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Comment by Frost1x | Hacker News Reader

I find the non-zero-sum arguments often lacking imagination. Outside of simple mechanic table games, in most of reality, resources and energy are finite and basic human needs are fundamentally shared.

Most scenarios claiming to be non-zero-sum often lack imagination or pursue academic dishonesty by isolating systems to a few components to project the scenario as being positive sum, when in the fact the goal is to sell zero sum or net negative sum game by outside players or those on the other side with much to gain.

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Resources and energy and the ability to meet basic human needs are, in fact, almost entirely NOT zero sum.

Virtually every resource we have, whether oil, minerals, food, shelter, entertainment, education, etc, is drastically expanded and in many cases is only possible by living in a society with many other people. There's vastly more oil, copper, food, shelter, entertainment, and education now than at any other time in history. That's because human ingenuity and economies of scale are fundamentally positive-sum.

Imagine you killed half of all people. Will your lot improve?

Let's say 99.9% of people are killed. I am certain that your life would rapidly become extremely difficult and would remain that way for the rest of your life.

There can be no industrial civilization without economies of scale. To pick a very Hacker News example, think about Moore's Law. It has only been able to be continued because the market for computing has continually expanded. If the revenue remains flat for semiconductors, there's not enough capital to be able to invest in the next generation of equipment that is yet more expensive. You need more people buying these chips in order to justify that greater investment.

>Resources and energy and the ability to meet basic human needs are, in fact, almost entirely NOT zero sum.

This is absolutely not true. Earth has a carrying capacity and we don't have technology currently to leave Earth for any reasonable time. Estimates vary as to the carrying capacity for humans but an upper estimate is around 16 billion. It could be significantly higher but there's definitely a limit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity

The brightest minds (ala The Population Bomb) recently thought that the end times were supposed to happen 40-50 years ago.

I see you an a lot of other people in this thread arguing in two completely different frameworks. Your counter didn't address the parent's claim that economies of scale improved our life immensely, you just pointed out that there is a cutoff on how many people the earth can support.

I think both points are true and in no way mutually exclusive. I will just highlight that while what your say is true, there _must_ be some upper bound where a high enough population will mean living on earth will become unsustainable, I would NOT use that as the most immediate threat seeing how:

1) We are still quite a bit off from the 16 billion figure you quoted.

2) The global trend is population shrinking, not population increase.

3) As proven in the past, technology does tend to allow us to greatly increase the carrying capacity of our environment.

I think that figure would be on the order of 100 billion to 1 trillion people on Earth itself. And I agree about population stagnation at about 10-12 billion for the foreseeable future.

Humans have the unique ability and motivation to increase the carrying capacity of their environment. We can breed or genetically modify crops to grow faster and fuller. We can clean dirty water. We can make bricks and build houses to shelter from nature. So far, there has been no evidence we are anywhere close to Earth's carrying capacity. Quite the opposite, actually.

If the job market (and economy) was zero-sum then why is population growth generally considered good for the economy? Wouldn't young people, as they age into the job market, push out all older workers? This happens in anecdotal cases but overall the vast majority of older Americans have jobs despite being outnumbered by younger generations.

We realize that new generations not only take up jobs but they also add value to the economy, growing it and making it possible for everybody to have jobs. Except in isolated cases immigrants do the same thing. If this wasn't true then America--being largely a nation of immigrants--would be one of the most poor countries in the world instead of one of the richest.

173,000 terawatts of solar energy hit the earth continuously. We don't even extract 1/100000th of that. And if we throw in other forms of energy for which we have no feasible extraction methods (such as fusion), we could multiply that potential several fold.

Yes, resource constraints exist...but the idea that we're anywhere near them is the one lacking imagination. There isn't a single practical resource constraint affecting our lives that isn't fundamentally a knowledge problem.

When I say "imagination," I mean that in the current context of time. Projecting into the future to grab non-existant technologies, like a dyson sphere or what-have-you, to try and resolve current energy demand roadblocks in photovoltaic and battery technology isn't looking at the current time frame we inhabitants of Earth share (with an ever so tiny bit of relativistic difference).

If we start looking at pure physical energy and matter, I'm not sure how we get around laws of conservation of energy and matter, making the universe on the grandest of scales potentially zero-sum, but then we get into realms of physics we just don't quite have evidence for yet. But we really don't understand that much about space expansion or potential fate of the universe at all to even make intelligent guesses.

Practical resource constraints are a function of knowledge, and knowledge is not, and never will be, zero-sum. Anything that we do that limits cooperation amongst humans in the generation of knowledge is a de facto creation of a resource constraint.

Immigration, and skilled immigration in particular, is part of that. Limiting immigration due to some imaginary idea of limited resources is inherently a self fulfilling prophecy.

If reality is zero sum as you say, why did we evolve cooperation?

To exploit the plebs? In the article they are selling us women joining the labour force in the 1970s as a net positive ("millions of jobs created"). In return we got caught in the two-income trap because childcare became an expense and real estate went up disproportionately in price. Anyone who isn't discussing this has an agenda, they are probably a capitalist who finds reserve labour useful to have around.

Because two people cooperating can kill one person who isn't and end up with 1/3rd more resources each.

That is literally zero sum and probably negative sum action.

We (humans) often cooperate because it allows us to do things we can't do alone. So perhaps we evolved cooperation so we could hunt and defend ourselves. If we look at this reduction alone, it looks like a positive sum because all of the humans benefit in this case. If we look at the system holistically, now that we can defend ourselves, some wild animal may struggle to find food and starve. All and all, zero sum.

This is all well and good for humans so long as the group size doesn't get to a point where theyre now competing for some finite resource.

Belief in infinite growth stems from an inability to understand how the exponential function works.

There is no such thing as indefinite growth, there is logistic growth between steady states. Pretending that immigration is always good is like pretending that drinking water is always good. Useful when you're in the Sahara, less so when you're drowning.

The US is currently in a situation where the labor market has an oversupply of people which is why real per hour worked wages are still at the level they were in '72. Adding more immigration now will only lower the living standards of the people already here, this will be the case until we increase the carrying capacity of the US economy with better labor laws, more government spending on fundamentals and better targeted research.

Indefinite parabolic growth (at least, for billions of years) is possible.

If you're going to be the one that explains to shareholders why their dividend is dropping each year but will only asymptotically approach zero so they should not fire you, by all means try. Somehow I don't think you'd be successful.

Over billions of years, sure. But no appreciably over a single lifetime.

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