So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. But even taking that premiss as correct
If you want more brain power you don't need more people, you can simply treat the people that already exist better. Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality. People who dont have enough money to survive, people who are in debt, spend so much mental energy just trying to survive. Calculating how much they can afford, how they can stretch their money. Its such a waste, when we could just provide them with the necessities they need to live a dignified life. And then we could see what they created. Sure some people make it out, but percentage wise they are the exception that proves the rule.
Based on what we know about epidemiology, the impact of pollution, the impact of prenatal and early childhood stress. Just consider how those compound with years of poorly funded education in neighborhoods made unstable by the transience of poverty. Add in the school to prison pipeline (partially fueled by a rise in police officers in schools in response to school shootings) and (imo) inevitable substance abuse and think about how many brain cells have been destroyed. I dont think I'd be able to think deeply in those situations.
If brains/ideas are our most important resource we are wasting them. On an almost unimaginable scale.
Yes. Stephen Jay Gould put this thought very well: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
On the other hand (outside of a handful of exceptions) major tech advances are usually made by multiple people at the same time that have access to a similar set of starting information, usually resulting in patent wars and other kinds of disagreements of who was first to figure out something by days or months. And that was already commonplace more than century ago.
The bottom line is with nearly 8 billion people alive there is no such thing as an original thought anymore and everyone is replaceable. So as a consolation even if these people died and continue to die it may not matter much in the grand scheme of things.
To say nothing of Einstein’a child born out of wedlock (to a mother who was Einsteins equal) because his family wouldn’t allow him to marry and lost to history. Now think of all the brilliant minds who by accident of birth are never afforded the opportunity of education. Now think of all the regular people who could contribute at a higher level with an bit of training.
Our biggest obstacle, and our greatest opportunity for advancement (and the continued growth our system requires) is the fact that opportunity is not available to all.
The good news is that the problem is so vast there are parts of it everywhere. Every one of us can pick it up and help.
And that is exactly why you need growth. In a more primitive society the subsistence farming and basic low-value manufacturing are all there is. As technology and capitalism ascend to greater heights you start to get more opportunities for creativity and ingenuity, and enough excess to create the leisure for more high-minded pursuits.
But I’ve come to see that waste of brilliant brains less and less as an unfortunate outcome in a non-ideal world, and more and more as intended.
The (western) world is full of mediocre yet privileged people who (consciously or subconsciously) do whatever they can to avoid competition. And this is the root of much evil in the world.
People are right to want to avoid competition. The issue is that in a system that pushes competition hard on individuals, the only way to avoid it is to prevent accomplishment.
The fundamental issue is that our system is built in such a way that one person's accomplishment is another person's loss.
I've always found the argument for competition rather funny. It seems as though most of us have grown up, not necessarily but at least with the idea, of the "loving family" in mind.
That in order for a child to grow and achieve their full potential they have to be loved and supported by everyone in their family; this means brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, etc.
How is it that the way we structure the core social organisation in our grand societies is so at odds with the way we structure the broader structures? Not only that, but if you look at a classroom; what is the best for children? Encouraging hyper competition or collaboration between classmates? What is the best inside a business, collaboration or competition? What is the best for our governments, collaboration between the different branches or competition?
It seems as though everywhere we look at, we go "yes, people in an organisation have to collaborate with other!" from families to governments... yet... an organisation of organisations (a society) is in turn better served through competition?
We developed these massive societies to overcome the need for competition, but sometimes I feel like this ethos is being turned against us and that some people want us to return to a state of being where everyone is out for themselves in a cruel world that is filled with dangers. And I don't understand why.
Can you elaborate on how avoiding competition is the root of much evil? It is plausible if you mean it as avoiding by stifling or suppressing it.
On the other hand, I believe that competition, broadly construed, is the root of evil (competition is for losers). The more we can not compete with each other, but rather support each other in our own personal endeavors, the better.
>So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible.
People believing in "infinite growth" or even a scaled-down "sensible" version of it, are like people believing in perpetual motion machines, but with degrees and influence on policy.
It's even more tragi-comical when they become even more commited to it as infrastructure, growth engines, society, etc. is crumbling all around them...
future brainpower though and the value of helping poor people is really far out (multiple generations); capitalism can’t even see past the quarter. people are still too self interested, we’d all need to catch religion for it to work
> Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality.
How much exactly? Do you have an estimate?
A good rule of thumb for dismissing bad arguments is asking yourself: "would the same have been argued in the opposite circumstance?" Improving conditions for people in need is a moral imperative. If it were proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that this won't actually maximize economic growth or pace of progress, would you say "oh well" and abandon them? I'd wager you would not. This is one cause to suspect you are not arguing in good faith when you shoehorn their plight into this discussion.
Based of what we know about conditions in modern advanced economies, intelligence as measured by standardized tests is both a good proxy for scientific achievement potential, without any signs of plateauing in the upper ranges [1] and overwhelmingly genetic in origin, with a large number of specific associated polymorphisms already known [2] and parents and children getting closer in the trait rather than diverging with age due to random effects [3]; crucially, with little to no effect of social stratification on heredity [4]. This all but rules out any significant impact of your laundry list of plausible harms – which are, nevertheless, issues that must be addressed for purely humanitarian reasons. (Purported evidence for significant impact is usually invalidated by genetic confounding).
What this means, however, is that there is very little or perhaps no low-hanging fruit left (it having been picked by Flynn effect over the last century), and we are unlikely to directly accelerate progress by any popular progressive policy, as it would not increase our labor pool for cognitively demanding work. And the hardest, highest-impact problems remain dependent on uniquely capable individuals – not lone geniuses but entire teams and organizations of them, sure, and only more scarce for it.
People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all. The tech is already here; the price can be driven almost arbitrarily low at scale. Whether we become a society of geniuses or one stratified by genetic enhancement [5] is a matter of policy – and willingness to look truth in the eye.
That is many big words to be so blind. A big brain does not make a person immune to poverty or war. If a person does not believe maximizing economic growth (as measured by GDP and/or the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) is the most holy of missions, then I suppose their genetics are just too impure.
I am not a serious wrestler, but I do not want the government instituting genetic programs as a final solution to a perfect society.
> People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all.
It's great to read comments like these because it's one of the rare times when these people go mask-off and just tell you that they're eugenicists. Kudos for honesty.
Genetics and race-science cannot be separated, as they were forged in the same (American) fire [1][2]. The role of the former in supporting the latter never goes away; it just changes forms. For every phrenology that's utterly falsified, there's an "omg but what about polygenic risk scores!?" that pops up in its place [3]. Intelligence scores, IQ, psychometrics? Same thing: willing and enthusiastic handmaidens of selective breeding and strengthening the gene pool. Forced sterilization came soon after (60-70k people in the US).
Don't let these guys fool you: there's no "debate" about intelligence and heredity, or really any behavioral genetics, only a reactionary moral and political project: find the vulnerable, the poor, and the sick, and grind'em into dust.
Meanwhile:
> and willingness to look truth in the eye.
Mask on or off, this is a constant: "I'm a brave teller of hard truths in a world intent on hiding from them." You wonder if they'd really be exempt from their own "programs of genetic improvement."
Notably this article doesn't mention water, and doesn't discuss land much other than a single line about Malthus and farmland. Then there's this assertion:
> "But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas."
Arable land - i.e. topsoil - is not a product of technology, it's a product of geology and biology, namely the erosion of rocks and the accumulation of biomass. Yes, one can indeed make an artificial soil-like system (hydroponics), but this in turn requires raw materials (typically clay pebbles, plastic pots, plastic pipes, plus a complete nutrient mixture of simple chemicals) which are in turn made from limited material resources.
Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in the absence of water, human populations do not grow. Just look at a population density map of the United States - note how few people live in the desert zones. Again, there are technological approaches: desalinate ocean water, pump it to the desert, and grow food hydroponically. This requires an investment of material resources and energy.
I get this feeling that economimsts who makes these claims about infinite growth have simply never studied the conservation of energy, or the conservation of mass. Every source I've looked at puts the minimal land area for food production for one human at about two hectares with traditional agriculture, and maybe half that with modern industrial double cropping methods. US farmland is about 166 million hectares, so that sort of fits, as the US population is about 330 million; exports of food also appear to match imports of food so that's a wash.
So clearly there are limits on the growth of the human population on a finite planet. If the question is, "can you have infinite economic growth with a fixed human population", well, whatever discipline makes claims like that is one entirely divorced from physical reality. Inflation maybe?
> Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in the absence of water, human populations do not grow
This isn't really true any longer. Desalinating seawater costs about $1 per 1000 liters. You need a relatively prosperous country to be able to afford that, of course, but an industrialized economy with reasonable levels of corruption is perfectly capable of desalinating enough water to make civilization work.
It's practically tautological that there's limits to population size in a finite world, and that growth cannot be infinite in a finite universe. But I think people often frame this question the wrong way. It's a bit of a straw man.
Economic growth is proportional to the amount of problems solved that humans care about. And the cost of the solution, of course, in terms of human effort. It isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of physical resources consumed or bound. It's a reasonable assumption that there's generally a positive correlation, but the function and coefficients don't have to be linear. That leaves a lot of headroom.
People should rather think about infinite (arbitrary!!) economic growth in terms of what can be done to make the lives of humans better, on average. Even in the Western world, we are so far away from the hedonistic limits that it's ridiculous. It's trivial to imagine a world with no illness, perfect health, indefinite lifespan, very high freedom and low repression, no seriously bothersome and mandatory chores for anyone and so on. What can be done to get closer to such a world? So much.
The limit isn't defined by how polluting our cars can be, or how much beef we're able to produce. Many of these arguments collapse into the completely unimaginative.
"Desalinating seawater costs about $1 per 1000 liters..."
Ah... so if I'm in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and have no water, but I do have a dollar in my pocket, someone will deliver me 1000 liters of water, sourced from desalination of Pacific Ocean water? How much energy will that take?
While the world has numerous issues that need to be solved - I think we've, for the time being, been able to classify exhaustion of materials as a problem we won't have to deal with for a long time.
The earth has a lot of matter in it - it is absurdly massive - technological advances in replicating necessary raw resources (and your topsoil one is particularly good to demonstrate this) have pushed us from looking at an absolute limit to instead viewing the perpetual creation of new components as a steadily rising economic burden.
One raw resource that is actually quickly depleting is river sand for concrete - our current consumption trends are extremely scary here and some governments (CoughIndiaCough) are doing an absolutely terrible job at properly enforcing externality costs on extraction leading to mass habitat destruction. But, if we suddenly found ourselves without easy access to rough river sand we do have alternative construction materials including processed wood in various forms that can be extremely resilient.
I don't really like the wording of the article in defining all resources as artificial - but the natural components driving the economy are quite abundant.
> the natural components driving the economy are quite abundant
defined narrowly, yes, most of them, but consider ecosystem services as equally important economic inputs and the picture looks very different
on this view things like stable weather patterns etc are also natural components driving the economy, and we are rapidly rendering this and many others scarce
> Every source I've looked at puts the minimal land area for food production for one human at about two hectares with traditional agriculture, and maybe half that with modern industrial double cropping methods.
You yourself said that technology doubled the output with the same input.
The whole articles point is that tech enables us to get more from what we have, to support growth. Maybe enough smart Americans will find a way to double it again, so the US can support 660M people with our 166 Hectares. Maybe then we’ll support 1.2B after a new invention!
Maybe they’ll discover a way to grow plants with salt water allowing use of the ocean while saving the freshwater. Maybe then they’ll find a way to make hydroponics less material intense, and they’ll build floating farms on the ocean, giving us more “land”. Given enough smart people, there’s so much more room for growth. That’s the point. We’re not at the breaking point yet.
It's interesting to consider that the total global human population could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more likely around 2100). Global population growth rate has already peaked at 2.1% in 1968, and has since dropped to 1.1%. [1].
In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4, Germany, 1.6, South Korea, 0.81). Albeit during COVID, the 2020 TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the last four years in a row [3].
With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!).
More than just the most developed industrialised countries too. India has just reached replacement and is set to start declining in a few decades. And China ditched the one child policy years ago and are now pushing for more in a bid to prevent a crash landing after they dropped below years ago - currently they're maybe ~20 years from starting to see population decline unless they soften immigration rules.
It's going to take a long time before this change sinks in for people who are still used to worrying about overpopulation, outside of the fringe groups panicking over "white replacement".
A lot of people aren't worried about overpopulation in a vacuum. They are worried about overpopulation along with the rise of personal consumption and potential competition (read: perceived zero-sum games). The job market is already ridiculously competitive. Rent and homes are already crazy, partially due to so many people insisting on living alone and many countries still not having adapted to an increasingly more individualistic society.
Telling them "it'll cool off in 20 years" is about the equivalent of telling them "yeah the problems we have now will continue another 20 years, deal with it".
Peter Zeihan has a few fascinating presentations on the subject (youtube.com/watch?v=l0CQsifJrMc is representative) choke-full of facts and trend lines.
> But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.
That sounds far-stretched. The climate isn't an artificial resource, it's very natural and messing it up is going to seriously hinder growth. The fossil fuels that drove our growth for two centuries aren't artificial either, nor are they idea.
If people want to argue about perpetual growth, they should come with numbers based on known estimates of the resource available today. Otherwise, it's just faith and holds no scientific value.
Just to take computing as an example analogy: the problem is that some physical limits are close at hand, like the heat dissipation possible per square or cubic centimeter, which constrains processor improvements more today than say, 30 years ago, and some limits are far away, like the number of bits that can stored per unit of volume given the inherent quantum noise, which is an enormous number of bits in a tiny space, and we are nowhere near close to this limit. So we can reasonably assume a long growth trajectory for storage density but a short and slow growth trajectory in compute.
Malthus wasn't really wrong, we just pushed back the boundaries farther than what he imagined. For example, there was a lot more farmland available than he thought or calculated; we grew up to and past that. We also increased yields per acre roughly 4x in the 20th century. There's no realistic 4x happening for that again; in fact, soil quality has been depleted to the point that yields are flat or even falling. (plus climate change supercharges weather patterns and lots of crops are lost). Though his words were clunky, he was basically saying that exponential growth will outstrip polynomial growth in the end. And that's inescapable.
Some resources on Earth are in tight supply, like helium and lithium, and others are super abundant, like uranium and water (though fresh water is tight!). But they are all limited and eventually the "ideas" we keep coming up to utilize them better will be no substitute.
The fossil fuels are pumped out (and refined) with billions (and billions...) of dollars of high tech machinery based on complex ideas, though, rather than just being natural pools of gasoline you drive your car up to.
> In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth... Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall.
Well you really only need a small number of very talented brains. And continuing to grow the global population is probably not the most efficient way of getting them.
You're so right. I strongly dislike the argument put forward by Bezos and others (paraphrased, "imagine how many Einsteins we would have with a much larger world population"). Completely ignoring the billions of human brains that are full of scientific potential but forced to spend their efforts trying to figure out how to survive.
I find it almost aggressively misanthropic. That most people on the planet are basically there to serve an (unchangeable) percentage of those who have the luxury of thinking about abstract concepts all day.
Not to mention that Einstein had a fairly stable, stress-free job that paid the bills and even allowed him some extra time to moonlight his ideas with various friends from the university and work on his doctorate. These same people want to pay people as little as possible and make them work as hard as possible, cut the social safety nets, not pay for national infrastructure like healthcare, education, and transportation, and retreat to their $250 million mansions--of which Bezos himself could afford one thousand--and fuck off to space. Tell us more about all those latent Einsteins, oh exalted one!
I'm tired of this doom and gloom. Things have never been better for the average person globally. Someone in relative poverty today lives better than even the wealthiest people a few hundred years ago.
Things like the Pareto principle suggest our ability to do science is greatly impacted by raising the total population and creating more outliers who do extreme contributions.
Can it continue? Sure. Theoretically we could all be hooked up to computers that slow our perception of reality and allow us to create 2x the digital commodities we could normally in our lifetime. This would technically count as "growth". But I think the actual question is flawed to begin with. Why do we need infinite growth? Do we really need 3% economic growth per year ad infinitum? Why is that our metric for optimization? Why don't choose something else to optimize on like human happiness or fulfillment or freedom?
Not only do we need more brains, but we also need robust knowledge transfers between generations (between current and new brains). I.e. for new brains to be effective, they must start from the point that the old brains stopped.
As I see it the opposite process is at play. For example, cloud computing decrease the need to understand hardware/os. Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge accumulation pipeline.
I enjoy the freedom to have a closet full of extremely finely tailored clothes (going by the 1800s standards) I'm practically living the millionaire's dream from that era... but never in my life have I learned how to operate a flying shuttle loom - some information is specialized and doesn't need widespread knowing.
When I went to uni (and I'm only 35 so I'm not talking about the 80s) we learned about low level data structures, I took a course in relational algebra, operating system design, assembly language - these were necessary (imo) broadening exercises that have enabled me to better understand how to make things work performantly at a high level. Now a company may only need one or two folks like me with a passion for algorithm design among a dev team of fifty - but we don't all need formal training in every little thing.
Imparting the knowledge of how to learn, along with those pieces of basic information we deem critical, can be enough.
> Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge accumulation pipeline.
This is why Boeing can’t build planes anymore:
They decided midcareer engineers were too expensive and their crop of senior engineers are aging out — so they no longer have the expertise necessary, due to outsourcing and not supporting their young employees.
Another way to look at this is just as an optimization problem. We found a good local optimum and it became too costly to search further.
In the early days of aerospace, the search space was mostly unknown and there were tons of companies investing R&D in a wide variety of designs. Huge amounts of human capital were invested, and as in all things, some designs worked, some didn't. Many companies went bankrupt.
Eventually we find some good designs and the risk/reward of searching the space further just doesn't make sense. Only recently with improved tech and ML/AI + simulation has the cost to search been reduced enough that it makes economic sense to try again.
Robust knowledge transfers between generations sounds nice, but the older people are retiring in droves and younger people aren't replacing them quickly enough. We just get a bunch of newbloods that don't get the chance to learn from old hands who will get paid less than them due to labor shortages. It is too bad we treat people like shit in this country. Consider, if you would the situation of nurses in America. We have record nursing school enrollment, high rates of turnover, increasing rates of violence against medical professionals, and levels of burnout that should give everyone pause.
Nurses and doctors are all facing mental health crises. Violence against medical professionals is rising at rapid rates even prior to the pandemic. Many health professionals don't report assaults either because of their altruistic tendencies. More than half of nurses are thinking or planning on quitting their jobs. More than half of all doctors wouldn't recommend or don't want their children to go into medicine. Here's a fun little excercise for you. Google the nearest hospital near you and see how many openings they have. Especially for security. The hospital near me has never had a security officer. Now they have five. Hospital workers are being taught de-escalation techniques and taking self defense classes. Senior homes are facing record shortages of labor.
Who'd you rather have treating your loved ones? The nurses with decades of practical experience, or the nursing school graduates who will quit after 3 years of burn out and stress? We're starting to treat nurses as badly as we do teachers. What do we expect to happen? This is just one industry as well. A few fun links for your perusal.
> Now, that’s a problem for another time. But note that in five minutes we’ve gone from worrying about overpopulation to underpopulation. That’s because we’ve traded a scarcity mindset, where growth is limited by resources, for an abundance mindset, where it is limited only by our ingenuity.
I think that's also something that will be eventually be irrelevant.
Right now it's standard for productivity of a person to be the driver or benchmark of an economy, but once you can automate a process so completely that there is no human involved in it then you can scale infinitely regardless of population, even if it stagnates or decreases.
Raw resources aren't a exactly limited thing in the solar system, not on our scales anyway.
Readit News
The bottom line is with nearly 8 billion people alive there is no such thing as an original thought anymore and everyone is replaceable. So as a consolation even if these people died and continue to die it may not matter much in the grand scheme of things.
Our biggest obstacle, and our greatest opportunity for advancement (and the continued growth our system requires) is the fact that opportunity is not available to all. The good news is that the problem is so vast there are parts of it everywhere. Every one of us can pick it up and help.
Deleted Comment
But I’ve come to see that waste of brilliant brains less and less as an unfortunate outcome in a non-ideal world, and more and more as intended.
The (western) world is full of mediocre yet privileged people who (consciously or subconsciously) do whatever they can to avoid competition. And this is the root of much evil in the world.
Or at least that’s how I increasingly see it.
The fundamental issue is that our system is built in such a way that one person's accomplishment is another person's loss.
That in order for a child to grow and achieve their full potential they have to be loved and supported by everyone in their family; this means brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, etc.
How is it that the way we structure the core social organisation in our grand societies is so at odds with the way we structure the broader structures? Not only that, but if you look at a classroom; what is the best for children? Encouraging hyper competition or collaboration between classmates? What is the best inside a business, collaboration or competition? What is the best for our governments, collaboration between the different branches or competition?
It seems as though everywhere we look at, we go "yes, people in an organisation have to collaborate with other!" from families to governments... yet... an organisation of organisations (a society) is in turn better served through competition?
We developed these massive societies to overcome the need for competition, but sometimes I feel like this ethos is being turned against us and that some people want us to return to a state of being where everyone is out for themselves in a cruel world that is filled with dangers. And I don't understand why.
On the other hand, I believe that competition, broadly construed, is the root of evil (competition is for losers). The more we can not compete with each other, but rather support each other in our own personal endeavors, the better.
People believing in "infinite growth" or even a scaled-down "sensible" version of it, are like people believing in perpetual motion machines, but with degrees and influence on policy.
It's even more tragi-comical when they become even more commited to it as infrastructure, growth engines, society, etc. is crumbling all around them...
Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow.
Simple aggregation does not work for brains. Message assessment and discrimination are expensive.
How much exactly? Do you have an estimate?
A good rule of thumb for dismissing bad arguments is asking yourself: "would the same have been argued in the opposite circumstance?" Improving conditions for people in need is a moral imperative. If it were proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that this won't actually maximize economic growth or pace of progress, would you say "oh well" and abandon them? I'd wager you would not. This is one cause to suspect you are not arguing in good faith when you shoehorn their plight into this discussion.
Based of what we know about conditions in modern advanced economies, intelligence as measured by standardized tests is both a good proxy for scientific achievement potential, without any signs of plateauing in the upper ranges [1] and overwhelmingly genetic in origin, with a large number of specific associated polymorphisms already known [2] and parents and children getting closer in the trait rather than diverging with age due to random effects [3]; crucially, with little to no effect of social stratification on heredity [4]. This all but rules out any significant impact of your laundry list of plausible harms – which are, nevertheless, issues that must be addressed for purely humanitarian reasons. (Purported evidence for significant impact is usually invalidated by genetic confounding). What this means, however, is that there is very little or perhaps no low-hanging fruit left (it having been picked by Flynn effect over the last century), and we are unlikely to directly accelerate progress by any popular progressive policy, as it would not increase our labor pool for cognitively demanding work. And the hardest, highest-impact problems remain dependent on uniquely capable individuals – not lone geniuses but entire teams and organizations of them, sure, and only more scarce for it. People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all. The tech is already here; the price can be driven almost arbitrarily low at scale. Whether we become a society of geniuses or one stratified by genetic enhancement [5] is a matter of policy – and willingness to look truth in the eye.
1. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101....
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/
4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708491114
5. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/america-in-2072-a-society-s...
I am not a serious wrestler, but I do not want the government instituting genetic programs as a final solution to a perfect society.
It's great to read comments like these because it's one of the rare times when these people go mask-off and just tell you that they're eugenicists. Kudos for honesty.
Genetics and race-science cannot be separated, as they were forged in the same (American) fire [1][2]. The role of the former in supporting the latter never goes away; it just changes forms. For every phrenology that's utterly falsified, there's an "omg but what about polygenic risk scores!?" that pops up in its place [3]. Intelligence scores, IQ, psychometrics? Same thing: willing and enthusiastic handmaidens of selective breeding and strengthening the gene pool. Forced sterilization came soon after (60-70k people in the US).
Don't let these guys fool you: there's no "debate" about intelligence and heredity, or really any behavioral genetics, only a reactionary moral and political project: find the vulnerable, the poor, and the sick, and grind'em into dust.
Meanwhile:
> and willingness to look truth in the eye.
Mask on or off, this is a constant: "I'm a brave teller of hard truths in a world intent on hiding from them." You wonder if they'd really be exempt from their own "programs of genetic improvement."
1. https://archive.ph/eILU7
2. https://books.google.com/books/about/War_Against_the_Weak.ht...
3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-021-00961-5
> "But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas."
Arable land - i.e. topsoil - is not a product of technology, it's a product of geology and biology, namely the erosion of rocks and the accumulation of biomass. Yes, one can indeed make an artificial soil-like system (hydroponics), but this in turn requires raw materials (typically clay pebbles, plastic pots, plastic pipes, plus a complete nutrient mixture of simple chemicals) which are in turn made from limited material resources.
Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in the absence of water, human populations do not grow. Just look at a population density map of the United States - note how few people live in the desert zones. Again, there are technological approaches: desalinate ocean water, pump it to the desert, and grow food hydroponically. This requires an investment of material resources and energy.
I get this feeling that economimsts who makes these claims about infinite growth have simply never studied the conservation of energy, or the conservation of mass. Every source I've looked at puts the minimal land area for food production for one human at about two hectares with traditional agriculture, and maybe half that with modern industrial double cropping methods. US farmland is about 166 million hectares, so that sort of fits, as the US population is about 330 million; exports of food also appear to match imports of food so that's a wash.
So clearly there are limits on the growth of the human population on a finite planet. If the question is, "can you have infinite economic growth with a fixed human population", well, whatever discipline makes claims like that is one entirely divorced from physical reality. Inflation maybe?
This isn't really true any longer. Desalinating seawater costs about $1 per 1000 liters. You need a relatively prosperous country to be able to afford that, of course, but an industrialized economy with reasonable levels of corruption is perfectly capable of desalinating enough water to make civilization work.
It's practically tautological that there's limits to population size in a finite world, and that growth cannot be infinite in a finite universe. But I think people often frame this question the wrong way. It's a bit of a straw man.
Economic growth is proportional to the amount of problems solved that humans care about. And the cost of the solution, of course, in terms of human effort. It isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of physical resources consumed or bound. It's a reasonable assumption that there's generally a positive correlation, but the function and coefficients don't have to be linear. That leaves a lot of headroom.
People should rather think about infinite (arbitrary!!) economic growth in terms of what can be done to make the lives of humans better, on average. Even in the Western world, we are so far away from the hedonistic limits that it's ridiculous. It's trivial to imagine a world with no illness, perfect health, indefinite lifespan, very high freedom and low repression, no seriously bothersome and mandatory chores for anyone and so on. What can be done to get closer to such a world? So much.
The limit isn't defined by how polluting our cars can be, or how much beef we're able to produce. Many of these arguments collapse into the completely unimaginative.
Ah... so if I'm in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and have no water, but I do have a dollar in my pocket, someone will deliver me 1000 liters of water, sourced from desalination of Pacific Ocean water? How much energy will that take?
When it comes to resources, humanity doesn't have much a track record of doing so.
The earth has a lot of matter in it - it is absurdly massive - technological advances in replicating necessary raw resources (and your topsoil one is particularly good to demonstrate this) have pushed us from looking at an absolute limit to instead viewing the perpetual creation of new components as a steadily rising economic burden.
One raw resource that is actually quickly depleting is river sand for concrete - our current consumption trends are extremely scary here and some governments (CoughIndiaCough) are doing an absolutely terrible job at properly enforcing externality costs on extraction leading to mass habitat destruction. But, if we suddenly found ourselves without easy access to rough river sand we do have alternative construction materials including processed wood in various forms that can be extremely resilient.
I don't really like the wording of the article in defining all resources as artificial - but the natural components driving the economy are quite abundant.
defined narrowly, yes, most of them, but consider ecosystem services as equally important economic inputs and the picture looks very different
on this view things like stable weather patterns etc are also natural components driving the economy, and we are rapidly rendering this and many others scarce
You yourself said that technology doubled the output with the same input.
The whole articles point is that tech enables us to get more from what we have, to support growth. Maybe enough smart Americans will find a way to double it again, so the US can support 660M people with our 166 Hectares. Maybe then we’ll support 1.2B after a new invention!
Maybe they’ll discover a way to grow plants with salt water allowing use of the ocean while saving the freshwater. Maybe then they’ll find a way to make hydroponics less material intense, and they’ll build floating farms on the ocean, giving us more “land”. Given enough smart people, there’s so much more room for growth. That’s the point. We’re not at the breaking point yet.
In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4, Germany, 1.6, South Korea, 0.81). Albeit during COVID, the 2020 TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the last four years in a row [3].
With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-cov...
It's going to take a long time before this change sinks in for people who are still used to worrying about overpopulation, outside of the fringe groups panicking over "white replacement".
Telling them "it'll cool off in 20 years" is about the equivalent of telling them "yeah the problems we have now will continue another 20 years, deal with it".
> But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.
That sounds far-stretched. The climate isn't an artificial resource, it's very natural and messing it up is going to seriously hinder growth. The fossil fuels that drove our growth for two centuries aren't artificial either, nor are they idea.
The limits to growth is still valid today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth There's no scenario in which growth is perpetual.
If people want to argue about perpetual growth, they should come with numbers based on known estimates of the resource available today. Otherwise, it's just faith and holds no scientific value.
Malthus wasn't really wrong, we just pushed back the boundaries farther than what he imagined. For example, there was a lot more farmland available than he thought or calculated; we grew up to and past that. We also increased yields per acre roughly 4x in the 20th century. There's no realistic 4x happening for that again; in fact, soil quality has been depleted to the point that yields are flat or even falling. (plus climate change supercharges weather patterns and lots of crops are lost). Though his words were clunky, he was basically saying that exponential growth will outstrip polynomial growth in the end. And that's inescapable.
Some resources on Earth are in tight supply, like helium and lithium, and others are super abundant, like uranium and water (though fresh water is tight!). But they are all limited and eventually the "ideas" we keep coming up to utilize them better will be no substitute.
Those turned out to be scarce and limited, and were used up quickly.
Well you really only need a small number of very talented brains. And continuing to grow the global population is probably not the most efficient way of getting them.
I find it almost aggressively misanthropic. That most people on the planet are basically there to serve an (unchangeable) percentage of those who have the luxury of thinking about abstract concepts all day.
Things like the Pareto principle suggest our ability to do science is greatly impacted by raising the total population and creating more outliers who do extreme contributions.
If you keep a stable population and pay people based upon life expectations * skill, no one would need a retirement account.
But those with pull want to sit on their hands and do nothing, and throw around large sums of money, hence the ponzi scheme.
The optimal number of children is 2.1, for offspring to replace parents
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/fertility-rate
When there is no population growth, no inflation or economic growth:
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJis2K6B8Q
You might think that worldwide and US has <2.1%, but technology amplifies productivity, so it is not a 1-1 ratio
[3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=Popu....
[4] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...
Not only do we need more brains, but we also need robust knowledge transfers between generations (between current and new brains). I.e. for new brains to be effective, they must start from the point that the old brains stopped.
As I see it the opposite process is at play. For example, cloud computing decrease the need to understand hardware/os. Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge accumulation pipeline.
When I went to uni (and I'm only 35 so I'm not talking about the 80s) we learned about low level data structures, I took a course in relational algebra, operating system design, assembly language - these were necessary (imo) broadening exercises that have enabled me to better understand how to make things work performantly at a high level. Now a company may only need one or two folks like me with a passion for algorithm design among a dev team of fifty - but we don't all need formal training in every little thing.
Imparting the knowledge of how to learn, along with those pieces of basic information we deem critical, can be enough.
This is why Boeing can’t build planes anymore:
They decided midcareer engineers were too expensive and their crop of senior engineers are aging out — so they no longer have the expertise necessary, due to outsourcing and not supporting their young employees.
In the early days of aerospace, the search space was mostly unknown and there were tons of companies investing R&D in a wide variety of designs. Huge amounts of human capital were invested, and as in all things, some designs worked, some didn't. Many companies went bankrupt.
Eventually we find some good designs and the risk/reward of searching the space further just doesn't make sense. Only recently with improved tech and ML/AI + simulation has the cost to search been reduced enough that it makes economic sense to try again.
Nurses and doctors are all facing mental health crises. Violence against medical professionals is rising at rapid rates even prior to the pandemic. Many health professionals don't report assaults either because of their altruistic tendencies. More than half of nurses are thinking or planning on quitting their jobs. More than half of all doctors wouldn't recommend or don't want their children to go into medicine. Here's a fun little excercise for you. Google the nearest hospital near you and see how many openings they have. Especially for security. The hospital near me has never had a security officer. Now they have five. Hospital workers are being taught de-escalation techniques and taking self defense classes. Senior homes are facing record shortages of labor.
Who'd you rather have treating your loved ones? The nurses with decades of practical experience, or the nursing school graduates who will quit after 3 years of burn out and stress? We're starting to treat nurses as badly as we do teachers. What do we expect to happen? This is just one industry as well. A few fun links for your perusal.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/04/19/new-survey...
https://www.ajc.com/pulse/survey-shows-90-of-nurses-consider...
https://www.benefitnews.com/news/nurses-are-planning-to-quit... https://www.aacnnursing.org/News-Information/News/View/Artic....
Just a motivational speech.
Right now it's standard for productivity of a person to be the driver or benchmark of an economy, but once you can automate a process so completely that there is no human involved in it then you can scale infinitely regardless of population, even if it stagnates or decreases.
Raw resources aren't a exactly limited thing in the solar system, not on our scales anyway.