6 ms·
The Doomslayer (1997)
- tesdinger 3y agoWhy listen to a professor for business admin instead of climate scientists? Are you an idiot?
- glitchc 3y agoThat's quite wrong. Scientists can tell you if you something is wrong, but can't really inform society on what to do about it. Macro-economists have tools that make them better equipped to gauge the impact of specific approaches on society's well-being.
- tesdinger 3y agoMacro-economists can not even predict a recession happening next year.
- StableAlkyne 3y agoUnbelievable that a nearly 30-year-old article is still (retroactively?) paywalled.
- xnx 3y agoSummary from Gemini: "This is an article about Julian Simon, who challenges the commonly held belief that the environment is going to hell. Simon argues that most important measures of human well-being have improved over time. He believes that resources are not becoming scarcer, but rather more abundant. For example, he says that air and water quality have improved. Additionally, he argues that deforestation is not a major problem. Simon believes that the environment will continue to improve as long as humans are free to innovate."
- api 3y agoThe fact that Ehrlich is still highly regarded in many circles in spite of being almost perfectly wrong points to some underlying appeal behind his worldview. People almost want it to be true, or think it must be true, because it confirms some underlying world view that isn't stated explicitly but is kind of implied. I personally think it's racism and eugenics. I remember watching a documentary in grade school about overpopulation. When they wanted to convey the problem they always showed the same sorts of shots: seething hordes of mostly black and brown people in places like India and Africa. Meanwhile the scientists and other experts interviewed to argue the Malthusian case were almost entirely white men. I recall even back then (9th or 10th grade probably) thinking this had a racist vibe, and I'm a white male who isn't particularly hypersensitive to such things. Strip off the intellectual veneer and it was literally a bunch of wealthy educated white men complaining about there being too many poor colored people. Wish I could remember the name of this doc, I bet it would come off even worse through today's eyes. Of course today the new hotness is to panic over underpopulation and demographic collapse. That's got a huge undercurrent of racism too. Desirable countries can easily compensate for any concerns over population decline by importing population, but the depopulation zealots seem to freak out even more over that. We can't just let people immigrate... because... they never quite seem to finish the sentence but you know the reason. Population panics just always seem racist. Overpopulation panics are about too many of the "wrong" people, while underpopulation panics are about not enough of the "right" people.
- spencerflem 3y agoBeautifully put
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI feel you might be a bit sensitive about racism here. Growing up far away from the US, but still around western-ish culture, my experience was that overpopulation fears were primarily about resource shortage and creation of large poverty class within the same society; more recently, in context of immigration, about culture shifting to something that's alien or hostile to people living today (that's the "${immigrant group} isn't assimilating" complaint), and about housing and unemployment issues. Underpopulation, in the meantime, I see primarily talked as risk of there being not enough young people to fund old people's retirement pensions. It's a major factor why people I know in my generation all assume we won't get government-run retirement when we get old; the system will collapse due to negative population growth. Might be a perspective of someone from the old continent, but those issues are rarely if at all viewed through a racial/ethnical perspective (immigration notwithstanding) - even the feared poverty class is just expanding within the same society.
- DinaCoder99 3y ago> Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way Ahh, I smell Pinker Bullshit in the air. It is true that if you only measure things looking for positive change, you'll only find positive change.
- api 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo... We don't live in a utopia, but we also don't live in anything close to a Malthusian collapse. It's hard to get middle class people in the developed world to see this because life has in fact gotten harder in many ways for them, but those are entirely self-inflicted wounds. The #1 problem is failure to build housing to meet demand, leading to housing cost hyperinflation. That's a policy choice, not a result of any hard limit. Other problems include spiraling university costs due to institutional inefficiency and spiraling health care costs for a variety of reasons, and these are also policy failures. The rich world basically decided to make life hard on its working classes and young middle class people by perpetuating runaway cost disease in critical areas. Overall the world is getting less poor.
- DinaCoder99 3y agoOk, I don't particularly contradict the idea that we do not live in the best or worst possible worlds, but this doesn't change the fact that people who claim that the world is better in every measurable way conveniently don't measure anything that contradicts this claim.
- mjhay 3y agoThis article may have made sense in the heady optimistic end-of-history days of the late 90's, when climate change and global ecological collapse were not nearly is far along. In 2024, however, this kind of thing is just delusional. It should be filed alongside similar techno-economic-utopian nonsense by people such as Bjorn Lomberg.
- wilburTheDog 3y agoSo what? It's easy to find people who believe nothing is wrong. All they have to do is ignore all the measurements of temperature, sea ice, CO2, methane, species extinction, peak oil, and whatever else contradicts their fondly held world view. Hey, don't look behind the curtain, look over here, everything is fine.
- cupcakecommons 3y agoDid you read the article?
- glitchc 3y agoJulian Simon is speaking facts not beliefs. He's not disagreeing with CO2 measurements or global warming. He's disagreeing with what we do about them.
- palmfacehn 3y agoThe failure of the peak oil doomsayer's predictions confirm the author's ideas. It is probably the least politically loaded item we could look at. Production increases and efficiency gains have been consistent. Yet the doomers continue to claim, "This time will be different". These factors aren't unknown unknowns. A casual observer of history can find similar trends throughout humanity's technological journey.
- cupcakecommons 3y agoPaul Ehrlich seems like an evil person in that unintentionally or not he refuses to learn from his mistakes. They are also the kind of mistakes that incur massive opportunity costs which people are much less sensitive to than direct losses.
- photochemsyn 3y agoThe concept of a healthy population structure is typically left out of the ongoing over/under population debates. There are some exceptions, e.g. discussion of the gender imbalance that came about in many regions of China as a result of the now-defunct one-child policy, or the stresses facing societies with a high ratio of elderly to young people (Japan, US boomers, etc). Fundamentally, we want to avoid population boom-bust cycles as those tend towards destructive outcomes (famine, war, disease, migration), and instead have a stable steady-state population structure that's pyramidal and gender-balanced, and neither increasing nor decreasing. Whether this is possible without increased authoritarianism is an open question. Similarly, we want to ensure that all regions of the planet have access to the basic necessities of life, water and food and shelter, as otherwise the refugee and immigration crises will expand. This is where the climatic instability brought on by fossil fuel combustion will have varying impacts, with some regions being hit much harder than others. The solution is investment in resilient infrastructure (instead of wars). Personally I like the idea of preserving a half-wild Earth, as a planet packed from one end to the other with nothing but human beings and their crops sounds a lot like a dystopian hellscape.