Again, you assume that 2X people will have to fight over the same resources as half as many people. To refute this even partially, if the population remains the same, does that mean there is a freeze on new building projects, or that houses stop being built?
Here’s another example I use to illustrate this idea: let’s say I have 9 bags of candy that I intend to give to each one of my party guests. At the last minute, one of my guests calls and says his brother came in unexpectedly and can he come to the party? I say, sure. So, what happens to the candy?
A. I destroy all the candy so that nobody gets any, thus keeping the amount of candy for all guests equal.
B. I empty all the bags into one pile and then re-distribute them into 10 smaller bags instead of 9.
C. I explain the situation to the guests, and have them compete gladiator-style for the candy. Only the top 9 finalists will get candy.
D. The 10th guest must beg for candy from the other 9 guests. If he gets none, that’s his own damn fault for being such a lazy ass.
As you can see, all the scenarios you mentioned are as ludicrous as the ones I mentioned. On the other hand:
E. I go out and buy another bag of candy.
is what usually happens. The underlying assumption that the candy, food, housing, air, water, etc. is a limited and finite resource is just plain wrong.
Everything is a limited and finite resource. That limit might be much beyond what we use today or it may be very close. That’s something we have to figure out from all the evidence we can obtain, not something to be assumed just as a general philosophy of resources.
Your example shows that. It’s a weird example anyway. There are parties where everybody gets a goody bag of things at the end. Those are children’s parties with a precise limit on the attendees. It’s not typical to tell children that the items they get at a party do not come out of some limitless source that costs no one anything, but they will learn that soon enough. If the host was told to suddenly supply an extra bag of candy, he might be able to stop at a store and get it. But sometimes he wouldn’t have time to do that and would have to figure out something else. If he was told to supply ten extra bags, he would probably say to forget it and ask what business the guest had bringing extra people along. If one hundred extra guests arrived at the party, the host would call the police and ask them to get rid of those people.
There are limits on all the resources you list. There is a limit on the amount of food the world can produce each year. It’s true that at the moment we aren’t actually at that limit yet. People starve these days not because we have yet reached the limit but because politics prevents their getting enough food. However, there is a limit on the maximum amount of food that can be produced in the world, and it’s not hugely greater than what’s being produced today.
There is a limit on the amount of water in the world. The limit is pretty close to what’s being used now. We’ve got to figure out how to efficiently use what water we have or soon we will reach the limit.
There is a limit on many things that you list. There is a limit on clear air. There is a limit on the amount of energy we can produce per year without destroying other necessary resources. There is a limit on the amount of housing we can ever build. There is a limit on just about everything. To calculate what that limit is requires a lot of scientific research into how those resources work. You can’t just say, “Well, my philosophy is that there’s no limit to anything, so I can use unlimited amounts of any resource I feel like.”
It is only limited if you eliminate human production. Why haven’t we run out of water yet? Humans recycle it. Why haven’t we used more water than humans can recycle? Because humans recycle it faster and more efficiently. Why haven’t we run out of water yet? Etc. Water has been predicted to be used up for hundreds of years, and we still have plenty of it to bathe in and flush with.
I recently heard a theory that the US outgrew Europe because Europe used up all the wood. Why hasn’t all the wood been used up in the US yet? Humans are better at managing forests and recycling wood than before, as well as finding replacements for things traditionally made out of wood.
The point of the candy example is that the underlying assumption is that there are only 9 bags of candy, period. The same with water, Social Security, air, etc.: whatever we have now is all we’ll ever have, which is just wrong.
Social Security is another great example. The way it’s structured, it shouldn’t even last one year. How does it continue? More people keep joining the workforce and keep increasing income over expenditures.
One of the major examples is in the late 1700’s, a sociologist predicted overpopulation will soon outstrip production. What happened in the 1800’s? The Industrial Revolution. Just because we can’t imagine what will happen next doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
Let’s flip the question: name one thing in the past 20 years that has been used up, when the human population doubled from 4 billion to almost 8. Even the last animal that went extinct did so around 100 years ago.
There is a given, finite amount of water on the planet Earth. Therefore there is a limit on the amount of water. There is a given, finite amount of air on the planet Earth. Therefore there is a limit on the amount of air. There is a given, finite amount of material that can be converted into food on the planet Earth. Therefore there is a limit on the amount of food.
You’re going to say, “Oh, but those limits are well beyond what we use at the moment, so practically we have no limits. We’ll figure out how to use what we have more efficiently.” The point is that there is a limit. You can’t forever say, “I don’t believe in limits, so I’m going to act as if there are none.” This is like saying, “There is no limit to the amount of money in my bank account, so I’m going to keep writing checks forever. Somehow the amount will increase in the account.”
Of course we can use water, air, food, and everything else more efficiently. So what? The point is that there are limits to everything. You can’t find those limits by invoking your theory that there is no limit to resources. You have to sit down and calculate the best way to use what resources there are.
Fine, yes everything is limited, which is completely not what I am talking about. Also, if you are unsure what I mean, it’s better to ask for clarification than make up incorrect interpretations.
Maybe you should explain things better in your posts instead of making wild statements that can easily be misinterpreted. That is, assuming that they are being misinterpreted. I suspect rather that that you make wild, exaggerated statements deliberately and then when you get called on them, you claim that you’re being misinterpreted.
Thank you for trying to contribute a positive example instead of generalities.
It’s a bad example for many reasons, though I can see the appeal because there is a grain of truth underneath that is easily misunderstood. Hellestal - who is an expert in economics, BTW - demonstrated the economic failings of the example. I’m more of a historian and so I would ask you - since you are claiming a universal truth - to examine the entire set of major population reducing epidemics and famines (there are hundreds even since the Black Death) to see if economic advancement accompanied each of them. The answer is no. There were far more destructive examples than positive ones.
I already gave it above - the dozens of cities in the Rust Belt and the Sunbelt and their economic changes since WWII. The one I know best is Rochester, NY.
After WWII, Rochester was an economic powerhouse, rich, conservative, stable, the largest company town in America with Kodak directly providing 20% of all jobs mostly with lifetime employment. It got the nickname Smugtown, USA. Even so, population in the county peaked in 1970 and it’s been stagnant since then. The city proper peaked in 1950 and has lost more than a third. Various studies put it in the top five in poverty.
What happened? An area with falling population cannot cope with a loss in jobs. Kodak employment fell by nearly 90% since the 70s. Some of those jobs were replaced by smaller start-up firms, but the net effect was that people looking for good jobs left the area for cities that were growing and therefore providing jobs. The ones who were left were competing for jobs - but a *smaller *pool of jobs, not a stable one. That’s the huge hole in your logic. Jobs follow people; people create jobs. If jobs were available people would move into the area seeking them; they then require food and housing and services and that creates more jobs, a virtuous cycle. A falling population removes those needs and that creates a vicious cycle. The economic universal is exactly the opposite of what you’re been claiming. All you need to see it is to look at economic demand since WWII, both here and in other older industrial countries like Britain. A few individual cities have managed to turn themselves around, but as a generalization falling population increases poverty rather than reverses it.
We have water because the *planet *recycles water. Humans waste water and dump it into the oceans where a limited amount returns as usable rain. Desalinization, I suppose a form of recycling, is limited and expensive. Nothing else exists on a mass scale. We are depleting water. Aquifers in the west are drying out, e.g. No amount of human recycling will replenish them on a timely basis.
I can’t imagine what meaning you’re giving to the word “recycle” but it’s not one in my vocabulary.
My vote for most embarrassing prediction was in Larry Niven’s short story “How the Heroes Die,” published in 1966. It takes place around 2040, during the “Third Mars Expedition”; the protagonist, an ecologist named Jack Carter, kills another man, communications tech Lew Harness, for making sexual advances on him. Lew’s brother Alf Harness chases Jack out onto Mars in a daring high-stakes Mars-buggy chase, because, even though Alf and all the other scientists on the mission understand Jack’s reaction to the filthy gay hitting on him, Lew was still his BROTHER, DARN IT, and plus Lew wasn’t REALLY gay, he just turned gay when he was placed in an all-male high-stress situation for years.
I think attitudes toward gay people changed rather more quickly than Niven was expecting. It’s difficult to see Jack Carter as a sympathetic protagonist these days.
Perhaps you are thinking of “The Dispossessed” where the dissidents of one plant at Tau Ceti are exiled to their moon, a barely habitable world with a thin atmosphere.
The real question we are discussing here is “where does wealth come from?”. If you can give a concise answer to this, in 200,000 words or less, it may earn a Pulitzer and a Nobel prize.
The question comes up any time anyone discusses history or economics. What allowed Britain to develop an industrial revolution ahead of the rest of Europe? Why Europe ahead of the Oriental civilizations or India? The USA is an easy gimme - population, resources, and unhindered capitalism… but why did Japan, Taiwan, or Korea become dominant economic powerhouses despite a singular lack of raw materials and the handicap of a large feudal population?
Why has China joined the ranks of the wealthy while India seems to lag so much further behind? Why is Russia still stuck in economic doldrums? Canada, despite all mod cons, has an economy that grows and shrinks more with the price of raw natural resource.
Education, freedom from bureaucracy, and the determination of the government all seem to play a part. As any refugee camp points out, dumping a lump of population without support does not advance the economy. However, there are plenty of mass migrations where the new inhabitants raise their standard of living and all those around them.
The mass death of 1350 may have raised both wages and cost of living. It had one extra effect though - by creating a shortage of labour, it gave a labourer options they had not had before and hastened the death of feudalism. Where before towns did not or need want excess unskilled labour - one of the scenarios of migration - now there was a shortage, and there was work for those willing and able, so migrants from the countryside were no longer discouraged.
I disagree with much of this. Jobs follow economically viable people, not just any people. If jobs simply followed people then we would have virtually no unemployment in many large cities. If people cannot afford a house then houses will not be built; if they cannot afford to eat out in a cafe then the Ma & Pa cafe will not open. Its little use people being in a city when that city is economically dead. All it does is artificially keep people from internally migrating to other areas. You mentioned England. Cities such as Liverpool have no right to be the size they currently are. Liverpool’s past prosperity is an accident of history, not an entitlement for its population now and forever. For much of its history Liverpool was a small village or town. By rights it should return to something like its former size.
Rochester you say; have you ever heard of one of your moderately famous citizens, Louise Brooks?
I remember watching a youtube video by the economic historian, Deidre McCloskey. She claims economic success was explained by a public/societal admiration for inventors, inventions and such(and giving these inventors the opportunity to profit from their inventions). That most of the other reasons that have been used to explain economic progress were actually in place throughout history. These reasons being things such as wealth availability, available workforce etc. These reasons then in no way explain the economic progress of the past 250 years.
She also stated that technological innovation will increase at a higher rate in future. That a literate Asian population will push technological progress faster. That previously the ability to innovate was in the hands of a minority of the worlds population; basically Europeans and North Americans. An inexhaustable supply of creative Asians will benefit us all.
In the real world, people tend to be a mixed bag of skills, abilities, and potentials. It’s possible that a group of people will add nothing of value, but it’s not likely. Nor was I using simple size as a function; growth is more important. Stagnancy at a given size is not valuable. Size has some usefulness, though. Metro Toronto is five times the size of Rochester and consequently has not just more of everything but many things that Rochester lacks and always will. But Rochester is five times the size of Binghamton and is correspondingly more varied.
Talk about a city’s size “by right” is silly today, though. It made sense in the past for a city to exist and prosper because of its site and natural advantages continue to play some role. Liverpool became a major city because it made for a good port when shipping was vital and lost population when the industry consolidated elsewhere. So? How does that imply that it “should” be a small town in the totally different economic world of the future?
Of course I’m familiar with Louise Brooks. She was a great beauty, who slept with all the right people in the 1920s and made a few important films before her arrogance made her unemployable and she descended into homelessness and prostitution. Eventually she settled in Rochester because one of Kodak’s legacies was the film museum at the George Eastman House. She wrote Lulu in Hollywood, a pretentious, dubiously accurate, and sometimes gloriously bitchy book designed to settle scores. Legions of fan-boys made pilgrimages to her house. She detested them. She detested everybody. She’d be great on the Dope.
Everyone has a theory about economics. Technology. Capitalism. Rule of Law (the government does not confiscate your profit arbitrarily). Certainly market size, raw materials or trade to access those, etc. Trained workforce. Education. You name it…
Obviously all are important. Some are more important than others, and what works in one situation may not work in another.
Liverpool should become a smaller city as it is no longer economically viable the size that it is now. With unemployment benefit all we are doing is ensuring generaton after generation of Liverpudlians remain unemployed in the City . Its growth was due to the UK’s industrialisation and trade. None of these factors are now present in the UK, or at least not to the same degree. If I said Liverpool should only be a small town now then my wording was poor. However, it really should be much, much smaller than it is now.
I might not have phrased it quite that way, but yeah, pretty much…
It’s not possible to be a legitimate expert in the future, because no one actually knows anything about it. You can’t study the future the way someone would study chemistry or medicine or literature. You can study current trends and past advances, but it’s not so clear to me that understanding the history of technological development puts you in all that much of a better position to predict the next technological advance. Nor is it the case that one’s ability to make a living as a futurist is well correlated with the accuracy of one’s predictions.
If you have a very compelling vision of the future (one that excites people), that would help you write a book about it and sell a bunch of copies, or get invited on a T.V. talk show to talk about it, or what have you. If you have a very accurate vision of the future, that’s not necessarily going to help with any of that, because you have no way of demonstrating to anyone the accuracy of your vision, other than waiting a few decades and saying “See, I told you so!”
I think the problem is it is very hard to predict the future 50 to 100 years out. It is easier to predict 10 to 15 years out of cool stuff emerging in the lab.
We all got very disappointed of no supersonic commercial planes , AI robots ,lasers, phasers ,plasma and other energy guns ,self healing power body armor ,power swords , energy swords , beam weapons.
It just turn out these things are very hard to make and require stuff we have not made.
It may be 100 years out or more or we may never get a lot of the cool stuff in scfi movies.
One explanation is easy stuff was easy to make and now onto the hard stuff.
It turn out getting in space is very costly and requires a lot fuel. And fixing the human body is hard the medical stuff is hard and complex. Well electronics is easy compared to medicine and space exploitation.
Will humans go to other star systems ,colonized other planets , space mining and space station so on. Probably.
But probably not like in star trek and more like feudalism society where the super rich will go and selected astronauts and scientists that can cough out million dollars a space ticket to planet XX.
Not only star trek ships would be very costly well over trillions of trillions of trillions of dollars!!! From a safety point of view having more than say 100 people on a ship would be too much lost if some thing goes wrong.
Commercial supersonic planes exist; they’re just not very practical. And we don’t notice the robots, not because they’re rare, but because they’re so ubiquitous: Many of us carry around robots in our pockets with capabilities far beyond what most AI theorists dreamed of.
Supersonic planes are too costly for the average public.Other than the military and rich businessman there will never be a market for supersonic planes:eek::mad::mad: unless some thing is done about the cost issue.
And like the posters said in similar threads here , we may never discover super fuel or make a jet engine very fuel efficient.
And scientist know all the elements and have good understanding of chemistry so odds of new super fuel go down. It not like 50 or 100 years ago scientist discovering new elements and compounds.
