[Koromix]

Burning through the vast energy and natural resources at our disposal is what has allowed us to "lift" so many people out of poverty. "Proposerity" and "progress" are not a miracle of economic thinking, or technology. We owe all of this to fossil fuels, nothing more, nothing less.

In fact, you'd need to slap an extremely inefficient economic system on top of this mind-blowing amount of resources to not enrich the global population at least a little bit. Or you'd have to purposefully design it to work that way.

[logicchains]

>Burning through the vast energy and natural resources at our disposal is what has allowed us to "lift" so many people out of poverty. "Proposerity" and "progress" are not a miracle of economic thinking, or technology. We owe all of this to fossil fuels, nothing more, nothing less.

The Soviet Union had equal access to natural resources as America and Western Europe, yet at the time of its collapse it was much poorer, and many former Soviet Union countries still are. Clearly in the short term at least natural resources aren't all that matters.

[Koromix]

Maybe, but I hope there are better arguments for the current system than "it works better than the Soviet Union". All you have done here is establish that an extremely dysfunctional economy can either waste or fail to use its resources, which would mean that America and Western Europe are not completely dysfunctional. This is a pretty low bar.

And as you said, we're talking short term here. Very short term. On slightly longer terms, it really doesn't look so good. Indeed, it takes an absurd level of denial / techno-optimism / magical thinking (whichever you prefer) to look at paleoclimatology and current climate indicators and think it can go on for much longer without global catastrophy.

At the end, if the best we can say of globalization is "For around 40+ years it was great fun for a lot of people. Well, for the most privileged countries anyway. And then it collapsed, and took a great chunk of the biosphere and the human population with it"... I don't see much to celebrate.

[logicchains]

>Maybe, but I hope there are better arguments for the current system than "it works better than the Soviet Union". All you have done here is establish that an extremely dysfunctional economy can either waste or fail to use its resources, which would mean that America and Western Europe are not completely dysfunctional. This is a pretty low bar.

It's a reasonable argument to make when people are advocating moving closer to Soviet Union policies (e.g. restricting trade, stronger government intervention in industry).

>And as you said, we're talking short term here. Very short term. On slightly longer terms, it really doesn't look so good. Indeed, it takes an absurd level of denial / techno-optimism / magical thinking (whichever you prefer) to look at paleoclimatology and current climate indicators and think it can go on for much longer without global catastrophy.

>At the end, if the best we can say of globalization is "For around 40+ years it was great fun for a lot of people. Well, for the most privileged countries anyway. And then it collapsed, and took a great chunk of the biosphere and the human population with it"... I don't see much to celebrate.

Ultimately all life on Earth will die when the sun burns out or otherwise significantly changes its output. The only hope humanity has to outlive this is taking to the stars, and that won't happen without consuming a lot of resources.

If you want to look at it in terms of natural resources, personally I think irrational fear of nuclear power is the biggest problem facing the world. Modern reactors pose almost no risk to the biosphere compared to coal, oil and the like, nor do they contribute to global warming. More people die every year from coal-burning related illness than have ever been killed by nuclear power accidents.

[Koromix]

> Ultimately all life on Earth will die when the sun burns out or otherwise significantly changes its output. The only hope humanity has to outlive this is taking to the stars, and that won't happen without consuming a lot of resources.

There's 500M to 1 billion years left for complex multi-cellular life on earth, due to increased solar output. That's around 100000x to 200000x longer than human recorded history. So clearly, not an imminent problem any rational human needs to worry about.

Trashing the planet in a few decades for such a far away "problem" is absurd. All it does is significantly shorten the time we have here. We could decide that 500M to 1B years is enough, stay here and enjoy all the time left.

If we really want to escape our fate on earth, well we could simply take our time to slowly develop ways go to space. Assuming that it is possible for humans to reach anything beyond the solar system, which may not be the case. There are practical physical and thermodynamic considerations that may prevent us from ever colonizing much in space, even if we were to try hard. In which case, preserving earth would not just be the best thing to do, it would be the only thing we can do.

> If you want to look at it in terms of natural resources, personally I think irrational fear of nuclear power is the biggest problem facing the world. Modern reactors pose almost no risk to the biosphere compared to coal, oil and the like, nor do they contribute to global warming. More people die every year from coal-burning related illness than have ever been killed by nuclear power accidents.

No disagreement here. Though it only addresses some of the issues we face, nuclear fission is probably the only semi-viable alternative to fossil fuels.

[logicchains]

>Trashing the planet in a few decades for such a far away "problem" is absurd. All it does is significantly shorten the time we have here. We could decide that 500M to 1B years is enough, stay here and enjoy all the time left.

>If we really want to escape our fate on earth, well we could simply take our time to slowly develop ways go to space. Assuming that it is possible for humans to reach anything beyond the solar system, which may not be the case. There are practical physical and thermodynamic considerations that may prevent us from ever colonizing much in space, even if we were to try hard. In which case, preserving earth would not just be the best thing to do, it would be the only thing we can do.

Ultimately it's a moral judgement. The people living now are different in one key way from people who may exist in the future: they exist. At the core of economics is fulfilling peoples' revealed preferences. If peoples' revealed preferences show they prefer greater consumption now at the expense of people who may live in the feature, that's what will be optimised. What weight should the potential wishes of people potentially born in the future have compared to those of people actually existing now? That's ultimately a philosophical questions, outside the range of economics, maths or science. The one thing that economics shows is that the collective preferences of people existing now tend to put a lot more weight on the importance of people existing now than on people who might exist in the future.

[Koromix]

Many / most people exisiting now also fail to grasp how bad the future will get on our current course. They fail to realize that modern life is anything but a short-term artefact of fossil fuel gluttonery (every person in the first world has uses the equivalent of 100 fossil fuel slaves. It's easy to mock human slavery when you can burn such a dense source of energy instead) and mild stable climate, both of which are likely to go very wrong this century.

The decision to put more weight on the present is mostly made in ignorance and wishful techno-optimism. Many people still think that we're somehow building a cheap-energy no-death space-faring future, or they're not thinking about it at all (though that does not stop them from making children). Going to space to escape the hard reality of life on earth and then never dying is basically the techno-optimist's replacement for the now outdated concept of heaven.

People on HN tend to go for techno-optimism. This is readily apparent when the AI, singularity delusion is treated as a grave and imminent civilizational problem but fossil fuel, energy shortage and climate change are dismissed with "PV will solve all of this. Evil greedy subsidy-loving coal and oil companies are the problem". Our fossil fuel powered civilization would quickly beg for these "evil" companies to resume their activity if they somehow decided to stop providing oil for a week.

Finally, this preference is also made at the expense of most of the wildlife and biodiversity that exists now (or not long ago for a significant chunk of it), which would very much like to continue exisiting too.

[dpc59]

They started out poorer though, and the reverse argument can be made comparing Cuba and various Caribbean countries (Haiti and Jamaica in particular come to mind).