6 ms·

We already have sufficient technology, agricultural & manufacturing output, and logistics in place to feed, clothe, and assumably shelter every human on the pla

We already have sufficient technology, agricultural & manufacturing output, and logistics in place to feed, clothe, and assumably shelter every human on the planet. Social organization away from surplus value hoarding by big capital seems to be the key missing piece of the puzzle.

meri_dian 9y ago
I agree that novel social partnerships will need to develop, but I still think large increases in productivity and technical capability are necessary. For example, the total amount of wealth in the world is about 250 trillion USD according to Credit Suisse. There are about 7.5 billion people in the world today. 250T/7.5B = 33,333 USD per person. This really isn't that much wealth per person. So the total amount in existence still needs to increase dramatically.
- knieveltech 9y ago
  Given we've either already destroyed or are in the process of destroying every major marine fishery on the planet and something like 40% of the total dry land area on the planet is currently used for some form of agriculture it seems pretty plain that we cannot sustainably support the current global population. You sure that massive increases in global wealth and not a reduction in global population are what are called for?
  - paganel 9y ago
    > Given we've either already destroyed or are in the process of destroying every major marine fishery on the planet Partially related to this, but my parents live in a village on the Lower Danube (the second largest river in Europe, after the Volga). I remember that when I was a kid (in the '80s) you had no problems catching enough fish during a day in order to feed a family of 3 or 4 if you wanted, and even sell something on the side for some extra cash (not much, but it mattered). I remember my uncle telling me that back when he was a kid (the '70s) the fish resources were even more plentiful, as in whenever the river was flooding the marshland-like areas he and his friends would go in there and catch the fish using their bare hands. Nowadays you can barely catch a fish. Some former colleagues of mine spent an entire day trying to catch something in the Danube and at the end they hadn't catch anything (bare in mind, they were using more modern tools compared to what people were using back in the '70s and '80s). The struggle is real.
    - _coldfire 9y ago
      Highly recommend Four Fish by Paul Greenberg, does a good job showing all sides of the fishing industry and the projected future if we keep going the same way. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7347759-four-fish https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7347759-four-fish
  - boubiyeah 9y ago
    Thank you for bringing back some sanity. Exponential population growth is not sustainable and will only make the poor, poorer (or not as poor but at the cost of health, etc).
- ErikVandeWater 9y ago
  I would like to pick your brain on this - what number for wealth/person do you think would be a big number? What catches my eye about this is if everyone were a doctor right out of med school, the world's net worth would be negative, but everyone would be fed and clothed and be rich in 10 years. I'm not sure wealth per person is a great way to measure economic prosperity. If you have lots of wealth, does that necessarily translate to more income down the line?
  - colemannugent 9y ago
    >if everyone were a doctor right out of med school, the world's net worth would be negative, but everyone would be fed and clothed and be rich in 10 years If everyone were a doctor that skill would be worthless. People are (mostly) paid according to the amount of value they bring to a company. That value is relative to others in the industry. Knowing how to competently use Microsoft Office (which puts you ahead of 99% of the world population) gets you nowhere in a AI focused startup because it doesn't make you more valuable to them. >I'm not sure wealth per person is a great way to measure economic prosperity. If you have lots of wealth, does that necessarily translate to more income down the line? I totally agree with you here. The metric I think matters more is relative wealth. Say you are a software developer making $120,000: in the Silicon Valley that is about average, but in Kentucky that is three times what the average person makes. So in SV you live a "normal" life, but in Kentucky you are decidedly upper class.
    - Amygaz 9y ago
      MDs are as valuable in the North America are they are in Europe, they go to similar training, and enrollment numbers kept arbitrarily low. Yet they are paid a lot more in the US and Canada that they are in the UK or France. And we all know that cost of MD has minimal bearing on total the cost of healthcare, which in itself has minimal bearing on the relative healthcare efficiency. I am ambivalent about the relative wealth. I think it is fair and helps, up to a certain level, but globally, money attracts money, which means that certain people, with certain background and certain jobs would be deemed worth leaving in California. And this relative wealth-based system is already in place (e.g. designers in Cuppertino, IT in N. Dakota, assembler in Shenzhen).
- Amygaz 9y ago
  It's actually a huge amount of wealth per person. 1st, you do realize that you include babies and elderly in that 7.5B? 2nd, you do realize that if we were living like touaregs instead of north americans we would all feel like f'ing rich with $30k? 3rd, and, spinning this back to social partnership, we could very well live in a world with no money, or at least a society in which money is not the only measure of contribution (i.e. where narcissistic douches like the donald wouldn't be seen as useful contributors). (edited layout only)
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    But I'd much rather live like a North American than a Tuareg (I take you to mean the Berber people called the Tuaregs). I like my central heat and air conditioning, and Netflix, and Spotify, and my comfortable and spacious car, and my ability to use air transport, and the restaurants that exist to serve me delicious food, etc... Come now, we're human beings! The world is our domain! We should be working to create more things for more people, not settling for less!
    - titzer 9y ago
      I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not. If you are being serious, then mind taking a moment to consider your impact on the Earth? It's kind of in a bad way right now.
      - meri_dian 9y ago
        I'm not being sarcastic at all. Whatever damage humanity is doing to Earth now in pursuit of material comfort will be quickly healed once we transition to more sustainable sources of energy. The Earth will be fine, it's very resilient. Living well and living sustainably are both important, we don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
        titzer 9y ago
        Well I disagree on all the above points, and there is a lot of evidence the Earth is having a really tough time dealing with our massive destruction of habitat, production of CO2, toxins, pollution--especially pesticides--overfishing, overpopulation, and overconsumption of every type of food. Ecosystems are in freefall, insects are disappearing, ecosystems are unraveling, the ice caps and Greenland and nearly all global glaciers are melting, the ocean is full of trash, and parts of the planet are likely to be uninhabitable in a century or two. This is not normal. Thousands of years of human history and it's come down to less than a century of industrialized fuckery to create a situation where a very ugly collapse increasingly looks inevitable. And then you talk about living sustainable. Well buckle up, your lifestyle, and mine--I dunno for sure, since you mention Netflix and traveling I assume you are a relatively normal middle-class or upper-middle class westerner--are going bye bye. It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people, so we are all are either going to have check out early without having kids or find a way to maintain our lifestyles using less energy, less food, less travel, and overall fewer goods, and then explain to our kids how they are going to have make do with even less than that. The fantasy of a tech utopia run by machines on sustainable energy and the environment being all rosy like in the movies is just not going to happen. Unless we invent the Matrix--in which case, we'll all probably gladly enter it.

meri_dian 9y ago

I agree that novel social partnerships will need to develop, but I still think large increases in productivity and technical capability are necessary. For example, the total amount of wealth in the world is about 250 trillion USD according to Credit Suisse. There are about 7.5 billion people in the world today. 250T/7.5B = 33,333 USD per person. This really isn't that much wealth per person. So the total amount in existence still needs to increase dramatically.

knieveltech 9y ago
Given we've either already destroyed or are in the process of destroying every major marine fishery on the planet and something like 40% of the total dry land area on the planet is currently used for some form of agriculture it seems pretty plain that we cannot sustainably support the current global population. You sure that massive increases in global wealth and not a reduction in global population are what are called for?
- paganel 9y ago
  > Given we've either already destroyed or are in the process of destroying every major marine fishery on the planet Partially related to this, but my parents live in a village on the Lower Danube (the second largest river in Europe, after the Volga). I remember that when I was a kid (in the '80s) you had no problems catching enough fish during a day in order to feed a family of 3 or 4 if you wanted, and even sell something on the side for some extra cash (not much, but it mattered). I remember my uncle telling me that back when he was a kid (the '70s) the fish resources were even more plentiful, as in whenever the river was flooding the marshland-like areas he and his friends would go in there and catch the fish using their bare hands. Nowadays you can barely catch a fish. Some former colleagues of mine spent an entire day trying to catch something in the Danube and at the end they hadn't catch anything (bare in mind, they were using more modern tools compared to what people were using back in the '70s and '80s). The struggle is real.
  - _coldfire 9y ago
    Highly recommend Four Fish by Paul Greenberg, does a good job showing all sides of the fishing industry and the projected future if we keep going the same way. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7347759-four-fish https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7347759-four-fish
- boubiyeah 9y ago
  Thank you for bringing back some sanity. Exponential population growth is not sustainable and will only make the poor, poorer (or not as poor but at the cost of health, etc).
ErikVandeWater 9y ago
I would like to pick your brain on this - what number for wealth/person do you think would be a big number? What catches my eye about this is if everyone were a doctor right out of med school, the world's net worth would be negative, but everyone would be fed and clothed and be rich in 10 years. I'm not sure wealth per person is a great way to measure economic prosperity. If you have lots of wealth, does that necessarily translate to more income down the line?
- colemannugent 9y ago
  >if everyone were a doctor right out of med school, the world's net worth would be negative, but everyone would be fed and clothed and be rich in 10 years If everyone were a doctor that skill would be worthless. People are (mostly) paid according to the amount of value they bring to a company. That value is relative to others in the industry. Knowing how to competently use Microsoft Office (which puts you ahead of 99% of the world population) gets you nowhere in a AI focused startup because it doesn't make you more valuable to them. >I'm not sure wealth per person is a great way to measure economic prosperity. If you have lots of wealth, does that necessarily translate to more income down the line? I totally agree with you here. The metric I think matters more is relative wealth. Say you are a software developer making $120,000: in the Silicon Valley that is about average, but in Kentucky that is three times what the average person makes. So in SV you live a "normal" life, but in Kentucky you are decidedly upper class.
  - Amygaz 9y ago
    MDs are as valuable in the North America are they are in Europe, they go to similar training, and enrollment numbers kept arbitrarily low. Yet they are paid a lot more in the US and Canada that they are in the UK or France. And we all know that cost of MD has minimal bearing on total the cost of healthcare, which in itself has minimal bearing on the relative healthcare efficiency. I am ambivalent about the relative wealth. I think it is fair and helps, up to a certain level, but globally, money attracts money, which means that certain people, with certain background and certain jobs would be deemed worth leaving in California. And this relative wealth-based system is already in place (e.g. designers in Cuppertino, IT in N. Dakota, assembler in Shenzhen).
Amygaz 9y ago
It's actually a huge amount of wealth per person. 1st, you do realize that you include babies and elderly in that 7.5B? 2nd, you do realize that if we were living like touaregs instead of north americans we would all feel like f'ing rich with $30k? 3rd, and, spinning this back to social partnership, we could very well live in a world with no money, or at least a society in which money is not the only measure of contribution (i.e. where narcissistic douches like the donald wouldn't be seen as useful contributors). (edited layout only)
- meri_dian 9y ago
  But I'd much rather live like a North American than a Tuareg (I take you to mean the Berber people called the Tuaregs). I like my central heat and air conditioning, and Netflix, and Spotify, and my comfortable and spacious car, and my ability to use air transport, and the restaurants that exist to serve me delicious food, etc... Come now, we're human beings! The world is our domain! We should be working to create more things for more people, not settling for less!
  - titzer 9y ago
    I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not. If you are being serious, then mind taking a moment to consider your impact on the Earth? It's kind of in a bad way right now.
    - meri_dian 9y ago
      I'm not being sarcastic at all. Whatever damage humanity is doing to Earth now in pursuit of material comfort will be quickly healed once we transition to more sustainable sources of energy. The Earth will be fine, it's very resilient. Living well and living sustainably are both important, we don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
      - titzer 9y ago
        Well I disagree on all the above points, and there is a lot of evidence the Earth is having a really tough time dealing with our massive destruction of habitat, production of CO2, toxins, pollution--especially pesticides--overfishing, overpopulation, and overconsumption of every type of food. Ecosystems are in freefall, insects are disappearing, ecosystems are unraveling, the ice caps and Greenland and nearly all global glaciers are melting, the ocean is full of trash, and parts of the planet are likely to be uninhabitable in a century or two. This is not normal. Thousands of years of human history and it's come down to less than a century of industrialized fuckery to create a situation where a very ugly collapse increasingly looks inevitable. And then you talk about living sustainable. Well buckle up, your lifestyle, and mine--I dunno for sure, since you mention Netflix and traveling I assume you are a relatively normal middle-class or upper-middle class westerner--are going bye bye. It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people, so we are all are either going to have check out early without having kids or find a way to maintain our lifestyles using less energy, less food, less travel, and overall fewer goods, and then explain to our kids how they are going to have make do with even less than that. The fantasy of a tech utopia run by machines on sustainable energy and the environment being all rosy like in the movies is just not going to happen. Unless we invent the Matrix--in which case, we'll all probably gladly enter it.