Unfortunately life expectancy and quality of life is very strongly correlated to GDP.

I’m not saying we can’t live without money, or anything like that. But modern society strongly relies on complex economies for even basic functions like food supply.

The health of that economy can be roughly measured using GDP, a significant drop in GDP (such as a depression) strongly suggest that economy isn’t healthy, and then the basics (like food) stop working.

Unfortunately plenty of people already rely on food banks to avoid starvation. You can’t feed an entire country like that.

The short version of the above is at the extreme you can either risk it with coronavirus (~1%-10% death rate depending on the health of your heathcare system), or in the long term risk it with starvation (guaranteed to kill you).

So yes, at certain point risking widespread infection becomes preferable to economic collapse.

The evidence is not nearly as clearcut as you suggest and periods of economic decline are actually associated with lowered mortality rates.

Past periods of economic decline have very different root causes than our current scenario. I don't think this is an apples to apples comparison.

Yes, and consistently despite varied causes of economic decline, it has led to decreased mortality.

In biology the health of a species is in its fertility. High GDP is associated with low birth rate. Life expectancy drives it down even further.

> But modern society strongly relies on complex economies for even basic functions like food supply.

This is as true as it is stupid.

> The health of that economy can be roughly measured using GDP

I would argue that if you have to depend on others you are not fit enough. You do want efficiency but not to the point where it dramatically eats into your resilience.

> Unfortunately plenty of people already rely on food banks to avoid starvation. You can’t feed an entire country like that.

It wouldn't be pretty but agriculture employs amazingly few people, we makes a lot of luxury products we don't need and we feed a lot to our cows, pigs and chickens. If it is impossible or not will depend on administrative tasks/logistics/bean counting. I could see us screw that up tho.

Without paper moving, other things, like goods, can't move efficiently enough to feed 8B of the population.

This was true and tested before IT.

If "before IT" is something like 1960, them, well, the world population was 3B. Also check the levels of deaths from starvation and from infectious diseases, and the cost of food.

No, moving the right "papers" with high speed has made a serious difference.

I was intentionally vague. People seem to read some opinion in it? (given the up and down voting) I have no idea what it means, its just an interesting fact. All I know is that doing it without moving paper was much harder before computers. I didn't mean to say: Because lobsters couldn't do it neither can we. Nor: We have computers now, everything is easy! IT just dramatically changes the puzzle. Not sure we should try history based prediction.

Unfortunately we know how to make more people but not necessarily how to restart a first world economy. And losing old "non-contributing" demographics is much less costly than the young which delays economic consumption and growth by 20+ amount of years to raise and train. It's crass to mention, but these are real considerations. It's down to: you can't work if you're dead, versus you can't work if modern society breaks down and you're dead anyway.

> Human civilisation has reached the point where keeping our fake paper moving is more important than staying alive. How exciting!

If you only knew how many sleep-less nights this has given me for the past 12 years... its terrifying when you add that to the massive amount of misdirected and misallocated time and resources (emergence of SJW, cancel culture Internet trolling, Social Media flexing etc...).

I seriously hoped we had made more progress in fully automated planting/harvesting systems by now--progress has been made, but as seen in this article the Human element is still the bottle-neck/PoF in the system.

Welcome to how our superorganism allocates resources.