http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.ph...
"Common Malthusianism - the idea that a given resource (such as living space or food) will run out in the future based upon extrapolation of present trends - stems from fundamental misunderstandings about economics, human action and change. We create change in response to our environment; our self-interest leads us to constantly strive at the creation of new resources where old resources are becoming scarce and expensive. This is the path to profit for the individual - and progress for all. One needs a certain amount of willful blindness to avoid seeing the process in action now and in recent history."
We may be quite sure that among plants, as well as among animals, there is a limit to improvement, though we do not exactly know where it is. It is probable that the gardeners who contend for flower prizes have often applied stronger dressing without success. At the same time, it would be highly presumptuous in any man to say, that he had seen the finest carnation or anemone that could ever be made to grow. He might however assert without the smallest chance of being contradicted by a future fact, that no carnation or anemone could ever by cultivation be increased to the size of a large cabbage; and yet there are assignable quantities much greater than a cabbage. No man can say that he has seen the largest ear of wheat, or the largest oak that could ever grow; but he might easily, and with perfect certainty, name a point of magnitude, at which they would not arrive. In all these cases therefore, a careful distinction should be made, between an unlimited progress, and a progress where the limit is merely undefined.
He then observed the tendency of humans to reproduce until the limits of their environment are reached and concluded that poverty will be the terminal state of humanity.
Malthus was merely wrong on this empirical point - humans are willing to voluntarily stop reproducing under certain cultural and economic circumstances. These circumstances involve modern levels of economic productivity, technologies (birth control) invented 100 years after his death, and western cultures. He wasn't wrong on principle, he merely lacked the data we have today.
I don't understand this point. Why would there be a limit to productivity, especially with machines and computers to leverage our efforts thousandfold and more?
And how could anyone know that such limit exists, even if it is actually reached one day? That would require predicting any possible innovation of the future.
Do you agree that that is a pretty hard limit?
PS: 1% growth per year seems slow and sustainable but in 20,000 years your talking about 2.7 with 86 zeros after it. Start with 1 atom for one second and compare it with every atom in the earth for a year and your only at 4.2 with 57 zeros. So if the total economic output of humanity was 1 atom we could not sustain 1% economic growth per year for 30,000 years.
Edit: This assumes that the economy is based on physical goods, if we assume intangibles can take up 99.99...9% of the economy then 1% growth is possible for long periods of time even if it's somewhat meaningless.
There are limits to what you can do with matter. It's unlikely the economy (our productive capacity) will continue to grow much for 100,000 years after all mass we can get at is weird ass artificial quark composite computronium.
However, energy needs do seem to increase with productivity, and there's limit on how much energy we can get from the sun (a dyson sphere encloses the sun, capturing all its energy). But there's some assumptions here: that we can't discover ways of being productive that require less energy (and wouldn't that enhancement itself be "productive"?); that we can't discover other sources of energy (e.g. room temperature fusion micro-suns - or something better).
Once you factor in the unknown (i.e. knowledge that we don't yet have) it's hard to know what the limits are. I guess the entire universe is a limit on matter... if we can't discover a way to make more matter... or more universes.
Population growth is already zero or negative in most developed countries if you remove the effects of immigration. If this becomes a consistent rule for all countries once they become fully developed, the real question is not whether we can sustain infinite population growth, but whether we have the resources to support a developed lifestyle for the entire world. Given current technologies and energy sources, the answer is almost certainly "no", but this is a much more tractable problem.
What kind of trajectory takes us from here to there (or to a place dense with similar stable solutions) without going through war and famine? Or, how does a developed nation survive in relative bounty surrounded by nations undergoing severe war and famine?
>Or, how does a developed nation survive in relative bounty surrounded by nations undergoing severe war and famine?
Brutality and self interest.
No, unfortunately there are plenty of other irrational sensationalists.
>Malthus wasn't wrong in principle, just in timescale.
He has been horribly wrong in principle, as has every other pessimist who cried wolf for the past 3000 years. Saying 'the timescale was just wrong' is not an adequate defense by any means. Timescale is what matters and is the essence of all predictions.
Ask a trader: a prediction that oil will go up in the long run is completely useless if you don't define when that event will occur, and subsequently loose everything on a big short term dip that you were blind to.
Additionally, if your prediction is allowed to take "infinity" duration to come true, then it can never be disproven. And what can't be disproven is usually categorically not worth the thought.
To discuss particulars, the current evidence is technology allows us to produce TOO much food TOO cheaply, which is compounded further by domestic farm subsidies. Efficiency gains are so successful in keeping up with demand, that in Mexico City they buy corn from Iowa, even though they have cheaper farmland and local labor that could be utilized.
Additionally, many economists are currently considering the possibility of efficiency gains being so strong a factor that they lead to structural unemployment. This picture of runaway efficiency gains is the exact opposite of what Malthus had envisioned (constant\linear resource utilization massively outstripped by population growth rate)
>It's sounds science fiction-ey, but I don't understand how you can see data like this and then defund NASA.
All the nations economically developed enough to have a space program are rapidly decreasing in population. China, Russia, Japan are all on the decline, the US is only increasing due to immigration. It's economics 101: wealthy people have more economic freedom to invest in birth control and their time in things other than family. Additional children switch from being an asset into a liability when you have to pay substantial amounts for them to be educated and the opportunity cost of taking time to raise a child becomes higher. The S shaped curve has been in full swing in developed countries like the US and Russia where the vast majority of the land is deserted, without anything resembling a Malthusian scenario.
I'd posit, if you were to try to assign children a status as a good in a wealthy culture, they'd be a luxury good. They cost a great deal, are effectively useless, but still desired.
The typical Mathusian "overpopulation" argument (based on a shallow misreading of Malthus) is not that we'll have an S-shaped population growth curve, but an A-shaped one -- that we'll have population grow out of control, and then come crashing back down through some massive tragedy (akin to the Kaibab Deer population [0]). The A-shaped scenario is reasonably unlikely for humans.
[0] http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story3...
Interestingly from the population statistics alone it is possible to make an argument about the total likely future number of humans that will live. There is debate about whether the reasoning is correct, but it is at least suggestive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument for more.
If someone gave you a trick coin, and you didn't know which side was favored, you'd have to assume 50/50, even knowing that you were certainly wrong. Knowing that one side is weighted doesn't give you any interesting information for one toss.
If you follow the arguments for and against the DA, it's clear this isn't about a well-defined statistical argument, but immediately devolves into qualitative arguments about our survivability. The optimists say, well, based on the average extinction rate it's extremely unlikely we'll die in <100 million years. The pessimists counter that we're creating technologies with extinction level capacities very rapidly. Either way, we don't have a way of gauging the predictive power of these claims. We can't run a controlled study of 100 human species spans.
And that's fine, because we need to argue about and introspect on the longevity of species, but brainteasers like the DA don't further it in any meaningful way.
If it is true, it can let us put probabilistic upper bounds on the future of the human race. For instance with 99.99999% likelihood I can tell you that the human race will fail to succeed in expanding colonization of other stars. As much as we may dream of the stars, we will never reach them.
Similarly the odds of our maintaining our current population levels for the next thousand years is something like 40%. That is both interesting and predictive. Its meaning, however, is highly debatable.
http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Population-Crash-Planets-Surpri...
Malthus has been postponed for centuries. And may well be postponed for more centuries. But unless resources grow exponentially, Malthus eventually will have the last laugh.
Yes, it points out a lot of potential problems, and makes it obvious that societies _do_ fail, and that we're not yet above that rule, but I wouldn't call it scary.
The politicians who authorized the current pension structures for California state employees undoubtedly had similar data, so I imagine defunding NASA would be comparatively trivial short-term thinking.
Malthus wasn't wrong in principle, just in timescale. It's clear that technologies have improved Earth's human carrying capacity, but I don't know any method to claim that an S-shaped curve isn't inevitable.
It's sounds science fiction-ey, but I don't understand how you can see data like this and then defund NASA.