Prior Editions: Ed.1 May 2008 //

[1] ~ Degradation, Losses, Sustainabilities and Photosynthetic Limits of the Earth's Productive Land-, Marine- and Freshwater Systems ~
[1-A] ~ Degradation and Losses of Productive Land-, Marine-, and Freshwater Systems ~
[1-B] ~ Sustainabilities of Productive Land-, Marine- and Freshwater Systems ~
[1-C] ~ Human Co-Option of Net Primary Production - The Photosynthetic Limits to Global Carrying Capacity ~
[1-D] ~ The Food Crisis - Some Solutions for a World with Fewer Options for Satisfying Increasing Demands ~
[1-E] ~ Terra Preta - An Inexpensive, if not Profitable, Solution to the Problems of Global Warming and Developing World Hunger ~

[2] ~ Family Planning, Contraception, Population Growth and Armed Conflict - The Linkages and Trends ~
[2-A] ~ The Controversy over U.S. Support for International Family Planning ~
[2-B] ~ The Muslim World's Changing Views Toward Family Planning and Contraception ~
[2-C] ~ Quinacrine Sterilization: The Controversy and the Potential ~
[2-D] ~ Could Family Planning Cure Terrorism? ~

[3] ~ Globalization-Related Issues ~
[3-A] ~ Globalization: The Convergence Issue ~
[3-B] ~ The Outsourcing - Insourcing Issue ~
[3-C] ~ The Informal Economy of the Developing World ~
[3-D] ~ Privatization of the World's Water Supplies and Other Public Utilities and Infrastructure ~

[4] ~ Health-Care Economics and the Health Care Crisis in the U.S. ~
[4-A] ~ Health-Care Economics ~
[4-B] ~ The Health-Care Crisis ~

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NOTE: Nothing here is copyrighted. Feel free to use whatever you find here in any way that you wish. Everything here is updated at reasonable intervals as the author collects more data or refines his analyses. You can also obtain (free - via email attached file) any of the WORD 2000 (.doc) files that went into creating this website if that will make your own work easier.

This is a sizeable website. If converted to single-spaced 8.5 x 11" pages it would span on the order of 1000 pages. However seven of the 20 main files are composed of data compilations interwoven with brief comments that help you to understand the data better or to see the problems (e.g. conflicting data) associated with the data. Occasionally there are more detailed analyses that make use of the data. All of this kind of material you can take note of - or select those data, comments and analyses that you need for your own work. There are lots of detailed tables of contents and lists of references to help you with this. Even then, this website may be more than you can handle. So to accommodate your needs better, these "Highlights" summarizes some of the key findings of this overall website. This should help you to narrow down your selection of reading material significantly.

This website focuses on issues that significantly affect all our lives today, and that can be expected to continue in this role for some decades. The analyses of these issues here could produce disputes. But because the issues examined here are so basic, misconceptions and misinterpretations seem destined to carry severe penalties for us all - thus the value of this website. Twenty documents divided among four main categories of issues define this entire website. Neglecting health care, the three remaining categories of issues taken up here are global in scope. They deal mainly with three broad topics that turn out to be tightly interwoven (as you can tell from all that cross-referencing). These three categories are:

• The degradation, loss and lack of output sustainabilities of the Earth's key land-based- and marine-based life-support systems;
• Population-related issues that help to define the changing magnitude and character of the demands human impose on these key life-support systems,
• Globalization-related issues -- basic economic issues that are significantly affected by the other two topics, especially in a highly bipolar world of exploding mobilities of virtually all components of economic activity and human culture.

The focus in all three categories is the huge bipolarity that characterizes human civilizations from a global perspective (e.g. standards of living that differ by a factor of ten). How is it explained? How does it affect the relationship and interactions between the two polar extremes? Limiting our focus to any two of these three categories is likely to be less productive. Thus this website. The huge and growing mobilities of virtually every component of economic activity and human culture insures that the problems and characteristics of one pole are bound to affect the problems and traits of the opposite pole to ever-increasing degrees as mobilities increase. Essentially all of the problems associated with globalization are a result of bipolarity and the tendency for ever-increasing mobilities to reduce bipolarity - something that many people regard with horror, and with good reason. The degradation, loss and low levels of output sustainability of the Earth's key land-based- and marine-based life-support systems characteristic of the developing world are certain to affect the end point of any convergence process - in economic, social, political and cultural terms. Thus the horror. Population-related issues are dealt with here from the often-disputed viewpoint that most of the developing world's economic, social and political problems originate from high human populations and/or population growth. Reducing population growth, if not also population sizes, is argued throughout this website to be the best way, if not the only way, of reducing the developing world's other problems.

Obviously none of these issues can be dealt with definitively without an understanding of the cause of the bipolarity. This is why you will see, throughout this website, terms like "environmental determinism theory" and "bad government theory." Both of these two conflicting theories claim to explain the origin of the bipolarity of the global economy. You will find the most detailed analysis of this debate in "The Controversy over U.S. Support for International Family Planning: An Analysis." This author comes down on the side of the environmental determinism theory of the origin of human cultures. That theory says that the evolution of human cultures reflects primarily adaptation to changing forms and degrees of environmental stress. For most developing nations that translates into large population growth rates in a world of typically low fertility tropical soils. For some developing nations it translates into high population growth rates in regions once occupied by ancient civilizations where centuries of abuse (erosion, deforestation, overgrazing, salinization, etc.) have reduced carrying capacities of the region to numbers far less than the current population. It also translates into huge demands on financial capital that get absorbed by the need to expand the infrastructure in response to growing populations. An extreme scarcity of financial capital is a primary characteristic of developing world economies.

The "bad leadership" theory was apparently put forth around 1981 when the Reagan Administration declared the scale of natural systems to be vastly larger that the scale of human activity. This implies that environmental determinism theory is not applicable. To explain the ills of the developing world the "bad leadership" theory had to be put forth. That theory remains one of the bedrock theories of the US Republican party to this day, and largely explains its foreign policies, population policies and environmental policies. The Vatican also vigorously opposes any use of environmental determinism theory, possibly because of the difficulties it creates in defending its position on contraception and abortion. (All, or virtually all, of President Reagan's top advisors were Irish Catholic.) Virtually all other governments appear to favor environmental determinism theory.

Unexpected By-products of this Website
One unexpected product of this website was some apparently simple solutions to some of the world's most serious and vexing problems. Perhaps this might have been expected of any examination of some of the fundamental issues that define the constantly changing limits that the land imposes on Man, and that define evolution of human cultures. Somewhere on the pages of this website you will find the following:

• A highly efficient, low-cost, politically viable process for eliminating global warming.
• A process for bringing the fertilities of tropical soils up to those of temperate soils. This could open the way for reducing the economic bipolarity that defines the difference between the developed- and the developing worlds.
• Several long-term strategies for ending the global food crisis.
• A simple, low-cost, relatively safe means of enabling the poorest of developing world women to keep the number of children she has within the constraint of her desired family size.
• A solution to the US health-care crisis within the constraint of maintaining, or increasing, the quality of care.
• A strategy for significantly reducing the scale and frequency of armed conflict, and accomplishing this in a cost-effective manner.
• An efficient process for greatly reducing, if not eliminating, the AIDS/ HIV pandemic, and doing so within the financial resources available for this task.

In "Globalization: The Convergence Issue" you will discover that the two central arguments supporting the views that (1) the prices of labor in the developed- and developing worlds will not converge and that (2) if they do converge, they will converge upon developed world labor prices. Both of these arguments are easily shown to be false. The convergence will most likely entail a 60-80% reduction in real labor prices in the developed world. This convergence process has been under way since the early 1980s. So far it has been mostly concealed by: (1) increasing the percentage of families with two wage earners, (2) drawing down savings, and rapidly increasing credit card debt, and (3) selling the equity in people’s homes. No more significant options remain untapped, so globalization’s effects are almost certain to become far more evident in the future. The recession of 2008 is liable to last longer, and be deeper, than most people imagine.

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"Productive" here pertains only to the meeting of human needs, i.e. soils, croplands, forests, grazing lands, irrigated lands, fisheries, surface waters and ground waters.

[1-A] ~ Degradation and Losses of Productive Land-, Marine- and Freshwater Systems ~ All these categories of key resources are facing numerous degradation/ loss processes almost worldwide. A few of the most serious such processes in each category are described briefly below.

Soils and Croplands:
(1) Soil degradation in the major grain-growing areas of major exporters. Because grains constitute such a large fraction of the food humans eat, and because such a large fraction of the nations of the world are grain importers, the implications of grain-land soil degradation plaguing nations like the US, Canada, Russia and Australia are staggering. Soil organic matter contents are declining; fallow periods are shrinking virtually everywhere, and salinization problems are increasing. The availability of undeveloped arable land appears to be nil, despite what many may believe. One consequence is mass human rural-to-urban migrations in developing nations, resulting in explosive growth of "informal economies." The extreme duress of people living under such conditions appear certain to threaten the social, economic, and political stabilities of numerous developing nations.
(2) Shrinking glaciers (believed to be a result of global warming). These threaten the continuity of flow of the water supplies of about three billion people - nearly half of the people in the world. About 70% of water-use by humans is for agriculture. Irrigation produces 60% (by value) of the food consumed by humans.
(3) The trend in the US away from "mixed agriculture" and toward animal feedlots and concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs). These concentrate manure production, resulting in manure being collected in large ponds rather than being distributed to croplands. Without manure to compensate for the adverse effects of excessive doses of chemical fertilizers, fertile temperate soils take on the attributes of typically low fertility tropical soils. Soil organic matter concentrations decline and soil chemistry and physical properties degrade. (Numerous cropland soil properties are highly dependent on soil organic matter contents.)

Forests:
(1) Large-scale theft of timber (often 50-80% of the total harvest) mainly in tropical forests, but also in temperate and boreal forests. (Stolen timber and firewood are not counted in tallies of global wood production.)
(2) Large-scale over-harvesting of timber and firewood, mainly in tropical forests, but also in some temperate and boreal forests.
(3) Ever increasing numbers of invasive species of tree-destroying pests (a result of increasing levels of global trade).
(4) Huge tropical forest monoculture plantations. These are at high risk of destruction by diseases and pests. Also there are significant doubts as to whether typically low-fertility tropical soils can sustainably support harvests of rapidly growing tree species. These species also create groundwater supply problems.

Grazing lands:
(1) Replacement of high grade grazing lands by low-grade croplands, producing wind erosion. Recall the US "Dust Bowl" and the Soviet "Great Lands" debacle. Also note the rapidly increasing frequency of dust storms that start in China and the Sahel and cross the world's oceans.
(2) Riparian habitat loss due to overgrazing. These habitats often provide up to 80% of the productivity of grasslands. In the US West, 80-90% of riparian habitats have been destroyed.
(3) Invasions, by invasive species, of grassland soils bared by overgrazing. These are frequently non-palatable or toxic to livestock, and they tend to spread over vast areas of grassland.
(4) Overgrazing in forested grasslands, resulting in grass understory being replaced by woody shrubs. This increases forest fire intensity, resulting in trees being destroyed, rather than just the understory that would have been the case in the absence of overgrazing.

Irrigated Lands and their Water Supplies:
(1) Salinization and waterlogging. Despite the fact that 60% of the world's food (by value) comes from irrigation, and despite all lessons from decades, centuries and millennia past, it appears that few of the world's irrigation systems have invested in systems of drainage tiles that would guard against productivity declines and abandonment resulting from salinization and waterlogging.
(2) Water supplies. Irrigation accounts for about 70% of human use of freshwater. So it is the primary reason why so many major rivers no longer reach the oceans for at least part of the year. It is also why so many aquifers are being drained. Increasing reallocations of water to urban area make matters worse. Drip- and micro-irrigation could greatly reduce water requirements, but these technologies are used on less than 1% of the global acreage of irrigated lands. The reason probably lies in the fact that governments worldwide subsidize water supplies to irrigators and to urban users (Subsidies are typically 80-90% of production costs.) This tells irrigators that drip- and micro-irrigation are not economically viable.
(3) Irrigation funding in developing nations. Because developing nation governments subsidize water supplies and lots of other items, they do not receive sufficient income to repay the loans supplied by external sources (World Bank, IMF, foreign governments) that were meant to fund such projects. Because the developing world's external debt increases by about $1 trillion every 10-15 years, external sources of capital grow increasingly reluctant to fund such projects. This helps to explain why sub-Saharan Africa is so under-irrigated, and why hunger levels there keep increasing.

Fisheries:
(1) Trophic level cover-ups. As fish population at higher trophic levels (position on the food chain) become depleted, fish harvest levels are maintained by fishing at lower trophic levels instead of addressing the real problem and maintaining sustainability.
(2) Excess capacity. Fishing fleets have grown far larger that what is required to fish within sustainable limits. Huge government subsidies make fishing badly depleted fish stocks economically viable, thereby promoting fishery collapse.
(3) Habitat destruction. Key habitats (mangroves, coral reefs, sea grasses and coastal estuaries and wetlands,) are essential in some portion of the life cycle of virtually all fish harvested commercially. Yet all of these habitats are being degraded and reduced in scale by a variety of processes.

[1-B] ~ Sustainabilities of Productive Land-, Marine- and Freshwater Systems ~
The primary conclusion reached here is that the sustainabilities of the outputs of these systems are disturbingly low in terms of global averages. However these sustainabilities tend to vary markedly from region to region and show strong influences of culture. The old developed world (Europe, and parts of the Far East) contains by far the most sustainable systems, although they are pushing hard against their limits. The situation in the newer portion of the developed world (North America and Australia) seems to reflect mainly mismanagement and bad attitudes. The situation in the developing world is tragically poor, although there are isolated instances of amazingly high levels of sustainability, even in the midst of extreme poverty. The developing world's need to focus on the here-and-now in a world largely dominated by subsistence-level conditions suggests a downward spiral - one of many positive-feedback processes plaguing that world. The financial- and other resource costs of sustainability tend to be seen as unaffordable. These variations can be explained with environmental determinism theory that states that the evolution of human cultures reflect primarily adaptations to changing forms and degrees of environmental stress. Furthermore, if one were to also consider the sustainabilities of other systems, e.g. energy or minerals or land-use patterns, the three regions would demonstrate the same ranking, suggesting that cultures largely determine sustainabilities. Since environmental determinism theory explains the evolution of human cultures, it is fundamental to understanding sustainability issues.

Sustainability issues seem to suffer most from four common misconceptions that, if eliminated, could produce major improvements in the overall levels of understanding of the sustainabilities characterizing all three regions of the planet. So it seems appropriate, in these "Highlights," to attempt to dispel these misconceptions. This is done below. These four misconceptions pertain to the four developments that were responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the increase in the world's human carrying capacity over the past half-century. Without the first three of these developments, about half of the people alive on Earth today would not be alive. The four relevant misconceptions reflect the human tendency to believe (incorrectly) that future increases in productivity of the world's food supply systems require merely further expansions of these four developments.

The Misconception related to Chemical (inorganic) fertilizers: Farmers cannot simply increase the dose rate of chemical fertilizers indefinitely (as they once thought). This is because there are serious side effects. The most serious one is the damage done to soil chemistry when dose rates significantly exceed the rate of nutrient-uptake by the plants being fed. Fertile temperate soils get converted to infertile soils typical of those found in tropical climates as a result of long-term overdosing with chemical fertilizers. Farmers can increase the dose rate beyond this limit by also adding organic fertilizer (manure) in increasingly large doses. In fact, this is what Europeans do today. The US, unfortunately and ultimately tragically, is closing out this option by raising an ever-increasing fraction of its livestock in feedlots and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) instead of in significantly more sustainable "mixed agriculture" environments. Since feedlots and CAFOs make it difficult to distribute the manure to farms, the manure (solids and liquids) is dumped into huge lagoons that all too commonly breach and create huge pollution problems for downstream water supplies. A less serious side-effect is nitrogen pollution of surface waters and ground waters. Legal limits (about 50 ppm) have been placed on nitrates in drinking water in order to minimize the serious effects on human health. Europeans are pushing hard up against this limit as a result of the very high doses of both inorganic and organic fertilizers that European farmers apply to their croplands. Problems of the same nature are cropping up in isolated areas of the US. It should also be noted that the marginal productivities of chemical fertilizers decline with increasing dose rates (a simple application of Justus von Leibig's "Law of the Minimum") so the economics of chemical fertilizers grow increasingly worse as dose rates increase. It should also be noted that the "Green Revolution" (See below.) would not have taken place without Fritz Haber's development of chemical fertilizers. Furthermore, the economics of large-scale irrigation systems (See below.) were also critically dependent on Haber's development of chemical fertilizers.

The Misconception Related to The Green Revolution: Most people assume that plant geneticists will simply go on increasing crop yields with genetically improved strains of grain indefinitely. Those plant geneticists of the mid-20^th century have essentially all gone home, having butted up fairly close to the theoretical limits of the "Green Revolution." Contrary to common misconceptions, the green revolution did not improve on the basic process of photosynthesis. It simply increased the fraction of the plant that is seed (grain). The theoretical limit is around 0.6. The green revolution increased this fraction from 0.2 to around 0.5. Today people talk more about "genetically modified" (GM) plants as if these will take over where the Green Revolution left off. If you examine GM developments you will note that most, if not all, of them are merely aimed at creating new GM plant breeds that are immune to the latest GM pests that keep evolving by natural selection. It is far from clear that this race between geneticists and pests will be won by the geneticists. The genetic diversity of the world's food crops is declining, making development of improved plant species increasingly difficult. The planting of vast monocultures, the decline of strip-cropping, crop rotation and other sound agricultural practices are also giving GM pests an ever-increasing advantage. The ever-increasing doses (and ever-increasing toxicity per dose) of pesticides have failed to put a dent in crop losses to pests. Now pesticides are starting to have serious effects on humans (e.g. Parkinson's disease). Unfortunately the rate of development of GM humans by natural selection is vastly slower than the rate of development of GM pests by natural selection.

The Misconception Related to Irrigation: We have all heard of the collapse of ancient irrigation systems that have altered the course of human history over past millennia. We all know that salinization and waterlogging (and occasionally siltation from upstream deforestation) of ancient irrigated plots caused the collapses. Some of us have even seen the remains of ancient irrigation systems - still glistening white in the sun as a result of salt crusts. Unfortunately it is commonly assumed that the lessons of the historical past have been well learned by modern-day irrigators, so that such problems will never happen again. So we relax, confident that the 60% of the world's food (in dollar terms) from modern irrigation is being produced sustainably. We need to study that issue more carefully to determine what is actually happening (or not happening). To eliminate salinization we have three choices: (1) locate irrigation systems in monsoon climates (i.e. eliminate a huge percentage of today's irrigation systems) or (2) use drip-irrigation or micro-irrigation (currently being employed on 1-2% of today's irrigated plots) or (3) underlay irrigation systems by systems of drainage tiles. One might think that much research has been done to determine what fraction of today's irrigated land has such drainage tiles. After all, the course of human history depends on the answer. It turns out that such research has apparently never been done. The best this author could find after some decades of study of irrigation system degradation is the opinion of one irrigation expert who surmised that very little of today's irrigated lands have such tiles. This suggests that we have learned little from our ancestors, and that the future of the bulk of today's irrigated lands will be essentially the same as the irrigated plots of millennia past - vast plots of white, glistening in the sun. Even the World Bank, when it funds irrigation system developments, does not require that the systems funded include buried drainage tiles.

The Misconception Related to the Global Supply of Undeveloped Arable Land: Before 1960 the major contribution to increasing global food supplies came from cultivating more undeveloped arable land. Since 1960 increasing crop yields (tonnes/ unit area) has been the predominant contributor to increasing food supplies and the area of croplands under cultivation has increased only minimally. Much research casts considerable doubts on the notion (based on aerial surveys) that huge arable areas still lie idle. Below are some analyses and data supporting these doubts.

• Much of the alleged undeveloped arable land in developing nations is under forest - mainly tropical forest. The population of shifting cultivators in the world's tropical forest is far larger than the carrying capacity of those forests. So even though only a small fraction of the world's tropical forest is actually under cultivation at any point in time, it has to be considered as fully utilized in terms of its use by shifting cultivators. Also tropical forests are over-harvested and should not be considered for other purposes.
• The total area of cereal-producing croplands in the LDCs (less-developed countries) peaked in 1996 at 4.45 million km² (out of a total area of arable land in the LDCs of 7.49 million km²). By 2002 cereal-producing croplands in the LDCs had fallen to 4.27 million km².
• For low-income food-deficient countries (LIFDCs) the total area of cereal-producing cropland peaked in 1998 at 3.45 million km² (out of a total area of arable land of 5.4 million km²). By 2002 cereal-producing arable land in the LIFDCs had fallen to 3.29 million km².
• Cultivation in developing nations often extends onto steep slopes, frequently without adequate soil conservation, so crop outputs are not sustainable.
• Cultivation has become increasingly common in semi-arid zones with croplands endure high risks of drought and wind-erosion. Often farming conflicts with pastoral use. (Conflicts between farmers and pastoralists are common throughout sub-Saharan Africa. This would be unlikely were there supplies of undeveloped arable land with adequate precipitation.)
• Large regions of both Asia and Africa are being cropped continuously, with no fallow periods, resulting in declining crop yields and salinity problems.
• Average farm size in many parts of the developing world has fallen substantially below one hectare. This is commonly a result of farms being subdivided among several children. If there were substantial areas of undeveloped arable land, this would probably not happen.
• Illegal cultivation of forest reserves, national parks and other protected areas is commonly observed in developing nations.

The above situations could hardly exist if there were plenty of undeveloped arable land capable of sustainable crop production.

• An independent survey of forest clearance found that the true area of forest cover was over-estimated through failure to recognize illegal clearance for agriculture. This error results in an under-estimation of cropped area and an over-estimation of the percent of arable land that is not used as cropland.
• Much arable land that is not being used as cropland is, instead, being used as urban areas, protected areas, water supplies or forests. These are uses that cannot readily be converted to croplands and therefore should not be counted as area into which croplands could be extended if the need arose.
• Uses that cannot realistically be eliminated to accommodate increased demands for more croplands are believed to occupy some two million km² of arable land. This is 12% of the area of arable land that is claimed to be unused as cropland.
• Two studies estimated that 45% and 65% of arable land that is not used as cropland is used as forestland or as forestland and wetlands - lands essential for other purposes.
• Global harvested area of annual crops grows by only 0.3%/ year to 0.5%/ year (far smaller rates than in decades past), so cropland area per capita has been shrinking. (The developing world's population growth rate is about 1.3%/ year). Other data finds that the area planted to cereals in less developed countries peaked in the 1990s and has been declining since then. This further supports the contention that the world's cropland area in use is close to, or in excess of, the land area capable of being cropped sustainably. Over 70% of the land with rain-fed crop production potential in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America suffers from one or more soil- and terrain constraints.
• Developing countries (still) have over 3 million km² of natural wetlands that are potentially suitable for crop production. It would be a mistake however to regard these 3 million km² as a component of the world's undeveloped arable land since they serve important rolls in flood prevention and aquifer recharge.
• An analysis by Buringh contends that "Today, virtually all of the productive land on this planet is being exploited by agriculture. What remains unused is too steep, too wet, too dry or lacking in soil nutrients."
• Canada is said to be using only half of its arable lands. But all of its unused arable lands are low-grade, low-productivity lands that could not be cropped without high erosion rates - or are grazed or urbanized. Canada has felt compelled to reduce cropland fallow periods, increasing the rates of erosion and salinization. Why would Canada's plains farmers choose to endure these problems with their current cropland soils if all they had to do is buy some undeveloped arable land and plow it?
• During 1954-62 the former Soviet Union embarked on a massive "Great Lands" program, converting 300,000 km² of semi-arid grazing land to semi-arid croplands. The results were predictable - windstorms wiped out all the increased productivity and then some. The program was declared a disaster and abandoned. If Russia has large tracts of undeveloped but arable land, why did it not develop these, rather than resort to a desperate scheme with predictably disastrous results? And why are 13% of Russia's croplands on rocky hillsides? About 27% of the former Soviet Union's land area is used for agriculture. No more than 2/3 of this land is arable. This could hardly be the case if there were significant areas of undeveloped arable land in the former Soviet Union.
• The US is also believed to have lots of undeveloped cropland now masquerading as urban lands, grazing lands, wetlands and forestlands. But in 1972, when bad weather conditions prevailed, grain prices doubled over the following few years, and much of this undeveloped cropland was pressed into use. The results were huge increases in erosion. The federal Cropland Reserve Program, during the past few decades, took most of this non-sustainable cropland back out of production. This withdrawal (about 47,000 square miles during 1982-1997) achieved huge reductions in net US soil loss. If large tracts of undeveloped arable land are awaiting development, why was it necessary to put extremely marginal lands to the plow and risk disaster? The US Great Plains (a semi-arid wheat-growing area) are suffering the same ills as their Canadian neighbors - loss of about half of their organic matter and salinity problems.
• In recent years, Canada, Australia, the EU and Russia have imposed constraints on food exports.
• Globally, 4.6 million of the world's 12.3 million km² of rain-fed croplands are classified as dry lands. Most, if not all, of these dry lands should probably be used as grazing lands to avoid high wind-erosion rates, the risk of dust bowls and extreme droughts. If the world is awash in undeveloped arable land, why has so much low-productivity, economically marginal land been pressed into service as croplands? And why would so much financial capital, effort, and government subsidies be invested in irrigation?
• In South America, holders of large land tracts are being overwhelmed by hordes of wretched landless people seeking ways of survival. This is totally inconsistent with the view that vast areas of undeveloped arable lands exist throughout South America. If they did exist, these landless hordes would surely have found them and converted them into croplands.

(For more detailed information on this topic, see Section [D] of "Sustainability of the Outputs of the World's Croplands.")

[1-C] ~ Human Co-Option of Net Primary Production - The Photosynthetic Limits to Global Carrying Capacity ~
The analysis of human co-option of net primary production (NPP) of the world's photosynthetic processes enables one to estimate the photosynthetic limits to global carrying capacity - much like "footprint" analyses can do, but with an entirely different approach. Photosynthesis is the process that supports the bulk of living things. It is at the bottom of the food chain. There has been much interest in recent years in making improved estimates of the fraction of net photosynthetic outputs (termed "net primary production" or NPP) that is co-opted by humans. This appears to be a good way of estimating the human carrying capacity of the planet although it does neglect such issues as supplies of fossil fuels and other minerals, and constraints that "greenhouse gases" might impose. While there is no reason for believing that NPP analyses and "footprint" analyses ought to produce very close to the same conclusions, it is unsettling to note gross differences in the conclusions of the two types of analyses. The most widely quoted NPP analysis is still the 1986 analysis by Vitousek et al. While there have been improvements in that analysis over the years, a fairly wide disparity remains between NPP analyses and "Footprint" analyses. NPP analyses suggests that the human population of the earth could increase by a factor of roughly 2.5 (living standards held constant) while "footprint" analyses suggests that the current global human population is about all that the planet can sustainably tolerate at current living standards.

The document with the above title on this website takes a closer look at Vitousek et al's co-opted-NPP analysis. One major error was noted, along with some gross disparities with several kinds of well-established data. Also, the NPP problem needs to be redefined a bit to produce meaningful results. Some NPP is so diffuse (e.g. the bulk of that in open oceans) that it cannot be considered accessible. The harvesting costs (and the NPP that these costs imply) would make the harvest unaffordable. Also there is at least one major category of NPP that Vitousek et al's analysis considers to not be co-opted by humans but which, for all intents and purpose, is co-opted. That category is the co-opted NPP of the world's wetlands and marshes. These constantly shrinking lands provide vital services in terms of flood reductions and aquifer recharge. The recharge process has become vital as a result of the fact that the world's irrigation systems (producers of 60% [by value] of the food humans consume) draw an ever-increasing fraction of their water from aquifers. These aquifers tend to be increasingly overdrawn for irrigation and other human purposes. If one takes account (as the NPP document in this website does) of all these factors and corrects the NPP calculation by Vitousek et al accordingly, the large gap between co-opted NPP analyses and "footprint" analyses shrinks to unimportance. Further increases in global population and living standards must therefore come at the expense of the sustainability of the productivities of the earth's key life-support systems. This also indicates that, were living standards of the developed and developing worlds to converge (e.g. as the end-result of a globalization process), convergence would occur at living standards much closer to those of the current developing world than to those of the current developed world.

[1-D] ~ The Food Crisis -Some Solutions for a World with Fewer Options for Satisfying Increasing Demands ~
The most important, and least known about, aspect of the current food crisis is that the four processes responsible for virtually all of the increases in global food supplies during the last half of the 20^th century are approaching, have hit, or have exceeded, their limits (as described in Section [1-B] above). So exploiting these processes further runs increasing risks of being non-sustainable if not counterproductive. Options capable of fully replacing these four 20^th-century drivers of food production growth for more than a few decades into the 21^st century do not appear to exist. It is also important to know that the current food crisis could be short-lived. This is because a recent secret World Bank study has found that 75% of the increases in food prices over the past few years are attributable to the reallocation of food crops to bio-fuels. Could this reallocation be eliminated, the current food crisis would largely vanish. However this situation would be short-lived. This is due to the limitations on the 20^th-century drivers of food production mention above, relative to the 50% increase in global population anticipated during the first half of the 21^st century. This is also due to a number of problems that are growing more serious in the first half of the 21^st century than they were in the last half of the 20^th. Among them;

• The increasing degree of non-sustainability characterizing the current systems for producing food in a large fraction of the world;
• The high likelihood of increasing energy costs in a world where (1) the energy-intensiveness of food production systems has increased dramatically in recent decades and where (2) much of the developing world must, even now, allocate 50-75% of earnings to food.
• Rapid increases in per-capita food consumption in a growing fraction of the developing world,
• The risks of the effects of global warming significantly reducing food/ freshwater supplies via the currently apparent mechanisms of increasing aridity and elimination of the world's glaciers, plus less apparent, mechanisms.
• Increasingly rapid draw-downs and reallocations of the waters of the world's rivers and aquifers, posing serious threats to the world's irrigation systems (source of 60% [in dollar terms] of the world's food supplies).

Virtually all short-term options for increasing food supplies involve decreases in food-related subsidies and increases in the costs of food production - options that people who must already devote 50-75% of their earnings on food would find unacceptable.

Probably the most successful long-term (but more permanent) strategy for dealing with the long-term food crisis is to significantly reduce the extreme scarcity of financial capital in developing nations in order to make currently unacceptable strategies viable. A growing number of nations have accomplished this, and have evolved from developing-world status to (or close to) developed-world status. They all did this during periods characterized by the use of active family planning programs that eliminated the underlying cause of the capital scarcity - the need to expand infrastructural capital that population growth calls for. This strategy is becoming increasingly popular as the underlying cause of capital scarcity (and the instabilities that this scarcity cause) becomes more apparent. Also the cost of such a strategy has dropped by several orders of magnitude in recent decades as a result of new, low-cost technologies for averting births.

Another promising, but not yet fully developed, strategy is that of converting the typically low-fertility soils of tropical croplands to high fertility "terra preta" soils. (See below.) One significant side-effect of this strategy is its potential for eliminating global warming far more effectively, less costly, and with far greater political viability than any other known strategy.

[1-E] ~ Terra Preta - An Inexpensive, if not Profitable, Solution to the Problems of Global Warming and Developing World Hunger ~
It is long past time for a realistic assessment of the likelihood of anything being done on a global scale in response to the clear and obvious threat of global warming, regardless of the severity of the consequences. Kyoto meetings every decade or so show no signs of accomplishing anything beyond token gestures, the effects of which are easily overwhelmed by the effects of population growth and economic growth. Even such powerful proponents of addressing global warming as Germany backed out of its commitment in mid-2008. Every proposal so far for addressing global warming involves massive complexity and expense or is incapable, physically, of working. Also, they all only slow the rate of greenhouse gas introduction into the atmosphere. None have the ability to reduce the concentrations of greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere - concentrations already sufficient to melt Greenland's ice cover and produce a 25-meter increase in sea levels by the turn of the century. Just a few of the numerous possible consequences suggest that few of the earth's inhabitants will escape these consequences. Glacier melting threatens the continuity of water flows to half the people on the planet, and hence the viability of about 50% of the world's irrigation systems (source of 60% of the world's food supplies). Bangladesh would cease to exist, and its 150 million people will need to move elsewhere. India is already building fences along its boundary in preparation. The effects on the world's oceans thus far are producing devastating effects on Bangladesh's crops, water supplies, and other essentials. Bangladesh's other neighbor, Burma, could not even begin to accommodate such seas of humanity.

With that backdrop in mind, consider now what should be concluded to be the only physically workable, economically viable, and politically feasible strategy for dealing effectively with global warming -and the only strategy capable of reversing (not just slowing) the net flows of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. That strategy is also simple, and it has numerous major beneficial side effects. That strategy is:

• Invest an additional few tens of millions of dollars into the research efforts of the dozens of soil scientists from around the world now involved in the terra preta issue. These funds should be expected to speed up the process of relearning what primitive indians learned thousands of years ago. There is no reason for believing that such efforts might ultimately fail. Success is clearly just a matter of time. Converting the tropical world's cropland to terra preta soils doubles or triples the tropical world's food supplies (where about 75% of mankind reside). It also creates a carbon sink easily big enough to store all the atmospheric greenhouse gasses currently in the atmosphere plus all such gasses entering the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuels combustion for many decades.
• Instruct the roughly 200 million "slash-and-burn" tropical farmers of what the soil scientists learned. This should be simple, given the huge incentives for farmers to learn the skills of their ancestors - major increases in crop productivity plus major reductions in the amount of agricultural labor required (e.g. no more need to move to a new plot of ground every three or so years and to clear the tropical forest from it). Information flow via word-of-mouth under such circumstances should be rapid, and make its way to the non-slash-and-burn farmers of the tropics.

It's as simple as that.

Here we point out the highlights of the five population-related documents found on this website -- including important linkages and global changes that most people are unaware of. Yet these linkages and changes are likely to have significant effects on the course of history-making human events. Few other set of issues are more likely to set off contentious and emotional debates than population-related issues. This is partly because politics and religion unavoidably play a role in all this. This is why it is important that we lay out the related facts, figures, logic, analysis and arguments as clearly as possible. These five documents appear to depart markedly from the documents on the issues of land-based- and fishery-based degradation, loss, and output sustainabilities that are covered above, and that provided the initial stimulus for this website. Yet, as you read the five population-related documents described here you will discover strong linkages among all of these issues.

[2-A] ~ The Controversy over U.S. Support for International Family Planning ~
In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of supporting international family planning (IFP) was viewed by the US government, NGOs, the World Bank and others as completely bi-partisan, and vital to international peace and prosperity. The rationale was based on "demographic" concerns, i.e. on environmental determinism theory. In 1981, the Reagan Administration renounced environmental determinism theory in favor of "bad government" theory. That theory has remained an important part of Republican Party ideology to this day. It strongly affects the party's environmental policies, foreign policies and population policies. (A detailed analysis of the debate between environmental determinism theory and bad government theory is found in Chapter 4 of this web document.) Since then, supporting IFP has grown into one of the most contentious issues faced in budget negotiations, despite the small amount of money involved. Supporters of IFP responded by arguing for supporting IFP using maternal health arguments, and later using "women's rights" arguments. Nothing seemed to work.

But during and after the 1980s, governments and citizens alike became increasingly aware of the implications of population growth. Also, contraceptive technology advanced significantly. The Supreme Court overturned US laws forbidding the sale of contraceptives; ever-increasing numbers of foreign governments came to realize that family planning and contraception were crucial in dealing with many of their other social, economic and political problems. Abortion was legalized in numerous other nations; contraceptives became more widely available globally; research produced an ever-widening choice of contraceptives for women to choose from; a large fraction of Catholics in developed nations became "cafeteria Catholics," and various sophisticated media-related technologies, e.g. "Social Content Serial Dramas" ("telenovelas") ("soap operas") were able to use radio and TV in developing nations to cheaply sell people on the value of small families and other population-related arguments. All these changes lowered the cost of averting a birth over a span of several decades from around $600 to on the order of $10. Further major cost reductions to about $3 are in the works. (See "Quinacrine Sterilization" and "Strategies for Funding Family Planning . . ." below.) One of these new technological advances has even reduced the cost of averting a case of HIV/ AIDS to a few dollars, creating the possibility of wiping out this pandemic at an affordable cost. (See the document "Strategies for Funding Family Planning . . .") (Currently a large fraction of government- and NGO contributions that would otherwise go to funding international family planning services is being diverted to treating HIV/ AIDS. So reducing the threat of HIV/ AIDS would make family planning services far more readily available)

This web document also pointed out that the cost of the infrastructure expansion needed to accommodate the developing world's current population growth rate (1.3%/ year) is about $1.2 trillion/ year - a cost the median wage in developing nations (under $2/ person/ day) is unable to pay. This drain on capital makes financial capital (and human capital -education) extremely scarce. This leads to many other social-, political-, military- and economic-stability-related problems. It also explains all the other problems that extreme financial capital scarcity gives rise to, e.g. the inability to afford investments in key life support systems needed to insure that their outputs are sustainable. It also makes advancement to "First World" status impossible. (The five "Asian Tiger" economies and 4-5 other economies that advanced from developing nation status to [or near to] "First World" status during the final four decades of the 20^th century did so during periods of active family-planning programs.) Using this data, this web document shows that there would be a huge benefit/ cost ratio to diverting more of the First World's development- and humanitarian aid to developing nations (about $60 billion/ year) from accommodating population growth to reducing population growth. Currently about 97% of such aid goes to accommodating population growth, while about 3% goes to reducing population growth. This strategy is equivalent to throwing $60 billion/ year at a $1.2 trillion / year problem. The results, needless to say, are hard to detect, so legislators start wondering out loud why aid to the developing world is worthwhile. Had 10% of so of this foreign aid been spent on population growth reduction, the results would have been clear and positive. A recent study supports this with the finding that, over the past 100 years, no nation has been able to evolve from developing- to developed world status until its fertility rate has dropped below 2.3 children per woman.

Major changes in attitudes toward family planning and population issues in general are occurring throughout the developing world. Virtually every developing nation now understands the inverse relationship between population growth and living standards. Some even understand the direct relationship between population growth rates and frequency of armed conflicts. (See Section [2-D] below.)

[2-B] ~ The Muslim World's Changing Views Toward Family Planning and Contraception ~
The Muslim World has the world highest (or next-to-highest) population growth rates. In a land devastated by centuries of abuse (salinization, deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, etc.) this combination results in mass migrations to non-Muslim nations bordering the Muslim world. That "demographic aggression" has caused this border to become the locale of a large portion of the world's armed conflicts. The main cause of this high population growth (and resultant conflicts) has been conservative Muslim clerics who tend to oppose virtually all forms of contraception. This situation is now undergoing rapid changes as Muslims come to realize the economic consequences of high population growth rates in degraded lands. They are becoming "Cafeteria Muslims" for the same reason that created "Cafeteria Catholics" in recent decades. This web document compiles data that document this historic change and attempts to forecast the likely consequences of this change. It seems to hold the potential for significant improvements in the relationship between the Middle East and the West.

[2-C] ~ Quinacrine Sterilization: The Controversy and the Potential ~
An exciting recent, but largely unnoticed, development in contraception technology is the International Service Assistance Fund's (ISAF's) effort to get FDA Phase III clinical trial of a non-surgical method of female sterilization known as QS (quinacrine sterilization) under way. Such sterilizations have been performed in 50 countries on more than 175,000 women. It is so simple and low-cost that nurses instead of surgeons can perform it. It can be done in peoples' homes in the developing world using a simple, inexpensive, plastic, disposable tool. It costs only a tenth of the cost of a surgical female sterilization, a procedure that has long been the leading contraceptive method worldwide. In the developing world, the cost of a QS is about $5 vs. $50 for a surgical sterilization (usually unaffordable). Most women of the developing world do not have access to surgical contraception, and will not have such access for the foreseeable future. QS could revolutionize contraceptive provision worldwide. Successful completion of the FDA Phase III trial could reduce maternal mortality and morbidity by 40%, reduce the number of abortions worldwide by 40%, and reduce the number of unwanted births by more than 50%. This reduction in unwanted births would amount to over 25 million births per year out of the 78 million or so annual surplus of births in excess of deaths, and out of the 136 million births per year - a major change in global population growth trends. A 25 million reduction in births per year (virtually all in the developing world) would represent a savings in infrastructure costs to developing nations of $325 billion/ year. As noted above, these savings would come largely in the form of reductions in unmet needs for new infrastructure, plus reduced wretchedness, hopelessness, warfare, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, environmental degradation, and greater safety of financial capital and what it is invested in. In some areas of the developing world, the mortality rate for a typically illegal abortion is about one in three. A QS would eliminate the need for roughly two such illegal procedures, so QS could greatly reduce the number of motherless children in developing nations, and this tends to significantly increase juvenile survival rates.

Despite all these potential benefits, QS is still seen as the Vatican's worst nightmare. Imagine a poverty-stricken woman in a remote part of a developing nation finally having the ability to decide on how many children she wants or can afford, and then to be able to carry out that decision via a simple, inexpensive and relatively safe procedure! Vatican opposition has done much to slow the spread of QS in the developing world. There is no logical reason (in a developing world setting) for waiting for completion of a several-decade-long FDA Phase III test of QS. It has already passed the Phase I and II tests, meaning the risks are already extremely low and totally insignificant relative to the risk of maternal mortality from perhaps two illegal abortions (the typical alternative in lieu of QS in developing world settings).

[2-D] ~ Could Family Planning Cure Terrorism? ~
The answer to that question turns out to be yes. In fact, family planning could significantly reduce armed conflicts of all types. As pointed out in other population-related web documents described above, a large proportion of the wretchedness, poverty, hunger and hope-deprivation in developing nations generally results from an extreme scarcity of financial capital. This scarcity is usually a consequence of the extremely high capital cost of the infrastructure expansion needed to accommodate the developing world's high population growth rate. If one examines the world's numerous armed conflicts over the past 10 or so decades, one notes that armed conflicts are almost invariably born in environments of extreme duress. A "preemptive brothers' keeper" strategy of dealing with extreme duress in its early stages thus offers a low-cost strategy for reducing the frequency of armed conflicts. At least such a strategy is virtually certain to be far less expensive that the usual military responses that tend to occur well after the state of extreme duress boils out of control. This web document describes a study of why the world's poorest nations are failing to keep up, economically, with the rest of the world. After examining the usual culprits, the study found that the only statistically significant cause of this problem was the frequency of armed conflicts. Another study examined the frequency of armed conflicts as a function of population growth rates. It was found that the frequently of armed conflicts increases linearly with the rate of population growth. Combining the results of these two studies leads to the conclusion that population growth is the primary reason why the world's poorest nations are unable to keep up, economically, with the rest of the world. Since the cost of averting a birth has fallen to only a few dollars, the cost of a large proportion of "preemptive brothers' keeper" strategies have also dropped to extremely low values - vastly lower than the costs of ignoring situations of extreme duress and dealing militarily with the eventual outgrowth of such situations.

The CIA has written analyses that attempt to explain the origins of terrorism originating in the Middle East. They tend to attribute it to the wretchedness and hope-deprivation of large numbers of young men in the rapidly expanding populations of the badly degraded lands of the Middle East. This environmental determinism-based theory is far better at explaining all this than the "bad government" theory so popular in Republican administrations in the US since the early 1980s. The presidents of Pakistan and Egypt agree with the CIA's analysis. The bulk of the developed world's leaders (and population) appear to hold the same viewpoint.

[3] ~ Globalization-related Issues ~
The five globalization-related web documents found on this website reflect the reality that the explosive, global-scale increases in mobilities of virtually all components of economic activity have become the dominant shaper of the global economy. The previous globalization that began in the latter half or third of the 1800s and ended abruptly during WWI also resulted from rapid increases in mobility, but over a far smaller range of components of economic activity (mainly the conversion from wooden sailing ships to steam-powered steel ships). Most adverse consequences of the current globalization tend to be a result of this broad-scale mobility explosion happening in a highly economically bipolar world. Broad-scale mobility explosions would tend to reduce (or eliminate) bipolarity, i.e. cause full convergence of the economies of the First- and developing worlds. The document "Globalization; the Convergence Issue" shows that this convergence is virtually certain to be the end-result of the current globalization.

[3-A] ~ Globalization: The Convergence Issue ~
One often hears the argument that the point of convergence between the developed world and the developing world would be around 100% of the First World's standard of living. One should understand from the outset, however, that it would be physically impossible to raise living standards of the developing world up to those of the First World. "Footprint" analyses find that five Planet Earths would be required to support such a change. The NPP analysis (also mentioned earlier in these highlights) would produce much the same conclusion. To stay within the constraints of the "Footprint" and the NPP analyses, the standard of living of the First World would need to drop by on the order of 72% to get to the point of convergence. That figure becomes an 81% drop if allowances are made for the 50% increase in world population (almost entirely in the developing world) that is anticipated by 2050. The other equally false argument to the effect that First World labor will benefit from the current globalization is that "labor productivities" of First World labor are much higher than those of developing-world labor, so the difference in living standards will persist. What is neglected is the fact that this "labor productivity" advantage is due virtually entirely to massive capital investments in production facilities and technological knowledge, both of which are now highly mobile in a global sense. Using this simple fact, this web document easily demonstrates the fallacy of the "labor-productivity" argument. This leaves no reason for clinging to the belief that extreme standard-of-living reductions in the First World will not occur as globalization proceeds.

Huge amounts of financial capital are being transported to developing nations daily. Developing nations like India and China have seen the financial benefits of scientific and engineering knowledge and are constructing college-level schools of science and engineering by the hundreds, creating large numbers of human receptacles for the technological knowledge that multinational corporations are sending. Productivity gradients are shrinking. Global prices of food, energy, metals, etc. are rising. US Infrastructures are decaying. US current account deficits are doubling about every five years. The value of the US dollar has been on a long decline. US savings rates are negative. All these happenings are just different ways of saying that real US wages are shrinking. Wage scales in Europe and Japan are under extreme pressures for older workers and falling for younger workers.

Chapter 3 of this web-document compiles a sizeable amount of data showing the progression of numerous aspects of First World living-standard reductions since around 1980 when the current globalization became reasonably obvious. For many decades the rate of increase in wages and benefits have tracked well with the growth rate of labor productivity. This stopped being the case around 1980 when globalization became a significant factor. Currently US wages and benefits are roughly 20% lower than what they would have been had they continued to track labor productivity. A rather disconcerting aspect of the data of Chapter 3 has been the breadth of the decline in First World living standards. The decline appears to be covering cultural issue problems as well. It almost seems as if the First World is in the early stages of a collapse of its culture, not just economic decline. Evidence of growing stress levels in the workplace migrating to the home, to politics, to religion to interactions among human everywhere is becoming increasingly evident. Incidents of rage are increasing rapidly as are the number of different types of rage. Also, people are withdrawing from all sorts of social- and public service-oriented organizations.

Caste systems are also evolving in most of the developing world as part of the rapidly expanding "informal economy" (See Section [3-C] below.) resulting from a mass rural-to-urban migration (possibly the largest human migration in history). Globalization promoters are playing a role in two of the three main causes. Migrants have few skills to offer in an urban environment so they usually wind up in the "informal" economy where daily survival is a major challenge. Informal economies are usually the only component of most developing nations' economy that is growing. As a result, "informal" economies seem destined to become about two-thirds of the economy in most developing nations. A caste system raises prospects for huge social, political and economic instabilities that could draw the First World into a military response on a scale never before imagined. Perhaps the saddest part of all this is Argentina; a nation that has long been one of the world's least socially stratified nations.

Most people are unaware of the magnitude of the economic decline being bought about by globalization. This is mainly because it has been covered up by several adaptations to the reality of globalization. First, the percentage of wives working outside the home increased dramatically. Then people amassed ever-increasing credit-card debts at high interest rates on the balance -- until bankruptcy laws got a lot tougher. Then they sold off whatever equity they had in their homes until now many have little or no equity left. Then the housing bubble burst. Because all the available options for concealing the economic effects of globalization are now exhausted, the economy is starting its descent into what appears to be a major recession. The cover-up of the negative effects of globalization extends to the developing world as well. Globalization proponents keep pointing to all sorts of data on increasing per-capita GDPs in developing nations. However if one examines the effect on all sorts of consumption level issues (life expectancy, infant mortality, child mortality, public spending on education, literacy rates, school enrollment [primary, secondary and tertiary]) the exact opposite picture emerges. Apparently GDP/ capita includes all those profits accruing to those tens of thousands of multi-national corporations, and says little about changes in living standards.

This web document also examines the tendency for some developing nations to fare badly and suffer greatly as a result of submitting to the demands of the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and the trade agreements that they signed as part of signing on to the basic ideology that define globalization. They rang up huge, unaffordable trade deficits, suffered currency collapses, and are witnessing the evolution of huge, wretched, rapidly expanding "informal economies." (See Section [3-C] below.) They also had to abandon important environmental protection projects. Others (such as China, Vietnam and Chile) did remarkably well. On further inspection however, it was noted that the developing nations that did well were also the ones that engaged in large-scale government interventions in economic activity (contrary to the underlying principles of globalization) while largely ignoring the demands of the WTO and other external influences. However these nations are still dependent on the willingness of the US to endure dangerous, non-sustainable trade deficits indefinitely. Also, they distribute the benefits of their global trading to a small fraction of their populations. Those further inland are seeing diminishing health care benefits, huge increases in air- and water pollution and other abuses.

This web document also examines a common defense of globalization that comes from the "Ricardo Principle" dating back to the early 1800s. That principle argues that economies are the most efficient when every nation focuses its attention on what it does best, leaving the rest to other nations, and then allowing imports and exports to fill all needs. This principle may well have been applicable to the previous globalization with its narrow range of high mobility elements of economic activity. However, applying it to the current globalization with its broad range of highly mobile elements of economic activity leads to absurd results. The Ricardo principle would conclude today that the First World should have all labor contributions to the global economy done in developing nations and focus on only non-labor specialties. Today there is nothing other than cheap labor to provide specialties to focus on. For example, people once said that all glass lenses should be made in Japan with its reserves of rare earth glass. Today the owner of these glasses is likely to prefer to ship it all to China where lens-grinding labor is cheaper.

This web document also examines the possible mechanisms by which convergence is likely to be achieved. Japan and Europe have somehow managed to maintain trade surpluses while protecting wage scales to at least some degree, so convergence is likely to be gradual. The US however has shown a massive degree of mismanagement and has managed to acquire both massive and dangerous trade deficits while providing little if any protection of wages and benefits. The US has never been competitive in the global marketplace since globalization began around 1980. The rate of economic progress since 1980 in the US has been significantly less than during the 1950s through the 1970s. The probable convergence path seems likely to be rather traumatic, with a sinking dollar, then a collapsing dollar, thereby achieving de-facto convergence of wages and earnings. Similarly traumatic economic collapses precipitated WWII in Europe.

The end of this web document takes up numerous strategies for minimizing the ill effects of convergence. Many things can be done that hold out the potential for significant improvements in the human condition. These involve mainly making more efficient use of natural resources and capital and supporting family planning, especially in developing nations. However, in the end, the constraints on standards of living imposed on the fully converged global economy (including the fully converged price of labor) by "footprint" analyses and NPP analyses must still be adhered to.

[3-B] ~ The Outsourcing -Insourcing Issue ~
A few years ago, a flurry of articles appeared in the mass media in the US contending that globalization could hardly have any harmful effects of the US job market because the number of jobs "insourced" exceeded those "outsourced." This web document examined the relevant data in the cited document published by a US government agency. It was found that the definitions of "insourced" and "outsourced" were not conceptually similar and were not the mirror images of each other. For example, if a German company purchased a US company and its US production facilities and then made no changes in its labor force, the labor in these newly German-owned US facilities would be counted as "insourced" even though the actual effect of the US job situation was zero. It was also noted that production facilities in the US that had foreign ownership had, on average, abnormally large amounts of imported parts and materials, typical of what one might expect of a foreign company that sets up an assembly plant while importing all the manufactured parts to be used in the assembly process. A new analysis taking into account these and other irregularities found that "insourced" jobs in the US were negligible when compared to the number of "outsourced" jobs.

A massive human migration is underway in the developing world. It is called "urbanization" or the "rural-to-urban" migration. It could wind up being the largest human migration in all recorded history. The three main causes are:

• The shrinkage of farms in the developing world in an environment characterized by (1) little or no undeveloped arable land and (2) a growing population that requires farms to be sub-divided whenever they must be divided among multiple heirs;
• The conversion of labor-intensive agriculture/ fishing to capital-intensive agriculture/ fishing, resulting in huge reductions in the amount of labor required for each acre of land or each fish caught;
• "Structural Adjustment Programs" imposed by the World Bank or the IMF or the World Trade Organization (WTO) on most developing nations. SAPs require (among other requirements that caused extreme duress) developing world farmers to compete in the global marketplace against heavily subsidized First World Agri-businesses -totally at odds with the basic premises of globalization.

Migrants have few skills to offer in an urban environment so they usually wind up in the "informal" economy where daily survival is a major challenge. Informal economies are usually the only component of most developing nations' economy that is growing. As a result, these informal economies seem destined to become about two-thirds of the economy of most developing nations. This raises the prospect for huge social, political and economic instabilities that could draw the First World into a military response on a scale never before imagined.

Also of great concern is the clear signs of the early stages of caste systems evolving in Japan, the US and Europe. The same is happening in most of the developing world as well. The signs are remarkably similar in all three First World regions, suggesting a common origin that almost has to reflect desperate attempts to achieve (or maintain) "competitiveness" in an environment of ever-increasing globalization. One tragedy is that Japan was once considered to be the world's least socially stratified nation. (Argentina was also one of the world's least socially stratified nations, but it too is finding itself in a situation suggestive of early stages of a caste system.) A caste system also seems to be evolving in many developing nations, where deliberate acts by the government and the "formal" economy are preventing the wretched, abused members of the "informal" economy from ever moving up into the formal economy.

The World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are able to exert tremendous pressures on many developing nations to impose ill-conceived, ideology-driven "structural adjustment programs" (SAPs) on most developing nations to privatize as many public facilities as possible on the grounds that efficiencies will be enhanced and corruption will be reduced. Why any efficiencies achieved by creating a privately held monopoly to replace a public utility (that must submit to the judgment of the voting public) should be expected to trickle down to the consumer is not clear. SAPs have even required the privatization of public schools, raising the specter of large-scale illiteracy among people unable to afford tuition. The net result is globalization close to home. If a water main breaks near your home you may find yourself trying to locate the owner of your community's water system who may have their office in Switzerland. Other results: Efficiencies are improved minimally if at all, and studies have found that there is little or no reason for believing that efficiencies should improve. Corruption is unchanged if not worsened, and utility rates tend to skyrocket after the agreed-upon initial delay in rate increases expires. (Remember Enron and how California got taken for about $10 billion? If you do, might you also remember Montana's similar debacle? If you do, are you aware that the part of Pennsylvania's law that prevents deregulated power companies from doing what they did to California expires soon?)

Often a state-owned or city-owned utility is "privatized" by selling it to a politically well-connected individual who takes his/ her private monopoly for all it is worth. In 1990 the Mexican government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sold the Mexican national phone company, Telmex, to his friend, Carlos Slim, along with a de facto commitment to maintain Slim's private monopoly status for years. Then the Mexican government awarded Telmex the only nationwide cell phone license. Today, Telmex has a 90% share of Mexico's landline phone service, and it controls almost 75% of Mexico's cell phone market. Mexicans pay well above average for landline, cell phone, and Internet access. Carlos Slim is now the world's richest man, being worth $59 billion. In 2006, ten Mexicans were among the world's 946 billionaires. The Mexican government created many, if not most, of Mexico's ten billionaires during its privatization of state-owned companies in the 1990s. The huge number of opportunities for bribing public officials that are created by the privatization process make it unlikely that privatization will ever result in a decrease in corruption of public utilities.

[4] ~ Health Care Economics- and the Health Care Crisis in the U.S.
[4-A] ~ Health Care Economics ~
These two web documents have little relation to the remainder of this website, other than being one of a class of issues that are likely to have significant effects on us all. The first web document (on health-care economics) describes the four major categories of inefficiencies in the US health care system. Inefficiencies tend to become extreme whenever an insurer is interposed between buyer and seller of goods or services, partly because the buyer is no longer concerned about the cost of anything, so there is no longer a free market. The usual response of the insurer is to develop free-market "proxies," e.g. insurance companies involved in automotive collision insurance require two or more quotes on a repair job. The health care system is vastly more complex, so free-market "proxies" of health insurers become complex and expensive, and there is lots of fraud and abuse. The overall health care system's information flow, analysis and storage (IFAS) systems become incredibly complex and expensive and demand huge amounts of the time of health care professionals and administrative personnel. This is due partly to all those proxies and partly due to insurers being interposed between buyers and sellers of health care.

[4-B] ~ The Health Care Crisis ~
The second of the two web documents on health care addresses the health care crisis by tackling the largest of the four major categories of inefficiencies in the U.S. health care system. It points out that this crisis could by solved by creating a single software system that computerizes the entire information flow, analysis and storage (IFAS) system of the US health care industry. This would require contracting a single software source that uses the rest of the huge health care software industry to serve as sub-contractors. This would avoid all those incompatibilities among software systems that plague the health care system. It would also require that the contractor deliver a "source code" to avoid any possibility of a monopoly holding us all for ransom. This idea is not unique to this author. Every decade or so a huge study of the US health care system's problems is performed. All of these studies have pointed out the massive inefficiencies of the health care system and the need for more and better computerization. The web document points out numerous peripheral benefits in addition to the 400-500 billion dollars in annual cost savings in the US health care system. The one-time cost and the annual cost of maintenance/ development/ updates of this software would be negligible relative to the annual savings. Some of these benefits are:

• It would create a system that makes it much easier and cheaper to create a virtually unlimited array of improvements to the quality of US health care.
• It would eliminate most, if not all, of the shortfalls of 200,000 doctors and 800,000 nurses that have been forecasted for the year 2020.
• It would flesh out a strategy for achieving large-scale computerization of IFAS systems in numerous other industrial, commercial, educational and government operations.
• The saving to just the federal government's Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health-care programs would be on the order of several hundred billion dollars per year - sufficient to significantly reduce the annual federal budget deficit.
• The cost of doing major public health research projects would be drastically reduced, permitting far more extensive and elaborate public health studies to be done.
• The cost of health care insurance would drop drastically, significantly enhancing the competitiveness of US business and industry and reducing the number of uninsured citizens.
• The bulk of the several hundred billion dollars of annual fraud and abuse in health care billings to insurers could be largely eliminated.
• A broad realization would develop acknowledging that persistent health-care system efficiencies are not a failure of a free-market system, but simply a lack of central leadership that make these efficiencies logistically impossible to achieve. Once this realization comes about, eliminating health care system inefficiencies would take on a bipartisan character, thereby eliminating the current most serious, long-term impediment to solving the health care crisis. Work could then begin on the three remaining classes of inefficiencies plaguing the U.S. health care system.

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