For example, the total amount of wealth in the world is about 250 trillion USD according to Credit Suisse. There are about 7.5 billion people in the world today. 250T/7.5B = 33,333 USD per person. This really isn't that much wealth per person. So the total amount in existence still needs to increase dramatically.
Partially related to this, but my parents live in a village on the Lower Danube (the second largest river in Europe, after the Volga). I remember that when I was a kid (in the '80s) you had no problems catching enough fish during a day in order to feed a family of 3 or 4 if you wanted, and even sell something on the side for some extra cash (not much, but it mattered). I remember my uncle telling me that back when he was a kid (the '70s) the fish resources were even more plentiful, as in whenever the river was flooding the marshland-like areas he and his friends would go in there and catch the fish using their bare hands.
Nowadays you can barely catch a fish. Some former colleagues of mine spent an entire day trying to catch something in the Danube and at the end they hadn't catch anything (bare in mind, they were using more modern tools compared to what people were using back in the '70s and '80s). The struggle is real.
If everyone were a doctor that skill would be worthless. People are (mostly) paid according to the amount of value they bring to a company. That value is relative to others in the industry. Knowing how to competently use Microsoft Office (which puts you ahead of 99% of the world population) gets you nowhere in a AI focused startup because it doesn't make you more valuable to them.
>I'm not sure wealth per person is a great way to measure economic prosperity. If you have lots of wealth, does that necessarily translate to more income down the line?
I totally agree with you here. The metric I think matters more is relative wealth. Say you are a software developer making $120,000: in the Silicon Valley that is about average, but in Kentucky that is three times what the average person makes. So in SV you live a "normal" life, but in Kentucky you are decidedly upper class.
I am ambivalent about the relative wealth. I think it is fair and helps, up to a certain level, but globally, money attracts money, which means that certain people, with certain background and certain jobs would be deemed worth leaving in California. And this relative wealth-based system is already in place (e.g. designers in Cuppertino, IT in N. Dakota, assembler in Shenzhen).
The point you made was 100% correct, but that wasn't my meaning. I said right out of med school because I meant to focus on the problem in terms of cash flow - you can be in heaps of debt but still be well off. If the world were in huge amounts of debt (negative wealth) it seems like it could still be well off.
1st, you do realize that you include babies and elderly in that 7.5B?
2nd, you do realize that if we were living like touaregs instead of north americans we would all feel like f'ing rich with $30k?
3rd, and, spinning this back to social partnership, we could very well live in a world with no money, or at least a society in which money is not the only measure of contribution (i.e. where narcissistic douches like the donald wouldn't be seen as useful contributors).
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I like my central heat and air conditioning, and Netflix, and Spotify, and my comfortable and spacious car, and my ability to use air transport, and the restaurants that exist to serve me delicious food, etc...
Come now, we're human beings! The world is our domain! We should be working to create more things for more people, not settling for less!
Living well and living sustainably are both important, we don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
And then you talk about living sustainable. Well buckle up, your lifestyle, and mine--I dunno for sure, since you mention Netflix and traveling I assume you are a relatively normal middle-class or upper-middle class westerner--are going bye bye. It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people, so we are all are either going to have check out early without having kids or find a way to maintain our lifestyles using less energy, less food, less travel, and overall fewer goods, and then explain to our kids how they are going to have make do with even less than that.
The fantasy of a tech utopia run by machines on sustainable energy and the environment being all rosy like in the movies is just not going to happen. Unless we invent the Matrix--in which case, we'll all probably gladly enter it.
Pointless statement because you are anthropomorphizing the planet. The only way the plan ceases to exist is if we manage to blow it up. Otherwise it's fine. Be more precise in your words.
>the ocean is full of trash
Again, it's not full. Don't be hyperbolic when convincing someone of an argument.
>It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people
There is no evidence of this. The lifestyle of a vegan westerner who does not travel frequently scales extremely well.
If by 'sustainably' you mean some hand-wavy 'no impact to anything on the planet' then no, we cannot. We will certainly need to farm a lot and that takes land which will displace something.
Also, the ecosystem of the planet itself is not sustainable because of the competitive and evolutionary nature of life. Even without humans, animals and plants continually go extinct and have mass extinction events and yet life continues.
The Earth isn't a being with a utility function, you can't have a beneficial or harmful impact on it, only on people who attach positive or negative value to certain conditions on the Earth.