A true Malthusian is a dangerous thing, in my opinion, insofar as they fully claim that the only way that we can all be rich is by limiting population.
It's possible, at any rate, to accept most of the correlations in this article and to reach a very different conclusion: that the earth is capable of more and more population while still redistributing its proceeds. This argument was made by Henry George more than 130 years ago, and still is worth reading[0].
And the argument may have appealed, 130 years ago. Since then we've quintupled our population and gained a much better understanding of carrying capacity. That capacity may be larger or smaller than our current population, but in either case, indefinite growth is not a sustainable plan — unless we know where our next planet is.
It's simultaneously true that infinite growth isn't feasible, and yet true that most predictions on resource depletion haven't been borne out. We can make soil more productive, find new ways of creating potable water, create energy out of seemingly nothing... Most of the suffering from limited resources have been a case of artificial scarcity owing to monopolistic control.
I don't think it's unduly optimistic to agree with the mindset of "Spaceship Earth":[0]
> It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"
>been a case of artificial scarcity owing to monopolistic control.
Well, that sounds like an excuse. 1.6bn people are living in poverty via the Human Poverty Index (HPI) measurement, which is defined as less than earing $1.50 a day. Worse, if we raise the value to $2.50 a day, then we're talking almost half the population of Earth! Half of every living and breathing human right now is poor on a level that I can't comprehend.
Oh we can add more and more excuses like bad government, 'lazy' people, people who should 'move to better jobs', etc but it doesn't make a difference. If the political and economic engines of the world can't keep almost 1/3rd of us out of poverty then its time to consider that maybe we know more about the Earth's carrying capacity today than we did 130 years ago and that you can't just wish post-scarcity into existance nor wish away the effects of human economic activity that ultimately hurts us like climate change as a "Chinese hoax."
We probably can continue to add people but we'll just be making larger numbers in each category, mostly poverty and the poor. Hey, I'm doing well because poor countries tend to work for my interests but that's an accident of birth. Unfortunately, not everyone gets to be born into the life of an urban westerner.
Sure you can point at some changes but you don't know what is causing them and when they're begin to peter off. We do know that a lot of the poverty fixes of late are almost exclusively linked to the fall of communism in Asia. Now they're all on market economies and we still have 1/3rd poverty and 1/2 living with under $2.50 a day.
Now we've eliminated communism, now what? The market approach has itself bottomed out and even wealthy states are struggling with late stage capitalism which is extremely low growth and rising unemployment and taxation unable to keep up with entitlements. On of the dirty little secrets of capitalism is that rich countries need poor countries to stay rich. You can't just raise everyone up. Limited resources will always mean uneven distributions, the same way economies don't naturally have an even distribution of money/resources.
Also one of the main reasons things are better today is become of liberalism in regards to abortion and the lowered population in especially hopeless areas in the 70s and 80s that led to starvation and resource warfare, thus these people aren't here anymore to pad poverty stats. They're dead. We shouldn't see that as a win for economic prosperity.
You don't have to look at just the last couple decades.
You can look at the last 200 years.
Every decade some smart academic makes the same, Malthusian, population bomb, peak oil, or whatever argument.
And every decade that person gets proven wrong, for the last 200 years.
Is this decade different? Are the Malthusians going to proven right NOW even though they have been wrong every single other time they make these predictions? Maybe. But I think I am going to wait a little while before giving that argument any weight at all.
No arguments, no predictions, only evidence.
We are in late stage capitalism once living standards stop going up, and they have yet to do that.
The people that said you wouldn't be able to afford an apartment in overcrowded SF were dead-on right. The people who predicted widespread traffic jams were right.
The people who said that third world countries needed to cut birthrates before they could get richer turned out to be right everywhere.
The people that said Bengala-Desh would get to be like Bengala-Desh were right. As were the people who predicted overcrowding and exodus from the Sahel.
I pick 1960 San Francisco, when it was the home of emerging 1960s culture and twenty year olds with unskilled 3/4 time jobs could buy a house and start a family. (That's the exact same house you need to make $550k to buy today)
I pick 1950s Bengala-Desh because you didn't have to risk your kids lives from flooding because of overpopulation and DDT was just ending the malaria problem (some came back after the ban).
Lots of 1950s third world countries are first world today, like Mexico or Korea. In that case, I'd pick today over 1950s.
There are lots of benefits to growth in per capita income. There are no benefits to growth in GDP from population increase while GDP per capita stagnates.
> The people that said you wouldn't be able to afford an apartment in overcrowded SF were dead-on right. The people who predicted widespread traffic jams were right.
One doesn't need be a Malthusian to have predicted this. This is a simple consequence of Ricardo's Law of Rent, and the Tragedy of the Commons.
And in fact, the problems have been exacerbated by Malthusian-style rationing (ie Prop 13), the exact opposite of Georgist-style solutions for housing and traffic.
> Unfortunately, not everyone gets to be born into the life of an urban westerner.
As a Rawlsian, I'm fixated on this very problem, but I'm drawn to solutions that work to tear down the mechanism (in short, open borders) rather than a Malthusian answer (limiting population) that I'm skeptical will do much to end poverty.
Open borders, of course, don't help very much if life is unaffordable once you cross that border. And again I advise looking towards Henry George for solutions to this problem.
No, "converting energy" is converting energy, and creating energy is generating energy, because those words are synonyms. But this whole point is moot, because when someone "generates energy", what they mean is "generate useable energy" through a process of energy conversion. Even then, conservation of energy doesn't always hold.
If you're going to be pedantic, you could at least be correct.
I am correct. Read the first law of thermodynamics. Energy can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed. "Create energy" is impossible.
And what do you mean that conservation of energy doesn't always hold?
"Create energy" in this context means "Create usable energy through an energy conversion process." As I stated above. So yes, you are correct, if you're being uncharitable to the flexibility of the English language.
>And what do you mean that conservation of energy doesn't always hold?
I mean what I said. Conservation of energy is not a law of nature, it's only a local approximation to the Conservation of the value of the Stress-Energy Tensor. Which when manipulated conservatively, can and does result in the creation and destruction of energy.
Also consider that the carrying capacity of the world isn't fixed, but depends on how good our technology is (with a potential theoretical upper limit). Well tech is improved by people working on and inventing better technology, right? So you get better technology with more people - and with that you can have more people working on better technology. The biggest mistake, and the one all Malthusians made, is to forget that humans are, on average, net produces not net consumers.
While I might generally agree with your first sentence it's just as important to note that post-scarcity thinking and economics can be just as dangerous, and I say this as a very big fan of Henry George.
We must always be aware and cautious of scarcity of resources (there will always be limiting factors) and the competition that will inevitably arise from that while not making that competition an end to itself.
> A true Malthusian is a dangerous thing, in my opinion, insofar as they fully claim that the only way that we can all be rich is by limiting population.
I'm with Julian Simon (in terms of the desirability of manually controlling the birth rate -- I'm against it). People naturally limit their offspring as they become richer -- and why not?
As machines do more and more work and thus people get richer I assume the birth rate will continue to fall. I do think the birth rate is way too high.
We have to limit population growth because of thermodynamics, otherwise we will all die.
If we increase our energy consumption by 1 % per year, we will all be dead in less than 1000 years because at that point the surface temperature of Earth will have reached the boiling point of water because it can not radiate the energy into space. [1]
You may object that we can reduce the energy consumption per capita and therefore have population growth without an increased energy consumption but that does not work.
Starting with the population of 7.4 billion people in 2016 and a population growth rate of 1 % per year, it will take less than 1400 years until body heat alone will raise the surface temperature of Earth above the boiling point of water. [2]
You may now object that we will of course move into space and leave Earth instead of sticking around here until we all get boiled alive. Unfortunately this does not help much either.
With a population growth rate of 1 % per year we have 2685 more years until we run out of places to live in the Milky Way assuming 400 billion stars and one Earth-like colonizable planet per star. Unfortunately 2685 years is not nearly enough time to reach all the stars in the Milky Way. Even if we would be traveling at the speed of light, we could cross just about 2 % in that time.
Even more fundamentally, space has three dimensions and therefore the number of stars and planets we can reach only increases with the third power assuming a homogeneous distribution [3] and will in consequence quickly be overwhelmed by exponential population growth within the reachable volume.
We can push all those numbers to tens of millennia with a growth rate of 0.1 % per year, but that is still the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. So there are very real limits to the possible growth of the human population and the time frames are not that large even with moderate growth rates. [4]
[1] The total emission of an ideal black body with surface area of 510.1 million km² at 373.15 K is 560,791 TW. The world total primary energy supply in 2012 is estimated to have been 155,505 TWh which is 17.75 TW on average. This is a factor of 31,591 from what Earth could radiate into space at 100 °C or 1,041 years of 1 % growth per year.
[2] Assuming an average basal metabolic rate of 80 W, a population growth rate of 1 % and an initial population of 7.4 billion people, it takes 1,383 years to reach an body heat output of 560,791 TW.
[3] Within a galaxy like the Milky Way it actually becomes more like the second power after some time due to the flat shape.
[4] All this assuming a form of living not to different from today. Moving human brains into computers and getting rid of the bodies would certainly impact the numbers, but even then computers will still consume energy. Similarly the numbers could be impacted by major revolutions in physics. I mean really, really major changes.
Of course, I only wanted to argue that ongoing growth is fundamentally not an option, I did not want to argue that this is actually the scenario we are heading towards. At worst growth would just stop once we hit resource limits, which may of course be a very unpleasant experience.
But I totally agree with you that it does not look like population growth will become an issue. Ressource consumption per capita may be a different story, it will take quite some additional resources to bring the entire current world population to first world standards.
It's possible, at any rate, to accept most of the correlations in this article and to reach a very different conclusion: that the earth is capable of more and more population while still redistributing its proceeds. This argument was made by Henry George more than 130 years ago, and still is worth reading[0].
[0] http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP10.html