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> I recall being fascinated by these paradoxes caused by wealth and substitution effects For your intellectual safety, just be sure to exclude "population grow

> I recall being fascinated by these paradoxes caused by wealth and substitution effects For your intellectual safety, just be sure to exclude "population growth" from your list of effects. People really really seem to hate it when anybody points that one out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus If history is any guide, they'll strawman your "-ism" until even the most general observations about feedback loops and population become twisted into a freakishly specific (and easily dismissed) reinterpretation. Even today, most people think that historical increases in food production since the 1800s "disprove" the Malthusian thesis.

toolz 3y ago
> Malthus considered population growth as inevitable whenever conditions improved Interesting how the most developed nations have the lowest birthrates. I don't think his findings in the late 1700s have withstood the test of time. edit: the trend also applies for population growth, not just birthrates
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Malthus could not have foreseen the development of the Haber-Bosch process or the green revolution.
  - schiffern 3y ago
    He literally did. Read him. Malthus foresaw and mentioned the possibility of improved farming techniques. After all, it's not like improvements in farming hadn't happened before! In reply to this predictable objection, Malthus..... well, I suppose you'll just have to read it to find out. :) https://archive.org/details/essayonprincipl00malt https://archive.org/details/essayonprincipl00malt
    - toolz 3y ago
      thank you for linking to source material, but I don't think it's very useful to reply with teasers expecting us to read a book to understand one tightly constrained topic of conversation/debate.
  - Kbelicius 3y ago
    Someone already answered that he in fact did foresee developments in food production but that is totally irrelevant to hist point which is: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man"
- schiffern 3y ago
  > Interesting how the most developed nations have the lowest birthrates. Hard to say this isn't merely an unstable temporary intermediate state. Low birthrate populations (by definition) are replaced by high birthrate populations, per evolution. Various and growing migrant crises worldwide seem to bear this out. The usual "solution" offered is that eventually 100% of nations will become "developed." This is probably fantasy anyway, but it's not even clear if this is a biophysical possibility. Thus far, the only way "developed" countries have been able to support their existence is by systemic organized theft of resources from the "developing" countries (this is another thing people really really don't like when you point it out :-D).
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > the only way "developed" countries have been able to support their existence is by systemic organized theft of resources from the "developing" countries No, this is not correct. The way developed countries support a high standard of living is by creating enormous amounts of wealth. That wealth wasn't taken from anywhere; it did not exist before the developed countries created it.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Again, this may or may not be a transient condition... Currently we create a lot of wealth, but that wealth is highly pinned on farming lots of actual labor of to places with high population/cheap labor and keeping the expensive labor here. If we are unable to convert those jobs to automated tasks before the standards of living increase in those high population/poor countries then we are going to have a big problem, because there will not be anyone to farm that work off to cheaply (as we see with China starting to purchase cheaper labor from African countries). There will be a massive bout of stagflation at some point.
      - pdonis 3y ago
        It's quite true that wealth creation is not guaranteed, and that there are many ways of messing it up. That does not change the fact that wealth is created; there is not a fixed pool of wealth on the planet that will never change. There is nothing impossible about creating enough wealth to give everyone on the planet a first world standard of living. That doesn't mean it is guaranteed to happen; but it does mean it can happen.
CalRobert 3y ago
Are you referring to more efficient food production leading to increased numbers of children (at least surviving ones)?
pdonis 3y ago
> Even today, most people think that historical increases in food production since the 1800s "disprove" the Malthusian thesis. No, what disproves the Malthusian thesis is the simple fact that this... "humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living" ...is not what we actually observe. Once people are able to have a high standard of living, as they do in the developed world, they start using more abundance for that instead of for population growth. The people on Earth who have the highest standard of living also have the lowest birth rates.
- schiffern 3y ago
  > "humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living" Is this quote directly from Malthus? Or did you copy a second-hand source, for which I already warned about ubiquitous phenomenon of erasure-by-mass-strawmanning? > Once people are able to have a high standard of living, as they do in the developed world, they start using more abundance for that instead of for population growth. And so far, the only way people are able to have a high standard of living is by making other people far away (or not so far away, in some cases) have a low standard of living. This is the inconvenient truth of "development." After you finish Malthus, maybe check out Confessions of an Economic Hitman. In effect, our low population growth is only possibly because we're "exporting" high population growth to the poor colonial satellite nations we rely on.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > Is this quote directly from Malthus? It's from the Wikipedia article you referenced.
    - schiffern 3y ago
      Yes I know. The question was rhetorical. Point is, don't entrust any second-hand source to paraphrase Malthus. They have pretty much universally been twisted into unrecognizably distorted strawmen. As I said, this is one of the historically verified perils of going against the intellectual grain. Even if you're right, your opponents will rewrite history (including your own thesis!) to make you "wrong" in the end. Caveat cogitatoris, friends...

toolz 3y ago

> Malthus considered population growth as inevitable whenever conditions improved Interesting how the most developed nations have the lowest birthrates. I don't think his findings in the late 1700s have withstood the test of time. edit: the trend also applies for population growth, not just birthrates

Paul-Craft 3y ago
Malthus could not have foreseen the development of the Haber-Bosch process or the green revolution.
- schiffern 3y ago
  He literally did. Read him. Malthus foresaw and mentioned the possibility of improved farming techniques. After all, it's not like improvements in farming hadn't happened before! In reply to this predictable objection, Malthus..... well, I suppose you'll just have to read it to find out. :) https://archive.org/details/essayonprincipl00malt https://archive.org/details/essayonprincipl00malt
  - toolz 3y ago
    thank you for linking to source material, but I don't think it's very useful to reply with teasers expecting us to read a book to understand one tightly constrained topic of conversation/debate.
- Kbelicius 3y ago
  Someone already answered that he in fact did foresee developments in food production but that is totally irrelevant to hist point which is: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man"
schiffern 3y ago
> Interesting how the most developed nations have the lowest birthrates. Hard to say this isn't merely an unstable temporary intermediate state. Low birthrate populations (by definition) are replaced by high birthrate populations, per evolution. Various and growing migrant crises worldwide seem to bear this out. The usual "solution" offered is that eventually 100% of nations will become "developed." This is probably fantasy anyway, but it's not even clear if this is a biophysical possibility. Thus far, the only way "developed" countries have been able to support their existence is by systemic organized theft of resources from the "developing" countries (this is another thing people really really don't like when you point it out :-D).
- pdonis 3y ago
  > the only way "developed" countries have been able to support their existence is by systemic organized theft of resources from the "developing" countries No, this is not correct. The way developed countries support a high standard of living is by creating enormous amounts of wealth. That wealth wasn't taken from anywhere; it did not exist before the developed countries created it.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Again, this may or may not be a transient condition... Currently we create a lot of wealth, but that wealth is highly pinned on farming lots of actual labor of to places with high population/cheap labor and keeping the expensive labor here. If we are unable to convert those jobs to automated tasks before the standards of living increase in those high population/poor countries then we are going to have a big problem, because there will not be anyone to farm that work off to cheaply (as we see with China starting to purchase cheaper labor from African countries). There will be a massive bout of stagflation at some point.
    - pdonis 3y ago
      It's quite true that wealth creation is not guaranteed, and that there are many ways of messing it up. That does not change the fact that wealth is created; there is not a fixed pool of wealth on the planet that will never change. There is nothing impossible about creating enough wealth to give everyone on the planet a first world standard of living. That doesn't mean it is guaranteed to happen; but it does mean it can happen.

CalRobert 3y ago

Are you referring to more efficient food production leading to increased numbers of children (at least surviving ones)?

pdonis 3y ago

> Even today, most people think that historical increases in food production since the 1800s "disprove" the Malthusian thesis. No, what disproves the Malthusian thesis is the simple fact that this... "humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living" ...is not what we actually observe. Once people are able to have a high standard of living, as they do in the developed world, they start using more abundance for that instead of for population growth. The people on Earth who have the highest standard of living also have the lowest birth rates.

schiffern 3y ago
> "humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living" Is this quote directly from Malthus? Or did you copy a second-hand source, for which I already warned about ubiquitous phenomenon of erasure-by-mass-strawmanning? > Once people are able to have a high standard of living, as they do in the developed world, they start using more abundance for that instead of for population growth. And so far, the only way people are able to have a high standard of living is by making other people far away (or not so far away, in some cases) have a low standard of living. This is the inconvenient truth of "development." After you finish Malthus, maybe check out Confessions of an Economic Hitman. In effect, our low population growth is only possibly because we're "exporting" high population growth to the poor colonial satellite nations we rely on.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > Is this quote directly from Malthus? It's from the Wikipedia article you referenced.
  - schiffern 3y ago
    Yes I know. The question was rhetorical. Point is, don't entrust any second-hand source to paraphrase Malthus. They have pretty much universally been twisted into unrecognizably distorted strawmen. As I said, this is one of the historically verified perils of going against the intellectual grain. Even if you're right, your opponents will rewrite history (including your own thesis!) to make you "wrong" in the end. Caveat cogitatoris, friends...