Technology and the profits of doom

Over a century ago the great physicist Pascal (after whom the pressure unit is named) wrote that our first moral obligation is to think clearly. Quite right! But all these years later we still find that most thinking is woolly thinking.

The worst is when people intentionally don't want to think clearly, usually because they have a predetermined agenda and they want manipulated thinking to appear to support the conclusion that they want. So that is even more reason to remember Pascal saying that good clear thinking is a moral obligation.

In 1798 Thomas Malthus proposed a doctrine of economics that was to cause major waves, and attract great attention. In his; An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that the human population would increase at an exponential rate, but that food supplies would increase only arithmetically.

Basically he said that the world would run out of food, leading to great misery, and probably to food wars. Malthus was wrong! But people seem to love juicy bad news and the Malthus stories have stuck around.

Even the 1972 Limits to Growth report produced by the Club of Rome followed a Malthusian line, causing great consternation, but was wrong. None of this has stopped modern Malthusians from continuing to cry the same scare stories. One renowned such nut is Paul Ehrlich who wrote the book The Population Bomb in 1968. He predicted that in the 1970s the world would undergo famines and that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Ehrlich was wrong. Undeterred, in 1970 on Earth Day, Ehrlich stated that between 1980 and 1989 a staggering 65-million Americans and four-billion other people on the planet would die of starvation. He was wrong again! But this guy does not give up, and ever true to Malthusian theory, Ehrlich and his wife Anne published a book The Population Explosion in 1990 in which they said that at the beginning of the twenty-first century it "seems safe to predict" that starvation will raise death rates. He is going to be wrong again. But now he puts in the word seems and does not specify exact dates, unlike his two previous wrong predictions!

Just as Malthus was formulating his theory, we know now, that the world was on the brink of the largest surge in economic and population growth ever experienced by humanity! In the century between the publication of his essay and the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income in England rose sixfold, despite a sixfold increase in population. Taking an even larger period between 1820 and 1992 the world's population increased by 500%, even as the world's economies grew 40-fold.

So why was Malthus so wrong? Well quite simply he and his modern-day prophets of doom did not take technology and innovation into account. Malthusians continued to lick their pencils, sitting by their candles, and multiply out - if one man and one ox can plough so much in a day, then with two oxen... and so on.

Sitting by their candles, these folks did not introduce modern fertilisers into their equations, or insecticides, or cold trucks, or diesel generators, or artificial insemination, and the list goes on. Even less did they take innovative spirit into account. So in one way it is quite reasonable for Malthus to have been able to lick his pencil and do his sums and arrive at scary answers. Throughout history the same lack of attention to technology innovation has been the norm. People had problems in wondering how sailing ships would ever be able to carry enough cargo across the ocean to satisfy consumer demand, then along came steam ships. Then there were aircraft, now spacecraft and whatever else.

In other words, technology is playing an ever-increasing role in determining the economic future of the planet. I also, without doubt, can make the prediction that technology is going to play a major role in the Nepad (New Programme for African Development) initiative of President Thabo Mbeki.

Nepad's progress is going to be determined almost exclusively on how well technology is implemented. Malthus even said that aid should be withheld from the poor because it will only extend their suffering and make them even more miserable later. There are even modern followers of Malthusian doctrine who still agree with this sentiment today.

The technology family have a great responsibility to lead in building the world of the future. Lead, don't wait for other guys to tell you where to go!

Dr Kemm's column Techtrack appears each week in Engineering News. Engineering News can be accessed at www.engineeringnews.co.za.