[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich#The_Population...
If you go with the gut, then sure everything was fine and dandy. But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of humans starve to death.
So on the one hand, the predictions were completely wrong. On the other, none of the underlying problems have really gone away and any analysis of the future will still conclude that population growth (even flat-lining at this point) is insanely risky in terms of how much human suffering it will eventually lead to. So the people pushing it still have influence. Although I've been a lot more chipper about the situation since it turns out that wealth leads to depopulation which is one of those wonderful and unexpectedly good things. Plus obviously the AI and presumably coming robotics revolution are just absurdly promising.
It really doesn’t seem like a winning bet (other than fear mongering popularity), because you’re unlikely to be right, and when you are things seem to be falling apart. See also Peak Oil.
However, birth rates in most of the world (except Africa, SE Asia, and India by a bit) are falling below replacement. Many are looking at this as a good thing (exponentials can’t go on forever), and there are the contrarians, but being at the edge of a long term exponential transition is dangerous. There are many cultural and economic systems that have worked the way they do and grown to be dominant because of the exponential growth. People will continue to hope and believe long after things become obvious (see climate change). See also Moore’s Law.
You’ve piqued my interest, where can I read about this data oriented approach that leads to this conclusion?
It is a matter of time until we have a multi-billion person famine. Hopefully multiple centuries away if the transition away from oil to something else works out. Something like the year without summer [1] could be even more catastrophic, for example. Or wars, particularly of the nuclear variety.
How often do complex societies break down or decline in such a way that the complex systems which keep our urban populations alive are compromised?
So if we reach a point of mass starvation many counties will adopt similar strategies and drastically raise crop yields.
Credible Citation needed.
> full of chemicals
So what? You're also full of chemicals.
> something that would have been considered unsuitable for human consumption earlier
Actually our standards for consumption have gone up a lot. People used to eat all sorts of stuff when danger of starving was higher and population was poorer.
It's recent, I'll grant you that. I can't even think of when there was rationing in the west? Shortly after the war? At least the current grandparent generation seems to have childhood memories of that.
But to me, it looks like we've figured out those basic necessities to the point where at least ordinary variation in harvest won't be making us hungry. You could call that being noise proof.
The danger is that we systematically alter how the planet works, so that is not just bumps in annual crop yields, which we also seem to be doing, but it's not clear that we've messed up our basic necessities pipeline yet. It's also not clear that we'll inevitably do that.
there was a pandemic a few years ago in which various western countries experienced shortages and in some cases rationing of some things.
There is rationing of water usage in many parts of the world, including parts of Western countries in which people live in water constrained areas, although that rationing is for garden usage - not drinking water.
I'm sure similar things can be thought of.
Obviously you don't mean those forms of rationing, you seem to mean large rationing of many different necessities and materials. But the fact that these rather minor forms of rationing exist in contrast to that in place during WWII does indicate that the system is not as able to handle all needs as well as you and a few other people in this thread seem to believe.
on edit: added word "exist"
> Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs)
We didn't have birth control until the 20th century and it is mostly used by people who, historically speaking, are living with resources far in excess of their basic needs. Traditionally the self regulation was that people were born then the ones that couldn't eat enough to survive died.
And there is a pretty high risk of not finding stable equilibrium. The logistic map isn't a totally crazy model and displays some rather chaotic behaviour [0]. In practice that looks like a lot of famines.
> ... markets innovate in response to scarcity ...
Markets have existed forever, usually the innovative response to food scarcity was, once again, people starving to death. It is hard to underline just how weird the Green Revolution is. Obviously a great time to be alive but it is not a normal thing in the human experience.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#Behavior_dependen...
If anything, you might be underestimating the ongoing momentum of technological progress, which is not just sustaining its pace but accelerating across many fields. Some experts predict AGI is right on the corner - a development that could drastically amplify innovation and potentially eliminate the challenge of food scarcity.
Additionally, birth control will only keep becoming increasingly accessible worldwide, enabling more effective regulation of fertility rates in response to resource constraints.
The exact opposite is what we are observing: people in poorer parts of the world, and poor people in richer parts of the world have way more children than people who have all their basic needs met and then some.
The best known predictor of average number of children is infant mortality rate: without fail, as infant mortality decreases, average number of children per family decreases as well.
Completely disproven by the baby boom era where people were poor in many countries for years after the war but still made a lot of babies. Reality bites hard.
"Oh, he's wrong in all the details but maybe his general themes are right" is not acceptable when the outcome of listening to him is mass murder.
This. It's hard to make predictions precisely because the rate of change has been so rapid.
What is interesting to note though is the varied societal responses to the changes over the last 70 years or so. The US embraced materialism with some reluctant social movement (womens rights, civil rights etc). Europe embraced Socialism (in the sense of Social support, not Communism), the Middle East embraced materialism, but eschewed any form of social development (eg women's rights et al).
Right now we're in a bit of a rebound phase. Change has come too quickly (especially the last 40 years) so we're seeing pushback on rights (in the US) on social support (in Europe) and a general political swing to the right in lots of places.
There's a "looking back" element which seeks to slow found societal change even as technology accelerates.
Predicting what comes next is, well, tricky. But I expect in my lifetime to see global population maximum. I expect to see significant climate change. Both of those will be huge disruptions, and the knock-on effects could be anything
The US is the most fundamentalist Christian country in the world. There is also a large degree of materialism, but still, only a fraction of the population of the USA even accepts the idea that atheism (a hallmark of materialism) is a legitimate religious position. What the USA has embraced more than anything is consumerism, not materialism.
What most of Europe has is called social democracy, socialism is a completely different ideology (workers having majority control of enterprises).
The Middle East embraced Islamic fundamentalism, not materialism. You could say that they also embraced consumerism, like the USA. But hardcore Islamic fundamentalism as we see it today in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan is a very recent phenomenon, born of the last fifty years or less (at any wide scale), and it is at a level that consumes entire societies. These Middle East countries didn't eschew progress on women's rights, they actively regressed women's rights to pre-medieval levels. Iran and Afghanistan had the right to vote for women before the USA: they lost it as fundamentalist forces gained power (actually, they still have it in Iran, but it's significantly affected by other lack of freedom).
Due to a large population it leads as the country with the largest absolute number of Christians, sure.
In terms of percentage of Christians in the population as a whole, it doesn't even make the top ten list.
Vatican City, Timor Leste, American Samoa, Romania, Armenia, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, Greenland, Haiti, and Paraguay all have greater than 95% christian populations.
The US has perhaps a 65% Christian population albeit many of whom are in name without being particularly devout.
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2014/11/the-ultimate-fat...
My point being: being a religious fundamentalist country doesn't require an almost totality of the population to be religious, but just the people who have power (weapons, money, etc.) to be fundamentalist... and the rest of the country to not violently oppose them.
But overall, the prominence of Christianity in day to day American life and culture and the political sphere is off the charts. Things like saying Grace at family dinners as a common tradition, presidents and many other politicians ending their speeches with "God bless America", "In God we Trust" on dollar bills - these are virtually unheard of outside of the USA. Not to mention, the amount of times Biblical passages and teachings are brought up in political debates is staggering, even coming from a nominally "more Christian" country like Romania. Similarly, the amount of places and institutions named after religious figures or concepts is unprecedented.
Tough question to answer, I suspect it might, Pacific Islanders hold tight to Jesus ...
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
The US wins by weight of numbers, of course, but having the most tongue talking snake handlers doesn't make the entire country the poster child for revival tents.
…on average - inequality has never been so high.
For example, eradicating Smallpox. Controlling Measles, Polio, Tetanus. Synthetic fertilizers eliminating famines in all but the most dysfunctional areas, etc.
It used to be dying of disease or famine was a huge problem in much of the world. Now it is only in tiny, very broken areas, for relatively small portions of the population.
https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/average-homeownership-age-peop...
PS: Obviously my comment above was about contemporary generations: sure, we live better today than in the middle ages.
But how relevant is that?
Just as the Industrial Revolution has reduced income inequalities within societies, it has increased them between societies. There lives now both the richest people who ever walked the earth, and the poorest. This divergence in regional and national fortunes since the Industrial Revolution has recently been labeled the Great Divergence.
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, (2006) pp 3--4.
<https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/FTA20...>
NB: Clark's book is from the Princeton University Press's "Economic History of the Western World" series edited by Joel Mokyr. It's an absolutely phenomenal treasury of books about economic history with a special focus on the immense transformation of the Industrial Revolution(s). Some may have heard of Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, one of the 50+ books in the series. It's not all the books I'd recommend reading on the topic, but it's a dense treasury of quite good ones.
<https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-princeton-economic-hi...>
I really doubt that...
But just going with this number, since "the 70ies" refer to a time span of 10 years, that'd be 90m people, and I don't quite understand why his forecast is considered to be so wildly inaccurate then.
Nobody could be that stupid by accident. Ehrlich is a ghoul who was excited about people dying because it would have justified his preferred political philosophy.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259827/global-famine-dea...
The speaker is Nobel Peace Laureate Norman Borlaug, in his acceptance speech for that award. For those unfamiliar, it was his work developing high-output agricultural staple variants, the heart of the Green Revolution, which was the basis of that award.
<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/accepta...>
The 1960s and 1970s were a period in which concern over global population growth and the apparent insufficiency of the food supply were absolutely rampant. It's a depressingly common trope, and not only on HN, to deride such concerns as misguided and laughable, but the truth is that the trends at the time were quite dire. Concerning now, global margins of crop production and surplus suplies have been narrowing over the past decades, and it is in fact food supplies and their reflection in prices which have been fingered as major components of recent political upheaval: the Arab Spring (2010--2012) was motivated in large part by populations stressed by high food prices and reduced supplies. Food price inflation in the US, Canada, and Europe are behind much of the anti-incumbancy mood in those nations --- being part of the advanced world is no guarantee that even modest disruptions to basic human needs won't have political ramifications.
Food Price Index, US, 1968--2022:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_prices#/media/File:Food_P...>
Right so he went out and improved things.
> It's a depressingly common trope, and not only on HN, to deride such concerns as misguided and laughable, but the truth is that the trends at the time were quite dire
I'd say its sadly not common enough. If anything I'd say that the reason it can't be written off as laughable is not because they had a point but because it helped cause a lot of violations of peoples rights with not fully informed consent sterilization and the one child policy.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-world...
Sure they didnt have knowledge we have now but we do. We know that birth rates fall when poverty falls and more women get educated and that coercive methods are not necessary. We also know that the capacity to grow food was much larger.
Ehrlichs predictions were wrong. He predicted
> “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
And from my understanding hasn't admitted being wrong (and trying to be figure out how he became so sure of something that was incorrect) implying that it may still happen someday(when he predicted it would have happened long ago).
Mass famine isn't exactly the same thing as expensive food although obviously it can lead to higher levels of starvation. Fundamentally famine and even high levels of starvation are due to bad government and or economic systems. Its no suprise the Arab spring started with a fruit seller who set himself on fire in response to corrupt policeman preventing him from making a living/stealing his wares.
<https://archive.org/details/ecologypoliticso0000ophu>
(Ophuls bibliographies and biblographic notes are in general absolute gold mines.)
Ehrlich himself rapidly learnt, and spent much of his career arguing, that coercive measures are hugely harmful and largely don't work. What does work best and foremost is women's education, along with social stability, medical and family planning services, and the like. Ehrlich wrote about 40 books as well as numerous papers and articles, he's remembered most for one of the earliest. A quite different thought process is evident in later ones, such as One With Niniveh (2004)
<https://archive.org/details/onewithninevehpo0000ehrl_z0h7/pa...>
Or this 2013 release:
"Equal rights, education for women key to avoiding civilization's collapse"
[T]he Ehrlichs offer a roadmap for avoiding society's total collapse, emphasizing that giving women equal rights worldwide is a critical first step.
<https://phys.org/news/2013-01-equal-rights-women-key-civiliz...>
Not a step, but a critical and first step.
In 1968 the situation appeared absolutely calamitous, Borlaug's Nobel speech came two years later, and concerns over overpopulation continued in the mainstream well through the 1970s and 1980s. That's 40 and 50 years ago now, beyond the ken of most reading this no doubt, but very much the spirit of the times. Influenced in part by Ehrlich, but also by many others. Drastic measures, as one possible tool, and proposed with grave concern, were among the possible interventions.
What ultimately did occur was that, despite several more famines (Sahel drought, 1968--1972, 1,000,000 dead; Ethiopia, 1972-1973, 60,000; Bangladesh, 1974, up to 1.5 million; Khmer Rouge, 1975--1979, 500,000; Ethiopia, 1983--1985, ~500,000; Sudan, 1988, 100,000; Somalia, 1991--1992, 300,000; North Korea, 1994--1998, up to 3.5 million, Congo, 1998--2004, 2.7 million; Somalia, 2011--2012, 285,000; Tigray, Ethiopia, 2020--present, up to 200,000; Gaza, 2023--present, 62,000, and many others <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines>), overall population growth has decreased markedly through much of the world, to the extent that low birth rates are a concern in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and most of the world, and quite notably the largest populations in India, China, and elsewhere aren't living with looming hunger. But that balance is delicate and precarious as we're constantly reminded.
And for those scanning my or Wikipedia's larger list and objecting "but most of those were political, civil war, or other conflicts", I ask preëmptively what the hell do you think drives most such conflict and unrest? Food insecurity (or its near peer, water insecurity) is a primary driver of social unrest around the world and throughout history:
See e.g., "Food Insecurity and Unrest: What You Need to Know" (2022)
<https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2022/07/12/food-insec...>
1. Political expediency. Look to the institutions which celebrated his work.
2. Easy to understand. Scarcity doom can be sold easily. Simon's ideas require considering or observing second order effects at a minimum.
So the prediction was off by an order of magnitude.
I would love to know what it was about England that meant it's end was nigh, I mean what about France, Norway or Belgium ?
Also, when he said "England" was he actually referring to the United Kingdom (as Americans often are) or were Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland going to be spared in some way ?
If it is not, then we have a serious problem if we want human civilization to thrive and continue. The only solutions I can think of are, reaching a very high recycle rate, but we know from thermodynamics that chemical reactions are not reversible, but maybe we can build enough tech that we recycle everything very well and not just dump them in landfills.
Or we develop enough tech to be able to mine the asteroids, which can give us access to some minerals at amounts that would last us another 1000+ years. But not all minerals are found at asteroids, and it’s not clear if we can actually do this very hard task.
The final solution which seems to have fallen out of vogue but I’m in favor of is limiting human population. If everyone has 1 kid, human population halves in 1 generation. If we do this for 3-4 generations, we can reach a really good sustainable population, and then have 2 kids to maintain it.
I don't understand this insane to me belief that we want to constantly grow human population. It seems to come from the belief that each human is an innovation robot, and that with more innovation robots we get more innovation. A cursory glance at humanity shows this to be obviously false. Humans need to be trained, taught, led to be able to produce something new. We have 10x more researchers now and scientific progress has still slowed compared to 1900s. Throwing more researchers into the mix will not fix it. People who run companies intuitively know this. If Google could invent AGI, by hiring 100,000 more AI engineers, they would do it in a heartbeat. Instead you find that talent density is extremely important for innovation. Small groups of exceptional talent, outperform large groups of mediocre talent always. There is a cost to cultivating talent in human beings and obviously with more humans it becomes more competitive and harder to cultivate talent in every human. There is a cost to coordinating between different humans and sifting through to find talent, that again increases the more humans are thrown into the mix.
This whole more humans are undeniably good always, is insane enough that only academics and those with no experience in the real world can convince themselves of it. There is obviously an optimal number of humans, you may disagree that it is higher or lower than the current number, but the number must exist! I suspect we are way more than optimal, ymmv.
This isn't a matter of inflation but of the lack of accounting for the fact that nonrenewable resource are, well, nonrenewable. Unlike (at a first blush) farming or labour, where utilisation currently doesn't mean that the same resource is unavailable in the future, once a nonrenewable resource is extracted and used, that production process cannot be run again.
Metals and ores can of course be recycled or reused, though in practice achieved rates are quite low (50% is exceptional, and that means that 1/32nd of the original resource is available after five cycles). Fuels which are combusted are a whole 'nother matter, as once burnt (or fissioned, in the case of nuclear power), the resource has been degraded and won't reform in anything less than geological time, if ever.
Once one comes to face with the fact that we're utilising fossil fuels at ~1--10 million times their rate of formation, the problem and inadequacy of economic pricing models becomes glaringly apparent.
Metal ores may recycle in less time, and some (e.g., iron) are massively abundant. But, again in the case of iron, when one considers that commercially viable ore deposits were formed 1--3 billion years ago, during the first phases of life on Earth, and driven by those biological processes.
All commodities together feed into inflation. So either some will become less expensive or some will outpace inflation.
What we're seeing here is that resource extraction can get better, so resources aren't really scarce. But there are certainly some commodities, not reflected here, that became much cheaper. E.g., corn or meat, so these metals might have become more expensive in relative terms.
I think this is the wrong way around, as the price dropped and that’s why Ehrlich lost and had to pay, no?
The reality (WRT to bulk metals) is that we get some "free passes" due to mining technological advancements, and that increased scarcity -> increased costs -> curtails wastes, encourages recycling, and drives substitutes.
More generally, peak production isn't a problem itself, per se. There is concern when there are risks for sudden shocks or collapse. If we suddenly ran out of phosphorous, that would be bad.
I think there is still a lot of waste that could be captured with cleverer engineering, especially ag runoff, in industrial process, and failure to capture material going into landfills. Perhaps in 100 years, we will be mining old landfills for rare earth metals.
A lot of battery related FUD recapitulates this, people mistake active mines for available reserves and available reserves for worldwide geology. We aren't running out of the inputs to make batteries we're in supply chain shock not resource limits.
Same with oil and peak oil. We'll never run out of oil.
Ehrlich thought need would exceed afford at scale. And that it would have massive societal repercussions. Well, it just didn't historically, and there's no reason to believe the (misnamed) rare earths and metallic ores are limiting things for any reason other than price motivation.
This last decade we had a temporary chip shortage affect car production rates worldwide. Localised supply chains for Diesel additive have been a problem. There were discussions about ring fencing nitrate fertiliser as a strategic supply. None of these are "limits to growth" stories. Capital investment followed.
That said, the price of copper spiked enough to make people start stealing it again worldwide.
"Australia’s shortage of diesel additive Adblue is serious, but we can stop it going critical" (December 12, 2021)
<https://theconversation.com/australias-shortage-of-diesel-ad...>
But then, we definitely don't want to burn all fossil fuels there are, because that would be catastrophic for the climate. Nevertheless, as long as it is profitable to do so we will. So we'll never run out of oil, and that is, in truth, unfortunate.
In the same manner, we'll never run out of minerals, which is also pretty unfortunate because mining is somewhat environmentally damaging.
At one level it's a truism, if you wind up with price the main constraint on something, if it is substitutable you will go to a cheaper substitute, when price exceeds some threshold but that threshold is variant to circumstance, and the consequences of substitution also come to play.
[https://wolfstreet.com/2021/03/30/the-most-splendid-housing-...], [https://www.pgpf.org/article/why-are-americans-paying-more-f...]
Average Housing costs as a multiple of average salary are at 10x, and increasing. Roughly where they were in the 80’s during hyper inflation.
Healthcare spend has increasing from 5% of GDP in ‘62 to 17% of GDP in 2022.
Education cost data is similarly insane - [https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college#:~:text=Th....]
With an average 4 year degree (living on campus) costing > $100k.
If you need a study to tell you traffic is terrible right now, you might just have no idea what’s happening.
