Dick Smith's Population Puzzle; a Q&A

Whadaya reckon about this whole Dick Smith $1m prize thing? He seems to be after a practical strategy for decoupling economic and physical growth. It’s not like people haven’t been thinking about that already. What are your thoughts?

I see three questions:

 1) Do I agree with Smith’s premise?

 2) Do I agree with his goal?

 3) Do I agree with his methodology of achieving that goal?

1) Premise

Based on his letter (I didn’t watch his TV shows), Smith has clearly linked “population” to “environmental degradation”. That, by itself, is an incomplete equation: what’s important is not just the number of people, but how each of them behaves i.e. how much “environment” they consume.

That most of the worldwide debate has been about changing how people act is, I suspect, less to do with any ignorance of the factor “population” than the knowledge that it’s much easier to convince a family of four to consume less than it is to convince them to stop at one child (at least in most societies); we’re simply focussing on the solution that appears easiest to implement.

This, I think, is the key point: yes, the number of people is a problem – but it’s only a part of the problem, and it may be much more difficult (or even unnecessary) to change this part than to focus on other causes.

2) Goal

For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume that changing our consumptive behaviour won’t be enough (if that’s not true now, it may well be in the future), and we need to change the number of people we “generate” as well. That requires either a big cultural shift (bottom-up change) or lots of enforcement (top-down change). China and some other states can do autocratic change; we can’t.

So, cultural reproductive change (to complement our lifestyle change in consumption) – how does one best go about achieving that?

3) Methodology

This is where I’m as ignorant as the next guy (unless the next guy is Hari Seldon) – how do you go about manipulating society? In general, I guess you have to get the idea “out there”; create awareness. In that sense, a TV show seems like a good idea. Whether it’s better than a thoughtful book, a few opinion pieces in the paper and some radio interviews, I can’t say. But I’m pretty certain Smith is doing more good than harm, since this prize thing means the issue should float around in public consciousness for a while.

Note that I’ve completely ignored the fact that the prize is to be awarded for “something”; an invention or scheme or whatnot. Unless I’m wrong in my thinking that our reproductive behaviour is primarily due to culture (having passed the point of requiring children to provide for us in our old age [provide, not care]), any winning entry that doesn’t change culture is pointless.

4) Verdict

If one wants to be generous, one could say that Dick Smith is a long-term thinker concerned about sustainability who is trying to sow the seeds for a cultural shift in our attitude towards reproduction. Perhaps he’s even thought, “Oh – I’m not sure how best to change societal thinking; perhaps creating a prize will encourage people to come with ideas.”

However – and this is where I pull my economist hat down firmly over my ears – is this the best way to spend this one million dollars? I freely admit I don’t know much about changing cultural mores, but I’ll bet you buttons to bootstraps that any solution we come up with will be harder to spread to the rest of the world than one that changes (the impact of) our consumptive behaviour – and spread these solutions to the world we must, because Australia doesn’t have enough proportion of the world’s population that changing culture here alone will make a big difference. Could Smith achieve more for (global) sustainability by investing his money to develop and/or spread (existing) changes to our consumptive lifestyle? I suspect so. But then, he probably wouldn’t get as much publicity for that…