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Yeah and the Malthusians have been predicting the downfall of civilization due to "non-infinite growth" for the last couple centuries as well. And they keep b

by stale2002 9y ago

Yeah and the Malthusians have been predicting the downfall of civilization due to "non-infinite growth" for the last couple centuries as well. And they keep being proven wrong. Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet. Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go. The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world.

throwaway34DF23 9y ago
The counter to the reflex argument "it's worked thus far" is the parable of the turkey. Or the guy who jumped out a 100th floor window (and passing the 2nd floor said "so far so good"). https://blog.commonwealth.com/independent-market-observer/the-parable-of-the-turkey https://blog.commonwealth.com/independent-market-observer/th... Looking at the past only works if the future is like the past. It's a lazy argument, but sure, statistically you are right most of the time. This in turn is a case of survivorship bias and a result of how you count: Everybody who is wrong is weeded out immediately. If you sample many times you are more likely to find that it all works just fine because those who survive are counted many times, failures only count one time. The more often you count the more your argument will look favorably for the side of the "anti-alarmists".
llukas 9y ago
You always measure distance taken with speed? Quality of life is nothing without way to sustain it long term.
nils-m-holm 9y ago
> Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. There's enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed. -- Gandhi > The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world. Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger. In terms of digits in a bank account, that's probably true. Is it true in terms of actual living conditions and power? Is the gap now wider than between Louis XIV and his Haitian slaves?
  - klibertp 9y ago
    Yes. With scientific and engineering advances, we in the "first world" have all the royalty-level of power and energy at our disposal. Washing machine alone is an equivalent of a maid or two. The ability to just sit down whenever and enjoy a play or a concert on TV is something you can do now, while it was utterly impossible for even the most powerful kings. If you couple this with advances in medicine it's safe to say that we live our lives in comfort and safety unheard of ever before, to the point that kings of the past, with all the personnel, seem trivial. Meanwhile, "Haitan slaves" - or just normal people who didn't have the luck to born where they should - live exactly the same way they lived hundreds and possibly thousands of years ago. They struggle every day just to have something to eat and they die of hunger if they fail. The technology they use is the same as it was a thousand years back. In effect, the gap between rich and poor only widened in time. And that's comparing low end to a average in first world countries. It gets really ugly when we start comparing low end with top 1% - it's the difference between struggling to just stay alive another day and taking a leisure trip to the ISS (or was it Mir back then?). The difference between having half of your family dead before your thirties and having a healthy life with all your friends well into 80s. So in short, yes, living conditions of a king and a peasant were worlds apart but it did get markedly worse with time.
  - taneq 9y ago
    Well, given that there are still slaves (maybe even Haitian ones) and the living conditions of the average first world working class person are far better than those of Louis XIV, I'd say yes.
- stale2002 9y ago
  > The gap between rich an poor has never been bigger. So? I'd rather live in the modern day, "unequally" with the rich, than starve or die of disease equally with the rich of the middle ages. Just because the rich have 100Xed in quality of life over the last century, doesn't negate the fact that the poor have 10Xed in quality of life. Making everyone equal is easy. Just make them all equally dead, starving, or miserable, just like they were in past centuries.
stupidcar 9y ago
Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some evidential basis in that it is based on measurement of resource levels and their rate of use, not just some political philosopher's wooly notion of overpopulation. The problem, as I see it, is that even if you are optimistic about the theoretical capacity of the planet to sustain human life, its practical capacity is limited by how efficiently we use the resources to hand, and the current system does not properly incentivise efficient use. More often, it's the complete opposite, because the price of resources like water and soil does not reflect their true scarcity. It's like having a large store of firewood. Enough, in theory, to heat your home through several years of harsh winters. Then you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. That night, by every metric, you'll be warmer and cosier than you ever have been before, but you'll still have doomed yourself.
- anvandare 9y ago
  Reminds me of the well-known type of question in introductory calculus: Q: "A population of bacteria in a petri-dish doubles every hour, after 24 hours the petri-dish reaches 100% saturation. At what time did the petri-dish reach 50% saturation?" A: 23 hours.
- dennisgorelik 9y ago
  > you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. How can people possibly burn our Sun energy ahead of time (billions of years ahead)?
- dennisgorelik 9y ago
  "How efficiently we use the resources to hand" depends on how many people are working on solving that problem (of efficient use of resources). Higher population would mean more people trying to find more efficient use of resources.
pakitan 9y ago
> Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet. And just because Malthusians have been wrong for centuries, doesn't mean they won't turn out to be right in the next 50 years. At some point something will snap. Yeah, we have it pretty good right now. At least those of us in the west. I'm not sure if those people in India who have to endure 51 Celsius heats, don't have access to fresh water and live in areas where it's hard to breathe are in a better positions than their ancestors. A trillion people on Earth may be possible if there was a God designing the planet from scratch with the specific aim to put a trillion people on it. But moving gradually to such a number, from where we are now, I'd say is absolutely impossible. Countries like India and China that are already bursting at the seams, seem to be proving that.
- stale2002 9y ago
  Sure, the world's resources are finite, and we will hit those limits "eventually". But the burden of proof is on the doomsday predictors who claim that doomsday is right around the corner, when all actual evidence shows that things are going great right now. China and India are NOT bursting at the seems. Quality of life is better there than they have ever been. Quality of life is still going up, and it is going up like crazy in those places. You can look at any quality of life metric at all. Mortality rates. Access to fresh water. Diseases. Hunger levels. Life expectancy. They are ALL getting better. And they are getting better by leaps and bounds. No, not just in the west. In poor countries and the third world. Evidence that they are having problems, would look something like "hunger is going up, and quality of life is going down." but that isn't happening.
fiblye 9y ago
>Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. Honestly, you can think whatever you want. But what people want to think and what's actually true often don't line up, and they certainly don't here. Wikipedia says that the total land mass of Earth is about 150,000,000 km^2. Do you really think a global population density of 6666 people/square kilometer on every single piece of land on earth is in any way sustainable? That's a population density that exceeds Tokyo. Japan's population is heavily dependent on food imports to sustain itself. When the whole world is denser than Tokyo, where is the food going to come from?
- OscarCunningham 9y ago
  That's 150m^2 per person. If everyone lives in skyscrapers then living space isn't much of that, and 150m^2 is (in the best case) enough for one person's food. So it might be that this scenario is impossible for other reasons, but I don't think mere land area is a problem.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    You mean if every meter of the planet was covered with skyscrapers? Not sure how that's remotely realistic. And it sounds incredibly dystopian.
    - OscarCunningham 9y ago
      No, the opposite. I mean you could use skyscrapers to make people's living space take up a much smaller proportion of the land area, leaving the rest free for farming.
  - fiblye 9y ago
    Where exactly would the resources for enough skyscrapers to house a trillion humans come from? The world is facing a sand shortage already with not even 1% of that imagined population.
    - 9y ago
ben_w 9y ago
> Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go. A bold claim given we’re already way over the ecosystem limits regarding CO2 production, biodiversity loss, atmospheric nitrogen depletion; and close to the limits for ocean acidification, land use converted to cropland, & water consumption; and until we invent sustainable replacements for currently non-renewable oil drilling and phosphorus mining, it’s probably a better idea to say “fund research into fixing this” than “it’s all good”.

throwaway34DF23 9y ago

The counter to the reflex argument "it's worked thus far" is the parable of the turkey. Or the guy who jumped out a 100th floor window (and passing the 2nd floor said "so far so good"). https://blog.commonwealth.com/independent-market-observer/the-parable-of-the-turkey https://blog.commonwealth.com/independent-market-observer/th... Looking at the past only works if the future is like the past. It's a lazy argument, but sure, statistically you are right most of the time. This in turn is a case of survivorship bias and a result of how you count: Everybody who is wrong is weeded out immediately. If you sample many times you are more likely to find that it all works just fine because those who survive are counted many times, failures only count one time. The more often you count the more your argument will look favorably for the side of the "anti-alarmists".

llukas 9y ago

You always measure distance taken with speed? Quality of life is nothing without way to sustain it long term.

nils-m-holm 9y ago

> Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. There's enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed. -- Gandhi > The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world. Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger.

icebraining 9y ago
Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger. In terms of digits in a bank account, that's probably true. Is it true in terms of actual living conditions and power? Is the gap now wider than between Louis XIV and his Haitian slaves?
- klibertp 9y ago
  Yes. With scientific and engineering advances, we in the "first world" have all the royalty-level of power and energy at our disposal. Washing machine alone is an equivalent of a maid or two. The ability to just sit down whenever and enjoy a play or a concert on TV is something you can do now, while it was utterly impossible for even the most powerful kings. If you couple this with advances in medicine it's safe to say that we live our lives in comfort and safety unheard of ever before, to the point that kings of the past, with all the personnel, seem trivial. Meanwhile, "Haitan slaves" - or just normal people who didn't have the luck to born where they should - live exactly the same way they lived hundreds and possibly thousands of years ago. They struggle every day just to have something to eat and they die of hunger if they fail. The technology they use is the same as it was a thousand years back. In effect, the gap between rich and poor only widened in time. And that's comparing low end to a average in first world countries. It gets really ugly when we start comparing low end with top 1% - it's the difference between struggling to just stay alive another day and taking a leisure trip to the ISS (or was it Mir back then?). The difference between having half of your family dead before your thirties and having a healthy life with all your friends well into 80s. So in short, yes, living conditions of a king and a peasant were worlds apart but it did get markedly worse with time.
- taneq 9y ago
  Well, given that there are still slaves (maybe even Haitian ones) and the living conditions of the average first world working class person are far better than those of Louis XIV, I'd say yes.
stale2002 9y ago
> The gap between rich an poor has never been bigger. So? I'd rather live in the modern day, "unequally" with the rich, than starve or die of disease equally with the rich of the middle ages. Just because the rich have 100Xed in quality of life over the last century, doesn't negate the fact that the poor have 10Xed in quality of life. Making everyone equal is easy. Just make them all equally dead, starving, or miserable, just like they were in past centuries.

stupidcar 9y ago

Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some evidential basis in that it is based on measurement of resource levels and their rate of use, not just some political philosopher's wooly notion of overpopulation. The problem, as I see it, is that even if you are optimistic about the theoretical capacity of the planet to sustain human life, its practical capacity is limited by how efficiently we use the resources to hand, and the current system does not properly incentivise efficient use. More often, it's the complete opposite, because the price of resources like water and soil does not reflect their true scarcity. It's like having a large store of firewood. Enough, in theory, to heat your home through several years of harsh winters. Then you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. That night, by every metric, you'll be warmer and cosier than you ever have been before, but you'll still have doomed yourself.

anvandare 9y ago
Reminds me of the well-known type of question in introductory calculus: Q: "A population of bacteria in a petri-dish doubles every hour, after 24 hours the petri-dish reaches 100% saturation. At what time did the petri-dish reach 50% saturation?" A: 23 hours.
dennisgorelik 9y ago
> you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. How can people possibly burn our Sun energy ahead of time (billions of years ahead)?
dennisgorelik 9y ago
"How efficiently we use the resources to hand" depends on how many people are working on solving that problem (of efficient use of resources). Higher population would mean more people trying to find more efficient use of resources.

pakitan 9y ago

> Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet. And just because Malthusians have been wrong for centuries, doesn't mean they won't turn out to be right in the next 50 years. At some point something will snap. Yeah, we have it pretty good right now. At least those of us in the west. I'm not sure if those people in India who have to endure 51 Celsius heats, don't have access to fresh water and live in areas where it's hard to breathe are in a better positions than their ancestors. A trillion people on Earth may be possible if there was a God designing the planet from scratch with the specific aim to put a trillion people on it. But moving gradually to such a number, from where we are now, I'd say is absolutely impossible. Countries like India and China that are already bursting at the seams, seem to be proving that.

stale2002 9y ago
Sure, the world's resources are finite, and we will hit those limits "eventually". But the burden of proof is on the doomsday predictors who claim that doomsday is right around the corner, when all actual evidence shows that things are going great right now. China and India are NOT bursting at the seems. Quality of life is better there than they have ever been. Quality of life is still going up, and it is going up like crazy in those places. You can look at any quality of life metric at all. Mortality rates. Access to fresh water. Diseases. Hunger levels. Life expectancy. They are ALL getting better. And they are getting better by leaps and bounds. No, not just in the west. In poor countries and the third world. Evidence that they are having problems, would look something like "hunger is going up, and quality of life is going down." but that isn't happening.

fiblye 9y ago

>Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. Honestly, you can think whatever you want. But what people want to think and what's actually true often don't line up, and they certainly don't here. Wikipedia says that the total land mass of Earth is about 150,000,000 km^2. Do you really think a global population density of 6666 people/square kilometer on every single piece of land on earth is in any way sustainable? That's a population density that exceeds Tokyo. Japan's population is heavily dependent on food imports to sustain itself. When the whole world is denser than Tokyo, where is the food going to come from?

OscarCunningham 9y ago
That's 150m^2 per person. If everyone lives in skyscrapers then living space isn't much of that, and 150m^2 is (in the best case) enough for one person's food. So it might be that this scenario is impossible for other reasons, but I don't think mere land area is a problem.
- goatlover 9y ago
  You mean if every meter of the planet was covered with skyscrapers? Not sure how that's remotely realistic. And it sounds incredibly dystopian.
  - OscarCunningham 9y ago
    No, the opposite. I mean you could use skyscrapers to make people's living space take up a much smaller proportion of the land area, leaving the rest free for farming.
- fiblye 9y ago
  Where exactly would the resources for enough skyscrapers to house a trillion humans come from? The world is facing a sand shortage already with not even 1% of that imagined population.
  - 9y ago

ben_w 9y ago

> Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go. A bold claim given we’re already way over the ecosystem limits regarding CO2 production, biodiversity loss, atmospheric nitrogen depletion; and close to the limits for ocean acidification, land use converted to cropland, & water consumption; and until we invent sustainable replacements for currently non-renewable oil drilling and phosphorus mining, it’s probably a better idea to say “fund research into fixing this” than “it’s all good”.