8 ms·

That is ridiculous. Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. There are incredibly strong network effects from having more people (in

That is ridiculous. Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. There are incredibly strong network effects from having more people (in cities, etc), and the benefit of international trade relies on more people to enable better specialization. All kinds of incredibly important markets, like semiconductors (including computer chips, solar power) and even mining rely on having a lot of people to sell to to pay for the upfront and continuous high costs of setting up these operations. The economies of scale are incredibly important. Additionally, a shrinking population means that the working-age population shrinks relative to those who are too old to work. That means less care and less quality of care (and at greater cost) for the elderly. It also means the elderly will be forced to work longer. Does this sound like improved quality of life? This zero-sum Malthusian thinking is not only untrue, but following it collectively will make us much, MUCH poorer and worse off. It's a common way of thinking on both the left and the right, and it is fundamentally anti-human and contradicted by reality.

nostrademons 8y ago
It's not untrue, but it is nuanced. Basically, Malthus was right for some people. More people tends to benefit capital and harm labor, because it increases both the potential labor pool and potential market size for capitalists & entrepreneurs but increases competition for laborers. It tends to benefit specialists and harm generalists, because specialists can more easily find buyers for their skills while generalists have to try harder to stand out from everyone else. It tends to benefit landowners (who already own part of the fixed supply of property) at the expense of renters (who must compete with more people for housing). While I'd agree that more population is overall good for humanity (if only because there's more of it), what's good for humanity is not necessarily good for individual humans. However, since the groups that it is good for tend to be the groups that set the prevailing narrative, these distinctions usually get papered over. There's a credible theory that Black Death lead to the Renaissance, because the depopulation of Europe allowed laborers to bargain for higher wages and kickstarted the growth of a permanent middle class. There's a bunch of resources on this if you google [black death lead to renaissance], but the Wikipedia page has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#Social,_environmental,_and_economic_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  The linked article nowhere mentions the Renaissance, except in the title of an article mentioned as a reference. Also, I don't think that the Renaissance depended a whole lot on the middle class. The middle class was critical to the economic changes that transformed Europe, sure, but that was kind of separate from the Renaissance itself.
knuththetruth 8y ago
>Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. Wages have essentially been flat for most workers since the 1970s[0] >This zero-sum Malthusian thinking is not only untrue, but following it collectively will make us much, MUCH poorer and worse off. I agree, but unless the US is willing to claw back wealth from the robber barons of our age, build a sustainable future with social services on par with other developed countries, people are going to respond to the tenuousness of their circumstances in this fashion. [0] https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america
- jpttsn 8y ago
  Have other countries solved the problem? Which ones?
  - knuththetruth 8y ago
    The US solved the problem in the postwar period by taxing the wealthy at high rates, providing subsidized housing and education, and numerous other social democratic benefits to their population. This, combined with liberal immigration policies, resulted in tremendous growth.
    - firic 8y ago
      and of course by bombing all of the competitors factories making the US a monopoly in manufacturing.
      - knuththetruth 8y ago
        Yes, that of course was important. But given that today we see greater social mobility in wealthy social democracies than is present in the US demonstrates that this was not the exclusive cause.
      - baybal2 8y ago
        >and of course by bombing all of the competitors factories making the US a monopoly in manufacturing. But also making them poor enough to not to be able to buy anything from America. This is 9 out of 10 people pulling out this argument forgot.
mattigames 8y ago
Its disingenuous to only point out only the positive network effects of having more people and not negative ones such as: - Global Warming (https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/32/2/150/1610588 https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/32/2/150/1610588) - Happiness level https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/the-price-of-happiness-in-cities/487823/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/the-price-of-happines... - Pollution rates (along with cancer rates) https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-polluted-cities-in-the-world-ranked/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-polluted-cities-in... I never said the word "over-population" because such concept is so emotionally charged and too subjective; the threshold for over-population depends heavily in the amount of resources available and the ability (and willingness) to distribute them; the same number of people that is normal today may be over-population tomorrow depending on how much damage we do to our own resources in the next years due to climate change or other major negative issues with uncountable repercussions in human life. Also we need to be talking numbers; does such positive network effects continue after 10 billion humans? 20 billion? 100 billion? Surely even in that optimistic theory there must be a limit. BTW claiming that wanting less humans is anti-human is extremely disingenuous and probably an ad-hominem of sorts, e.g. its more pro-sharks to have 2 well-fed ones in an aquarium than 20 that will live starving lives.
flashman 8y ago
> Wages have never been higher Except that "in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today." [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...]
- 4ad 8y ago
  In the US, not in the rest of the world, the majority being 3rd world countries.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I've also used that link in the past, but in digging more into the data I think there may be some problems with those data - perhaps that they only consider hourly wages, and not compensation. These [1] data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and are just a cleaner representation of direct Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That is Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Compensation Per Hour. And you can see it has been consistently increasing - up about 50% since 1970. Nonfarm business sector is defined as: The nonfarm business sector is a subset of the domestic economy and excludes the economic activities of the following: general government, private households, nonprofit organizations serving individuals, and farms. The nonfarm business sector accounted for about 77 percent of the value of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000. --- Another important metric is that in the US there has been a sharp upward trend in wealth of society. I ran into this [2] when actually searching information on the chiseling out of the middle class. And that paper does describe that chiseling of the middle class. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income, and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (well at least today as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% with the middle class left with 26%. There's even been a chiseling out of the middle class as a whole declining from 38.8% of society to 32% of society. But the eye opener is this. This is the change in the size of each economic group between 1979 and 2014 as a percent of the total population: - Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8% - Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4% - Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32% - Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1% - Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8% These data are certainly not indicative of flat lining of real earnings. Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging'. If one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [3]. Though the paper itself is very transparent in their methodology and extremely readable. I found it all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview. --- I'm unsure what exactly what causes the biggest skewing of Pew's numbers. It could be that perhaps we have a greater relative ratio of workers that are excluded from their numbers (for e.g. occupying 'supervisory' roles), or it could be that compensation beyond wages itself has just become much more valuable. It's also possible that their numbers are reasonable but the labor force dynamics make them misleading. For instance imagine if a smaller chunk of society counts as part of the labor force or that the labor force participation rate declines. Still considering wages just within this segment of society would not really indicate the changes for society at large. In any case, and for whatever the reason, those those data are not really indicative of the economic direction of the nation. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB [2] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...
dvdhnt 8y ago
I think it’s pretty arrogant to conclude that the human race is somehow exempt from the concept of a carrying capacity. Wages are higher because of inflation, the floor has moved, and it’s relatively meaningless as the cost of rent, healthcare, and food has greatly outpaced such growth. To put it bluntly, your semiconductors are insignificant if we can’t house and feed our population.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  It's also pretty shortsighted to underrate human advances in adapting their abilities.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/responsible https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/responsible
  - dvdhnt 8y ago
    That’s not the point. What good is the ability to grow enough food for everyone if we arbitrarily withhold it from them? I’d argue patching a system that values the very few over the many is not an advancement.
    - paulddraper 8y ago
      It's hardly a solved problem, but it's getting much better. Wordwide undernourishment rates went from 19% to 11% from 1991 to 2015. [1] Another couples decades of human progress and starvation will be rather rare. :fingerscrossed: [1] https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
      - dvdhnt 8y ago
        The numbers are positive and I respect your optimism. I have nothing to add but wanted to say that.
- 8y ago
beiller 8y ago
I thought I would add to this an interesting youtuber I've watched, and the idea of "Arcologies". The claim is that, a (current) skyscraper sized building that is a self sufficient ecology of human living space / food production, poking out one every few square miles, could support dozens of times our current earth's population and that heat, not space, is the real bottleneck for further growth[1]. Has some estimate calculations to back it up. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&t=2s

nostrademons 8y ago

It's not untrue, but it is nuanced. Basically, Malthus was right for some people. More people tends to benefit capital and harm labor, because it increases both the potential labor pool and potential market size for capitalists & entrepreneurs but increases competition for laborers. It tends to benefit specialists and harm generalists, because specialists can more easily find buyers for their skills while generalists have to try harder to stand out from everyone else. It tends to benefit landowners (who already own part of the fixed supply of property) at the expense of renters (who must compete with more people for housing). While I'd agree that more population is overall good for humanity (if only because there's more of it), what's good for humanity is not necessarily good for individual humans. However, since the groups that it is good for tend to be the groups that set the prevailing narrative, these distinctions usually get papered over. There's a credible theory that Black Death lead to the Renaissance, because the depopulation of Europe allowed laborers to bargain for higher wages and kickstarted the growth of a permanent middle class. There's a bunch of resources on this if you google [black death lead to renaissance], but the Wikipedia page has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#Social,_environmental,_and_economic_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
The linked article nowhere mentions the Renaissance, except in the title of an article mentioned as a reference. Also, I don't think that the Renaissance depended a whole lot on the middle class. The middle class was critical to the economic changes that transformed Europe, sure, but that was kind of separate from the Renaissance itself.

knuththetruth 8y ago

>Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. Wages have essentially been flat for most workers since the 1970s[0] >This zero-sum Malthusian thinking is not only untrue, but following it collectively will make us much, MUCH poorer and worse off. I agree, but unless the US is willing to claw back wealth from the robber barons of our age, build a sustainable future with social services on par with other developed countries, people are going to respond to the tenuousness of their circumstances in this fashion. [0] https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america

jpttsn 8y ago
Have other countries solved the problem? Which ones?
- knuththetruth 8y ago
  The US solved the problem in the postwar period by taxing the wealthy at high rates, providing subsidized housing and education, and numerous other social democratic benefits to their population. This, combined with liberal immigration policies, resulted in tremendous growth.
  - firic 8y ago
    and of course by bombing all of the competitors factories making the US a monopoly in manufacturing.
    - knuththetruth 8y ago
      Yes, that of course was important. But given that today we see greater social mobility in wealthy social democracies than is present in the US demonstrates that this was not the exclusive cause.
    - baybal2 8y ago
      >and of course by bombing all of the competitors factories making the US a monopoly in manufacturing. But also making them poor enough to not to be able to buy anything from America. This is 9 out of 10 people pulling out this argument forgot.

mattigames 8y ago

Its disingenuous to only point out only the positive network effects of having more people and not negative ones such as: - Global Warming (https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/32/2/150/1610588 https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/32/2/150/1610588) - Happiness level https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/the-price-of-happiness-in-cities/487823/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/the-price-of-happines... - Pollution rates (along with cancer rates) https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-polluted-cities-in-the-world-ranked/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-polluted-cities-in... I never said the word "over-population" because such concept is so emotionally charged and too subjective; the threshold for over-population depends heavily in the amount of resources available and the ability (and willingness) to distribute them; the same number of people that is normal today may be over-population tomorrow depending on how much damage we do to our own resources in the next years due to climate change or other major negative issues with uncountable repercussions in human life. Also we need to be talking numbers; does such positive network effects continue after 10 billion humans? 20 billion? 100 billion? Surely even in that optimistic theory there must be a limit. BTW claiming that wanting less humans is anti-human is extremely disingenuous and probably an ad-hominem of sorts, e.g. its more pro-sharks to have 2 well-fed ones in an aquarium than 20 that will live starving lives.

flashman 8y ago

> Wages have never been higher Except that "in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today." [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...]

4ad 8y ago
In the US, not in the rest of the world, the majority being 3rd world countries.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I've also used that link in the past, but in digging more into the data I think there may be some problems with those data - perhaps that they only consider hourly wages, and not compensation. These [1] data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and are just a cleaner representation of direct Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That is Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Compensation Per Hour. And you can see it has been consistently increasing - up about 50% since 1970. Nonfarm business sector is defined as: The nonfarm business sector is a subset of the domestic economy and excludes the economic activities of the following: general government, private households, nonprofit organizations serving individuals, and farms. The nonfarm business sector accounted for about 77 percent of the value of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000. --- Another important metric is that in the US there has been a sharp upward trend in wealth of society. I ran into this [2] when actually searching information on the chiseling out of the middle class. And that paper does describe that chiseling of the middle class. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income, and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (well at least today as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% with the middle class left with 26%. There's even been a chiseling out of the middle class as a whole declining from 38.8% of society to 32% of society. But the eye opener is this. This is the change in the size of each economic group between 1979 and 2014 as a percent of the total population: - Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8% - Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4% - Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32% - Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1% - Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8% These data are certainly not indicative of flat lining of real earnings. Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging'. If one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [3]. Though the paper itself is very transparent in their methodology and extremely readable. I found it all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview. --- I'm unsure what exactly what causes the biggest skewing of Pew's numbers. It could be that perhaps we have a greater relative ratio of workers that are excluded from their numbers (for e.g. occupying 'supervisory' roles), or it could be that compensation beyond wages itself has just become much more valuable. It's also possible that their numbers are reasonable but the labor force dynamics make them misleading. For instance imagine if a smaller chunk of society counts as part of the labor force or that the labor force participation rate declines. Still considering wages just within this segment of society would not really indicate the changes for society at large. In any case, and for whatever the reason, those those data are not really indicative of the economic direction of the nation. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB [2] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...

dvdhnt 8y ago

I think it’s pretty arrogant to conclude that the human race is somehow exempt from the concept of a carrying capacity. Wages are higher because of inflation, the floor has moved, and it’s relatively meaningless as the cost of rent, healthcare, and food has greatly outpaced such growth. To put it bluntly, your semiconductors are insignificant if we can’t house and feed our population.

paulddraper 8y ago
It's also pretty shortsighted to underrate human advances in adapting their abilities.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/responsible https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/responsible
- dvdhnt 8y ago
  That’s not the point. What good is the ability to grow enough food for everyone if we arbitrarily withhold it from them? I’d argue patching a system that values the very few over the many is not an advancement.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    It's hardly a solved problem, but it's getting much better. Wordwide undernourishment rates went from 19% to 11% from 1991 to 2015. [1] Another couples decades of human progress and starvation will be rather rare. :fingerscrossed: [1] https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
    - dvdhnt 8y ago
      The numbers are positive and I respect your optimism. I have nothing to add but wanted to say that.
8y ago

beiller 8y ago

I thought I would add to this an interesting youtuber I've watched, and the idea of "Arcologies". The claim is that, a (current) skyscraper sized building that is a self sufficient ecology of human living space / food production, poking out one every few square miles, could support dozens of times our current earth's population and that heat, not space, is the real bottleneck for further growth[1]. Has some estimate calculations to back it up. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&t=2s