A Malthusian crisis has been “imminent” since the 19th century. I think that you should try writing down what facts you think support the a priori assumption that our sinful ways are leading us to a future, sudden disaster. I don’t think you will find much evidence that isn’t traceable to popular opinion. Sorry, fam, it’s just Puritanism for the modern age.

Some guy in the 19th century made a bad prediction and that's your rationale for dismissing climate change?

Are you saying that climate change, ocean depletion, soil depletion, desertification, plastic pollution and food shortage are not real?

We don't have a food shortage. Crop yields and agricultural productivity are at all time human civilizational highs.

This is a fragile argument. Systems can often be at peak before crashing.

It's a factual argument. Our civilization has been peaking in agricultural productivity decade after decade for 200 years. Your hypothetical argument is not statistically likely. Sure, on a long enough time frame some natural disaster will occur that causes a crisis, but the fundamental mechanics of photosynthesis and ag science aren't going anywhere.

The population growth trend proves OP point.

No, it doesn't. It still levels off way above what was the carrying capacity of Earth before the "Green Revolution" - and the systems maintaining our food production are unsustainable. We extract surplus food from the ground by destroying the ability to grow more food in the future.

It was, and it was postponed several times through technological means, at the cost of widespread environmental degradation. The underlying logic of the prediction is still sound.

It's like someone is warning you that, with your current spending patterns, you'll go broke in a year. You come to them five years later, showing off your fancy new car and talking about vacations, defying their "alarmist predictions", conveniently omitting the fact that in those five years, you've maxed out on all your credit cards and every possible loan anyone would give you.

No, the crisis is still ahead, and will hit us that much harder unless we work quickly to make our economy sustainable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism has been widely criticized for its incorrect predictions and ties into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

When I say fair I mean 'accepted' by people, they know people are selling them stuff, probably useless, but they still choose to go and buy some. It's fair to most people's brain inner workings IMO.

Also I had various western countries in mind in my comment, including those where healthcare is paid for, it doesn't change the overall lifestyle that much (high rent, long hours, dumb jobs)

> You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill.

Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others

I think the US has serious progress to make on safety nets, but this type of statement doesn’t really help move the discussion forwards

> Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others

I didn't write the comment you responded to, but I don't think its author was advocating for the mythical "free lunch." I read their comment as a statement decrying the seemingly artificial constraints built into modern (American, I presume) society that force workers to make an essentially binary choice between a stable, secure life and one of, potentially, poverty and marginalization.

To be more explicit - most people can't simply provide (even valuable, in-demand) work on their own terms, so they're forced (by various intentional and unintentional social/economic/legal/etc. barriers) to work according to terms that may not make sense to a rational third-party. This is (probably) why the commenter you responded to mentions the binary distinction between financial stability and physical insecurity - there's hardly any middle ground between the two categories when it comes to most fields of employment. Although "tech" is probably the most flexible industry in this regard, it's still difficult to find positions that allow part-time employment with health insurance benefits (even at lower-than-average pay rates), for example.

In most industries, the prospect of being able to work to provide only enough "value" to comfortably sustain oneself, as opposed to "being forced" to fully commit to the lifestyle (i.e. 40+ hours/week, car for commuting, lodging within commuting distance, childcare, general cost of paying for convenience in food/housework/etc. due to having less free time, etc.) is laughable. I believe this is what the commenter you reference was referring to - having the freedom to live cheaply without becoming financially insecure or socially marginalized, not some desire to have others pay for their lives.

But how is that binary choice artificial? You’d have exactly the same choice 10000 years ago. Either go and hunt and forage for food, or starve

I mean, I'm living near a concentration camp for folks who were doing that.

Some folks fenced everything off, hunted the large animals to death, and re-educated the children.

There really isn't a choice, or at least if there is, I've seen what the US did to the folks choosing that choice, and it wasn't pretty.

This is a false dichotomy. Parties do not have to have binary, 1 and 0 values for how much power they have in a given transaction, and remarking that employees having little power places them in the same place as ancient hunter-gatherers is... perhaps somewhat dishonest?

If we're experiencing what it is to have an employer have 8:2 relative power to an employee, that doesn't mean that a ratio of 6:4, while still favoring the employer, is no different.

Perhaps the world has changed somewhat in the last 10000 years.

It's not the work that's the problem, it's that most people are forced to work in an arrangement that's stacked against them.

> I think the US has serious progress to make on safety nets, but this type of statement doesn’t really help move the discussion forwards

This type of statement is nothing new. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject[1]:

> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other

According to Wikipedia[1]:

> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery#History

There was a comment that is provably true and has been downvoted:

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I think the comparison of carbon footprints between the average westerner and the global south seems to indicate these issues aren’t about the raw number of people and absolutely to do with lifestyle.

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