[brownbat]

Malthus was wrong.

Hans Rosling, "What Stops Population Growth?" http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth...

In Malthus's model, new people only consume food and breed. But we do this other cool thing, too, we also think about human problems and how to solve them. We all add resources to the computer of humanity.

Some really cool, like Norman Borlaug, go around the world and teach people how to grow more reliable crops, stopping famines, increasing the reliability and scale of the food supply while lowering the resources it takes to produce the food. It's sometimes said he's saved a billion lives. He did so without increasing the strain on others, but by spreading knowledge and increasing efficiency, maybe even lowering the strain on the planet.

Humanity's ability to solve problems isn't in a flat linear relationship with how many people we have either. If we just have 100 people, they all have to farm all the time, and can't stop and think about much. With a billion people, we get economies of scale, so we just need 40% to be farmers, and we can have, say, 20% work on logistics, 10% work on massive aqueducts and public infrastructure, and 10% be scientists and inventors.

At a certain point, every additional person makes it easier for more people to survive on the planet. And yes, there is some raw physical limit to population on this rock... but visit the Russian Taiga, Wyoming, Namibia, or Mongolia. We're nowhere near that point yet, it's several orders of magnitude away. And if you note Rosling's points, we probably won't keep growing anyway.

He notes that population growth is really a switch towards health systems with lower infant mortality. You have previous generations that keep having 10 kids because only one or two of them will survive, then the health conditions improve and suddenly all of them survive. The next generation or so reverts to normal family planning, having just one or two kids. Malthus was wrong to suggest that people just breed as much as humanly possible.

All that said, I don't think you should be downvoted for asking a question. If we buried every premise we disagreed with, we'd never get a chance to lay out the reasons we believe the opposite, we'd never convince anyone. We'd just be insisting on dogmatic agreement, rather than any actual understanding of the complex issues.

[aestra]

Norman Borlaug is the father of the Green Revolution. Green revolution agriculture techniques require a massive amount of oil and gas as inputs. Eventually we're going to run out of those. When oil prices start to spike, people will starve. Also it has decreased diversity to only a few high yielding varies of crops making our food supply more susceptible to pathogens because of lack of biodiversity.

As well as a whole host of other problems, such as people switching to profitable crops to export rather than to feed the local population.

[brownbat]

I'm familiar with the criticism, but remain unconvinced that:

1. oil and gas are strictly "required" as an energy source

2. energy consumption of these methods is higher per yield than traditional farming

3. oil/gas will run out in any meaningful time frame

4. peak oil/gas will be sudden or catastrophic

5. adaptation to new conditions is impossible

6. exporting profitable crops is a net social loss for a local population (or even the stronger corollary, that locovorism is ever beneficial)

Some of those are contentious areas, matters of continuing study. Some are probably hyperbole, and we'd likely agree on more moderate formulations. Some I'm pretty firmly convinced are incorrect. Even if they were all just mildly suspect, though, it's a lot of shaky steps for me to take all at once. So I remain cautiously optimistic, skeptical that food insecurity due to Borlaug's methods and oil shocks will have any meaningful impact for the next fiftyish years. I guess there's some chance, just seems exceedingly unlikely to me.

That said, I think you laid out your criticism of his methods in a clear and concise way, and while I disagree with some of the premises, they're not radically unreasonable or anything, I can see how one would stand by that conclusion. Have an upvote for a well formulated dissenting view, something we should all encourage whenever possible.

[Houshalter]

We've been saved by falling reproduction rates. First world countries have around 2 children per couple. If growth stayed exponential, then no amount of increasing crop yields would help. Exponential growth is a terrifying thing. After a few generations there would be more humans than could fit on the surface of the Earth.

[Double_Cast]

> and increasing efficiency, maybe even lowering the strain on the planet.

You might find Jevon's paradox interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox