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Comment by f_allwein | Hacker News Reader

"Economic growth is a central assumption to political and economic systems… But strong growth is not normal, being a recent phenomenon over the last two centuries… It was based upon the profligate use of mispriced natural resources such as oil, water and soil. It relied on allowing unsustainable degradation of the environment. The human race refuses to accept that it is not possible to have infinite growth and improvement in living standards in a finite world."

Exactly this - it seems that while we are aware of it as individuals, we act as of it were not so as societies.

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The unstated (and unsupported) assumption is that economic growth requires growth in the use of resources.

well, even if it didn't, the increasing wealth leads to increased use of resources, as people will spend it on things, long distance flights etc.

Increased wealth comes from an increase production of value in the world. It is not a one-way street, one gains wealth by contributing to society. A single person's work can provide jobs for thousands. It can increase the production of food/housing/etc which helps millions of people. Or reduce millions of hours used in one area to free up human capital to focus on other areas, etc, etc. It's entirely possible for individuals in society to contribute far far more than they consume and set up systems which helps future generation contribute far more and at a faster rate than previously possible (ie, via investment in education, economic support systems, access to capital/banking, etc).

There's no reason why increased individual consumption can't be sustainable or a ultimately net gain in society despite their increased individual consumption (by their own productivity, contribution to taxes, economic contributions, social work via charity, etc).

This is what is so often overlooked in people's efforts to blame 'wealth accumulation' as the underlying problem, as if it only benefits that one person. Resulting in policies trying to reduce "wealth inequality" that ultimately end up hurting everyone (including the poor) in a 'noble, well intention' effort to punish the rich.

The government and volunteer groups are the primary bodies that needs to address and coordinate many of those social and economic issues.

The biggest problem with India is that:

a) the taxes/government organizations are wasted and terribly corrupt which hurt both economic growth for the middle class and small business [1], where only the powerful/connected are allowed to operate in an efficient business environment and social policies make little progress

b) countless individuals exploiting this corruption and contributing nothing to society (ie, rewarding people despite not contributing any value to the economy) by leeching off these public institutions either by getting friends in gov to do their bidding or more directly skimming off public funds

c) big longterm social issues can't be addressed with an ineffective government, a private/non-profit industry constrained by endless bureaucracy and top-down political influence, a healthy middle class and safety net (where the majority of the population can't live a sustainable lifestyle out of pure necessity to eat/live).

d) the smartest people needed to lead those non-profits and government agencies all leave to North America and Europe - driven away by the government incompetence, leaving many mediocre B-players in leadership positions within India, further contributing to government failure - an evil cycle.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVwIZzGHxwc

It only takes a shortage of one core resource (e.g. water) for a whole economy to crumble.

The concept of whether a belief in indefinite growth as a possible tragectory for human societies is “normal” offers little to people considering the issues.

You don’t have to look that far back in history to find examples of societal “norms” that are downright sociopathic. For all the problems of the developing world, life is much less cheap now, than any other time, anywhere

The US bombed civilian populations with napalm in the Vietnam War.

If anything, the forces of greed and self interest that lie behind the problems described in the article are timeless. The problem is that the human species has been so successful, and developed new technology, that there are new problems to go along.

Fundamentally, the most severe problems facing human populations have their roots in politics and culture, not resource constraints.

As I was thinking about what motivates the super rich to keep going with obtaining wealth far beyond their needs, I had a bit of an epiphany.

All people suffer from being vulnerable, by our nature, and assured of our own guaranteed destruction. To the extent that wealth creation and accumulation provide real, if marginal, improvements to our security, it’s not surprising that someone super rich would continue whole heartedly in one of the activities that actually does the increase security.

But since even the super rich are only a little bit more existentially secure than the rest of us, to stop with the process of wealth accumulation would deprive them of one of the few activities they have relied on to increase their sense of security. It would lead to a greater experience of their subjective personal powerlessness.

I also think, based on my own idle speculation, anecdotally, that more pronounced sociopathic behavioral traits are distributed among the population, across class.

Such traits provide an advantage to power seeking individuals, with talent, ambition, and cultural resources at their disposal. Hence, positions of power have an over representation of heartless, ruthless, greedy people in their ranks.

Such people, lacking in empathy and charity, once they reach positions of power, can distort the behavior of the institutions they control, leading to the kind depredations described in the original article.

The only hope against such people is that the mass of non-sociopathic individuals can weave supporting and countervailing structures.

If the societal institutions are strong enough, the talents of such driven people, with the “killer instinct” can be mitigated, and in some cases channeled into productive activities.

We see such sociopathic behavior from Trunp, big time. My fear right now is that in his wake, he is tearing at this social fabric, as an end in itself.

The people associated with him, the powerful republicans who populate Washington, are being”turned” by Trump, and are re-introducing and amplifying a “take no prisoners, scorched earth” approach to US politics.

Sean Spicer does not strike me, or probably anyone, as someone who would instinctively go on national TV, and spout obvious lies, in service of maintaining a corrupt politician. But that’s what he did.

I’m he’s asked himself many times, “what was I thinking?”

I don't understand any donwvotes on parent, because these dynamics are pretty well known and observed.

> not possible to have infinite growth and improvement in living standards in a finite world

But our world might be infinite, and there is certainly at least 20 orders of magnitude more available resources than our current usage, so this isn't a practical consideration.

Unfortunately, the opposite is true for basic resources such as clean water and air: look up "Earth overshoot day" [1]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2017-08-earth-resource-spent-august.ht...

Near limitless clean water is a technological problem that we have already solved via reuse and desalination. The challenge now is to make it far less expensive, which we'll also do in the coming half century or so.

Vast progress in real-world use of desalination is why Israel can exist at all for example. [1]

Large cities in California will likely become supplied mostly by desalination in the near future. San Diego is getting 1/3 of its water from one plant. It can fulfill the water needs of its entire population for about the cost of three, one billion dollar desalination plants. I consider that an extreme bargain. Such plants will get cheaper and more efficient with time.

Indoor agriculture and altering crops to need less water, adjusting them to indoor efficient growing via CRISPR, will also significantly lessen our water demands over time. That'll take decades to bring to meaningful impact, however there's no scenario where we don't do that.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

The main problem with desalination is energy use. I don't see desalination on a massive scale happening unless we get a lot more (and thus cheaper) energy being produced.

Basically, fingers crossed for fusion.

Really? Do you have any evidence for this claim? Genuinely interested, as it's the first time I hear this.

What do you mean the world might be infinite? The Earth isn't. Do you mean the sun, asteroids and other planets in the solar system will provide all the resources and energy we could ever need? Because even that's not infinite on a Kardashev increasing energy scale.

But the real concern is the biosphere, which most certainly is finite and the 7.4 billion humans are very much dependant on it. Maybe we terraform Mars someday, but I doubt that will do much for life on Earth.

Did you mean "20 times" instead of "orders of magnitude"?

I meant orders of magnitude, which most of the replies seem to have completely ignored.

Do you realize how large 20 orders of magnitude would be?!

It's fairly large - meaning we could double our population at current levels of resource usage every 100 years for about 6500 years before we start to reach the limits.

Yeah and the Malthusians have been predicting the downfall of civilization due to "non-infinite growth" for the last couple centuries as well. And they keep being proven wrong.

Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet.

Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go.

The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world.

The counter to the reflex argument "it's worked thus far" is the parable of the turkey. Or the guy who jumped out a 100th floor window (and passing the 2nd floor said "so far so good").

https://blog.commonwealth.com/independent-market-observer/th...

Looking at the past only works if the future is like the past. It's a lazy argument, but sure, statistically you are right most of the time.

This in turn is a case of survivorship bias and a result of how you count: Everybody who is wrong is weeded out immediately. If you sample many times you are more likely to find that it all works just fine because those who survive are counted many times, failures only count one time. The more often you count the more your argument will look favorably for the side of the "anti-alarmists".

You always measure distance taken with speed?

Quality of life is nothing without way to sustain it long term.

> Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people.

There's enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed. -- Gandhi

> The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world.

Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger.

Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger.

In terms of digits in a bank account, that's probably true. Is it true in terms of actual living conditions and power? Is the gap now wider than between Louis XIV and his Haitian slaves?

Yes.

With scientific and engineering advances, we in the "first world" have all the royalty-level of power and energy at our disposal. Washing machine alone is an equivalent of a maid or two. The ability to just sit down whenever and enjoy a play or a concert on TV is something you can do now, while it was utterly impossible for even the most powerful kings. If you couple this with advances in medicine it's safe to say that we live our lives in comfort and safety unheard of ever before, to the point that kings of the past, with all the personnel, seem trivial.

Meanwhile, "Haitan slaves" - or just normal people who didn't have the luck to born where they should - live exactly the same way they lived hundreds and possibly thousands of years ago. They struggle every day just to have something to eat and they die of hunger if they fail. The technology they use is the same as it was a thousand years back.

In effect, the gap between rich and poor only widened in time. And that's comparing low end to a average in first world countries. It gets really ugly when we start comparing low end with top 1% - it's the difference between struggling to just stay alive another day and taking a leisure trip to the ISS (or was it Mir back then?). The difference between having half of your family dead before your thirties and having a healthy life with all your friends well into 80s.

So in short, yes, living conditions of a king and a peasant were worlds apart but it did get markedly worse with time.

Well, given that there are still slaves (maybe even Haitian ones) and the living conditions of the average first world working class person are far better than those of Louis XIV, I'd say yes.

> The gap between rich an poor has never been bigger.

So?

I'd rather live in the modern day, "unequally" with the rich, than starve or die of disease equally with the rich of the middle ages.

Just because the rich have 100Xed in quality of life over the last century, doesn't negate the fact that the poor have 10Xed in quality of life.

Making everyone equal is easy. Just make them all equally dead, starving, or miserable, just like they were in past centuries.

> Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger.

Actually, it has been much bigger in the 19th century. Source: Piketty

Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some evidential basis in that it is based on measurement of resource levels and their rate of use, not just some political philosopher's wooly notion of overpopulation.

The problem, as I see it, is that even if you are optimistic about the theoretical capacity of the planet to sustain human life, its practical capacity is limited by how efficiently we use the resources to hand, and the current system does not properly incentivise efficient use. More often, it's the complete opposite, because the price of resources like water and soil does not reflect their true scarcity.

It's like having a large store of firewood. Enough, in theory, to heat your home through several years of harsh winters. Then you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. That night, by every metric, you'll be warmer and cosier than you ever have been before, but you'll still have doomed yourself.

Reminds me of the well-known type of question in introductory calculus:

Q: "A population of bacteria in a petri-dish doubles every hour, after 24 hours the petri-dish reaches 100% saturation. At what time did the petri-dish reach 50% saturation?"

A: 23 hours.

> you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night.

How can people possibly burn our Sun energy ahead of time (billions of years ahead)?

"How efficiently we use the resources to hand" depends on how many people are working on solving that problem (of efficient use of resources). Higher population would mean more people trying to find more efficient use of resources.

> Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet.

And just because Malthusians have been wrong for centuries, doesn't mean they won't turn out to be right in the next 50 years. At some point something will snap. Yeah, we have it pretty good right now. At least those of us in the west. I'm not sure if those people in India who have to endure 51 Celsius heats, don't have access to fresh water and live in areas where it's hard to breathe are in a better positions than their ancestors.

A trillion people on Earth may be possible if there was a God designing the planet from scratch with the specific aim to put a trillion people on it. But moving gradually to such a number, from where we are now, I'd say is absolutely impossible. Countries like India and China that are already bursting at the seams, seem to be proving that.

Sure, the world's resources are finite, and we will hit those limits "eventually".

But the burden of proof is on the doomsday predictors who claim that doomsday is right around the corner, when all actual evidence shows that things are going great right now.

China and India are NOT bursting at the seems. Quality of life is better there than they have ever been. Quality of life is still going up, and it is going up like crazy in those places.

You can look at any quality of life metric at all. Mortality rates. Access to fresh water. Diseases. Hunger levels. Life expectancy. They are ALL getting better. And they are getting better by leaps and bounds.

No, not just in the west. In poor countries and the third world.

Evidence that they are having problems, would look something like "hunger is going up, and quality of life is going down." but that isn't happening.

>Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people.

Honestly, you can think whatever you want. But what people want to think and what's actually true often don't line up, and they certainly don't here.

Wikipedia says that the total land mass of Earth is about 150,000,000 km^2. Do you really think a global population density of 6666 people/square kilometer on every single piece of land on earth is in any way sustainable? That's a population density that exceeds Tokyo. Japan's population is heavily dependent on food imports to sustain itself. When the whole world is denser than Tokyo, where is the food going to come from?

That's 150m^2 per person. If everyone lives in skyscrapers then living space isn't much of that, and 150m^2 is (in the best case) enough for one person's food. So it might be that this scenario is impossible for other reasons, but I don't think mere land area is a problem.

You mean if every meter of the planet was covered with skyscrapers? Not sure how that's remotely realistic.

And it sounds incredibly dystopian.

No, the opposite. I mean you could use skyscrapers to make people's living space take up a much smaller proportion of the land area, leaving the rest free for farming.

Where exactly would the resources for enough skyscrapers to house a trillion humans come from? The world is facing a sand shortage already with not even 1% of that imagined population.

Sure whatever. I'm just saying land area isn't the problem.

Except it is. At least half the world's land is unusable for agriculture, and often for habitation. And transport had to be btaen into account for area. And that leaves no space for any wilderness, forests etc. Which is impossible ecologically. Your theoretical arguments here have no practical value.

Land usable for agriculture is a significantly smaller percentage than that.

Much of the world is empty, undeveloped land right now, and cities take up a very small percentage of land.

Double the amount of cities in the world, from 1% to 2% of land usage, and that's 5 billion more people that the world can support.

For food well, we currently only use a very small percentage of the sunlight that hits the earth, and energy = food. Especially if lab technology for growing food gets much better.

Yeah, it is unsubstantiated sci-fi predictions but taking about these Sci-fi scenarios in detail is kinda missing the point.

The point I was trying to make, is that the whole "resources are finite" is a dumb argument because it doesn't say at all how close we are to that limit.

Someone's 1 billion people carrying capacity prediction is just as valid as my unsubstantiated 1 trillion people prediction.

And if you are predicting that doomsday overpopulation scenario is right around the corner, you better provide some damn good evidence, because all the current evidence shows that humans are doing better than they ever have been in the history of the world.

Evidence for us hitting the carrying capacity of the planet would be things like "hunger is increasing and quality of life is going down in these overpopulated places". But so far this is not happening.

> Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go.

A bold claim given we’re already way over the ecosystem limits regarding CO2 production, biodiversity loss, atmospheric nitrogen depletion; and close to the limits for ocean acidification, land use converted to cropland, & water consumption; and until we invent sustainable replacements for currently non-renewable oil drilling and phosphorus mining, it’s probably a better idea to say “fund research into fixing this” than “it’s all good”.

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