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Comment by bobo888 | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, considering that humans are on top of the food chain, maybe what you describe is a good thing (and we have it in our genes):

Population can not grow forever on a planet with a limited amount of resorces. So people either stop having children, or begin killing each other.

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malthusian arguments have been debunked. humans are wealth producing, not destroying.

But on the other hand, people want more and more wealth. For example, I cannot imagine myself living today without a washing machine. Yet 50 years ago it would have been considered a luxury.

"Humanity grows exponentially, food production grows linearly" has not been debunked. People have starved in the last few decades, and we barely managed to avoid a widespread catastrophe through a big one-time upgrade to the best farming techniques known. How many other improvements are left before we reach biology's productivity limits? How long until we run low on natural gas to make fertilizer, having long since mined the pre-existing fertility from the soil?

Almost every case famine during last few decades had to do with some kind of local conflict (e.g. local gangs interfering with delivery of food aid) as opposed to resource shortage. Developed countries produce much more food than they need and then consume it in a very inefficient way. Growing grain and using it to feed livestock as opposed to consuming grain directly is one such example. Earth could comfortably support much large population than we have now.

But what if we actually want to eat meat? What if we want a TV? A refrigerator? A dishwasher? A mobile phone? A car?

Being both a carnivore and a big consumer electronics junkie I can relate to your argument. I was mostly answering to parent poster's comment about people starving. However I'm a big believer in technology being able to overcome that kinds of limits. Here's an excellent essay illustrating how 15 billion people could be supported at the level of American living standards: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html

(As a nice bonus, this is written by John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP).

> humans are wealth producing, not destroying.

Why should this statement be independent of the number of humans in the world?

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