The Business Roundtable has released a third paper in its Occasional Paper series, a review of Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Wolfgang Kasper, professor of economics emeritus and a senior fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney.

Diamond's book discusses the possibility of 'ecocide' - environmental collapse leading to social disintegration. Kasper locates it in a long tradition of environmental doomongering from Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century to the notorious Club of Rome report in 1972 to today's Green eco-pessimists.

Kasper points out that over the past 60 years, world economic output per capita has risen 3.5 times, and has been accompanied by improving health, education, longevity and environmental amenity, as well as by great reductions in working hours and absolute poverty.

The review explains the sources of modern economic growth. Kasper points out that the mobilisation of capital, labour, technology, skills and natural resources are only the proximate causes of growth. What fundamentally matters for growth is sound institutions and policies, in particular secure property rights, limited government and economic freedom, which facilitate entrepreneurial endeavour.

Kasper argues that Diamond, a geographer, physiologist and World Wildlife Fund associate, fails to understand economic processes.

As a result, he generalises spuriously from isolated cases of environmental degradation and draws wild conclusions. Kasper gives as one example Diamond's statement: "Socially stratified societies consist of farmers, who produce food, plus non-farmers who … are in effect parasites on farmers."

"Does Diamond really mean to imply that 98 percent of the American population [who are not farmers] are parasites?", Kasper asks.

Similarly, Kasper quotes Diamond's "breathtaking statement" that the best estimate of a sustainable population for Australia at its present standard of living is 8 million people - "no source, no reasons, no strategy how to dispose of the remaining 12 million Australians!"

Kasper also points to Diamond's "Malthusian error" that the world cannot sustain China and other Third World countries operating at First World Levels, noting that "only rich and growing economies will spare effort and wealth for remedying ecological damage and conserving nature."

His concern about Diamond's flawed thinking is that "it will promote interventionism with unexpected political side effects that will hurt the poor and future generations."

The Business Roundtable's 2003 Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, The Real State of the World, deals with similar issues.

Other papers in the Occasional Paper series are available on the Business Roundtable website, www.nzbr.org.nz

Purchase Human Progress - and Collapse?: A Review of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Wolfgang Kasper ($12.50 plus postage and handling)

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Roger Kerr
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