However, it follows from these figures that only about 30 per cent of the economy is globalized, considering national markets, including several exclusively local but very important economy sectors, such as housing, utilities and infrastructure. At the same time, only the high-technology sector of the economy, which is related to basic sustenance, has been globalized alongside finance and its specifics.
1991 may be considered the watershed moment of the update of another component of globalization – the global crisis of resources and demographics, which was officially declared a global threat by the experts of the Club of Rome. The reports of this elite group of experts ordered by the UN147 were created in correlation with representatives and structures of the global elite. Therefore, the reports of the Club of Rome and its members are not exactly independent research, but rather the position of global elites in relation to the problem of a global crisis of resources and demographics camouflaged as research and illustrated by certain scientific computations. The policy of the “nucleus’ states and international political and financial institutions (UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.) is based thereon.
The leading cause of the crisis of resources and demographics was the “baby boom’ in non-industrialized countries on the global periphery (South, “third world’ countries), coupled with the growing depletion and, by consequence, the growing prices of natural resources. These days, the baby boom in countries on the global economic periphery has led to a migration tsunami, irreversibly destroying the ethnocultural integrity of European nations and Russia.
On the cusp of the 1990s, the growth of the population of the “third world’ exhausted the results of the green revolution – the technological modernization of the agricultural sphere of the third world, initiated by industrialized countries and meant as a means of social rehabilitation of former colonies. The end to the growth of productivity against the backdrop of the growth of population and conversion of arable lands into space used for other purposes resulted in lower per capita grain production as an objective indicator of the lower food security and life standard in general.148
The stabilization of the fast pace of economic growth typical of the first stage of the industrialization led to the population growing faster than the GDP, which stamped out newly industrialized countries’ hopes for a new consumption level characteristic of the countries in the old industrialized and financial nucleus of the global system.149
As a result, the contradiction between the limited resources and the unlimited growth of population in countries with a traditional model of demographic growth left the confines of the third world and took on a new quality, becoming a global problem. At the same time, the crisis of resources and demographics is not only manifested as a growing lack of balance between the global population and world’s resources, paving the way for a global catastrophe, even based on an average model from the Club of Rome. The inconsistency of the demographic development, which put demographic and migration pressure on the countries at the nucleus, as well as on the countries of the industrialized periphery (for example, Russia) is no less dangerous.
How many billion men can our planet feed if the population of the Earth may reach eight billion by as early as 2020? This issue is becoming a matter of life and death for billions, rather than millions, of the inhabitants of the world’s periphery and half-periphery, who do not “fit in” with the competing projects of a post-crisis lifestyle.
At the end of the 1960s, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence in Kennedy’s administration, who later became, characteristically, the President of the World Bank, spoke about the threat of the “demographics explosion” and impending lack of resources. In fact, it was McNamara who brought the term “demographics explosion” into the political vernacular.
At the beginning of the 1970s, a secret directive on the policy on global population elaborated by a similarly famous figure, Henry Kissinger, was adopted by the United States National Security Council, wherein the policy on “containing’ the growth of the global population was equal in importance to the defence programmes in terms of US national security.
Similar reports on the inevitability of the deficit of resources and ecological crisis were received by other expert groups, which is not surprising: the problem of the finite nature of the global mineral and biological resources was up in the air: in particular, it was clearly formulated within Vernadsky’s theory of geospheres. The problem of the limits of growth was posed and solved in the USSR largely independently from the West and based on own scientific potential.
In particular, Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky suggested to academic Moiseyev150, a member of the Computation Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the creation of a mathematical model allowing estimation of how many billion men may fit into natural ecological cycles of the Earth at the current level of technologies. Essentially, the wording of the task and its solution were comparable to the results obtained by experts of the Club of Rome.
Later, the problem of objective limits of the world’s population, based on some or other boundary conditions and limits, was posed more than once and the scientific community is focused on this now. In particular, the model of the Earth’s population growth made by the scientist Kapitsa151 and research by Kondratyev152 received widespread attention.
First theoretical estimates of the maximum Earth population date back to the times of van Leeuwenhoek (1679), but most were published in the twentieth century, when humankind neared objective limits of economic and demographic growth. The discrepancy between various estimates is from one billion to a thousand billion people, although the most realistic estimates of contemporary researchers are between two billion and 20 billion people.
Most of these estimates are based on mathematical models extrapolating the population growth curve based on regional dynamics of population density, forecasts of the accessibility of water and land, estimates of fertility of arable lands, and other ecological and economic indices.
A well-known model from US demographist Cohen from Rockefeller University forecast a change in population based on the difference between the actual and the largest possible population density, multiplied by a certain constant known as a Malthusian coefficient. At the same time, the Earth’s human-carrying capacity is a function of a range of parameters of various quality, including subjective ones such as investment and economic climate defining the economic possibility of the introduction of necessary technologies.153
Therefore the population may invest resources in sustainable development or, on the contrary, exhaust the critically important resources that future generations need, which will influence the Earth’s human-carrying capacity in the future as well as in the present. It is typical that liberalization of the economy, orienting businesses towards receiving profit in the present (efficiency as profitability), is forcing capital to borrow from the future.
In this context, the global crisis of resources and demographics is not made up by neo-Malthusians but is an objective component of the global systemic crisis whose urgency is proved not only by scientific extrapolations, but by actual economic tendencies, reflecting the growing deficit of natural resources as well as the growth of over-population.
Moreover, it is the crisis of resources and demographics that is the primary reason for crises and catastrophes in the economy. The foremost importance of the physical nature of economy, putting material limits on market reality, was pointed out by such supporters of a physical approach to economy as LaRouche154 and Kuznetsov.