ENERGY AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE

They are darn right it can't. Most of them are spoiled children from affluent families who take all food, clothing, shelter and transportation for granted, but even they would perhaps agree that longevity, infant mortality and literacy are among the quantifiable measures of the quality of life. The International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis has recently published the first two of a series of reports studying the relationship between health and energy. L.A. Sagan and A.A. Afifi, two California professors, have collected a data base encompassing 150 countries on nutritional, socio-economic, medical care, and other indicators and have correlated them with per capita energy consumption; their data cover 99% of the world's population over the period from 1900 to 1975.

What they found in most cases were S shaped dependencies: Societies with a commercial per capita consumption of less than 100 kg coal equivalent per year have subsistence farming, inadequate diet, illiteracy, and high infant mortality (29 countries with 9% of the world's population); the mature economies with more than 4,000 kgce per capita consumption exhibit urbanization, industry, a small fraction of the labor force employed in agriculture, and virtually universal literacy (21 countries with 20% of the world's population). In both of these extremes the health and culture indicators do riot vary very sharply with energy; the most striking sensitivity to energy is in the transitional countries, typically in India and much of South America (the very countries lectured by well manicured Western environmentalists as to how they should make do with windmills, wheelbarrows, and other reappropriated technology).

A typical relationship is shown in the figure overleap The two reports; Health and Economic Development, RM 7841 and RM 7842, are obtainable for $3 each from llASA Publications pt., A 236 I Laxenburg, Austria (US checks accepted).