The Great Horse Manure Crisis
In the 1890's, dealing with manure was becoming a global crisis. If you believed all of the doomsayers, we were being runover by horse manure which proposed numerous health risks. Around the turn of the century, in ten major U.S. cities, the equine population rose by 328% whereas the human population only increased by 105%. Even a small town like Bolivar, Tennessee with a population of only about 1,000 had more horses than people!
Back then, it seemed like The End of Civilization As We Know It would be brought about, not by a meteor strike, global sickness or warfare, but by an excess of manure by the urban equine. Problems with horse drawn transport were not new. Even Julius Caesar had banned the presence of horse drawn carts from Rome between dawn and dusk in an effort to curb gridlock, noise, accidents and the other unpleasant by products of equine transport.
Here is a collage
of early Bolivar streets in
1890-1910 era.
Things got so bad that in 1898 an international urban planning conference was convened in New York to address the problem. Cities all over the world were experiencing the same problem. Unable to see any solution to the manure crisis, the delegates abandoned the conference after only three days of the scheduled ten day conference!
The Problem Solved Itself
Then quite quickly, the crisis passed as millions of horses were replaced by millions of motor vehicles. This change did not happen instantly but the horse-drawn vehicles were more expensive to own and maintain than the automobile. In 1900, there were only 4,192 cars sold in the U.S.; by 1912 that number had risen to 356,000. In 1912, traffic counts in New York showed more cars than horses for the first time. Here is a collage
of Bolivar streets in
1960 to current day
(see no more manure)
And the Moral of the Story is ...
We should draw two lessons from this.
First, human beings, left to their own devices, will usually find solutions to problems, but only if they are allowed to; that is, if they have economic institutions, such as property rights and free exchange, that create the right inentives and give them the freedom to respond. If these are absent or are replaced by political mechanisms, problems will likely not be solved.
Second, the sheer difficulty of predicting the future, and in particular of foreseeing the outcome of human creativity, is yet another reason for rejecting the planning or controlling of people's choices. Above all, we should reject the currently fashionable "precautionary principle" that forbids the use of any technology until proven absolutely harmless because few things exist without side affects or consequences of some type.
Today, we need to be aware of doomsayers who take current trends and extrapolate them into the future as a means of predicting ultimate ruination. Sometimes such messages are accompanied by the suggestion that we have the means of averting doom if we will only change our ways, often at considerable economic cost or even at the cost of personal liberty.
Where have you heard these dire predictions of doom and gloom...
Global Warming
Oil Shortage
Earthquakes
Pollution
Population Explosion
Nuclear Weapons Proliferation
Increased World Tensions
The fundamental problems with most predictions of this kind, and particularly the gloomy ones, is that they make a critical, false assumption; that things will go on as they are. This assumption ignores one of the basic principles of free enterprise...that people will respond to incentives and in a system of free exchange, people will receive all kinds of signals that lead them to solving problems. That does not mean that we should do nothing because something or someone will come along and solve it for us. It simply means that we should take a "measured approach" when someone confronts us with the next doomsday prediction. Make sure they are not trying to give us some more horse manure!
Source: Story adapted from http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com/2011/07/great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894.html
