News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better. Parent comment

Re:The world is awful, the world is much better, the world c... by yorwba on Thursday July 21, 2022 @05:14AM (#32177213)
The black death is a bad analogy. At the time, population was at the upper limit that could be sustained with the technology of the time. If a farmer wanted a larger harvest, they would need to farm a larger area, denying its use to others, thus causing them to starve. Conversely, the large number of deaths directly increased the resources available to everyone else. It was a zero-sum game, with one person's loss being the other's gain, and vice versa.

We no longer live in that world. Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth. This is very much not zero-sum. If a farmer who used to till the fields by hand switches to using a tractor, they're feeding many more people than they harm with the tractor's greenhouse gas emissions.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The world is awful, the world is much better, the world c... by tsimionescu on Thursday July 21, 2022 @07:26AM (#32178078)
100M deaths may make sense if we're ignoring the extreme likelihood of a third world war caused by climate. But given what we know of the history of resource depletions, and the fact that some of countries which will be first affected will be India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which have minor skirmishes even today and two of which are armed with nuclear weapons, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that such a low number is going to prove anywhere near accurate.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The world is awful, the world is much better, the world c... by lotsofpulp on Thursday July 21, 2022 @05:59AM (#32177468)
> Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth.

I presume this is highly dependent on which 100M people are killed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The world is awful, the world is much better, the world c... by yorwba on Thursday July 21, 2022 @08:02AM (#32178325)
I was talking about the difference between (world resources)/(world population) and (world resources)/(world population - 100 million).

Of course if you personally kill a very rich person and take their stuff, that might be a life-changing event for you, but unlike during the black death, the average person's income is not significantly derived from dead people's stuff.

[ Parent | on HN ]