Source: BBC Radio 4: Start the Week
URL: N/A
Date: 01/07/2013
Event: Population: Ten Billion
Credit: BBC Radio 4, also to Geoff Chambers for transcribing this
People:
Sue MacGregor: Hullo. Today we’re going to consider nothing less than the future of our planet in the light of what at least one respected scientist calls "the unprecedented planetary emergency that we've created". He’s Stephen Emmott, whose new book Ten Billion - that was also the name of the play in which he starred a year ago at the Royal Court theatre in London - not many scientists can say that - anyway, his new book conveys a deeply pessimistic message about population growth, and Stephen himself leads an extensive scientific research programme at Cambridge University.
Also with me is a scientist who takes a very different view - Danny Dorling, professor of Geography at Sheffield University. "Be an optimist" he advises us, "Don’t listen to what he calls 'the aggressive pessimists'". His own book is encouragingly called Population Ten Billion: the Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It.
And here too with me is the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. His latest book, An Uncertain Glory is about the challenges faced by his own country, India, which will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous. And Jill Rutter, from the Institute for Government, an independent body promoting more effective government. With a background in sustainable development, Jill has her own views on how governments deal or don’t deal with crises current and to come.
But let's start with Stephen Emmott. Stephen, your book Ten Billion: at the end of it you say: "“we cannot avoid global catastrophe". You think we've "had it". You use rather stronger language which I’d better not use at this hour of the day. Why are you so pessimistic?
Stephen Emmott: Well, before I answer that question I should just say one thing which is that I and my lab is at Microsoft in Cambridge, not at the Cambridge University, sorry.
I'm pessimistic for the following reasons, and it’s probably best to put it into this kind of context. We are the drivers of every, almost every, global problem that we face, such as climate change, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, water stress. And as we continue to grow towards ten billion, possibly more, every one of these problems is set to get worse, much worse.
For example, as we continue to grow and more of us continue to want to consume the way in which we around this table consume, demand for food is set to at least double, possibly treble, by the end of this century. Demand for water is set to at least double, possibly treble by the end of this century, and demand for energy is set to at least double, possibly treble by the end of this century.
Sue MacGregor: And you remind us of the figures which are quite frightening in a way, the accelerating rate of population growth - one billion people on the world in 1820, seven billion now, ten or more billion by the end of the century. How has it accelerated so fast?
Stephen Emmott: Well, as Danny will no doubt point out, the rate at which population is increasing is declining, but it’s still going up in terms of absolute numbers, going up rapidly, and, you know, I suppose that one thing that Danny and I may or may not agree on is that it’s less the numbers, and more the way in which we live, and that’s the key...
Sue MacGregor: You mean our aspirational living...
Stephen Emmott: Well, there’s several billions of us on the planet who have aspirations to live how Europeans and Americans consume, and the way in which Europeans and Americans largely consume is causing enormous problem, er, enormous problems. But I think one of the reasons why I'm pessimistic at the end of the book is that probably one of the most important things is not just the increase in population from seven billion to ten billion and coupled with that, the way in which an increasing number of those ten billion will wish to consume, or consume, is the fact that, I suppose I could characterise it like this - is that, is the failure of us, and in particular the failure of governments, to actually do anything about it.
Sue MacGregor: Well, the trouble is that ten billion people in the lifetime of our grandchildren perhaps, put it that way, seems still a long way away, and it’s really hard to get worried - unless you’re a member of the Green movement, and many millions are - about that, isn't it? I mean, I mean, I'm not saying I approve of that view, but it is hard to get people to bother about something that's going to happen when they're not around.
Stephen Emmott: I agree, it’s incredibly hard. That’s why I’m not entirely certain what the solution is going to be, I mean, you know, whether it involves legislation from governments who probably, now, for the future, but, is an interesting question. Governments do like to be, politicians do like to be elected, and politicians being elected in this, it seems highly unlikely because it would require very unpopular measures to actually control some of the problems that we're heading for.
Sue MacGregor: Well, we’ll come back to that very important question, but, Danny Dorling, I know that you disagree with quite a lot of what Stephen says, but you do agree that there is a slight deceleration in the population growth, but do you...? You don’t disagree about ten billion in the year 2100?
Danny Dorling: I agree with what Stephen says about how we behave, this is crucial. Population is now rising at a very high rate, but in fact the deceleration began way back in 1971. It's like a juggernaut, where the brakes were applied slightly in 1971. In 1990 we hit peak baby in the world. We’re currently about peak 18-year-old, but it's going to carry on rising...
Sue MacGregor: When you say "peak baby" what does that mean?
Danny Dorling: Oh, more babies were born in 1990 than at any point before or after. And so we're actually... we often talk about the world as ageing, we don't talk about the declining numbers of young people. Which is all good news. The big problem is not the numbers of people, the numbers of people is going down quite rapidly and we may not get to ten billion.
Sue MacGregor: Well, not from those figures that we've just heard.
Danny Dorling: Well, a large part of the reason why our numbers will increase is that more of us will be around for longer. So it's not more new people, and when you’re talking about worrying about it, it isn't our grandchildren, it’s our children. Odds on, if you believe the OMS life expectancy figures, one of my children will probably live to be around when we hit ten billion, so this is really approaching quite rapidly, but we do need to understand it's not because of our... our birth rates are now falling, this is great news, and have been falling for forty years...
Sue MacGregor: But we're all living longer.
Danny Dorling: We're all going to live longer, and that means that at any one time there's going to be more of us about. The question is: can we live longer and not consume as much, and that's the hardest question.
Sue MacGregor: Well, that’s something that must have concerned you, Amartya Sen. The United Nations predicts that India's population will surpass China's quite soon, in the next fifteen years or so to just under one and a half billion people. As an economist, this must be of concern to you.
Amartya Sen: It would have been of concern if the UN demographic prediction had been better in the past than they have been. So I think those numbers, I mean, they keep on revising these numbers. Actually the Dorling book goes through that a bit, how quickly they're revising, they have a maximum scenario, they have a minimum scenario...
Sue MacGregor: But they're not revising them severely downwards are they...
Amartya Sen: Well, they have in the past, they have under-estimating the population birth rate decline of which Danny was speaking. You see, I think the thing to recognise is that six of the Indian eighteen states already have below replacement population. I think what is important - actually I am concerned like Stephen is with the nature of the problem - that there could be a large number of people, and there is an aspiration at least, and we might come back to that a bit later, and then there could be, if we do get to ten billion or more, there could be a genuine issue, genuine problem. But I think what it looks is that , there is, the factor that full [?] population growth down, the birth rate down, that is the births rather than population grows because of people living longer, it's been a subject of debate right from the time of Malthus and Condorcet in the eighteenth century. Malthus took the thesis from Condorcet who was worried about overpopulation...
Sue MacGregor: Well, Malthus thought we were done for in his time didn't he?
Amartya Sen: He thought that one billion was more than the earth could bear. That scenario we've visited again and again. Well, I think that’s not my concern so much here. It’s just that Malthus thought that education and health care did not have an impact of reducing population, birth rate, whereas Condorcet's position was exactly the opposite, and he was one of the first to emphasise the importance of women’s education. Just to give an example, the education of women, and the women having gainful activity, having a bigger voice, immediately reduces the fertility rate. For example Bangladesh has gone from seven children to 2.2...
Sue MacGregor: Yes, we’ll come to that in a minute, because I take it that you would count yourself among the optimists, and not..
Amartya Sen: No, I’d count myself - you see neither optimists nor pessimists assume that our policies and policy thinking does make a difference. We have reason to be optimists if we intelligently do right things.
Sue MacGregor: Right. And doing the right thing is where I come to Jill Rutter now. We’ll talk to Amartya later about India’s specific problems in all of these areas, but Jill, Stephen’s conclusion that we've had it. Are you somebody who thinks that governments can make a difference? I mean, isn't this an indictment of the cleverness of politicians to be able to lead us out of these Sloughs of Despond?
Jill Rutter: I think there's inevitably quite a big collective action problem. One of the problems with the conversations we’re having about ten billion is it's essentially a global problem, and as we've seen in the prolonged attempts to get a success at the Kyoto treaty, actually that sort of collective action problem...
Sue MacGregor: That was sixteen years ago...
Jill Rutter: Sixteen years ago, and you might say that the sort of agreement you can get governments to sign up to is the sort of agreement that actually doesn’t deliver very much, so that people think we’re probably over-seduced by the success of the Montreal Protocol in phasing out CFCs which was actually a relatively easy thing to do, so people assumed it would be relatively easy to get global agreement to reduce carbon emissions. I think there’s now an increasing number of people who say: “Actually, we may be banging our head on a brick wall on that one. It might be better to do something else, whether it’s go for an agreement between, er, between sort of leading countries, and then look at sort of carbon adjustment taxes ans things like that, that maybe that model of universal global agreement with ever more nations being added to the UN really isn’t that feasible, so I think there’s a real..
Sue MacGregor: ...and ever more nations being added to the European Union, a new one today
Jill Rutter: .. Croatia coming in today, whatever, but I think there’s sort of interesting differences because quite a lot of these policies then play out at domestic level, and that’s where you get the question about being elected, and quite noticeable that the UK, to its credit, took the lead in 2007 being the first country to introduce legislated carbon targets - now, whether you think the government’s going to meet them or not is a different issue - but that was done with an amazing degree of cross-party consensus, only three people in the House of Commons voted against the Climate Change Bill was introduced, and that was a first attempt to really set a bit of a long-term trajectory for the UK to deal with something. It was on the assumption that leadership would then translate into action in Copenhagen, which we saw then didn’t happen, which is perhaps a reason to veer slightly more towards Stephen’s end of the dimension, but anyway...
Sue MacGregor: Alright Jill, I’m going to come back to you and talk to you about what government priorities in this country are in terms of this big problem, but let me move across and back to Danny Dorling. Danny, your book, “Population Ten Billion: the Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It” - the very title tells us that you are an optimist about this, maybe even an aggressive optimist, or a rational one anyway.
Danny Dorling: No no no. I’m not a rational... Rational optimists are people who think that technology will solve our problems.
Sue MacGregor: And you don’t?
Danny Dorling: I describe myself as a possibilist, that it is possible that we will be OK. The phrase comes from Hans Rosling, who created Gapminder.
Sue MacGregor: You’ll have to remind us what that was.
Danny Dorling: Gapminder is, is this programme that’s available for free on the web that lets you see how the world is changing, and Hans is the person who coined the phrase “peak baby” for 1990.
Sue MacGregor: Oh, I see. Will that make us feel more optimistic or pessimistic if we constantly look at this website?
Danny Dorling: It would help a lot, I think, to look at what Hans is saying. It’s not that I am saying that we will be ok. It’s that if we think that there is almost no chance that we will be okay, then it’s very hard to say to people that they should bother about doing anything. I think there’s very good news on population numbers, there isn't yet much good news on consumption, however we do see some forms of consumption reducing, even in this country, before the crash, the amount of stuff that we were buying by weight was reducing up unto 2005 in everything apart from clothes. People were still convincing us to buy more clothes than we possibly needed, more clothes than we could ever wear...
Sue MacGregor: Somebody’s actually weighed all the clothes we bought before and after?
Danny Dorling: Yes, they work it out, and the difficulty I think is advertisers. Advertisers are encouraging people around the world to buy more and more things. These are huge problems, but our actual numbers are going down. What we’ve got to do is stop the people who are trying to get us to buy more from getting us to buy more.
Sue MacGregor: So you seem to hold out great hope that we will in the rich West change our behaviour.
Danny Dorling: We may change our behaviour. Our behaviour may already be changing. I don’t think that this necessarily will come from combined government action. It may simply come because, if you look at the period since population, the rate of growth began to reduce, economies haven’t been able to cope with it. Our economic way of being has relied on there being ever more people and ever expanding markets so that you can make a profit selling things.
Sue MacGregor: So there’s no incentive for the big corporations to stop doing what they’re doing?
Danny Dorling: well, but if they look at the population numbers they can realise that their markets are going to be shrinking for young people from now ever onwards. So trying to sell more and more and more, you’re more likely to fail. You need to be clever if you’re a corporation and not simply try to persuade people to buy more of your products, but to buy things they actually really need, less frequently, and wear them out till they’re finished
Sue MacGregor: but just one thought to add to that Danny, if you do - and it’s a big if - persuade people in the West to buy less and consume less, at the same time, aspirational people in the developing world are wanting to earn more, buy more, consume more. Aren’t they going to more than make up for the difference?
Danny Dorling: This is the worry. But if you look at somewhere like Japan, which is well ahead of this but which until recently was still increasing population, for the last twenty years, every year the number of cars bought in Japan has gone down. Japan has a far better model in Tokyo than London if you want to see a lower consumption society. But we do need, above all else, people in the West to consume less and we need our politicians to stop talking about winning the global race. That’s a global race to planetary destruction, and, you know, as soon as you hear the phrase “winning the global race” you need to think “idiot”, I think.
Sue MacGregor: Well, Stephen Emmott, here’s an intelligent fellow-academic, if you like, of yours, using the broader spectrum, saying it’s going to be alright, people can change their behaviour, and after all it’s only people living older that’s going to cause - living to be much older, or the population, the older population getting much bigger that’s going to be the problem. it’s not, sort of, acres and acres of new babies.
Stephen Emmott: Well I’m not sure I share Danny’s optimism in this, even in the, let’s say, more well-informed Europe and the US who are, nearly everybody, I mean virtually no-one can be unfamiliar with some of these problems, certainly not climate change and over-consumption, and if there is evidence of a reduction of consumption in the UK I think Danny was talking about, it’s certainly not visible outside Primark, and Danny...
Sue MacGregor: ..which is a very inexpensive shop
Stephen Emmott: Yes, and em, when we think about the amount of water that goes into producing cotton, for example, and that water, and that’s water that isn’t, we don’t pay for, it’s water that comes from some other country, it might be Bangladesh or Tunisia or, and you know we also have to remember, I mean, Danny’s talking about a reduction for example in consumption of cars in Japan, and every motor manufacturing sort of organisation is predicting that there will be at least 2.5, possibly 4 billion more cars produced over the next fifty years.
Sue MacGregor: Yes, you have some fascinating figures in your book about how many litres of water it costs to produce a car, and how many litres of water it costs to produce a litre of water in a bottle. Can you give us some of those?
Stephen Emmott: Erm, well I mean, I think you know I think for example er, well the most ironic one is it takes about, at least four, or at least four litres of water to produce a one litre plastic bottle of water, and I think in the UK alone we consumed and disposed of nine billion plastic bottles of water. I mean that’s absolute criminal activity, to be honest.
Sue MacGregor: And a car? A great deal more
Stephen Emmott: Well, that’s less an issue of water than
Sue MacGregor:...energy
Stephen Emmott: you know extracting things out of the ground, transporting it all around the planet in very polluting ships, erm, whether it’s the lead in the
Amartya Sen: ..atmosphere..
Stephen Emmott: .. lead in the battery, or you know, right.
Sue MacGregor: Yes, Amatya, let me bring you in here, we’ll talk specifically as I say about India later on, but the point I made about as the West , if it does, begins to consume less and the developing world more, um, you know this is not going to help the problem. What’s your view on that?
Amartya Sen: Well you know I think it’s a great mistake - I’m not accusing my colleagues of making the mistake - of thinking abstractly in terms of consumption. We get consumer goods to do something, have living standards, for example Adam Smith discussed already in 1776 the reason why you can’t appear in public without shame if you don’t have as much clothings as others do is because what you’re seeking is not to have as much clothing as others do, a kind of relative advantage but the ability to be able to communicate with people, so I think...
Sue MacGregor: But the ability of the third world, the developing world now to consume is looking to be enormous, and increasing...
Amartya Sen: Well, yes, but it depends on, this is where the issue of leadership is important. I think if it goes in the direction of individual cars rather than public transport, if it goes in the direction of commodities rather than expanding education, health care, none of which are as much absorbing in terms of environmental resources, then there is a problem. But you have to bear in mind, education, health care are extremely labour intensive work, and in general the kind of living standard that you can get, everywhere in the world, you see the service sector, which is a labour sector ultimately, is a higher and higher proportion. So it’s not so much the (?) basket of commodities that has continuously gone on increasing by trade. So one has to think in terms of the aspiration - that question came up, I think Stephen raised that - but I think the aspiration is about living standards, the quality of life, which is not the same thing as how many pounds of commodities you carry into your home.
Sue MacGregor: It's in a way, it’s how many cars you own, how many mobile phones you have and how many televisions.
Amartya Sen: The mobile phone is a different thing because I think that has made a big difference to the life of ordinary people.
Sue MacGregor: Oh, certainly, and in Africa particularly.
Amartya Sen: In Africa and everywhere, China, India and so on. But I think that generally I would think that one could be more pessimistic if one went only by a kind of homogeneous idea of consumption rather than what people are seeking, a good quality of life.
Sue MacGregor: Let’s return with Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government to the role of politicians here. Jill, I mean, all governments, particularly ours, have science advisors, scientific advisors, but politicans are the ones who bring policies into reality, or not, as the case may be. How important do you think is this demographic crisis to our politicians in this country?
Jill Rutter: I think there are two dimensions of demographic crisis, one of which is what is going on globally, and the impacts that that’s going to have, where they need to address that globally, and some of the things that Amartya Sen has been talking about, about girls’ education for instance, is a very big emphasis in our aid programme.
Amartya Sen: Yes indeed
Jill Rutter: And I think people recognise that that’s sort of a very important instrumental change
Sue MacGregor: And we have now sort of ring-fenced aid programmes..
Jill Rutter: We've ring -fenced aid. The figures for changes since 2010 in departmental budgets are really extraordinarily striking about what’s happening, to the department of international development. So that’s one set of issues. There’s the UK’s role in negotiating international agreements which is another one. Then there’s the sort of domestic policies, of what are you going to pursue - there I think one of the things that argues with Danny rather than Stephen is a lot of research says actually if you just scare people - we tried that when we were talking about climate change, we tried scaring people - the government did that relatively successfully on AIDS, they then tried that on climate change - if you just scare people, then they turn off, so that’s not a very positive way of engaging people, but actually..
Sue MacGregor: When did they last scare us, Jill? I don’t remember being scared by, well...
Jill Rutter: We tried to do some quite - we never had a big enough budget. There are two strategies that you adopt on climate change, one of which is to scare people, and tried that. DEFRA never had a big enough budget to scare people properly, but if you watched some very obscure channels you could watch DEFRA trying to scare people about carbon emissions.
Sue MacGregor: ... and you were part of DEFRA?
Jill Rutter: That was when I was part of the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, when it had responsibility for Climate Change before the creation of the department for Energy and Climate Change. So there’s a bit of attempts to say: actually, this is the dimension of the problem, this is what it’s going to look like. But the other thing that governments try and do, which I think is equally misguided, is to try and say that it’s all really quite easy. So the government ran a campaign before I joined DEFRA called “Are you doing your bit?” which suggested tha you could indeed do something about climate change if you filled your kettle with slightly less water
Sue MacGregor: Or shared a bath
Jill Rutter: Or if you shared a bath. Share a bath I think was more Patrick Jenkins in the 1970s to deal with the power cuts. Maybe we’ll do that again if we have the forecast power cuts from 2015 onwards. So, and that gave people the impression that actually just throwing away a couple of aluminium cans was enough to do that, and we would do polling which would say: yes, I'm doing my bit for the environment, I'm recycling and things like that. We all know it’s much more fundamental. The thing is, people were resistant to were the things that people most like doing, so when you started to interfere into people’s decisions about driving or flying, then you’re reaching points of resistance. We've had a lot of resistance to the idea of stealth taxes, green taxes - people are very suspicious about that - and one of the things that I think you also have to remember is that we live in an age when trust in politicians is extremely low. I mean, if you look at the Veracity Index that IPSOS/MORI produce, trust in politicians is usually below 20%, they’re nestling at the bottom with estate agents and sundry other people, who we wouldn't be taking very many lifestyle choices from. So that’s part of the context. But you also see some quite considerable behaviour changes on the other side of the ledger. I mean, fuel use has dropped quite markedly in quite a lot of countries since the 2008 price shock. So, you see, you saw that in the 1970s, that fuel efficiency in the US went tremendously, they then completely lost the plot and moved over to sort of SUV land, but as prices go up, people do adapt their behaviour,and that’s one way of looking at, so we have seen some very substantial behaviour change in a number of areas which have been politically acceptable.
Sue MacGregor: Well, let me put a very extreme view to you. Governments in the west would hesitate to say: Have fewer children. Look what’s going to happen to your children and your grandchildren at the end of this century. But it has been done. I mean, China, with its one-child policy until recently, and India under Mrs Gandhi I think I'm right in saying at one point there was, in quotes, enforced sterilisation.
Amartya Sen ...come in on that?
Sue MacGregor: Yes, come in on that.
Amartya Sen. I think that has been totally counter productive. You see, the Chinese have had a big reduction in birthrate, but the two main determining factors demographically (?) up quite sharply, across countries, within districts in India, they've done it every way - the two factors which reduce fertility rate are women’s education and women’s gainful employment. Anything that increases the voice of young women, whose lives are most frequently battered by over-frequent bearing and rearing of children, reduces fertility rate. Now, if you take those factors and put it against China, China has made big progress in the good things, and you find the Chinese fertility rate bang on the line. I think basically the one-child policy gave it very little bump. You see the sad thing about, the good thing that China does doesn't get enough attention. The bad thing does, namely forcing people, going against liberty, you know can really, totalitarianism (?) at its worst on the one-child policy did not have any of those results. And even you say about India, if you look at them, many of the Indian states, like Kerala, which has the same fertility rate as China, these are the ones that never did compulsory. The northern states which did, have still, rather than 1.7 in Kerala, have 3.2, 3.5. I think basically, nothing...
Sue MacGregor: So Kerala has had a sort of natural mean amount of children..
Amartya Sen: Kerala has done - all these are below replacement now. Now the important thing to recognise is - I mean Jill was absolutely right - the important issue is how to do it. But how not to do it is extremely important, and ordering people around is not only bad from a liberty point of view, but utterly counter productive.
Sue MacGregor: But Danny Dorling, is there a role for ordering people around from government? I mean
Danny Dorling: No, no,It doesn’t, it hasn’t worked very well
Sue MacGregor: It did work with smoking
Danny Dorling: Well, we still have very high rates of smoking amongst poorer people. The smoking, bad health, middle class people have to breathe in smoke when they less and less frequently go to the pub. But in general, whenever government has tried to force people to do things, it’s been counterproductive. But what government can do is help point out that, if you take Stephen’s bottles of water, the best way to increase your living standard when it comes to water is to carry a bottle around and refill it when you want more water. It actually makes you feel better, and you don’t drink as much sticky you know stuff with sugar in it
Sue MacGregor: And tap water tastes a bit better than it used to
Danny Dorling: Yeah, and government can certainly help with these kind of things where there are some easy wins, but a lot of it’s much harder. But whenever there’s been imposition, it tends to have been counterproductive, and one of the biggest factors that’s helped has been people winning rights themselves, so this emancipation of women that’s occurred around the globe has probably been the driving force for the slowdown in population, and it wasn’t government policy to emancipate women over the course of most of the last century.
Sue MacGregor: Stephen Emmott, do you feel a little bit better about things now? I mean, the examples we’ve been given are quite compelling, aren’t they? In terms of population growth.
Stephen Emmott: Erm, no, actually. In fact I don’t know where to start.
Sue MacGregor: You have the floor.
Stephen Emmott: So, well, take the issue of the positive outcome of reducing fertility rates. Now whether it’s enforced as in China, or whether it’s through education as we’ve seen in a number of countries, although not that many, I give some examples. You know, you look at China, which has had a really quite extreme policy, and yet its carbon emissions, its pollution, its consumption has gone through the roof, so just reducing fertility rates does not guarantee reducing consumption.
On the issue of Jill’s point about governments, about , and I take Jill’s point about scaring people, you know it often doesn't work, although it did, arguably with AIDS, at least in some sections of the population, and now of course we've gone to the other extreme with this nudge, which might -
Sue MacGregor: This is Malcolm Gladwell’s "Don’t frighten them off it's horses, just nudge people into doing something".
Stephen Emmott: Yes, you know, which I think we’re well beyond, the problems that we face are well beyond anything that nudge might achieve. I do...
Sue MacGregor: There’s a whole department for nudge.
Stephen Emmott: Indeed, I think some sort of Number Ten department.
Jill Rutter: I think there are about ten people working at the centre of government on nudge.
Stephen Emmott: That’s probably ten too many.
Jill Rutter: Actually I don’t agree, I don’t agree on nudge because I think you can see nudge as an alternative to regulation, taxation, and all the other things that are in the government’s toolkit, all of which the govennment needs to use, all of which governments used to reduce smoking rates, all of which governments need to use, or you can see nudge as actually improving the efficiency of all those instruments, by bringing a bit more thinking to about on how do you design policies sensibly, otherwise just leave it to chance, and actually I think if you see that as part of what the Behavioural Insights team is trying to do, I think that’s quite sensible. It’s also trying to understand what are some of the real barriers to people doing things, which I think are quite interesting. Now we have I think realised that just the sort of simple price mechanism, the very rational ways we go about things don’t always work. One of the interesting things they did on getting people to insulate lofts - very cheap win on energy efficiency, was actually send some people in to clear out people’s lofts and then people were prepared to insulate, because people actually just couldn't be bothered to do that, so it’s small, it may be at the margin, but actually I don’t think it’s worth deriding, actually, I think it’s a useful addition to -
Sue MacGregor: Well do continue Stephen if you would, because, if I may insert a question just to guide the conversation, I think that in the developing world, um, is there, well I wonder if you know the answer to this, is there a feeling that Armageddon is approaching in the life of people’s children and grandchildren? Or is the aspirational aspect of a better life totally overwhelming that?
Stephen Emmott: Well I suppose it depends on who you talk to, but I don’t get a sense that there’s, that the scale and the nature of the problems that we face are well, or fully or even well appreciated. And take Jill's point. I suppose I was being a little bit ungracious about the nudge unit, but the reason why I was is because the scale and the nature of the problems that we face are so immense that nudge -like efforts, to, you know, wee in the shower, or sort of share a bath with someone or just even reduce our consumption of tin cans or something is simply not going to do it. And a good example is, you know, about 30% to 40% of all greenhouse gases is produced by agriculture, and food production is going to at least double, probably triple this century.
Sue MacGregor: And we’ve already got, what, 40% of our land under agriculture
Stephen Emmott: Right. And so trying to reduce at the margins in posh countries or in rich countries like this is overwhelmed by the fact that agriculture is increasing sharply, obviously to be able to feed seven billion, and soon nine billion, and soon ten billion. And greenhouse gases simply do not have geopolitical boundaries.
Sue MacGregor: So if you could very briefly, shout very loudly one message at our government, our British government, what would it be? What should they concentrate on?
Stephen Emmott: Action, and not words
Sue MacGregor: Well, action – in which department?
Stephen Emmott: Well, I think in every department – the Department of Energy, Department of Transport, Department of – just every single department.
[Someone - either Danny Dorling or Amartya Sen - is laughing in the background.]
Sue MacGregor: Right, okay, fair enough. Let me move back to Amartya now. A failure of government I think either nudging or compelling is at the heart of your book, “An Uncertain Glory” about modern India. Modern India is thought of, isn’t it Amartya, mostly as a success story. It’s the world’s largest democracy. It’s a superpower in the making, it’s got a booming economy - bit of a dip recently, but all the same it’s booming and there’s a hugely rising middle class, and yet you say that India has failed to capitalise on this and raise even the most basic standards for the poor - worst in health care - that’s a pretty big indictment of government, isn’t it.
Amartya Sen: I hope it is, and the purpose of it is to have a discussion on that . India is a democracy, you’re right, there are a lot of successes. You know, human rights is a little success, compared with other countries. India sells more, Indians buy more newspapers than any other nation on earth by a considerable margin. There are all kinds of things, but the media discussion has been quite limited and very strongly influenced by the (?) middle classes - the kind of class I come from. I think the result of it is that some of the extent of the terrible lives of the literally uneducated, often completely uneducated bad health care people doesn’t get at all the attention. Now that’s the thing to change, so I think the diagnosis is the problem, but then the question is how to do it? Now in the case of India, it’s not - in the case of China in a way, because I was also involved because I was connected with Peking University, with their taking health more seriously, which they didn’t for a while in the eighties. Now I think there you have to convince the top layers. In India, even if you convince the Prime Minister, that would need not do it because he has to win an election, so then you have to get it in the public domain
Sue MacGregor: Well that applies all over the world doesn’t it?
Amartya Sen: ..to the democratic countries, that’s the point I’m making. It wouldn’t apply in China in quite the same way. But in the case of India, like in Britain, it is the public you have to look at. So my book is (?) book with Jean Drèze (?) what the book says is addressed to the public to change the nature of the public dialogue
Sue MacGregor: I mean, it’s a tremendously, a tremendous bit of irony that you point out in your book that the worst failure of the Indian government is in health care, and yet India is the world’s largest producer of generic medicines, so there’s no lack of skill, it’s simply a lack of application.
Amartya Sen: Well, clear thinking. I think, the question of nudge came up. My position on this is that there are some subjects where you don’t need much nudge, and I would say if you come back, and I do want to talk a little about my own book rather than Stephen’s, but I don’t think you need so much nudge to reduce the size of the family with educated women and independent voice of women. That you don’t. What you do need is the government to have a more organised health care, the nature of the consumption pattern as people getting richer not going in the direction of individual class, and so on. These are subjects on which the issue of nudge may come in. But I think the basic issue of education and health care, cutting down on the worries that Stephen is really worried about, seems to me doesn’t even require a nudge, it basically requires the thing to do it, and the question of difid (?) did come up earlier, and I must say I’ve seen it on the ground, and I think the record of difid (?) is excellent on this, and some of the NGOs like Oxfam with which I used to be, well I am associated, and so on. So I think the British thinking on this, whch wasn’t in this context in nudge form, but is to emphasise certain critical things, of which education and health care were very central.
Sue MacGregor: Quite a lot of people listening - and I’ll ask you if you wouldn’t mind Amarya to answer this question just briefly - would think: Why don’t the millions of poor people in India rise up and say: this is unfair on us, the way we’re treated?
Amartya Sen: well, you know, this is one of the problems with democracy. It depends much on how information is disseminated and discussed. Why is it that the large number of people without health care in America did not rise up? Why wasn’t it a more vote getting thing? Why is it democracy failed there? Why did the Americans get carried away on the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? I think there is no substitute (?) to have education, to have media discussion in a enlightened society.
Sue MacGregor: Jill Rutter, you’re dying to come in.
Jill Rutter: Ijust thought that there was one thing that crossed all three of these books, which was the importance of having a much more sophisticated discussion about the indicators we use of government performance. At the moment we’re all riveted every quarter about whether GDP, you know, total GDP has changed by point one, whatever,
Sue MacGregor: Whether we’re getting a bit wealthier or not..
Jill Rutter: It’s always back-revised anyway. We don’t even look at GDP per capita or what - we suggested in a report that we did, Institute for Government recently with the LSE, median GDP per capita, which at least would capture some of the distributional things, because I think that one of the things that comes out very strongly in Danny’s book is the increasing inequalities across a lot of the developed countries, that’s an issue here, an issue in India. And also in Stephen’s, capturing those environmental indicationsors, social progress indcators alongside just looking at GDP.
Sue MacGregor: So ther we are. We’re almost at the end of our programme, and all sorts of issues, but I don’t sense any agreement between Danny and Stephen yet. But Danny, behaviour change, governments, as Jill has pointed out, and indeed as Amartya has pointed out, are interested in the next election, and not giving the bad news. You’re still an optimist about our population
Danny Dorling: I’m an optimist about people, not necessarily governments. If Stephen says governments need to do action, one of the key things governments could do is not do things that are going to make things worse that people aren’t calling for. A classic example right now would be fracking, which across most of Europe is opposed, but our government is
Sue MacGregor: That’s drilling down through rock for oil.
Danny Dorling: But our government and a few business people want to release enormous amounts of carbon into the air and are scaring us that we’re going to get power cuts, rather than working out how we reduce our electricity consumption and don’t release all this carbon. The first government action, that governments could do, would be to not make things worse, rather than looking at the rest of the population.
Sue MacGregor: In terms of population, that might be difficult in the rest of the world. Stephen Emmott, any persuasive arguments counter to your own that you’ve taken on board today? Is it better to change behaviour naturally, or to legislate? Or are we doomed?
Stephen Emmott: Well, I think it would require both - legislation and changing individual behaviour, and the problem is that I think, I’m pessimistic about outcomes, I simply don’t think we will do so.
Sue MacGregor: Why?
Stephen Emmott: Because all the evidence points to the fact that we've known about these problems for twenty years, and we are not doing so, and there are billions of people who want, in developing countries who want to live like us, and there’s another three billion that are yet to be born, who will inevitably, a substantial proportion of them, also want to consume irresponsibly.
Sue MacGregor: Well at this point, we end on a slightly pessimistic note,
[Amartya Sen (?) laughs.]
Sue MacGregor: ..we must almost say goodbye. Thank you, big thank you to all my guests, first of all Jill Rutter from the Institute for Government, then Danny Dorling, whose book Population Ten Billion; a Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It is out now, Amartya Sen’s An Uncertain Glory, about India, co-authored with Jean Dréze is published this month, as is Stephen Emmott's Ten Billion. And that’s it for Start the Week until the autumn. Back on the 16th of September. Till then, may you have plenty of sunshine left in your summer. Thank you and goodbye.