II. The taming of scarcity and the end of empire

Abstract

The underlying structure, incentives and costs shaping international relations, state behaviour and the nature of power are profoundly different today to how they were in the past, in ways that are scarcely recognised and widely misunderstood. For much of history, world politics was marked by profound scarcity in resources, information and security. A series of historical revolutions has largely tamed this scarcity in ways few could have imagined. These revolutions, however, have generated new, potentially catastrophic challenges for the world – the problems of plenty.

In this Adelphi book, Francis J. Gavin argues that the institutions, practices, theories and policies that helped explain and largely tamed scarcity by generating massive prosperity, and which were sometimes used to justify punishing conquest, are often unsuitable for addressing the problems of plenty. Successful grand strategy in this new age of abundance requires new thinking. New conceptual lenses, innovative policies and processes, and transformed institutions will be essential for confronting and solving the problems of plenty, without undermining the expanding efforts against scarcity.

Notes

30 Steven Johnson, ‘How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life’, New York Times, 27 April 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/magazine/global-life-span.html.

31 Ansley J. Coale, ‘The Decline of Fertility in Europe Since the Eighteenth Century as a Chapter in Human Demographic History’, in Ansley J. Coale and Susan C. Watkins (eds), The Decline of Fertility in Europe: The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 1–30.

32 Paul Morland, The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), pp. 11–68.

33 Ansley J. Coale and Roy Treadway, ‘A Summary of the Changing Distribution of Overall Fertility, Marital Fertility, and the Proportion Married in the Provinces of Europe’, in Coale and Watkins (eds), The Decline of Fertility in Europe, pp. 31–181.

34 Jennifer D. Sciubba, ‘Intergenerational Controversy and Cultural Clashes: Political Consequences of Demographic Change in the US and Canada Since 1990’, in Achim Goerres and Pieter Vanhuysse (eds), Global Political Demography: The Politics of Population Change (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2021), pp. 325–50.

35 Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun, ‘Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications’, New York Times, 22 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html.

36 McNeill, Population and Politics Since 1750, p. 67.

37 Henrik Urdal, ‘Youth Bulges and Violence’, in Jack A. Goldstone, Eric P. Kaufmann and Monica Duffy Toft (eds), Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 123; Henrik Urdal, ‘A Clash of Generations? Youth Bulges and Political Violence’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3, September 2006, pp. 607–29, cited in Morland, The Human Tide, p. 21; and Herbert Moller, ‘Youth as a Force in the Modern World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 10, no. 3, 1968, pp. 237–60, cited in Morland, The Human Tide, p. 21.

38 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 515–16.

39 In current US dollars. See ‘World GDP per Capita 1960–1924’, macrotrends, https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-per-capita.

40 William N. Parker, ‘Productivity Growth in American Grain Farming: An Analysis of Its Nineteenth Century Sources’, in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), p. 176. See also Scott R. Nelson, Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World (New York: Hachette Group, 2022).

41 Philip G. Pardey and Julian M. Alston, ‘The Drivers of U.S. Agricultural Productivity Growth’, in Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, ‘2020 Agricultural Symposium: The Roots of Agricultural Productivity Growth’, https://www.kansascityfed.org/documents/7107/the-drivers-of-us-agricultural-productivity-growth.pdf.

42 Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 204.

43 Adam Tooze, ‘Chartbook on Shutdown: Keynes and Why We Can Afford Anything We Can Do’, Chartbook, 1 September 2021, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-on-shutdown-keynes-and.

44 Nadège Mougel, ‘World War I Casualties’, 2011, https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/reperes112018.pdf.

45 ‘World War II Fatalities by Country’, WorldAtlas, https://www.worldatlas.com/world-wars/world-war-ii-fatalities-by-country.html.

46 Mueller, ‘War Has Almost Ceased to Exist’.

47 Crystal Cazier and Andrew Kaufmann, ‘An Oral History of PEPFAR’, George W. Bush Presidential Center, 24 February 2023, https://www.bushcenter.org/publications/an-oral-history-of-pepfar-how-a-dream-big-partnership-is-saving-the-lives-of-millions.