In an engaging New York Times oped on the ascension of economists to power and influence in the world economy, Binyamin Appelbaum provides this engaging anecdote about Milton Friedman: “He joked that if bureaucrats gained control of the Sahara, there would soon be a shortage of sand.”
Well, the forces of the free market have pretty much prevailed, as Appelbaum explains:
Liberal and conservative economists conducted running battles on key questions of public policy, but their areas of agreement ultimately were more important. Although nature tends toward entropy, they shared a confidence that markets tend toward equilibrium. They agreed that the primary goal of economic policy was to increase the dollar value of the nation’s output. And they had little patience for efforts to limit inequality.
But it turns out that there really is a shortage of sand, just as Friedman predicted, although it is mostly due to unconstrained development and the absence of regulation, rather than bureaucracy.
Just a few blocks from my home, climate change has raised the level of Lake Michigan to the point that sandy beaches have all but disappeared. That is an inconvenience in Evanston, but it has been devastating for shoreline communities in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin:
“Long term, I don’t know how anybody along the lakeshore deals with it,” said Mitch Foster, the city manager in Ludington, Mich., where the rising water has closed roads, damaged homes and seeped into a museum.
The true sand shortage, however, is global and potentially disastrous. As reported by David Owen in The New Yorker, sand is “one of our most widely used natural resources,” and we are rapidly running out of it.
In the industrial world, it’s “aggregate,” a category that includes gravel, crushed stone, and various recycled materials. Natural aggregate is the world’s second most heavily exploited natural resource, after water, and for many uses the right kind is scarce or inaccessible. In 2014, the United Nations Environment Programme published a report titled “Sand, Rarer Than One Thinks,” which concluded that the mining of sand and gravel “greatly exceeds natural renewal rates” and that “the amount being mined is increasing exponentially, mainly as a result of rapid economic growth in Asia.”
In India, commercially useful sand is now so scarce that markets for it are dominated by “sand mafias”—criminal enterprises that sell material taken illegally from rivers and other sources, sometimes killing to safeguard their deposits.
There is still plenty of sand in the Sahara because, according to Owen, “desert sand is also unsuitable for construction and, indeed, for almost any human use.” Unfortunately, the more commercially desirable sand – necessary for construction and road building – is being mined nearly to exhaustion, with few regulations requiring conservation.
In other words, Friedman had it completely backwards. We are running out of sand because governments — or bureaucrats, to use his disparaging word — have not acted with sufficient foresight to protect it.
Ahhh, nice point. But, perhaps as glib as Friedman's.
The socialist way would confiscate all the sand in the world, and allow a vanguard to distribute it "equitably" which would, if history is a guide, inevitably lead to distribution to the benefit of the vanguard. Soon, the world would run out of anyway.
The capitalist way, probably, leads to the same result.
The difference is that, in the absence of a profit motive, again if history is a guide, the socialist society will be less likely than a free enterprise system to innovate, and develop an alternative.
"Managed decline" is what we usually hear from the socialists.
That, and scurrilous attacks, blaming a certain race and gender for all the ills of the world.
Steve, the article you refer to does not say that climate change has caused the water level near your house to go up. It does hypothesize that while water levels in the Great Lakes will continue to fluctuate over the years that climate change could cause higher highs and lower lows. We will have to see how this plays out but for now, you can blame this year's water level on the well above average rainfall levels in the Midwest over the past several months.
"you can blame this year's water level on the well above average rainfall levels in the Midwest over the past several months."
Paradoxically, one of the larger reasons for the current high water levels is the unusual level of icing last winter, which greatly reduces water evaporation.
Until recently, climate change was being blamed for reducing Great Lakes' water levels, primarily because warmer winters reduced winter evaporation.
http://glisa.umich.edu/media/files/projectreports/GLISA_ProjRep_Lake_Evaporation.pdf (2011)
The debate about climate change effects nearly always ends up embarrassing the hysterics who observe some ill effect, don't know the science, and make some wild claim about doomsday.
For example, the California wild fires. The entire "liberal" establishment couldn't help but claim that "climate change" caused the fires and the severity of the fires.
In fact, however, the long absence of rain left millions of tons of dead wood in the forests – fuel – and the same folks who claimed climate change caused the fires were the ones who wouldn't allow the necessary clearing to prevent the inevitable burning of this fuel.
ALl those who even dared to mention this fact — supported by solid science and government studies that called for the clearing before the fires — were mocked as saying that "sweeping the leaves" would have prevented the burning.
Lubet states as a fact that "climate change" is responsible for the water level in a lake a few blocks from his home. That there has been a change is likely true.
Does Lubet claim this change is based on anthropogenic global climate change? What is the actual percentage of the scientific community that believes that "global climate change" is anthropogenic? 97%? Let's hear it.
This debate is one that can be quite interesting, when the hysterical claims and remedies proposed are examined. For example, if the US reduces its CO2 emissions to zero (thereby destroying its economy) what will be the claimed effect on anthropogenic global climate change over the next fifty years?
If negligible, and the argument is that the US should lead by example anyway (and transfer vast sums of money to other countries which continue to emit CO2 at record and increasing levels to "level the playing field" to boot), cite the provisions in the Paris Accords upon which that belief is based, please.
Finally, what efforts have the doomsdayers made to support innovation rather than again (as always) managed decline and impoverishing the middle class?
did you even read the New Yorker article?
"Deposits of sand, gravel, and stone can be found all over the United States, but many of them are untouchable, because they’re covered by houses, shopping malls, or protected land. Regulatory approval for new quarries is more and more difficult to obtain: people don’t want to live near big, noisy holes, even if their lives are effectively fabricated from the products of those holes. The scarcity of alternatives makes existing quarries increasingly valuable. The Connecticut quarry I visited is one of a number owned by Stanley’s company, and like many in the United States it’s in operation today only because it predates current mining regulations."
The bottom line is that, as the world population grows and more and more people demand the same level of consumption, there won't be enough fish in the sea, sand, etc.
This observation was the ground for hysteria on the left a few decades ago. However, for some reason, they flit from flower to flower, like so many drunken bees, unable to settle on one basis to claim that, because of the looming extinction of the human race owing to its folly (capitalism) the world must adopt socialism (wealth transfer) and managed decline.
The way that some toss around their hyperbolic nonsense is not unexpected, but it really is not consistent with scholarly thought. If legal academia increasingly asserts that facts don't matter because it can cherry pick data and claim "consensus" without any thoughtful consideration, then the process of rebutting their nonsensical assertions becomes increasingly easy, but the prospect of convincing any of these persons to think a bit harder about their "truths" becomes increasingly dim.
The author looks out the window and sees the water level is higher and thinks he can make a scientific deduction therefrom (easily rebutted by another comment above.) Meanwhile, a champion of his point of view (wealth transfer based on the notion that it is evil for the wealthy to have so much compared to everyone else) just dropped a sizable chunk of his enormous wealth (which he is apparently hungrily acquiring as fast as he can) on a beachfront property.