Your argument may be fine, but I couldn't get past the common but ultimately inaccurate interpretation of Malthus that you begin with. Could someone who wrote the following be an advocate of population control?
"The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population."
Giorgi Kallis's book "Limits," even if you disagree with his argument about the environment, does a great job of extracting what Malthus was all about. He saw population as growing geometrically, if unchecked, but natural checks are plentiful. He opposed family planning, because he saw it as a "vice." He attacked ideas to "prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural," because "to remove the difficulty in this way will, surely, in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners." Those are the good reverend's own words.
Malthus opposed the poor laws not because it caused unchecked population increase but because it removed the misery that was the impetus for industriousness, and therefore reduced the potential for economic growth. Malthus's book is a celebration of inequality and attack on redistribution, not a paean to limits.
That's funny, here I thought I had a contrarian take on Malthus.
“Family planning” was probably the wrong term, since it implies contraception—sorry, and thanks for pointing that out. Malthus did advocate later marriage, which is a different kind of way to plan for a family.
I'm confused by your question “Could someone who wrote the following be an advocate of population control?” Um, yes? The quote you gave absolutely sound like someone concerned about overpopulation, especially given that he didn't think we could increase food production very much? How do you interpret it?
I agree that Malthus was attacking redistribution, but my reading of him is that he definitely wanted to control population growth and keep it down to a manageable level. Do you have a different reading?
My reading of him is that he's not at all opposed to population growth. You see in the quote that he argues that national happiness is related to population growth, to the degree that the increase of food production approaches the limit of *unrestricted* population growth.
I think we get the wrong idea about him because how he has been used by generations of environmentalists. They focused on the cause-effect relationship her presented and ignored that his moral vision actually ran orthogonal to theirs. But he's really just an advocate of fecundity (albeit inegalitarian and very much for a kind of scarcity) and, unsurprisingly for a man of the cloth, concerned about people's souls.
Really appreciate the post and your past writing, but may I rudely suggest an edit? I don't mean to be critical and it's a small change. I'm not sure if the word 'only' is communicating what you mean to say here: "Malthus countered that if supply of food is limited, then giving alms to the poor will ONLY drive up the price of food—a point of economics on which he was correct" (emphasis added).
Currently, it partially implies that the ONE effect of alms in a supply constrained model is to drive up the price of food, when that is not the case. It would also help the poor purchase food (even at the higher price and even if we assume 100% of their spending is on food). This is clear because we are giving alms to the poor in the model, not everyone. The conclusion might hold if, say, we have a model with homogenous consumers (equally rich) and who only purchase food (and the alms are printed into existence).
I normally wouldn't bring up such a small issue, but similar language gets made as political rhetoric to mislead people (although not necessarily intentionally). And, yes, I am aware of the dangers of subsidizing demand and the impact that has had in the healthcare, education, and mortgage markets to name a few.
Apologies for being critical (and if I've made a mistake)! Creation is far more valuable that criticism, of course.
Another BRILLIANT chapter by one of the most important thought leaders on the planet, Jason Crawford. Having deeply absorbed in my clueless college days (early 70s) the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist of "Limits to Growth", the writings of Deutch and Pinker were paradigm shifting. Crawford has summarized the pardigm that "sustainable" is a perjorative, not an unallowed good. We must have a GROWTH mentality for the future to be open, bright, and exciting for humanity.
Hardly anyone writing today has their head on straight as much as you do, and I wish I could multiply your influence 100X. You have flair and a lot of knowledge. I love it!
But you do have a tendency to be too obvious and uncontroversial. I tend to relish and learn from your details and examples, while being a little bored by your overall argument because I know it already.
So it was refreshing when you got all feisty, insisting that the idea of sustainability needs to die. That punched things up a bit. It made things really interesting.
However, it's kind of wrong.
It actually does make sense to ask whether various aspects of our lifestyle are sustainable or not, and to prefer sustainability over the alternative.
Of course, it's true that progress often overtakes an unsustainable practice with a better alternative, causing its abandonment without any sacrifice or reluctance long before, its resource base is exhausted. It's also true that when the scarcity of some resource, such as European arable land or firewood, starts to cause hardship, The hard chip off and turns out to be temporary because innovation discovers alternatives. You're right to highlight how misguided is the recurring intellectual blunder of thinking that progress must lead to collapse because it relies on some non-renewable resource.
But if we are dependent on some resource that is in limited supply, and is destined to get more expensive, while that's not a cause for despair, it is a cause for concern. It makes sense to be on the lookout for ways to switch to a more sustainable practice, if it can be done without too much sacrifice.
>From where we stand, growth is practically if not literally infinite: the true limits to growth are currently unknowable and need not affect any decisions we make today.
This has a couple issues:
Firstly we don't know what the actual maximum long term growth rate will be, however we do know what the upper bound is. This upper bound would be a geometric (not exponential!) growth rate which represents you expanding to colonize a sphere of space at nearly lightspeed. Importantly any sort of exponential growth rate will eventually outstrip this within thousands of years. For instance if you do the math for an 8 billion population expanding at near lightspeed with a 2% growth rate, then in 20k years every single Planck volume we've reached needs to support twelve quadrillion people within it.
Secondly is that while reaching this new type of Malthusian trap may take millennia (or way less with digital minds), if you want any chance to avert it you have to act way before things start looking bad! Since once humans have spread out over multiple light years (or even just colonized many far apart dwarf planets in our own system) the notion of trying to suddenly start enforcing any restrictions on growth becomes implausible. So if you don't get civilization to take precautions against this early on, then you basically guarantee that the inner shells of expansion all become a Malthusian trap sooner or later.
“Geometric” growth is usually a synonym for “exponential.” I think you mean growth that is limited to the 3D-geometry of space, that is, cubic.
Yes, once we are literally limited by the size of an expanding sphere, then growth can no longer be exponential. But I stand by the statement I made: those limits are so far away (both in time and in epistemic distance) that they are practically infinite.
Note, as I explained in part 2, that you aren't limited by space or capital until you have hit the best possible technology allowed by the laws of physics.
I think you somewhat underestimate the potential of future technologies to radically alter the speed at which certain things happen due to feedback loops:
For instance if economic growth is driven by the labor of digital humans, then you have a feedback loop because more money lets you run more minds faster which produces even more money.
Clanking self replicators also aren't constrained by human birth rates or labor once deployed. So if people hoard/waste enough resources via automation that could dramatically speed things along. We potentially could have built some of these by now if we cared enough, since a collection of large clanking machines that can collectively produce more of themselves needn't involve futuristic tech.
Lastly I'll point out that our current rates of progress are based on human intelligence, and that things which can enhance that, or do better than humans entirely will fundamentally change the dynamic.
Plus even if these issues don't arise in the next few decades, we still likely need to plan for them before they're pressing concerns. Simply because we might otherwise pass the critical period where you can do anything to address the issue. Since you just can't enforce any meaningful regulations on communities outside your solar system without FTL, and even enforcing regulations within the outer solar system may be infeasible.
It seems like a key challenge of our time is internalizing abundance, at the individual level and more broadly. We, humans broadly, still don't really believe abundance is something we can count on and even grow perpetually. Just being able to imagine big positive outcomes still seems rare and thus valuable. Silicon Valley culture is the obvious example of cultivating this kind of thinking. I hope it can become the norm. Work like yours must help.
Perhaps Optimists and Pessimists start from common ground: "The world will come to an end. Let's make it the best it can be."
But they diverge in the details of the inherent concepts:
Pessimists bound "the world" and "the best it can be" leaning heavily on existing knowledge. Optimists allow the bounds of "the world" and "the best it can be" to expand with the possibility of new knowledge.
> “Sustainable” biological feedstocks for commodities such as fuel or plastics, for instance, are a bizarre regress to the unsustainable pre-industrial reliance on plant and animal resources—such as guano fertilizer, whale oil, and elephant ivory—that we moved on from in the 19th century.
For various reasons relating to relative biological efficiency, the world can produce a lot more grain than ivory.
World corn production is about 2.5 times world plastic production, so making plastic from bio feedstock without reducing plastic consumption is plausible. Especially if farming byproducts, like straw, can be used.
It is a happy relief that there are progressive people who focus on growth and production over redistribution . Hopefully we can convince more people with our ideas .
Your argument may be fine, but I couldn't get past the common but ultimately inaccurate interpretation of Malthus that you begin with. Could someone who wrote the following be an advocate of population control?
"The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population."
Giorgi Kallis's book "Limits," even if you disagree with his argument about the environment, does a great job of extracting what Malthus was all about. He saw population as growing geometrically, if unchecked, but natural checks are plentiful. He opposed family planning, because he saw it as a "vice." He attacked ideas to "prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural," because "to remove the difficulty in this way will, surely, in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners." Those are the good reverend's own words.
Malthus opposed the poor laws not because it caused unchecked population increase but because it removed the misery that was the impetus for industriousness, and therefore reduced the potential for economic growth. Malthus's book is a celebration of inequality and attack on redistribution, not a paean to limits.
That's funny, here I thought I had a contrarian take on Malthus.
“Family planning” was probably the wrong term, since it implies contraception—sorry, and thanks for pointing that out. Malthus did advocate later marriage, which is a different kind of way to plan for a family.
I'm confused by your question “Could someone who wrote the following be an advocate of population control?” Um, yes? The quote you gave absolutely sound like someone concerned about overpopulation, especially given that he didn't think we could increase food production very much? How do you interpret it?
I agree that Malthus was attacking redistribution, but my reading of him is that he definitely wanted to control population growth and keep it down to a manageable level. Do you have a different reading?
My reading of him is that he's not at all opposed to population growth. You see in the quote that he argues that national happiness is related to population growth, to the degree that the increase of food production approaches the limit of *unrestricted* population growth.
I think we get the wrong idea about him because how he has been used by generations of environmentalists. They focused on the cause-effect relationship her presented and ignored that his moral vision actually ran orthogonal to theirs. But he's really just an advocate of fecundity (albeit inegalitarian and very much for a kind of scarcity) and, unsurprisingly for a man of the cloth, concerned about people's souls.
Really appreciate the post and your past writing, but may I rudely suggest an edit? I don't mean to be critical and it's a small change. I'm not sure if the word 'only' is communicating what you mean to say here: "Malthus countered that if supply of food is limited, then giving alms to the poor will ONLY drive up the price of food—a point of economics on which he was correct" (emphasis added).
Currently, it partially implies that the ONE effect of alms in a supply constrained model is to drive up the price of food, when that is not the case. It would also help the poor purchase food (even at the higher price and even if we assume 100% of their spending is on food). This is clear because we are giving alms to the poor in the model, not everyone. The conclusion might hold if, say, we have a model with homogenous consumers (equally rich) and who only purchase food (and the alms are printed into existence).
I normally wouldn't bring up such a small issue, but similar language gets made as political rhetoric to mislead people (although not necessarily intentionally). And, yes, I am aware of the dangers of subsidizing demand and the impact that has had in the healthcare, education, and mortgage markets to name a few.
Apologies for being critical (and if I've made a mistake)! Creation is far more valuable that criticism, of course.
Another BRILLIANT chapter by one of the most important thought leaders on the planet, Jason Crawford. Having deeply absorbed in my clueless college days (early 70s) the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist of "Limits to Growth", the writings of Deutch and Pinker were paradigm shifting. Crawford has summarized the pardigm that "sustainable" is a perjorative, not an unallowed good. We must have a GROWTH mentality for the future to be open, bright, and exciting for humanity.
Hardly anyone writing today has their head on straight as much as you do, and I wish I could multiply your influence 100X. You have flair and a lot of knowledge. I love it!
But you do have a tendency to be too obvious and uncontroversial. I tend to relish and learn from your details and examples, while being a little bored by your overall argument because I know it already.
So it was refreshing when you got all feisty, insisting that the idea of sustainability needs to die. That punched things up a bit. It made things really interesting.
However, it's kind of wrong.
It actually does make sense to ask whether various aspects of our lifestyle are sustainable or not, and to prefer sustainability over the alternative.
Of course, it's true that progress often overtakes an unsustainable practice with a better alternative, causing its abandonment without any sacrifice or reluctance long before, its resource base is exhausted. It's also true that when the scarcity of some resource, such as European arable land or firewood, starts to cause hardship, The hard chip off and turns out to be temporary because innovation discovers alternatives. You're right to highlight how misguided is the recurring intellectual blunder of thinking that progress must lead to collapse because it relies on some non-renewable resource.
But if we are dependent on some resource that is in limited supply, and is destined to get more expensive, while that's not a cause for despair, it is a cause for concern. It makes sense to be on the lookout for ways to switch to a more sustainable practice, if it can be done without too much sacrifice.
Fantastic article. The sad thing is that most “educated” people are convinced of the exact opposite.
>From where we stand, growth is practically if not literally infinite: the true limits to growth are currently unknowable and need not affect any decisions we make today.
This has a couple issues:
Firstly we don't know what the actual maximum long term growth rate will be, however we do know what the upper bound is. This upper bound would be a geometric (not exponential!) growth rate which represents you expanding to colonize a sphere of space at nearly lightspeed. Importantly any sort of exponential growth rate will eventually outstrip this within thousands of years. For instance if you do the math for an 8 billion population expanding at near lightspeed with a 2% growth rate, then in 20k years every single Planck volume we've reached needs to support twelve quadrillion people within it.
Secondly is that while reaching this new type of Malthusian trap may take millennia (or way less with digital minds), if you want any chance to avert it you have to act way before things start looking bad! Since once humans have spread out over multiple light years (or even just colonized many far apart dwarf planets in our own system) the notion of trying to suddenly start enforcing any restrictions on growth becomes implausible. So if you don't get civilization to take precautions against this early on, then you basically guarantee that the inner shells of expansion all become a Malthusian trap sooner or later.
“Geometric” growth is usually a synonym for “exponential.” I think you mean growth that is limited to the 3D-geometry of space, that is, cubic.
Yes, once we are literally limited by the size of an expanding sphere, then growth can no longer be exponential. But I stand by the statement I made: those limits are so far away (both in time and in epistemic distance) that they are practically infinite.
Note, as I explained in part 2, that you aren't limited by space or capital until you have hit the best possible technology allowed by the laws of physics.
I think you somewhat underestimate the potential of future technologies to radically alter the speed at which certain things happen due to feedback loops:
For instance if economic growth is driven by the labor of digital humans, then you have a feedback loop because more money lets you run more minds faster which produces even more money.
Clanking self replicators also aren't constrained by human birth rates or labor once deployed. So if people hoard/waste enough resources via automation that could dramatically speed things along. We potentially could have built some of these by now if we cared enough, since a collection of large clanking machines that can collectively produce more of themselves needn't involve futuristic tech.
Lastly I'll point out that our current rates of progress are based on human intelligence, and that things which can enhance that, or do better than humans entirely will fundamentally change the dynamic.
Plus even if these issues don't arise in the next few decades, we still likely need to plan for them before they're pressing concerns. Simply because we might otherwise pass the critical period where you can do anything to address the issue. Since you just can't enforce any meaningful regulations on communities outside your solar system without FTL, and even enforcing regulations within the outer solar system may be infeasible.
It seems like a key challenge of our time is internalizing abundance, at the individual level and more broadly. We, humans broadly, still don't really believe abundance is something we can count on and even grow perpetually. Just being able to imagine big positive outcomes still seems rare and thus valuable. Silicon Valley culture is the obvious example of cultivating this kind of thinking. I hope it can become the norm. Work like yours must help.
Well done.
Perhaps Optimists and Pessimists start from common ground: "The world will come to an end. Let's make it the best it can be."
But they diverge in the details of the inherent concepts:
Pessimists bound "the world" and "the best it can be" leaning heavily on existing knowledge. Optimists allow the bounds of "the world" and "the best it can be" to expand with the possibility of new knowledge.
> “Sustainable” biological feedstocks for commodities such as fuel or plastics, for instance, are a bizarre regress to the unsustainable pre-industrial reliance on plant and animal resources—such as guano fertilizer, whale oil, and elephant ivory—that we moved on from in the 19th century.
For various reasons relating to relative biological efficiency, the world can produce a lot more grain than ivory.
World corn production is about 2.5 times world plastic production, so making plastic from bio feedstock without reducing plastic consumption is plausible. Especially if farming byproducts, like straw, can be used.
Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, but is there a plan to publish the whole thing as a ebook or similar?
Yes once it's finished!
It is a happy relief that there are progressive people who focus on growth and production over redistribution . Hopefully we can convince more people with our ideas .