Why did the consumption of resources leap ahead of the rise in the global population in the twentieth century?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: It is hard to separate cause and effect. New technologies enabled twentieth-century industries to unlock new energy resources, with a consequent rise in prosperity. When prosperity leaps, expectations explode. Demand and supply feed off each other. The twentieth-century world got hooked on prosperity, locked into dependence on economic growth. The world economy grew, on average, by about 1.5 percent a year—about two and a half times as fast as in the nineteenth century, when growth rates seemed dazzlingly high to those who experienced them. Electorates wanted more food, more goods and more energy. So governments encouraged, or at least allowed, environmental overexploitation. The distribution of consumption suggests that overconsumption is a function of prosperity. Greed grows from growth. In 1991, people in the United States used up, on average, between 30 and 50 times as much copper, tin, and aluminum as people in India, 43 times as much petroleum, and 184 times as much natural gas. In 2000, the United States consumed about a quarter of the world's energy. Other countries began to catch up, but the United States still accounted for a fifth of the total in 2008 . Facts of these kinds are usually—and validly—cited as evidence of morally deplorable inequalities. If, however, the Indian or African were to consume as much as the Westerner, it would redress the equality but not redeem the immorality. On the contrary, it would be an extension of bad habits. Global disparities in consumption suggest a further conclusion: Abundance is there to be exhausted. Given the chance, people gorge until, in effect, they burst or until they empty the pantry. Anthropologists and philosophers have identified "spiraling desire"—an instinct, or maybe a pathology, that makes people want whatever is available, or envy whatever others have. Such a craving may have operated cumulatively in the twentieth century, under the impact of growing, spreading prosperity.