4 ms·

I take it this is a rebuttal of: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

I take it this is a rebuttal of: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... They bring up Malthus w/o noting that his math was correct --- he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world. The one valid point made is that we are moving ever larger quantities of rock for ever-smaller returns --- when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense?

yetihehe 3y ago
> when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense? When asteroid mining is viable perhaps.
api 3y ago
> he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world. ... which is why historically Malthusians have been wrong. A Malthusian bacterium writing at the time before photosynthesis would have concluded that life on Earth was doomed. Chemotrophic bacteria were gradually consuming all the left over high energy compounds from the Earth's formation and eventually this would run out, leading to a population crash and the end of organic life. Their math would have been correct. The thing they are leaving out of their models is adaptation and intelligence. Life isn't guaranteed to always find a way, which is why shorter term stagnations and die-offs do occasionally happen, but given time and resources it eventually will. Life will probably keep finding a way until the heat death of the universe. The bumps in the road are part of the process. In evolution they provide the constraint that stimulates learning through natural selection. In post-evolutionary cognitive intelligence (humans and eventually AI) constraints give rise to signals such as price signals that tell the system that it needs to learn, change, and adapt. This isn't a justification for total rose colored glasses woo-woo utopianism because as I said bumps in the road do occur. But it shows why simple Malthusian reasoning hasn't historically been accurate and probably will continue to be mostly inaccurate. Malthusians are like perma-bears that are always calling for a recession in the market. Occasionally they're right, but there's a joke in finance that these are people who have "predicted 54 of the last 3 recessions." A prediction method that's wrong that often isn't actually worth very much.
- baq 3y ago
  There's predicting short-term fluctuations and then there's predicting thermodynamic limits. You can blame Malthus for not predicting an efficient way of getting nitrogen out of the atmosphere; this was theoretically possible, the nitrogen was always there, etc. You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 years. Thermodynamics is a bitch. Unless a magic future technology turns Earth into a heat pump which can push heat back into the Sun.
  - m_mueller 3y ago
    Maybe the growth is just going to happen off-planet soon?
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 Yes you can. Because baked into this statement is the false premise that energy use (on earth or otherwise. Maybe the concept of energy itself is wrong) would be the limiting factor on economic growth. Just like how if someone did a simple mathematical calculation on horses would be wrong to predict transportation doomsday, so too wrong the physicist may be for predicting energy doomsday.
    - baq 3y ago
      There's literally nothing about economics in what I wrote/quoted. That said, if you can figure out how to decouple planetary economic growth - as in, people's lives on the planet getting better, which is the point of having an economy at all, I guess - from planetary energy production growth, I'm listening. I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country; I know that past performance does not predict future results, but we can comfortably say that people need to consume energy in advanced economies to move themselves and goods around, to heat homes and to run their factories and there are certain theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limits to all those things. In some cases, we already have technology operating close to those limits.
cornholio 3y ago
> we are moving ever larger quantities of rock for ever-smaller returns --- when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense? In economics we deal with supply and demand curves. If you price in the emissions, mining will at some point come into equilibrium with demand and continue to supply copper for those essential activities that require it, while forcing alternatives to switch to something else. For the specific case of copper, aluminum is a close substitute in most practical applications (or CCA composite wires, combining the advantages of both). The world reserves of bauxite seem sufficient for centuries at current rates of extraction. For high end applications like ship or wind turbine use, superconductor motors are becoming a reality.
connorgutman 3y ago
Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's *genuine* carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt. It has directly accelerated the mass-depletion of countless other finite resources such as water, healthy top soil, micronutrients, and more. The fact that it has allowed humanity to grow so much without consideration for other finite factors has also contributed to several secondary "loans" which have further trapped us in debt. Most notably, humanity's dependence on mono-culture farming which ravages biodiversity, creates super pests, and zaps soil health. You simply cannot feed 8 billion people with organic farming methods and the current energy cost of controlled-climate hydroponics makes it impractical at scale. As you mentioned, all of this growth also contributes to humanity's collective appetite for, well, everything. Plus the HB process is responsible for 1.4% of global emissions, giant oceanic dead-zones caused by runoff, increased acid rain, less overall nutritious foods, and so so much more. It's a planetary catch-22. Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event.
- tivert 3y ago
  > Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's genuine carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt.... Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event. It's worth noting that process is one of the technologies that techno-optimists like to cite to shout down skeptics of their belief we humans will always techno-magick ourselves out of every problem. We will until we can't, and a couple generations after being proven wrong by famine and extinctions, the techno-optimists will resume their chant.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  Yeah, a couple of less than pleasant factoids: - we are burning up to 10 calories of petrol chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy - we are currently using something like 3 times earth's annual resource production
- 3y ago

yetihehe 3y ago

> when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense? When asteroid mining is viable perhaps.

api 3y ago

> he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world. ... which is why historically Malthusians have been wrong. A Malthusian bacterium writing at the time before photosynthesis would have concluded that life on Earth was doomed. Chemotrophic bacteria were gradually consuming all the left over high energy compounds from the Earth's formation and eventually this would run out, leading to a population crash and the end of organic life. Their math would have been correct. The thing they are leaving out of their models is adaptation and intelligence. Life isn't guaranteed to always find a way, which is why shorter term stagnations and die-offs do occasionally happen, but given time and resources it eventually will. Life will probably keep finding a way until the heat death of the universe. The bumps in the road are part of the process. In evolution they provide the constraint that stimulates learning through natural selection. In post-evolutionary cognitive intelligence (humans and eventually AI) constraints give rise to signals such as price signals that tell the system that it needs to learn, change, and adapt. This isn't a justification for total rose colored glasses woo-woo utopianism because as I said bumps in the road do occur. But it shows why simple Malthusian reasoning hasn't historically been accurate and probably will continue to be mostly inaccurate. Malthusians are like perma-bears that are always calling for a recession in the market. Occasionally they're right, but there's a joke in finance that these are people who have "predicted 54 of the last 3 recessions." A prediction method that's wrong that often isn't actually worth very much.

baq 3y ago
There's predicting short-term fluctuations and then there's predicting thermodynamic limits. You can blame Malthus for not predicting an efficient way of getting nitrogen out of the atmosphere; this was theoretically possible, the nitrogen was always there, etc. You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 years. Thermodynamics is a bitch. Unless a magic future technology turns Earth into a heat pump which can push heat back into the Sun.
- m_mueller 3y ago
  Maybe the growth is just going to happen off-planet soon?
- stale2002 3y ago
  > You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 Yes you can. Because baked into this statement is the false premise that energy use (on earth or otherwise. Maybe the concept of energy itself is wrong) would be the limiting factor on economic growth. Just like how if someone did a simple mathematical calculation on horses would be wrong to predict transportation doomsday, so too wrong the physicist may be for predicting energy doomsday.
  - baq 3y ago
    There's literally nothing about economics in what I wrote/quoted. That said, if you can figure out how to decouple planetary economic growth - as in, people's lives on the planet getting better, which is the point of having an economy at all, I guess - from planetary energy production growth, I'm listening. I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country; I know that past performance does not predict future results, but we can comfortably say that people need to consume energy in advanced economies to move themselves and goods around, to heat homes and to run their factories and there are certain theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limits to all those things. In some cases, we already have technology operating close to those limits.

cornholio 3y ago

> we are moving ever larger quantities of rock for ever-smaller returns --- when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense? In economics we deal with supply and demand curves. If you price in the emissions, mining will at some point come into equilibrium with demand and continue to supply copper for those essential activities that require it, while forcing alternatives to switch to something else. For the specific case of copper, aluminum is a close substitute in most practical applications (or CCA composite wires, combining the advantages of both). The world reserves of bauxite seem sufficient for centuries at current rates of extraction. For high end applications like ship or wind turbine use, superconductor motors are becoming a reality.

connorgutman 3y ago

Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's *genuine* carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt. It has directly accelerated the mass-depletion of countless other finite resources such as water, healthy top soil, micronutrients, and more. The fact that it has allowed humanity to grow so much without consideration for other finite factors has also contributed to several secondary "loans" which have further trapped us in debt. Most notably, humanity's dependence on mono-culture farming which ravages biodiversity, creates super pests, and zaps soil health. You simply cannot feed 8 billion people with organic farming methods and the current energy cost of controlled-climate hydroponics makes it impractical at scale. As you mentioned, all of this growth also contributes to humanity's collective appetite for, well, everything. Plus the HB process is responsible for 1.4% of global emissions, giant oceanic dead-zones caused by runoff, increased acid rain, less overall nutritious foods, and so so much more. It's a planetary catch-22. Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event.

tivert 3y ago
> Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's genuine carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt.... Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event. It's worth noting that process is one of the technologies that techno-optimists like to cite to shout down skeptics of their belief we humans will always techno-magick ourselves out of every problem. We will until we can't, and a couple generations after being proven wrong by famine and extinctions, the techno-optimists will resume their chant.
WillAdams 3y ago
Yeah, a couple of less than pleasant factoids: - we are burning up to 10 calories of petrol chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy - we are currently using something like 3 times earth's annual resource production
3y ago