Bishop Hill Jeremy Grantham gets it wrong
Nov 17, 2012 Economics Nature magazine has continued to scrape out the green slime at the bottom of the enviro journalism barrel, giving Jeremy Grantham space to push the apocalyptic visions of the future that no doubt help his share portfolios along quite nicely: this kind of thing for example:
Then there is the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash). These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It’s a scary set of statements. Former Soviet states and Canada have more than 70% of the potash. Morocco has 85% of all high-grade phosphates. It is the most important quasi-monopoly in economic history.
Fortunately, Tim Worstall is on the case.
Oh dearie me, oh my. This is just a horrible mistake by Jeremy Grantham here. I agree that he’s a vastly better investor than I am, no doubt hugely more intelligent as well. But this really is a basic, schoolboy error.
Opinion among experts differs as to whether Worstall has got it quite right. Richard Tol, for example reckons this is an undergraduate error rather than a schoolboy one. But I think it is fair to say that there is a consensus that Grantham is talking out of his hat. It's hard not to recall Carl Wunsch's remarks about the kind of thing that gets published in Nature these days.
Readers will unsurprised to hear that Grantham's mouthpiece Bob Ward has been yapping furiously in response. It must be a thankless task having to defend your boss when he is talking nonsense.
Reader Comments (55)
All of the resources we have so far extracted from the Earth have come from the crust and that is less than 1% of the volume of the earth. At the moment nobody knows to what extent we can exploit the other 99% plus of the Earth's bounty however we have not yet even scratched the surface of what is available from the crust itself.
Last year one shale oil discovery in the USA more than doubled the worlds known oil deposits overnight with the discovery of the Green Rivers shale deposit in Wyoming. There was another slightly smaller discovery in Russia.
A large number of well informed people know all of the above but the majority of the people who read the scare stories do not.
When I did O level maths, we did logs, trigonometry and calculus; all vital to applying maths to the real world. I'm told these are now AS level.
Nov 17, 2012 at 10:59 AM | Allan M
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It's a funny old world. I did logs, sines, cosines, tangents (no calculus) for O-level maths in 1975. I don't think I have used them since then - nor have I come across a problem tht required them.
I had to learn calculus to get through accountancy exams in 1986. Again, I have had no need to use it since then.
It was merely rote-learning to pass exams, of no relevance to the future course of my life. Why are so many people nostalgic for such a strange approach to education?
mooloo / diogenes
I can assure you I have no nostalgia for O-level maths nor do I believe that there is only one way of learning. I simply pointed out as part of a cross-reference exercise that the disciplines mentioned were indeed part of the O-level syllabus in the late 50s.
But I don't regret having studied, even at such a primitive level, either calculus or trigonometry. Or, for that matter, Geometry, Latin, or any of the other subjects which have, I hope, helped to make me the person I am.
To say that any of them has been "irrelevant" is a pretty bold claim, I would suggest.
"It was merely rote-learning to pass exams, of no relevance to the future course of my life. Why are so many people nostalgic for such a strange approach to education?"
Perhaps because, for anyone entering a technical profession, such maths is essential. In particular, the earlier calculus is taught, the better. At my comp we were introduced to it - with simple differentiation - at the end of the second form (12/13), and it was a major topic at O level (1980) and A level. And there was no overlap with the maths courses that were part of my engineering degree, they picked up where A level left off (although there might have been overlap for the brain-boxes who took 2 maths A levels).
maybe it would surprise you that I think my liberal arts background was more useful to me as an accountant than any rote-learning of maths! smiles sweetly. It struck me that sciences were good for rote-learners, whereas Latin, English, History etc at least forced you to try to express yourself in an intelligible way and thereby demostrate understanding, rather than merely recite equations and formulae.