I have, for many years, considered one of my friends to have been mildly eccentric because he resolutely refused ever to purchase a book where the characters were depicted on the cover.
In his view, this governed his expectation of the characters; their appearance, relative positions and, to some extent, the outcome of the story. So many times we’ve laughed at this ‘unusual’ behaviour oblivious to the fact that psychologists identify this as ‘normal’ behaviour describes as his recognising it as an anchoring heuristic.
In more precise terms, heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines. Well, that’s what it says in Wikipedia so it must be right. Unconsciously, we use a number of these experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery and heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a good enough solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical. What for some is an educated guess or intuitive judgment, is for others a subject for scientific record and categorisation but, in reality, we all do it all of the time.
Take, for example, the process of buying petrol. We drive in, usually to a well recognised, branded petrol forecourt, with the expectation that the fuel will be of a standard quality, that the pumps will be easy to operate and the rest of the purchasing experience will be familiar to us. True, the price per litre might challenge one’s pacemaker but the familiar way in which the price is advertised, comfortingly backlit to make the information clear and the relationship transparent is all designed to provide reassurance that all is well in the world. How many of us drive away wracked with concern that political upheaval in the Middle East could rapidly alter our whole way of life and the basis for almost everything we do, every day of our lives? Of course not, it’s not expressed to us in that way, for very good reasons but we fool ourselves if we think that things can stay this way forever.
In the short term, Russia is making hay out of the steep rise in global energy prices resulting from the political upheaval in the Middle East and in North Africa . Already pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia, Russia has seen a huge rise in the value of its currency which, in turn, will provide a major hedge against inflation during an election year so, yet again, Mr Putin is laughing all the way to the bank. We should, perhaps, remind ourselves that Russia is outside OPEC and while OPEC has recently sent reassuring signals about increasing production to offset any big drop in global oil production, the violent upheavals in the Middle East could easily affect Saudi Arabia which is the dominant and controlling contributor to OPEC. For OPEC to fail and Russia to dominate world oil supplies is unthinkable, given the cavalier nature of Russia’s treatment of Belarus in 2007 and Ukraine in 2009. One could not imagine the political and military ramifications of such a situation.
Because we find it difficult to imagine such implications, we don’t do so or, at least, not willingly, but we all know that oil is a finite commodity and that we are using oil at almost the same rate as we are discovering it. Currently, the world is using 26,000,000,000 barrels each year which, at that rate, will provide enough oil for at least 40 years. However, having just come back from China, I could see for myself, the huge surge in relative affluence as more and more consumers rise into the band where acquisition becomes not just possible but desirable. We know that the world’s population is around 6.5 billion and is set to rise to rise to 8 billion by 2025 whereas it numbered just 2.5 billion in 1950. While population growth is the greatest indicator for food supply requirements, the rapidly rising numbers of comparatively affluent consumers in Brazil, Russia, India and China will do more to hasten the drive to exhaust oil supplies or, at the very least, to drive far more costly oil discovery and reclamation from increasingly difficult and remote regions.
In the 1990s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated that there were around 800 million undernourished people in the world and some reports suggest that, for modelling reasons, this estimate may have been set too high. Before we sigh in relief and reach for the chocolates, we should recognise that the problem is complex; in the west, we have too much availability and too high a level of purchasing power to make redistribution even conceivable, so much so that obesity is now the biggest problem facing our national health services. By attributing world hunger to poverty and an inadequate distribution model we fool ourselves into thinking that the problem is manageable and that a global crisis can be avoided. It’s just another heuristic, interpreting the signalment to more conveniently fit the situation. Playing the ostrich is an easy way to solve the problem and we do it so very well.
Already, China buys more new cats than America and that y 2050, China will have as many as 660 million motor vehicles and that to fuel these will need about 1 billion tonnes of oil each year which is twice the total current output of Saudi Arabia. At present, America eats 9billion chickens, or other poultry, each year which is 30 chickens/per capita/year. If, by 2050, Asian consumers emulate their American cousins, they would be chewing through 120 billion chickens annually. That’s the calculation shown in last week’s South China Morning Post and equates to one chicken to every star in our galaxy. Who’s going to tell the rampant Chinese, Brazilians, Indians and Russians that they cannot have what the western world has been having for decades? Whether we look at supplies of food, water, oil or other sources of energy, we know deep down that change is inevitable and that rapidly burgeoning world populations with a hunger on an industrial scale for all of these finite resources will inevitably hasten the moment of crisis.
Poverty, repression and decades of unemployment and injustice have all been cited as the reasons for the recent political turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa but a less recognised reason for upheaval in territories ranging from Egypt through to Jordan and now Iran has been rising food prices which are directly related to a regional water crisis. The problem can only be tackled by sharing resources more equitably but the concept that we might learn to share our natural resources and reduce profligate waste of energy and water is politically unthinkable and we should expect political relationships to break down as food becomes unaffordable and demand for energy and water soars.
A more comfortable heuristic would be to say that such issues are outside our concerns and can therefore be easily ignored. While massive unrest in other regions is newsworthy, we can still ignore it until the alarm bells ring more loudly here at home. However, rising oil prices will affect us all in an escalation of transport costs and in prices of basic commodities. As an example, we can expect a serious hike in petfood costs as the ingredient prices continue to rise and we should expect all the plastics we use daily, to increase in price as petrochemical industries struggle to absorb current prices but, otherwise, we haven’t yet seen very much effect of this mounting crisis here at home. However, we will, during the next few months, see rapidly rising inflation and considerable pressure on employment as a result of these external trends, added to our own need for more prudent fiscal management adding to the austerity measures already in place.
We will need to curb our own costs in practice and we will see far more pressure on both the family purse and on farm gate prices. Whether we worry about this in advance and plan for its impact depends on our own view of the adjustment heuristic. “Hear no evil, see no evil” may have served us well in the past but the future is entirely different. If the biggest challenge facing us is to keep pace with food supply issues, we might all need to dust off our farm animal textbooks and look up the section on poultry health.
Without doubt, there will need be a galactic rise in chicken production if we are to fend off a catastrophic environmental collapse and that change may happen rather sooner than we had expected.