The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)

> Ultimately you are right. We will ultimately and inevitably face resource constraints. How we respond and which resources will provide the limiting constraint is unclear.

Why?

Keep in mind that it is not evident that population will continue to grow.

In 100 years you'll be dead as Caesar's ghost regardless of what car you drive or how braggable your social media presence makes your life appear. Pointless bling is pointless, regardless of how it's framed. Edit: apparently that poked someone in the worldview. Nifty.

"Currently used" and "required" are two different things.

It's not going to happen overnight, but we have the ability to transition a lot of current agriculture toward more sustainable practices, and that's only going to improve as we learn more. I'm not talking about pie-in-the-sky stuff like vertical farming either, I'm talking about more about more proven techniques like soil restoration and permaculture.

>> The purest example of scarcity creating existential terror is declining birth rates. 50% of the world population is now below the replacement birth rate and younger generations are delaying reproduction or choosing to go childless altogether. While this is generally correlated with one-time increases in standards of living, inverted population age pyramids have historically spelled doom for societies.

I think this is mainly correlated with the invention of antibiotics and the near-elimination of child mortality. Historically, when HALF the children are dead before reaching the age of 5, a species has got to have a high birth rate to compensate. Which has been the case in humans since their beginnings:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

Only extremely recently on a historical scale have we surpassed this conundrum and seems like mentally we haven't fully adapted to it. It's no longer necessary to spew out 10 kids in the hope maybe 2 or 3 make it to adulthood. With high likelihood, every born kid can now make it to old age.

And we're still too many, human population is still too big due to this unusual condition of mixing a historical high birth rate with high survivability.

Personally I think there's absolutely no danger. Humans have bounced back since .. I dunno, some 10,000 individuals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck).

I'm sure we don't need 10 billion to continue to survive and natural decline is an elegant solution to overpopulation without the need for Soylent Green scenarios. About half of how many we are currently would be good, a quarter would be even better in the long term.

Bonus it would create incentives for actual efficient work. With less manpower to compensate by just throwing work at the problems, they'd have to be solved in a more automated / sustainable manner.

Sure, but I think there's hope. People learn and change.

I've been speaking pretty openly about how shitty the effects are of the pro-corporate, anti-human ideology that's prevalent on HN for a few years now. I've noticed more people joining me in speaking out, and less push-back. I made an aside comment a few days back about corporations being willing to murder for profit, and someone else linked a bunch of examples of corporate murders. A few years ago, I would have had to pull together all that research myself, and I was the only one I ever saw doing it.

And to be clear, I'm not saying this to take credit for the change--I'm sure there are other people. I'm just saying, change is happening, if slowly.