[rob74]

> Everyone should be living much more like the most wealthy people in the most wealthy nations are living now. It should be considered a moral abomination that billions of people are not living in multiple story homes with robotic assistants to control their lights, security, doors, air-conditioning and the temperature of their pools.

As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.

[beaconstudios]

Not only that, but the conditions in the West are contingent on the work done in the rest of the world. There's a reason we're not all working in sweatshops making all the products we are constantly using, and it's because we have poor people in other countries doing it instead. For their living standards to rise, ours will have to lower (though the economy is not a zero sum game of course, and technology/automation can reduce the necessary labour).

I don't think it's malicious or anything - I just think that this perspective is a little ignorant of how the world really works.

[chii]

> we have poor people in other countries doing it instead.

and they become less poor afterwards. Eventually, they will no longer accept the low wages as their own wealth increases. i think this is a good outcome - all parties benefit from the transaction.

This will take a long time to play out, and in the mean time, the research and development of tech would progress enough to find a solution to the energy and resource problem - increasing efficiency, or finding new sources to extract (my money is on asteroids).

But the way it will play out, means that there's always a gradient of relative "conditions" - from the lowest, to the highest. As long as this gradient is always shifting up - aka, everyone's condition is improving - i think it is acceptable.

[beaconstudios]

> and they become less poor afterwards.

This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are. It's exploitation of the poor, pure and simple - there's no trickle-down economics in play, they just get to stay poor but alive while the goods they make are sold to wealthier countries.

It would be really nice if free markets played out the way free market advocates say they do, but they don't.

> But the way it will play out, means that there's always a gradient of relative "conditions"

Personally, I'd rather we lived in a meritocratic system where hard work and innovation benefits the individual responsible, and everybody earns the value of their work. I don't like the idea of a perpetual underclass based on characteristics unrelated to personal capability, like nationality or race.

[ericmay]

>This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are

How did any country ever become wealthy? The US and UK for example went through the Industrial Revolution too, where people were paid subsistence wages and worked in sweatshops...

[dragonwriter]

> The US and UK for example went through the Industrial Revolution too, where people were paid subsistence wages and worked in sweatshops...

Then they had mass, deadly, pro- and anti-labor violence culminating in various labor protections which resulted in a less-miserable distribution of the rewards of industry, a process which has been interspersed with backsliding and repetition over time.

[ericmay]

Right and so then they became less poor afterward.

[softcactus]

That's very easy for you to say in your current situation. I think you would not find it acceptable if you were one of the sweatshop workers. This is the exact logic that has been used to justify slavery/exploitation throughout history.

[yetihehe]

What is your argument exactly, that we should not give job to workers in poorer countries? So that they don't have any money?

[softcactus]

Pay people without exploiting them. You can pay people decent wages and avoid putting them in unnecessary danger while still making a significant profit. If that truly cant be done, then that industry needs to be nationalized to cover the deficit.

[beaconstudios]

the economy is not a binary choice between "pay people subsistence wages" and "don't pay them at all". We could pay people better, invest in the development of underdeveloped countries that we exploit (no, IMF loans do not count). We could focus on helping people instead of exploiting them for profit. Many options are available.

[yetihehe]

Why don't you do this? If you don't have resources for this, why do you think other people have them? Ask yourself honestly, if you won a lottery yesterday, would you give it away to those workers in underdeveloped countries? I would not, because I'm too greedy, but I don't think you would really give money away either, and I supported Ukraine with about $100, which is probably the biggest donation I have done in my life, many people could live on it for two weeks where I live. Many options are available, but not all of them are as good as just giving them jobs. And if you wanted to give them better paying jobs - who will pay? Would you pay more for some laptop because it supported some unknown person on the other side of earth? Why don't you just send them some money today? You have that option after all.

[ZeroGravitas]

The multistory rather than merely spacious homes and 'pool' with the implication of a private pool, which are both very space inefficient make this seem foolish to me, but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors.

[throwaway6532]

>but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors

So sand shortages, and water shortages are not a thing?

[ZeroGravitas]

The problems with water and sand are not physical limits. Like climate change and pollution generally they're just unpriced externalities.

We have better solutions already, getting people to use then when they can abuse the situation for short term profit is the hard bit.

And ironically, if you intend to abuse the system for short term profit, one of your best moves is to claim the problem is not solvable (though only once claiming it's not happening stops working).

[throwaway6532]

>The problems with water and sand are not physical limits. Like climate change and pollution generally they're just unpriced externalities.

I'd say it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. They're definitely are physical limits to those things, and they are definitely subject to unpriced externalities at present. I think the water shortages in South Africa are a good case study where the public reacted to avert a crisis once they were made acutely aware that a crisis was imminent if they didn't act. People just take water for granted, until they no longer can. But in saying that there is almost certainly a point at which things just can't keep up, or the alternative cannot be procured/switched to in a short enough time to avoid the disaster. I see it less as a problem of pure physical limits and more as a problem in control theory.

[beaconstudios]

This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for. However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).

[rmah]

4 bil households (8 bil people) with each household living on a detached 500 sq m lot (20m x 25m or apx 1/8th acre) => 4,000,000,000 hh * 500 sq m => 2mil sq km.

The earth has 149mil sq km of land area so those suburbs would take up about 1.7% of the land. If you subtract out antarctica (14 mil sq km), siberia (13 mil sq km) and 3/4 of canada (7 mil sq km), the sahara desert (9mil sq km)... you're still left with about 106 mil sq km so we're using about 1.8% of the land.

Density isn't evenly distributed you say? Well, let's look at only china then... Some 1.4 bil people in 9.6mil sq km. Everyone living on in 500 sq m lots means 350,000 sq km, or about 5% of the land. Lots of western china is too inhospitable you say? Fine, subtract out Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xining (forget the fact that 60mil+ people live there). That's half of china's land area! You're still left with around 4.860 mil sq km. So everyone's suburban lots would fit in about 7% of the land.

My point here is that the earth is not really as crowded as many people seem to believe. It only seems crowded if you spend the majority of your life in or near dense urban areas. Which most people do these days. So most see it that way. There are still vast tracts of nearly uninhabited land and even vaster expanses of sparsely inhabited land. Sure, these are typically not the really nice bits of the earth (from a human perspective), but we do have central heating and A/C now, right? :-)

[beaconstudios]

I didn't mean to imply that land area was the constraint - the constraint is energy/fuel use, traffic, and other symptoms of inefficient resource use.

We should be aiming to design houses so that minimal HVAC is necessary to maintain comfortable conditions, not building ramshackle houses in the desert and patching the inefficiencies with massively energy-consuming devices.

The broader point I'm trying to make is that we should be aiming for effective improvements in living standards - and there are two components in effectiveness, correct orientation and efficiency. American suburbs are pretty backwards in terms of cost/benefit: they're expensive to maintain infrastructure-wise, they isolate people from each other, and you have to drive for an hour to get to anything leading to even more expensive car-centric infrastructure. We should be aiming to fulfil human needs on a planetary scale, which means efficient use of resources.

[rmah]

Sorry, that post was my attempt at a bit of data humor :-) I actually agree with everything you're saying.

[beaconstudios]

ah sorry, the medium doesn't always lend itself to tone-based jokes! I see it now, haha

[marcosdumay]

> it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc

Car traffic and road maintenance are limiting factors here, but I don't see any reason why the private air conditioning and even heating a pool (the space for a private pool, on the other hand is a traffic generator) would be limited by energy availability.

[beaconstudios]

It's not that HVAC limited by energy availability - it's that what people want is to regulate the temperature of their environment, and you can get most of the way there with good architectural design. This means people can get what they want in a more energy efficient way.

[marcosdumay]

I personally hate HVACs, but I live in a very comfortable climate.

Way too many people live in places where the environment temperatures are outside of the survivable range, or in places that get so hot, it's hard to do anything (often even at night). You just can't fight those by designing you building differently. You can improve the situation a little bit, but not enough.

[beaconstudios]

You'd be surprised. Ancient Iran (a literal desert) kept buildings cool with windcatchers [1] and qanats [2]. I do agree that we have a tendency to set up shop in really extreme places, but that's not necessarily a limiting factor in sustainable design.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling

[silicon2401]

> This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for.

I'd rather push for population control. I don't want to live in a world where humans have to live like insects, crammed into giant hive cities.

> However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).

I'd rather use cleverness to sustain our quality of life with smaller populations. If we had your sci fi utopia, we could have a population of 1 million total humans, each living like a king. I don't understand why you want to use sci fi magic just to have everyone live like an ant in a box

[beaconstudios]

wow, an unironic Malthusian in the wild. Nobody wants you to eat the bugs and live in the pod, friend - the point is to give everybody the best possible standard of living with the resources we have at our disposal. We can attain a pretty great standard for everybody.

Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.

As standards of living increase, population growth also naturally shrinks to even or below-even maintenance rates; so if you're worried about a future with 100 billion humans crammed into Hong Kong style bed cages, your best bet is to try to improve living standards around the world.

[silicon2401]

> We can attain a pretty great standard for everybody.

By whose definition? Living in a city is not a great quality of life for me. I've done it and hated it compared to living in a suburb.

> Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.

Educated people have way fewer children than poor and uneducated people. Not to mention placing a cap on immigration, etc. Your argument is reductivist and leaves out a lot of valid ways to reduce populations.

[beaconstudios]

I don't live in a city either, but American suburbs are terrible. I can't imagine living somewhere where I can't nip to the shops 2 minutes down the road (walkable or drivable), where I have to drive long distances to get to the nearest economic hub because it was plonked down in the middle of nowhere, where the main road is basically a small highway. I want walkable human-friendly environments with a mix of high- and low-density accomodation to suit people's preferences.

Number of children is tied to economic status, not education - "poor and uneducated" should just be "poor". That's exactly what I said. A cap on immigration doesn't change the population - but with all your arguments put together, it certainly gives me a vibe of what you actually want.

[pmontra]

It's not that the planet is not enough, because maybe it is, but does the author really think that even people that can afford those comforts now really want them? My own data point: home, yes, multiple story no. No stairs, no elevators is best. Robotic assistants for lights, I don't care. Security: if that's a burglar alarm yes. Control doors? I'm happy and feel more secure with traditional locks. Air-conditioning, yes. Pool, I don't care.

[throwaway6532]

>As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.

If you had a lot less people on it, you wouldn't have the labor force needed to keep that standard of living functioning :)

It's hubris in the extreme.