From Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Jared Diamond, 2019) pp414-6
Is everybody’s dream of achieving a First World lifestyle possible? Consider the numbers. Multiply current national numbers of people by national per-capita consumption rates (of oil, metals, water, etc.) for each country, and add up those products over the whole world. The resulting sum is the current world consumption rate of that resource. Now repeat that calculation, but with all developing countries achieving a First World consumption rate up to 32 times higher than their current ones, and no change in national populations or in anything else about the world. The result is that world consumption rates will increase by 11-fold. That’s equivalent to a world population of about 80 billion people with the present distribution of per-capita consumption rates.
There are some optimists who claim that we can support a world with 9.5 billion people. But I haven’t met any optimist mad enough to claim that we can support a world with the equivalent of 80 billion people. Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utterly impossible, a cruel hoax. We are already having difficulty supporting a First World lifestyle even now, when only 1 billion people out of the world’s 7.5 billion people enjoy it.
We Americans often refer to growing consumption in China and other developing countries as “a problem,” and we wish that the “problem” didn’t exist. Well, of course the so-called problem will continue: the Chinese and the people of other developing countries are just trying to enjoy the consumption rates that we already enjoy. They wouldn’t listen if we were so silly as to tell them not to try to do what we are already doing. The only sustainable outcome for our globalized world that China, India, Brazil, Indonesia. African countries, and other developing countries will accept is one in which consumption rates and living standards are more nearly equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to sustainably support the current First World, let alone the developing world, at current First World levels. Does that mean that we are guaranteed to end up in disaster?
No: we could have a stable outcome in which the First World and other countries converged on consumption rates considerably below current First World rates. Most Americans would object: there is no way that we will sacrifice our living standards just for the benefit of those people out there in the rest of the world! As Dick Cheney said, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” But the cruel realities of world resource levels guarantee that the American way of life will change; those realities of world resources cannot be negotiated out of existence. We Americans certainly will sacrifice our consumption rates, whether we decide to do so or not. because the world can’t sustain our current rates.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a real sacrifice, because consumption rates and human well-being, while they are related. m not tightly coupled. Much American consumption is wasteful end doesn’t contribute to high quality of life. For example, per-capita oil consumption rates in Western Europe are about half those in the U.S., but the well-being of the average Western European is higher than that of the average American by any meaningful criterion, such as life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools, and support for the arts. When you finish reading this page of my book, just go out into a street in the U.S., look at the cars driving by, estimate their gas mileages, and ask yourself whether that wasteful American gas consumption contributes positively to any of those measures of quality of life. There are other areas besides oil in which consumption rates in the US. and in other First World countries are wasteful, such as the wasteful and destructive exploitation of most of the world’s fisheries and forests already discussed.
In short, it’s certain that, within the lifetimes of most of us, per-capita consumption rates in the First World will be lower than they are now. The only question is whether we shall reach that outcome by planned methods of our choice, or by unpleasant methods not of our choice. It’s also certain that, within our lifetimes, per-capita consumption rates in many populous developing countries will no longer be a factor of 32 below First World consumption rates, but will be more nearly equal to First World consumption rates than is the case at present. Those trends are desirable goals, rather than horrible prospects that we should resist. We already know enough to make good progress towards achieving them; the main thing lacking has been the necessary political will.
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