Defying Malthus

[sus]

I thought this talk was great, maybe people have read the book or related book reviews, or are just familiar with Charles Mann's stuff more generally. I've been reading and liking 1491, moving on to 1493 soon.

This lecture, even in just the first 20 minutes, sets up the major fault lines for the ideological drama Mann recounts. That ideological drama is embodied in the stories of two rival scientists, Borlaug and Vogt, and their different backgrounds and worldviews, and how their different work. Borlaug authored the Green Revolution by cross-breeding wheat in Mexico; Vogt worked on Malthusian death-spirals in South America. Borlaug thought we could defy Malthus with technological and scientific innovation. Vogt thought the world's poor was doomed to live in hunger, and needed to live in a self-restrained ecological balance with nature—an austerity approach that involved withdrawing from the land. To Mann, they stand for the wizard vs prophet archetypes:

Wizard archetype: Build better tools. Coordination magic.

Prophet archetype: Apocalypse and limits, humility and repentance.

One thing I see here of interest is a potential synthesis of social leftist (i.e. pro-working class/labor/global south) and SV techno-optimism via a rejection of aristocratic aestheticism. That's probably my inclination, but I'm sympathetic to prophet and luddite and degrowth views.

Another is that the zoomed-out perspective; I think the macro view lends a layer of richness to thinking about the present.

 

[sus]

Also down generally to talk about:
- Malthus's predictions
- the developments/growth he failed to foresee
- zero-sum vs positive-sum thinking & games generally
- the tension between labor and aristocratic values within leftist politics
- long-termism, sustainability
- biodiversity (one of Mann's other big topics is the "homogenocene" and "New Pangea")
- Charles Mann

 

[sus]

Last thread seed, this quote from Brad DeLong, from an interesting talk about historic growth patterns:

Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough. When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor. It was really fact.

What does this elite consist of? Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm not really familiar with Malthus beyond second-hand treatments of his doctrine/trap about population growth. Henry George dedicates a lot of ink to refuting it in Progress and Poverty, and makes a compelling case, essentially saying that productivity's inability to match population growth isn't just due to natural ecological reasons, but also due to social and economic systems and relations of production.

 

[HMGovt]

“Paul Ehrlich had written several hysterical books arguing that the earth was on the edge of catastrophe from running out of vital resources, with precise dire predictions about the dates on which these resources would be exhausted. In 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich to name any raw materials and any period longer than a year, and bet him $10,000 that the price of each of these metals, adjusted for inflation, would be lower at the end of the period than before it. Ehrlich picked copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten, which were all materials he had predicted would
run out. Yet, in 1990, the price of each of these metals had dropped, and the level of annual production had increased, even though the intervening decade had seen human population increase by 800 million people, the largest increase in a single decade before or since.

In reality, the more humans exist, the more production of all these raw materials can take place.
More importantly, perhaps, as economist Michael Kremer argues, the fundamental driver of human progress is not raw materials, but technological solutions to problems. Technology is by its nature both a non‐excludable good (meaning that once one person invents something, all others can copy it and benefit from it) and a non‐rival good (meaning that a person benefiting from an invention does not reduce the utility that accrues to others who use it). As an example, take the wheel. Once one person invented it, everyone else could copy it and make their own wheel, and their use of their wheel would not in any way reduce others' ability to benefit from it. Ingenious ideas are rare, and only a small minority of people can come up with them. Larger populations will thus produce more technologies and ideas than smaller populations, and because the benefit accrues to everyone, it is better to live in a world with a larger population. The more humans exist on earth, the more technologies and productive ideas are thought of, and the more humans can benefit from these ideas and copy them from one another, leading to higher productivity of human time and improving standards of living”

Excerpt From: Saifedean Ammous. “The Bitcoin Standard”. Apple Books.

 

[HMGovt]

I sometimes wonder about abiotic hydrocarbon production, because as a civilisation, we still run on oil and gas (and coal, again). I mean, if (presumably) lifeless Titan is all made up out of methane and other hydrocarbons, why can't Earth be brimming with them too?

 

[sus]

I'm not really familiar with Malthus beyond second-hand treatments of his doctrine/trap about population growth. Henry George dedicates a lot of ink to refuting it in Progress and Poverty, and makes a compelling case, essentially saying that productivity's inability to match population growth isn't just due to natural ecological reasons, but also due to social and economic systems and relations of production.

Yeah I mean I think this becomes much easier to say around George's time, because there was finally an uptick of growth rate after thousands of years

 

[version]

Gus changing his name to Sus.

 

[sus]

@HMGovt the Simon view is true though in some absolute sense. At some point we do in fact run out of natural minerals. Just, presumably, we figure out how to synthesize them cheaply before that happens.

I think that sorta view (yes there's a limit, but our runway is really long) makes sense and is true, true even of oil—we have hundreds of years worth still—but I do think that pre 1870, it's not clear the runway is long enough for takeoff. It seeming easily long enough is the result of 20th C growth rates

 

[version]

I like the blue. It's cool that the colour changes with your username.

 

[sus]

 

[shakahislop]

definitely one thing that i notice travelling around the world and thinking about these different places is that population growth is a phenomenon that has shaped basically everywhere. it's a really key element of how the world has changed in the last 50 years i think, there are just a ton of us now. the data is probably not great, but the estimate on google for bangladesh is that it's gone from 68 million to 168 million people in that period. i sometimes wonder if that volume of labour, which is very much exploited by people in the west for clothes and places like dubai for construction, taxi drivers etc, is one of the ways that material wellbeing in the west etc has managed to reach such a high level over the same period, rather than anything to do with economic management, general domination, technology and so forth.

another thing i think about a lot is that about 100 billion human beings have ever existed. it's really a lot less than i expected. and it somehow feels better being one of 100 billion rather than one of an infinite number, which is what it felt like until i came across that figure.

 

[shakahislop]

its not just bangladesh though, it's everywhere. even rural oxfordshire is also really shaped by the number of people that are around. part of the reason that a different way of life has emerged in what was a quiet backwater even in the 80s.

 

[luka]

one striking thing about London is how the scale has changed. the old post war tower blocks look Liliputian in comparison to the new stuff that dominates just about every district now. although its not clear this is even linked to population growth per se

 

[sus]

Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist best known for his pessimistic—and wildly inaccurate[2][3][4][5][6][7]—predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources.[8][9]

Ehrlich became well known for the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb which he co-authored with his wife Anne H. Ehrlich, in which they famously—and erroneously—stated that "n the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."[10][11] Among the solutions suggested in that book was population control, including "various forms of coercion" such as eliminating "tax benefits for having additional children,"[2] to be used if voluntary methods were to fail, as well as letting "hopeless" countries like India starve to death. For its faulty predictions and the impact it had on human fertility rates, the book has been called "one of the most spectacularly foolish books ever published".[12]



brutal wiki page intro lmao. the chain of citations after "wildly inaccurate." devastating.

 

[sus]

I do think it's interesting that we have this history of getting really scared about an environmental issue for like, 1-2 decades, and then it turns out to be not as dire as it seemed, and we basically fix it and everyone forgets

like what happened to acid rain and save the whales and the bee crises and the ozone layer, all these things

I'm not saying climate change isn't real but I think there should be some optimism as a takeaway here, about our ability to respond

 

[Mr. Tea]

its not just bangladesh though, it's everywhere. even rural oxfordshire is also really shaped by the number of people that are around. part of the reason that a different way of life has emerged in what was a quiet backwater even in the 80s.

The English countryside is very densely populated, especially in the south. You go to rural France and it's empty by comparison.