Mangled Message of a Misleading Missive

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, book summaries

You may know that Elon Musk, for one, publicly promotes increasing the world's population more rapidly. He claims it is the key to increased global prosperity. I recently read a review of a book that elaborates on the idea: Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley, published in 2022. I looked for the e-book, and found only a summary by Alexander Cooper, so I bought that, hoping it would be a useful condensed version.

The Summary is 39 pages, three of which detail the credentials of Messrs. Tupy and Pooley. The print book is 580 pages. I was far from impressed. A big problem with reviewing a summary: To whom do I attribute issues? Does it appear that the summarizer fairly expressed the authors' concepts and arguments?

The Summary has 5 chapters—I am sure the book has dozens, perhaps in 5 sections—and Chapters 4 and 5 deal with "The Tupy-Pooley Framework", a mathematical treatment for forecasting the progress of prosperity (or its opposite). I got that far into it before I realized that the text was generated, automatically summarized, and at best lightly edited. Perhaps Mr. Cooper used a LLM-based product such as Quillbot or Scribbr, or any of a dozen or so spinoffs of ChatGPT. I have used older tools such as Copernic Summarizer and the summarizer built into Microsoft Word. These in particular have the virtue of gathering key sentences and phrases without revision. 

The new LLM-based summarizers try to extract meaning and concept information and rewrite most of the sentences. That can be OK for summarizing narrative text, but it fails spectacularly to correctly interpret mathematical statements expressed in words. 

I found by experience that useful summaries such as by Copernic need to be 15% to 30% the length of the original text. This summary is 6.7%, which I think is quite inadequate. Cliffs Notes versions of books run in the 12%-15% range, and they are written by skilled humans.

The T-P Framework (I'll avoid the obvious pun, because the original may not be all that bad) uses 13 equations in the areas of Personal Resource Abundance, Population Resource Abundance, and Flexibility. The authors had to invent a bunch of terminology, or repurpose economics terminology, to do this. When I began to read it, every "equation" (they should have used actual equations) had some kind of blunder, even putting "times" for "divided by" or stringing together terms without the operators. The summarizing software ignored + – × and ÷ or /, pretty consistently. I can lay the blame for this squarely on Mr. Cooper, who should have at least proofread the text. Evidently not.

Almost anyone will be able to handle the first factor of the 13, the Time Cost. It goes like this: about a century ago, during the depression, a can of beans may have cost a nickel, and a loaf of bread 7-10 cents. Similarly, in the 1950's I remember buying gasoline for 25¢/gallon. So today, the can of beans may be a dollar or two, and bread ranges from $2.50 to $4.00, while we're paying $3.50 (where I live) to twice that in parts of California for a gallon of gas. But how long did it take an "ordinary person" (I haven't met one yet!) to earn the money for the purchase? The authors wrote of banana prices. 

• Scenario 1: Bananas cost 50¢/lb (that's about 4 bananas, so they're 12½¢ each), and you earn $10 per hour. So you need to work 3 minutes, or 1/20th of an hour, to pay for the bananas. 
• Scenario 2: Prices have risen, but so has your pay. Bananas are now 60¢/lb, but your pay has risen to $18/hr. That works out to 2 minutes, or 1/30th of an hour. So although the dollar cost of bananas is higher, the Time Cost to you is lower.

They never mention that some people's pay didn't rise that much. Bananas are currently 29¢ each, or about $1.16/lb, at Trader Joe's. Someone making the new minimum wage in many states earns $15/hr, and their Time Cost for bananas is about 4.6 minutes. Five years ago we got bananas for 15¢, or 60¢/lb, and in most states minimum wage was $7.25. Time Cost for bananas was just under 5 minutes. So this figure has improved just a bit. But in that same period, the cost of a Big Mac almost tripled, and people who were already making more than minimum wage didn't see even a doubling of their pay, so the time cost of most commodities has increased. People in America, at least, are nearly all less prosperous than they were in 2018 or 2019.

I also take issue with that word pair in the title, "infinitely bountiful". Authors, no matter how much you want to hype your message, don't go that far! Presently, humans make up about 1/9000th of the total biosphere, most of which is plants. If a near-miraculous technology allowed us to increase population so that humans made up 5% of the biosphere, and all else was plants, that would be a 7,500-fold increase in the number of humans, from 8 billion to 60 trillion. Neither Elon Musk nor the authors of Superabundance nail down an ideal growth rate, but others have proposed 1% to 2% per year. With those as sideboards, how long will it take to fill the earth? I won't put the equation here; it's not hard to look up. The results:

• At a 2% rate of increase, it would take 451 years.
• At a 1% rate of increase, it would take 897 years.

That's all. Not all that infinite. Furthermore, the land area of Earth is 148 million km². Divide by 60 trillion, and you get about 405,000 persons per square km, with each one having 2.47 square meters to move around in. Would you like to live there? A twin size bed takes up 1.55 m². Obviously, to leave about half the land area for agriculture, the rest would need to be a solid mass of high-rise apartment structures at least 20 stories high, so each person has 24.7 m² of living space, about the size of an Independent Living unit in which many seniors live. Read Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner or Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov for portrayals of living situations that are less odious than that, but not by much.

Just call me "Malthus on steroids". 

Finally, the authors make much of the notion that a larger population will mean there are more bright people in total, with more bright ideas. That can't be taken too far. For bright minds to get new ideas they need to be educated. History shows that the more educated people are, the fewer children they raise. It is expensive and hard work to raise a child to be a useful citizen. Education helps a person understand just how costly and just how hard. And when the educational system starts going downhill, as it has been in America for 50+ years, the young people learn enough to understand the downside of raising big families, without learning the skills they'd need to do it well. This is why in many countries half the members of the Y and Z generation doesn't even date any more, and the numbers who either marry or cohabit is dropping. Not worth it, they think. They look at the society that Left is creating in more and more nations, and they don't want to have progeny who live in the society they expect.

I may get the full book, but considering that I disagree with the authors' premises, at the moment I don't consider it would be time well spent. But for sure, don't bother with the Summary. It's too badly done to be worth much. You're welcome.