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Maltheus was okay and all trying to model things, but this was back before economists were using feedback to model things. Models were mostly extrapolating from
by muzani 2y ago
Maltheus was okay and all trying to model things, but this was back before economists were using feedback to model things. Models were mostly extrapolating from historical data, rather than using that data to figure out the system and then modeling based on the system.
For example, when food is low, food prices go high, and people just stop having babies. It was also a time when people thought poor people in africa will just have kids because more kids bring in food. But having lots of kids still makes sense where there's land for subsistence farming and such. Having more kids in places like, say, Singapore wouldn't work because there's no land for food. In these places, poor people just choose not to have kids.
- adastra22 2y agoThat is true, although it merely punts the problem until we eliminate aging (which is not as fantastical an idea as one might think). But even with exponential growth in population, resource availability is still a non-issue, and will remain a non-issue for hundreds or thousands of years into the future. When people talk about there only being a fixed quantity of some resource "available," they almost universally mean "accessible." But the definition of what's accessible changes over time as prices rise (making it economical to extract harder to reach/refine resources). There's enough power from the Sun and resources in the solar system to support hundreds of trillions of humans.