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2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
251–260 of 317 posts
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just added the "EDIT" section before I saw your question. That was what made me start questioning my beliefs. Here's a few things the letter said that eroded away the assumptions I had built regarding: POVERTY: > There are still slums and pockets of poverty, but by and large when I visit there now I think, “Wow, most people who live here are middle-class. What a miracle.” > There is a class of nations in the middle…
As a firm believer that overpopulation won't be solved by throwing money at it, and that the people who are having children are the ones who shouldn't, I see most of this as irrelevant. Of course money solves poverty in the short term, no one should be surprised by that. But notice how he keeps comparing one generation with only the previous, and never making long-term assertions. Besides, I doubt Gates can go from t…
Sorry, making Windows ubiquitous on our PC's by monopoly position shenanigans does not equate, evil-wise, to the abuse of workers rights, health and our environment that many blue chip companies have participated in over the past 60 or so years - e.g. oil companies, food giants, mining corps.
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#253It's an excellent piece. I'll admit to being a bit confused by the assertion, however: > "letting children die now so they don’t starve later—doesn’t actually work, thank goodness. It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too." I spent five months in Kenya, and…
Overpopulation can also result from simple trade. NYC and generally the entire US eastern seaboard are overpopulated by your definition.
Is food given to people in NYC/East Coast for free, or do the people there purchase it?
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worrying about ecological self-sufficiency and sustainability at a smaller than planetwide scale is essentially throwing away the entire advantage of how much our massive global logistics network has shrunk the world in recent decades.
Relying on the massive global logistics network to support massively nonequilibrium populations in highly infertile land is counting on a patently unsustainable level of resource use to create a massive risk. It's one thing to have local shortfalls of food or water of a few percent which can be satisfied with largely local imports of a few hundred kilometers (say, Germany, which is roughly 90% self-sufficient for foo…
> [...] is counting on a patently unsustainable level of resource use to create a massive risk.
Can you please elaborate? We sit on a giant ball of matter, and there's enough energy coming in from the sun (or via nuclear power) to last us a few billion years.
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overpopulation can also result from simple trade. NYC and generally the entire US eastern seaboard are overpopulated by your definition.
Or virtually all of the Persian Gulf. Some of the fastest-growing populations, in what's empty desert without even sufficient water for cities let alone agriculture. The economist's answer is that these regions have economic outputs (financial wizardry, advanced manufacturing, tourism, oil) which the rest of the world wants, and the rest of the world (which in the case of the Atlantic seaboard is largely the US's own…
For me the difference between economic and ecological self-sufficiency is that the economic system is a societal output and is malleable to a greater degree than the ecological.
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overpopulation can also result from simple trade. NYC and generally the entire US eastern seaboard are overpopulated by your definition.
Is food given to people in NYC/East Coast for free, or do the people there purchase it?
People there purchase commodities in great volume, surely.
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's two big missing facts that I've never noticed Murphy in particular acknowledge: the 1980s peak in global births -- population growth is now driven entirely by decreasing mortality -- and the late 20th century decoupling of energy consumption from economic growth. Both point to an obvious counter-theory: That industrialization was a centuries-long process, involving exploding populations and energy consumption…
the late 20th century decoupling of energy consumption from economic growth. If you bothered reading my post and links, I've gone into extensive length on how economic decoupling hasn't happened and that the observed increase in efficiency is fully consistent with complex systems / dissipative systems theory. The problem with technical capital is that it depreciates rapidly. While some Roman infrastructure remains st…
I appreciate the dialog you're already having, but I thought you might like to know that some of the statements you're making are causing my skepticism of the whole argument to increase, not decrease. I'm not knowledgeable enough to weigh in, but it might be useful for you to know what arguments work well and which don't.
Here's what I noticed in your reply that I found myself questioning your authenticity:
1. Your first sentence is long and diminutive to the reader. I don't know who the other person is, but maybe they did read your post and links? I'm not sure. I also am highly skeptical of anyone that refers to their extensive anything on anything. It really highly signals "quack" to me. Again, I'm not trying to suggest you are.
2. Your first sentence includes a number of terms that demand unpacking. This is really strongly related to the first point, because I feel like as a reader I'm being talked down to and then hit with some deep jargon that I don't understand. Perhaps I'm just out of my league on this conversation, though.
3. Your argument on peak minerals doesn't seem to make sense to me. It's one of those things where, I read it and it feels very strongly like when I read a staunch libertarian/Austrian economic argument between friends on Facebook and see someone cite a universal law of microeconomics and then they use it to justify something much larger or more complex. Looking up Leibig's law didn't help me here. I'm just left a little more bewildered and even if I read and interpreted Leibig's law as being one hundred percent correct in its original formulation, there's a gap in my intuition between that and your use here, as near as I can tell.
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Relying on the massive global logistics network to support massively nonequilibrium populations in highly infertile land is counting on a patently unsustainable level of resource use to create a massive risk. It's one thing to have local shortfalls of food or water of a few percent which can be satisfied with largely local imports of a few hundred kilometers (say, Germany, which is roughly 90% self-sufficient for foo…
> [...] is counting on a patently unsustainable level of resource use to create a massive risk. Can you please elaborate? We sit on a giant ball of matter, and there's enough energy coming in from the sun (or via nuclear power) to last us a few billion years.
You could start here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/index#wiki_that_.22...
The reading list starts here, it's a brief introduction to a very broad topic:
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/index#wiki_so_..._a...
(And for anyone stumbling on this comment in the future -- I'm planning on substantially reorganizing that Wiki page though it should link to the appropriate sections).
The major issue with tapping solar power for high-grade electrical energy is whether or not it's possible to do so in a manner that sustains the ability to create that solar energy infrastructure and support technological life. EROEI, capital and maintenance requirements, and other resource limits all come into play.
The last time humans had a sustainable-energy based economy was 1700. The state of technology was markedly lower. If we return to that energy state, we should continue to have the benefit of scientific understanding gained since then (engineering, germ theory, metalurgy, sanitation, evolution, steam power, thermodynamics, electricity, chemistry, relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic physics, astronomy, electronics, pharmacology, aviation, rocketry), though how much of it we'll have the techological stack to support is another question.
Joseph Tainter, Charles Hall, Robert Ayres, Donna & Dennis Meadows, and William Stanley Jevons would make for some interesting reading.
Oh, and you've only got 800 million - 1 billion years: solar flux and/or C4 synthesis will mean the end of life as we know it. Life on Earth is past middle age. Even allowing for the lignin revolution and decomposer lag, that's barely sufficient time to replenish fossil fuel stocks for a do-over should humans fail.
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or virtually all of the Persian Gulf. Some of the fastest-growing populations, in what's empty desert without even sufficient water for cities let alone agriculture. The economist's answer is that these regions have economic outputs (financial wizardry, advanced manufacturing, tourism, oil) which the rest of the world wants, and the rest of the world (which in the case of the Atlantic seaboard is largely the US's own…
For me the difference between economic and ecological self-sufficiency is that the economic system is a societal output and is malleable to a greater degree than the ecological.
There are levels of disequilibrium which are possible. They require constant and predictable inputs of energy and resources.
That's a fundamental principle of dissipative systems.
Re: 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
#260Some major ground has been covered in the article, and sparked a few more pointers. I come from a country receiving substantial aid, and yet I see that a lot of new initiatives could be kickstarted by the wealthy citizens themselves. Covering the reasons why the middle-class and the rich hesitate to lean in philanthropy would also instigate more people to contribute.