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The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
21–30 of 164 posts
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#22I don't understand how any species escapes logistic growth without strict population control or interstellar travel.
In the right circumstances, birth control happens automatically.
As people get more wealthy, there seems to be less incentive to have lots of children. Perhaps due to better healthcare (less deaths in childbirth) and more securities for old age (eg. pensions).
Seems Africa is at the moment the only continent that still has population growth (and quite massive).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272789/world-population-...
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#23Excited to answer any questions and happily surprised to see it on the front page. Thank you.
I noted elsewhere that this is undergoing major revisions ahead of submissions to IJPS[1]. Riane Eisler read it and asked that I submit. I started working with a co-author a few months ago and he is a published anthropologist so my hope is to have a version done just focusing on the core claims this year.
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#24I prefer the Forward to the UNEP 2024 Global Resources Outlook (181 pages): Natural resources are the basis on which all economies and societies are built, making their sustainable management critical to ending poverty and reducing inequalities. They are also essential to drive the transition to net-zero. To stay below a 2°C temperature rise by 2050, we will need over three billion tonnes of energy transition mineral…
Extreme taxes on luxury physical goods? How can these goals be reached?
^F on the document: https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/44901/...
returned no hits on "luxury" and 16 hits on "taxes", eg:
For several decades, international organizations, scientists and civil society actors have pleaded for the phasing out of environmentally harmful taxes and subsidies, unsustainable spatial planning practices and so on.
We should not accept that meeting human needs has to be resource intensive and we must stop stimulating extraction based economic success.
This report demonstrates that compared to current trends, it is still possible to reduce resource use while growing the economy, reducing inequality, improving well-being and dramatically reducing environmental impacts.
Pages 17 and 18 (labelled as pages xiv and xv) outline nine key message points.
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#25At some point in population growth you run out of land to grow food on. Surely, there are limits?
We use most of our crops to make meat, and we eat far more meat than is healthy. We could simply eat the crops ourselves.
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#26At some point in population growth you run out of land to grow food on. Surely, there are limits?
Why are we assuming population will grow unbounded?
Surely, there is birth control.
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#27I don't understand how any species escapes logistic growth without strict population control or interstellar travel.
In the right circumstances, birth control happens automatically. As people get more wealthy, there seems to be less incentive to have lots of children. Perhaps due to better healthcare (less deaths in childbirth) and more securities for old age (eg. pensions). Seems Africa is at the moment the only continent that still has population growth (and quite massive). https://www.statista.com/statistics/272789/world-populat…
Disagree, wealthy countries are labor resource constrained so the cost of child care balloons compared to wages.
And I predict that as the cost of labor goes up, people will want to have more kids again because it will be profitable, not unlike subsistence farmers wanting kids to work on the farm.
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#28Also worth thinking about in this context is the so-called “repugnant conclusion”:
In Derek Parfit’s original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is stated as follows: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living”.
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked at their HN profile because I was curious. I had printed the PDF to read, finally had time to read it this evening, and posted it after reading it because I found the content to be of high value and was surprised to find it had never been submitted previously.
I absolutely LOVE finding a brain doppelganger on HN, then if they're an article poster, seeing what they've been thinking about. It's like running into a version of myself that's been running my own mental processes across different content and desire paths :) I'm sure there's a way to automate the discovery of ppl like haha ... Oh. hm
Are you my doppelganger? I've been considering training a model on hn comments and using it to find potential co-founders
Re: The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)
#30At some point in population growth you run out of land to grow food on. Surely, there are limits?
We use most of our crops to make meat, and we eat far more meat than is healthy. We could simply eat the crops ourselves.
Eh, sure, but that doesn't really address the parent comment's concern if population keeps growing unbounded. The real answer is that population doesn't keep growing unbounded.