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the population stopped growing as fast as it could. That is all. No. Population growth has slowed, but not stopped. Of the 7 Billion people alive today, how m

the population stopped growing as fast as it could. That is all. No. Population growth has slowed, but not stopped. Of the 7 Billion people alive today, how many of them are not better off than virtually anyone of Malthus' day 200 years ago? How many people have no access to antibiotics, running water, and a wealth of conveniences that they take for granted? Yes, there are many people that don't have these advantages. But today, much of the world is better off than virtually anyone from 2 centuries past. So that's not all, there must be something else. The Simon/Ehrlich wager did not involve population statistics at all. It involved changes in the prices of commodities. In other words, Ehrlich (the Malthus disciple) lost the bet because in real life, people find substitutes for resources for which prices are increasing. Thus quantity demanded decreases, and eventually price decreases. Our ancestors used to hunt whales into oblivion to get (amongst other things) blubber to fuel lamps. But as the whale population decreased, so did the supply of blubber, and thus prices rose. That led to people finding alternative means of lighting, and the end is that we don't hunt whales hardly at all anymore. Thus, the fact that greater tension between resource availability and quantity demanded lead to increased prices. That causes somebody to say to himself "if people are willing to pay so much for resource X, they'd be willing to pay just a little less to me for an alternative". He figures out how, people switch, and the market for resource X declines.

emiliobumachar 14y ago
I think he meant "the population stopped (growing as fast as it could)", not "the population (stopped growing) as fast as it could"
- gwern 14y ago
  I meant the former, yes; I would hope that would be obvious from context since the latter interpretation makes no sense.
kylebrown 14y ago
Note that although Simon won the bet, "if you re-round the same bet on a rolling basis.. [Ehrlich] has won by such a big margin in the last decade that it has more or less undone the price gains of the previous century." (quoting Peter Thiel in a debate with George Gilder: Accelerating or Decelerating? The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth http://youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc http://youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc)
rsheridan6 14y ago
Assuming, as Malthus did, that people breed at a rate above replacement whenever they have the means to do so(which turns out not to be true these days in many countries, and may turn out not to be true for the world as a whole soon), population growth will eventually reach a rate at which the world would be a ball of humans expanding faster than the speed of light. It's hard to imagine human ingenuity figuring out a way to make that happen. Exponential growth is a bitch. HN readers should understand this, because it's the same thing that makes exponential time algorithms unreasonably slow, no matte what hardware you throw at them. A century or two of faster than usual technological growth does not falsify Malthus, nor does a hysterical follower like Ehrlich who made predictions that were obviously ludicrous when he made them (he predicted the extinction of marine animal life by 1980 in 1970, which is not justified by anything Malthus wrote). Declining birthrates in the face of prosperity does - if it lasts.
gwern 14y ago
> The Simon/Ehrlich wager did not involve population statistics at all. It involved changes in the prices of commodities. In other words, Ehrlich (the Malthus disciple) lost the bet because in real life, people find substitutes for resources for which prices are increasing. Thus quantity demanded decreases, and eventually price decreases. Ehrlich lost the bet technically, but won in spirit; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-grantham-profit-from-ecological-mayhem.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-granth... : > The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. > >Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities. Grantham concludes that the longer-run story of the bet “proves, in fact, both that man is mortal and must make short-term bets, and, more importantly, that Ehrlich’s argument was right (so far).” That final parenthesis, a nod to uncertainty, leaves open the remote possibility that the apparent paradigm shift might still turn out to be just a bubble in commodity prices. Or > An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart). > > The Cornucopians might argue that today’s metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man’s famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets. Which supplies a nice graph showing the basket: http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20110806_FNC358.gif http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/29...

emiliobumachar 14y ago

I think he meant "the population stopped (growing as fast as it could)", not "the population (stopped growing) as fast as it could"

gwern 14y ago
I meant the former, yes; I would hope that would be obvious from context since the latter interpretation makes no sense.

kylebrown 14y ago

Note that although Simon won the bet, "if you re-round the same bet on a rolling basis.. [Ehrlich] has won by such a big margin in the last decade that it has more or less undone the price gains of the previous century." (quoting Peter Thiel in a debate with George Gilder: Accelerating or Decelerating? The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth http://youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc http://youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc)

rsheridan6 14y ago

Assuming, as Malthus did, that people breed at a rate above replacement whenever they have the means to do so(which turns out not to be true these days in many countries, and may turn out not to be true for the world as a whole soon), population growth will eventually reach a rate at which the world would be a ball of humans expanding faster than the speed of light. It's hard to imagine human ingenuity figuring out a way to make that happen. Exponential growth is a bitch. HN readers should understand this, because it's the same thing that makes exponential time algorithms unreasonably slow, no matte what hardware you throw at them. A century or two of faster than usual technological growth does not falsify Malthus, nor does a hysterical follower like Ehrlich who made predictions that were obviously ludicrous when he made them (he predicted the extinction of marine animal life by 1980 in 1970, which is not justified by anything Malthus wrote). Declining birthrates in the face of prosperity does - if it lasts.

gwern 14y ago

> The Simon/Ehrlich wager did not involve population statistics at all. It involved changes in the prices of commodities. In other words, Ehrlich (the Malthus disciple) lost the bet because in real life, people find substitutes for resources for which prices are increasing. Thus quantity demanded decreases, and eventually price decreases. Ehrlich lost the bet technically, but won in spirit; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-grantham-profit-from-ecological-mayhem.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-granth... : > The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. > >Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities. Grantham concludes that the longer-run story of the bet “proves, in fact, both that man is mortal and must make short-term bets, and, more importantly, that Ehrlich’s argument was right (so far).” That final parenthesis, a nod to uncertainty, leaves open the remote possibility that the apparent paradigm shift might still turn out to be just a bubble in commodity prices. Or > An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart). > > The Cornucopians might argue that today’s metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man’s famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets. Which supplies a nice graph showing the basket: http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20110806_FNC358.gif http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/29...