Hobbit Manifesto

This is more of a suggestion for an avenue of research/activism that EA could pursue than a criticism of its current priorities and it’s one that might be too weird for anyone but EA to pursue, but one that still has huge potential from the point of view of a utilitarian calculus. I suppose you could phrase it as a criticism in the form: “EAs’ prioritise are wrong and you should focus on this more”. I’ll briefly cover why I think it’s an idea that’s worth considering before I reveal what it actually is because I think it might be dismissed as ridiculous if presented without first considering its full potential.

It’s a proposal with the potential to cause a qualitative shift in the material wealth of human civilisation whilst simultaneously reducing its environmental impact and improving life expectancy, over the course of maybe a couple of generations, as well as a whole host of other more minor benefits. Its financial cost would be insubstantial and I estimate the research needed to make it possible would be trivial in comparison to current research projects that are considered worthwhile but have much more limited potential. The proposal is:

Making people physically smaller.

By “smaller” I mean reduce the average human height to the minimum practical limit. I’ll discuss how small that might be, but for the coming estimates of the implications for economic consumption take halving average height as roughly the kind of change I’m suggesting.

I’ll refer to the project of reducing peoples’ size as “Hobbitisation” and people of reduced size as “hobbits” from here on (I promise this isn’t some Tolkien fans’ elaborate ploy to turn the world into Middle Earth).

II.

I’ll lay out exactly why I think the gains from Hobbitisation are so great but it mostly boils down to one principle: due to the square-cube law, many of people’s resource requirements(everything they consume, the infrastructure they need etc.) scale cubically, that is to the power three, with their linear size. Of the requirements that don’t scale cubically, many scale at least exponentially and few are completely independent of size. Therefore reducing the peoples’ size dramatically reduces their overall resource requirements for any given standard of material comfort, effectively making them wealthier.

There are other more minor gains to be had, like increased life expectancy, but first I’ll go over the main areas of economic consumption that could be heavily economised on after Hobbitisation and I’m sure there are others I haven’t considered.

The big one is probably housing and buildings in general. Dividing a room in half along all three dimensions gives you eight times as many rooms. I’ll repeat that, the housing stock could be multiplied eight fold, in addition to most other types of building, almost over night by reducing average height by 50%. A hobbit society could provide housing at a fraction of its current cost, when not designing to accommodate full sized people. The CO2 released from pouring concrete, a major contributor to global warming, would also be reduce in the same proportions, just one of the many reductions in civilisations ecological costs Hobbitisation would induce. Some people suggest the current housing crisis is the cause of many of our other crises, so you could probably expect to see a whole host of other indirect benefits from reducing its cost eight fold. For example you’d also see general gains in productivity from increasing the population density of cities, hugely reducing commutes and the average distances between any two points in the city.

Which leads onto the next major area of reduced needs for hobbits: transport. The world has seen precious little improvement in its transportation technology since the early 20^th century, we still mostly get around using the same technologies and at the same speeds as 100 years ago. Reducing passenger size hugely reduces the capacity you need for public transport systems and road ways. Things like railways and busses that can install extra storeys increase their capacity in the same way as buildings by making more efficient use of space in all three dimensions, so a cubic increase in efficiency. Roads only reduce their space requirements exponentially, reducing width and length, but that still means you could get four times as many cars on the same road space if they were half as large.

Reductions in food consumption might not translate in to large economic savings as food is produced at historically low cost in the modern world and doesn’t make up much of a typical households’ budget. It would however significantly reduce our ecological impact by minimising land and resource use as well as the pollution associated with agriculture. Perhaps the most important gains are the ethical ones derived from lowering the number of non-human animals involved in our food production systems when our calorie requirements as a whole drop. If a hobbit had the same bodily proportions as a full size human but was only half the height the volume of their body would be only ¹⁄₈^th, in accordance with the square cube law. Calorie requirements don’t scale exactly with body mass, for reasons such as smaller bodies losing more energy in heat loss, Wikipedia claims “The basal metabolic rate accounts for about 60 to 75% of the daily calorie expenditure”, assuming metabolic rate is proportional to body mass, a hobbit might require something like ¹⁄₃^rd the normal food consumption. People tend to increase meat consumption as their incomes grow, as they would under Hobbitisation, so maybe a ²⁄₃^rd reduction would be too optimistic, but even a ¹⁄₃^rd reduction would translate in to enormous ethical gains.

Across most realms of production resource requirements decreasing cubically is the norm because the brute physical material necessary to produce commodities declines in all three dimensions. Only areas where value is derived from complexity, like semi-conductors are exceptions. Overall several big sectors of the economy would see exponential growth in productivity after Hobbitisation, it’s difficult to estimate the increase in GDP as a whole but I don’t think a doubling in overall productivity would be an unreasonable estimate. I realise other entrants to the competition might be able to quantify the gains from their proposals more exactly but bear in mind I’m suggesting a long term overhaul of most of the economy here.

Another big advantage hobbits are likely to have over large people is increased life expectancy and maybe lower rates of cancer. Generally smaller individuals live significantly longer than larger individuals of the same species, for reason that aren’t well understood. German Shepherds for example live 9-13 years compared to 13-16 years for Jack Russels. About a 30% extension. Assuming Hobbit life expectancy would improve by a similar amount, that would translate to increasing the world’s life expectancy from about to 73 to about 95. Arguably (very tenuously) the equivalent of saving the lives of ¹⁄₃^rd of the worlds’ population. The lower cancer rates just stem from having fewer cells in the body.

III.

Genome analysis technology is advancing rapidly, already methods exists that can predict polygenetic traits such as milk and egg production in farmed cattle and poultry respectively, for the purpose of husbandry. For human genomes a company called “Genomic Prediction”, co-founded by Steve Hsu, has an ML algorithm that can predict height with a high degree of accuracy and is progressing rapidly with algorithms for other traits. Other actors in that field of research include the Chinese government. In the coming decades it is highly likely the technology to select human embryos, derived via IVF, with specific traits will become available. Modern western society imposes a lot of competition on individuals and we’re just generally not a culture with a relaxed attitude towards people’s aptitudes and abilities. Given that this kind of technology would be extremely difficult to regulate and offers people significant advantages for their children, it seems likely it might spread rapidly and could very probably become the norm over the coming decades. One trait that is valued very highly in our culture is height, so you could easily imagine a future scenario where height is actually selected for and average height rises. The cost to society as a whole of such a development would of course be the opposite of the gains offered by Hobbitisation. A lot more could be said about the probability of this kind of eugenics becoming the norm, but since it’s not the focus of this essay I’ll just suggest that embryo selection may become common and it maybe that selection for height is already inevitable and it’s only a question of whether that selection will be positive or negative.

One question you might have is if hobbits are so much richer, healthier and more environmentally friendly than ordinary humans, why are humans such an awkwardly large size in the first place? And the answer is that obviously humans are the optimal size for the environment we originally evolved in. Which was an environment that required a lot of hunting, warfare and other activities where large size is an advantage. Most of the activities needed to sustain life in the modern world are things like organising information and operating machines which can just as easily be done by anyone of almost any body size, provided the general infrastructure is designed to accommodate them. So the down sides of down sizeing are minimal. If you’re interested; I also think hobbits would have been at an advantage as early in history as the agricultural revolution, where they would have been able to support a much higher population density and would have had a larger surplus to direct towards non-agricultural activities, thanks to their lower calorie requirements. If we get really speculative I also think if Tolkien’s Middle Earth were caught in the same kind of Malthusian/Darwinian struggle for survival between groups as the real world has been, then the hobbits would outcompete the Elves, Dwarves and Men, discounting things like magic.

Estimating how small it might be possible to make humans is difficult, but according to Wikipedia the lower bound for typical heights among people with dwarfism is 2’8”. Research into the minimum height that could practicable be achieved and the genes involved in regulating height would be important areas of research for anyone hoping to pursue Hobbitisation.

If Hobbitisation has a weakness it’s that it’s weird and probably difficult to sell to the general public, but EA can’t be criticised for its reluctance to championing weird causes (you might even say it’s your comparative advantage). If it were ever implemented it would soon become the new normal and it would be our Hobbitized descendants who found us weird as well as poor, environmentally destructive and short lived. It’s also worth mentioning that the gains from Hobbitisation can almost all be reaped by single individuals, there’s no coordination problem, as with most social reform schemes, early adopters would see immediate gains. It also requires people to accept human genetic engineering. If that were to ever happen there are probably a whole host of other improvements that could be made, the point of this essay is mostly to argue that, if human genetic engineering ever did become widespread, Hobbitisation should be at the top of the list of potential changes and also to shift the cost benefit calculation in favour of more permissibility.

IV.

I hope I’ve convinced you that Hobbitisation is at least worth consideration as a project and that its potential gains outweigh the gains from perhaps any other project EA could pursue for a similar cost, also that some form of eugenics in the near future may already be inevitable and that it may only be a question of guiding it. The main insight I hope to have conveyed is that humans in their current form are mal-adaptively large for the environment they inhabit and probably have been so since the transition from hunter gathering to farming, but particularly since the industrial revolution. Perhaps had simple agrarian society persevered for a long enough time scale for evolution to have its effects, people would in fact already be much smaller. Since economic progress seems like it could be the ultimate driver of all other forms of progress, and the total economic capacity of civilisation determines how much it can alter the natural world for the purposes of doing good, any gains to economic productivity also benefit everything else EA cares about. If you accept those tenets it should be more than enough justification for including research in and promotion of Hobbitisation as one of EAs’ aims.