Scarcity, crises and choice.

• Author: Goldstone, Jack A.
• Position: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Book review

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond (New York: Viking, 2004), 592 pages.

The title of Jared Diamond's new book is misleading, sounding like a melodramatic doomsayer's call to arms. A more truthful title for the book, although it would do less for sales, would be: "A comparative analysis of a range of modern and pre-modern societies, showing how varied responses to ecological and international pressures produced widely divergent outcomes." The key to understanding Diamond's argument, and its importance, is to focus on that full range of divergent outcomes. He shows that while some societies have come to varying degrees of grief, other societies--even those facing great challenges-have managed to survive, and even thrive, under difficult conditions.

Diamond is a physiologist by training, and an ornithologist by profession, but in this book he draws on his full range of experience, from youthful farm work in Montana's Bitterroot Valley to consulting for the World Wildlife Fund on oil firm conservation and development issues in New Guinea. The results of his reflections are sometimes surprising, well-grounded in the latest archeological and ecological findings and always entertaining. As readers of his previous works know, he is a graceful writer who blends touching personal stories with clear accounts of global processes of natural and social change in an enticing mix.

This book has a serious message. However, that message is in danger of being lost in the fascination we all have for vanished empires, whose ruins provide mysterious evidence of past greatness. The largest portion of the book is taken up with accounts of the collapse of the societies of Easter Island, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the classic Maya of Mesoamerica and the Viking settlements in Greenland. Seeded through these chapters are hints that even wealthy industrialized nations may, if they do not change their ways, share the fate of these vanished civilizations. Romantics may thus take away from these chapters the overly simple lesson that advanced countries are on the path to self-destruction, while conservatives may dismiss as outrageous the notion that countries with modern technology could even be discussed in the same breath as these technologically primitive societies.

Both conclusions are mistaken and would be severe misreadings of Diamond's book. For all its emphasis on ecology and the fragility of certain environments, the book is basically an exercise (albeit a very historically rich and sophisticated exercise) in accounting. Any community--from a neighborhood to a small tribal or island society to a great and populous empire--is bound by a simple rule of accounting: If it spends its accumulated wealth faster than it creates new wealth it will, sooner or later, go broke. There is no other possible outcome.

Paradoxes of Plenty and the "Resource Curse"

Most people, if asked whether it is better to start out rich or start out poor, would say it is better to start out rich. They would likely extrapolate this logic to entire societies as well, suggesting that societies living in lands rich in natural resources should be better off than societies living in poor and barren lands.

Yet, history and the modern global economy demonstrate that the opposite is often true. In 1650, the richest territory in all of the Americas was the "pearl of the Antilles," otherwise known as Haiti. Its vastly profitable sugar plantations fed Europe's sweet tooth and that of American colonists as well, producing huge wealth for its planters (including black planters, often freed slaves who went into the business). Other centers of wealth included central Mexico and the Peruvian highlands, with their vast silver mines. By contrast, distant lands poor in resources, such as the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies in North America, or Chile on the Pacific coast of South America, were backwaters where people struggled to wrest a living from the rocky, swampy or dry soils. Three and a half centuries later, however, it is those resource-poor regions that are rich, while the once resource-rich regions are poor, sometimes desperately so. (1)

The phenomenon of an inverse relationship between initial resource endowments and later wealth is not only seen in the Western Hemisphere. Several Asian countries that are relatively poor in natural resources include South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore. South Korea was widely assumed to have scant prospects for development after the devastation of the Korean War, as it lacks any valuable resources beyond coal. Hong Kong was such a barren rock that it was barely settled by the Chinese before its development as a British colony. Taiwan was a small and remote province of the great Chinese empire, and Japan has only a relatively small amount of good farmland and has neither oil nor gold nor diamonds nor many of the other resources that represent wealth. On the other hand, all of these countries are now comparatively far richer than countries blessed with greater and richer farmland (such as India, Vietnam, Ghana and Egypt) or valuable petroleum and mineral resources (such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola).

How can countries that lack resources become wealthy, while countries with plentiful resources fall into poverty? Economists have found this dynamic to occur so often that they have given it a name: The "paradox of plenty" or the "resource curse." (2) Having plentiful natural resources creates a number of problems for societies that we have only recently come to appreciate. The availability of such resources, like winning a lottery, creates temptations and distortions that lead to behavior that is, in the long run, destructive for society

Human beings have very limited abilities to judge large numbers or long-term outcomes of gradual processes. We can readily see that if we have a dozen oranges, and eat three a day, our stock will not last out the week. However, if we have three billion oranges (or trees, or tons of topsoil, or gallons of fresh water or cubic meters of natural gas), it is very difficult to judge how long they will last. Indeed, supplies of this magnitude seem, to our limited imaginations, inexhaustible. Thus we place no price on these resources and consume them without restraint. The loggers of the vast forests of North America's western mountains never thought they could exhaust the forest and Europe's fishermen never thought they could exhaust what seemed like the endless bounty of the North Atlantic fisheries or the Caspian and Volga sturgeon. Even today we tend to think of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans as infinite resources.

Yet they are not. Initially, unconstrained use of a resource provides great wealth to those who appropriate it. But eventually, such actions have an impact. At first the quality of the resource is degraded: The prime logs and largest fish are gone, and the remaining logs or fish are smaller or harder to find; the remaining gas, oil or ore requires more effort to get out of the ground; and fresh water, estuaries and bays or even oceans become polluted...