You need to put Malthus into context. Right in the title of his book he mentions “the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.” Godwin is William Godwin, husband to Mary Wollstonecraft, father of Mary Shelley. Condorcet is Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Both were utopians who believed in Progress with a capital P and were confident that the future would not be the gruesome present they were living in. Malthus deliberately went as far as he could in the other direction.
Godwin refuted Malthus in On Population in 1826.
So far, Godwin has been more right than Malthus, true. But the arguments between the two sides never stopped for a moment since 1826. You still hear Malthusians today, pointing out that at some point the total energy of the planet will not be sufficient for a sufficiently large population. Malthus may not have been wrong, but just early.
Population growth always has a negative influence on the average standard of living. If the population of the world was what it was when Malthus wrote his book the average standard of living would be much higher.
That doesn’t follow at all. Historically, population growth fueled innovation and competition in technology of all kinds including agriculture and distribution. It also paid for more scientists, engineers, and inventors to create better products. None of that would have happened with a small, stagnant population.
No one predicted the Uncanny Valley, did they? Everyone thought robots would all be cute, or indistinguishable from living humans. The closest I can think of is a line in The Terminator that mentions Terminators with rubber “skin,” which people could spot a mile away. It wasn’t until people actually invented humanoid robots that fell into the Uncanny Valley, that someone coined the term.
People engage in that kind of hand-wringing all the time (maybe Asimov isn’t hand-wringing, but he’s saying the kind of thing hand-wringers say). I’m sure someone bemoaned store-bought butter, and the decline in people who knew how to properly use a butter churn. My mother remembers when cake mixes came into stores, and people swore they’d never use them, and wouldn’t forget how to bake a “real” cake.
I know people now who don’t even know how to use a mix-- someone in my building a few months ago came to borrow eggs, because she’d bought a cake mix for the first time (she was in her early 30s, I’d guess) and didn’t look at the back of the box until she got it home, to realize she needed eggs. I just shrugged it off, but DH must have gone on for 5 minutes about “who doesn’t keep eggs in the house?”
Right. The standard of living dropped so much in the US when the baby boom caused a population spike.
The population has to cause a competition for resources, which means it has to rise above the ability of an area to support the population. The standard of living in immigrant areas of New York was very low in the 1880s-the Depression because they were overcrowded. Immigration slowed, birth control became somewhat more available as laws were struck down that classified information about birth control as pornographic, laws were passed that cleaned up some of the worst tenements, and the standard of living in places like the Lower East Side improved a lot. But that has to do with already-born people flooding into an area, and not the birth rate.
A lot of the problems third world countries have, have to do with transportation and allocation of resources. Sometimes there are too many people in a city, and it’s a lot easier to get into the city than out, or there are soldiers preventing natural immigration that would happen as people sought out better places.
Perhaps it didn’t drop in terms of its ability to provide the material things of life. But as the boomer generation grew up and started families of their own, they generally had to find housing much farther away from the city center than their parents had. Arguably, all that time spent sitting in traffic diminishes one’s standard of living.
Theoretically we (Americans) might have handled this growth better, for example by allowing for more dense housing development in and near the cities, but given our history there’s just no way that would have flown at the time.
Very subjective. Early baby boomers and their parents were seeking the American Dream with houses on a plot of land and a white picket fence. The shift was not entirely due to these people being forced out of the city center but rather seeking what they perceived to be a better life. I don’t think traffic was that big an issue at that time except possibly around NYC and LA.
Even today I know people that gladly move farther from the city to have more living space and are happy to trade commuting convenience for cheaper land with more open space. These are tradeoffs, not mandates.
The one thing no one predicted–or could have in 1950–was the integrated circuit. It affected everything. Cell phones, cars, even dishwashers now depend on ICs. Even Shockley, who invented the transistor, didn’t see that coming. Transistors were great, but our current civilization, runs on ICs.
Incidentally, in 1945, Vannevar Bush published an essay: As we may think, As We May Think - Wikipedia in which he predicted something like Wiki. An online indexed encyclopedia. But it would consist of an encyclopedia on microfilm and when you called up something, the machine would find the article and display on, I suppose, your TV screen. He certainly saw something coming, but this was before the invention of the transistor and 15 years before the IC.
Actually, the very first important robot story is in many ways an Uncanny Valley story. “The Sandman,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann is about a beautiful female robot who otherwise lacks so much humanity that her mere presence disturbs everyone who meets her except for one besotted youth. That was in 1815. People have been rewriting it ever since.
Pretty much nobody thought robots would be cute; that’s extremely modern. Robots were menacing, or goofy, or overwhelmingly huge, or animated boilers, or collections of springs, nuts, and bolts but not cute and seldom ever indistinguishable from humans. The latter springs from Karel Capek’s R.U.R. but the point there was that the “robots” (“workers”) weren’t metal at all but artificial protoplasm, what we would today call androids.
The first cute robot I can think of is Sparko the Electric Dog, the companion of Elektro at the 1939 World’s Fair, designed to be as unthreatening as possible. Robots started getting more whimsical in the 50s, but the vast majority of images were still of menacing robots. I’d say they didn’t start getting cute until cartoons in the 60s and 70s.
A lot of wealth was created because of the use of oil, which contributed significantly to mass manufacturing and mechanized agriculture from 1945 to the present. The result was a drop in infant mortality rates and the rise of life expectancy rates.
The problem? The population boomed, and per capita consumption increased readily, such that the ave. ecological footprint has now exceeded bio-capacity:
“List of countries by ecological footprint”
The first is set to increase further due to a growing global middle class:
“The rise of the global middle class”
How much more resources will be needed? According to the IEA, we will need to add the equivalent of one Saudi Arabia every seven years just to maintain economic growth. To meet a growing global middle class, we will need one every three years. In general, we will need several more earths.
To make matters worse, the second is set to decrease further due to a combination of environmental damage and global warming.
Thus, we are dealing with multiple problems, many of which will involve solutions that will be difficult to implement or that will solve only some problems while amplifying others.
FWIW, it works both ways, as the population boomed because of the use of oil and other resources from 1945 onward, and environmental damage coupled with the effects of global warming set it.
The problem is likely more than just allocation given ecological footprint and biocapacity. Even in terms of increased standards of living, the world’s resources will obviously not be able to support a growing global middle class.
The catch is that in order to sustain a global capitalist system, the middle class must grow continuously.
Living conditions are not the only problems. For example, there are significant oil and water inputs for mechanized agriculture, and in the case of the U.S. food has to be transported across thousands of miles, through JIT systems which require extensive amounts of energy and resources, particularly oil.
The U.S., which has less than 5 pct of the world’s population, requires up to a quarter of world oil production to maintain middle class standards. Very likely, a 75-80 pct drop in oil use will mean more than just giving up on some luxuries.
The U.S. also needs an energy return of around 40, far higher than what many sources of energy will allow.
The reason why problems concerning energy and resource supply issues did not emerge for many years was because the global middle class remained small (around 15 pct of the world’s population). The catch is that in order to maintain its living standards, the same middle class had to sell more goods and resources, which meant that the global middle class had to grow. And it did, as seen in BRIC and emerging markets. But these regions have far larger populations.
I read elsewhere that computer chips, etc., require extensive energy and water inputs. The same goes, of course, even for products ranging from grains to T-shirts.
In many ways, this is also perhaps something that very few expected, that the same innovations that allow for efficiency, etc., end up amplifying the problems that they are expected to solve.
We should never assume that technological advances will save us from the harmful effects of population growth. Also, technological advances only benefit those who are able to use them.
Currently computer technology increases the relationship between intelligence and income. It is a major factor behind the growing income gap. Another major factor is population growth. It benefits those who get their income from property ownership at the expense of those who get their income from work.
Moreover, consider the market value of labor from a global perspective, which seems to have become vanishingly small. Would less population growth between 1950 and 2014 have been better for the average worker, or worse?
It would be far better for the average worker. The fewer people there are looking for a job, the easier it is to get a job, the more the job seeker gets paid, and the more secure his job is.
We can never assume that for the future, true. However, when we look at the past that is the invariable pattern we see. There is no reason to doubt that in the short run, the next couple of decades, that pattern will continue.
You also need to look at the population globally rather than merely the U.S. A billion or so Asians are having markedly better lives because of technology. Another billion are projected to join them over those same next couple of decades. This is unprecedented in world history. Every single forecast was that the growth of India and China over 1 billion each would lead to enormous famines. Exactly the opposite has occurred.
This global realignment of prosperity may make for localized stagnancy. But that’s a result of moving demand and wealth in global terms. Population growth in the U.S. absolutely is not a factor in the growing income gap. It is the countries who have dropped below replacement rate in growth (Japan, Italy) who are seeing their economies stagnate. Who takes care of a senior population when there aren’t enough workers? The U.S. will see some of this effect but will be shielded from the worst brunt because of the growing Hispanic population, with a tendency toward larger families and therefore more young, and the increase in immigration of younger workers. Population growth is a positive thing. True, like other positive things, you want to keep the growth within certain bounds, but growth is vital.
You are leaving out an enormous factor in your equation. The fewer people, the fewer jobs. More people create more jobs. Try living in the Rust Belt where populations have been declining for decades. Unemployment is higher there, not lower, because there are fewer jobs produced. This turns the entire equation upside down. We know what you are saying is wrong, because we’ve been living it for decades.