The Global Population Crisis That Never Was • Hacker News Board

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#231

Post by bryanlarsen » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #219

xwolfi wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will most likely not do all this. It s sad and bad, it's happening and our fault, but there has been costal cities in trouble before, people already mass migrate in time of despair without the need for the climate, and wars happen for far less. You can roll up agonizing in fear, or you can prepare yourself for a bit of struggle. We can help lower the impact, but there's no reason to panic. Most likely the impact o…

I'm fine with taking things calmly. But what your advocating is the ostrich approach to problems. That's just being blind about the problems. Nuclear war is all one of the biggest existential threats to civilization. It didn't end with the cold war. Think of all the close calls we've had. Now look forward 100 years, what's the odds it happens? 1000 years? 10000? We're our own worst enemy and our civilization is the b…

It'll cost a few trillion to prevent climate change from getting worse.

It'll cost a few tens of trillions to mitigate climate change and many non-human species will be in serious trouble if we don't do anything about it.

Either way, humans will be fine. But I still advocate strongly for option number 1.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#232

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #227

eloff wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you move the hundred million people in Bangladesh? What do you do in Florida?

First of all, people can move themselves. They don't need someone else to move them. Floridians have a continent of 49 other states to move to. The Bangladeshis are in a tougher spot, since they're approaching 200 million and might need to cross a political border. If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Sibe…

>If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.

The "if" is funny. There's already many hundreds of millions of poor people around the world that have the borders closed to them. I don't see why 200M extra poor Bangladeshis wouldn't suffer the same fate.

And there is no reason to believe Siberia will be habitable, at least not in exactly the timeframe it needs to be to offset other habitable areas that are lost.

Climate change will be a slow moving, albeit accelerating, series of crisis that will grind those who are poorer and don't have the power to move to suffer losses.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#233

Post by ravi-delia » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #225

megiddo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malthus was refuted by the early 19th century on economic grounds - namely that the pricing system prevents people from over-exploiting scarce resources. While there has certainly been some poor husbandry of the earth's resources, there have been and continue to be significant efforts to improve resource utilization in environmentally friendly ways - not the least of which is increased costs of basic resources leadin…

Picking something unlikely but possible, imagine if water becomes scarce enough that half the population of India can't afford market price and must do without. That thought is pretty much enough to refute the refutation. The idea that a resource can't run out because "economics happens" is simply a non-sequitur. Economics is perfectly comfortable with optimising a bunch of humans out of the system because they can't…

A Malthusian collapse would entail running out of resources because the population grew too fast, not because the resources are otherwise affected. Conditional on some constant access to a shared resource, the price increase would smoothly counter the population increase, bringing everything back into stability without ever leading to massive starvation. Supply shocks are certainly a thing, but we have not seen anything like a Malthusian collapse since he wrote about it.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#234

Post by ravi-delia » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

_iyig wrote: post #173

OrbitRock wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is forcing anybody. It’s more just sharing things like birth control technology and education. This whole discussion is actually a sort of win-win scenario, because what proves to lower birth rates more effectively than anything is improved regional health, education, and wealth, so helping along those factors is the biggest impact. https://fs.blog/2016/04/hans-rosling-population-growth/

China has forcibly implemented strict birth control policy for decades. They're also forcibly sterilizing ethnic minority populations, Uyghurs in particular: https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/china-xin...

Ok yes, some people are forcing people. Clearly the person you responded to meant that they, and most people concerned about overpopulation, don't want to force anyone.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#235

Post by ravi-delia » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #147

simonh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, I think that's very useful historical context. Yes Malthus had useful and valuable insights, but also yes we have since discovered mechanisms and processes that can largely mitigate these risks which he could not have foreseen.

Yes, we quite obviously have much higher carrying capacity, thanks to improvements in farming technology and in expanding farming into places that haven’t been farmed before. Right now, Europe has more forests and less farmland in use than it had during medieval times, despite having much higher population. We devised ways to mitigate the problems associated with population growth, but we have not solved it: the fund…

The real death knell is that technological growth grows with population, which means that until some kind of discontinuity is hit the population won't ever be able to hit the carrying capacity before the capacity is increased again. Is there a way to support a trillion people? I can't see one, but technological progress has been doubted before, and rarely correctly.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#236

Post by ravi-delia » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

firebaze wrote: post #220

Humans are bad in estimating exponential growth (like, totally - we're good in suppressing bad news, and _very_ bad in accepting ideas we don't like) Still, we're depending on exponential growth (be it pension funding, companies, inflation, you name it). We're lying to ourselves regarding population. Ok, too many people - we'll resort to a vegetarian diet - oh wait, that's not sustainable, too many people. Well, we'l…

Humans are indeed bad at estimating exponential growth, but you may have fallen into your own trap. We have already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet in Malthus's time. The reason is exponential growth in technology. Technological progress is dependent on current level of technology, and population. As population grows, so does technology. It's hard to imagine how to effectively feed the theoretical maximum population, but then again it was hard to imagine profitably extracting oil from arctic shale or natural gas from long-tapped reserves in Appalachia. I wouldn't bet against this exponential continuing long into the future.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#237

Post by ravi-delia » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

nahuel0x wrote: post #15

Now take in account the ecosystems destroyed and the picture is very different. We must leave behind the humans-only perspective.

That assumes that population growth is somehow the primary cause of climate change and space expansion. The issue is lack of caring and technology, not population.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#238

Post by jojobas » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

lucian1900 wrote: post #223

lupire wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is capitalist and imperialist.

It allows limited forms of private property and profit seeking in order to develop the productive forces. It’s a way to avoid invasion or sanctions by the US while keeping the working class in control of the state. China doesn’t extract profits through the export of capital at usury rates from other countries at gunpoint, though. It is not imperialist.

China allows sweatshops that work people to suicide. CCP has nothing to do with the working class, it developed it's own bureaucratic class. Chairman Xi hasn't worked a day outside power structures as he was born to a bigwig. China does extract profits through usury, most of Africa is proof to that. It also buys up Western countries through universities and politicians. There's no honest way to look at it as anything else than an autocratic empire.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#239

Post by fallingfrog » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

foobiekr wrote: post #153

fallingfrog wrote: post #121

The population bomb thesis was reasonable, up until about the 1970’s. But it turns out, if you give women access to education and birth control, the problem mostly goes away. I don’t know if I really fault people before then for worrying about it, perhaps the worrying was partly responsible for the solution. People say the same thing about nuclear war: all those marches were useless because the war never happened. Ho…

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It always amazes me that people take the predictions about one trajectory of human population as crazy/fringe but the other prediction as some kind of scientific law. In addition, we are well past the viable population for even a moderate footprint lifestyle. We got to neatly 8B by keeping half the world at 1/10th or less the resource and environmental footprint of…

True, there’s a survivorship bias too especially in the case of nuclear war where we probably got through the Cold War more by dumb luck than anything else, but people assume there was no other way that could have turned out.

The human population is expected to peak at around 11 billion; I have no idea whether the earth can support that many, certainly not with the way our civilization works right now.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#240

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #225

megiddo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malthus was refuted by the early 19th century on economic grounds - namely that the pricing system prevents people from over-exploiting scarce resources. While there has certainly been some poor husbandry of the earth's resources, there have been and continue to be significant efforts to improve resource utilization in environmentally friendly ways - not the least of which is increased costs of basic resources leadin…

Picking something unlikely but possible, imagine if water becomes scarce enough that half the population of India can't afford market price and must do without. That thought is pretty much enough to refute the refutation. The idea that a resource can't run out because "economics happens" is simply a non-sequitur. Economics is perfectly comfortable with optimising a bunch of humans out of the system because they can't…

> if water becomes scarce enough that half the population of India can't afford market price and must do without

This would require importing water and/or energy. If there was an ability to pay by the government, desalination would create new fresh water. There probably wouldn’t be, which would cause short-term pain, but that’s the feedback mechanism OP alluded to.