[skywhopper]

I agree that it's impossible for the rates of economic growth and lifestyle improvements we saw since the late 1800s to continue indefinitely, but the key to growth is investment. And from the late-1800s till the mid-1900s, there were huge government investments made in building new and innovative infrastructure in the US--railroads, the phone network, state universities and K-12 public education, electricity generation and distribution, highways, airports. Those investments in common infrastructure allowed private investment to piggyback and provide the enormous success the US economy has had in the time detailed.

But today, we've forgotten the formula. Education funding is falling, basic maintenance isn't being performed on much of the infrastructure, and we aren't investing enough in the new things that can provide growth for the next hundred years. High-speed and light rail could help address the limits of airport and highway capacity, and provide better mobility in and between cities. Investing in clean electricity generation, a national power network, and improved battery technology could revolutionize how our homes and cars get their power. Very-low cost higher education was a thing in mid-20th-century America--it was possible to attend your in-state university for a few thousand bucks in today's dollars. What happened? As long as we pretend these things are too expensive to invest in, then we're sure to enter a long slow decline.

[paganel]

> What happened? As long as we pretend these things are too expensive to invest in, then we're sure to enter a long slow decline.

I'll go on the Marxist side of things and say that "quantitative differences have turned out into qualitative ones". What I want to say is that scale matters. Regarding investment in higher-education, it was relatively ok and feasible to give Government subsidies for all the students attending university when only 1%-2% of the students finishing high-school were going to university (I think that happened up until the mid-50s, but maybe I'm wrong), but once you've got 30-50% of the students finishing high-school going to university then the money just isn't there anymore.

And to add to that, it always baffled me how Malthus's name has always had such a bad reputation. The economics for handling a planet inhabited by 1.5 billion people in the late 1800s (we only reached 2 billion people in 1927) are totally different from the economics of a planet inhabited by 7+ billion people, going on 10. Our resources are finite, no matter how much we try to hide it.

[TeMPOraL]

> And to add to that, it always baffled me how Malthus's name has always had such a bad reputation. The economics for handling a planet inhabited by 1.5 billion people in the late 1800s (we only reached 2 billion people in 1927) are totally different from the economics of a planet inhabited by 7+ billion people, going on 10. Our resources are finite, no matter how much we try to hide it.

I still don't get how Malthus's name got that bad rep in the first place. As for the difference between the late 1800s and now, it's smaller that one may think. Back then people were hitting the ceiling of Earth's capability to feed people. We got through that, and grew beyond 2 billion people, thanks to a series of scientific and technological flukes, like Haber–Bosch process[0]. We were lucky then, this doesn't imply we'll be lucky this time.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

[harshreality]

The implication is that some sort of population control might be necessary, if psych/soc pressures don't stabilize the population by themselves. Population control is antithetical to western individualistic values, so people reject the premise because one of the potential policy consequences (population control) causes an emotional melt-down. If desire to believe in an abstract principle is strong enough, facts will be rejected.

[jerf]

"if psych/soc pressures don't stabilize the population by themselves."

Since at the moment, the evidence strongly suggests that they are, "population control" measures sound even more evil to me than they did before.

The problem is that when you go to concretize the abstract question, you end up with the question "Who gets the power to decide who lives and dies?" (or reproduces) and one need not study history for very long to become very nervous about the possible answers. Those of you who casually assume you'd be on the "live" side are unjustified in your confidence.

[GFischer]

Well, China did have such a policy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

[hx87]

It has been of questionable utility since the decline in fertility began before the policy was implemented. In fact, the policy was conceived to counteract Mao's pro-natalist policy where a large(r) population was supposed to be a hedge against nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

[splintercell]

People forget that resource pressure acts as a population control measure, and it isn't an 'if'.

It is to be noted that resource pressure is not the same thing as poverty. A lot of poor regions produce more babies than say people in Manhattan, because people in Manhattan have higher life quality expectation for their kids, than people living in a poor region.

[davidiach]

You do realize that crop yields have grown exponentially as well?

And I hope you also realize that "natural resources" is not an intrinsic property that some things have, it's just a way of describing things around us and for which we figured out use cases. It's like when someone says that a certain phenomenon is mysterious. That's not a description of the phenomenon itself, it just describes the state of knowledge of the person making the claim. Likewise, the reason gold, iron, oil and wood are "natural resources" is because we figured out stuff to do with them. Worrying about running out of resources is basically worrying that we exhausted all the ways we can rearrange atoms to better achieve our purposes.

[paganel]

> You do realize that crop yields have grown exponentially as well?

I do realize that, yes, only that nowadays people are not content with only eating bread and making it to the next day (which, I agree, we have enough resources for) but they instead want to have a "Western"-style of life, meaning middle or higher education, a car, some electronics (phones, TVs), air-conditioning etc. I'd say our planet doesn't have enough resources to provide a Western-style of life for 7 billion people, feel free to prove me wrong on that.

I'll also say that the recent immigration-related issues are resource-related, meaning the poorer parts of the world (places like Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa) don't have enough resources to provide a Western-style of living for people from there. I remember reading an interview with a 16-year old from Gabon (I think), who was waiting at the Italian-Swiss border hoping to make his way to Germany, and the reason he gave for making it all the way there from his home country was that he wanted to attend University in Europe, he didn't mention not having enough bread to eat at home.

[Retric]

70% of the globe is covered by Ocean which is minimally used. If we covered 10% of that with solar we get .7 * .1 * 196.9 * 10^6 mi * 2.59e+6 (miles to meters) * 100 watts/meter average * 20% efficiency ~= 713959400000000 watts / second. Or 100kw 24/7 per person for a population of 7 billion. That's plenty of energy cover loss of fossil fuel, and to upgrade everyone's lifestyle for the next billion years.

Granted, nothing keeps up with exponential growth. But, world population does not seem to be on that trajectory long term.

[Decade]

Yes. The ‘”Western”-style of life’ needs to change.

The intellectual conservatives are aware of this, and react negatively. They believe that nobody should tell them how to live their lives. Rejecting human-driven climate change is a way out of their cognitive dissonance.

As for me, I don’t have air conditioning, I don’t own a car, I reduce and reuse before recycling, I don’t buy on credit. (Electronics are astonishingly cheap these days, and once you filter out the noise, the Internet is a vast trove of knowledge.) Westerners might say that they believe in global warming and all that, but when it comes to the cost of lifestyle changes, they balk. I have the “advantage” that I started out cash-poor, so I didn’t grow up assuming that I would need anything.

Just something I was thinking about, related to gentrification, urbanization vs NIMBYs, and Elon Musk’s Tesla master plan.

[hx87]

> air conditioning

It's just a pet peeve of mine, but why is so much blame placed on air conditioning, when heating uses an order of magnitude more energy?

[paganel]

I don't necessarily "blame" air-conditioning, it's just that in order to have AC you need to have a functional power distribution network that works at country level, which in turn requires having the initial capital for building it and then (I say most importantly) the necessary political and economical stability in place in order to raise the power distribution poles and, generally speaking, keeping the power distribution network up and running.

I know that us people in the "West" now take this for granted, but I'd say that in a great part of the world the conditions for putting that in place will not be met in the next 30-50 years.

I speak from first-hand experience (I spent my childhood in communist Eastern Europe in the '80s, when the going got tough) but one of the first things to go when a regime/society is economically and politically crumbling is the power distribution, meaning country-level power black-outs.

[Retric]

Solar powered AC works just fine without a power distribution network and even tends to track production and demand. Heating on the other hand needs power in the darker parks of the year and needs fuel, much larger investments, or a power distribution network.

[ArkyBeagle]

Not only were only 1-2% of high school grads going to college, but the proportion finishing high school was lower as well. And all this was okay by the lights of the time.

Malthus got a "bad reputation" because Malthus made a prediction of a continued state of affairs that was very wrong. The prediction itself became dangerous. Color (organic) chemistry met agricultural production, engines replaced muscle and what happened was quite the opposite of Malthus' prediction. You can see the effects of this in the 1920s during the famine in Soviet climes.

[bryanlarsen]

Malthus's arguments may have made some sense when he made them, the green revolution may have been difficult to predict back then. But any neo-Malthusian arguments don't pass the smell test today.

1) If we were running out of food it would be reflected in the price. The price of wheat in British pounds has stayed relatively constant for ~800 years, staying within the range of 1-5 pounds per bushel. That's right, we've had inflation in everything but the price of food.

A bushel of wheat contains approximately one month's worth of calories. You used to be able to buy a slave for ~100 pounds. Today that buys about a day's worth of labour, but it still buys the same amount of wheat.

2) It's trivially easy to grow more food per acre than today's farms do. There are probably hundreds of different ways we could do so. We don't do any of them because they are all too expensive. If the price of food rose, those techniques would become viable. For example, we can increase production several orders of magnitude in temperate regions by building greenhouses.

We had a food price spike 5 years ago, the price of wheat went to about $10/bushel, a historically unprecedented level. Farmers responded by farming more intensively, and now the price is below $4/bushel.

3) To a first order approximation, food is created from energy and water. We use raw solar energy for food production because it's the cheapest, but we're reaching a point where it's starting to become feasible to use other forms of energy. Given desalination, our water supply is also only limited by our energy supply. Virtually all of the other secondary inputs to food production are basically transformed energy: diesel, fertilizer, herbicides, et cetera.

And every other element required for food production usually has its prevalence expressed as a percentage of the earth's crust. For example, Potassium is 2.6% of the earth's crust. So for all intents and purposes, unlimited. The energy required to extract the potassium is the limiting factor, not the potassium itself.

Is our world energy supply finite? Yes, but we can expand it using nuclear & solar faster than we can expand the world's population.

[danbruc]

If you increased our energy consumption by 1 % per year, we would all be dead in less than 1000 years because at that point the surface temperature of the Earth would have reached the boiling point of water.

EDIT: In case the down votes are for the numbers. The total emission of an ideal black body with surface area of 510.1 million km² at 373.15 K is 560,791 TW. The world total primary energy supply in 2012 is estimated to have been 155,505 TWh which is 17.75 TW on average. That is a factor of 31,591 from what Earth could radiate into space at 100 °C or 1,041 years of 1 % growth per year.

[TheCoelacanth]

If we increased our energy production to 20000 times our current production (roughly 1000 years at 1% growth), I highly doubt we would still be stuck on Earth.

[danbruc]

Leaving Earth does not really help that much - the number of stars and planets you can reach only increases with the third power - assuming an homogeneous distribution - and after some time more like with the second power due to the flat shape of the Milky Way and is in consequence quickly overwhelmed by exponential growth. You would not really get that far from Earth before you would already have to consume all the resources of the galaxy assuming some constant rate of growth on the order of 1 % per year.

[coldtea]

>Regarding investment in higher-education, it was relatively ok and feasible to give Government subsidies for all the students attending university when only 1%-2% of the students finishing high-school were going to university (I think that happened up until the mid-50s, but maybe I'm wrong), but once you've got 30-50% of the students finishing high-school going to university then the money just isn't there anymore.

Well, other countries like Germany etc can do it just fine, so...

[objectivistbrit]

> And from the late-1800s till the mid-1900s, there were huge government investments made in building new and innovative infrastructure in the US--railroads, the phone network, state universities and K-12 public education, electricity generation and distribution, highways, airports.

Excluding the world wars, US government spending was much lower during that period than it is today. It increased greatly with the New Deal in the 30s, and has continued to increase until the present day.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ccxOaz-W_p0/UsgZkuJp-jI/AAAAAAAAAR...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was huge private investment in infrastructure and basic research (e.g., Edison's research lab).

[conjectures]

These are two different measures. It's entirely possible for governments to spend more money without building more infrastructure. Either by spending it on different things, or badly.

So in this sense you can both be correct.

[dv_dt]

Can you really exclude the wars? Wasn't a huge amount industrial infrastructure built up during WWII, and then re-used at a lower capital cost basis by industry for future production?

[bluetomcat]

This, and the wasteful misallocation of resources to bloated and unproductive industries like finance, insurance, advertising and entertainment.

[taneq]

coughmilitarycough

[davidivadavid]

How are these industries unproductive?

[wildmusings]

>Very-low cost higher education was a thing in mid-20th-century America--it was possible to attend your in-state university for a few thousand bucks in today's dollars. What happened? As long as we pretend these things are too expensive to invest in, then we're sure to enter a long slow decline.

I don't think your point about education makes sense. You want more investment, but then bemoan the fact that it costs more, as if that signifies low investment. People are investing in their education at record levels!

Maybe you think student loans are a problem for other reasons, but they certainly aren't stopping people from going to college. Again, they're going in record numbers and spending record money to do so.

[internaut]

> People are investing in their education at record levels!

They are investing in formal qualifications. Certificates.

As Thiel points out, a university degree has transmogrified from "investment" to "insurance" to "tournament".

The reality is that the previous generation knows jack shit about the environment facing the current generation. Their 'common sense' can be thrown out nearly entirely with few exceptions. In today's environment most of them wouldn't stand a chance.

[wildmusings]

I agree actually, but state funding of higher education, as the GP is suggesting, would probably only further cement the current broken system.

[wildmusings]

Edit: Not "would probably". It already is serving to entrench the current system.

[yummyfajitas]

According to wikipedia, more people than ever before are getting educated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_Attainment_in...

Spending on infrastructure is going up.

https://www.economy.com/dismal/analysis/free/254109

The issue is not lack of investment, it's out of control costs.

[mrow84]

The first bullet point in your second link is:

"Public investment in infrastructure sits at its lowest level since records have been kept because of underfunding across all levels of government."

And the lead into the second graph, which shows real-terms per-capita public investment is:

"On a per capita basis, real government spending on structures is the lowest it has been since at least 1950."

Given statements like that, I don't see how you can make the leap from "Spending on infrastructure is going up." to "The issue is not lack of investment, it's out of control costs."

[yummyfajitas]

That is the mood affiliation of the post - it is in fact the only position on infrastructure that is within the overton window.

But I'm citing the graphs, not the mood affiliation. The graphs show a large increase in spending on transit/water infrastructure and a large increase in costs.

There is also relatively flat per-capita government investment in structures (a broader category which includes buildings/similar things, and is not the typical power/transit/water cited by the parent).

[jbooth]

Hang on, are you really pointing to nominal spending increases while hand-waving away that real, per-capita spending is down?

[yummyfajitas]

Per-capita spending on structures is down.

Since 1992, federal spending (in real terms) on transportation/water infrastructure has doubled. State spending has increased by 2.5x. Population has increased 25%.

[geomark]

Maybe it's a red herring, but I always wonder how much infrastructure spending that would have gone into surface building (roads and bridges) has instead gone into subsurface building (deep underground military bases and the tunnels connecting them). Spending for the latter is buried in the black budget so actual numbers aren't available but it has to be huge and it's been going on for decades.

[bluetomcat]

Getting educated in what? Corporate law, advertising and marketing, journalism, HR, French literature...

If most of these jobs are replaced by proper blue-collar occupations, we would see far more tangible results – most importantly, cheaper construction and housing.

[hx87]

It's difficult to make construction in the USA cheaper without greater acceptance of prefabrication and panelization in the residential sector and lowering of permitting costs.

[yummyfajitas]

Not to mention breaking public sector unions, eliminating "Buy American" provisions, and just generally removing all the unique things that no one else in the world does.

Delhi built phase 2 of her metro for $2.9B in 3 years (85 stations, 77 miles of track). NYC build Hudson Yards in 9 years for $2.5B (1 station, 1 mile of track).

Various tricks: Delhi didn't wildly overhire and overpay workers, they bought standard train cars/other equipment from Japanese and German corporations that have a proven record in supplying such things, and eliminated a bunch of red tape. It's almost as if Delhi built a metro with the goal of having a metro rather than with the goal of funneling money to MTA workers.

[bwanab]

All the things you mention are true and important, but they're all second derivative. The first derivative to growth between 1870 and 1970 was cheap energy - primarily oil. What happened in the 70s? The oil embargos and drastic increases in prices. Since the 1970s whenever growth gets started, oil prices rise given the new demand which triggers recession which lowers demand and on and on.

Growth can continue when we develop new energy sources that are relatively inelastic to demand.

[dominotw]

> Very-low cost higher education was a thing in mid-20th-century America--it was possible to attend your in-state university for a few thousand bucks in today's dollars.

I went to a state school in mid 2000's and paid around $1700/sem in-state tuition for full-time course load.

Is this still an option?

[wil421]

I also went to a 2 year school first and paid around the same.

When I transferred to a 4 year school the tuition doubled to a little over 3k. At the time I wasn't making anything waiting tables so I qualified for the Pell Grant. Graduated a few years older than usually graduates but with 0 student debt.

It's most definitely an option but most students are fine with Student debt. Many people I've met have student debt more than the first house I want to buy.

[quadrangle]

For most cases, no. Tuition rates have skyrocketed since only 10 years ago.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/10/23/charts-just-h...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-18/college-t...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/18/college-tuition-una...

Whether obscure deals or aid make things possible today, I don't know. Put simply: today's students are not looking at the same options as those just a few years ago.

[wil421]

I graduated 3 years ago and what the parent said is definitely still an option. Especially if you transfer in to a larger school after 2 years.

[quadrangle]

Thanks for the anecdotal data, glad to know there are still options. The overall stats in the chart may be skewed by the expensive institutions becoming that much more expensive, but still… my anecdote is that the regional state school I graduated from in 2004 (not a community college, but not a top-ranked place) is in the $5k-$6k range for 15-credit in-state semester today. And I checked that its below average for in-state tuition, all the state schools are in that range.

If your "transfer…" comment refers to community college, that's a smart financial decision but not exactly the topic of the post I was replying to.

[dforrestwilson]

Railroads were privately funded for the most part, same story with phone networks, same story with electricity. Universities and public education are debatable as to whether they actually fuel growth.