2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor

Even (especially?) geniuses compartmentalize. I applaud life saving and misery reduction regardless of who does it, and I'm not going to make my approval contingent on an apology for past wrongs.

The Gates foundation seems to be doing the best they can to model as far into the future as feasible so as to make best use of their resources. Models that propose death and misery as their means are rightly viewed with skepticism.

Which force are you talking about? I'm talking about the one that mandates that people pay for contraception with tax dollars.

I should point out that, as I said in the other thread, I'm Catholic. And I didn't just inherit my Catholicism, I worked hard to find it. And I examined many of its precepts and tenets (including birth control), and found them each to be reliable and founded on a mountain of logic built on a kernel of faith. So they're my own beliefs. Not inherited, and not held blindly.

That's why I can't support the inclusion of contraception anywhere, among other things. I'm well aware that in some people's eyes this makes me an enemy of women, an enemy of the poor, etc. But I stand by my views without shame or regret, because I have acquired and maintain them with all the integrity I can muster.

There are multiple problems with Gates's predition, but two of the biggest are these: 1. Growth in real economic wealth is very strongly tied to growth in real resource consumption. The master resource is energy, but numerous other resources are in tight supply, with a critical set being "bauxite whose production peaked in 1943), copper (1998), iron ore (1951), magnesium (1966), phosphate rock (1980), potash (1967), rare earth metals (1984), tin (1945), titanium (1964), and zinc (1969)" (from Richard Heinberg's The End of Growth[1])

I've explored the concept of decoupling in greater length using Wolfram+Alpha data to show the relationship between energy use and GDP for the G8 nations plus China, India, and Brazil, as well as global growth, in the periods of 2000 - 2010, 1990 - 2012, and 1980-2012 (not all data available for all periods, though the 2000 - 2010 data are complete for all nations analyzed). While there's some sign of very weak decoupling of energy and GDP growth, principally in Japan and the USA, for global GDP growth, there's a very strong relationship between GDP and energy usage, and both have been increasing. With limited exceptions, global per capita energy use has also been increasing.

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economic...

As I write this, I'm listening to a news story that the IEA has announced that US oil consumption, flat for years, is up 2%

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/rising-demand-oil-gr...

2. The second major problem is that the so-called Demographic Transition which Gates and Hans Rosling like to trumpet is little more than a largely unexplained phenomenon observed in some but not all data series. Tom "Do the Math" Murphy, UCSD physics professor, has specifically looked at this with regards to oil states, and makes the observation that "surplus energy makes babies"[2]. This is significant for two reasons: it means that the demographic transition isn't being observed in all countries, and it means that population growth, and hence domestic energy consumption growth, is highest in the major oil exporting nations. Growing domestic consumption means reduced availability of energy for export markets -- a phenomenon known as the "export lands model". Other research suggests that the causality link between development rates and birth rates is less clear than popularly portrayed[3].

I could bore (or terrify) you with numerous other challenges: flat or falling agricultural productivity, EROEI deficiencies in virtually every non-fossil energy alternative, pandemics risks. There's a reason I don't get invited to parties much .... But I think these two will do. While I have respect for some of Bill Gates's work (and I'm by no means an uncritical fan of his), his optimism here seems misplaced and founded on a very incomplete portrayal of the situation.

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Notes:

1. Sources: http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/ and http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/597/2/

2. "The Real Population Problem" http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-populat...

3. "Revisiting demographic transition: correlation and causation in the rate of development and fertility decline." http://www.iussp.org/sites/default/files/event_call_for_pape...

Or virtually all of the Persian Gulf. Some of the fastest-growing populations, in what's empty desert without even sufficient water for cities let alone agriculture.

The economist's answer is that these regions have economic outputs (financial wizardry, advanced manufacturing, tourism, oil) which the rest of the world wants, and the rest of the world (which in the case of the Atlantic seaboard is largely the US's own inland agricultural regions -- breadbasket to the world) is willing to exchange its agricultural produce for those goods.

There's a difference between economic self-sufficiency and ecological self-sufficiency. Arguments can be made over which is preferable. Comparative advantage means that the economic argument leads to greater overall population and productivity, sustainability means the ecological argument leads to greater sustainability.

There's also that little matter that agriculture has largely transformed into a factory system for converting petrochemical energy to food energy via modest sunlight inputs.