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Comment by OgsyedIE | Hacker News Reader

The problems he describes all fit into three buckets

* Insurance industry rent-seeking

* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)

* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)

I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:

https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-...

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> I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism

But you do want to assert that it is true, without being aware of its meaning?

Malthusianism is the notion that some people must be poor / hungry because humans choose to reproduce until they reach the limits of the environment to provide for them (especially those Irish potato farmers, according to Malthus), and that increases in productivity will not change this - they will just be absorbed by a growing population (which ought to be 'swept away').

In reality, growing populations have led to more than adequate improvements in food production efficiency and people are choosing to reproduce less rather than more.

There is an excellent summary and rebuttal of Malthusianism in the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George, which offers an alternative view of how supply and demand for finite land (your words) rather than reproductive instinct (Malthusianism) creates poverty.

How about point 4 - the litigiousness of American society leading to those high insurance costs, given that any accident on a playground can result in a multi million dollar payout?

I think litigiousness is a symptom of the lack of a social safety net so you are pressed to push for financial support from Wherever you can.

I see it more as a symptom of deaths and incapacities becoming orders of magnitude more rare than they were a century ago. We've always not had a social net (and relatively speaking, we have more of a social net now than before); it's the human perception and familiarity with suffering of those around them that has shifted drastically. If you were alive 100 years ago you would have likely expected to have one or two children passed away and dozens of deceased or incapacitated friends/family members by your thirties; such was life, as disease, malnutrition and other dangers were rampant. Nowadays we have such a lower incidence of death and harm that the relative emotional impact of one is staggering, to the extent that people will go out of their way to assign blame and sue to the greatest extent possible rather than see risks as an inherent part of life.

Completely ignoring the extreme inequalities in ownership and just basic control about the general direction that economic development goes to, so I can't really take this seriously.

Also not sure how large-scale ecosystem destruction counts as "Ennui".

There is zero objective necessity for the current data center gold rush, and yet it takes away an enormous amount of resources.

Meanwhile, China somehow manages to turn deserts back into fertile land.

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