I always wonder how concerned to be about the degrowth arguments of the Prophets of Doom. They seem unlikely to persuade anyone who's not already wealthy, but I wouldn't put it past developed nations to try sabotaging global development or dramatically reducing global populations through war and famine - after all, you can justify any atrocity if you convince yourself that the alternative is human extinction.
"A tall, lanky Norwegian-American broiling under the Mexican sun, seeds from a dozen countries in his blistered hands, just trying to do the right damn thing."
I suppose that's the irony of the contrast - Borlaug really doing it the old-fashioned, agrarian pastoral idyll way, where you cross the strains and plant the resultant seeds and see what is going to happen, and try try again.
For "Air"/Climate Change, I think a key point is that nuclear power should have solved climate change decades ago, but "prophets" killed it with false concerns about radiation, meltdowns, and waste.
I'm confused/sad about why "prophet" thinking is so popular and powerful given its repeated failures. A big risk IMO is that as we make everything more legible and centralized "prophets" will take over and stifle future progress (e.g. as you say in the post, maybe Borlaug would get crushed by regulators today)
Small but important detail: crossing different strains of wheat to obtain an improved strain is not the same as GMO. Crossing is more natural in the sense that it can occur naturally by cross pollination by insects. Then humans got into the act as well. Hence the huge variety of plant cultivars available in any garden centre. GMO goes beyond this, making it even possible, for example, to insert pesticides into crop plants, which disastrously affect more insects (like bees!) than the targeted pests, and which stock and/or humans then consume. Not healthy! This type of practice has given GMO a bad name.
Mystery OP - You are finding the lack of balance in book because Mann assiduously avoids making it into a horse race where the author must, in the name of neutrality, agree that both sides have valid points.
Sometimes, it really is the case that one side revolutionizes the human experience to the point of slaying one of the horsemen of the apocalypses, and the other side is objectively pro-death.
I admit, happily, that I am not neutral on this. My father, uncles, aunt, and grandfather are all avowed wizards - civil engineers and enviro engineers. They are, or were, long haired, hippy-type, pinko (cis hetero people) (I was born in a VW van). I grew up immersed in this debate. I've heard the best arguments from both sides to the point where I could repeat them like Happy Birthday and The Apostle's Creed. One sides solution is always life, and the question is always how to make it work. One is always death, and the question is how do we convince people to embrace it.
>>... borrow from his predecessors’ racist-tinged doom-heralding and expand on it by chastising all humans, rich and poor, white and non-white alike. According to Mann, Vogt argues that "consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world’s ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity." Crucial to this is the concept of "carrying capacity" – the idea that the earth has a fixed capacity to support human and animal life.<<
>>Though Borlaug didn’t tend to wax philosophical like Vogt did, I think if he were to comment on the idea of carrying capacity, he would describe it as a fluid equilibrium that can be turned into a virtuous circle: find ways to feed more people, and their increased productivity pulls them and their countrymen out of poverty, increasing both quality of life and growth potential. The key is not to limit the number of people, but to not let the people starve and fall into ruin. To Borlaug, the earth is not a finite planet-sized fish tank, because humans aren’t fish; we can understand and engineer our way out of problems that a salmon fry can’t, and it’s our responsibility to use the tools at hand for the benefit of all.<<
Count me as a Prophet, though I would never argue against the Green Revolution or the goal of eliminating hunger.
So the Earth is an aquarium and humans can out innovate and out engineer every other species on the planet. Lots of humans, hooray! And not much of anything else.
That's not a future I applaud.
Fortunately there is a solution: fewer people. A lot fewer in fact. About a billion.
“The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth.” by Peter Rodes Robinson
“Experts not being able to talk about problems they’re solving because of security protocols” is a good description of what happened to science in the USSR. The relatively free intellectual cross-pollination that happened between fields and projects in places like Bell Labs, IAS and of course Silicon Valley was fundamental to their impact. I think creeping corporatization and Balkanization of specialties might pose their own risks to that kind of intellectual environment.
Neat review. I'm guessing the Earth will, however, run out of fossil fuels one day (even if "run out" here means "it doesn't make economic/energetic sense to extract").
I thought this was a good review, but one place I would differ from the author (not the reviewer, necessarily) is I really don't like the Manichaen oppositional framing of "Wizards" vs "Prophets"
In my view what *KIND* of Wizard and what *KIND* of Prophet you are matters as much or more than what broad camp you're in. We really DO need more advanced engineering/science and we really DO need more people willing to warn us about the cliff we're about to walk over. I think these two groupings obscures more than it illuminates.
The thing that stands out for me is that while the Wizards are right in the short run, the Prophets will be right in the long run. The real question is the time-scale involved.
The Wizards’ insistence that there will always be a way to delay the inevitable is as much a fallacy as the Prophets’ insistence that THIS time is the Big One(tm). I see your Zeno’s Paradox and raise you Jevon’s Paradox: greater efficiency leads to greater overall consumption.
The real limit on consumption is price: as it costs more to consume, whether because of resource scarcity or pollution, people will consume less. The one upside is that between improved technology and reduction of the externalities from consumption, we might still end up ahead in terms of overall well-being from where we were in the past.
I am mostly in the wizard camp. But it is troubling for the wizard ethos that birth rates are falling voluntarily worldwide, and the main driver of this is education. Education and voluntary choices are not bad things. There is something to the prophets' argument, as long as people choose it willingly, and for themselves.
I think it's worth noting that when it comes to global warming, there are policy approaches that could be considered "Wizard vs Prophet neutral" -- like, impose CO2 taxes, and then to what extent doing so results in Wizardry vs to what extent it results in Prophecy (?) is up to the market!
Interesting to hear the conflict between total and average utilitarianism in this context. The classic objection to total utilitarianism is the Repugnant Conclusion, which is a very Malthusian Argument - if population growth continues as total utilitarians would encourage, eventually we'll reach the point at which everyone has lives barely worth living due to resource constraints.
Of course, average utilitarianism has it's own repugnant conclusions, for example the idea that you can make the world a better place by eliminating people with below average welfare.
I lean towards the total view since I stubbornly insist that life is worth living, but I'm personally of the opinion that people should have the number of children they want to have - the lazy preference utilitarian solution! Declining birth-rates suggest that overpopulation is not really worth worrying about, and I'm optimistic that we'll eventually invent our way out of our current environmental problems.
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
I disagree strongly. Could we have done better? Yes. But plagues have been a problem for humanity for all of known history, and for all of known history we really only had one way of solving it: hunker down and wait for it to pass. Let it kill all the people it was going to kill, and then the survivors can move on. The Spanish Flu happened just 100 years ago, a blink of an eye historically, and we did basically the same thing. We tried to help people with medicine, which did some good, but mostly we just waited it out, all three waves of it, just like humanity has done with every plague in history. They came up with a vaccine, which failed miserably because we still didn't know what we were doing. I want to make that clear: the best minds we had worked on solving the problem, huge amounts of money and resources were diverted to creating and distributing a vaccine, and the vaccine just plain didn't work because we had identified the wrong pathogen as the culprit. And so about 50,000,000 die wordwide. What could you do?
COVID-19 is arguably the first plague we have faced where we actually have the tools and knowledge to do something about it. And it will probably be the first worldwide plague to be stopped not by waiting it out but by vaccinating: in other words, because we did something about it. Could we have done it faster, and better? Yes, definitely. 100%. But it's still a remarkable achievement and I can't see it as anything other than a slam dunk win for the Wizards.
We are a learning species, and while we didn't do as good as we could we did much better than we have previously in terms of saving lives. And I think we'll do much better for the next plague, because the Wizards of their day will be able to look back on the mistakes we made this time around.
I'm not sure about this alleged revealed preference for maximising *total* utility. It seems to me that the default position people instinctively default to is "maximise the total utility among people *already living*", while resolutely not taking potential future people into account. Else, you end up in Repugnant Conclusion territory.
This is distinct both from Vogt's position (where decreasing the population is an acceptable way to increase the average utility) and from what you allege to be the default position (where increasing the population is a desirable way to increase the total utility), and I think is necessary to avoid reaching weird, counterfactual results like the Repugnant Conclusion. The number of actually, objectively living minds who can experience happiness or not should be taken as a given; it is not a variable to be itself fiddled with in either direction.
I really should go eat lunch and get back to work, but thank you for this review. I've meant to read this book for a while now and this has pushed me to do so. I consider myself in the Prophet camp, just because it's much harder to engineer the technology of how we humies organize ourselves compared to the technology of how we make useful things from nature's resources, but I've always admired Borlaug ever since I learned of him. I hope humanity can find a way to break the back of Jevons Paradox so that the advances in efficiency that people like him have created or discovered can redound to our common benefit, instead of simply speeding up the treadmill another notch.
I don't see a mention of biodiversity loss, or of the loss of habitat for a wide range of wildlife. The rapid increase in human population and living standards are leading to increasing amounts of the planet being used for agriculture (or other human uses), which in turn is causing an increasing number of extinctions. Currently, wizards don't seem to be averting this problem, and once an existing biome or species is lost, it is pretty much unrecoverable. (There may be edge cases where recovery is possible but not on the scale that extinction is happening).
This may be a matter of what people value. Some people value "nature" (for want of a better word) and want to preserve it. Others see it primarily as a source of raw materials for human wealth. Most people who I know do value "nature", even if they are wizards; but wizards don't get to make the rules about what is valued by humanity as a whole, and currently humanity as a whole clearly puts more value on using land for our own benefit than on preserving the existing biodiversity.
On reading the review, I'm sceptical about the framing of the book - why choose these positions? Why choose these representatives of those positions?
I recall Mann doing a pretty good ob of presenting the Prophet argument. I am also biased towards the Wizardry approach, but I remember coming out of the book thinking it was more reasonable than before. For example, there might be ways to consume less without greatly reducing our quality of life, but getting there is a behavioral issue. Getting people to no longer think of huge lawns and car-dependent suburbs as being the only way to raise a family is not primarily a technical problem; it's largely one of attitude.
I'll feast in the watery halls of Valhalla with Vogt when the hubris of Wizard types inevitably dooms the world and sends the majority of humankind, pest of the world, to the afterlife. Then I'll know the ecosystems will evolve and keep living after getting rid of us.
Just as an organism is rationally more valuable than a single cell within it or a certain species of bacteria in its gut fauna, an ecosystem is more valuable then any individual animal or any single species. Thus trying to keep as many human beings alive as possible is as meaningless as trying to keep as many pandas alive as possible without them being a part of an ecosystem but a panda breeding institute or whatever.
Although I know this isn't a very popular kind of thought here, trying to explain this brought me an insta-ban from the dc server :)
I find the argument "America’s Next Top Model makes fun of it" an unconvincing way of doing cost-benefit analysis of organic farming. I'm not a farmer myself (my garden is definitely a hobby, meaning that on net it's a money sink), nor a student of agriculture; my current beliefs around this are strongly influenced by reading Drawdown (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143130447). The impression I got from it was that artificial fertilizer did in fact have the potential to destroy soil ecosystems (not necessarily everywhere), and that effective organic alternatives existed that harnessed increased understanding of said soil ecosystems. (Again, not necessarily everywhere. For the purposes of Drawdown it is sufficient that the following claim be true: "in some not-exceptionally-rare circumstances, organic techniques will be both more productive than synthetic fertilizer and more effective at carbon sequestration.") The book presents this as an increase in our understanding of soil ecosystem, so insofar as any basic science is Wizardry this might still be in camp Wizard, but it doesn't escape the derisory label of "organic". Can someone more knowledgeable comment on this?
>C4 photosynthesis (a more efficient way for plants to distinguish between hydrogen and carbon dioxide, requiring less water and nitrogen for the same yield).
"Hydrogen" in the above sentence should actually be "oxygen". But yes, the C4 rice project is very cool!
Also, a fun note: I once took a class in Borlaug Hall at the University of Minnesota.
If Vogt's life began in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, then he would have been mighty old by the time he connected with the nascent environmental movement in the 1930s. Actually he was born in 1902, so you mean "turn of the 20th century."
The right classic companion book to read to this is John McPhee, "Encounters with the Archdruid."
Also, I am 60% confident that this is the review Scott was 60% confident would win when he made his predictions. Which is of course not the same as saying *I* am 60% (or for that matter 36%) confident that it will win!
>Each of today’s systems is more like Chesterton’s Maze of Forking Paths, where pulling out a brick here (say, trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution) leads to a catastrophic tunnel collapse there (more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save).
I don't think this counts as a failure of Wizards due to complexity. If I remember correctly, people like Zvi and even *Matt Yglesias* were predicting that trying for "equity" would be worse for everyone than simple distribution based on something like age or whether you were near the clinic when vaccines started expiring. The CDC wasn't actually optimizing to distribute vaccines such that all people reaped the most benefits distributed fairly; they were optimizing to *look like* they were distributing vaccines equitably; and that's why they failed.
I think the major takeaway from the government's mismanagement of covid wasn't that increasing complexity is too hard for Wizards. It's that increasing complexity is too hard for *governments*.
I find it more than a little weird if this book (written in 2019 according to Amazon), or at least the reviewer, never mentions the importance of the global demographic transition for the likely future fate of humankind. It is highly relevant if one wants to estimate the odds of the Wizards versus Prophets scenario.
The global demographic transition is the tendency that ferility is falling everywhere (following in the footsteps of the global fall in mortality). More than 70 of the 193 countries in the world are already below 2.1 children per woman. Including Nepal, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Tunis, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, and of course the whole of Europe - if official statistics, and gapminder.org, can be approximately trusted:
..moreover, the tendency is downward everywhere. In the last decades fertility reduction has been particularly dramatic in the Middle East and India.
Apart from Afghanistan, Tadjikistan and sub-Saharan Africa, the world is fast approaching below-reproduction levels everywhere (and even in these countries, fertility is falling).
This bodes well for humankind, since it increases the odds that we can maintain or increase per capita consumption levels without risking an all-out banana-flies-in-the-bottle scenario.
The go-to book in this regard is Tim Dyson (2010): "Population and Development: The Demographic Transition". Dyson's book is a bit old by now (there are newer books and a ton of articles), but it still provides the most comprehensive discussion of the economic, social and cultural changes that take place in the wake of the transition. Despite its excruciatingly boring title (which has prevented a wide readership), this book is on par with Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel in its scope.
Granted, this may seem peripheral to the theme in the book being review'ed here; but any discussion of the likely future of the world (will we crash or will we be fine) that neglects to discuss the demographic transition, misses the main engine driving global changes - including environmental changes.
). This suggests that the Malthusian problem will take care of itself.
"It wasn’t just red states or populist leaders or microchip truthers that were guilty; everyone in every country, state, and Holy See didn’t adopt masks, close the borders, roll out tests, or vaccinate quickly and effectively enough, and the blood of 2 million people and counting (not to mention the global loss of jobs, social activities, educational quality, and basic human connection) is on our hands."
Can anyone point me to a fair examination of the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of masking to prevent covid? Most of what I see is either observations based on arbitrary-endpoint graphs (e.g. "as you can see, cases increased/decreased after [country or state] started/ended its masks mandate!") or arguments based on anecdote or arguments based on lack of RCT confirmation of effectiveness. None of these is particularly satisfying.....
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
The Wizards did roll up their sleeves and create solutions to the problem. Then the Bureaucrats walked into the room, threw half their projects in the garbage and locked the other half away for a year. Finally, we all collectively looked at what the Bureaucrats had done and decided that not only were we not going to hang them, we would let them keep their jobs.
Don't blame the Wizards man, they did their part, and it could have been enough.
I recently read this as well. The passage that stuck in my mind (which I can’t find at the moment) was about the effects of the green revolution in India - in states where land ownership was highly concentrated, the green revolution boosted yields for landlords and led to mass evictions and migration to urban slums, whereas in states where, for historical reasons land ownership was more evenly distributed, the high yielding varieties boosted incomes for subsistence farmers. Though I am typically wizard-sympathetic, I think the profound interaction between technology and politics/power tends to be a blind spot in wizard thinking. Recent farmer protests in India show the legacy of the green revolution is hardly settled. I think the land issue here also ties in nicely to the Henry George review.
One (probably unconscious) sleight of hand that happens in the "Wizards have managed to provide enough food and water for increasing populations" arguments is an "any edible food == any edible food" equivalence. Something I've come to realize more and more is that in order to be able to provide for larger and larger populations, we've had to push the land (and water sources) to its limits, and that has clear significant effects on the quality of the product. Replacing two nourishing juicy carrots that taste great, with six just-about-edible ones that managed to grow in poor soil optimized to look good on the shelf, is treated blindly as a threefold increase in food production with no concern for the value lost in other ways.
More food to prevent hunger is certainly good, but at some point the loss in quality becomes significant enough to also be an important factor - at least enough to start considering, are seven lives lived at 65% well-being more desirable than four lives lived with 90% well-being? This blindness to quality and richness and long-term consequences seems pervasive among Wizardkind - and experiencing and understanding this loss has moved me from being largely on the Wizard side to a slight preference for the Prophetic position.
This was great and I really appreciate the reevaluation of the central conflict between Wizard and Prophet that the reviewer went through as a result of COVID-19 and the fallout over the last year. Even so... I wonder if this is because it's a topic I know a fair bit about already, maybe I'm less enthused about reading about it. The Galen biography and Georgism analysis, OTOH, were almost totally novel for me, at least what I thought I knew turned out to be a lot less than I actually did when the original texts were illuminated.
I'm going to break the tie in my personal rankings at last because over the last few weeks I've occasionally thought 'By George!' and it's made me chuckle. I don't know if the voting system is decided yet but I'd like to cast my vote for some sort of ranked choice. Personally, I'd be satisfied if any of the top 5 (so far) we're winners. And no shade on Order Without Law or Why Buddhism is True, I just didn't connect with the topic and/or reviewer's style as much as the others.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd The Wizard and the Prophet
4th Double Fold
5th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
My conclusion from the COVID charley-foxtrot is that the Prophets, so to speak, are utterly useless. They may be 100% right on the ultimate root or our problems -- our social psychological nature, and our habits of social intercourse -- but the historical evidence is that these things are 100% proof against any lasting change brought about by the direst social force, let alone such sunny mild methods as rational persuasion.
If there's a particle of difference between the attitudes and inclinations of the 21st century American Facebooker during COVID and the 14th century English peasant when the Black Death arrived, I have yet to see it. The main reason we haven't gotten to the point of putting all the cats or Jews to the stake as a burnt offering, or dosing ourselves with mercury, garlic, and/or leeches, is because our Wizards managed to produce a magic potion (vaccine) in jig time (and secondarily because COVID isn't anywhere near the lethality of Y. pestis).
Wizardy can't solve all our problems, without doubt. But maybe it can solve all the problems that actually have solutions accessible to human beings. Perhaps the remaining problems are as intractable to us as the problem of the killer asteroid was to the dinosaurs.
This whole review is premised on the idea that what we care about is human beings, but much of what the Prophets are worried about is the natural world which is totally overlooked.
You think the fish are fine? Are the rainforests fine? Even the insects might be suffering catastrophic declines right now.
If all you care about is human well being sure, the Wizards look alright. But if you expand your scope to the natural world it is clear something is very very wrong, has been for a long time, and we are not fixing it.
This seems like the most political, ingroup-y review so far-- not necessarily a bad thing but not my preference. I lean toward the Wizard outlook as well but I don't feel the review effectively steelmans Prophets; one can point out that innovation faces increasing (x-)risks and diminishing returns while consumption and population tend to quickly absorb the new production. Despite its obvious sympathies and some tangents toward the end, though, the review was effective at presenting the book's arguments and major claims, so props for that.
Tangential, but I also have a tattoo of the muted post horn from Crying of Lot 49. I didn’t realize when I got it there are tons of other people with the same idea, and we together make up a kind of secret society who speak to each other in code, similar to the one in the book that the symbol represents.
Contra the reviewer Borlaug also believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
I Borlaug believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
Borlaug is a much more eminent figure than Vogt in their respective movements, so this book is also a real profile raiser for Vogt. Iowans would put Borlaug on the currency. Environmentalists would put Carson and Muir, not Vogt, on their Mount Rushmore.
"Each of these contain multitudes of factors that no single human on earth, not even the Normanest of Borlaugs, could keep straight in his or her head and 'fix' with a single quick hack like a better strain of wheat."
I think it's worth emphasizing over and over again that Ugur Sahin, Hamilton Bennett, and all the others did do basically this for the coronavirus itself. With the accumulated effort and science of decades behind them, we got two extremely effective extremely safe vaccines in mid-January 2020. For both the BioNTech and Moderna teams, it only took a couple days. As the CEO of Moderna said, "this is not a complicated virus" — at least, not for Wizards like them.
Production and distribution, meanwhile, were mainly just limited by money. (When something has positive externalities, by default in a free market the creators don't make enough profit and not enough of the thing gets produced.)
The hard part, the part the actually took so long and is related to the increased complexity of the modern world and its modern problems, was getting approval from the FDA, EMA, etc. (Note that *testing the safety and efficacy* isn't the hard part; the regulatory agencies just don't happen to like the fastest ways to test safety and efficacy. It's specifically getting the approval.)
Errr... humankind is not going to get wiped out by COVID-22 or whatever, and this pandemic proves it. Governments will just lock down, or force everyone to take tests all the time, or force everyone to wear hazmat suits all the time to keep food production and distribution going.
A Chinese-style four-week hard lockdown is likely to stamp out almost any disease, provided enforcement is adequate. A sufficiently horrible plague should provide all the necessary incentive.
Also, hazmat suits aren't all that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
I think the Wizards can get us through for food, water, energy and most human desires that can be accommodated through markets. Where we are headed for doom is through our massive depletion of the diversity and abundance of wildlife and ecosystems. Maybe this won't lead to our material impoverishment, but it will surely cause us to be sadder and less fulfilled than we would otherwise be. It seems to me that this is not what we would choose, we just haven't found a good way to protect global public goods. I would readily pay say 10% of my incoming to bring into being arrangements that protected biodiversity across the world, others would offer 20%, 5% or 1% and it would be enough if used well. As the reviewer points out, the Wizard and Prophet construct is least successful when applied to climate change. I would argue that it is even less useful for the related issue of biodiversity. Still an excellent book though.
"If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. "
You are confusing "we have not made things as much better as we would like them to be" with "things are getting worse." Over the past thirty years, the fraction of the world's population in extreme poverty has dropped by a factor of four. Go back a few more decades and it has fallen from a large majority of the world's population to a small minority.
In order for "economic stagnation" to drag down average utility, the growth rate of per capita real income would have to be negative. Aside from briefly due to Covid, it isn't and hasn't been.
There are problems in the modern world, but they are largely due to the prophets. The Covid vaccine took two days to develop, most of a year to get approved, because the FDA et. al. were applying standards of proof wildly excessive when the cost of delay is hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions, of lives. That wasn't the work of Wizards — as you point out in imagining Borlaug's problem facing a modern regulatory regime.
Great review. The last part helps me crystalize an idea.
'If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. I don’t think it’s from a lack of trying; I think we may have hit a carrying capacity limit on our ability to deal with complexity.'
While "engineering" and making everyone smarter could help, I think there are some easy gains to be made here. My model looks like this: rent seekers constantly infiltrate society and tries to find a safe niche to extract rent. (Rent seeking is sometimes unconscious and in good faith.) Humans seem to be biased towards rent-seekers in many context (this made sense in the ancestral environment). Rent seeking can be greatly reduced if we make decision-makers suffer the consequences of their actions. The problem with e.g. the FDA is that the organization isn't designed to get feedback on its actions. Markets and (functioning) democracy are two mechanisms to provide this feedback.
This is a bad EILI5 of rationalist-ish economists like Robin Hanson, but I thought it was missing from the discussion in the review.
This was really off-putting. (Really surprisingly, given what a great reads the other reviews so far have been.)
The whole Wizard-Prophet dichotomy is so obviously forced and misleading that I came away with an impression of two dangerous extremes. One trying to contrast itself with the other to make itself look better, but, in the end, only making itself look dishonest.
Clearly, Borlaug was a great person and we need more Borlaugs. (How few people disagree, though?) But I'm not associating Wizardry with Borlaug now, I'm associating it with irresponsible ideologues high on high modernism, who use Borlaug as a fig leaf for, eg., their absurd beliefs about inexhaustability of fossil fuels and support for harmful, wasteful scams like fracking.
I am hopeful for scientific progress, because it's demonstrated great results and potential. I also value and wish to preserve the nature, because it's demonstrably important for our livehood, a sophisticated, efficient machinery on its own, valuable and (so far, at our current level of understanding) irreplaceable in its sheer diversity of lifeforms and ecosystems. Those two beliefs are neither contradictory nor in conflict. Rather, they come from the same core values of truth ad reason, values which, I feel, conflict with any simplistic ossified heuristic, unquestioning trust or mistrust of civilization alike.
Characterizing COVID as an example of the failure of Wizardry seems completely wrong. It's an example of the failures that occur when you allow Prophets to regulate Wizards.
If we had decided to authorize vaccines after Phase 2 trials, we could have had a vaccine starting in July 2020 instead of November 2020. If we had decided to do challenge trials, we probably could have had a vaccine starting in March or April 2020. The same regulatory Prophets still haven't approved AstraZeneca or Novavax and decided to ruin public confidence in vaccines by pausing J&J because it might have caused as much damage as a single minute of the pandemic.
You can see this elsewhere too. The US could have had a majority of our electricity produced without carbon dioxide since the 1970s. Instead, we decided to make a nuclear regulatory agency that is paid based on the amount of time they spend reviewing a project.
Really glad this book was included in the review contest. It puts terms (and a lot more detail) behind concepts that I had vague thoughts about, but couldn't have expressed well. I'm very much in the "Wizard" side of things and the best way I had to describe this to date was the question "Would you rather live 500 years in the future or 500 years in the past?" to which I consider the future to be the clear correct answer. This review definitely motivated me to read it. Thanks anonymous reviewer!
A couple of minor points, and a larger one that needs further explanation:
There is a statue of Borlaug, and it's in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Congress building (sponsored by Iowa).
There is also a Hall of Laureates of the World Food Prize (a quite beautiful building) in Des Moines, Iowa. Its purpose is to honor the recipients of the annual World Food Prize, but it unavoidably has the air of a Monument to Normal Borlaug (who founded the World Food Prize).
More deeply, there was a tremendous worry about a "world population explosion" in the 1960s. In fact, it was the expectable Malthusian consequence of the various improvements in food supply (including Borlaug's) after WW II; fewer people were starving to death. But after that time, the world population growth rate started slowing. (The book "The Population Bomb" was published within a few years of the time of the peak growth rate.) What changed things appears to be urbanization. Peasant farmers have lots of children, both for the obvious biological reasons and the fact that they're profitable. (I've read that peasant children are cash-flow positive by age three and net profitable by age five. Certainly, farmers' children were valuable workers in pre-mechanization Iowa farming.) Conversely, for townspeople, children are an expense, and they tend to have a lot less of them, less than the replacement rate -- although this transition in behavior seems to take a generation or two after immigration to the city to be established.
The result of this is that the higher the ratio of townspeople to peasant farmers, the lower the possible population growth rate, and if the ratio is high enough, the population ceases growing. That ratio is the same as the number of other people a single farmer can feed, i.e., the productivity of farming.
So the increased productivity that Borlaug created stopped people from starving in the short run, but also helped to get us to the point that we are freed from being at equilibrium at the Malthusian limit.
What remains to be explained is why townspeople, after a few generations of adaptation to that environment, don't produce unlimited children due to ordinary evolutionary pressures.
You seem to be on the side of the Wizards, and the book clearly is too, but at the end you fall into doomism and mark yourself out as really wishing to be on the side of the Prophets. Systems are not getting too complex to ever hope to get things right, it is instead that we tackle ever more complex problems as our capabilities rise.
Climate change failure is a result of a lack of action rather than a lack of knowing what to do. It is a systems failure of politics only. For the most part I blame the left here, for giving in to doomism and failing to come up with a compelling (or really any) ideology that the general public could buy into.
1. There ought to be a 90 foot tall bronze statue of Normal Borlaug. Buck naked. Riding a horse or holding up a lamp to the heavens or such shit.
2. I understand that Norman Borlaug's views of Wizards vs. Prophets were more "nuanced" than are sometimes reported. He didn't believe that technology would always eventually come up with solutions (yay, Science!), that there was no limit to the number of people that the earth or the universe could practically hold, but rather, that:
a. Third World Poverty is most often romanticized by people who don't have to live it and have no real experience of it; and
In spite of being pretty Wizardy, as I suspect most commenters here are, I get a lot out of the articles from Low Tech Magazine, which has a pretty extreme Prophet-tilt: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
> Incidentally, the particular bird species Vogt was seeing decline and was so worried about, the dovekie, is currently listed as "least concern" on the conservation status scale, so I guess all that ditch-dredging and pesticide-spraying didn’t have much of a long-term impact. In his defense, though, dovekies are ridiculously cute.
I live on the east coast, and we have extremely strict conservation rules for wetlands (as well as a lot of bird conservation measures, including a number of no-humans-allowed bird sanctuaries on islands near me). Having no direct knowledge about dovekies in particular, I'd naturally interpret their current status as an indication that changes to how we treat wetlands successfully saved many species, rather than an indication that they were never in danger to begin with. After all, dumping pesticides in swamps is *currently* unthinkable and vaguely disgusting to people around here, and a lot must have changed for it to have been business as usual only a century ago.
I absolutely adore this review - but I am cautious of the Engineer archetype that people say is being missed:
"A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs."
Call me a conflict theorist, but all of these types in the modern day have reduced themselves to Prophetry or beholden to them see - people taking Greta Thunberg seriously at the UN. It's not merely that she's a climate change alarmist, she's the exact sort of "we need to adopt social controls of my design to prevent growth and human production in order to save the planet" type of alarmist that is extremely commonly Prophetic. Not only that, but if you're going to accept such activist claims - Greta Thunberg is not exactly the scion of well-argued and thought-out climate policy (consider: she left China out of her climate lawsuits).
I am not saying this is necessarily The Route of All Things, but we have empirical evidence that organizations that *allow* Prophets will eventually be run by them.
Ah! That's who Tom Lehrer was singing about in "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". I figured it probably wasn't the "Autobahn Society", I just couldn't hear it any other way.
Drip irrigation should be in wizards column, no? Also vaccines provided they continue to work against future variants are arguably the singular wizard solution to covid that we couldn't overcome otherwise due to social constraints, I'd say
GDP-energy decoupling seems historically marginal and extremely difficult, so unless nuclear fusion energy enters mass production in the next half-century, I would give Air AND Fire to the Prophets... (it only takes one to risk wrecking civilization as we know it)
I love this book and I love this review, though I don't agree with everything in either. For one thing, I suspect that both the book and the review are a little unfair to both Vogt and Borlaug.
After reading the book a couple years ago I got hold of a copy of Vogt's manifesto (Road to Survival) and was a little surprised that most of that book is devoted to concerns about food production. That doesn't seem like misanthropy to me (though I suppose it's possible that Vogt's true motivations were more misanthropic and he merely focused on food production because he thought that argument would be more palatable to readers).
Meanwhile, Borlaug was actually a strong advocate for population control. Even talked about it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
I was going to review this book but never got around to it! Glad someone did and looking forward to reading it.
Scott - why do you say that 'Everything is permitted' is misquoted by Sartre?
I always wonder how concerned to be about the degrowth arguments of the Prophets of Doom. They seem unlikely to persuade anyone who's not already wealthy, but I wouldn't put it past developed nations to try sabotaging global development or dramatically reducing global populations through war and famine - after all, you can justify any atrocity if you convince yourself that the alternative is human extinction.
"A tall, lanky Norwegian-American broiling under the Mexican sun, seeds from a dozen countries in his blistered hands, just trying to do the right damn thing."
I suppose that's the irony of the contrast - Borlaug really doing it the old-fashioned, agrarian pastoral idyll way, where you cross the strains and plant the resultant seeds and see what is going to happen, and try try again.
Now I really wonder what the book had been like if instead of Vogt, the author had picked say, Wendell Berry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry
Which would be what you would roughly get if you took Norman Borlaug and made him a Prophet instead of a Wizard
For "Air"/Climate Change, I think a key point is that nuclear power should have solved climate change decades ago, but "prophets" killed it with false concerns about radiation, meltdowns, and waste.
I'm confused/sad about why "prophet" thinking is so popular and powerful given its repeated failures. A big risk IMO is that as we make everything more legible and centralized "prophets" will take over and stifle future progress (e.g. as you say in the post, maybe Borlaug would get crushed by regulators today)
Small but important detail: crossing different strains of wheat to obtain an improved strain is not the same as GMO. Crossing is more natural in the sense that it can occur naturally by cross pollination by insects. Then humans got into the act as well. Hence the huge variety of plant cultivars available in any garden centre. GMO goes beyond this, making it even possible, for example, to insert pesticides into crop plants, which disastrously affect more insects (like bees!) than the targeted pests, and which stock and/or humans then consume. Not healthy! This type of practice has given GMO a bad name.
Mystery OP - You are finding the lack of balance in book because Mann assiduously avoids making it into a horse race where the author must, in the name of neutrality, agree that both sides have valid points.
Sometimes, it really is the case that one side revolutionizes the human experience to the point of slaying one of the horsemen of the apocalypses, and the other side is objectively pro-death.
I admit, happily, that I am not neutral on this. My father, uncles, aunt, and grandfather are all avowed wizards - civil engineers and enviro engineers. They are, or were, long haired, hippy-type, pinko (cis hetero people) (I was born in a VW van). I grew up immersed in this debate. I've heard the best arguments from both sides to the point where I could repeat them like Happy Birthday and The Apostle's Creed. One sides solution is always life, and the question is always how to make it work. One is always death, and the question is how do we convince people to embrace it.
>>... borrow from his predecessors’ racist-tinged doom-heralding and expand on it by chastising all humans, rich and poor, white and non-white alike. According to Mann, Vogt argues that "consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world’s ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity." Crucial to this is the concept of "carrying capacity" – the idea that the earth has a fixed capacity to support human and animal life.<<
>>Though Borlaug didn’t tend to wax philosophical like Vogt did, I think if he were to comment on the idea of carrying capacity, he would describe it as a fluid equilibrium that can be turned into a virtuous circle: find ways to feed more people, and their increased productivity pulls them and their countrymen out of poverty, increasing both quality of life and growth potential. The key is not to limit the number of people, but to not let the people starve and fall into ruin. To Borlaug, the earth is not a finite planet-sized fish tank, because humans aren’t fish; we can understand and engineer our way out of problems that a salmon fry can’t, and it’s our responsibility to use the tools at hand for the benefit of all.<<
Count me as a Prophet, though I would never argue against the Green Revolution or the goal of eliminating hunger.
So the Earth is an aquarium and humans can out innovate and out engineer every other species on the planet. Lots of humans, hooray! And not much of anything else.
That's not a future I applaud.
Fortunately there is a solution: fewer people. A lot fewer in fact. About a billion.
“The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth.” by Peter Rodes Robinson
https://link.medium.com/u1ILr0lUcab
“Experts not being able to talk about problems they’re solving because of security protocols” is a good description of what happened to science in the USSR. The relatively free intellectual cross-pollination that happened between fields and projects in places like Bell Labs, IAS and of course Silicon Valley was fundamental to their impact. I think creeping corporatization and Balkanization of specialties might pose their own risks to that kind of intellectual environment.
Neat review. I'm guessing the Earth will, however, run out of fossil fuels one day (even if "run out" here means "it doesn't make economic/energetic sense to extract").
I thought this was a good review, but one place I would differ from the author (not the reviewer, necessarily) is I really don't like the Manichaen oppositional framing of "Wizards" vs "Prophets"
In my view what *KIND* of Wizard and what *KIND* of Prophet you are matters as much or more than what broad camp you're in. We really DO need more advanced engineering/science and we really DO need more people willing to warn us about the cliff we're about to walk over. I think these two groupings obscures more than it illuminates.
Correct URL:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616
The thing that stands out for me is that while the Wizards are right in the short run, the Prophets will be right in the long run. The real question is the time-scale involved.
The Wizards’ insistence that there will always be a way to delay the inevitable is as much a fallacy as the Prophets’ insistence that THIS time is the Big One(tm). I see your Zeno’s Paradox and raise you Jevon’s Paradox: greater efficiency leads to greater overall consumption.
The real limit on consumption is price: as it costs more to consume, whether because of resource scarcity or pollution, people will consume less. The one upside is that between improved technology and reduction of the externalities from consumption, we might still end up ahead in terms of overall well-being from where we were in the past.
I am mostly in the wizard camp. But it is troubling for the wizard ethos that birth rates are falling voluntarily worldwide, and the main driver of this is education. Education and voluntary choices are not bad things. There is something to the prophets' argument, as long as people choose it willingly, and for themselves.
I think it's worth noting that when it comes to global warming, there are policy approaches that could be considered "Wizard vs Prophet neutral" -- like, impose CO2 taxes, and then to what extent doing so results in Wizardry vs to what extent it results in Prophecy (?) is up to the market!
Interesting to hear the conflict between total and average utilitarianism in this context. The classic objection to total utilitarianism is the Repugnant Conclusion, which is a very Malthusian Argument - if population growth continues as total utilitarians would encourage, eventually we'll reach the point at which everyone has lives barely worth living due to resource constraints.
Of course, average utilitarianism has it's own repugnant conclusions, for example the idea that you can make the world a better place by eliminating people with below average welfare.
I lean towards the total view since I stubbornly insist that life is worth living, but I'm personally of the opinion that people should have the number of children they want to have - the lazy preference utilitarian solution! Declining birth-rates suggest that overpopulation is not really worth worrying about, and I'm optimistic that we'll eventually invent our way out of our current environmental problems.
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
I disagree strongly. Could we have done better? Yes. But plagues have been a problem for humanity for all of known history, and for all of known history we really only had one way of solving it: hunker down and wait for it to pass. Let it kill all the people it was going to kill, and then the survivors can move on. The Spanish Flu happened just 100 years ago, a blink of an eye historically, and we did basically the same thing. We tried to help people with medicine, which did some good, but mostly we just waited it out, all three waves of it, just like humanity has done with every plague in history. They came up with a vaccine, which failed miserably because we still didn't know what we were doing. I want to make that clear: the best minds we had worked on solving the problem, huge amounts of money and resources were diverted to creating and distributing a vaccine, and the vaccine just plain didn't work because we had identified the wrong pathogen as the culprit. And so about 50,000,000 die wordwide. What could you do?
COVID-19 is arguably the first plague we have faced where we actually have the tools and knowledge to do something about it. And it will probably be the first worldwide plague to be stopped not by waiting it out but by vaccinating: in other words, because we did something about it. Could we have done it faster, and better? Yes, definitely. 100%. But it's still a remarkable achievement and I can't see it as anything other than a slam dunk win for the Wizards.
We are a learning species, and while we didn't do as good as we could we did much better than we have previously in terms of saving lives. And I think we'll do much better for the next plague, because the Wizards of their day will be able to look back on the mistakes we made this time around.
I'm not sure about this alleged revealed preference for maximising *total* utility. It seems to me that the default position people instinctively default to is "maximise the total utility among people *already living*", while resolutely not taking potential future people into account. Else, you end up in Repugnant Conclusion territory.
This is distinct both from Vogt's position (where decreasing the population is an acceptable way to increase the average utility) and from what you allege to be the default position (where increasing the population is a desirable way to increase the total utility), and I think is necessary to avoid reaching weird, counterfactual results like the Repugnant Conclusion. The number of actually, objectively living minds who can experience happiness or not should be taken as a given; it is not a variable to be itself fiddled with in either direction.
I really should go eat lunch and get back to work, but thank you for this review. I've meant to read this book for a while now and this has pushed me to do so. I consider myself in the Prophet camp, just because it's much harder to engineer the technology of how we humies organize ourselves compared to the technology of how we make useful things from nature's resources, but I've always admired Borlaug ever since I learned of him. I hope humanity can find a way to break the back of Jevons Paradox so that the advances in efficiency that people like him have created or discovered can redound to our common benefit, instead of simply speeding up the treadmill another notch.
I don't see a mention of biodiversity loss, or of the loss of habitat for a wide range of wildlife. The rapid increase in human population and living standards are leading to increasing amounts of the planet being used for agriculture (or other human uses), which in turn is causing an increasing number of extinctions. Currently, wizards don't seem to be averting this problem, and once an existing biome or species is lost, it is pretty much unrecoverable. (There may be edge cases where recovery is possible but not on the scale that extinction is happening).
This may be a matter of what people value. Some people value "nature" (for want of a better word) and want to preserve it. Others see it primarily as a source of raw materials for human wealth. Most people who I know do value "nature", even if they are wizards; but wizards don't get to make the rules about what is valued by humanity as a whole, and currently humanity as a whole clearly puts more value on using land for our own benefit than on preserving the existing biodiversity.
On reading the review, I'm sceptical about the framing of the book - why choose these positions? Why choose these representatives of those positions?
I recall Mann doing a pretty good ob of presenting the Prophet argument. I am also biased towards the Wizardry approach, but I remember coming out of the book thinking it was more reasonable than before. For example, there might be ways to consume less without greatly reducing our quality of life, but getting there is a behavioral issue. Getting people to no longer think of huge lawns and car-dependent suburbs as being the only way to raise a family is not primarily a technical problem; it's largely one of attitude.
I'll feast in the watery halls of Valhalla with Vogt when the hubris of Wizard types inevitably dooms the world and sends the majority of humankind, pest of the world, to the afterlife. Then I'll know the ecosystems will evolve and keep living after getting rid of us.
Just as an organism is rationally more valuable than a single cell within it or a certain species of bacteria in its gut fauna, an ecosystem is more valuable then any individual animal or any single species. Thus trying to keep as many human beings alive as possible is as meaningless as trying to keep as many pandas alive as possible without them being a part of an ecosystem but a panda breeding institute or whatever.
Although I know this isn't a very popular kind of thought here, trying to explain this brought me an insta-ban from the dc server :)
I find the argument "America’s Next Top Model makes fun of it" an unconvincing way of doing cost-benefit analysis of organic farming. I'm not a farmer myself (my garden is definitely a hobby, meaning that on net it's a money sink), nor a student of agriculture; my current beliefs around this are strongly influenced by reading Drawdown (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143130447). The impression I got from it was that artificial fertilizer did in fact have the potential to destroy soil ecosystems (not necessarily everywhere), and that effective organic alternatives existed that harnessed increased understanding of said soil ecosystems. (Again, not necessarily everywhere. For the purposes of Drawdown it is sufficient that the following claim be true: "in some not-exceptionally-rare circumstances, organic techniques will be both more productive than synthetic fertilizer and more effective at carbon sequestration.") The book presents this as an increase in our understanding of soil ecosystem, so insofar as any basic science is Wizardry this might still be in camp Wizard, but it doesn't escape the derisory label of "organic". Can someone more knowledgeable comment on this?
>C4 photosynthesis (a more efficient way for plants to distinguish between hydrogen and carbon dioxide, requiring less water and nitrogen for the same yield).
"Hydrogen" in the above sentence should actually be "oxygen". But yes, the C4 rice project is very cool!
Also, a fun note: I once took a class in Borlaug Hall at the University of Minnesota.
If Vogt's life began in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, then he would have been mighty old by the time he connected with the nascent environmental movement in the 1930s. Actually he was born in 1902, so you mean "turn of the 20th century."
Nuclear power is "dirty"? Actually, it is probably the cleanest source known to man, and is/should be getting cleaner.
The right classic companion book to read to this is John McPhee, "Encounters with the Archdruid."
Also, I am 60% confident that this is the review Scott was 60% confident would win when he made his predictions. Which is of course not the same as saying *I* am 60% (or for that matter 36%) confident that it will win!
>Each of today’s systems is more like Chesterton’s Maze of Forking Paths, where pulling out a brick here (say, trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution) leads to a catastrophic tunnel collapse there (more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save).
I don't think this counts as a failure of Wizards due to complexity. If I remember correctly, people like Zvi and even *Matt Yglesias* were predicting that trying for "equity" would be worse for everyone than simple distribution based on something like age or whether you were near the clinic when vaccines started expiring. The CDC wasn't actually optimizing to distribute vaccines such that all people reaped the most benefits distributed fairly; they were optimizing to *look like* they were distributing vaccines equitably; and that's why they failed.
I think the major takeaway from the government's mismanagement of covid wasn't that increasing complexity is too hard for Wizards. It's that increasing complexity is too hard for *governments*.
I find it more than a little weird if this book (written in 2019 according to Amazon), or at least the reviewer, never mentions the importance of the global demographic transition for the likely future fate of humankind. It is highly relevant if one wants to estimate the odds of the Wizards versus Prophets scenario.
The global demographic transition is the tendency that ferility is falling everywhere (following in the footsteps of the global fall in mortality). More than 70 of the 193 countries in the world are already below 2.1 children per woman. Including Nepal, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Tunis, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, and of course the whole of Europe - if official statistics, and gapminder.org, can be approximately trusted:
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$bubble$encoding$y$data$concept=children_per_woman_total_fertility&space@=country&=time;;&scale$domain:null&zoomed:null;;;;;;&chart-type=bubbles&url=v1
..moreover, the tendency is downward everywhere. In the last decades fertility reduction has been particularly dramatic in the Middle East and India.
Apart from Afghanistan, Tadjikistan and sub-Saharan Africa, the world is fast approaching below-reproduction levels everywhere (and even in these countries, fertility is falling).
This bodes well for humankind, since it increases the odds that we can maintain or increase per capita consumption levels without risking an all-out banana-flies-in-the-bottle scenario.
The go-to book in this regard is Tim Dyson (2010): "Population and Development: The Demographic Transition". Dyson's book is a bit old by now (there are newer books and a ton of articles), but it still provides the most comprehensive discussion of the economic, social and cultural changes that take place in the wake of the transition. Despite its excruciatingly boring title (which has prevented a wide readership), this book is on par with Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel in its scope.
Granted, this may seem peripheral to the theme in the book being review'ed here; but any discussion of the likely future of the world (will we crash or will we be fine) that neglects to discuss the demographic transition, misses the main engine driving global changes - including environmental changes.
). This suggests that the Malthusian problem will take care of itself.
"It wasn’t just red states or populist leaders or microchip truthers that were guilty; everyone in every country, state, and Holy See didn’t adopt masks, close the borders, roll out tests, or vaccinate quickly and effectively enough, and the blood of 2 million people and counting (not to mention the global loss of jobs, social activities, educational quality, and basic human connection) is on our hands."
Can anyone point me to a fair examination of the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of masking to prevent covid? Most of what I see is either observations based on arbitrary-endpoint graphs (e.g. "as you can see, cases increased/decreased after [country or state] started/ended its masks mandate!") or arguments based on anecdote or arguments based on lack of RCT confirmation of effectiveness. None of these is particularly satisfying.....
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
The Wizards did roll up their sleeves and create solutions to the problem. Then the Bureaucrats walked into the room, threw half their projects in the garbage and locked the other half away for a year. Finally, we all collectively looked at what the Bureaucrats had done and decided that not only were we not going to hang them, we would let them keep their jobs.
Don't blame the Wizards man, they did their part, and it could have been enough.
I recently read this as well. The passage that stuck in my mind (which I can’t find at the moment) was about the effects of the green revolution in India - in states where land ownership was highly concentrated, the green revolution boosted yields for landlords and led to mass evictions and migration to urban slums, whereas in states where, for historical reasons land ownership was more evenly distributed, the high yielding varieties boosted incomes for subsistence farmers. Though I am typically wizard-sympathetic, I think the profound interaction between technology and politics/power tends to be a blind spot in wizard thinking. Recent farmer protests in India show the legacy of the green revolution is hardly settled. I think the land issue here also ties in nicely to the Henry George review.
One (probably unconscious) sleight of hand that happens in the "Wizards have managed to provide enough food and water for increasing populations" arguments is an "any edible food == any edible food" equivalence. Something I've come to realize more and more is that in order to be able to provide for larger and larger populations, we've had to push the land (and water sources) to its limits, and that has clear significant effects on the quality of the product. Replacing two nourishing juicy carrots that taste great, with six just-about-edible ones that managed to grow in poor soil optimized to look good on the shelf, is treated blindly as a threefold increase in food production with no concern for the value lost in other ways.
More food to prevent hunger is certainly good, but at some point the loss in quality becomes significant enough to also be an important factor - at least enough to start considering, are seven lives lived at 65% well-being more desirable than four lives lived with 90% well-being? This blindness to quality and richness and long-term consequences seems pervasive among Wizardkind - and experiencing and understanding this loss has moved me from being largely on the Wizard side to a slight preference for the Prophetic position.
This was great and I really appreciate the reevaluation of the central conflict between Wizard and Prophet that the reviewer went through as a result of COVID-19 and the fallout over the last year. Even so... I wonder if this is because it's a topic I know a fair bit about already, maybe I'm less enthused about reading about it. The Galen biography and Georgism analysis, OTOH, were almost totally novel for me, at least what I thought I knew turned out to be a lot less than I actually did when the original texts were illuminated.
I'm going to break the tie in my personal rankings at last because over the last few weeks I've occasionally thought 'By George!' and it's made me chuckle. I don't know if the voting system is decided yet but I'd like to cast my vote for some sort of ranked choice. Personally, I'd be satisfied if any of the top 5 (so far) we're winners. And no shade on Order Without Law or Why Buddhism is True, I just didn't connect with the topic and/or reviewer's style as much as the others.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd The Wizard and the Prophet
4th Double Fold
5th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
6th Order Without Law
7th Why Buddhism is True
My conclusion from the COVID charley-foxtrot is that the Prophets, so to speak, are utterly useless. They may be 100% right on the ultimate root or our problems -- our social psychological nature, and our habits of social intercourse -- but the historical evidence is that these things are 100% proof against any lasting change brought about by the direst social force, let alone such sunny mild methods as rational persuasion.
If there's a particle of difference between the attitudes and inclinations of the 21st century American Facebooker during COVID and the 14th century English peasant when the Black Death arrived, I have yet to see it. The main reason we haven't gotten to the point of putting all the cats or Jews to the stake as a burnt offering, or dosing ourselves with mercury, garlic, and/or leeches, is because our Wizards managed to produce a magic potion (vaccine) in jig time (and secondarily because COVID isn't anywhere near the lethality of Y. pestis).
Wizardy can't solve all our problems, without doubt. But maybe it can solve all the problems that actually have solutions accessible to human beings. Perhaps the remaining problems are as intractable to us as the problem of the killer asteroid was to the dinosaurs.
In the end, though, isn't the influence of militarists and politicians more important than either?
You know, Fighters and Thieves. ;)
"To a greater or lesser degree, I believe in some of these things (except socialism… sorry, guys)."
Any actual reason here?
This whole review is premised on the idea that what we care about is human beings, but much of what the Prophets are worried about is the natural world which is totally overlooked.
You think the fish are fine? Are the rainforests fine? Even the insects might be suffering catastrophic declines right now.
If all you care about is human well being sure, the Wizards look alright. But if you expand your scope to the natural world it is clear something is very very wrong, has been for a long time, and we are not fixing it.
Brief review-of-the-review:
This seems like the most political, ingroup-y review so far-- not necessarily a bad thing but not my preference. I lean toward the Wizard outlook as well but I don't feel the review effectively steelmans Prophets; one can point out that innovation faces increasing (x-)risks and diminishing returns while consumption and population tend to quickly absorb the new production. Despite its obvious sympathies and some tangents toward the end, though, the review was effective at presenting the book's arguments and major claims, so props for that.
The "complex" diagram is too low res to tell what it is, is there a link to a larger version?
Tangential, but I also have a tattoo of the muted post horn from Crying of Lot 49. I didn’t realize when I got it there are tons of other people with the same idea, and we together make up a kind of secret society who speak to each other in code, similar to the one in the book that the symbol represents.
Contra the reviewer Borlaug also believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
I Borlaug believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
Borlaug is a much more eminent figure than Vogt in their respective movements, so this book is also a real profile raiser for Vogt. Iowans would put Borlaug on the currency. Environmentalists would put Carson and Muir, not Vogt, on their Mount Rushmore.
"Each of these contain multitudes of factors that no single human on earth, not even the Normanest of Borlaugs, could keep straight in his or her head and 'fix' with a single quick hack like a better strain of wheat."
I think it's worth emphasizing over and over again that Ugur Sahin, Hamilton Bennett, and all the others did do basically this for the coronavirus itself. With the accumulated effort and science of decades behind them, we got two extremely effective extremely safe vaccines in mid-January 2020. For both the BioNTech and Moderna teams, it only took a couple days. As the CEO of Moderna said, "this is not a complicated virus" — at least, not for Wizards like them.
Production and distribution, meanwhile, were mainly just limited by money. (When something has positive externalities, by default in a free market the creators don't make enough profit and not enough of the thing gets produced.)
The hard part, the part the actually took so long and is related to the increased complexity of the modern world and its modern problems, was getting approval from the FDA, EMA, etc. (Note that *testing the safety and efficacy* isn't the hard part; the regulatory agencies just don't happen to like the fastest ways to test safety and efficacy. It's specifically getting the approval.)
____
(Also, formatting note, the "everything is permitted" link is broken and should point to https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616 instead.)
Errr... humankind is not going to get wiped out by COVID-22 or whatever, and this pandemic proves it. Governments will just lock down, or force everyone to take tests all the time, or force everyone to wear hazmat suits all the time to keep food production and distribution going.
A Chinese-style four-week hard lockdown is likely to stamp out almost any disease, provided enforcement is adequate. A sufficiently horrible plague should provide all the necessary incentive.
Also, hazmat suits aren't all that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
I think the Wizards can get us through for food, water, energy and most human desires that can be accommodated through markets. Where we are headed for doom is through our massive depletion of the diversity and abundance of wildlife and ecosystems. Maybe this won't lead to our material impoverishment, but it will surely cause us to be sadder and less fulfilled than we would otherwise be. It seems to me that this is not what we would choose, we just haven't found a good way to protect global public goods. I would readily pay say 10% of my incoming to bring into being arrangements that protected biodiversity across the world, others would offer 20%, 5% or 1% and it would be enough if used well. As the reviewer points out, the Wizard and Prophet construct is least successful when applied to climate change. I would argue that it is even less useful for the related issue of biodiversity. Still an excellent book though.
"If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. "
You are confusing "we have not made things as much better as we would like them to be" with "things are getting worse." Over the past thirty years, the fraction of the world's population in extreme poverty has dropped by a factor of four. Go back a few more decades and it has fallen from a large majority of the world's population to a small minority.
In order for "economic stagnation" to drag down average utility, the growth rate of per capita real income would have to be negative. Aside from briefly due to Covid, it isn't and hasn't been.
There are problems in the modern world, but they are largely due to the prophets. The Covid vaccine took two days to develop, most of a year to get approved, because the FDA et. al. were applying standards of proof wildly excessive when the cost of delay is hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions, of lives. That wasn't the work of Wizards — as you point out in imagining Borlaug's problem facing a modern regulatory regime.
Great review. The last part helps me crystalize an idea.
'If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. I don’t think it’s from a lack of trying; I think we may have hit a carrying capacity limit on our ability to deal with complexity.'
While "engineering" and making everyone smarter could help, I think there are some easy gains to be made here. My model looks like this: rent seekers constantly infiltrate society and tries to find a safe niche to extract rent. (Rent seeking is sometimes unconscious and in good faith.) Humans seem to be biased towards rent-seekers in many context (this made sense in the ancestral environment). Rent seeking can be greatly reduced if we make decision-makers suffer the consequences of their actions. The problem with e.g. the FDA is that the organization isn't designed to get feedback on its actions. Markets and (functioning) democracy are two mechanisms to provide this feedback.
This is a bad EILI5 of rationalist-ish economists like Robin Hanson, but I thought it was missing from the discussion in the review.
This was really off-putting. (Really surprisingly, given what a great reads the other reviews so far have been.)
The whole Wizard-Prophet dichotomy is so obviously forced and misleading that I came away with an impression of two dangerous extremes. One trying to contrast itself with the other to make itself look better, but, in the end, only making itself look dishonest.
Clearly, Borlaug was a great person and we need more Borlaugs. (How few people disagree, though?) But I'm not associating Wizardry with Borlaug now, I'm associating it with irresponsible ideologues high on high modernism, who use Borlaug as a fig leaf for, eg., their absurd beliefs about inexhaustability of fossil fuels and support for harmful, wasteful scams like fracking.
I am hopeful for scientific progress, because it's demonstrated great results and potential. I also value and wish to preserve the nature, because it's demonstrably important for our livehood, a sophisticated, efficient machinery on its own, valuable and (so far, at our current level of understanding) irreplaceable in its sheer diversity of lifeforms and ecosystems. Those two beliefs are neither contradictory nor in conflict. Rather, they come from the same core values of truth ad reason, values which, I feel, conflict with any simplistic ossified heuristic, unquestioning trust or mistrust of civilization alike.
Characterizing COVID as an example of the failure of Wizardry seems completely wrong. It's an example of the failures that occur when you allow Prophets to regulate Wizards.
If we had decided to authorize vaccines after Phase 2 trials, we could have had a vaccine starting in July 2020 instead of November 2020. If we had decided to do challenge trials, we probably could have had a vaccine starting in March or April 2020. The same regulatory Prophets still haven't approved AstraZeneca or Novavax and decided to ruin public confidence in vaccines by pausing J&J because it might have caused as much damage as a single minute of the pandemic.
You can see this elsewhere too. The US could have had a majority of our electricity produced without carbon dioxide since the 1970s. Instead, we decided to make a nuclear regulatory agency that is paid based on the amount of time they spend reviewing a project.
Wizardry doesn't work if the Prophets forbid it.
Really glad this book was included in the review contest. It puts terms (and a lot more detail) behind concepts that I had vague thoughts about, but couldn't have expressed well. I'm very much in the "Wizard" side of things and the best way I had to describe this to date was the question "Would you rather live 500 years in the future or 500 years in the past?" to which I consider the future to be the clear correct answer. This review definitely motivated me to read it. Thanks anonymous reviewer!
A couple of minor points, and a larger one that needs further explanation:
There is a statue of Borlaug, and it's in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Congress building (sponsored by Iowa).
There is also a Hall of Laureates of the World Food Prize (a quite beautiful building) in Des Moines, Iowa. Its purpose is to honor the recipients of the annual World Food Prize, but it unavoidably has the air of a Monument to Normal Borlaug (who founded the World Food Prize).
More deeply, there was a tremendous worry about a "world population explosion" in the 1960s. In fact, it was the expectable Malthusian consequence of the various improvements in food supply (including Borlaug's) after WW II; fewer people were starving to death. But after that time, the world population growth rate started slowing. (The book "The Population Bomb" was published within a few years of the time of the peak growth rate.) What changed things appears to be urbanization. Peasant farmers have lots of children, both for the obvious biological reasons and the fact that they're profitable. (I've read that peasant children are cash-flow positive by age three and net profitable by age five. Certainly, farmers' children were valuable workers in pre-mechanization Iowa farming.) Conversely, for townspeople, children are an expense, and they tend to have a lot less of them, less than the replacement rate -- although this transition in behavior seems to take a generation or two after immigration to the city to be established.
The result of this is that the higher the ratio of townspeople to peasant farmers, the lower the possible population growth rate, and if the ratio is high enough, the population ceases growing. That ratio is the same as the number of other people a single farmer can feed, i.e., the productivity of farming.
So the increased productivity that Borlaug created stopped people from starving in the short run, but also helped to get us to the point that we are freed from being at equilibrium at the Malthusian limit.
What remains to be explained is why townspeople, after a few generations of adaptation to that environment, don't produce unlimited children due to ordinary evolutionary pressures.
Norman Borlaug was the greatest man of the 20th century, and it ain't even close.
Clearly the worst book review so far.
You seem to be on the side of the Wizards, and the book clearly is too, but at the end you fall into doomism and mark yourself out as really wishing to be on the side of the Prophets. Systems are not getting too complex to ever hope to get things right, it is instead that we tackle ever more complex problems as our capabilities rise.
Climate change failure is a result of a lack of action rather than a lack of knowing what to do. It is a systems failure of politics only. For the most part I blame the left here, for giving in to doomism and failing to come up with a compelling (or really any) ideology that the general public could buy into.
1. There ought to be a 90 foot tall bronze statue of Normal Borlaug. Buck naked. Riding a horse or holding up a lamp to the heavens or such shit.
2. I understand that Norman Borlaug's views of Wizards vs. Prophets were more "nuanced" than are sometimes reported. He didn't believe that technology would always eventually come up with solutions (yay, Science!), that there was no limit to the number of people that the earth or the universe could practically hold, but rather, that:
a. Third World Poverty is most often romanticized by people who don't have to live it and have no real experience of it; and
b. Technology buys humanity time.
In spite of being pretty Wizardy, as I suspect most commenters here are, I get a lot out of the articles from Low Tech Magazine, which has a pretty extreme Prophet-tilt: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
> Incidentally, the particular bird species Vogt was seeing decline and was so worried about, the dovekie, is currently listed as "least concern" on the conservation status scale, so I guess all that ditch-dredging and pesticide-spraying didn’t have much of a long-term impact. In his defense, though, dovekies are ridiculously cute.
I live on the east coast, and we have extremely strict conservation rules for wetlands (as well as a lot of bird conservation measures, including a number of no-humans-allowed bird sanctuaries on islands near me). Having no direct knowledge about dovekies in particular, I'd naturally interpret their current status as an indication that changes to how we treat wetlands successfully saved many species, rather than an indication that they were never in danger to begin with. After all, dumping pesticides in swamps is *currently* unthinkable and vaguely disgusting to people around here, and a lot must have changed for it to have been business as usual only a century ago.
I absolutely adore this review - but I am cautious of the Engineer archetype that people say is being missed:
"A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs."
Call me a conflict theorist, but all of these types in the modern day have reduced themselves to Prophetry or beholden to them see - people taking Greta Thunberg seriously at the UN. It's not merely that she's a climate change alarmist, she's the exact sort of "we need to adopt social controls of my design to prevent growth and human production in order to save the planet" type of alarmist that is extremely commonly Prophetic. Not only that, but if you're going to accept such activist claims - Greta Thunberg is not exactly the scion of well-argued and thought-out climate policy (consider: she left China out of her climate lawsuits).
I am not saying this is necessarily The Route of All Things, but we have empirical evidence that organizations that *allow* Prophets will eventually be run by them.
> Audubon Society
Ah! That's who Tom Lehrer was singing about in "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". I figured it probably wasn't the "Autobahn Society", I just couldn't hear it any other way.
Penn and Teller once declared Norman Borlaug to be the greatest human being that ever lived.
https://youtu.be/9RD2Gigny8I
Drip irrigation should be in wizards column, no? Also vaccines provided they continue to work against future variants are arguably the singular wizard solution to covid that we couldn't overcome otherwise due to social constraints, I'd say
Prophets of the past were unable to predict how far the planet's ressources could be stretched.
Still, there is a finite pool of resources, and as we draw further into it it takes more and more energy to extract the oil.
The Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of oil has gone down from >100 pre-1940 to 23 in the 1970s and 8 in 2005 (http://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2004.05.023)
GDP-energy decoupling seems historically marginal and extremely difficult, so unless nuclear fusion energy enters mass production in the next half-century, I would give Air AND Fire to the Prophets... (it only takes one to risk wrecking civilization as we know it)
I love this book and I love this review, though I don't agree with everything in either. For one thing, I suspect that both the book and the review are a little unfair to both Vogt and Borlaug.
After reading the book a couple years ago I got hold of a copy of Vogt's manifesto (Road to Survival) and was a little surprised that most of that book is devoted to concerns about food production. That doesn't seem like misanthropy to me (though I suppose it's possible that Vogt's true motivations were more misanthropic and he merely focused on food production because he thought that argument would be more palatable to readers).
Meanwhile, Borlaug was actually a strong advocate for population control. Even talked about it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.