A Diamond in a rut

Joel Schwartz offers his take on Jared Diamond and his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

The book's thesis is that societies -- such as the Maya, Easter Islanders, Vikings in Greenland, and many more -- collapse when they squander and/or despoil their environmental resources, ignore signals of upcoming disaster, and overpopulate their lands. He uses these past societies as analogies to what he believes is a high risk that modern societies will soon collapse as well.

Not only is there a "high risk", he seem to believe we're headed toward collapse unless we mend our ways.

...continued in full post...

How realistic is this fear?

Diamond has been criticized for failing to account for the role of institutions such as property rights, market exchange, and the rule of law. These institutions force people to consider the effects of their decisions on other people and others' property and to pursue the interests of others at the same time they pursue their own interests.

So does Diamond really fail to consider these mechanisms?

a questioner asked Diamond for his thoughts on whether market prices protect modern societies from overrunning their resources, since these prices let everyone know when various products are abundant or scarce. Diamond responded that free markets work in some situations, but fail in others. As examples of the failure of free markets, he pointed to overfishing of the world's oceans, and the complete clear-cutting of Easter Island's forests by its Polynesian inhabitants. What Diamond calls a free market is actually the tragedy of the commons -- the state of affairs that results from common ownership of resources and absence of price signals -- exactly the opposite of a free market. A free market requires well-defined, freely exchangeable, and enforceable private property rights. Diamond casually discounts free markets, but doesn't seem to understand what a market is, or to be aware that it is the absence of free markets that causes much of the environmental degradation he laments. Indeed, the creation of free markets in fishing rights is beginning to address overfishing problems around the world. During his talk, Diamond asked "what was the Easter Islander thinking as he cut down the last tree?" He provided a few potential answers given by students in his classes at UCLA: * It's my property and I'll do what I want with it. * Don't worry; new technologies will come along to replace wood. * This proposed ban on logging is premature -- we need more research. This is as deep as Diamond went in his economic analysis, and was also indicative of his style of argumentation. He brought facts and reason, the discourse of science, to bear when discussing his favored explanations for societal collapse, but resorted to ridicule and caricature to preempt reasoned discussion of alternatives that don't fit into his incomplete paradigm.

Hmmm... Where have we seen that before? In offering his parody, Diamond appears to believe that there is no reasonable free market position an Easter Islander could have taken. Is the question as disposed of as he seems to believe?

The question still remains: what was that Easter Islander thinking when he cut down the last tree? Here's my guess: "If only we had well-defined property rights instead of common ownership, and if only we had the rule of law instead of the law of the jungle. Then we would have avoided the tragedy of the commons that's forced me to cut down this tree before the next guy gets it. We would be trading among ourselves and with other tribes, instead of fighting each other for control of an ever-shrinking resource base. We would have created new technologies that would allow us to make more stuff from a given amount of resources, transform formerly useless materials into new resources, and create substitutes for resources that become scarce. And we would have supplanted wood with better and cheaper materials a long time ago."