Peak water, peak fish and the end of everything

The peaknik movement has already moved on from its obsession with oil and—like the peacenik movement of yore—split into a multitude of factions, each warning of the impending catastrophic consequences of one form of peakonomics or another.

And so in addition to the peak oilers, we now find people banging on about peak fish (the point at which the amount of food we can pull from the sea goes into decline), peak soil (same thing except for agriculture), peak water (an impending water shortage) and peak carbon (which has something to do with global warming). A former Cisco employee named Jaswant Jain has identified something he calls peak debt, the point at which the ability of consumers to access credit will run out, with a corollary called peak dollars, the supposed limit of the government’s ability to print money.
At its essence peakonomic thought rejects the foundational economic principle of our civilization, that over the long term, increased productivity leads to ever-higher levels of prosperity, social stability, and well-being. Instead, peakniks suggest output will soon crest in any number of sectors, followed by an extended or permanent period of decline. The assumption is all historical trends in production and consumption inevitably continue along their current path, with no hope for innovation, no leaps in technological progress or improvements in institutional design.

But why should we buy this assumption? It is weirdly ahistorical to think we’re not going to get massive innovation in each of those sectors. Over the past 100 years, life in the developed world got steadily better by almost any conceivable measure. Life expectancy rose while infant mortality dropped; the air quality of our cities improved, food got cheaper and more nutritious, and the workplace became safer as wages steadily climbed. There is no reason to think this sort of across-the-board progress cannot be sustained. From global warming to food production to the current economic crisis, the odds are we’re going to figure things out.

Macleans