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Can we have prosperity without growth? No. Can we have sustainability with growth? No. Then we can not have prosperity and sustainability. Can we afford not ha

• mytailorisrich 7y ago
  We can have sustainability and prosperity. It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway). The key issue is the global population. (Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resources)
  • aww_dang 7y ago
    Malthus was proven wrong by productivity gains. England did not starve due to a rising population, but went on to become an industrialized nation. Increased population allows for greater specialization. This only holds true as long as free markets are allowed to operate somewhat unimpeded. Typically the Malthusian position is one that advocates excessive government intervention. When taken to an extreme this can make the Malthusian catastrophe self-fulfilling as the market can longer allocate resources efficiently.
    • ericmay 7y ago
      > Increased population allows for greater specialization Can you elaborate on this point w.r.t the OP you’re discussing?
      • aww_dang 7y ago
        Yes, but it would help if you could be a bit more specific. I fear this reply may be too general. The post above suggests that we cannot have a sustainable, prosperous growing population. A rising population allows for greater specialization in that the general population can rely on specialists (auto mechanics, computer programmers, bakers, farmers) to handle their respective field of expertise. You do not need to farm wheat to eat bread in a modern society. Bread is lined up waiting for you in the nearest market. You can go online and have your groceries delivered by a truck.
      • nickik 7y ago
        His point is that you need less human labor to produce the same amount of stuff. Thus with a growing population you have ever increasing productivity, helping you offset potential negative effects of population. That is just one of the effect that work together to over and over again prove the 'over-population' crowd wrong.
        • ericmay 7y ago
          > Thus with a growing population you have ever increasing productivity, helping you offset potential negative effects of population. I’m not sure I follow. How will we prevent over-fishing for example? Traffic? Deforestation? I think you can blunt the effects of overpopulation for humans (we probably won’t starve) but at what cost? How will specialization affect human health and happiness? Are people who specialize in a very specific thing more happpy (or less) than people who do general tasks? I would argue even right now we have plenty of people without meaningful work - how will increases in population improve that?
          • aww_dang 7y ago
            Fish farms, new more efficient methods of transport and agroforestry. Consider all of the time saved with today's technological advancements and specialization. Years ago peasants would lay idle on near starvation diets for most of the winter. During the growing season they would work from dawn until dusk, just to enjoy a sustenance lifestyle. So while work may not be as meaningful as we would like, our leisure time is increasing. Mass automation will likely provide even greater leisure and cheaper goods. All of this ignores the rampant inflation of the money supply, which is silently taxing our leisure, labor and consumption. There are many who would like to increase this and would do so by indulging the fears you listed at the top of your comment.
            • ericmay 7y ago
              Respectfully, I disagree with the spirit of all of this excluding how peasants lived. I think saying "tech will solve it and we'll have great lives where everything is cheap" is equivalent to saying Jesus will come save us all.
      • mytailorisrich 7y ago
        IMO, he puts forward a purely economic approach about how to produce enough to ensure a growing population remains materially prosperous. This blissfully ignores the key issue under discussion: Our impact on the planet in doing so.
        • paganel 7y ago
          > This blissfully ignores the key issue under discussion: Our impact on the planet in doing so. It still baffles me that we choose to ignore externalities in part because we cannot attach any “rational” prices to them, it’s like they don’t even exist to us as long as we cannot put them in an exact Excel sheet with a well-defined value.
          • aww_dang 7y ago
            In terms of political economy we could easily tabulate the money paid to lobbyists. For example, it is much cheaper for a coal fired power plant to pay politicians to implement their desired environmental regulations. Instead of being liable for damages caused by their pollution, these energy producers can simply claim that they are within the regulations set forth by the EPA. The price discovery mechanism has been hampered by the victim's inability to collect damages.
    • BlueTemplar 7y ago
      How exactly was he proven wrong ? The rising productivity gains are built-in in his model. Where do you get the idea that he "advocated excessive government intervention" ? He was instead criticized for his anti-welfare stance ! Or do you think that "educating women" is "excessive government intervention" ?!?
      • aww_dang 7y ago
        There was not mass starvation as I clearly stated. The Malthusian position is one of finite resources and productivity. Peak oil, population control and assorted doomsaying. It would not be unreasonable to characterize the one child policy as excessive. Your comment attempts to misconstrue cherry picked historical facts against the broader definition of Malthusianism. It becomes offensive when you attempt to inject identity politics into what had been previously a mostly polite discussion. I'm afraid there is nothing for us to discuss.
        • BlueTemplar 7y ago
          A "broader definition" that you haven't even bothered to give ? Equating Malthus and "malthusians"? Straw-manning much ? What about the Irish Great Famine (shortly after Malthus' death). And I see that it's often blamed on laissez-faire politics ? Where did you get "identity politics" from ? Do you realize that peak oil denial is a deeply anti-science position ? (Unless you're thinking of abiotic oil?)
  • atemerev 7y ago
    So, which country would you want to depopulate first?
    • oblio 7y ago
      I vote that we start with the country that uses the most resources per capita, and that pollutes the most per capita :-P
      • deleted 7y ago
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    • virmundi 7y ago
      Europe, Japan and the native population of the US have elected themselves. Africa probably won’t have the population boom since education is spreading, which tends to slow reproduction rates. Problem is solved in about 30 years with the death of the boomers and the non-replacement rates.
      • modo_mario 7y ago
        >the native population of the US They're already tiny af tho
      • ericmay 7y ago
        What worries me is will we do enough damage in 30 years that it doesn’t matter? And will economies be able to adjust? Even if this happens, do we get to a steady state of 10bn? 9? I think our global population should be closer to 1bn if we want an ideal world. Also boo to those who are downvoting you about the US comment. Either you can’t read or you’re intentionally not reading. The OP was referencing people who are citizens in the US who do it have as many kids as immigrants and without immigration would be below replacement rates.
    • ericmay 7y ago
      In a perfect scenario you’d just have people have fewer babies. The issue is that countries want growth at all costs - the incentive is always more, bigger, faster.
  • chii 7y ago
    why can humans not expand interplanetarily? Then, inter-stellarly, then finally, inter-galactically?
    • newsgremlin 7y ago
      We can, we just need to not burn out our resources and single planetary home before then.
    • paulintrognon 7y ago
      Because that's still science fiction. We have enough ressources to sustain current population/economic system for a few decades, a century at most (i'm thinking gas, rare earth, phosphore, etc). It's been 50 years since we got to the moon and we're still stuck on low-orbit earth. Even getting to Mars is still very very hard. Do you think we'll be technologically ready to colonize an earth-like planet by the end of this century? While we can't rule it out fure sure, it would be crazy to bet on that possibility.
      • mft_ 7y ago
        I’d argue not that we’re ‘stuck’ here on Earth (just) because it’s hard, but because there’s been no major incentive to do otherwise for decades. The original incentives for the space race were political during the Cold War - rockets, satellites, then landing on the moon. Since then, NASA has mostly stagnated without a clear vision to deliver. Likewise (until recently) the major aerospace providers were happy just doing well enough to make some dollars from their lobbying and ‘cost-plus’ contracts. The only game-changer is SpaceX, set up to deliver the vision of a slightly eccentric multi-millionaire (now billionaire, of course). But I’d argue that SpaceX isn’t doing anything so revolutionary that it couldn’t have been done earlier by various others (including NASA itself) if they’d had the right vision and incentives. Sad, really - all of that money, time, effort, and human potential effectively wasted.
    • pacala 7y ago
      Because of interplanetary transportation costs, due to physically unavoidable planetary gravity wells, the existence of other inhabited planets has essentially zero effect on the prosperity of the average Earth inhabitant. There is physically no way to build the space equivalent of cheap maritime shipping.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • nickik 7y ago
    > It's a triangle That is wrong. In fact we have a much larger population, in many ways human life is more sustainable then it ever was and its easily more prosperous then in the past. Just like in the 60s the people over-hyping population growth are just as fundamentally wrong as the people who wanted to force cut of trade and foreign aid to India to force them to adopt population control matters. These same terrible dangerous and fundamentally wrong ideas pop up over and over again. In fact, with a growing population humans have been using less of earths space. More people live in much denser areas. And even with billions more people we are far below the peak amount of agro culture land. In fact all over the western world wood and wild lands are growing. With Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Water energy the environmental impact will be far less then what we currently have (and countries with nuclear had for a long time). We could double and triple world population again and there would be no energy issue other then a temporary scale issue.
    • mytailorisrich 7y ago
      We have continuously expanded our use of land and resources. That fact that forests are expanding in e.g. Europe, a continent that has already been completely devoid of wilderness should not mask what is happening in continents that are 'behind' like Africa, South America, and Asia. This is the key issue at hand and is driven by population growth coupled with less poverty, and what is causing current climate and environmental issues. Ignoring this is what is fundamentally dangerous and we can see the effects on the planet right now.
  • deltron3030 7y ago
    It's a diffult situation and not easy to find the true culprit, because the society we live in is a cascade of hacks of nature that started aprox. 10k years ago with the dawn of civilization and agriculture. Nomadic tribes intrinsically self regulate, what can't be carried can't be possesed beyond group boundaries and falls back to the environment automatically.
• atemerev 7y ago
  Who are “we”?
• deleted 7y ago
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