Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

> There’s a lot of interesting critique written by heterodox leftists today, in the spirit of Chris Lasch, on how the current progressive movement is just intra-elite competition.

There's a joke in leftist spheres that boils down to "Progressives simply want more female slave owners". I think it encapsulates the sentiment of the paragraph I partially quoted quite nicely.

> In the middle ages the nobility were effectively the government (and the church provided checks and balances, kind of)

This was kind of true early on, and got less true both as the size of the nobility grew (especially in countries like France and Russia, which had serious nobility surpluses) and as a professional class of government emerged (by the time you get to Samuel Pepys, you're talking about largely a professional government). Even before that in practice many or most government functions were carried out by appointed or elected commoners.

To take a ridiculously over the top example, take the samurai class in the Tokugawa Shogunate. They were about 10% of the population, and by and large weren't really allowed do anything much at all (beyond wars, but there were no significant wars during that period). 99% of them were pure drain on the economy.

> as well as the investor class

This is way more dubious. Obviously it depends on the time and place, but in most times and most places it was anything from socially unacceptable (England) to effectively illegal (Roman Republic/Empire) for aristocratic landowners to invest in non-land things. What little investment in productive projects there was was largely by merchants, money lenders, and later banks, all generally commoners.

Try to look from another lens.

Climate hysterics want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their carbon-neutral policies are going to have on society. They want accountability from others, but not themselves. How many have done the calculations to work out the second and third order effects of their zero fossil fuel agenda?

Many of the most ardent callers for climate action are themselves not even climate scientists, but merely offload their thought processing to the intellectuals who are. Almost without fail, neither them, nor the intellectual are educated in economics.

The reality is that nobody can work out the second and effects and so on for these drastic changes, because they have incomplete information. The intellectuals and 'thought leaders' themselves have a fraction of a percent of the actual tacit knowledge that drives economic activity. The knowledge is very widely distributed, which is why central planning is less efficient than the market almost all of the time.

The tension isn't caused by the "status quo" fighting back. It is caused by hysterics calling for action on things they know nothing about. How many extinction rebellion fanatics have read The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels? It's not like they would if they were recommended it - the mere name will put them off because they have a preconceived notion and will ardently resist any information which is likely to cause cognitive dissonance in themselves.

Which tells you everything you need to know.

It isn't intellectualism driving them - it is misplaced fear due to grossly exaggerated climate scare claims, drummed up by the status-quo.

Almost always, it is the same crowds who babble on about equality and wealth distribution too. Many of them from wealthy or middle-classes, who have resources to help the people they claim to want to help, but rarely, if ever, engage in altruistic acts of voluntary work or charity because they'd rather spend the time talking about it. They won't put their own money or action where their mouths are, but demand it of others - many of whom are not in such fortunate positions.

I suppose that's understandable too. To be clear I'm not saying there aren't any with a passion for the subject, there are probably just as many now as were. Probably more. But there are also a lot of people going into it for whom it's just another career, and that's fine as long as there are enough jobs for them and they're willing to work. The problems come when there aren't.

Wow, Europe's investment in renewable energy has really collapsed.

Part of the problem is that people think a Malthusian catastrophe would play out like a Hollywood disaster film. That's extremely unlikely. The word "catastrophe" encourages this thinking. A better term might be "Malthusian crunch."

It would be more likely to play out very gradually over decades. We would see gradual inflation in the cost of anything requiring energy, water, land, etc., and a gradual reversal of progress for the world's poor and middle class. The upper middle class may barely feel it, but they would notice it as they tend to live close to other classes. The rich may neither feel it nor notice it unless they eventually get caught up in rising political instability or populist revolutions.

... which looks a bit like today.

If it eventually results in widespread death most of that death would be due to war, genocide, and disease, not direct starvation as you'd see in a Hollywood film. Most of the death would be proximally caused by political instability, and it would be lost on most people that this political instability was ultimately caused by resource constraints.

There are two places it could eventually go. If technology keeps advancing while population growth slows, we might eventually balance out and even reverse the trend. The crunch would be a kind of narrowing passage through which we would eventually pass. If technology stagnates, population growth accelerates, or political instability causes vital systems to collapse, the result could be extremely ugly.

Decarbonization should be a big priority because climate change adds yet another drag on the system in the form of massive damage to coastal cities and possibly decreased food production or increased cost, increasing the likelihood of the worst outcomes.