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This is promising, but it does basically rely on human populations stabilizing fairly soon. Interestingly the most solid factors for that is women's education
This is promising, but it does basically rely on human populations stabilizing fairly soon. Interestingly the most solid factors for that is women's education and rights and children's health care, that correlates most closely with reduced population growth (I mean, not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm, given the choice - having two kids is the basic replacement number assuming they survive to adulthood).
Hydroponics plus desalination is kind of interesting, as then you could grow some crops on seriously non-arable land, although I don't recall ever seeing high-protein crops (such as legumes with associated nitrogen-fixing bacteria) grown hydroponically. In terms of total calories per land area IIRC potatoes are the big winners there, never seen hydroponic potatoes either.
>not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm
Wasn't something like 50% childhood mortality more typical?
Probably with a lot of variance, this would happen to some people. IIRC Darwin.
I think child mortality is counted as deaths before age five; I think it's lower if you count survival to adulthood and then having children. For population to remain constant each couple has to have two children survive to that point (on average; if some people have larger families and some have none it would balance out). Regardless, having half your children die as the norm is a pretty unpleasant reality.
You need a bit more than each couple having two kids because of people who never marry, etc.
But I suspect we’re headed toward a world where many have zero or at most one kid - and a small few have many. Arguably more efficient, too.
At this point population decline is a bigger risk than population growth.
Its time to move on from the woman education and children health care cliche talking points. Its very 2000.
Its no longer a interesting question for the world at large. Africa and a few others are the only hold outs, and while they deserve those things, it shouldn't be the go to talking points w.r.t. world population.
The vast majority of places is by all measures destined for a population collapse.
In many places there is a bump in the population pyramid around child bearing age as we speak. That bump isn't even close to replacement fertility, and in 10 years the people in that age brackets are so few that their fertility won't be significant for total population numbers.
Population stabilization is a subject for 30 years from now. First we're getting a population collapse and we should be talking about it.
World population is growing 1% a year. If you go back a century, world population never grew that fast in human history (except perhaps the dawn of human history). There is no global population collapse happening or on the horizon, this past century has had the fastest human growth rate in history, including now (the peak was the world baby boom in the 1960s).
There are countries where population is falling, and policy has to account for it, but there is not a global population collapse right now at all. Only if you measure against the peak baby boom of the 1960s does it seem less.
most of the developed world is experiencing population decline if you exclude immigration.
I wonder how up to date that 1% number is? From what I understand China has recently passed the zero to now be in negative population growth territory in 2022. Other countries have led the way. From my understanding, India is still in the positive territory but it is trending towards the negative as is the growing global trend it seems.
> never seen hydroponic potatoes either
https://youtu.be/9ck5iEP03g4 https://youtu.be/9ck5iEP03g4
Aeroponic potatoes. They don't even need any substrate.
I think that's seed potato production, where the consistency and lack of pathogens justifies the extra cost. Here's a manual:
https://cipotato.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/005447.pdf https://cipotato.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/005447.pdf
It would be possible to grow potatoes for human consumption with a similar system, but I don't think it's currently economic.
It's happening
"Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53409521 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53409521
> bigger risk
Only if the economic system is a giant ponzi scheme that depends on continuous, infinite growth.
Really, high population is the source of an enormous amount of problems. We should absolutely be focused on decreasing our population. The planet can support us at our current (and higher) populations, but to be frank, liberal democracies and capitalist markets at-scale are incapable of organizing production in a way that doesn't destroy the earth.
It's funny, there was a post recently about "unsolved problems in economics." Nowhere was there a mention of the biggest economic problem in existence: externalities. Why? Because capitalism is incapable of solving the problem, and the economists know this, so they don't bother talking about it. They pretend it's an issue of state, when the profit mechanism itself is the cause for most externalities.
If we want to preserve our current precious economic order, we need lower populations.
“Capitalism can’t solve externalities”
Blanket statements like that are so clearly false and I’m not sure what you’re implying. What is communism’s record on environmental protection? Well, we can go to China or Russia for some clues.
HUMANS aren’t good at understanding externalities. Of course this isn’t some new realization, we’ve known about the tragedy of the commons for some time which is why we have regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
> when the profit mechanism itself is the cause for most externalities.
I was pretty clear.
I'll break it down for you though! I have costs, and I have sales. sales - costs = margin (or, profit). If my sales are steady, what's a good method of increasing margin? Reducing costs! How is this generally accomplished? By making some other sap pay for them: externalizing my costs.
The profit mechanism actively incentivizes externalities. This is plain fact, and there's nothing "clearly false" about it. Our economic system encourages externalities, and then builds enormous state apparatuses to quell the effects. You're free to ignore the facts, though.
> What is communism’s record on environmental protection?
How is this relevant? And why is state planning the only solution in people's minds to replacing capitalist markets? There's more than either/or here.
> HUMANS aren’t good at understanding externalities.
We understand them fine. We're being literally paid to create them, though.
> which is why we have regulation.
Yeah, that's working great so far!
I think the problem with 'externalities' is that they're little more than convenient fictions that fly in the face of basic physical concepts like conservation of mass and energy. Any economic theory that relies on excluding 'externalities' to measure economic growth is purely nonsensical.
Fundamentally, economics needs to adopt realistic system-level concepts, such as 'primary production' (gross photosynthetic input to a system like a lake). Then you can actually start to calculate how productive a hectare of land can be. This also clearly explains why concepts like 'infinite growth in a closed system' are so nonsensical.
As far as capitalism, it's important to note the huge differences between 'investment capitalism' (Wall Street) and 'commodity capitalism' (Main Street). The latter is much more rationale, as it's not based on fairy dust, but actual real things, like farmers growing potatoes. Similarly, there are many areas of the economy that are best managed without any market influence, but rather by state-managed tax-financed programs (basic infrastructure development for example).
Humans understand externalities just fine, they just don't care about them because the more convenient option is to ignore them and optimize for the short term, which seems a key feature of our species.
That short term bias keeps one alive for another day in our original biological state as hunter-gatherers, which we still are. But it's a pretty crappy quality at planetary scale.
Pure market thinkers say that when you pollute a river, it will create a new market to clean up the river. That makes no sense as you might as well not pollute the river in the first place, so you can't claim efficiency. More importantly, this market to clean up the river does not spontaneously come into existence, as nobody is going to place an order for a clean river. It requires political will, which is easily corrupted, just like regulation.
I would agree that communism would not solve this problem either.
We, as citizens, are equally guilty of this outcome. The politician that plans for the cleaning up of the river will lose from the politician that builds a new sports stadium.
Terms like "capitalism", "socialism", etc. don't really come up in serious economic discussion. They're fuzzy words that no one can seem to agree on the meaning of and they don't describe any real economies. At best they should be relegated to philosophy. Please clarify what exactly you mean when you say "capitalism".
> Only if the economic system is a giant ponzi scheme that depends on continuous, infinite growth.
Just because growth is good for a system doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme (or some other type of scam). Population decrease _obviously_ harms economies because it leads to fewer young people willing to take on entry-level jobs and more elderly people who aren't working anymore. That's not to say it can't be managed - economic growth is also driven by technological advancements which aren't directly dependent on population growth. But a decline in population would inarguably have _some_ kind of negative impact which would need to be handled correctly.
> liberal democracies and capitalist markets at-scale are incapable of organizing production in a way that doesn't destroy the earth
That's an incredibly bold claim with absolutely no evidence supporting it. And you seem to imply that there exists some other system distinct from whatever you call "capitalism" which can organize production in a less harmful way - again with no evidence.
In general, recent growth of rich "capitalist" countries has significantly outstripped their energy use (an imperfect metric of environmental harm, I know, but it's what I could find) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP?locations=FR-US-GB-DE-ES https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP?locat....
> It's funny, there was a post recently about "unsolved problems in economics."
IIRC that post was only kind of accurate at best. Popular culture's understanding of economics is hilariously bad.
> Because capitalism is incapable of solving the problem, and the economists know this, so they don't bother talking about it. They pretend it's an issue of state, when the profit mechanism itself is the cause for most externalities.
From where are you pulling the notion that "capitalism" (for some definition of that word) is incompatible with managing externalities? Or that economists somehow just ignore the existence of externalities?
This kind of attitude is distressingly common online and to me it seems no different from the mentality of anti-vaxxers. Just because a field of science is imperfect and distorted to some extent by government/corporate agendas doesn't give you carte blanche to throw out every bit of research ever done and substitute your own reality.
Economists talk a lot about externalities. After all, they invented the term.
They also have many ways for dealing with them.
> Please clarify what exactly you mean when you say "capitalism".
Privately-owned productive instruments using a profit-based, moneyed system of distributed production (necessarily with state-based control mechanisms).
> That's an incredibly bold claim with absolutely no evidence supporting it.
Besides the planet we live on? Are you suggesting that if we do everything the same as we have been for the past 100 years, that everything will be fine? Why haven't markets started incorporating the known costs of fossil fuel usage at-scale? What about the countries made of plastic floating in the oceans? Why is the price of single-use plastics still low? Why is planned obsolescence cheaper even though the long-term shared costs are much higher?
Why are we still using an economic system where the price of something and the known cost has such an enormous differential?
> And you seem to imply that there exists some other system distinct from whatever you call "capitalism" which can organize production in a less harmful way - again with no evidence.
Capitalism is just a protocol. There are other protocols available to us (that are distinct from state planning) that can organize production. As far as evidence of them, how would that work? Capitalism is the dominant economic system and actively stamps out any other economic systems. There's fun little experiments like Rojova or EZLN, but nothing at-scale.
If you want an example of such a protocol, you can look at one that I'm developing: https://basisproject.net/ https://basisproject.net/
> From where are you pulling the notion that "capitalism" (for some definition of that word) is incompatible with managing externalities? Or that economists somehow just ignore the existence of externalities?
Capitalism, at least in its current form, is incapable of managing externalities because it ignores their existence. It operates on the principles of determining the differential between supply and demand via pricing and profit...this is an overly simplistic mechanism which provides no other information inputs for managing known externalities. It delegates this as a matter of the state. As an economic system, it is incomplete and externalizes its own "simplicity" to other systems.
> This kind of attitude is distressingly common online and to me it seems no different from the mentality of anti-vaxxers. Just because a field of science is imperfect and distorted to some extent by government/corporate agendas doesn't give you carte blanche to throw out every bit of research ever done and substitute your own reality.
I'm not substituting my own reality, and frankly that's fairly insulting. I believe I've described the mechanism at play several times, yet it feels like I'm screaming into the void.
Do you or do you not agree that the profit mechanism incentivizes externalities? If so, do you agree that if a productive system using profit as the organizational lynchpin is scaled, the externalities will scale with it? If so, do you agree that there is a threshold beyond which many externalities cannot be absorbed by the system at large (eg, CO2 output)? If so, then you've reached the same conclusion that I have. This isn't rocket science.