3 ms·

A notable number of people fight the idea of degrowth, claiming it's really all about reducing the population to zero. Recent HN have shown this mindset. Degro

A notable number of people fight the idea of degrowth, claiming it's really all about reducing the population to zero. Recent HN have shown this mindset. Degrowth from war is one technique, I expect it will happen at some point.

dredmorbius 3y ago
There's a lot of blindness and reflexive response to this and related concepts. The key notion behind Limits to Growth is that there are in fact limits to growth, and that those appear quite rapidly in any exponential-growth circumstance --- that is, a constant-percentage-rate growth (e.g., GDP or population growing at a rate of X percent per year). And limits are quite insensitive to constant factors such as initial starting point or total available resource. Doubling times are estimated by the rule of 70 (divide 70 by the periodic growth rate to get the number of periods to double the present value), and roughly three doubling periods (3.32192880948873234789, for the pedantic) will give a tenfold increase in magnitude. Uncertainties of a few percent matter little, and uncertainties factors of two or ten are rapidly subsumed by the underlying growth rate. How degrowth manifests is an open question, though in some ways it's fairly uninteresting, other than the two principle variants: planned and deliberate, on the one hand, or unplanned and exogenously imposed, on the other. There are the usual horsemen of the apocalypse: war, famine, plauge, death. Add to those a new risk emerging from our own present capabilities: technological collapse. It's critical to understand that overall impact is a factor of not only population but per capita resource use, and that there is in fact a continuum of possible sustainable options, where larger populations are traded against lower resource utilisation. That low resource usage itself might come from either limited services (that is, a low quality of life) or a tremendously efficient use of available resources (generally identified as a high-technology equilibrium). One challenge of technologically-intensive scenarios is that those themselves have a tendency to be fragile --- technology equals complexity, that complexity itself requires resources to be sustained, and any fractures in a dizzying set of relationships and requirements might result in the entire house of cards collapsing, this being the principle idea behind Joseph Tainter's work, see his Collapse of Complex Societies.
- quantified 3y ago
  Well put. Most societies seem (my limited perspective) to value quantity over quality. And nations and tribes recognize that if they volunteer to scale back and others don't, they will lose influence and/or disappear. There is a lot of ego wrapper up in feeling that the future generations of your group are so important, but it is a real fact of humans. I expect the less-industrialized nations would balk at scaling their populations back when they contributed much less to the damage to the environment, though by now pretty much everyone is doing it somehow. Separately, whether related or unrelated, there are influential voices that say "Malthus was wrong, we will out-innovate every obstacle" but that really seems like hubris. We will invest in more tech and some of it will be worthwhile, some of it will not pan out, and if public money is thrown at must-succeed problems there will also be some graft. I'm only talking about the human response. It would be so much better if we didn't base our economies and societies on a population pyramid scheme. Bringing 8 billion people around to cooperate when only a few are ready now will take a lot of work and time, probably multiple generations' worth that we may not have
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    On quantity over quality, quantity is far more readily measurable, which turns up in all sorts of incentive systems, whether from market mechanisms, command economies, or internal management policies. Which is to say that it's far beyond just ego, though sure, that probably plays a part. On Malthus, there was a good piece posted to HN a few days ago by William E. Rees which does an excellent job of anticipating and rebutting the standard rebuttals (several of which featured in the few comments posted to the thread before the submission was itself flagged off): "The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable", World 2023, 4(3), 509-527; <https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032 https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032> By William E. Rees, School of Community and Regional Planning, Faculty of Applied Science, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada <https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32> On technical solutions: I've been watching that space for going on 50 years now, and whilst there's been some impressive progress (information technology most especially, solar PV and rechargeable batteries), there's a great deal which hasn't panned out, at least not yet: nuclear fusion, nanotechnology, a whole host of lower-impact / sustainability practices (urban spaces, residential, commercial, industrial; agriculture; transportation ... all with a common thread that large-scale coordination and going up against entrenched interests is unbelievably difficult). The population pyramid ponzi is its own issue, though that's also largely how ecological communities operate. The goal of having people live well in to old age puts an immense strain on those who can work, and if the elderly do continue to work themselves, requires accommodations to both capabilities and skillsets which challenge current business organisation. There's also the political dynamic of elderly populations, on which an essay / podcast I'd recently heard by David Runciman has been bouncing around my skull ever since: "Democracy for Young People". In it he notes that in democratic polities elections favour the rich, well-educated, and old (and correspondingly disadvantage the poor, uneducated, and young): [T]he reason you have elections, is precisely because of those ancient fears about being ruled by the poor, the less well educated, and the young no longer hold. You don't need to be frightened of being ruled by the young anymore because there aren't enough of them. Democracy was until very recently always understood to mean politics for young people because there are always more young people. Democracy is now politics for old people. <https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2018/129-democracy-for-young-people https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2018/129-democra...> (includes transcript) Which puts an interesting spin on how to resolve issues, not only at local, regional, and national scales, but global scales, where the disproportionately affected are the overwhelming majority who are young, poor, and undereducated, comparatively.

dredmorbius 3y ago

There's a lot of blindness and reflexive response to this and related concepts. The key notion behind Limits to Growth is that there are in fact limits to growth, and that those appear quite rapidly in any exponential-growth circumstance --- that is, a constant-percentage-rate growth (e.g., GDP or population growing at a rate of X percent per year). And limits are quite insensitive to constant factors such as initial starting point or total available resource. Doubling times are estimated by the rule of 70 (divide 70 by the periodic growth rate to get the number of periods to double the present value), and roughly three doubling periods (3.32192880948873234789, for the pedantic) will give a tenfold increase in magnitude. Uncertainties of a few percent matter little, and uncertainties factors of two or ten are rapidly subsumed by the underlying growth rate. How degrowth manifests is an open question, though in some ways it's fairly uninteresting, other than the two principle variants: planned and deliberate, on the one hand, or unplanned and exogenously imposed, on the other. There are the usual horsemen of the apocalypse: war, famine, plauge, death. Add to those a new risk emerging from our own present capabilities: technological collapse. It's critical to understand that overall impact is a factor of not only population but per capita resource use, and that there is in fact a continuum of possible sustainable options, where larger populations are traded against lower resource utilisation. That low resource usage itself might come from either limited services (that is, a low quality of life) or a tremendously efficient use of available resources (generally identified as a high-technology equilibrium). One challenge of technologically-intensive scenarios is that those themselves have a tendency to be fragile --- technology equals complexity, that complexity itself requires resources to be sustained, and any fractures in a dizzying set of relationships and requirements might result in the entire house of cards collapsing, this being the principle idea behind Joseph Tainter's work, see his Collapse of Complex Societies.

quantified 3y ago
Well put. Most societies seem (my limited perspective) to value quantity over quality. And nations and tribes recognize that if they volunteer to scale back and others don't, they will lose influence and/or disappear. There is a lot of ego wrapper up in feeling that the future generations of your group are so important, but it is a real fact of humans. I expect the less-industrialized nations would balk at scaling their populations back when they contributed much less to the damage to the environment, though by now pretty much everyone is doing it somehow. Separately, whether related or unrelated, there are influential voices that say "Malthus was wrong, we will out-innovate every obstacle" but that really seems like hubris. We will invest in more tech and some of it will be worthwhile, some of it will not pan out, and if public money is thrown at must-succeed problems there will also be some graft. I'm only talking about the human response. It would be so much better if we didn't base our economies and societies on a population pyramid scheme. Bringing 8 billion people around to cooperate when only a few are ready now will take a lot of work and time, probably multiple generations' worth that we may not have
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  On quantity over quality, quantity is far more readily measurable, which turns up in all sorts of incentive systems, whether from market mechanisms, command economies, or internal management policies. Which is to say that it's far beyond just ego, though sure, that probably plays a part. On Malthus, there was a good piece posted to HN a few days ago by William E. Rees which does an excellent job of anticipating and rebutting the standard rebuttals (several of which featured in the few comments posted to the thread before the submission was itself flagged off): "The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable", World 2023, 4(3), 509-527; <https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032 https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032> By William E. Rees, School of Community and Regional Planning, Faculty of Applied Science, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada <https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32> On technical solutions: I've been watching that space for going on 50 years now, and whilst there's been some impressive progress (information technology most especially, solar PV and rechargeable batteries), there's a great deal which hasn't panned out, at least not yet: nuclear fusion, nanotechnology, a whole host of lower-impact / sustainability practices (urban spaces, residential, commercial, industrial; agriculture; transportation ... all with a common thread that large-scale coordination and going up against entrenched interests is unbelievably difficult). The population pyramid ponzi is its own issue, though that's also largely how ecological communities operate. The goal of having people live well in to old age puts an immense strain on those who can work, and if the elderly do continue to work themselves, requires accommodations to both capabilities and skillsets which challenge current business organisation. There's also the political dynamic of elderly populations, on which an essay / podcast I'd recently heard by David Runciman has been bouncing around my skull ever since: "Democracy for Young People". In it he notes that in democratic polities elections favour the rich, well-educated, and old (and correspondingly disadvantage the poor, uneducated, and young): [T]he reason you have elections, is precisely because of those ancient fears about being ruled by the poor, the less well educated, and the young no longer hold. You don't need to be frightened of being ruled by the young anymore because there aren't enough of them. Democracy was until very recently always understood to mean politics for young people because there are always more young people. Democracy is now politics for old people. <https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2018/129-democracy-for-young-people https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2018/129-democra...> (includes transcript) Which puts an interesting spin on how to resolve issues, not only at local, regional, and national scales, but global scales, where the disproportionately affected are the overwhelming majority who are young, poor, and undereducated, comparatively.