Re:"Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (1960)
by pfdietz on Friday November 13, 2026 @10:41AM
(#50485145)
This feels like a version of the Nirvana fallacy, asserting that unless things are better off by every metric, then they are worse off.
Re:"Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (1960)
by pixl97 on Friday November 13, 2026 @11:31AM
(#50485903)
It's the metrics that you ignore that kill you.
Building anti-fragile systems is something capitalism has been ignoring for a bit and Covid pointed out quite a bit of that. A lot of things have got better off, or at least cheaper, but at quite a cost of fragility. For example, more high technology created in one place in the world or controlled by a few people. Higher amounts of energy required to extract ever difficult resources. World wide manufacturing pipelines that are ripe to be disrupted.
Two hundred years ago you didn't give much of a shit what happened on the other side of the planet, unless it was a huge volcano it wasn't really going to affect you. Now some dipshit 8000 miles away can cause you to lose your job and send you into bankruptcy.
That is a very specific version of "better off". There are many versions for which this is quite obviously not true. Anybody who wants to take a walk in pristine nature in Europe or large parts of NA needs to travel far to even have a chance of doing something resembling this. Not important you might say, well, that's your personal value judgement. Liberal democracies might also just be a temporary glitch and we're all back to dictatorships 100 years from now and I don't know how that would make us "better off" necessarily. Though that's not very related to overpopulation necessarily.
Even for your metric, life expectency has been stagnating in substantial areas. It's not a given that tech will solve that.
> 3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years
US water aquifers are approaching irreversible depletion, so I'd be careful with such statements.