Abundance and scarcity are both evidenced in deep time by feast and famine qualities in the archaeological record.
We believe in abundance because it happens often enough. Extreme lack of abundance causes survival bias: dead men tell no tales.
The existence of tools which demand time to make and primitive stone tool factories suggest abundance: division of labour is necessary to invest time in tool making for future benefit. There has to be a relative surplus, more food than not, less time for survival only, to make tools work.
We believe in abundance because of millennia of life experience incorrectly or not.
In modern times, most scarcity problems are supply chain not actual exhaustion, diamond mines and gold not withstanding. Rare earths aren't rare. Uranium isn't rare. We aren't running out of lithium. Erlich/Simons explores the reality of abundance in the earths crust.
Things may get expensive or hard to find from time to time but our brains are mostly tuned for optimism.
Extreme pessimism in a species is neither pleasant nor useful. Why live a life of fear, reality not withstanding? Stoicism, that's beneficial. Some hesitancy to optimism? Useful. Unremitting black depression and Calvinistic preordained hell on earth? That's jonestown by another path (Jones sold salvation in the afterlife but you know what I mean)
While your examples like rare earths, uranium and lithium are indeed among the chemical elements that are not very rare (though the differences in abundance between various kinds of rare earths are very large), any engineer should better be well aware about the natural abundances of the elements and in all new designs less abundant elements shall never be used instead of more abundant elements, unless this is really unavoidable.
Some elements are indeed so abundant that they can be used without any worries, like carbon, iron, aluminum, calcium, sodium and more than a dozen others.
The elements with medium abundance, like lithium, are available in quantities that are many thousand times less than the abundant elements, so even if we should be able to use enough of them to cover all our needs, if such elements would constitute e.g. one percent or more of the average composition of all the things we have, then that would mean that it is likely that they are used in quantities that are too large to be sustainable.
The less abundant elements are available only in quantities that are many million times less than the abundant elements, so they should never be used without first making sure that it is impossible to substitute them.
Nowadays, a lot of people all over the world have to spend a lot of work with the search of more abundant substitutes for less abundant elements.
Much of this work could have been avoided if better choices had been made in the past. The reason why many bad choices have been possible is that the costs for most chemical elements that are included in a product are fake, they include only the smaller cost for mining, processing and transportation before the product is made, without adding the greater costs that would be needed for the recovery of the element from an end-of-life product and for repairing the environmental damage caused by its mining.
The payment of these extra costs has been pushed into the future, when someone else will have to pay them, instead of the users of the elements mined now.
On the subject of substitutability, the element chosen to examine in that paper was mercury. According to the paper, "about 2250 tons of mercury were used [in the US] each year [in the period of 1964-1973]".
How much mercury does this US now use? According to the USGS, the domestic consumption of mercury in the US in 2018 was 9 tons.
Until you've innovated your way into living and growing your food underground because the surface of the earth has become so hot or suffers from so extreme climate events that it has become impossible to actually live on it.
Until space underground becomes so scarce that it becomes impossible to live...then you innovate and terraform the atmosphere to make the surface inhabitable again.
A few years back, a 60 Minutes segment was on a startup was making grid scale batteries out of seawater and dirt. Haven't heard anything about it since.
Lithium batteries are great due to their energy/weight ratio. But grid scale batteries have no issue with size or weight, it's energy/cost that matters. And seawater/dirt is cheap as dirt (!).
> We believe in abundance because of millennia of life experience incorrectly or not.
It's only not been near-universal to experience at least one severe famine that kills many people you know, in a full human lifespan, in the Western and (relatively—this goes back a while) developed world, since like 1600 (thanks, potatoes and corn!).
Even then, wasting away hungry for entire seasons was still something you were pretty likely experience a few times. Only industrial nitrogen production mostly ended that. Luckily, malaria and cholera and such kept the number of mouths to feed in check, LOL.
> It's only not been near-universal to experience at least one severe famine that kills many people you know, in a full human lifespan, in the Western and (relatively—this goes back a while) developed world, since like 1600 (thanks, potatoes and corn!).
That's phrased that kinda weird, so am I correct that it means: "Before circa 1600, it was near universal that in one's life they would experience severe famine that kills many people you know" ?
I think that's too strong of a claim. If someone survived infancy and childhood, they often lived a decent lifespan (though childbirth and war killed many adult women and men, respectively). I don't think "severe famine" was so common that almost everyone would experience it at least once.
This isn't something I've studied so I'm going off the small bits I've read; is there anything to support that claim?
Free markets do a fine job of justifying their value with straight facts, no need to reach like that. Apply whatever you're considering free markets to other places & times, and it wouldn't have had the same outcome. It took a lot of things coming together, but most of them were scientific advances or just luck (new world plants exist and are awesome, was a really big one)
It's had the same outcome every time. Take a look at Lenin's collectivization of agriculture. Production collapsed, and famine resulted. He then instituted the New Economic Program, and production was restored. Collectivization was applied again, and it collapsed again. Finally, the Soviet Union allowed farmers to farm certain parcels and keep the profits, which staved off famine, supplemented with wheat shipped from Kansas (known as "the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union").
Pretty sad, as before 1917 Ukraine was known as the Breadbasket of Europe.
Did you know that the Pilgrims tried communism for their first year? They starved. Then they switched to private ownership, and fed themselves.
There were some notable historical events in early 20th Century Eastern Europe that quite famously had an impact on how many farmers were around to farm.
The Ukrainian famine of the 30s was not caused by either world war. It was caused by forced collectivization. It was caused by Stalin. It was peacetime at that time.
Failure to embrace/invent capitalism sooner isn't the main reason basically all graphs measuring anything related to humans start to shoot up in 19th century. Lots of factors contributed. There must be (given it happened) reasons that, while doing very well in some ways, more-free-market approaches didn't wildly outcompete everything else much sooner, though some efforts were made that way well before the 19th century (and, again, did sometimes experience notable, but not categorically-different, levels of success)
> Failure to embrace/invent capitalism sooner isn't the main reason basically all graphs measuring anything related to humans start to shoot up in 19th century.
All? Nope. Only the ones that were more free market, and the more free market the more things "shot up".
Evidence? The millions of poor leaving everything behind and coming from Europe to the US.
I don't think it's an honor, but I couldn't care less about my karma points. I just enjoy telling the truth, whether it's popular or not.
I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism, despite no historical evidence of its success anywhere. And, on the flip side, the consistent success of free markets.
My favorite excuse for the prosperity of the US free market was the fact(!) that the millions of Europeans who migrated here were the wealthy(!) of Europe.
> I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism, despite no historical evidence of its success anywhere. And, on the flip side, the consistent success of free markets.
Indoctrination.
> My favorite excuse for the prosperity of the US free market was the fact(!) that the millions of Europeans who migrated here were the wealthy(!) of Europe.
I don't think free markets are the ultimate solution. For example, the Irish Potato Famine was made worse by absentee landlords selling potatoes as a cash export crop, contributing to the single-crop dependence and the overall famine.
Similar dynamics occur in bananna republics, the congo, etc... Free markets are great for wealthy countries with lots of functioning social and political institutions.
Free markets have been great at lifting many, many people out of poverty. However, unrestricted free markets can have horrible consequences. Just google for a few examples. Free markets work with functioning legal and social systems. I don't think it's fair to characterize the elimination of poverty as solely due to free markets.
I'm no expert on 19th century Ireland, but the economic system there appears to be a vestige of feudalism rather than a free market. There was no free market for land:
Slavery is a great evil, then, now, and forever. Nevertheless, antebellum American plantation slavery, where the overwhelming majority of persons in chattel bondage were held, was focused on cash crops like tobacco and cotton, and not on feeding the populace.
Slaves were used to grow rice (South Carolina, Georgia), sugarcane (Louisiana), corn (Virginia, to Mississipi), wheat, and vegetables (sweet potatoes, beans, okra, collard greens, squash, cabbage etc)
They were used in cattle ranching and hog husbandry. They worked as butchers and meat processors. In places like the Chesapeake Bay region enslaved individuals were involved in oyster harvesting and processing.
The division of the US into slave and free states produced an increasingly stark prosperity contrast between the two. That disparity underlay the friction between the two groups.
Quite. It was very noticeable, and it was one of the reasons that people in the South resented the North and so were keen on secession. It's that pride that keeps one from admitting to making mistakes. I think many in the South understood unconsciously that industrialization was the future, not slavery, but they couldn't bring themselves to admit it, and the local slave-holding interests were culturally powerful. It took a long time to break that culture.
I find the Albion's Seed[1] hypothesis to be considerably more convincing for explaining the Southern resentment of the North. The England that colonized the New World was far from a united front. I'm not going to attempt to summarize because it's a complex issue that I won't be able to do justice to in a few sentences. Nevertheless I recommend anyone who is interested to read that book or find a summary from someone more confident of his ability than me. The short version though is that the English immigrants to the new world were neither culturally or even racially[2] homogenous.
[2] This is why the framers fabricated a notion of "White" identity, to create solidarity where none had really existed. To understand what they meant by race one must look at contemporary dictionaries. Needless to say the word meant something very different over 200 years ago than it does today.
I've not read it. Certainly the colonies were made of different sub-cultures, and that would and did have a major impact in self-identity in the colonies. But even in the South there were large differences from one State to the next, and that leaves slavery- and climate-caused industrialization disparities between North and South as the main drivers of that resentment of the North, and that chip on their shoulder almost certainly exacerbated the South's cultural attachment to slavery. By 1861 the people of the South definitely saw themselves as quite apart from the people of the North, and even quite apart from each other (organizing as a confederacy was not just to be starkly different from the federal North, but also because they had and wanted to maintain very strong national identities in each Southern State).
In the South, which lagged way behind the North for the simple reason that slavery was a disincentive to innovation and industrialization. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this. The difference between slave-holding South and mostly-/entirely-slave-free North was stark.
Slavery didn't build the U.S. The mostly-slavery-free North built the U.S.
The "mostly-slavery-free North" was where the industrialised (that is, high-value-add) cotton-processing factories and mills were located.
It may not have harboured slaves, but it was definitely profiting by them.
And early stages of industrialisation, most notably the cotton gin, extended the viability of slave-based plantation labour by several more decades, according to extensive accounts.
The North certainly did trade with the South, and thereby make money. But when the Southern economy was cut off from them, they continued to prosper, which the Southern economy ground to a halt.
The Southerners had expected that they had a trump card with cotton exports to the North, but oops.
That occurred as the North was transitioning from an agricultural-based economy to one more grounded in transportation (railroads), industry (steelmaking), oil (petroleum, first exploited in the US in Pennsylvania and New York), electrical products (motors, generators, telephones, etc.), and more, all in the period 1850--1880. The real take-off of the North was largely post-1900 with automobile manufacture and the rise of New York City as a global financial and trading centre.
The South languished in part due to Reconstruction and being politically repressed by the North following the Civil War, but also for geographic and climatic reasons: it was hot and humid, and would remain hot and humid until electrification and air conditioning arrived ~1930--1950, the oil booms of Texas, Oklahoman, and Louisiana (~1900 -- 1940), and arrival of petrochemical industry (1950--).
Agreed that cotton was a ... weaker thread ... binding South and North than the South would have hoped for.
And whilst we're talking regional economic development, though an unrelated territory: I found it interesting a while back to find that Los Angeles in the mid-20th century was often the second-largest manufacuturing centre across a whole slew of industries: oil, automobiles, aircraft, tyres, among them. I've yet to find a good explanation of this, though my own hunch is that it was a combination of factors:
- Local petroleum sources, that is, a tremendous energy supply.
- Far enough from East Coast manufacturing that a local industry made sense.
- A sufficiently large local population to feed that demand.
This pattern emerged after the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 in San Francisco which greatly dampened development of Northern California, as well as the Bay Area's geographic limitations (a small peninsula, poor cross-bay transport until the creation of the Golden Gate and SF-Oakland Bay bridges in the 1930s), as well as a largely agricultural / timber orientation of Northern California's economy, with secondary strengths in transportation (ports, railroads) and finance.
Cotton was also a thread (good joke) attaching the South to the UK, and it was where the resentment of protectionist policies came from. It's all related: slavery, cotton exports, non-industrialization, cultural and economic resentments, dependence on free trade rather than protectionism. It was a very bad mix, so it's no surprise that it ended in war.
The timing was such that it was too late for the South to be able to win independence -- the North was already too strong. But when the North was weaker the drive to secession was also weaker because the resentments were bred in part by the stark contrast in prosperity. The North had to get strong enough to win the war for the South to be willing to go or endure the war.
Sam Houston understood all of this, and for his troubles of advising Texas stay in the Union he was removed as governor by the legislature.
Which pre-Columbian Indians? There'a a big difference between the Iroquois, Navajo, and the Lakota ways of life, and that's just naming a few very well known tribes in the territory of the present day USA. And for what it's worth, none of those societies had anything remotely like a big government, so they were closer to a free market than any industrialized state.
Also just because arable land is there doesn't mean it's being farmed effectively. The Iroquois were a relatively sophisticated agrarian society, but the Lakota were essentially fire hunter gatherers by comparison. And of course the Navajo worked wonders feeding themselves in an extremely arid environment.
Don't get me wrong I'm a big fan of free markets. On the other hand all the successful farmers who are personally known to me either established their business on the back of generous government loans in the latter half of the 20th century, or inherited or otherwise acquired a concern that did. I'm a big fan of small government, but I'm an even bigger fan of food security, so not starving is definitely an area where I'm open to big government intervention. That's not to downplay the creation of perverse incentives that come out of those policies, but the fact of the matter is nothing is perfect and maybe it's worth accepting a little inefficiency to avoid famine.
So yeah I'd say it's more the US federal government's interventionist policies that have caused this country to make such effective use of its arable land and not the invisible hand at work.
From what I read, all of them that were investigated.
> so they were closer to a free market than any industrialized state.
The Indian economies were pretty basic, as far as I can tell. They did engage in trade, but also raiding and slavery. They did not appear to have much of a conception of inalienable rights, or of individuals owning plots of land, although there was certainly the concept of tribal land. Frankly, not a whole lot is known about pre-Columbian Indian societies. Even estimates of their numbers vary by over an order of magnitude.
Much of what we do know comes from random accounts and letters written by Europeans, such as how the Cheyenne lived and operated.
Farming in colonial times and in the US got its start with giving away land to settlers who promised to farm it.
> maybe it's worth accepting a little inefficiency to avoid famine
The famines ended in the US around 1800 and never reappeared. We're doing fine.
This may also be attributed to untapped resources that major companies are exploring and even already exploiting some of them perfect example is Moon and Mars
You need to do better than that link -- Several history classes I have had all discussed the dust bowl as an ecological catastrophe and a famine. I think that's a broadly accepted and uncontroversial definition.
Tge link you provided discusses raising crop prices and, at least the on the first page, doesn't refute the dust bowl.
The reason that prices needed to be raised was because the dust bowl had cause a famine and the collapse of food prices. Even where crops had been successful, the prices were too low for farmers to make a profit so they destroyed their crops rather than sending them to market. It was largely a failure of unrestricted free markets.
Again, all this is a fairly uncontroversial interpretation.
> The Grapes of Wrath is a novel.
Yes, a novel about the dust bowl and it's consequences.
Think about what low crop prices means. It means FOOD IS CHEAP. That's utterly inconsistent with famine. And Roosevelt destroying zillions of pigs and letting their carcasses rot in ditches is famine? It beggars belief.
> It was largely a failure of unrestricted free markets.
The dust bowl was caused by unsustainable farming practices, which were changed as a result. The Depression was caused by the Fed (read "Monetary History of the United States" by Milton Friedman. Not a novelist.)
> Yes, a novel about the dust bowl and it's consequences.
Novels are fictional, and historical proof of nothing at all. Steinbeck was not a historian, and was known to exaggerate for dramatic effect. There are plenty of history books on the Depression written by professional historians. Any credible claims have no reason to rely on fiction.
P.S. My dad went to public school in Long Beach in the Depression. He sat next to Oakies. They weren't starving. Times were hard, yes. But it wasn't famine.
Your original comment was how free markets, seemingly alone, had fixed hunger in America. The response was: "American famines existed long after the year 1800. You ever heard of the Dust Bowl? The Grapes of Wrath?"
During the great Depression, food was, in general, both cheap and largely unavailable. The prices that farmers could get for many of their crops had fallen to a level that the cost of getting their crops to market would result in them losing money. So they destroyed a lot of their crops. Again, this is some basic American history, easily found in text books for High School and college classes. Essentially, it was an economic problem. There was physical food and crops. However, the price farmers could get for food had fallen to below the level that they could profit from it. The government had decided to implement price supports. It might be hard to believe, but that's what happened.
People here at HN know what novels and history books -- there is no need to insult anyone by explaining it. The book, Grapes of Wrath, was clearly brought up to illustrate a point, not as a proof.
I'm willing to go along with characterizing The Dust Bowl as a time of famine in America, and one that happened after your claim, that free markets eliminated the specter of famine in the US.
Here's a cite for you: "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes. A history of the Depression, it does not mention "famine".
If you've got a cite from a real history book there was famine in the US in the 1930's, feel free to post it.
P.S. I have a copy of "AP United States History" from the "Research & Education Association, 639 pages. It has no mention of famine during the Dust Bowl.
”How can you reconcile cheap food being unavailable food? Doesn't make any sense"
I've given a brief explanation twice already. If it doesn't even make sense to you then, honestly, don't know what to say further.
As to the famine point, lets try google... The first result is as follows, from Wikipedia: ”The abandonment of homesteads and financial ruin resulting from catastrophic topsoil loss led to widespread hunger and poverty". You clearly disagree that it qualifies as famine.
This isn't a formal historical discussion, and Im not a historian. The fact of widespread hunger and poverty isn't in dispute by any reputable historian and I'm honestly not interested in debating minutia.
Hunger, yes, famine, no. There's a huge difference in degree. I know it's popular these days to use extreme words trying to make a point, but it isn't acceptable in a serious discussion. Wikipedia did not say "famine".
> I've given a brief explanation twice already.
Sorry, it makes no sense. What makes food cheap is abundance, not scarcity. Do you really think that if the country was gripped by famine, that FDR would have gotten away with slaughtering millions of pigs and leaving the meat to rot?
You used the word famine earlier in this tiresome little thread.
WalterBright: "The US was the first country to eliminate the specter of famine around 1800. Thanks to free markets."
It's delusional to argue that The Dust Bowl was a time of cheap and abundant food. As far as I can tell, that's your claim, but I'm not interested in discussing this further with you.
First google search result for dust bowl famine. Government websites explicitly mention “famine”. Is the Library of Congress a good enough source for you?
The single reason we live in a world where scarcity problems are supply chains issues is because of fossil fuels. Stuff does not extract itself, stuff does not move by itself, remove fossil fuels from the equation and the whole civilization you've come to know, love and also hate, crumbles.
Current limitations :
- Using that almost free energy from the ground changes our environment in a way that threatens our survival (which will have to rely on even more energy expenditure)
- What happens when we run out ? (Actually it's more about spending more and more energy for disminishing returns)
- Do we have enough to make the transition to renewables/nuclear while shielding ourselves for the currently happening global warming ?
With the development of shale oil and gas, the U.S. now has hundreds of years' worth of proven natural gas reserves.
The end of oil has been predicted for 60 years and it's never come. It will come some day, but right now it looks like we're very far from exhausting shale oil.
Old European fairy-tales do mention famine and war as a backdrop. Our ancestors were perfectly used to the condition of "mostly scarcity, sometimes abundance".
You are correct that extreme scarcity will kill everyone, but places where extreme scarcity actually happens (e.g. Svalbard or Atacama) were never settled in the first place.
Traditionally inhabited places (prior to the Industrial Revolution) were the ones that could sustain some population indefinitely, and if the situation slowly worsened, people abandoned them and went elsewhere, instead of passively waiting for death. And they took their memories with them.
Moderating optimism is overrated. Most people should make an effort to be more optimistic, due to our biological negativity bias. That will serve them better.
Do you have any academic or even non academic reference for this so called biological negativity bias? My entire life experience has been that people are too optimistic for their own good not the other way around.
Which if true suggest that a slight tendency to negativity has served an evolutionary purpose: survival.
It would be in line with the fact that you've noticed people who got in trouble for being overly optimistic ("too optimistic for their own good")
On the other hand, you may also think that is serves little purpose in a civilized society (by which I mean a society where making a mistake/a judgment error is not punished by death by your environment) and may be a hindrance in your life.
I don't have an opinion about it in general but I do think humanity is being overly optimistic about its ability to stop/tame climate change while aiming at achieving/conserving a way of life that relies on energetic abundance. It looks very much like collective denial to me. It's like hearing a addict telling he can stop tomorrow if he really wants. Let's hope I am wrong because if I am right it's not gonna be pretty, it's already not looking great.
Yes, I do tend to agree, but on some things (AGW geohacking) I'm less sure. Mostly I agree. Maybe it's best to moderate euphoria and stick to wry humour in dark times.
I guess to orbit back, the "rational" bit here is "the evidence supports it" (I still think we're in survivor bias but considering the other fork I'll take this one)
> Extreme lack of abundance causes survival bias: dead men tell no tales.
Not really; that would require everyone to die. But mostly famines have survivors, and their experience of the famine was not "I don't see what everyone else was complaining about".
There's actually way more 'abundance' around the Earth then 50 years ago, it's just spread out more evenly.
For example, even in Cambodia there's a Rolls-Royce dealership now. And even the 50th percentile Cambodian household has the material wealth now of at least a 5th percentile US household.
Those saying 'OK Boomer' are mostly just ignorant and/or frustrated because they expected to have even more wealth automatically, when that doesn't make sense anymore now that the entire world can effectively participate in the market.
> The existence of tools which demand time to make and primitive stone tool factories suggest abundance: division of labour is necessary to invest time in tool making for future benefit. There has to be a relative surplus, more food than not, less time for survival only, to make tools work.
I don't think that's really true. The species wasn't permanently on the brink of starvation such that they didn't have time to bend down and pick up a stick and use it to add to a shelter or throw at an animal, so in the very literal extreme sense we carry a surplus of energy with us. But the equation isn't necessarily much different between one person dividing their time between making tools and hunting, and a division over a slightly larger group. Efficiency improvements with primitive tools would have been large and quite immediate. Also people would have obvious and immediate specializations before any formal organization. Some would be faster, some stronger, some better climbers, some better at sharpening sticks. So there wouldn't have to be some significant build up of a surplus before pretty sophisticated tool making and division of labor would emerge, IMO.
Some claim "primitive" people only needed 3-5 hours per day (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society), I expect perhaps less in times of great abundance. Leaving plenty of time for knapping - if that's what you want to do.
IMHO abundance solves itself, as population grows past carrying capacity, leading to famine, war, conquest and death. (The cycle being eventually broken by TV then reddit).
Division of labour is only necessary to create time in an economy detached from survival.
An average might come out to 5 hours a day for food but I’d bet that’s not evenly distributed and looks a lot more like extremely long days spent hunting or gathering while plants are in season separated by times of very little action while you are basically starving and rationing the food you have left.
Your second statement is literally the Malthusian hypothesis which has been proven wrong repeatedly.
Division of labour is a good thing. It really sucks having to do everything yourself poorly because you don’t have enough time to do it right.
I feel your comment adds nothing of value. It would be interesting if you could contribute to the discussion if you had anything of value to contribute. Posting arrogant comments that boil down to a dubious homework assignment is just noise.
Do they dispute that fruit only grows at certain times of year as do tubers or that animals are migratory and calve once a year? Perhaps they take issue with the entire concept of seasons?
Right direction, but it's much more basic than that. Organisms have a tendency for both abundance and scarcity because both have existed throughout our evolutionary history going back to single-celled organisms or even before... and will continue to exist for as long as we exist. It's part of the optimization of resource consumption for survival.
Up until the Neolithic Revolution human population was stable, before that people were venturing out to hostile lands in search for food, as populated land couldn't carry any more.
Infanticide as a population control measure was the norm, early Australian explorers recorded about 30% of children being killed and/or eaten business as usual. There is no reason to think they were unique, equilibrium with your food chain is a cruel mistress.
Early stone quarries don't necessarily speak of abundance, it might have been a measure to extract more food out of existing area when time spent hunting/foraging barehanded didn't yield more food.
> early Australian explorers recorded about 30% of children being killed and/or eaten business as usual.
This seems extremely unlikely.
While it is true that early European explorers of Australia were notorious for not surviving and starving en route, it is also true that very few of them, if indeed any, took children along as a form of emergency ration.
Can indicate which "early Australian explorer" you're thinking of?
Perhaps you're thinking of explorers commenting on indigenous behaviour? I'm not finding much on eating children in the works of Francis James Gillen & Walter Baldwin Spencer so again, perhaps you can provide a source?
Good on you for the reply and the two sources, have an upvote for engaging :)
Quadrant
Well, there's your problem - it's not a science or anthropology journal it's an unabashedly conservative wank fest for overly educated private school chums that utterly hate the proles and Australian aborigines.
> According to University of Michigan professor of anthropology Aram Yengoyan:
Who has spent how much time in Australian aboriginal societies?
> Contemporary European observers of nomadic, tribal Aborigines were in apparent agreement that about 30 per cent of new-born Aboriginal children were routinely killed.
Again, no surprises there - there's an extremely long list of things that early European observers agreed upon about aborigines ... and most of them were garbage, worthless save as justification for having repeated massacres of local groups upset about being pushed from their lands.
> According to Samuel Gason (1845–97), an early settler of the Flinders Ranges, writing of the Dieyerie tribe of the Cooper’s Creek area between South Australia and Queensland, “about thirty per cent are murdered by their mother at birth”.
These are the same early settlers frequently associated with poisoning water holes and killing the very people they spent some time defaming as barbaric.
The problem with all these accounts is that many aboriginal groups continued through until recent times with their traditional practices, in the Western Desert [1], far north Queensland, remote Kimberley regions (where I'm from) etc. and anthropologists didn't find much in the way of actual baby eating.
What you have in the Quadrant article is a collection of all the European "Aboriginals are heathen scum" gossip of times past bundled up and presented as fact.
Your second link, the paper on scihub by Collishaw (1978) is, umm, kind of long winded and noncommittal - it passively rejects the 30% figure thus:
both reported that 30% of the children were killed at birth.
These contrast with other reports from S.W. Australia of infrequent infanticide.
and then never really commits to a frequency figure other than discussing at length the kinds of things that happened at much the same frequency in European countries at the same time - deformed children were often killed at birth, in hard times with not enough to eat weaker children would die to allow stronger children to survive.
It's an odd paper that has a few sound sources (Spencer .. good source, but unsurprisingly had a strong European point of view) but largely appears to repeat a lot of settler gossip.
So, basically, anybody who wrote about it is a part of an evil white conspiracy engaging in a coordinated attack on the noble savage, and William Rubinstein is just as well a bigot by virtue of publishing in Quadrant.
It was a universal phenomenon not disputed by anyone of note, some societies (i.e. Marshall Islanders) developing a complicated system of who gets not to kill their child, and assuming Australian Aboriginals should be seen as a null hypothesis with no serious evidence to the contrary, and a fair amount of supporting evidence.
As for contemporary Europeans, your claim is not supported by near exponential population growth ever since the Neolithic Revolution, as agricultural mothers didn't have to walk ~9km per day carrying all her non-walking babies. Children sure died left right and center, but infanticide was a no-no since at least the Middle Ages.
> So, basically, anybody who wrote about it is a part of an evil white conspiracy engaging in a coordinated attack on the noble savage, and William Rubinstein is just as well a bigot by virtue of publishing in Quadrant.
If you say so - I'd have phrased it differently myself and pointed out the history of Quadrant articles on Australian Aboriginals that proved to be dubious at best.
For anyone outside of Australia or unaware of Quadrant, its editor for many years was on a crusade to downplay European interactions with aboriginals. It's a massive multi volume kind of side issue to argue, see [1] [2] for airplane overview.
As a general rule, skin colour aside, colonisers did have a tendancy to overstate their virtue at the expence of those whose land they appropriated; check in with India, Canada, much of Africa, etc. There's a bit of a pattern.
Infanticide at low freqency being universal is correct - on that we agree, and Europe was just as prone as elsewhere, just as cannabilism was quite the fad in Europe a lot more recently than you might suspect if you're not already aware.
Where we disagree is in this 30% of kids killed and some high percentage eaten nonsense.
> Agricultural mothers didn't have to walk ~9km per day
That sounds about right for anyone tending crops when planting or harvesting by hand and many mothers hand tie wraps for carrying their babies ... you, ahhh, did know that I trust?
It also sounds as if you're under the delusion that Australian Aboriginals were nomadic on a daily basis and never settled down in one place for months at a time.
>Where we disagree is in this 30% of kids killed and some high percentage eaten nonsense.
Well you disagree not with me but with the likes of Marvin Harris and Joseph Birdsell (their estimate go as high as 50%).
>That sounds about right for anyone tending crops when planting or harvesting by hand and many mothers hand tie wraps for carrying their babies ... you, ahhh, did know that I trust?
A typical peasant family could have as little as 20 acres of land, i.e something like 80*1000m, walking that many times over daily seems far-fetched, and the wealthier they were the higher the probability that a nursing mother would be left alone. Otherwise she'd sure carry one baby around, but by the time the next one came up the previous one could be left at home. You might have also heard about them traditional gender roles, where most of the hard work in the field was a man's responsibility, women mostly tending to animal and a (rather small) vegie patch/garden, spinning, weaving, sewing, cooking, cleaning, and yes, rearing children.
Your conjecture that sedentary people had to walk as much as hunter-gatherers to feed themselves has to be a joke.
And yes, the super low food density of any untilled land means you have to walk - a lot - to feed yourself. Doesn't mean there wasn't a temporary camp for a few weeks at a time, you still have to walk a fair distance around that camp to hunt and forage.
You're getting into Bruce Pascoe territory here, with imaginary huts and grain fields.
We are not taking Nazi seriously either when they write about Jews or other non-Germans. It is not a conspiracy theory to believe that colonizers and genociders make stuff up so that their victims sound evil.
So basically the entirety of research on paleolithic infanticide is wrong because... Nazis?
On the other hand, the modern trend is to make stuff up about yourself and your ancestors who brought a lot of this world from misery of the stone age to prosperity, including for the colonized and genocided.
> In modern times, most scarcity problems are supply chain not actual exhaustion, diamond mines and gold not withstanding. Rare earths aren't rare. Uranium isn't rare. We aren't running out of lithium. Erlich/Simons explores the reality of abundance in the earths crust.
Everything eventually becomes rare if not used judiciously. This mindset of unlimited supply is flawed. It leads to the eventual destruction. Probably that's why most ancient civilizations had rules to only take what's needed from the nature.
For example in Western Countries, crabs and lobsters were once seen as "poor man's food". They are now a gourmet luxury item.
> For example in Western Countries, crabs and lobsters were once seen as "poor man's food". They are now a gourmet luxury item.
As an aside, I believe this mostly had to do with refrigeration & tank technology. They need to be kept alive all the way to the consumer. Before that was possible they were only really available to the consumer in a preserved form.
Looks as though it may have stalled a bit since 2015. But before that lobster catch definitely grew a lot.
Obviously with things like lobsters there'll be geographical variations, but I don't think there's any reason to suppose that lobsters have become a luxury good due to scarcity.
Evidence of lobster use comprises midden remains, artwork, artefacts, writings about lobsters, and written sources describing the fishing practices of indigenous peoples.
I can't be the only one that loves a massive untouched midden pile.
> Everything eventually becomes rare if not used judiciously.
Who judges what is "judiciously"?
Doomers have been predicting Peak Oil for more than 50 years, but we keep finding more. Malthusians predicted all sorts of awful things, but we keep growing more food, expanding where we build homes, etc.
> This mindset of unlimited supply is flawed. It leads to the eventual destruction.
The mindset that destruction is around the corner is _rarely_ true and more often impedes development which saves lives and improves quality of life.
Nothing is unlimited. But just as we over-fished lobsters and moved onto other food sources, so we will with everything else. Don't panic. Innovate.
> Nothing is unlimited. But just as we over-fished lobsters and moved onto other food sources, so we will with everything else. Don't panic. Innovate.
While it is true that nothing is unlimited and humans have historically adapted their behavior when resources become scarce, the argument of not panicking and relying solely on innovation to solve resource depletion concerns is overly optimistic and potentially dangerous.
Firstly, the comparison to over-fishing lobsters and moving on to other food sources oversimplifies the issue of resource depletion on a global scale. While localized shifts in consumption patterns are possible, the depletion of critical resources like fossil fuels, freshwater, and certain minerals poses more complex challenges. Merely assuming that innovation will provide an easy solution overlooks the significant time, effort, and investment required to develop and implement sustainable alternatives.
Secondly, relying solely on innovation to address resource depletion ignores the urgency of the issue. Natural resources are not infinite, and some of them, once depleted, cannot be easily replaced. Delaying action in the hope that future innovations will come to the rescue can lead to irreparable damage to the environment and exacerbate existing global challenges like climate change.
Additionally, innovation itself can be a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to create more efficient and sustainable solutions, it can also contribute to resource depletion when not guided by responsible practices. For example, the rapid advancement of technology can lead to increased electronic waste, which is already a significant environmental problem.
Rather than dismissing concerns and promoting blind faith in innovation, a more prudent approach would involve a combination of strategies. We should focus on both responsible resource management, such as conservation and sustainable practices, and continuous innovation to find alternative solutions. Emphasizing a diversified approach can help mitigate the risks associated with resource depletion and foster a more balanced and resilient future.
Innovation is an essential component of addressing the resource depletion. But we must not overlook the severity of the problem and the need for urgent and responsible action. Relying solely on innovation without taking immediate measures to manage resources responsibly can lead to irreversible consequences for the planet and future generations.
I have a funny and illustrative story about abundance and scarcity mindsets. I used to work in an office that had just a few too few forks in the kitchen. Because of this, people hoarded forks, often forgetting they had one at their desk and taking a second one back. Even though there were only a few fewer forks than people, there was almost never a fork available in the kitchen.
One lunch hour I walked to the thrift store down the road, bought a bag of forks for three bucks, and put them in the kitchen. Once there were enough forks, people stopped hoarding and we had more forks than we could ever need. It's about as clear an illustration of scarcity vs abundance mindset I've ever seen.
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery"
There's a line you cross - maybe call it "enough" - that has an enormous psychological effect on our well-being.
I think there's a similar sort of effect with the economy. If the economy is good, people (top to bottom) make positive plans for the future, spend with certainty, relax and sleep well.
It's also an excellent illustration of exponential effects, how just a few things over a threshold of thousands can make a disproportionately huge difference.
Those forks in the extra bag were probably worth hundreds of dollars each to the office in terms of time and productivity savings from all the effort saved from fork hoarding.
Very interesting and insightful article. But I always find it odd when historical articles omit the role of massive resource extraction from the colonies that provided the driving force in European economies to be able to convert all the ideas into actual reality.
When people assert that extractive empires, which go back to the beginning of civilization, are the "driving force" behind the order-of-magnitude per-capita wealth increase of the last couple of centuries -- and often put it like it needs no argument -- that's what struck me as odd when I first started seeing this claim a lot in recent years.
(I agree the sins of the colonizers and their role in European growth are worth talking about, of course. But the view where they were obviously the key factor behind a phase change in the rate of progress now shared with the majority of the world, that's really alien. I guess we both find each other odd.)
European growth was propelled by a diversity of extracted resources. Previous empires extracted mostly food. A system such as the Dutch East Indies in the 1600s, where the natives were forced to neglect growing food for themselves and tend to the production of spices instead (to be sold halfway across the world) [1], would have been completely out of place as the way to run a province of the Roman or the Ottoman Empire. Another example is that the Indians were forced to stop producing their own textiles ("calicoes" that were quite popular on the world market) in order to buy inferior English products instead (for which they would ship the raw cotton); again, something never encountered at this scale in the classical or medieval worlds [2].
The article covers a large enough chunk of time that it gets very awkward to talk about "colonialism" as such. One of the incidents the article describes was the Dutch Revolt, where the people of the Netherlands overthrew their oppressive foreign rulers and began to flourish as an independent country. A shining example of an anti-colonial revolt, except that for historiographical reasons we don't call it that.
Do you think the extraction of resources created wealth and progress at home and abroad?
I have it fixed in my head that progress generally requires an external catalyst. In 2023, it would be very controversial to suggest Europe and the historical colonies are both wealthier as a result.
I have seen how the Spanish destroyed La Paz's natural environment yet it is a bustling city. What do you think?
No, I think the extraction of resources from the colonies created a lot of wealth in Europe. In fact, a very strong argument could be made that that's where our (euro-centric) belief in abundance comes from.
Why the colonies were so adversely affected is a bit more complicated, and I think is more related to destruction of existing societal institutions and the installation of deliberately extractive institutions.
Wealth was definitely created in the colonies but the native inhabitants were almost always adversely affected. In the current wealthiest country in the world, it was the European migrants that benefited while the natives were mostly killed or eliminated.
People might debate how much of the killing was intentional but I wouldn't have thought it controversial to say that American natives, by and large, did not reap the benefits of colonization and actually incurred major losses.
> In the current wealthiest country in the world, it was the European migrants that benefited while the natives were mostly killed or eliminated.
The aboriginal peoples of the Americas mostly died from diseases which they hadn't been exposed to. It was tragic but not unique and rarely deliberate.
But what about the smallpox blankets? Well, smallpox isn't spread through bedding, and that single story happened in the late 1800s after centuries of the aboriginal peoples dying of disease.
Sure, they were monsters for _trying_ to kill those people with smallpox, but it didn't work.
There was plenty of war, also, and later displacement and Indian Schools and other atrocities, but we shouldn't promote a "noble savage" myth or misrepresent what killed the aboriginal peoples: it was disease as a natural consequence of contact with foreign peoples.
There is a difference between traditional colonies that were exploited for resources and some of their wealth was stolen and those like the US where the natives were outright exterminated and all the wealth stolen outright.
A world of difference between say the philippines or india and 'settler colonies' of the US, Canada, etc.
When people talk europeans exploiting their colonies, most are talking about traditional colonies, not settler colonies which are ultimately european nations themselves.
> Wealth was definitely created in some colonies, the wealthiest country in the world is made up of former colonies.
Insofar as the mother country was inexperienced at having colonies and lax at imposing its will on them. The British tried hard to prevent America from establishing any industries and reduce it to just importing everything at the cost of raw resources. They got a bit distracted in the 1600s with civil war and religious strife, and in the 1700s with fighting the French; so a bit of wealth accumulated in America anyway. (Much if not most of it belonged to smugglers.)
In the 1800s the British imperialists got their act together and became much more efficient at extracting wealth from their colonies, as evidenced by massive famines ( Ireland, India), opium wars etc.
> The British tried hard to prevent America from establishing any industries and reduce it to just importing everything at the cost of raw resources. They got a bit distracted in the 1600s with civil war and religious strife, and in the 1700s with fighting the French; so a bit of wealth accumulated in America anyway. (Much if not most of it belonged to smugglers.)
Its kind of odd that people miss this (and particularly the first sentence) since that’s the big picture behind essentially each of the specific grievances that led to the rebellion.
I imagine this is true. It was strange passing a mine in Bolivia owned by a company local to myself in the UK. Who got wealthy and who lost out due to the colonies is another question I imagine.
Were they so adversely affected? Doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny. Why is south Africa which was the most heavily colonized part of Africa not any worse off than Ethiopia which wasn't colonized? Why are the different countries in south America so different economically today even though they were mostly colonized by the same regime?
Also take Ireland, which is now richer than it's colonizer.
The colonies were a burden. They were useful for military and political reasons, but not for economic reasons. The reason Europe is so wealthy is Capitalism and early industrialization. The reason the colonies are so poor is colonialism.
But it seems to miss the point that capitalism requires cheap resources and also markets, and the European countries got these resources at huge concessions from the colonies which also provided a market for them. For example the British used Indian tax to buy cotton with tax collected from India, send it to the industrialised production centres (while deliberately destroying the traditional ones in India), and then sell it back to the Indians.
An easier way to understand it is imagine if the US got a 5% discount on Chinese imports -- would that help the US economy? British got close to a 90% discount (by force) on imports from India.
> Malthusian ideas kept coming back of course—they still surround us—but the growth genie has been out of the bottle ever since and the mindset of abundance has been a part of our culture. Never again can the concept of progress be dismissed as impossible.
Mathusian ideas are to the current concept of Planetary Boundaries and the need for a sustainability transition what Aristotelian physics was to modern physics: A flawed but directionally correct early recognition and internalization that in material terms (and for the foreseable future) we (homo sapiens) form a closed biosphere system that must satisfy certain constraints.
The constraints that this ground truth puts on the human condition are variable, technology dependent and still somewhat poorly understood (e.g tipping points) but they cannot be eliminated.
Unhinged "free market" enthousiasts, technosolutionists and assorted economic growth-uber-alles ideologies are decoupled from reality and (given this mind set is the dominant political and decision framework globally) increasingly terminally dangerous. Their simplistic agenda hiddes fake and unsavory axioms such as trickle-down-economics and being relaxed about destabilizing inequalities that if further aggravated will be the primary path towards a new dark ages.
A certain form of abundance is logically possible. We can obviously have in abundance anything that is compatible with long-term biosphere equilibrium and that is quite a lot.
The missing catalyst are social technologies that will help us collectively create and enjoy what is plenty and equitably share what is not. The ideology expressed in this article, the adulation of past social inventions will never get us there. To use the physics analogy again, it is akin to Newtonian physics (it did solve many problems within its domain of applicability) whereas we actually live in a quantum mechanical and relativistic universe. The toolkit needs to be replaced or expanded as appropriate.
Unfortunately there is no hint yet that we are in the process of inventing new and adapted socio-economic and political systems that will get us to a sustainable abundance phase. The world is run by vested interests that will gladly sacrifice the future to maintain current privilige.
Our free markets are hardly free. Pick any sector and play an easy and educational "find-the-oligopoly" game.
Hint: grow beyond the free markets vs the soviets debate. It shows a rigidity and simplicity of thinking that makes any discussion pointless
Truly free markets have a role to play in a future sustainable abundance scenario. But the current actors parroting "free markets" will definitely not take us there.
Government / regulatory capture is a really bad thing. Businesses that can use the government to shut down competitors is bad. None of that is free market. Companies that are indistinguishable from government are bad. Tax payer Subsidies to pick winners and losers are bad.
None of those are free market.
People often argue against free market by pointing at things that are the opposite of free market.
> In some remote provinces, writing disappeared entirely.
The remote provinces were filled with recently conquered barbarians, and the writing that disappeared was the writing that the Roman colonists and state brought with them where they went, including back home.
but throught the middle ages, Christianity kept spreading and by that period of history, where it spread, writing spread too. And from what I understand, the Moslem lands also launched on a positive slope literacy-wise.
Yeah it’s amazing how people keep buying Renaissance era CT propaganda about itself. Those classics they were “rediscovering”? They only existed at all because the church copied papyrus to vellum to books. Papyrus doesn’t last 1000 years outside of deserts (e.g. Egypt).
The whole sequential history narrative, the Standard Model, is totally blinkered from its NW european perspective.
"Civilisation," meaning societies that have cities, taxes, writing, big government, roads, aqueducts, and such.... these existed for thousands of years in Egypt, Iraq, India, China, Greece etc. Rome was such a society.
Rome also conquered "The East," and the north african coast... all long established urban "civilisations." When Rome "fell," those civilisations persisted. Persia had "fallen" before them, as had Alexander's empire, Assyria, Babylon, Sumer, etc. etc.
There were good centuries and bad, but they generally stayed "civilised" through thousands of years worth of political turmoil and change. They always had scribes, high priests, princes, infrastructure and such.
England, France, Germany and whatnot.... These were never civilisations. They were, for short periods ruled by Rome. They had some elements of civilisation, but for brief periods with limited reach. It was never culturally rooted or widespread. They were barbarian societies, and continued to be barbarian societies. Writing doesn't "disappear" in europe, it never really existed.
Concepts like Scottish or German renaissance are ridiculous. These were new civilisations being established in previously barbarian societies. They weren't renewing, they were founding.
Urban civilisation is new to NW europe. 200-500 years old. England's "old world civilisation" is only 150 years older than US civilisation.
> The whole sequential history narrative, the Standard Model, is totally blinkered from its NW european perspective.
It’s not blinkered if it’s a model of northwestern European history.
> England, France, Germany and whatnot.... These were never civilisations. They were, for short periods ruled by Rome. They had some elements of civilisation, but for brief periods with limited reach. It was never culturally rooted or widespread. They were barbarian societies, and continued to be barbarian societies. Writing doesn't "disappear" in europe, it never really existed.
This is misleading if not entirely false.
* Germany was never meaningfully conquered or ruled by Rome.
* The land we call France today was conquered by Julius Caesar by 40 BC. The Romans called it Gaul. Gaul remained within the Roman Republic and Empire for centuries. During that period, Gaul had a large and growing population of Roman citizens. Three emperors were born there. And eventually, by 212 AD, Roman citizenship was extended to everyone living within the borders of the empire. It wasn’t until the fifth century until Rome finally lost control of Gaul, which was conquered by Germanic barbarians. One of those tribes was called the Franks, hence the name “France”. But by that point, it had been part of Roman civilization for 500 years.
* The Roman province of Brittania—modern day England and Wales—was conquered in 43 AD after decades of invasions dating back to Julius Caesar. It remained part of the Roman Empire until 410–in other words, it was part of Roman civilization for almost 400 years. It was also subject to the 212 decree granting Roman citizenship to all inhabitants. Even as late as the early to mid 500’s, we have British writers such as Gildas who still considered themselves and their fellow Britons to be Roman citizens. Like France, England was conquered by tribes of Germanic barbarians, one of which (in this case, the Angles) gave the country its modern name. But even after this point, Britonnic culture persisted in the Welsh frontier.
> Urban civilisation is new to NW europe. 200-500 years old.
Paris was founded in the first century as the Roman city of Lutetia. It persisted as a Roman city until the fifth century, when it was renamed to Paris and used as the capital of the Merovingian kingdom. It has remained a major city ever since—not for 200-500 years, but for nearly 2000.
Yes, European thought is simply colored by the fact that Rome was the first civilizing empire in Europe. For people in the fertile crescent and the Levant, it was just another empire in a long line of empires. We shouldn't discredit how important that empire was, however. For most of the world, empires came and went with an average state of terminal stagnancy. The fall of Rome was like a springboard for the successor states to industrialize and colonize the entire world. That's impressive for a place with little previous history of civilization.
> The remote provinces were filled with recently conquered barbarians
The Roman Empire reached its maximum geographic extent under Trajan in the first century while the western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, so I’m curious which of these “recently conquered barbarians” you’re referring to.
> the writing that disappeared was the writing that the Roman colonists and state brought with them where they went, including back home.
Who went back home? Any “Roman colonists” at the frontiers of the western empire by the fall of Rome would have been there for centuries; in other words, they were already “at home”. More on this in a bit.
> but throught the middle ages, Christianity kept spreading and by that period of history, where it spread, writing spread too
Christianity was also the Roman state religion at the end of the western empire, and indeed remained the state religion of the eastern empire until it fell to the Ottomans in the 15th century.
Let me give an example tying these points together. The population of Roman Britain had been Roman citizens since 212. Roman troops weren’t withdrawn from Britain until the late 300’s and early 400’s, but by that point the Britons had become a predominantly Christian population that had held Roman citizenship for over a century. So at least in Britain, it was less a story of recently conquered barbarians being left behind by retreating Romans, and more a story of a piece of the Roman Empire being cut off from the rest due to a decline in state capacity.
So what about the writing? We don’t have a lot of surviving examples of it from Britain for another couple of hundred years, which makes it hard to figure out exactly what happened during this period. What we do know is that Angles, Jutes, and Saxons arrived and effectively conquered what is now England. The “Anglo-Saxons” were still Germanic heathens at this point, and while had a runic alphabet of their own, we don’t have any surviving Anglo-Saxon literature from this period. Brittonic people survived, particularly in Wales, and we do have some writings from some of them, such as Gildas. Wikipedia notes the following:
> Gildas's work is important for reasons beyond the historical information he provides. At the time when Gildas was writing Britain was Christian. Gildas uses Latin to address the rulers he excoriates and regards Britons, at least to some degree, as Roman citizens, despite the collapse of central imperial authority. By 597, when St Augustine arrived in Kent, England, or at least most of it, was populated by adherents of Anglo-Saxon paganism, and the new rulers did not think of themselves as Roman citizens.
Gildas wrote at some point between 490 and 550, and even at this late point you have some Britons who still considered themselves (and one another) to be Romans. In other words, to the degree England becomes “barbarian” (in the sense of “not Roman”), heathen, and illiterate, it’s because it was invaded and conquered by illiterate barbarian heathens, not because the population reverted to their pre-Roman culture.
After that point, I do agree that the spread of Christianity likely reintroduced writing; it’s only after missionaries like Augustine arrive and start to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity that we have any surviving literature written by Anglo-Saxons themselves, whether in Latin or Old English.
The greatest thing about technology is that it will ultimately enable superabundance. We have a duty to leverage technology for the greater good of humanity & civilization.
The vast majority of humans can only dream of that mythical superabundance you keep talking about. For if they were to experience it, even briefly, the endless consumables you seem to enjoy will disappear before you know it.
It's depressing reading willfully oblivious stuff like this when the planet is being ravaged. It is a zero sum game.
Luckily, we have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that's not set to be decommissioned any time in the next billion years and which outputs orders of magnitude more energy than is needed by our civilization. Otherwise, we'd be screwed :P
The problem isn't abundance or scarcity, the problem at this point is equal access.
We have entire countries stuck in poverty selling their resources (human and natural alike) for a pittance like indentured servants and we have individuals hoarding and amassing more wealth and riches than they could spend or use in a thousand lifetimes.
We also have a global economic system that by necessity wastes these precious resources in products that get shredded without being used, food that gets destroyed without being eaten and machines that are being run without getting to fulfill their purpose.
So on the one hand we have wasteful overproduction for the rich (relatively - which, globally speaking, includes everyone on HN) and on the other we have a handful of the extremely rich (the fraction of a permille of the globally richest people) wasting the equivalent of dozens of poverty lifetimes worth of resources on their fancies. This seems like an easy problem to solve but we need the extreme poverty to maintain the narrative that enables the extremely rich to exist.
In other words, no matter how much we expand the "abundance" we also need to maintain the scarcity because the differential is what enables our economic system and those benefitting from it the most. Those who have the most also have the most to lose from the elimination of scarcity.
And you are the Righteous Judge of the Universe who will determine how to redistribute those resources?
I live in a third-world country (Nigeria) and every part of the economy that doesn't work is because of compassionate, self-anointed do-gooders like you trying to plan the economy.
The only parts of the economy that work are the chaotic parts that the government has left alone to be developed by the greedy 'individuals hoarding and amassing more wealth and riches than they could spend or use in a thousand lifetimes.'
Even when the West sends foreign aid, it is diverted to politicians and used to equip armies that oppress the local populations, while countries like China that have left the market run its course have jumped from having a billion poor to lifting 600 million out of poverty.
Leave the market alone, keep your compassion - nobody needs it. The amoral market is the only way out of poverty.
I'm not anti-market. I don't believe in planned economies, certainly not Soviet-style ones.
> Even when the West sends foreign aid, it is diverted to politicians
The function of a system is what it does. Do you think "the West" is just extremely foolish and doesn't know where that money goes, or do you think there might be a benefit to "the West" when those politicians become dependent on this money?
> while countries like China that have left the market run its course
China has been extremely protectionist and very tightly controls what foreign companies and investors can do in its market. It only started applying for World Bank loans in the late 80s and even then only for very targeted investment programs. Why do you think that is?
> while countries like China that have left the market run its course have jumped from having a billion poor to lifting 600 million out of poverty.
It's more complicated and nasty than that.
Markets are much more efficient than central planning. Outside of perhaps North Korea, nations mix them to varying degrees and ways.
The Chinese government permits markets up to a certain size, and then it begins taking over the large players via things like replacing leadership, buying off leaders, absorbing leaders, threatening leaders with "re-education", things like that. The companies then engage in markets internationally but are heavily managed internally by the government.
Just look what happened to Jack Ma.
So China is using these international markets to bring in tons of money and has brought generations out of poverty.
BUT
We shouldn't ignore the One Child Policy that lasted for decades. We also shouldn't ignore than Deng Xiaoping's market reforms came _after_ Mao killed 10s of millions of people pushing his Communist utopia. We shouldn't ignore that the Chinese population was deliberately restricted so there would be fewer Chinese to divide the prosperity among.
It's complicated and nasty.
I'm less familiar with the Chinese government's involvement in African nations, but the bit I've gathered is this: they are the dealer at the casino, they always have the advantage, even if you're winning individually, the casino is raping everyone else.
Yes, nations should be wary of foreign aid from The West. Nations should also be wary of investment from China. Neither are looking out for the people of the nations they claim to be helping.
I'm not disagreeing with any of your points, but I think you're misunderstanding me. Markets are always better than planned economies, yes, and China is a good example of the free market running its course, although its by no means perfect.
All the problems you pointed out are not market inefficiencies but government bureaucrats interfering with the market mechanism using their monopoly of violence.
Secondly, killing several 10s of millions of people doesn't transform into economic gains; I can give you a list of several African countries that have lost proportional numbers of their population without any commensurate economic growth.
You don't lift an agrarian economy into the first world by killing of peasants.
Foreign aid: I approach foreign aid with a libertarian lens - if Chinese (or whatever nationality) companies are investing in Africa with their private capital, that's perfect. If a state is doing it, the resources will be poorly allocated and will go into a dictator's pocket.
> Markets are much more efficient than central planning.
Ironically large multinationals like Amazon are approximating planned economies in how their logistics are set up, especially if you compare them to what Cybersyn was intended to be in Chile rather than the stocky bureaucracy of the USSR.
I think it's a mistake to label China "communist" just because that's what its ruling party calls itself (after all we don't call North Korea "democratic" either) but it's also important to keep in mind that capitalism in China very explicitly exists only under the watchful eye of the state and the state has intervened rather drastically in the past. It's a stretch to compare it to comparatively free market economies.
> I approach foreign aid with a libertarian lens - if Chinese (or whatever nationality) companies are investing in Africa with their private capital, that's perfect. If a state is doing it, the resources will be poorly allocated and will go into a dictator's pocket.
That's not a libertarian lens, that's just assuming a difference where one doesn't exist. If Chinese companies invest in Africa, they do so to further political goals of China (i.e. the "Chinese economy"). If the US invests in Africa, it is doing so to further economic goals of US companies (i.e. the "US economy"). If a state does it, it just comes with more moral pretense and the people deciding where the money should go are usually only paid by corporations, not working for them directly.
The function of a state is to advance the interests of its economy and that is defined by its businesses, not its citizens. The well-being of its citizens is the presumed and stated ulterior motive but as history has demonstrated time and again, when it comes to sacrificing citizens or the economy, states generally favor the economy. In other words: in free market economies, politicians are the middlemen of corporations. The only difference in China is that those corporations are in turn under the direct control of the Party (i.e. Bezos is more influential to the US than Biden but Xi Jinping is more influential to China than Zhong Shanshan).
> The problem isn't abundance or scarcity, the problem at this point is equal access.
Efficient use of resources is also a big problem. Resources wasted in every society to some degree but knowing/seeing how they were wasted on a scale in USSR left a very strong impression. And this waste was not about equal access (though it was not equal too) but about incentives and caring (or rather not caring about anything you don't own and people owned almost nothing).
In other words, somebody should forfeit what they think is hard-earned to some foreigners for nothing. We have hard enough time convincing people to share with your actual neighbours, good luck with weird people from across the world doing civil wars and female genital mutilations.
Where every other belief comes from: When a mommy belief and a daddy belief love each other very much, they make a baby belief! The more precise question is why do certain beliefs die and others keep going strong? A belief in abundance, like beliefs about justice, karma and God, give us a useful illusion of order and safety in a universe that is chaotic, unsafe, and unjust. Abundance gives us the courage to try new things, to fail, to try again. And so, amazingly, almost mystically, justifies itself, at least to some degree for some period of time. When humans multiply to the point where they threaten to poison the thin skin of life that sustains them, it may be worth reassessing.
I don’t think they mean “The Secret” style abundance here, more like “physical things (and maybe knowledge) the population has access to and can utilise for their own good”
What does this comment actually contribute to the dialogue beyond a glib reply to the title of the link for karma farming? "OoO from our environment obviously" yawn.
>And so, amazingly, almost mystically, justifies itself, at least to some degree for some period of time. When humans multiply to the point where they threaten to poison the thin skin of life that sustains them, it may be worth reassessing.
Citation needed Malthusian. This reeks of "We've burned down the house we live in" rhetoric without actually stretching its neck out enough to risk courting a quantified rebuttal.
>What does this comment actually contribute to the dialogue
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know YOU were reading. Let me break down the concrete assertions in a numbered list for you. Feel free to attack any or all of them:
1. The origin of belief is unknown.
2. The success of belief is the thing.
3. Belief success is best analyzed as a system of selection, not generation.
4. The selection pressure on a belief changes over time.
5. An example of selection pressure is anything contributing to feelings of safety.
6. An example of selection pressure changing is when "abundance" is linked to "externalities".
And, I would also add:
7. People are very attached to belief either as identity or as comfort.
8. (Subjective) there is a profound comfort in dispelling illusions and embracing nuanced understanding of a thing
9. (Normative) you should try it!
10. A false assertion at one time can be true in another time.
EDIT:
11. Malthus did not anticipate technological advance, esp ammonia fertilizer tech, that invalidated his timeline.
12. Tech advances end. An example of the end of a tech advance ending is Moore's Law.
It is lucrative for an individual (or group) to be able to instill (correct or incorrect) beliefs in people other than themselves.
It turns out that it is even lucrative to be able to coerce others to assert such beliefs even if they silently disbelieve (as this can convince yet others to believe).
These two factors make it complicated to understand (let alone model) how beliefs succeed and fail.
There’s a sense in which women specifically are more inclined to abundance. There’s an accurate stereotype of a single man’s apartment: there may be a single chair, a TV, a mattress on the floor, and not much else. I’ve always gotten the impression that this sort of scenario is uncomfortable to women on a very fundamental and intuitive level. Anecdotally, I actually just had a fight with a female friend. Her roommate recently moved out, and I kept commenting how much I liked her bare and open apartment. I hadn’t realized it, but she felt the opposite: that her bare apartment was embarrassing to the point where she was uncomfortable even having people over.
Most discussions of economic limits in the future don't account for thermodynamics or the planetary energy budget and this article is more of the same.
On the sociology side, this article doesn't even question the assumption of "our belief in abundance", a thing that I doubt you'll find much of in places like Izmir, Dhaka and Guayaquil.
Thermodynamics doesn't pose a fundamental limit on economic value. The planetary energy budget is even less of an issue.
For the latter, we have fission, fusion and we can grow into space.
For the former: in principle you can create arbitrarily large economic value on arbitrarily small energy budgets (if you have enough time). Getting a bit philosophical and speculative:
Assume computation is one way to create economic value. Eg either because computation is just useful for humans, like today, or because in the future you'll be able to simulate human beings (or other economic actors) directly via computation. Landauer's Principle [0] gives us a physical lower limit on the amount of energy we need to do a single bit operation:
E >= k * T * ln 2
(where k is the Boltzmann constant).
Stripping away all the constants, this tells us that as the universe expands and cools off, computation gets cheaper. The absolute minimum cost of computation is proportional to the ambient temperature of the universe.
As a simple example, you can get an infinite amount of computation out of a single Joule, if you wait for the temperature to half between each operation.
Of course, in practice we are far, far away from the Landauer limit being relevant. And we are far, far away from more conventional limits to economic activity.
> On the sociology side, this article doesn't even question the assumption of "our belief in abundance", a thing that I doubt you'll find much of in places like Izmir, Dhaka and Guayaquil.
İzmir is in Turkey which has seen an enormous increase in welfare over the past 200 years thanks to the Industrial Revolution. In about the last ten years mismanagement has damaged the economy of Turkey. Such a short episode in history might damage people's belief in abundance, but we can hardly blame people who are in dire straits at the moment for holding short-sighted beliefs.
Many people in countries that are doing just fine, like eg the US, also like to engage in gloom and doom mongering.
>For the latter, we have fission, fusion and we can grow into space.
Going to space and colonizing the milky way within the next 2000 years yields grow rates below 0.1% per year. That is far less than a capitalist society needs to maintain existing living standards (yes, in a system with growing inequality you need constant growth just for things to stay the same), let alone improve them.
>Assume computation is one way to create economic value. Eg either because computation is just useful for humans, like today, or because in the future you'll be able to simulate human beings (or other economic actors) directly via computation. Landauer's Principle [0] gives us a physical lower limit on the amount of energy we need to do a single bit operation:
You are ignoring something obvious. Since the brain contains the utility evaluation mechanism, any external aid to evaluate utility of an activity or object must be trusted by the human blindly, otherwise he would have to cross check the result and be bounded by his own cognitive resources. Thus we would need genetic engineering to increase our brain capacity just to interface with the external evaluator. If you can do this, why even bother and not simply engineer us to be as happy and perceive as much economic value as possible? The whole concept of absolute utility breaks down. Utility only exists in the context of a utility evaluator and if you change the evaluator you are missing the point. An equally valid solution would be to hunt down all humans and let them go extinct so that they can't be unhappy.
If we keep the evaluator the same, there is still another way to cheat and that is to create an adversarial model with superior computational resources that creates an inverse model of the evaluator and abuses the lack of cognitive resources in the evaluator so that he rates low effort activities and products as having insanely high utility.
The fertility of nearly all nations has slowed beyond replacement. Your concern would be valid if we were on pace to feed a quadrillion people but we aren’t.
Not in Africa. The plan is to have billions of Africans migrate to Europe to do the work instead, due to the climate crisis.
When they get to Europe, they are going to expect the same quality of life that Europeans have historically enjoyed. So, just because Europeans aren't reproducing, doesn't mean that they aren't being superseded by a new group of materialist consumers.
For those unfamiliar with Discourse Magazine, it is a new-ish (~2020 launch) publication of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, both of which are strongly Libertarian, highly ideological, free-market fundamentalist, strongly aligned with the Koch family and Koch Industries, who provide major financial support and whose head, Charles Koch, serves on the board.
I'd advise heavy dosings of salt in reading this or the other 25 parts of this book-length "Abundance" series, though as an insight into present trends in Libertarian cornucopian theology, it may be useful.
That, general tone, some familiar names amongst authors of a few of the pieces. Then I decided to check the masthead / about sections.
When I first saw this turn up in the HN "new" queue (the story hit the 2nd chance queue after failing to gain traction the first time 'round), I thought it might be some new-age woo group. Took a bit of chewing to realise who was behind the curtain.
For those unfamiliar with <insert group>, it is a <noun> of <bad people>, who are highly ideological and strongly aligned with <other bad people>, who provide major financial support and whose head, <absolute monster>, serves on the board.
The Kochs, GMU, Mercatus, the Atlas Network, and many affiliated organisations and individuals are at the heart of disinformation about global warming and challenges on both the resource and environmental impacts fronts, and have been for many decades. Koch Industries itself is a massive oil and gas concern which obviously benefits from rebutting and confounding arguments against usage of fossil fuels, both through scientific investigation and governmental regulation, its two principle bogeymen.
The madness lies on their side, and generally lacks libs.
Sounds nice...but between human nature and century-ish historical periods where various smaller groups of people were enjoying an upswing, I suspect that human beliefs in Abundance are older than Gilgamesh.
The article reads far more sensibly if one reads its "we" as being confined to a certain narrow thread of western European intellectuals.
Which group am I smearing by saying that there are tons of people who suck at their trade in every trade, in response to someone claiming that all people in one set of trades suck?
Abundance is possible because our needs are finite but our capacity is infinite.
The Republic of Letters was a remarkable spontaneously organized institution, consisting of intellectuals who corresponded on philosophy, politics and science.
One reason for that might be that the large ice sheets in North America delayed migration to much of the continent, meaning less time for civilizations north of Mexico to develop. But there were some irrigation projects, farming, and clear cutting.
There are species which lie dormant for near prime years and then burst forth. Do you think from one visit by boat from Europe an explorer could know there are a million cicadas on the east coast?
And, at the species level I'd argue boom-bust is a fine survival pattern, witness plagues of mice and locusts.
Sigmoid or exponent to bust, doesn't have to mean life ends.
Rome as a state existed for multiple tens of generations across plague and famine. 4 per century is normal, a thousand years is 40. Would anyone alive today be able to cast back 40 generations and say "life is hard" at scale?
A thousand years ago we barely had discrete components let alone VLSI. Those monks were bespoke all day long. Machines had few moving parts. Radios weren't invented until the reformation, Linux came along in the age of enlightenment, and nuclear was invented by Victorian times? Wait.. wrong timeline.
I don’t think we are because the sun is still chucking out a shitload of low entropy energy, most of which we don’t use. So the curve steepness will depend on if we can figure out how to harness it. And we are working on brain augmentation already (AI).
> > We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason … On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
What I like about this article is it subverts Marx's ideas of capital and markets and how the proletariat are being exploited/alienated/dehumanized to enrich a capitalist and if they'd only wake up to this fact they'd do a people's revolution.
But, Marx assumes people are stupid. They aren't. They realize that free markets, as noted by Locke in the article, create abundance for everyone. An acre of land becomes 100 acres when an ambitious person owns it and works it. We all do better when we allow the exceptional people in society to do their thing which betters themselves and then everyone else. That envy at their success expressed through confiscation and redistribution is counter productive.
History is created by the heroic and it is why we build monuments to them.
> How did we get out of this Malthusian malaise? (dark age economics)
IIRC, the dark age cliches are opposite of "Malthusian." Malthusian is about exponential growth of populations, economic activity and such while food, resources, and labour compensation cannot keep up.
This is a good example of where these grand theories of Economics, Civilisation and Everything go wrong. We have been doing these obsessively for 200 years. It's notable how we are still bad at it in the same ways.
Malthus, Marx or Milton Friedman and all the rest failed hard, ultimately. Their "schools" become endless apologetics machines, tasked with complexifying ideas originally appealing for simplicity and generality...
For me... I want see questions. I want to see odds and chances. I want to see actual engagement with real tensions, contradictions and problems in both reality and theory.
Private infrastructure? OK... Maybe. Have you examples of private infrastructure abundance? Are there any problems private infrastructure can't solve? Problems private infrastructure creates?
Same for "housing." At this point, pointing to NIMBYism is cliche. It's like blaming problems on corporate greed, inherent government inefficiency, worker laziness or whatever one-liners go do well in your circle. It's not insight, even if it is true.
To be interesting, you need to get much grittier than this. NIMBYism is not limited to real estate, for example. There's plenty of analogy in industry, agriculture, financial services, intellectual property. The rights, desires and demands of existing players conflict with the needs of growth, of newcomers and such.
I'm not saying authors' conclusions are wrong. I'm saying that the questions are contrived to be resolved by preselected answers. They're not curious questions.
Staying with housing and NIMBY... Lets start with a recognition of the central tension. When house prices go up... homeowners, banks, realtors and builders are financially strong. When house prices go down, homeowner wealth recedes.
For newer, younger or poorer homeowners housing price recession is a wipeout because the mortgage/leverage puts a multiple on losses and their wealth is likely concentrated in housing. Banking/finance also comes under stress, because finance is also leveraged and likely concentrates risk. Runs, bailouts, etc. Even if banking is robust, negative price growth means a tight lending market... a local deflation of money.
Even if your mayor had a housing price dial... it's not clear that we'd turn it to "abundance." Affordability would improve. Middle class wealth might tank. Banking might collapse.
Meanwhile.... how "solved" is housing affordability in NIMBY afflicted markets, once NIMBYism is wiped out? It's extremely doubtful, IMO, that YIMBY affects affordability in cities like SanFran or Munich apart from (perhaps) enabling smaller houses/sites. That is affordability though, not abundance, and it is marginal.
This is where econ101 guys tend to fail basic econ101 test. The proverbial Econ101 model is a model. What does YIMBY do on the model? X is quantity. Y is price. Demand trends down with price. Supply trends up. How does this look for real estate? How much does YIMBY add to total supply? 0.1, 1%, 5%?
IRL the supply of housing in expensive, established cities usually doesn't change enough to meaningfully affect prices much. Not in theory, or in practice. The demand curve, OTOH, is heavily affected by interest rates, lending practices, buyer confidence in real estate as an investment. Very heavily. Stop lending, crash house prices. See Ireland, 2009.
That's affordability "solved." Or rather, that's "price" solved. Except... rent hasn't decreased. Mortage payments haven't decreased much or for many. Investors are buying everything and homeowners can't get financing. Prices are lower.
We need more intelligent discussion. Not this time magazine, political pamphlet, feel good simplifications. There are real, difficult, tensions. Real trade offs. Real problems that need real tactics. Chalkboard rhetoric based on generalities is pointless. It was interesting in the 19th century, destructive in the 20th and foolish in the 21st.
Housing affordability is a function of the proximity of job opportunities. If job opportunities did not concentrate in a handful of cities people would be free to live where housing was affordable.
The real problem isn't NIMBYs rejecting more housing, it's the NIMBYs not rejecting commercial real estate.
Housing affordability is a function of income and housing prices.
There are lots and lots of things that affect or arguably affect either of these.
The problem with "some effect," based on a econ101 generality, is failing to estimate scale of affect in the 101 model, supply and demand.
You could argue, and this was popular in the 90s, that the solution to housing affordability is education. Better education, better income, housing affordability.
NIMBY related ideas about housing affordability issues are the 2010s version of this. Unlikely to have any measurable impact on housing even if the politically unrealistic polucues are implemented in full.
Read Basic economics by Thomas Sowell. It’s gives a fantastic understanding of supply and demand, what wealth is, how it’s created, etc. Why some places prospers, and some don’t.
Both of photochemsyn's criticisms are largely accurate.
Looking at resource requirements as mapped to land area is highly instructive, and one of the more illuminating exercises I've done is to plot population growth as the falling available land area (for all resource and ecosystem service value afforded) over time. We're well below "40 acres and a mule" --- with 8 billions of souls on Earth, there are about 4.6 acres/person, or 1.86 hectare.
Many of the most interesting and useful analyses of Earth's resource situation provide a similar mapping.
I'm aware of David MacKay's Without the Hot Air which maps just energy use by land area (with a focus on the UK). What becomes painfully evident is that it would be immensely challenging to supply energy equivalent to present utilisation from wind and solar potential of the British Isles alone, meaning something would have to give. (Less energy utilisation, imports from elsewhere, and/or both.) Many industrialised nations face similar challenges.
Vaclav Smil is another, with Energy and History and Energy and Civilization both looking at energy-as-land-use based on 1 kW/m^2 influx (and lesser densities of wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.). Smil is the source of one of the more picturesque descriptions of oil wells: punctiform sources of energy, a hole in the ground a few inches wide through which millions of years of accumulated ancient sunshine spew forth. Combine that with Jeffrey S. Dukes "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686>, which I've posted to HN a few times (limited discussion), to realise that we're consuming fossil fuels at millions of times their rate of formation, a cost utterly unaccounted for in market prices.
(Imagine a YC-funded startup had a similar burn-rate....)
And yes, social sciences, including economics, sociology, political science, and political economy very often utterly ignore these facts, on both the left and right, simply because they're ideologically inconvenient. As I've already commented, my first impression on seeing this item in the HN queue was that it was some far-left woo along the lines of the Jacque Fresco's Venus Project (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project>). Such schemes are often surprisingly similar to right-libertarian theology, as this turned out to be. The physical and natural sciences (physics, chemistry, ecology, environmental studies) are often deeply and legitimately critical of such views.
Given that the criticism is also being voiced to power, and to interests which are deeply vested in oil and gas, HN is once again disadvantaging the disadvantaged who speak to truth power, and tone-policing them to boot. I know what your justifications for this are, but it remains a very bad look.
"The social sciences are viewed with contempt by the real scientists and engineers, by the way" was obviously a shallow dismissal and a putdown, as well as an internet cliché. Cheap oneliners expressing contempt not only poison discussion, they dumb it down and evoke worse from others. Surely you know this.
I'm familiar enough with HN and your moderation to know that that was the chief complaint here.
Know two things:
- Economics was my own major field of study. I've since taken on a strong interest in sociology (despised by both economists and "real scientists and engineers"), particularly the work of Charles Perrow and Robert K. Merton, which offers insights into organisational behaviour which economics fails to account or allow for. Other significant study was in hard sciences, environmental studies, and ecology. I'm well aware of the conflicts between orthodox economics and these fields, and have spent much of my post-uni life trying to understand why and how this emerged. The works cited by Mirowski, Oreskes, and Conway go a long way to explaining why and how.
- That economics is at odds with basic physics, thermodynamics specifically, and ecology, is extraordinarily well established. It's the foundational basis for a number of heterodox economics disciplines, notably biophysical and ecological economics. There are widely-respected bodies such as the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the more popular Evonomics blog (itself featuring many notable economists as well as other critics) which address this as a major point of study. The mainstream profession periodically goes into hand-wringing mode itself, usually after some economic crisis, usually signaled by The Economist announcing a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. I've been around the profession long enough to have seen a few cycles of this myself, as I commented here three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23941770>
Despite its attitudes and behaviours, Libertarian / Austrian economics is not mainstream, though it certainly tries to portray itself as that. It has had a profound influence on both popular discussion and the economics profession, however, much of that as a deliberate and decades-long (approaching or exceeding century-long) project. Again, Mirowski, Oreskes, and Conway all describe this, amongst many other authors.
The quip was far less a cheap shot than a shorthand. And again, my principle issue is that HN tone-polices criticisms, ignoring its own advice to "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Could the comment have been better? Sure. Most can, certainly my own.
Nicely put. But bear in mind that agricultural output of a given piece of land varies every year, sometimes greatly. Weather is the farmer's eternal frenemy, but there's also flood, disease, pestilence, vulcanism, ...
> ...are viewed with contempt...
Hard scientists and engineers have good reasons to sneer at much of the social "sciences". But the human and social realities which those folks claim to study are dangerously real.
What's the minimum materials needed to build a bridge? (Depends on technology: Design, Materials, etc).
Agricultural footprint is exactly the same – I mean we could build an underground farm from hydroponics if we wanted.
But what does that have to do with Social Sciences? And why contempt? are you saying there is no phenomena in social interaction/groups? Where do you draw that line? Is understanding Ants and Bees contemptible? Just humans? Why?
> the social sciences are viewed with contempt by the real scientists and engineers
They're not. They're viewed by contempt by techies with overinflated egos who don't realize that when looking at complex systems outside their area of expertise they're like junior developers coming into a legacy project guffawing at the needless complexity because they don't yet grasp the unwritten requirements that created the scar tissue they see as bad craftmanship.
Actual "real scientists" and "real engineers" understand that the social sciences are amongst the most complex of sciences because they don't have the liberty to run isolated experiments in a vacuum, run simulations and test assumptions with a pen and paper because their field of study encompasses the complexity of the entire human brain and its interaction with everything around us.
Sure, there are thousands and possibly millions of hacks in those fields but there are also thousands and millions of hacks in STEM. Imagine having your entire field judged on the musings and performance of the worst techie you know.
We believe in abundance because it happens often enough. Extreme lack of abundance causes survival bias: dead men tell no tales.
The existence of tools which demand time to make and primitive stone tool factories suggest abundance: division of labour is necessary to invest time in tool making for future benefit. There has to be a relative surplus, more food than not, less time for survival only, to make tools work.
We believe in abundance because of millennia of life experience incorrectly or not.
In modern times, most scarcity problems are supply chain not actual exhaustion, diamond mines and gold not withstanding. Rare earths aren't rare. Uranium isn't rare. We aren't running out of lithium. Erlich/Simons explores the reality of abundance in the earths crust.
Things may get expensive or hard to find from time to time but our brains are mostly tuned for optimism.
Extreme pessimism in a species is neither pleasant nor useful. Why live a life of fear, reality not withstanding? Stoicism, that's beneficial. Some hesitancy to optimism? Useful. Unremitting black depression and Calvinistic preordained hell on earth? That's jonestown by another path (Jones sold salvation in the afterlife but you know what I mean)