”

“No, the first one that was, you know, yours.  Like how mine is the pickup.”  I knew that was the question he was asking, but sometimes dads like to tease.

I replied, “My first car was a 1975 green GMC® truck.  Stick shift, just like yours.  It had a rubber floor, no A/C, and all the radio you could want, if you liked AM.  And it had a vinyl bench seat.  Vinyl bench seats were nice.  When your date got in, she could slide right over next to you.”

And in college, this one girl said we didn’t have chemistry together.

I smiled, remembering the first time I took a girl on a date.  I tried to capture that first date magic with The Mrs. for our last anniversary, but she got mad when I tried to drop her off with her Mom and Dad.

Even though it was only “my” pickup for two years, it was a wonderful little truck with the worst engine that you could imagine.  I think it put out at least a dozen horsepower.  But it was my first taste of freedom.

“Yeah, weird that there’s a shortage of trucks now,” I said.

“What?”  Pugsley laughed.  “What’s the joke?”

As most people know, that’s not a joke.  Because of a semiconductor shortage, new trucks are in short supply.  They can make the rest of the truck, but they can’t make it work without computer chips.

Since people keep their old trucks longer, spare parts for older trucks are in short supply, too.

Shortages tend to build up and have ripple effects.

And my brain is now randomly deleting memory, too.

I started thinking and realized that, with the exception and weirdness of the Great Toilet Paper Famine of 2020, Pugsley has lived in a world of abundance.  In his world, people don’t have to line up for products, the products line up for the people and wait for them.  Probably the only shortage he’s used to is a shortage of spending money.

That was intentional.

In my life as well I can’t recall any real shortages of anything.  I recall (vaguely) my parents talking about a gas shortage.  I guess that impacted the people in Flint, Michigan a lot:  I heard they had a shortage of unleaded.

The only other shortage I recall was the normal shortage of fruits and vegetables when they weren’t being grown.  Strawberries?  “Get some frozen ones,” Ma Wilder would say if I wanted strawberries in winter.  “Strawberries are out of season.”

I got a strawberry stuck in my ear once.  My doctor had cream for that.

Back then, the technology didn’t really exist for the behemoth national chains to manage global logistics to get strawberries in winter.  Now?  Fresh fruit and vegetables are flown across the globe.  I read that one particular species of fish (don’t remember which one) was caught in Chile, flown across the ocean to China for processing, and then flown to the United States for consumption.  Teach a man to fish and he has fish for life.  Give a man a fish and he’ll create a multinational logistics chain to optimize profitability.

This is efficient.  It makes use of low labor prices in China for processing.  But, as we’ve discussed, again and again, efficiency is bad.  Efficiency is why we have a shortage of electronic chips for trucks to move that fish today.  I don’t think the British have this issue – I keep hearing about their fish and chips.

One consequence of efficiency is concentration.  The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company™ (TSMC) was named with all of the characteristic creativity of a colorblind engineer whose parents were introverted accountants.

“What are we making?”

“Semiconductors.”

“Where are we going to make them?”

“Taiwan.”

“I have an idea.  Now you might think it’s crazy . . .”

One thing about excellence is that it brings smart people with similar skills together to work on tough problems.  The more they learn, the more smart people show up because as they solve one problem, another one comes up, and, pretty soon (if the solutions are profitable enough) there are lots of smart people around.  Give the nerds enough time, and they will solve enough problems that they will know more about the subject than anyone else on the planet.  Unless it involves deodorant.

And the movie came out in the early 1980s . . .

That makes for very efficient, centralized production.  Detroit sprang up around the auto, New York around money, and Paris around wide, broad avenues that were perfect for a panzer parade.

But these centers of excellence are centers of vulnerability.  TSMC™ has recently illustrated the vulnerability of companies all over the world to a single manufacturer.  Even going back into the deeper past, during the period of the Roman Empire, most porcelain plates and cups were made in the south of France.  When the Empire fell, everyone was stuck eating out of Tupperware™ from that box in the garage with all their college stuff in it for five hundred years.

Another danger from plastic storage tubs?  Developing Tupperculosis.

Covid-19 triggered shortages have exposed how precarious an efficient world is.  We are often dependent upon single sources of materials and innovation from areas all across the globe to bring us something as simple as the Large Hadron Collider, even though most people think they could construct it from spare parts to a 1993 Buick™ and that old refrigerator that they have in their garage.

Efficiency has made us vulnerable.  I have no real reason that while we’re in the midst of the ‘Rona Retreat around the world to think that this will change for the better soon.  As freedom collapses, and as efficient markets based on low inflation implode, we aren’t headed for a time of plenty.

Soon we may miss the time when stuff waited for us in the grocery store, and the thought of that might bring a happy memory like the thought of a long-gone 1975 GMC® truck.

With bench seats . . . .