Yesterday, I came across this quote:
“America: Less than 5% of the world’s population, consumes over 25% of the world‟s resources.”
This is meant to shock and shame. How selfish of the people living within this geographical area to consume so much! That sentiment may be warranted if life were some kind of reality TV show with everyone stuck in a house with a fixed pool of resources, but it’s not. If we really want to understand the world, we need to ask a key question: where do those resources come from?
They come from production and trade. Everything that is consumed must first be produced. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In order for people in the borders of America to consume stuff, they must obtain it. They can produce it themselves or trade something else they have produced for it. In a free market, every exchange is voluntary. In order for both parties to agree to trade, both must consider themselves better off after than before. Because economic value is subjective, both walk away wealthier than before because they gave up something they valued less than what they got.
Now that we know some basic economics, what does the statistic about consumption tell us? It tells us that, in order to consume a lot, American’s must have produced a lot. It means what they produce must be more valuable to their trading partners than what they consume. In other words, it means they are creating value for the world.
There is an exception to the rule that more consumption happens after more value creation. Consumption can also happen after resources are taken by force, outside the operations of the market. This fact is illustrated by another quote I came across yesterday on a list of common economic fallacies. The commenter said a common fallacy is,
“Not asking where ‘G’ comes from.”
In macroeconomics, wealth is often measured (somewhat dubiously) in GDP. The typical formula for measuring a nation’s GDP is: C+I+G+(X-M). In this equation, C means private consumption, I is investment, G is government spending, X is exports and M is imports.
There are plenty of problems with this formulation, but leaving those aside, the math tells you that increasing any of these addends increases total wealth. This is what leads many to advocate for increased government spending as a way to grow the economy. To the true believers, any spending will do. John Maynard Keynes famously suggested that the Treasury should stuff jars with bank notes and bury them in abandoned coal mines to be dug up again.
But where does G come from? Government produces nothing, it only takes. Every penny in the G category was taken from C or I. This would not seem problematic at first for the economy as a whole, much as individual taxpayers may not like it, because the sum would remain unchanged. Except that, as we have been reminded, economic value is subjective.
A dollar taken from someone and spent on her behalf is less valuable to her than keeping that dollar. If this were not so, she would have given it up voluntarily. People put their resources to their highest valued use, according to their own scale of value. Any time resources are taken by force, value is destroyed. Further, the choices people would have made would send signals rippling through the economy, telling entrepreneurs and producers what to produce more and better of. When government puts resources to their uses, it signals entrepreneurs and producers to create more of what government wants, which diverts production and innovation away from the areas most valued by the citizenry.
The common problem in both scenarios – assuming the a high rate of US consumption means less for everyone else; and assuming an increase in government consumption means more for everyone else – is a failure to examine causal connections. Static snapshots of data – whether a percentage of world consumption or GDP – tell us nothing about the ongoing relationships in our world.
These relationships have patterns and feedback and adaptations. The data comes from somewhere, and it’s more than a simple path; it’s the result of a complex and constant churning of causes producing effects. Freezing this dynamic process in time and measuring where a bunch of stuff is can’t tell you whether the process is just or efficient, or what the results will be over time.
Before you make data-based judgments about systems in the world, understand where the data come from. What does the process look like that produced it? What are the causal relationships? What happens to the data through time? Citing a lot data might make you feel smart, but if you accept data alone as proof of cause, it’s only a feeling.