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Lots of pretty words that translate to "reduce population and living standards or die." If true this is the hardest warning that people refuse to hear. If fal

Lots of pretty words that translate to "reduce population and living standards or die." If true this is the hardest warning that people refuse to hear. If false it is a way to co-op guilt and fear to sell control. How I wish I knew which it was.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago
The two are not mutually exclusive. We all know endless growth with finite resources is impossible. We can innovate do things more efficiently or differently and find solutions to previous limits of course. The hypothesis in the paper is simply that eventually a civilisation will encounter circumstances in which the timescale to solve it is longer than the time they have to do it. Then they must either achieve a form of homeostasis (and no growth) or die off (or retreat and start again). The boundary for this doesn't have to be a planet. It could be a solar system, or maybe more than one.
sgt101 4y ago
Or: allow population to fall and material prosperity as it is. Note: material prosperity is not the same as living standards, as there is more to life than things. There is no reason at all to think that 1Bn humans can't live on earth at early 21st C standards more or less indefinitely. 11bn at twice that level.... that's harder to see.
denton-scratch 4y ago
I didn't read it that way. The authors propose "homeostasis" as the alternative to extinction. They give Bhutan as an example of a country that has opted for homeostasis rather than growth; Bhutan has reduced neither living standards nor population. It seems to be a sociology paper. I find the writings of sociologists impossibly dense and obscure.
hellotomyrars 4y ago
I would say they’re inversely related. The more people, the less there is to go around. Even if standard of living continue to go up and have, as a function of the population, the two aren’t intrinsically linked by themselves. However as limited resources become more strained over a larger population, the divide and quality of life, certainly in average, has to go down. It may not be 10 years, 20 years, or even 100 years away but at the moment we have limited quantities of many resources. At some point these lines are going to cross and it is going to lead to a reduction in quality of life. Whether or not that will be blunted by trends in developed nations toward negative population growth remains to be seen. Novel technology that lets our resources go farther or allows us to gain new sources via space (asteroid capture or mining on other planets, etc.) could also change the tipping point. The doom and gloom of Malthusian theory is so far unrealized but I think it is hard to argue that the theory is sound at its base. Whether or not we can keep the lines from crossing is the only thing that keeps it unrealized.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

The two are not mutually exclusive. We all know endless growth with finite resources is impossible. We can innovate do things more efficiently or differently and find solutions to previous limits of course. The hypothesis in the paper is simply that eventually a civilisation will encounter circumstances in which the timescale to solve it is longer than the time they have to do it. Then they must either achieve a form of homeostasis (and no growth) or die off (or retreat and start again). The boundary for this doesn't have to be a planet. It could be a solar system, or maybe more than one.

sgt101 4y ago

Or: allow population to fall and material prosperity as it is. Note: material prosperity is not the same as living standards, as there is more to life than things. There is no reason at all to think that 1Bn humans can't live on earth at early 21st C standards more or less indefinitely. 11bn at twice that level.... that's harder to see.

denton-scratch 4y ago

I didn't read it that way. The authors propose "homeostasis" as the alternative to extinction. They give Bhutan as an example of a country that has opted for homeostasis rather than growth; Bhutan has reduced neither living standards nor population. It seems to be a sociology paper. I find the writings of sociologists impossibly dense and obscure.

hellotomyrars 4y ago

I would say they’re inversely related. The more people, the less there is to go around. Even if standard of living continue to go up and have, as a function of the population, the two aren’t intrinsically linked by themselves. However as limited resources become more strained over a larger population, the divide and quality of life, certainly in average, has to go down. It may not be 10 years, 20 years, or even 100 years away but at the moment we have limited quantities of many resources. At some point these lines are going to cross and it is going to lead to a reduction in quality of life. Whether or not that will be blunted by trends in developed nations toward negative population growth remains to be seen. Novel technology that lets our resources go farther or allows us to gain new sources via space (asteroid capture or mining on other planets, etc.) could also change the tipping point. The doom and gloom of Malthusian theory is so far unrealized but I think it is hard to argue that the theory is sound at its base. Whether or not we can keep the lines from crossing is the only thing that keeps it unrealized.