In short: it's bullshit.
Oh, the poor little wogs, they lead such brutal lives, it's so sad that there are so many of them, if only there were fewer of them the world would be a better place. This is the sub-text that I see underlying these comments. It's "surplus population" crap yet again.
These are people. People with dreams and ambitions. People with lives and families. People who are capable of amazing things if given a chance. They're not just grubby uneducated unwashed masses. These are folks who will build the world of the 21st century, who will help lift their own countries out of poverty. These are people who will build fusion reactors, and space ships, and nano-technology. People who will cure cancer, create art, and music, and literature. They don't need people who think that they are wastes of resources, all they need is a chance, and just enough help to start building their own futures.
On the question of population growth, families are getting smaller across the globe. If you're in the UK, I recommend this excellent programme presented by Hans Rosling.
Don't Panic: The truth about population http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03h8r1j
From the programme description: "With seven billion people already on our planet, we often look to the future with dread, but Rosling's message is surprisingly upbeat. Almost unnoticed, we have actually begun to conquer the problems of rapid population growth and extreme poverty."
Rosling is, of course, a well-known statistician so he actually presents his conclusions based on real data.
What utter nonsense. If you want people to take your opinions seriously, you should start having opinions that aren't obviously wrong.
I don't think surplus population is the issue (in the present) because we do have enough resources for everyone. At least to give everyone a decent standard of living if not a first world one. And the way population growth is declining I don't think it will become a problem. Not the real problem anyways.
However yours is a terrible argument against overpopulation fears. It is possible for there to be too many people for the world to support, regardless what you think of them as individuals.
Bill Gates is a massive investor in Monsanto, if you are naive you might think Bill Gates is a saint. He is really just a globalist with an extremely stubborn perspective of the future.
Think of his contributions to IT: Proprietary software.
Anyone that is a fan of Bill Gates cannot also be a fan of humanity unfortunately.
a) bringing affordable / usable home computing to the majority (something I usually see Jobs credited with)
b) using a large amount of his vast wealth for good causes (I never heard of Jobs doing anything).
Several parties have said Jobs donated to causes, but would often do so anonymously. Known is that he donated to the Democratic Party and to cancer research.
As for Gates: he is once again the richest person in the world. He could give away half of his wealth and he would still be in the top 6. Let’s not think too long about how he amassed his fortune, but I’ll give one example: under his leadership at Microsoft, he ’gave away’ tens of millions of Windows licenses to schools, so that kids would grow up being used to using Windows. It was presented as charity and Microsoft received tax benefits from doing so.
I take it you aren't a fan of GMO foods then? If so, then you are wrong. I'll leave it to former anti-GMO activist Mark to make that argument[1].
If you are talking about their business practices, then generally I agree with you. I can understand the point of view of people who think otherwise, though. I think people who agree with Monsanto's view are wrong, but that is a disagreement about methods, not outcomes.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/09/mark-lyna...
GMOs present numerous issues. Proprietary interest in seed corn and yet another usurpation of privileges by corporate interests are a key issue. It's not intrinsic to GMO, but it's quite the extant problem. Genetic drift is another. Encouraging use of pesticides (through resistance).
And ultimately, they don't address the root issue: humans have to live within ecological limits.
Also: oh boy, Monsanto = evil, haha.
What if all the progress we've built is not built on any solid foundation? How much of our QOL boosts are based on actual increases in carrying capacity vs. capital drawdown? What happens when we run out of capital and built a system dependent on it's continual usage?
The reasoning is that capitalism can solve EVERY problem that it creates, but not until that problem is right up in it's face (because you know, capitalism is so short sighted, which incidentally is not a bad thing, just an odd trait).
So we wait and hope that the capitalists are right, which they of course aren't, but then they'll say they're sorry and we will feel good again.
OOPS, we are sorry, our predictions did not pan out. Good that we didnt follow our own conclusions because life would have been so much worse and it was not necessary.
I'm a Popperian. When the facts (best available science) changes, I change my opinions. Also known as "science".
Whatever their faults, the Malthusians made predictions. To be debated, validated, debunked. Far more useful than the techno utopian unverifiable views of the libertarian ostriches.
And capitalism isn't that bad. If a resource is running out, people can predict that decades in advance and have strong incentive to conserve it or invest in replacements. The price gradually rises over many years giving the world time to adapt, it doesn't just disappear overnight.
Malthusianism is correct in a closed system. Predictions of doom and gloom are as of yet unfulfilled because humans are clever and find new pockets of resources to exploit.
Do you believe our Earth is a closed system or an open system?
Malthusianism is incorrect in that they did not foresee ever increasing productivity leading to costs approaching zero. So reaching many limits has been postponed (e.g. peak oil is an economic issue).
I'm personally optimistic. We're in a bear race. I hope and work towards a sustainable economic model. Trivially, that means decoupling economic growth from resource consumption. I hope it happens.
But don't pretend the current situation is anything but dire. A positive outcome is far from certain.
* Earth is not a closed system, it receives an enormous influx of energy from the sun
* We are no where close to using even a fraction of that potential, or using too much of it, most of our energy use is in the form of digging up time-compressed solar energy.
* We are enormously wasteful in manufacturing, no where close to what can be achieved according to the laws of physics
* Life itself shows you that you can manufacture or an enormous quantity of material and continue to recycle it sustainable over eons. So while our current manufacturing techniques cannot sustainably scale forever, there's no fundamental reason why we can't have a manufacturing ecosystem that works more like a biological one
* Matter is neither created nor destroyed by our industrial processes, only rearranged. We benefitted by digging up low-entropy material filtered and concentrated by slow geological/biological processors, but again, there is no proof that we cannot, in an energy efficient manner, recover the used material. Whether through bio-technology or nanotechnology.
The basic premise that man is clever and keeps finding ways to postpone the Malthusian bombs is correct, but it's not just because we keep finding new pockets of resources to exploit, it's because we are getting more efficient at using those resources.
Not to mention the fact that the assumption that GDP growth is equal to manufacturing or population growth is wrong. The math allows value of goods and services to go up even as amount of energy, people, or raw materials used goes down.
We have clear challenges, and we should be scared enough to invest in them heavily. But if you're not a techno-optimist, that we will find ways to address and improve these issues without throwing away our entire style of life, and instead thing the world is going to renounce the last 300 years in favor of a return to life before the industrial revolution, you're backing a set of policies that will never succeed.
As I see it, if collapse is coming, only our smarts are going to save us, not a retreat.
There's something called "Jevon's Paradox". It asserts that increases in efficiency (via technology) increases consumption rather than decreases.
And no, I'm not a Luddite. The only way is forward. Full speed. Any hesitation means humanity loses.
The extent and degree of risk each poses to our life are debatable.
> Do you believe our Earth is a closed system or an open system?
The sun being a source of massive amounts of ongoing energy puts it squarely into open system territory in my opinion. Also, the human brain's ability to learn and build tools to improve upon what we are given by nature, as well as the ability for society to work together for common goals also to me distinguishes us from a classic closed system.
> But don't pretend the current situation is anything but dire. A positive outcome is far from certain.
These two sentences seem contradictory to me. I don't see anything particularly dire about our current state of affairs at all. Certainly we could be far better stewards of the planet, but I see very little that indicates a "positive outcome" (depending on your definition I suppose) is unlikely. At some point we may push the earth beyond its carrying capacity in certain areas, at which point we can simply shift to something else. Where I can agree is, some things are more important than others. If we lost the means of our current mass produced agriculture for example, we'd have to make some very serious lifestyle changes very quickly. But life would go on, and it may even be more fulfilling in some ways.
Misremembering, but there's a Soviet era quote about being 3 days away from revolt. People need to eat.
Yes, Life (sic) will find a way. But governments are far more brittle. Should we (humanity) experience food riots, things will get very bad very quickly.
Food won't vanish, like poof. It's about the disruption. That's when "normal" channels drys up and food is only available thru the black market. During a famine, there's always plenty of food. But the speculators withhold supply and the consumers don't have enough cash. (Note that I said cash, vs credit or savings.)
That's when people starve. That's when civil society (law and order) breaks down.
I'm all for fixing corruption and increasing transparency of governance worldwide, including here at home.
Perhaps. I've been accused of having a random free association narrative most of the time. :)
We seem largely on the same page about the challenges. So we're cool. I'm far more pessimistic than most people. For instance, I believe we're already way past the tipping point on climate change, per the opinions of the experts, and most people aren't there yet.
There is an interesting Ted talk on this: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_o...
>>> More people living doesn't necessarily mean people
living better lives. In a finite world with limits to
growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next
bottleneck.
Granted there are now lots of other things to kill the child, malaria etc, but I guarantee every single person on HN will rather take the chance of malaria than the certainty of not being born in the first place.
I also guarantee that most of HN places themselves on the "not yet happy" side of the fence, so I find your argument which seems to be "its no good bringing another child into this world, they might not die of starvation but something will get them, and they will never be happy" to fly in the face of, well, millions of years of evolution. We've always been unhappy.
More people is a good thing, more people, and in a world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice, it is an unalloyed good.
Perhaps that's true. But what about kids in all the destitute places on the planet? Using an average HN user as your test case just shows how biased your perspective is. Personally I'd rather not be born than be born in a place where I have a high change of dying of malaria, or dysentery.
Huh? And nobody asked you to reply to his comment. My goodness tptacek, this is a discussion board. Open-ended conversations take place here that drift off to all places. Sometimes they lead to interesting points, sometimes they don't. I see no reason to mock someone for that.
Seriously? You prefer a 0% chance, over, say, a 60% chance?
But then I'd jump at the offer of a 4% chance of making it over a 0% chance any day, so I guess it's just a different mindset.
EDIT: Come to think of it, if he's correct in his assumption that the non-privileged people of the world would tend to share his opinion, we should expect to see extremely high levels of suicide in these regions should we not?
The whole idea of rather not having been born is specifically because that precludes any of those emotions that make it hard to off yourself no matter how bad your situation is. It also removes the usual arguments against suicide such as impact on your family and friends.
I'm happy to consider that going through the act of suicide has some additional emotional overhead that could account for a lower rate than we might expect. But, will you consider the possibility that maybe life in a 3rd world country isn't actually so bad that it isn't worth living?
My original statement was simply a personal preference that I would choose not to live a life of suffering out of some romantic idea of the nobility of suffering, and that I'm sure there are plenty of people (especially those who end up on the wrong side of the statistics of various diseases) who would agree. It's absurd to think that someone should want to struggle through any sort of adversity for the chance of making it through on the other side. The rationality of this choice would completely depend on the various probabilities involved.
>But if the life is so harsh that it's not worth living, more people would commit suicide, at least those with no families.
This also isn't true. The self-preservation instinct is a powerful force. One can rationally decide that life isn't worth living but still be incapable of actually ending it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719288 "Personally I'd rather not be born than be born in a place where I have a high change of dying of malaria, or dysentery."
Maybe it's a nuance of the language, but "rather not be born" and "not worth living" are roughly equivalent in my interpretation.
While life in the 3rd world, or places where you have a high change of dying of malaria, dysentery, etc is not a walk in the park, except for the very worst places people are probably far happier than you imagine. The human spirit is really quite resilient.
At the end of the day, I think we'll both decide to believe what we want on the matter. :)
But you don't exactly see millions of people offing themselves, so clearly the human spirit survives such adverse conditions?
1) Rely on their prospective parents decision. To improve the parents decision making you attempt to improve their education and increase access to contraception.
2) Enforce laws about how many children a couple can have.
Most places have followed method (1). China followed method (2) (but also increased education).
Both methods seem to have resulted in dramatically better standards of living in less than a generation, and many people from drastically poor areas have gone on to live fulfilling lives.
Indeed some have accomplished more than I ever will - for example, the greatest distance runner of all time[1] grew up as 1 of 10 children of subsistence farmers during the Ethiopian 83-85 famine[2]. You can't get much deeper in poverty than that, and yet he won 2 Olympic Gold medals, 8 World Championships and broke 27 world records.
I'm unconvinced he would think he should never have been born.
Also - as the linked article shows - it is possible to tackle problems like malaria relatively easily and cheaply, if there is the will for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Gebrselassie
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%9385_famine_in_Ethi...
Yeah... the 1 in a million person is always the wrong person to ask. Perhaps if you asked the millions who have suffered and died if they would have been better off not ever being born, you might get a more meaningful statistic.
A sustainable population is better. There are many indications that the current world population is unsustainable. With the oceans being quickly depleted of fish, for one small example, I doubt that even 2 billion people can survive in the long run. Everyone eating Solyent is not a solution in my book.
Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc.
It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering.
Incorrect, that idea exists in the heads of many people, and many of them are doing something about it.
> the things needed to keep that population in a good condition are not manifesting.
Incorrect. Standard of living is improving for most people.
> Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc.
I'm open minded and willing to be convinced, but it will take more than a mere opinion. I don't see anything compelling in the news that even suggests this is likely.
> It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering.
So we shall just ignore happiness, but focus on suffering? Got it.
Bottom line is this, I was replying to the response to this comment "More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck." that said "this doesn't even make sense"
I'm showing that it does make some sense, though there is plenty of room for debate. I think too many people misinterpreted his comment for Malthusianism.
Here are a few papers on the matter:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1846696/pdf/brme...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586590/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1811054/pdf/proc...
Actually no. More people isn't automatically good. Taken to it's extreme this would mean just making as many people as is physically possible with the lowest standard of living possible. There has to be some trade off between number of people vs happiness per person.
Then there is the many worlds thing argument http://lesswrong.com/lw/ws/for_the_people_who_are_still_aliv...
You would have to assume that anyone who didn't want to be here would have topped themselves already.
Quite simply it is this, extrapolation of closed systems always fails to predict the behavior of those systems. The two most interesting examples are the use of energy and birth rates. Birth rates go down as countries become more prosperous for a variety of reasons, but the effect is that once it gets below replacement rate (as it has in Japan and elsewhere) the extrapolating the population leads it going to 0. We intuitively know that it is unlikely a population will simply die off due to a failure to reproduce. But it is easier some how to imagine a crushing horde of people, too many too feed, crammed into pens. Why? Energy is another area where we've constantly predicted (again via extrapolation) the end of the world as we know it, and again it has failed to materialize again and again.
These are examples of the responsiveness of the system to forcing functions. People don't reproduce as much if they are not worried that their children won't live to adulthood, energy as an expense is minimized by gains in efficency, process changes. The US' carbon 'footprint' has remained flat for years, policy change, people change, the economics change.
So predictions based on extrapolation are fallible if not simply wrong.
As countries grow richer birthrates tend to trend downwards, for a variety of reasons. The one country that actually took population growth seriously and tried doing something about it (China) continues to get shit over its policies today (sometimes for good reason). Just providing people in developing countries with access to contraception ignores many of the reasons that people in those countries choose to have large families.
Finally, I've read that UCSD guy's blog, and while I respect his expertise, I can't get over the fact that his analysis often seems to rest upon rather shaky assumptions. For example, one of the blog posts he links to ("Galactic-Scale Energy") argues that exponential growth means that even a modest ~2% growth rate, sustained into the far future, would result in humanity needing to consume ludicrous amounts of energy. The math is sound, but the assumption is that the human population will also continue increasing exponentially (e.g. 1%), meaning that economic output continues to be divided among the current populace at a rate that is not necessarily exponential. However, if population growth really is slowing down (as statistics show [0]), then 2% growth into the far future with a constant or slowly increasing population results in a ludicrous amount of economic output available on a per-capita basis. The author's point is that unchecked growth is a bad thing; I don't think unchecked economic growth is even meaningful in the context of a population that is no longer increasing. Many of his other posts contain similar 'spherical cow' assumptions meant to make his mathematical models more appealing in terms of presenting his overall message.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_ra..., data from US Census Bureau.
A child born in the west will consume vast amounts more resources than multiple children born in poverty.
Empowering women, with education, economic freedom, and reproductive choice, is the Correct Answer.
Fortunately, much progress has been made and will continue.
36 billion by the end of the century. You would have to convert all the land on Earth to farms and you still wouldn't be able to feed this many people.
216 billion by 2200 Which is almost four times as many as we could support if every planet in the solar system supported the same amount of people Earth does now.
1296 by 2300 An absurdly large number of people. You need to start expanding to other solar systems if you haven't already because this one is running out of resources. Transporting billions of people interstellar distances would take a ton of energy also.
362,797,056 billion (363 quadrillion) by the year 3000 We are running out of planets in the milky way to house them all.
2.19×10^25 by the year 4000
1.33×10^33 by 5000 We are out of planets in the universe to house them all.
8.02^40 by 6000 Now we are running out of atoms to make more humans.
And this is only 4,000 years, not even the amount of time civilization has been around. Not even a tiny fraction of the length of time humans have been around. Barely a blink of the eye for the age of the Earth, let alone the universe.
Exponential growth is a serious force.
It is naive and stupid to state that overpopulation increases the chances of a species' survival.
Please show your work.
Attempt #2: Gravitational potential energy = kinetic energy = .5massescape velocity^2. = .5human bodyweight kg 11,200 m/s. Convert the units and you've got a few years worth of calories (which I think I mixed up with kilocalories the first time).
Fertility is below replacement rates in China, and it's population will peak in the next decade. India's will peak by 2060. Population in Africa continues to grow, but with economic development there is every reason to believe that it can follow in the footsteps of India and China.
---
"In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.
“If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda.
In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates.
---
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/02/the-sec...
On such a button-pushing subject linking to your own blog. As if you have the very best post ever written on the topic. Even if you did though (which I doubt very much you have) humility should lead you away from self-promotion. If your writing is that great others will eventually submit your posts and link to you, won't they? Also, a quick look at your submissions history shows that every single submission is one of your own blog posts. In short, you are nothing but a self-promoter.
> More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives.
Yes. And. So. What? Where did you get that from the article? Better disease prevention leads to a _reduction_ in population growth. And this is the observed trend.
> limits to growth
Ok. So we have an energy growth ceiling. Yes. And. So. What? Where did you get in the article that Gates is calling for _unbounded_ energy growth? I read a lot of techno-utopianism, I read a lot about disease prevention. But _unbounded_ energy growth. Nope.
> Capitalism is great at increasing the pie, but poor at distributing it to those without capital.
This speaks directly to the article. Gater says that he is a fan of capitalism. He is suggesting that the current economic model is a good model. You are not. (I agree with you to some extent by the way.) You need to articulate a _better_ model instead of just disagreeing. Are you advocating more socialism? A Tobin tax? A carbon tax? What model are you proposing that better distributes wealth than the current one. Arguably Bill Gates's own action show that in order to address his needs he had to _go outside_ capitalism (i.e., he had to turn to philanthropy) to achieve his goals. This and his seeming antipathy to open-source and free-software are two very real areas you could take serious issue with Bill Gates rather than your overpopulation/finite_world/limits_to_growth schtick.
Pity I was late to this party :)
So the best cure for overpopulation isn't limiting growth it is accelerating it.
As much as it sucks to admit, there's no shortcut here. You need to go through every stage of development. Societies can't skip from step A where there is rampant starvation and disease and basic needs aren't met to step D where there is a flourishing middle class and population stability and control, without first going through steps B and C where basic needs are met but there is also overpopulation and widespread poverty.
If you ask me, disease should be our #1 priority. Human beings can do almost anything if they are well, but if they are sick it becomes much, much harder to function and provide for their own basic needs. They are much more likely to starve if they are not well enough to go out and work.
Poverty fuels rich people? Most likely in some cases. Having layer of fear between these two. Either fear/like/hate other and experience themselves thanks to other.
Some play life seriously, some not so, one with serious face will try hang onto ledge for as long as he can, nailing others to the ledge so they won't fall off too. Success is achieved, people don't fall off, but nails in palm makes it no pleasure also.
What alarms me is that there seems to be the morbid implication in your words that disease serves as population control. Improving quality of life and reducing unwanted pregnancy are parallel and not incompatible efforts. And I think they are two of the most important challenges of our generation.
[1] http://www.psfk.com/2013/04/bill-gates-condom-challenge.html
I rather think living is a necessary prerequisite to living better.
Maybe it could e.g. when offering a 'globally funded retirement provision' to people who agree to only have one child. Or maybe if you only offer Malaria/Polio 'technology' to people who agree to this and that condition.
Given this situation, to then turn around and claim that GM is the answer is ludicrous. Modern civilization has clearly lost its way by diverging too far from nature, which abhors a monoculture. The obvious and sustainable path is a move towards heterogeneous planting patterns, and ideally toward greater decentralization in land ownership, production and the re-recognition of longer term concepts such as sustainability, social and environmental concern.
A simple example: I have read that many farms in the US are actually energy-negative, ie. they cannot produce enough calories in agricultural output to offset the oil they burn.
For those here wanting to improve the world through agricultural change, please consider reading some of the philosophy behind permaculture and the short but thought-provoking book The One Straw Revolution then applying technical knowledge to building robots that can efficiently harvest densely interplanted crops from potentially reformed large-scale agricultural operations that may accept a high variety of species and thus embrace natural methods for pest control and moisture retention, eliminating most agricultural overhead in existing operations. New operations should be smaller and decentralized, because we need exercise, nature is nice, and robots aren't free.
Tangentially, last night I met a guy who has spent three years trying to find ways to save coral reefs and said that on a global scale we're screwed - they're all going to be gone within less than a generation. I spent a few weeks in Sumatra last month and the rainforests for which it was once famed are almost gone. Meanwhile in many Asian population centers (I'm in Bangkok at the moment), a view from above confirms that concrete dominates a landscape of air conditioning and energy-inefficient floor to ceiling glass, pockmarked only by the nervous system of fossil fuel burning transportation infrastructure, the odd plane flying overhead about a brown haze, and the glimmer of thousands of unnatural lights feeding on the same fossils, while themselves produced through an alchemy poisonous chemicals. The virus that scarred the landscape this way, humans, potter at all hours throughout, concerning themselves with alcohol, fashion, colosseums of sports on television, and reproduction.
But in this case it does, as quality of life over the entire earth has improved over the past 100 years and continues to improve.
Growing inequality does not mean quality of life is decreasing (the point you are disputing).
> More and more people (in the UK) relying on food banks.
Has general standard of living decreased? By most any measure it has not. People have vastly more resources than their ancestors did, but if you make poor choices yes you may have a visit to a food bank in your future. And there is a food bank to visit.
> Falling real wages, with increased rents.
This part I can agree with in many cases. But, let's not forget the vast improvement in affordable entertainment options available now compared to the past.
You would have us believe everything is worse. This is not true.
More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck.
(I use the term limits to growth in reference to the book Limits To Growth -- http://joshuaspodek.com/the_best_book_on_the_environment_eco... -- which strongly informs my perspective and I recommend to others as particularly relevant here. It offers a systems perspective -- http://joshuaspodek.com/systems-perspective-population -- necessary to create effective strategies to help everyone in the context of a finite planet.)
Reducing suffering caused by disease undoubtedly improves people's lives, but increasing the population without the ability to provide everyone resources doesn't. We know that simply having enough resources for everyone doesn't mean everyone will get enough resources. How we distribute resources matters and that's a social issue, not technical. Trying to solve social issues with technology doesn't work that well. Changing social patterns is much harder. Capitalism is great at increasing the pie, but poor at distributing it to those without capital.
I applaud his optimism and support for reducing suffering from disease and supporting education. I suspect he's helping create a world with similar fraction of people suffering versus happy, just more of them. And accelerating toward limits to growth, some of which we can't overcome with technology.
(If you challenge the belief that the planet has limits to growth or even that we're near any, I recommend the excellent blog "Do the Math" -- http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/post-index -- which looks at physical consequences to growth by a Caltech-trained physicist. I also recommend it if you like reading thoughtful, intelligent blogs by knowledgeable people who do the math behind what they talk about.)