[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.

[paganel]

> Solar powered AC works just fine without a power distribution network and even tends to track production and demand

It's pretty hard close to impossible to scale that to large and dense communities. I know for sure that my Eastern-European city (population: ~1.8 million) has enough problems as it is when in the summer heat people turn the AC on at the same time. And we're a pretty ok country in terms of power distribution, I'd dare to say, we have hydro, nuclear, wind, and of course coal-based energy.

More to the point, I fail to see how you can provide power to an African city with a population with 2 million (let's say) only using solar. I know that there's a lot of sunny days in sub-Saharan Africa, but you need to have huge solar farms, for which you need political stability (so that people don't destroy said farms), you need power lines that would bring said solar-generated power to the city (which also requires political and economical stability), you need engineers (preferably locally-trained, that way the costs are manageable) in order to manage all that, you need to make it easy for people to pay for it all (again, this requires institutional stability) and so on and so forth. I'd say that there are still large swaths of the world where all these conditions don't apply.

I'd say people here on HN have a slightly skewed perspective on things. Most of them have grown up (and some of them still live) in American suburbia where having the possibility to install your own solar-power thingie is totally feasible. But American suburbia it's not the whole world.

[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...