4 ms·

It depends on whether you are the sort of person who tries to account for recency bias or not. We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period in no

by roenxi 2y ago

It depends on whether you are the sort of person who tries to account for recency bias or not. We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period in not just the history of history, but probably also including the unrecorded aeons before humans even existed on earth that there was no particular reason to anticipate at the time. If you go with the gut, then sure everything was fine and dandy. But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of humans starve to death. So on the one hand, the predictions were completely wrong. On the other, none of the underlying problems have really gone away and any analysis of the future will still conclude that population growth (even flat-lining at this point) is insanely risky in terms of how much human suffering it will eventually lead to. So the people pushing it still have influence. Although I've been a lot more chipper about the situation since it turns out that wealth leads to depopulation which is one of those wonderful and unexpectedly good things. Plus obviously the AI and presumably coming robotics revolution are just absurdly promising.

Isamu 2y ago
> But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of people starve to death. You’ve piqued my interest, where can I read about this data oriented approach that leads to this conclusion?
- roenxi 2y ago
  Most people live in cities [0] and requires ~2,000 k/cal a day. The systems required to feed people are complex and energy demanding. There are 8 billion humans which is a large number relative to the amount of food we can store. It is a matter of time until we have a multi-billion person famine. Hopefully multiple centuries away if the transition away from oil to something else works out. Something like the year without summer [1] could be even more catastrophic, for example. Or wars, particularly of the nuclear variety. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
  - braiamp 2y ago
    The problem with such prediction is that it presumes that the population would grow at a accelerating pace, while the opposite is happening.
    - xyzzy123 2y ago
      For me it's not about population growth so much as societal risk; our current population is only sustainable due to a complex web of interdependent systems. How often do complex societies break down or decline in such a way that the complex systems which keep our urban populations alive are compromised?
      - lazide 2y ago
        The more people we have, also the more people we have available to keep these systems running and figure out new replacements. Assuming the caloric ‘profit margin’ stays positive anyway.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    We seem to be so far past breakeven food/water/warmth that most of our efforts are spent getting all sorts of other stuff, though? It's recent, I'll grant you that. I can't even think of when there was rationing in the west? Shortly after the war? At least the current grandparent generation seems to have childhood memories of that. But to me, it looks like we've figured out those basic necessities to the point where at least ordinary variation in harvest won't be making us hungry. You could call that being noise proof. The danger is that we systematically alter how the planet works, so that is not just bumps in annual crop yields, which we also seem to be doing, but it's not clear that we've messed up our basic necessities pipeline yet. It's also not clear that we'll inevitably do that.
    - jl6 2y ago
      One risk is that our systems are now extremely efficient, and one aspect of efficiency is that it tends to eliminate “unnecessary” buffers and stockpiles. Just-in-time manufacturing pulls supplies in response to demand. The global food supply chain still has buffers and stockpiles (e.g. grain bins) due to the seasonality of growing, but if hydroponics becomes the dominant method of agriculture (say, in a world with a more chaotic climate that needs to be kept at bay by greenhouses), then highly efficient farmers could optimize out all of their resiliency.
bruce511 2y ago
>> We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period This. It's hard to make predictions precisely because the rate of change has been so rapid. What is interesting to note though is the varied societal responses to the changes over the last 70 years or so. The US embraced materialism with some reluctant social movement (womens rights, civil rights etc). Europe embraced Socialism (in the sense of Social support, not Communism), the Middle East embraced materialism, but eschewed any form of social development (eg women's rights et al). Right now we're in a bit of a rebound phase. Change has come too quickly (especially the last 40 years) so we're seeing pushback on rights (in the US) on social support (in Europe) and a general political swing to the right in lots of places. There's a "looking back" element which seeks to slow found societal change even as technology accelerates. Predicting what comes next is, well, tricky. But I expect in my lifetime to see global population maximum. I expect to see significant climate change. Both of those will be huge disruptions, and the knock-on effects could be anything
- Muromec 2y ago
  We are seeing swingback to the right because the threat of left revolution (instignated or supported by nuclear state out there) is less credible now
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > The US embraced materialism with some reluctant social movement (womens rights, civil rights etc). Europe embraced Socialism (in the sense of Social support, not Communism), the Middle East embraced materialism, but eschewed any form of social development (eg women's rights et al). The US is the most fundamentalist Christian country in the world. There is also a large degree of materialism, but still, only a fraction of the population of the USA even accepts the idea that atheism (a hallmark of materialism) is a legitimate religious position. What the USA has embraced more than anything is consumerism, not materialism. What most of Europe has is called social democracy, socialism is a completely different ideology (workers having majority control of enterprises). The Middle East embraced Islamic fundamentalism, not materialism. You could say that they also embraced consumerism, like the USA. But hardcore Islamic fundamentalism as we see it today in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan is a very recent phenomenon, born of the last fifty years or less (at any wide scale), and it is at a level that consumes entire societies. These Middle East countries didn't eschew progress on women's rights, they actively regressed women's rights to pre-medieval levels. Iran and Afghanistan had the right to vote for women before the USA: they lost it as fundamentalist forces gained power (actually, they still have it in Iran, but it's significantly affected by other lack of freedom).
olalonde 2y ago
I disagree that the prosperity we've experienced was truly "unexpected". Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs), and markets innovate in response to scarcity (e.g. the Green Revolution). Technological progress, though unpredictable in its specifics, has consistently been a reliable force for adaptation. Ehrlich's predictions underestimated humanity's resilience, oversimplifying a highly complex system by reducing it to a linear regression.
- roenxi 2y ago
  This is that recency bias thing in action. Constant surprising technological progress of the sort we've seen for the last century or two is unprecedented and not at all the sort of thing that is suitable for long term planning. I usually wouldn't bother pointing that out, but there are two points I really want to emphasise as wildly optimistic: > Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs) We didn't have birth control until the 20th century and it is mostly used by people who, historically speaking, are living with resources far in excess of their basic needs. Traditionally the self regulation was that people were born then the ones that couldn't eat enough to survive died. And there is a pretty high risk of not finding stable equilibrium. The logistic map isn't a totally crazy model and displays some rather chaotic behaviour [0]. In practice that looks like a lot of famines. > ... markets innovate in response to scarcity ... Markets have existed forever, usually the innovative response to food scarcity was, once again, people starving to death. It is hard to underline just how weird the Green Revolution is. Obviously a great time to be alive but it is not a normal thing in the human experience. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#Behavior_dependent_on_r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#Behavior_dependen...
  - olalonde 2y ago
    I’m not sure why you keep invoking "recency bias." When forecasting the near future, as Ehrlich was doing, it’s entirely reasonable to use recent trends as a baseline. Are you suggesting progress might slow to the levels seen in prehistory, antiquity, or the medieval period? That seems highly implausible, barring a catastrophic event that disrupts modern civilization. If anything, you might be underestimating the ongoing momentum of technological progress, which is not just sustaining its pace but accelerating across many fields. Some experts predict AGI is right on the corner - a development that could drastically amplify innovation and potentially eliminate the challenge of food scarcity. Additionally, birth control will only keep becoming increasingly accessible worldwide, enabling more effective regulation of fertility rates in response to resource constraints.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
> We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period in [History] …on average - inequality has never been so high.
- jmb99 2y ago
  I think there’s a fairly reasonable argument to be made that the (super)majority people today are better off than they would have been 2-500 years ago, at least in most of the world.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Near as I can tell, folks have no idea (really) how bad it could be, since most of the really significant shifts have been in removing a lot of major problems. For example, eradicating Smallpox. Controlling Measles, Polio, Tetanus. Synthetic fertilizers eliminating famines in all but the most dysfunctional areas, etc. It used to be dying of disease or famine was a huge problem in much of the world. Now it is only in tiny, very broken areas, for relatively small portions of the population.
  - DrNosferatu 2y ago
    Then why average homeownership rate - at a same given age - is much lower for younger generations? Here's some actual data: https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/average-homeownership-age-people-born-different-decades https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/average-homeownership-age-peop... PS: Obviously my comment above was about contemporary generations: sure, we live better today than in the middle ages. But how relevant is that?
- ascorbic 2y ago
  People at every level of income are better off than their equivalent in the same country at every point in history. Once you get past 100 years or so it's not even close. Even the imperfect (to say the least) social safety nets in rich countries today are far above the level they were 100 years ago, and people are better off by almost every measure. Middle class people live like royalty a few hundreds years ago, when it comes to access to healthcare, food, travel, leisure (and that's before we talk about tech).
alex_smart 2y ago
All that is to say that the Malthusians are not just wrong, they are not even wrong.
cowsandmilk 2y ago
This isn’t anomalous or recency bias. You go back in history and everyone who makes predictions similar to Ehrlich about population crashes have been wrong. Malthus was saying the same things 150 years earlier and there were others before him and in between.
- kurthr 2y ago
  Every bacteria in the Petri dish doubles each generation, until it doesn’t. It really doesn’t seem like a winning bet (other than fear mongering popularity), because you’re unlikely to be right, and when you are things seem to be falling apart. See also Peak Oil. However, birth rates in most of the world (except Africa, SE Asia, and India by a bit) are falling below replacement. Many are looking at this as a good thing (exponentials can’t go on forever), and there are the contrarians, but being at the edge of a long term exponential transition is dangerous. There are many cultural and economic systems that have worked the way they do and grown to be dominant because of the exponential growth. People will continue to hope and believe long after things become obvious (see climate change). See also Moore’s Law.
UncleMeat 2y ago
Ehrlich didn't just make this claim in the abstract. He proposed specific and brutal (I'd even say genocidal) policies that he claimed were the only ways of mitigating this inevitable mass starvation. "Oh, he's wrong in all the details but maybe his general themes are right" is not acceptable when the outcome of listening to him is mass murder.

by roenxi 2y ago

Isamu 2y ago

> But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of people starve to death. You’ve piqued my interest, where can I read about this data oriented approach that leads to this conclusion?

roenxi 2y ago
Most people live in cities [0] and requires ~2,000 k/cal a day. The systems required to feed people are complex and energy demanding. There are 8 billion humans which is a large number relative to the amount of food we can store. It is a matter of time until we have a multi-billion person famine. Hopefully multiple centuries away if the transition away from oil to something else works out. Something like the year without summer [1] could be even more catastrophic, for example. Or wars, particularly of the nuclear variety. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
- braiamp 2y ago
  The problem with such prediction is that it presumes that the population would grow at a accelerating pace, while the opposite is happening.
  - xyzzy123 2y ago
    For me it's not about population growth so much as societal risk; our current population is only sustainable due to a complex web of interdependent systems. How often do complex societies break down or decline in such a way that the complex systems which keep our urban populations alive are compromised?
    - lazide 2y ago
      The more people we have, also the more people we have available to keep these systems running and figure out new replacements. Assuming the caloric ‘profit margin’ stays positive anyway.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  We seem to be so far past breakeven food/water/warmth that most of our efforts are spent getting all sorts of other stuff, though? It's recent, I'll grant you that. I can't even think of when there was rationing in the west? Shortly after the war? At least the current grandparent generation seems to have childhood memories of that. But to me, it looks like we've figured out those basic necessities to the point where at least ordinary variation in harvest won't be making us hungry. You could call that being noise proof. The danger is that we systematically alter how the planet works, so that is not just bumps in annual crop yields, which we also seem to be doing, but it's not clear that we've messed up our basic necessities pipeline yet. It's also not clear that we'll inevitably do that.
  - jl6 2y ago
    One risk is that our systems are now extremely efficient, and one aspect of efficiency is that it tends to eliminate “unnecessary” buffers and stockpiles. Just-in-time manufacturing pulls supplies in response to demand. The global food supply chain still has buffers and stockpiles (e.g. grain bins) due to the seasonality of growing, but if hydroponics becomes the dominant method of agriculture (say, in a world with a more chaotic climate that needs to be kept at bay by greenhouses), then highly efficient farmers could optimize out all of their resiliency.

bruce511 2y ago

>> We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period This. It's hard to make predictions precisely because the rate of change has been so rapid. What is interesting to note though is the varied societal responses to the changes over the last 70 years or so. The US embraced materialism with some reluctant social movement (womens rights, civil rights etc). Europe embraced Socialism (in the sense of Social support, not Communism), the Middle East embraced materialism, but eschewed any form of social development (eg women's rights et al). Right now we're in a bit of a rebound phase. Change has come too quickly (especially the last 40 years) so we're seeing pushback on rights (in the US) on social support (in Europe) and a general political swing to the right in lots of places. There's a "looking back" element which seeks to slow found societal change even as technology accelerates. Predicting what comes next is, well, tricky. But I expect in my lifetime to see global population maximum. I expect to see significant climate change. Both of those will be huge disruptions, and the knock-on effects could be anything

Muromec 2y ago
We are seeing swingback to the right because the threat of left revolution (instignated or supported by nuclear state out there) is less credible now
tsimionescu 2y ago
> The US embraced materialism with some reluctant social movement (womens rights, civil rights etc). Europe embraced Socialism (in the sense of Social support, not Communism), the Middle East embraced materialism, but eschewed any form of social development (eg women's rights et al). The US is the most fundamentalist Christian country in the world. There is also a large degree of materialism, but still, only a fraction of the population of the USA even accepts the idea that atheism (a hallmark of materialism) is a legitimate religious position. What the USA has embraced more than anything is consumerism, not materialism. What most of Europe has is called social democracy, socialism is a completely different ideology (workers having majority control of enterprises). The Middle East embraced Islamic fundamentalism, not materialism. You could say that they also embraced consumerism, like the USA. But hardcore Islamic fundamentalism as we see it today in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan is a very recent phenomenon, born of the last fifty years or less (at any wide scale), and it is at a level that consumes entire societies. These Middle East countries didn't eschew progress on women's rights, they actively regressed women's rights to pre-medieval levels. Iran and Afghanistan had the right to vote for women before the USA: they lost it as fundamentalist forces gained power (actually, they still have it in Iran, but it's significantly affected by other lack of freedom).

olalonde 2y ago

I disagree that the prosperity we've experienced was truly "unexpected". Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs), and markets innovate in response to scarcity (e.g. the Green Revolution). Technological progress, though unpredictable in its specifics, has consistently been a reliable force for adaptation. Ehrlich's predictions underestimated humanity's resilience, oversimplifying a highly complex system by reducing it to a linear regression.

roenxi 2y ago
This is that recency bias thing in action. Constant surprising technological progress of the sort we've seen for the last century or two is unprecedented and not at all the sort of thing that is suitable for long term planning. I usually wouldn't bother pointing that out, but there are two points I really want to emphasise as wildly optimistic: > Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs) We didn't have birth control until the 20th century and it is mostly used by people who, historically speaking, are living with resources far in excess of their basic needs. Traditionally the self regulation was that people were born then the ones that couldn't eat enough to survive died. And there is a pretty high risk of not finding stable equilibrium. The logistic map isn't a totally crazy model and displays some rather chaotic behaviour [0]. In practice that looks like a lot of famines. > ... markets innovate in response to scarcity ... Markets have existed forever, usually the innovative response to food scarcity was, once again, people starving to death. It is hard to underline just how weird the Green Revolution is. Obviously a great time to be alive but it is not a normal thing in the human experience. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#Behavior_dependent_on_r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#Behavior_dependen...
- olalonde 2y ago
  I’m not sure why you keep invoking "recency bias." When forecasting the near future, as Ehrlich was doing, it’s entirely reasonable to use recent trends as a baseline. Are you suggesting progress might slow to the levels seen in prehistory, antiquity, or the medieval period? That seems highly implausible, barring a catastrophic event that disrupts modern civilization. If anything, you might be underestimating the ongoing momentum of technological progress, which is not just sustaining its pace but accelerating across many fields. Some experts predict AGI is right on the corner - a development that could drastically amplify innovation and potentially eliminate the challenge of food scarcity. Additionally, birth control will only keep becoming increasingly accessible worldwide, enabling more effective regulation of fertility rates in response to resource constraints.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

> We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period in [History] …on average - inequality has never been so high.

jmb99 2y ago
I think there’s a fairly reasonable argument to be made that the (super)majority people today are better off than they would have been 2-500 years ago, at least in most of the world.
- lazide 2y ago
  Near as I can tell, folks have no idea (really) how bad it could be, since most of the really significant shifts have been in removing a lot of major problems. For example, eradicating Smallpox. Controlling Measles, Polio, Tetanus. Synthetic fertilizers eliminating famines in all but the most dysfunctional areas, etc. It used to be dying of disease or famine was a huge problem in much of the world. Now it is only in tiny, very broken areas, for relatively small portions of the population.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  Then why average homeownership rate - at a same given age - is much lower for younger generations? Here's some actual data: https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/average-homeownership-age-people-born-different-decades https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/average-homeownership-age-peop... PS: Obviously my comment above was about contemporary generations: sure, we live better today than in the middle ages. But how relevant is that?
ascorbic 2y ago
People at every level of income are better off than their equivalent in the same country at every point in history. Once you get past 100 years or so it's not even close. Even the imperfect (to say the least) social safety nets in rich countries today are far above the level they were 100 years ago, and people are better off by almost every measure. Middle class people live like royalty a few hundreds years ago, when it comes to access to healthcare, food, travel, leisure (and that's before we talk about tech).

alex_smart 2y ago

All that is to say that the Malthusians are not just wrong, they are not even wrong.

cowsandmilk 2y ago

This isn’t anomalous or recency bias. You go back in history and everyone who makes predictions similar to Ehrlich about population crashes have been wrong. Malthus was saying the same things 150 years earlier and there were others before him and in between.

kurthr 2y ago
Every bacteria in the Petri dish doubles each generation, until it doesn’t. It really doesn’t seem like a winning bet (other than fear mongering popularity), because you’re unlikely to be right, and when you are things seem to be falling apart. See also Peak Oil. However, birth rates in most of the world (except Africa, SE Asia, and India by a bit) are falling below replacement. Many are looking at this as a good thing (exponentials can’t go on forever), and there are the contrarians, but being at the edge of a long term exponential transition is dangerous. There are many cultural and economic systems that have worked the way they do and grown to be dominant because of the exponential growth. People will continue to hope and believe long after things become obvious (see climate change). See also Moore’s Law.

UncleMeat 2y ago

Ehrlich didn't just make this claim in the abstract. He proposed specific and brutal (I'd even say genocidal) policies that he claimed were the only ways of mitigating this inevitable mass starvation. "Oh, he's wrong in all the details but maybe his general themes are right" is not acceptable when the outcome of listening to him is mass murder.