Hey folks, Fireside this week! Next week we should be back to start looking at the other half of labor in the peasant household, everything that isn’t agriculture. Also, here are some cats:
For this week’s musing, I want to address something that comes up frequently in the comments, particularly any time we discuss agriculture: the ‘Mathusian trap.’ Now of course to a degree the irony of addressing it here is that it will still come up in the comments because future folks raising the point won’t see this first, but at least it’ll be written somewhere that I can refer to.
To begin, in brief, the idea of a Malthusian trap derives from the work of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) and his work, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In essence the argument goes as follows (in a greatly simplified form): if it is the case that the primary resources to sustain a population grow only linearly, but population grows exponentially, then it must be the case that population will, relatively swiftly, approach the limits of resources, leading to general poverty and immiseration, which in turn provide the check that limits population growth.
As an exercise in logic Malthus’ point is inescapable: if you accept his premises and run the experiment long enough you must reach his conclusion. In short, given an exponentially growing population and given resources that only grow linearly and given an infinite amount of time, you have to reach the Malthusian ‘trap’ of general poverty and population checked only by misery. So far as that goes, fine.
The problem is assuming any of those premises were generally correct in any given point in history.
I find this comes up whenever I point out that certain social and political structures – the Roman Empire most notably – seem to have produced better economic conditions for the broad population or that other structures – Sparta, say – produced worse ones: someone rolls in to insist that because the Malthusian trap is inevitable the set of structures doesn’t matter, as a better society will just produce an equally miserable outcome shortly thereafter with a larger population. And then I response that Malthus is not actually always very useful for understanding these interactions, which prompts disbelief because – look just above – his logic is airtight given his premises and his premises are at least intuitive.
Because here’s the thing: Malthus was very definitely and obviously wrong. Malthus was writing as Britain (where he wrote) was beginning to experience the initial phases of the demographic transition, which begins with a period of very rapid population growth as mortality declines but birth rates remain mostly constant. Malthus generalizes those trends, but of course those trends do not generalize; to date they have happened exactly once in every society where they have occurred. Instead of running out of primary resources, world population is expected to peak later this century around 10.5 billion and we already can grow enough food for 10.5 billion people. The next key primary resource is energy and progress on renewable energy sources is remarkable; at this point it seems very likely that we will have more power-per-person available at that 10.5 billion person peak than we do today. Living standards won’t fall, they’ll continue to rise, assuming we avoid doing something remarkably foolish like a nuclear war. Even climate change – which is a very real problem – will only slow the rate of improvement under most projections, rather than result in an actual decline.
So while Malthus’ logic is ironclad and his premises are intuitive, as a matter of fact and reality he was wrong. Usefully wrong, but wrong. The question becomes why he was wrong. And the answer is that basically all of his premises are at least a little wrong.
The first, as we’ve noted, is that Malthus is extrapolating out a rate of population growth based on an unusual period: the beginning of rapid growth in the second stage of the demographic transition – and then he is extrapolating that pattern out infinitely in time in every direction. And that is a mistake, albeit an easy one to make: to assume that the question of population under agrarian production is an effectively infinite running simulation which has already (or very soon will) reach stability.
Here’s the thing (this is a very rough chronology): human beings (Homo sapiens) appeared about 300,000 years ago. We started leaving the cradle of Africa around 130,000 years ago, more or less and only filled out all of the major continents about 15,000 years ago. The earliest beginnings of agriculture are perhaps 20,000 years old or so, but agriculture reached most places in the form Malthus would recognize it much later. Farming got to Britain about 6,500 years ago. Complex states with large urban populations are 5,000 or so years old. Large sections of the American Great Plains and the Eurasian Steppe were grazing land until the last 150 years.
In short, it is easy to assume, because human lives are so short, that the way we have been living – agrarian societies – are already effectively ‘infinitely’ old. But we’re not! Assuming we do not nuke ourselves or cook the planet, in the long view pre-industrial agriculture will look like a very brief period of comparatively rapid development between hundreds of thousands of years of living as hunter-gathers and whatever comes after now. To Malthus, whose history could stretch no further back than the Romans and no further forward than the year in which he wrote, his kind of society seemed to have existed forever. It seemed that way to the Romans too. But we’re in a position to see both before agrarian economies and also after them; we’re not smarter, we just have the luck of a modestly better vantage.1
In short, while we might assume that given infinite time, exponential population growth will outpace any gains made to production but you shouldn’t assume infinite time because we are actually dealing with a very finite amount of time. Farmers, whose demographics concern us here, appear around 20,000 years ago and begin filling up the Earth, spreading out to bring new farmland under the plow (displacing, often violently, lower population density societies as they did so) and that process was arguably nearing completion but not yet complete when the second agricultural and first industrial revolutions fundamentally changed the basis of production. As we’ve discussed, estimates of global population in the deep past are deeply fraught, but there is general agreement that population globally has increased more or less continuously since the advent of farming; it never stalled out at any point. In short, the Malthusian long run is so long that it almost doesn’t matter.
But if we limit our view to a specific region or society, that changes things. We certainly do see, if not Malthusian traps, what we might term ‘Malthusian interactions’ apparent in history. Rising population density and trade connectivity help spread disease, which lead to major downward corrections in population like the Antonine Plague, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and the diseases of the Columbian Exchange. Notably though, these sudden downward corrections are at best only somewhat connected to population growth and resource scarcity: lower nutrition may play a role, but travel, trade lanes, high density cities and exposure to novel pathogens seems to play a larger role. It’s not clear that something like the Black Death would have been dramatically less lethal if the European population were 10 or 15% less; it seems quite clear the diseases of the Columbian exchange cared very little for how well fed the populations they devastated were. Still, we see the outline of what Malthus might expect: downward pressure on wages before the population discontinuity and often upward pressure afterwards (most clearly visible with the Black Death in Europe).
So does Malthus rule the ‘small print’ as it were? Perhaps, but not always. For one, it is possible, even in the pre-modern world, to realize meaningful per capita gains in productivity due to new production methods like new farming techniques. It is also possible for greater connectivity through trade to enable greater production by comparative advantage. It is also possible for capital accumulation in things like mills or draft animals to generate meaningful increases in production. And of course some political and economic regimes may be more or less onerous for the peasantry. Any of these things moving in the right direction can effectively create some ‘headroom’ in production and resources. Some of that ‘headroom’ is going to get extracted by the tiny number of elites at the top of these societies, but potentially not all of it.
This is what I often refer to as a society moving between equilibria (a phrasing not original to me), from a state condition of lower production (a low equilibrium) to a stable condition of higher production (a high equilibrium).
Now in the long run when just thinking about food production, the Malthusian interaction ought to catch up with us in the long run. The population increases, but the available land supply cannot keep pace – new lands brought under the plow are more marginal than old lands and so on – and so the surplus food per person steadily declines as the population grows until we’re back where we started. Except there are two problems here.
The first is that can take a long time even in a single society, region or state because even under ideal nutrition standards, these societies increase in population slowly compared to the rapid sort of exponential growth Malthus was beginning to see in the 1700s. It can take so long that exogenous shocks – invasion, plague, or new technology enabling a new burst of ‘headroom’ – arrive before the ceiling is reached and growth stops. Indeed, given the trajectory of pre-modern global population, that last factor must have happened quite a lot, since even the population of long-settled areas never quite stabilizes in the long term.
All of which is to say, in the time frame that matters – the time scale of states, regimes, economic systems and so on, measured in centuries not millennia – some amount of new ‘headroom’ might be durable and indeed we know it ended up being so, lasting long enough for us to get deep enough into the demographic transition that we could put Malthus away almost entirely.
The second thing to note is that not all material comforts are immediately related to survival and birth rates. To take our same society where some innovation has enabled increased production: the population rises, but no new land enters cultivation. That creates a segment of the population who can be fed, but who need not be farmers: they can do other things. Of course in actual pre-modern societies, it is most the elite who decide what other things these fellows do and many of those things (warfare, monumental construction, providing elite extravagance) do very little for the common folks.
But not always. Sometimes that new urban population is going to make stuff, stuff which might flow to consumers outside of the elite. We certainly seem to see this with sites of large-scale production of things like Roman coarseware pottery. Or, to take something from my own areas, it is hard not to notice that the amount of worked metal we imagine to be available for regular people for things like tools seems to rise as a function of time. Late medieval peasants do seem to have more stuff than early medieval or Roman peasants in a lot of cases. Wages – either measured in silver or as a ‘grain wage’ – may not be going up, but it sure seems like some things end up getting more affordable because there are more people making them.
And of course some of that elite investment might also be generally useful. Of course as a Roman historian, the examples of things like public baths and aqueducts, which provided services available not merely to the wealthy but also the urban poor, spring immediately to mind. And so even if the amount of grain available per person has stayed the same, the number of non-farmers as a percentage of the society has increased, making non-grain amenities easier for a society to supply. And naturally, social organization is going to play a huge role in the degree to which that added production does or does not get converted into amenities for non-elites.
In short it is possible for improvements to provide quality of life improvements even if a new Malthusian ceiling is reached. It is the difference between getting 3,000 calories in a wood-and-plaster building with a terracotta roof, a good collection of coarseware pottery and clean water from an aqueduct versus getting 3,000 calories in a wood-and-mud hut with a thatched roof, no pottery at all and having to pump water at the local well. In a basic Malthusian analysis, these societies are the same, but the lived experience is going to be meaningfully different.
Notionally, of course, you might argue that if population continued to rise we’d eventually reach the end of those fixed resources too: we’d run out of clay and metal ores and fresh water sources and so on, except that of course there are 8.2 billion of us and we haven’t yet managed to run out – or even be seriously constrained – by any of those things. We haven’t even managed to run out of oil or coal and again, at the rate at which renewable energy technology is advancing, it looks like we may never run out of oil, so much as it just won’t be worth anyone’s time pulling the stuff out of the ground.2
None of which is to say that Malthus is useless. Malthusian interactions do occur historically. But they do not always occur because the sweep of history is not infinitely wrong and developments which produce significant carrying capacity ‘headroom’ actually happen, on balance, somewhat faster than societies manage to reach the limit of that capacity.
On to Recommendations:
First off, the public classics project Peopling the Past has turned five! Congratulations to them. Peopling the Part runs both a blog and a podcast both highlighting the ways that scholars, especially early career scholars, study people in the (relatively deep) past, with an emphasis on highlighting interesting work and the methods it uses. It’s a great project to follow if you want a sense of how we know things about the past and the sort of work we continue to do to understand more, with an especially strong focus on archaeology.
Meanwhile over on YouTube and coinciding a bit with our discussion of Malthus, Angela Collier has a video on why “dyson spheres are a joke,“3 in the sense that they were quite literally proposed by Freeman J. Dyson as a joke, a deliberate ‘send up’ of the work of some of his colleagues he found silly, rather than ever being a serious suggestion for science fiction super-structures.
Where this cuts across our topic is that Dyson, writing in 1960, explicitly cites “Malthusian pressures” as what would force the construction of such a structure and it serves as a useful reminder that until well into the 1980s and 1990s, there were quite a lot of ‘overpopulation’ concerns and it was common to imagine the future as involving extreme overpopulation and resource scarcity. I wouldn’t accuse Dyson of this view (he is, as noted, writing a paper as satire), but I think it is notable that these panics continued substantially on the basis of assumptions that the demographic transition – which was already pretty clearly causing population growth in Europe to begin to slow significantly by the 1950s and 1960s – was, in effect, a ‘white people only’ phenomenon, fueling often very racially inflected fears about non-white overpopulation. You can see this sort of racist-alarmist-panic pretty clearly in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), appropriately skewered in the If Books Could Kill episode on it.
Of course as noted is that what actually happened is that it turns out the demographic transition does not care about race or racists and happens to basically all societies as they grow wealthier and more educated – indeed, it has often happened faster in countries arriving to affluence late – with the result that it now appears that the ‘population bomb’ will never happen.
For this week’s book recommendation, I am going to recommend Rebecca F. Kennedy, C. Sydnor Roy and Max L. Goldman, Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation (2013). Students often ask questions like ‘what did the Greeks and Romans think about race?’ and the complicated answer is they thought a lot of things. That can come as a surprise to moderns, as we’re really used to the cultural hegemony of ‘scientific racism’ and the reactions against it. But it is in fact somewhat unusual that a single theory of race – as unfounded in actual reality as all of the others – is so dominant globally as an ideology that people either hold or push against. Until the modern period, you were far more likely to find a confusing melange of conflicting theories (advanced with varying degrees of knowledge or ignorance of distant peoples) all presented more or less equally. Consequently, the Greeks and Romans didn’t think one thing about race, but had many conflicting ideas about where different peoples fit and why.
That makes an anthology of sources in translation an ideal way to present the topic and that is what Kennedy, Roy and Goldman have done here. This is very much what it says ‘on the tin’ – a collection of translated primary sources; the editorial commentary is kept quite minimal and the sources do largely speak for themselves. The authors set out roughly 200 different passages – some quite short, some fairly long – from ancient Greek and Roman writers that touch on the topic of race or ethnicity. Those passages are split in two ways: the book is divided into two sections, the first covering theories and the second covering regions. In the first section, the reader is given examples of some of the dominant strains of how Greeks and Romans thought about different peoples and what made them different – genealogical theories, environmental theories (people become different because they are molded by different places), cultural models and so on. The approach is a brilliant way to hammer home to the reader the lack of any single hegemonic model of ‘otherness’ in this period, while also exposing them to the most frequent motifs with which the ancients thought about different peoples.
Then the back two-thirds of the book proceed in a series of chapters covering specific regions. Presenting, say, almost 20 passages on the peoples of ‘barbarian’ Europe (Gaul, Germany, Britain) together also helps the reader get a real sense of both the range of ways specific regions were imagined but also common tropes, motifs and stereotypes that were common among ancient authors.
The translations in the volume are invariably top-rate, easy to read while being faithful to the original text. The editorial notes are brief but can help put passages in the context of the larger works they come from. The book also features reprints of a series of maps showing the world as described by the Greeks and Romans, a useful way to remember how approximate their understanding of distant places and their geographic relations could be. Overall, the volume is useful as a reference text – when you really need to find the right passage to demonstrate a particular motif, stereotype or theory of difference – but is going to be most valuable to the student of antiquity who wants to begin to really get a handle on the varied ways the Greeks and Romans understood ethnic and cultural difference.
- To, almost certainly, be viewed as fools by the generations who come after who will have slightly better vantages from which to see.
- Indeed, in order to control climate change, we may end up focused more on ways to put it back in the ground, a task which would require, as I understand it, vast amounts of energy, presumably coming from renewables.
- I am keeping her capitalization, or lack thereof, in the title.
So maybe it is easier to say that a powerful Malthusian baseline force is real, but is typically counteracted by other fluctuating forces: disease, technology, trade, migration, and reproductive incentives.
It’s more that the interactionsa re real but the system they are interacting isn’t anywhere like Malthus assumptions.
It’s like if we’re forever confined to only Earth and we kept extracting and using new metal, never re-using anything, eventually we would mine all the metal of the planet.
Sure. But other things intervene, and we end up re-using things when they’re cheaper than mining new anyway.
So the assumptions are wrong, and therefore you cannot declare the conclusion proven.
Malthus is presented in the form of a logical theorem. The theory would be proven if the prepositions were correct. But they aren’t.
In other words, Malthus’s theorem is logically valid, but it is logically unsound.
It’s not exactly as easy as you describe it, though. I.e.
Exploring future copper demand, recycling and associated greenhouse gas emissions in the EU-28
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378019313251
I am now reflecting on “The Tragedy Of The Commons” also has the problem of being a simplistic system of supposed rigid unchangeable rules. When apparently it doesn’t work out that way in reality.
Another thing is that the author, Garrett Hardin, is/was a biologist and did not seem to understand how a classic “commons” works. Some of his arguments in some situations may make sense but the the title stinks.
Ah, yes I recall that Elinor Ostrom got her Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work which showed that surprisingly often ‘informal traditional arrangements’ about resource access outperformed both privatisation and state ownership. Another item on the long list of things which look interesting to me but for which I will likely never find the time to read them.
Though, that Garrett Hardin was an ecologist and microbiologist is new to me. I had previously only knew his name from a rant about how that ‘economics is racist’; which now appears even more unconvincing than when I had read it.
Yes; it’s really annoying because the phenomenon is 100% real and we have real-world examples of it happening (the most frequently mentioned one is overfishing) but — exactly because people had some intuitive understanding of the phenomenon — actual medieval commons had controls attached to them that prevented the phenomenon from eventuating. It is in fact so real that it has a later-discovered mirror image, the tragedy of the anticommons, likewise with real-world examples of it happening, as well as very old remedies (notably, eminent domain for building infrastructure) to it that in some types of cases prevented it from eventuating.
Yeah. “The Tragedy of the Commons” would be much better understood as “Public Restroom Syndrome.” In that while clean, well-maintained public restrooms do exist, they do not exist by default and everyone can think of examples of ones that do not qualify.
My paternal uncle has told me his father was sceptical of hippie communes. No-one of their members were particularly found of cleaning. I answered to him I saw this as an aspect of the tragedy of the commons. If there are no rules for who is going to do what it will not get done.
In response to heavy criticism, Garrett Hardin himself later acknowledged he should have titled the essay “Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons”, but I guess it’s hard to un-ring that bell.
I didn’t know about his post hoc thoughts of what he should have named it – though that renaming would be a bit of a dodge.
In the article, he contends that we’re very unlikely to regulate the commons, because putting in the work to create the regulations is its own commons problem. I a subset of us work hard to create rules, everybody will benefit from them, with many people not having given up anything to create them. So they are unlikely to be created.
Part of why Ostrom won her Nobel was not merely for documenting that they do in fact get created, but creating a taxonomy of factors that shape the likelihood of rules being created.
Another thing overlooked by many people who’ve heard of the article but not read it is that, while he leads you in with the old-timey example of a common pasture, he’s actually talking about human population. We’re going to overpopulate ourselves out of existence, because anyone with the inclination (implicitly, a genetic inclination) to do the responsible thing and have only a small family will thereby breed themselves out of the gene pool. The genes that drive irresponsible behavior will run wild, and humans will destroy ourselves.
He even writes, “The freedom to breed is intolerable!”
There’s a lot of wrong packed into a relatively short paper.
In the article, he contends that we’re very unlikely to regulate the commons, because putting in the work to create the regulations is its own commons problem
I think that’s fair- while he conceded in the paper that either privatization or state control/regulation were possibly solutions to the problem he posed, his preference was (at least, as far as I can judge) for the first. He did concede, at least in principle, though, that multiple solutions could exist.
Part of why Ostrom won her Nobel was not merely for documenting that they do in fact get created, but creating a taxonomy of factors that shape the likelihood of rules being created.
Right, lots of work in the succeeding decades has been done to figure out under what circumstances cooperative equilibria can develop (because clearly they exist, both in humans and in many other species). I’m more familiar with the people who have looked at that from the evolutionary biology / behavioural ecology perspectives, rather than from the economics side.
Another thing overlooked by many people who’ve heard of the article but not read it is that, while he leads you in with the old-timey example of a common pasture, he’s actually talking about human population.
Exactly. I’m a little more sympathetic to his concerns about population than you are, I think, but I do think it’s really interesting that a lot of people on, broadly, the “right wing” of American political discourse, who might really like the title of his essay (without having read it) and wave it around as a tool against “socialism” and “communism”, are also the same kind of people who are big believers in Christian sexual morality, large families, natalism and all the rest of it, and would be deeply uncomfortable to know that the essay is actually about population and how “the freedom to breed is intolerable”.
One of the interesting things about Garrett Hardin (like most interesting thinkers, really) is that he *doesn’t* fit neatly into contemporary US “progressive” vs. “conservative” boxes.
Embracing or condemning something without knowing what it really is about is a sign of thoughtlessness.
There’s a move afoot to have the Tragedy of the Commons renamed “The Tragedy of Open Access”.
Then the “the Tragedy of the Anticommons” would be “the Tragedy of Closed Access”.
This might come as a surprise, given that I’m very much opposed to capitalism and sympathetic to socialism, communism, etc., but I actually really liked the “Tragedy of the Commons” essay, as long as you take the essay for what it is, and don’t try to extrapolate unsupportable conclusions from it. People often draw the wrong conclusions from the essay (and “people” here probably includes Garrett Hardin himself), but if you restrict yourself to thinking of it as a thought experiment, and bear in mind its limitations, then it’s actually a good essay for what it does, it points out the failure mode for a truly unregulated commons, and more generally, the failure mode that cooperative equilibria fall into if you don’t have any mechanism to deter “cheating”.
The limitations of course are truly unregulated commons are really very rare- societies both premodern and modern tend to be aware that cooperation needs to be backed up with some kind of coercion against cheaters, and some mechanism to ensure people aren’t taking more than they’re due or contributing less than they owe. Societies tend to be aware (consciously or unconsciously) that the “tragedy of the [unregulated] commons” is a threat, and they take measures (legal, social, economic, whatever) to ensure that the threat won’t materialize. That’s not the solution to the problem that Garrett Hardin envisioned, but it’s a solution nonetheless.
I think the same is true about Malthus, incidentally- it’s a useful thought experiment to point out a direction we should be careful not to go down, and as such it’s still useful even if no society in history has ever actually gone down that road.
This is why cooperatives succeed while collectives fail. The people designing collectives tend to assume everyone is ‒ or could be made to be ‒ as selfless as themselves. They tend to be naïve and/or one-tracked too.
@Lena Synnerholm,
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by those terms, and perhaps you can clarify the distinction. In general though that’s not *my* point and I wouldn’t really agree. In fact, my point was that most historical non-capitalist societies (both premodern pre-capitalist ones, and 20th century socialist/communist ones) did have some kind of mechanisms to deter “cheating”, i.e. pay differentials, laws against unemployment, etc..
I also think trying to categorize people as selfish vs. selfless is kind of unproductive- people in general have both tendencies, and a healthy society is going to have mechanisms to try and channel both of them in pro social directions.
The obvious comparison would be between the two forms of ‘corporate’ structures. Completely flat collective’s only seem prevalent or successful in very limited circumstances (often things like artists collectives, where the collective portion is rather limited in function, as everyone is very much doing their own thing anyway), whilst both worker and consumer cooperatives have proven successful in a wide variety of fields (retail, manufacturing, finance etc.) because they don’t assume that there is an equal contribution model, only equal ownership (I used to work for a consumer cooperative as a shop worker. It was exactly the same as working for any other retail job, with the primary difference being that i saw our shareholders a lot more often, given they were any customer with a membership card).
The type of cooperative I am most familiar with is the tenant-owner’s association. This is because I grew up in such. Swedish ones own a piece of land comparable in size to a city block for their members to inhabit. These are built up with apartment buildings and in some cases row houses. When you buy an apartment or a row house you actually buy the right to live in it. You can do what you want with it as long as it is legal and it does not damage its usability as a dwelling. However, you have to pay a moderate monthly fee for maintenance of all the common things. These include the association’s part of the town/city network, stairways (may include elevators), garages, storage rooms, playgrounds and green spaces. If all dwellings did not have a washing machine from start there is a washery too. For all these common things there are clear rules for what you are allowed to do and not. As a result they are typically well mantained.
Sweden has at least two cooperative supermarket chains. One is a seller’s cooperative which specific shops are run by individual owners. But they cooperate to buy most of the goods they sell. The other one is a buyers’ cooperative although non-members may buy from its shops. All its members get a share of the profits from this supermarket chain. Both chains have their own brands of many of the goods they sell. These are offered alongside other brands of the same types of goods. Also, many farmers are members of production cooperatives. Each farmer family owns and works its own land and may employ farmhands if needed. However, they cooperate to process and/or sell things produced on their land.
I don’t use black and white thinking about people. That only leads to denial of individuality. My idea is the people designing collectives were near the altruistic end of mental variation. These dramatically overestimated the average person’s altruism. Alternatively, they believed everyone could be made as altruistic as needed for their collectives to work. While the human mind has some malleability this has biological limitations. Being neurodiverse I will always be a statistical outlier for some mental characteristics. In the same way individuals have inborn limits to how much they can change.
When I talk about collectives I mean something like the Israeli kibbutz system. It was designed by people which were both Zionists and socialists. The system they designed does not work well with human nature. Raising children collectively runs against the strong family bounds found in all societies. Similarly, people don’t feel at home only eating in communal dining areas. Insufficient regulations for working and taking goods eventually led to the tragedy of the commons. But since the kibbutz system was democratically organised it could be gradually abandoned.
Forced collectivisation in communist-ruled countries had even worse results. While they did not try to raise children communally they did use many economic aspects of collectives. People were supposed to collectively work on the land. There the problems of collectives were compounded by there being no guarantee they even had the means necessary for doing so. Communists tried to control their countries’ entire economies in detail. That led to constant shortages of the strict necessaries of life. There were simply too many factors their regimes did not think of. Forced collectivisation contributed to the Great Chinese Famine (1959 – 61). Other factors include drought and the melting down of iron tools to make steel of often too poor quality to be useful. Also, there was deliberate expatriation of insectivorous birds the authorities mistook for seedeaters. Which resulted in problems with smaller pests instead.
In connection with the Arab Spring my dad was surprised many Arab countries were dependant on food imports from Russia. I then counted 18 growth seasons from the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the winter of 2009‒10. This was enough time for Russia to go from net importer to great exporter of food. In 2010 Europe had a particularly hot summer with Eastern Europe suffering drought on top of that. Russia could not export as much food as it used too with rising food prizes as consequence. Combined with harvest failure in some local areas this triggered the Arab Spring. I think this has been called the “tortilla effect”.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma suffers from this as well, right down the presentation perhaps not always being as defensible as the steelman version. Most “criticisms” of the PD are either or both: 1) well, what if we imaged it was another game? or 2) or the author should have been more explicit that other games exist and will lead to other incentives. (They are also sometimes *wrong*; all else equal, two perfectly altruistic players will arrive at the same outcome as two perfectly self-interested players, and “breaking” a PD usually requires adding some other dimension to the game, usually the opportunity to punish defectors in some way.) It is true that if things were different they would not be the same, but this is perhaps less incisive than some critics imagine. Hardin too put some pretty clear bounds on what a theoretical commons is, and ones that have been further shored up in subsequent scholarship and discussion. I find some of Hardin’s critics are, at best, quite uncharitable about those bounds and, at worst, actively criticizing his paper in bad faith.
I think Malthusianism is much weaker on its own terms (see the essay above!), but Malthus does consider that changing circumstances can lead to different breakdown points. And I would note that his prediction that birth control would help prevent resource strain is, at least prima facia, a very plausible story of the industrialized world in the 20th century. So even if you end up rejecting his model, and I mostly do, I still think he suffers a lot from some of his more careful ideas getting shorn out of retellings
I suspect one of the weird things you can take from Malthus is that some of his recommendations have largely ended up being factually correct predictions of a naturally occuring future to when he was writing the thing – whilst the idea of implementing population control from ‘above’ might be lead to a bunch of terrible conclusions, it turns out it’s also unecessary, as people always have had control over their personal birth rate, and his conclusions aren’t wildly inintuitive, so as the population rises, individuals take steps to make sure their kids will have enough. As our host points out in his recent run on peasants, even peasant populations with high fertility rates (to counter high mortality rates) weren’t actually, as Malthus presumably simply missed, reproducing at the maximum fertility rates that would cause a short-term Malthusian trap. Presumably because the individuals involved were aware that they only had so much farm, and shouldn’t get pregnant again so quickly (after all, if it was prolongued nursing that often restricted fertility, it’s pretty intuitive that if women stopped nursing kids for 2 years as soon as they had more convenient methods to reduce fertility, that they were probably not doing it for fun).
“As our host points out in his recent run on peasants, even peasant populations with high fertility rates (to counter high mortality rates) weren’t actually, as Malthus presumably simply missed, reproducing at the maximum fertility rates that would cause a short-term Malthusian trap. Presumably because the individuals involved were aware that they only had so much farm,”
Not necessarily.
If an individual household OWNS so much land, which will not expand if they raise more adult children, only be split between more of them, then this is a disincentive to raise more children.
If, however, the household expects the adult children to be able to rent more land as tenants, or get jobs as hired labourers, that particular resource limitation does not apply.
In Malthus´ Britain, a great majority of the poor were tenants or hirelings, not owners. So the individual level limitation of total resources did not apply. A poor family could reasonably expect their adult children to compete on job market, not be limited to parental inherited farm.
Even the nobility, which had *lots* of land, implemented things like primogeniture to limit downward mobility due to the increase in the size of the family.
This argument is generally of the form “I, being virtuous, can limit how many children I have. It’s *those people*, who are too stupid (and hold wrong opinions), who must be coerced.”
“Even the nobility, which had *lots* of land, implemented things like primogeniture to limit downward mobility due to the increase in the size of the family.”
Because the nobility, unlike the poor of Malthus´ time, *owned* their land. And therefore increasing the size of the family led to down*ward* mobility *relative to the parents* even if the downwardly mobile nobles were still better off than the poor. Their expectations were higher.
The nobility did not just *earn* their land and salaries by their service as knights/officers, and therefore a noble family could not just raise an unlimited number of sons on the father´s earned salary and expect them, as adult qualified knights, to get jobs as knights somewhere else and earn salary equal to father´s income. A key part of the father´s income and family´s expectation of living standards was father´s land ownership which was not going to multiply with every adult son getting a job like salaries would.
“it’s pretty intuitive that if women stopped nursing kids for 2 years as soon as they had more convenient methods to reduce fertility, that they were probably not doing it for fun”
I don’t think they did it for fun either. Frequent, low-intensity nursing filled the function of increasing spacing between childbirths. Some psychodynamic thinkers misunderstood this as some sort of habitual sexual exploitation. Possibly because breasts were unusually sexualised in their culture. Those were the same ones which extrapolated historically documented trends far beyond their applicability. They believed extreme child cruelty to be the original human condition which runs against evolution theory. Anything increasing your children’s survival chances would have been selected for.
“And I would note that his prediction that birth control would help prevent resource strain is, at least prima facia, a very plausible story of the industrialized world in the 20th century.”
This seems quite silly to me. In the first place, as people on Twitter are always happy to point out whenever a conservative suggests the birth control pill was responsible for collapsing birthrates, birth rates started falling in the West in the 18th century, long before any reliable methods of birth control had been developed or were legal.
In the second place, if one thing could explain it, it wouldn’t be a mystery and demographers wouldn’t be arguing over it.
The fact that there is a stock argument argument against it from people who want to reach a different conclusion for political reasons does *not* make me rethink my fairly noncommittal stance here—as I said, the argument works prima facia and as you point out, it’s one of the arguments demographers make
If birth rates started to decrease before childhood mortality did I think this had different explanations in different countries.
the birth control pill was responsible for collapsing birthrates, birth rates started falling in the West in the 18th century, long before any reliable methods of birth control had been developed or were legal.
I think the birth control pill absolutely did *help* with collapsing birthrates, and contributing to them falling faster and farther than they would have otherwise. You’re certainly correct that they did start falling in some countries as far back as the 18th c, but on the other hand, some basic forms of birth control and/or abortifacients have been with us for a long time (as you note, less reliable and less safe than modern methods).
Many people are unaware there were any social changes before their own personal lifetime. A Baby Boomer might then mistake the Baby Boom for the original state of society. Which is then believed to have been disrupted by the spread of the pill. In reality the mid-20th century Baby Boom was a short-lived phenomenon (which is why it is called so). It was caused by two coincidental factors. First, a lot of people delayed childbirth during the Great Depression. Second, returning soldiers have sex more frequently than average. This increases the likelihood of their wives or girlfriends getting pregnant.
“Commons” almost never were common to all comers. Generally they were usable by locals. If non-locals came in and started using them, trouble ensued.
Simon_Jester mentions “public restroom syndrome”. This is a more accurate term, because public restrooms of the type that exemplify the syndrome really can be used by all comers, anonymously. The lack of any accountability is the largest reason for the phenomenon.
“Commons” almost never were common to all comers. Generally they were usable by locals. If non-locals came in and started using them, trouble ensued.
I remember seeing a talk by a behavioral ecologist about the evolution of cooperation some years back, and this is considered one of the classic examples where cooperation breaks down (i.e. when you have lots of migration, mobility, turnover). It’s even true outside humans, and for that matter, even outside the animal kingdom! (One of many reasons why tilling the soil is bad is that it disrupts symbiotic relationships).
One could draw conclusions from that about how compatible socialism/communism/cooperativism are with liberal, cosmopolitan values, but I won’t go there rn since it would take the thread too far afield.
I always assumed “commons” to mean “natural resource owned collectively by the locals”. If there are no rules for how much they can take from it the resource will be overused.
I find that typically, critics of Hardin’s Commons essay haven’t read it or don’t remember it well, though that seems somewhat less true in these comments. Still: Hardin gave _many_ real world examples of unregulated commons; the hypothetical overgrazed village commons was only one blip among them. He talks about overfishing, overgrazing of American federal land, urban parking, air/ocean pollution, and national park attendance. All of which are extremely real and can’t be dismissed with “well akshually the village commons was regulated”.
And I’ve seen people claim the essay is a simplistic argument for privatization, but in fact he said privatization or regulation.
Well, I wrote up my reaction to the essay years ago, I’ll just link to that. https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/223003.html
@mindstalko,
I actually agree with most of what you said in your reaction piece! You’re right that Hardin did concede that there were multiple possible “solutions” to the problem of overusing the commons, and that privatization was only one of them. The fact that common ownership has existed for long periods of time, suggests that there are certainly other solutions too. And you’re also right that there are plenty of examples of badly managed commons out there- overfishing is certainly one. (The fact that few states of whatever political stripe have really managed their fisheries all that well suggests to me that it might be an unusually tough problem). You’re also right that the Hardin’s biggest single in the piece was population and the “freedom to breed”.
I think you can go up one more level of abstraction though, and draw an even more general point, about cooperative equilibria in general. Hardin is suggesting that no social order based on purely voluntary cooperation is going to last in the long run- that’s true whether we are thinking about pollution, over-grazing, reproduction, donating to charity, overfishing or whatever. Without some form of coercion- economic, social, political, or legal- people who cooperate are going to be outcompeted by those who cheat, and the result is, as he puts it, “the elimination of conscience from the race”. Hardin didn’t come up with that principle of course, but I think the essay did a lot to popularize it.
Like I said, you don’t need to agree with the conclusions that he draws, or that popular culture draw from the essay (including a lot of people who haven’t even read it), to believe that it’s a good piece on its own terms, and that the problem it poses is real. I certainly don’t agree with his soluton of “private property plus inheritance”, but the problem and the thought experiment he sets out are no less valuable for all that.
I’d also note with respect to the population question, that Hardin wrote the essay in 1968 and he died in 2003. It seems fairly clear *today* that world population is going to peak and then start declining, and that the demographic transition to sub replacement fertility and population decline will eventually hit all countries. There’s still some question about that, depending on what happens in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Muslim world, but it seems like ultimate population decline, through contraception and changing cultural norms, is definitely the way to bet. That wasn’t at all clear in 1968 though, and it wasn’t even all that clear in 2003 (I’m old enough to remember conversations between 2000-2005 era, and it was just *starting* to be the case around then that Latin American and Southeast Asian countries were reaching replacement fertility and then going below it). Maybe if Hardin had lived a bit longer he would have come to think that voluntary fertility reduction was a possible solution to overpopulation, but maybe not (he might still think that in the long run, some degree of coercion would be necessary, as it would be to support all cooperative norms). We’ll never know.
The Commons in England were held in common with each household given certain rights for grazing, taking wood and so on. These rights were longstanding and sometimes explicitly codified. They were usually local, but the Charter of the Forest granted certain forest resources to all free citizens. There were all sorts of restrictions on just how much of each resource a party could take, and the courts were full of cases sanctioning abusers.
The tragedy was that when agricultural land increased in value, those rights were terminated and transferred to various wealthy parties who were soon to become even wealthier. It’s like what happens when your local food coop or condo common area gets sold to private equity.
For a standard irritating commenter shift of subject, I wonder if that’s part of the Fermi Paradox, where one of the base assumptions is that endless population expansion and interstellar colonization is inevitable and unstoppable. At least in the very big numbers aggregate, i.e. it doesn’t matter if only one in a million sapient species does it if there are billions of sapient species.
At least for me, the irritating thing about the Fermi paradox is the sloppy logic so often employed in it. “There are something like 200 billion stars in the galaxy. Each star seems to have multiple planets, with something like a trillion possible planets, life must be very common!”
“What if the odds of life arising on any given planet are 1 in 10^15?”
To me, the only thing that’s truly interesting about it (in part because our sample of knowledge here is so bad) is that the Drake Equations have to be extremely precisely tuned to come to an answer of say, 5 intelligent species in the galaxy at any one time. Most inputs tend to lead to either a limit of 0 or thousands, with very few possibilities in between.
“Most inputs” is only a meaningful statement if you have an a priori distribution of potential inputs. For the Drake equation, we have no such thing, so we cannot make any statements of the sort. You could assume a uniform distribution between [0, 1] for all the probabilities, but there’s precisely no justification for doing that rather than, say, an exponential distribution, or any other distribution you want.
As the old saying goes “garbage in, garbage out”.
Even something like the Rare Earth hypothesis (which I intuitively suspect is more right than not, but the spectrum of what that could mean is so broad that it doesn’t mean anything) still has, to my knowledge, many points where we can only be guessing at percentages. The observation “you’re not looking for an Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone, you’re looking for an Earth-sized planet with a mixture of water and land and tidal activity and maybe an axial tilt, and there’s probably a lot less of those” seems reasonable but could still be describing a huge number of candidate planets.
The point I rarely see addressed (maybe because I’m not looking?) is that the conditions for intelligent life != conditions in which intelligent life could even have the opportunity to develop technological society. It doesn’t matter how smart whales get: as long as they don’t have hands and live in an environment where they can’t usefully do chemistry experiments, they’re not going to build a radio or a rocket ship.
> is that the conditions for intelligent life != conditions in which intelligent life could even have the opportunity to develop technological society. It doesn’t matter how smart whales get: as long as they don’t have hands and live in an environment where they can’t usefully do chemistry experiments, they’re not going to build a radio or a rocket ship.
If they have very little use for intelligence, it’s less likely to evolve. The environment where humans evolved our intelligence was one where there were lots of things that a more intelligent human could do better.
And if they are intelligent enough, well the lack of hands might make things harder, but I would kind of expect them to get some way of building things anyway. Even if the whales need to train lobsters to actually do the fine manipulations, communicating via clicks and whistles.
When we look at which animals use tools. Crows are quite high up on the list. Not because they have great hands, but because they are unusually smart.
Don’t forget a moon of the appropriate size, and possibly means of formation.
I have read about some dolphins using tools (sponges) in the wild holding them with their mouths. But this does not seen common. The only crow or similar bird I know to use tools (twigs) in the wild is the New Caledonian crow. Likely because the rest of the Corvidae are too preoccupied watching out for predators. Monkeys have an advantage of being largely arboreal and having evolved hands for climbing. Varied tool use has been observed in all the great apes. It has also been observed in macaques and capuchin monkeys.
We still don’t know the probability of an Earth-sized planet forming. We still only have one example.
All the planets we’ve detected around other stars have been enormous, or close-in, or both. We don’t have the ability to detect something that small yet.
I don’t know if the planets we’ve detected raise or lower the odds of Earth-likes. Back when we couldn’t detect them, the theories tended towards other systems like the solar system, and the ones we’ve actually detected were considered unlikely.
It is still a case of “We know of a bunch of systems and they’re weird. But we can only detect them if they are weird.”
E.g. I don’t think we could detect even Jupiter in its orbit if it were circling Proxima Centauri.
I think we could:
https://planetplanet.net/2021/02/08/the-cosmic-one-percent/
This was written in 2021.
We have gained significant knowledge about at least some components of the Drake Equation, since it was first formulated.
Stars were already known to be very common. We now have pretty good evidence that planets are also common (over 6000 identified), and that planets within a star’s habitable zone are not vanishingly rare enough to explain the Fermi Paradox alone.
That does leave many elements as effectively unknown. We know that the fraction that develop life cannot be zero, but we can’t know if the sole example of Earth was one in a quadrillion odds, or one in ten odds. We know radio-using life can last for at least a few hundred years.
However, given that we are not inundated with radio transmissions from other planets, we can make conclusions about the *aggregate* value. It cannot simultaneously be the case that life develops easily when able, and intelligent life develops consistently, and intelligent life inevitably invents technologies such as radio, and that such civilizations endure for millions of years. At least one of those – or some factor Drake did not specifically break out – must be small, and if most factors are large the small ones must be *very* small.
That is the utility of the Drake Equation. It’s not about spitting out an exact answer, it’s a framework for thinking about how life like us might exist.
>> That is the utility of the Drake Equation. It’s not about spitting out an exact answer, it’s a framework for thinking about how life like us might exist.
Yes, it’s more useful to think of it as a checklist of successive conditions that must be met for technological life to exist, than as a mechanism to calculate it’s frequency. Sadly, it’s framed as the latter rather than the former.
We do have some information also about the likelihood of forming life in Drake’s equation beyond “if the sole example of Earth was one in a quadrillion odds, or one in ten odds” – we should model the various observed bottlenecks not as single “yes/no” random events but as a series of repeated chances; not as “one in quadrillion or one in ten odds” but rather as “one in quadrillion years or one in merely million years odds”. And then if go back to the archeological record and see which things took a long time and which transformations happened pretty much immediately as soon as the conditions were right, that gives some insight.
In particular, since the basic forming of life seems to have happened soon after Earth cooled down from being a ball of molten lava, that implies that it happening in those conditions likely wasn’t a “once in a quadrillion years” thing.
The Earth’s crust solidified 4.4 billion years ago. During the following 200 million years water condensed to from the oceans. As far as I know the oldest chemical evidence of life is form the Isua Greenstone Belt on Greenland. It is between 3.7 and 3.8 billion years old. I don’t think life on Earth is so much older than that, possibly a couple of hundred million years at most.
“What if the odds of life arising on any given planet are 1 in 10^15?”
But why that specfic number?
Sure, you can assume the conclusion (that humans are alone) and work backwards, tweaking the numbers to make it work out. But if you do that, the numbers have to be *very* specific- a little too low and humans never evolve at all, a little too high and the galaxy is filled with (obvious and highly visible) life. These sorts of “finely tuned universe” theories beg the question of why we got so lucky (literally astronomically lucky). If you believe in a benevolent supreme being then of course there’s your answer, but scientists usually look for a more materialistic mechanism.
This. The accuracy is on cosmology level, which I mean they treat 10^5 as close enough to 10^2, making the entire equation have unacceptably large margin. (To be fair to the cosmologists, their numbers are more like 10^105 to 10^102, making the “close enough” acceptable). Now I can’t take anyone who calculated drake equation seriously, seriously.
This seems a quite misunderstood description of the Fermi paradox. The way I see it, the core of it does not at all include an assertion like “life must be very common!”; quite the contrary, the essence of the paradox involves the observation that life in our galaxy apparently isn’t very common (because, otherwise, where are they?), but at the same time given reasonable assumptions about these probabilities and there being no “Great Filter” which we haven’t included in the model, life in our galaxy should be somewhat common, and so this difference is paradoxical, and logically implies that there apparently is some Great Filter causing this difference, and the nature of that filter is quite existentially important to us.
And yes, the “Most inputs tend to lead to either a limit of 0 or thousands” is a core observation of that model as well – because as it seems that we can discount the “thousands or more” option (as we think we would have noticed that), then this implies that we’re likely to be the only civilization in our galaxy.
The crux of the Fermi Paradoxon is “If intelligent live is common, and interstellar travel is easy, where is everybody?”
Yes, if live is not common, or interstellar travell is impossible, the whole question is mute. Yes, the two most obvious answers, are obvious. They are also the answers most likely to be right. But they also kind of ignore the premise of the question.
Supposedly Fermi’s actual outburst (AFAIK he never published anything on the subject) “Where is everyone?” was contextually more a comment about the feasibility of interstellar travel than it was about the existence of intelligent life in general.
The more generic ideas about how statistical modelling suggests we should have evidence of intelligent life elsewhere doesn’t require presumptions of endless expansion, because it’s more typically framed in my experience as a question of looking for signals of the kind we ourselves are pumping out into the universe. SETI is looking for transmissions, not spaceships, etc.
No, that’s backwards. If one in a million sapient species do it, you need few enough that nobody does it. If anyone does it in our galaxy, we’d see them.
Would we? The Milky was is 3600 light years across. Someone could have been sending out radio since the bronze age and we wouldn’t eve have gotten them yet. (and that’s assuming they would be recognizable to us even if they used radio waves)
As this is a pedantic blog: “The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a D25 isophotal diameter estimated at 26.8 ± 1.1 kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,600 light-years),”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
Although this only reinforces your point, I should add that 87,400 years is short compared to the life of the galaxy.
I’ve seen estimates that the radio transmissions Earth is producing effectively dwindle to nothing a few hundred lightyears out. There could be a small stellar empire on the other side of the galaxy and we wouldn’t know it (not even taking into account the clouds of dust and gas in the way).
That’s the other 999,999 out of a million. The 1 out of a million would be the guys sending generation ships and making multiple stars visibly anomalous.
For the timeframes Drake equation is relevant, we can think of million years as a tiny amount of time. The galaxy is very large and the galaxy is very old, but the scales aren’t comparable – the galaxy is much, much, much more old than it is large.
If the formation processes for a hypothetical Earth-clone planet with another civilization (and its star) would have happened just 1% faster, it would have a 90 million year head-start on us. If in on an average planet of that civilization every couple thousand years the political situation results in some weirdos launching a colonization ship that takes a few thousand years to reach and colonize some other star – that’s sufficient to fill the whole galaxy in that timeframe.
Yes, we would. Remeber the Fermi Paradoxon has the premise that intelligent species, other then us, exists, and interstellar travell is possible. (Yes two big ifs there)
So imagine a space travelling society creates 4 collonies. And in the timeframe of 50.000 years each of those collonies create another 4 collonies. It would take less then a million years for the descendants of this society to reach every star in the Galaxy.
Yes, the descandents on two ends of the galaxy would probably look nothing like each other anymore. But being diversified over million of planets makes it less likely that this species or conglomerate of species and civilisations will ever die out.
If intelligent life exists, and space travelle is easy, the galaxy should be thick with them.
The age of the Galaxy tells us, that if there was somebody out there travelling the stars, we would see them. Either in the electro magnetic spectrum, or as artefacts in our star system. The best answer for why we do not see anybody, is that there is nobody.
As far as I’m concerned there is no paradox. At any rate, we don’t know enough to understand the parameters of the question.
We’ve only started examining the stars for planets extremely recently–in our lifetimes. We haven’t fully explored our own system, and we currently have no idea if life exists on other planets or not. We’ve gathered enough evidence that I’m willing to argue Mars once harbored life (we’ve found stromatolite deposits, and the recent discussions of potential fossils corroborate that), plus we have some tantalizing hints of life on other moons. But that’s it. Being SUPER generous we have a sample size of 1.5.
Paleontology works with singletons all the time–instances where you have a single fossil in one location–so I’m willing to accept that there is useful information that we can derive from this. But the idea that we can make any broad statement about life itself, much less its presence or absence on planets we haven’t even found, is simply insane. It is unscientific in the extreme.
Further, we aren’t good at identifying what’s living and what’s not. The number of times we’ve failed to identify life ON THIS PLANET (see “Rare Earth” and “Life Everywhere”, two books approaching this problem from different angles but which generally agree on the evidence) should make us EXTREMELY skeptical about our ability to identify evidence of life anywhere else. The debate about whether fossils were living things or not should also teach us some humility. That debate raged for centuries. You may argue that this was under a different paradigm, and I’m forced to agree, but that presupposes that our current paradigm is The One True Answer, a claim that’s been made and proven wrong so often in the past that I’m not willing to accept it. To give one example: why are we looking for water? It’s been demonstrated, theoretically at least, that liquid methane is an equally viable solvent for metabolic processes (and there are hints that this may be occurring in our solar system).
To complain that we haven’t found what we’re looking for under these conditions reminds me of a young child looking in one place for their toy and then throwing a fit when they can’t find it. My view is that the only proper view of the Fermi Paradox, Drake Equation, and other ideas like that is to admit we simply don’t have sufficient information to make any statement on these. We can identify data gaps and start to close them–as we have with identifications of planets around other stars–but at the end of the day, right now, we just don’t know. It’s too early to know.
I think the saying “be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out” applies here.
Sure, it’s hard to really prove anything with certainty when we’re stuck here on Earth with very limited data. But we’re not completely ignorant either. There have been some very smart scientists working on this problem for a while now, and it’s worth appreciating the work they’ve done to show that, at the very least, some possibilities are a lot more likely than others.
At the very least, we can be pretty sure that the universe is *not* like Star Trek, where it’s filled with aliens zipping around in FTL starships visiting every planet they can find. We know because, well, first because physics equations show that FTL is impossible, but also because it would be pretty obvious if they were already here landing at the UN. Of course there’s always counterarguments like “they’re covering it all up using advanced technology to make themselves invisible,” but some basic Occam’s Razer thinking would tell you it’s much more likely that sort of thing just doesn’t exist.
For you question about water- it’s not just a bias. They’ve considered the possibility of more exotic life, such as methane-based life on Titan. But water has some huge chemical advantages. First it’s very common (two hydrogen atoms, by far the most common element in the universe). Second it’s a universal solvent, capable of absorbing almost any solid and binding them together. Third it’s a liquid under a reasonable range of temperatures, rather than the extreme heat or cold that would destroy almost any organization. Again this isn’t exactly *proof*, but there’s some strong arguments for why the complex chemical organization of life would be impossible without water.
The scientists working on SETI aren’t idiots or children, so they didn’t just look in one place. They’ve done their best to come up with all of the most likely places to search, and to search in as many as funding and physical limits allow. So far every single one has been a negative result. Since we can’t prove a negative, it’s impossible to be sure, but the probability seems to be moving more and more towards the negative, at least in regards to big, advanced life like what we imagine in sci-fi. You don’t have to call it a paradox, but surely you’ll agree it’s a bit puzzling and scary if we are truly alone in this gigantic universe.
“There have been some very smart scientists working on this problem for a while now, and it’s worth appreciating the work they’ve done to show that, at the very least, some possibilities are a lot more likely than others.”
This is why I cited Peter Ward.
The problem with “very smart scientists” is that there is precisely one science that has ever studied an alien planet: Paleontology. And guess how much influence they’ve had on xenobiology.
As for FTL ships, you’ve failed to account for anti-inductive systems. Intelligent beings are fully capable of not being identified because they don’t want to be found. We know this because we DO THIS. To presume that aliens are incapable of this is, frankly, stupid.
As for water, it only appears to have advantages because we are, fundamentally, puddles. What I mean is, we see the “advantages” of water as being significant because WE are water-based. This has precisely zero impact on xenobiology (or at least, we cannot assume, a priori, that it does). And this may move into the “not hypothetical” sphere of possibility space in our lifetimes; indeed, it may already have. It’s worth noting that the person who developed the hypothetical metabolic pathway for methane-based metabolism published at the same time as NASA published their Titan observations–meaning, we have evidence (if somewhat inconclusive) that water isn’t the universal solvent for life IN OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM. Once you accept that, looking for water becomes the equivalent of identifying North American civilizations by wheat consumption.
“The scientists working on SETI aren’t idiots or children….”
No, but they also haven’t studied alien life. Again, the ONLY field of science that has studied alien life is paleontology. There is not a second option here; in 200 years ONLY paleontology has studied the truly alien in terms of biology. And as a paleontologist, I can tell you that SETI has extremely obvious biases. For example, SETI would have completely passed over OUR OWN PLANET for most of its history. Their methods demonstrably preclude identifying most of Earth’s Precambrian history as having life. When you have clear evidence of a false negative of several BILLION YEARS’ MAGNITUDE, the proper conclusion is that the methods have some flaws.
I’m not saying they’re children. But. are they sedimentologists? And hydrologists? And meteorologists? And minerologists? And remote sensing experts? Are the isotopic geochemists? And are they capable of identifying their biases? Do they understand metabolism on a scale where Gibbs Free Energy comes into play? Do they understand how stellar evolution impacts the composition of planets? If the answer to ANY of these is no, this is a fatal flaw in their analysis. This is what was accepted as the minimum for studying life on our own planet when I was in school; it is not unreasonable to expect people studying alien life (and potential fossil evidence thereof) to have at least this background. (And, for the record, I’ve cited authors who DO have this background. I was introduced to Peter Ward’s work in a fairly arcane and highly technical capacity, the correlation of ammoniates between the east and west side of California’s Great Valley.)
And the idea that we haven’t found evidence of life is a lie. There have been publications in peer-reviewed journals demonstrating that the evidence would, on Earth, regardless of era, be accepted as evidence of life. I’ve personally seen several dozen examples of stromatolites on Mars, along with analogues on Earth. And that was before this week’s announcements. Put simply, unless an alien life form kidnapped the POTUS on live TV it wouldn’t be accepted as evidence. At a certain point skepticism is no longer a virtue.
Sorry, but everyone can make mistakes. Peer-review only removes the worst of them which is why the requirement if repeatability exist. There are a considerable number of papers passing peer-review which no-one has been able to repeat. As a person understanding the basics of modern science I think those results are questionable. You should not write off other sciences either. The people recognised by each other as working in the field of astrobiology can probably judge this subject better than you. I consider the evidence of life elsewhere in the Solar System inconclusive for now.
Also, you don’t have to ridicule your opponents. An interstellar object showing more spasmodic than smooth changes in movements would be enough of a technosignature for me. Of cause, this would have to be observed by at least three independent groups of people, each with some form of telescope. That aliens would not be discovered until entering the Earth’s atmosphere I find patently absurd.
@Dinwar,
Methane is nothing like water chemically, so I don’t see how “methane based life” could possibly work.
It seems like your example of Peter Ward actually supports my point. The radio astronomers at SETI and mathematicsl physicists like Dydon are obviously not specialists in paleontology, or any other kind of life science, but they’re still willing to listen and call on specialists when appropriate. The Rare Earth hypothesus has been much discussed, and many experts on biochemistry and related fields have searched the data from Mars and other places in our solar system where we can get data. They’re not some closed-minded math nerd stereotype.
When SETI searches for big obvious signs like radio beacons, its not juat arrogant bias like they dont want to look for small fossils. Those radio beacons (or Dyson spheres) are something we could actually observe from Earth, when we couldn’t possibly observe microbes on a distant planet. That’s like criticizing paleontology for “why do you only search the Earth’s crust, instead of drilling deep into the mantle and core?” There’s limits to what we can do.
Still, even though there are limits, we can still learn things . In this case, it seems like Peter Ward’s argument from paleontology and the evidence from radio astronomy SETI are in violent agreement. Without making any claims about simpler life such as microbes, it seems that intelligent, complex life is at best extremely rare.
Of course nothing is proven, and you can construct shine complex hypotheticals like “humans are literally the only intelligence to use radio waves while all aliens use nigh-magical technology to hide their existance.” More data would help, and that data is rapidly coming in now with some recent projects like Breakthrough Listen. But so far, there’s a preponderance of evidence from both theory and experiment showing that it’s highly rare or nonexistant. That raises the yncomfortable question of why…
@Hector: Assuming you’re being honest (always a question online–and yes, I acknowledge this applies to me as well): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanogenesis
Yeah, yeah, I know, Wiki is bad. But Wikipedia has a References section, which can lead you to peer-reviewed publications on the topic. I think it’s fairly reasonable to expect someone investigating one of the foundational questions of philosophy to look up some references. Our society has devoted no small amount of resources to establishing public libraries, and our age is defined by a technology specifically for sharing information.
I’m not expert. My area of expertise starts well after the Small Shelly Fauna. That said, I know enough to know that this research is at least plausible. The math works. Whether methane-based metabolism is real or not is an open question. Whether it is theoretically possible is not. It absolutely is plausible, and there is evidence (the decrease in hydrogen near the surface of one of Jupiter’s moons) that it is occurring within our solar system. NASA certainly believes that this sort of metabolism is plausible.
At this point, failure to understand how this could work is a confession of a failure of persona knowledge. Certainly not a moral issue–we all have our specializations–but the…well, frankly, you need to do some research. Since you are responding to a post on a blog, I can assume you have access to the internet. And given the nature of this blog, failure to do your homework is frankly a personal issue.
I wouldn’t be surprised. I know a lot of sci-fi settings, particularly Star Wars, get ragged on for having weird population numbers. But I can’t help but wonder how much of that is projection from Earth, and latent Malthusian thought.
Put another way, I would be fascinated to know what Martian population growth rates would look like if we were to colonize it. The countries most likely to be able to pull that off are mostly ones which are already past the demographic transition, and are wealthy enough to have internalized the different culture with regards to having children.
That, plus the distance and difficulty of true autarky, means I would suspect any kind of extra-terrestrial colony would never be self-sustaining with regards to population, and we would need to continually ship people there to make up for the poor replacement rate.
Right now we are heading towards negative worldwide population growth, and if you extrapolate that long enough you get human extinction on this planet, let alone Mars.
It seems likely to me that the trends leading towards negative worldwide population growth would at some point self-correct, unless they so incapacitate human society that an extinction-causing event (e.g. severe climate change) wipes us all out too sharply for us to adapt to.
We have the misfortune to live in a social milieu where in most nations it is seen as the individual’s responsibility to make sure they have the means to raise children, and the privilege of large institutions to extract as much profit from the individual as they can get away with. This gives large institutions an incentive to, in effect, make having children very expensive, which understandably depresses birth rates.
In pre-industrial times the milieu was similar, but raising more children did eventually translate into a measure of increased economic resilience for the family unit, so birth rates stayed higher.
It seems likely to me that the trends leading towards negative worldwide population growth would at some point self-correct,
Clearly. The general pattern for other animal species is that low population density favors higher fertility, and vice versa.
Not to mention, if societies ever got *really* existentially concerned about their own survival, there are lots of ways that social and political authorities could *impose* a self correction.
> extinction-causing event (e.g. severe climate change)
this is not a viable example, unless you count being struck by large asteroid as a case of “severe climate change”.
human adapted to so wide range of climates that you would require utterly absurd climate change to cause extinction. Centuries of deliberate, intentional and omnicidal work of entire humanity working toward that would be required, and nothing makes such insanity a likely risk – global warming we have now, in the worst scenarios, is not going to cause even anything close to that.
Severe climate change is not something we need but it would not cause human extinction. Compare with say Oxygen Catastrophe – but nothing indicates that we are doing anything like it.
“extinction-causing event”
A professor of mine once asked my class what an extinction was, on a physical level. We had all kinds of answers, more or less obscure as the case may be. But he merely laughed, and responded “An extinction is when the last of an organism dies. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Pretty much any time you see the phrase “extinction-level” or “extinction-causing”, you can assume that no one who studies extinctions was involved in the study.
I mean. A half-way competent colonization effort would pre-screen for desire for lots of kids, and once the colony is a going concern you can incentivize population growth via subsidy. Endemic growth rates might not be exponential but “positive” is easy to reach. If you text it to grow faster than yeah you have to ship more people up, but that’s no different than what happened in the US.
My favorite “ragged on” is when planets are criticized for being a single biome planet. I mean look at our solar system, how many multi-biome planet are out there? Exactly one! Out of eight! And even this one have 66% water surface, making someone could call it “only-ocean planet” in derision.
On that, I want to know how many planets are explicitly declared one-biome planets by the omniscient narrator or characters who would know and have reason to be accurate about it?*
As opposed to people who are talking causally and sloppily about planets which only have one area that is interesting or economically important, or the only place that people live.
And consider all the people in the *real world* who *actually exist* who talk about Canada as all being a frozen waste, or Africa as being all jungle, or China being all rice paddies.
Is it really a one-biome planet? Or are the characters just talking casually about what is important to them, not writing scientific papers that have to pass peer review?
* It is one thing if a character calls spiders insects, and another if the entomologist on the team does it. (Yes, it happened in a movie I saw.)
Ignorance of diversity is part of ignorance of geography. Then you get the myth of most areas having only one season too:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Climate-and-seasons#wbb1
Nitpick: It is more than one, arguably. Mars has the ice caps and the rockier deserts (and there may be divisions I’m not thinking about) Titan has the lakes, dunefields, and areas with less cover. Biggest issue judging these things is that many earth biomes come from different kinds of plant life which other planets just don’t have. Quite possibly some, say, Venus adapted or Triton adapted like would create multiple biomes based on subtle weather differences that just leave rock and ice on the planets as they actually exist.
/Nitpick over.
if you want to really nitpick, Mars doesen’t have biomes since biomes are well… biological-geographical regions, and Mars doesen’t (at this point) have life: It just has geography.
One might suggest that the very definition of the term biome makes it inapplicable to planets incapable of supporting life. The sci-fi planets in question possess enough water and sufficient temperature to support some life – and in that case, there would inevitably be marked differences between the poles and the equator.
Admittedly, if the planet tilts towards the extremes of habitability as far as temperature and/or water availability is concerned, those differences may not look very meaningful to humans – but they’ll still be present. On the other hand, a world habitable enough to have pronounced vegetation (i.e. Dagobah or Endor) is extremely unlikely to only be covered in this one form of vegetation and nothing else. While TVTropes is hardly a scientific source, I am also not sure if any scientific journals bothered to cover the fictional subject, so it’ll have to do for now.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/SingleBiomePlanet
To the above, I’ll add that another aspect which makes single-layer forest/jungle/swamp planets ludicrously unlikely is the oceans’ crucial role as heat sinks. You might have heard that ~90% of heat from climate change has actually gone into the oceans, while only 2% has been experienced as atmospheric warming. (~5% had warmed the land, and the rest had been melting the cryosphere.) Of course, this is due to the water’s heat capacity – heating just one meter of seawater by 1 degree Celsius takes the same energy as heating 3.1 kilometers of air the same amount! What this also means, though, is that without the oceans, there would be enormous seasonal swings in temperature – i.e. summer would always be Sahara-hot, and winter would always have sub-zero temperatures. Needless to say, stable, persisent plant cover is impossible under such conditions.
Further, I’ll add that while TVTropes (and scientists in general) agree that icy planets in general certainly occur, something like Hoth specifically is dubious. My issue with its depiction is that there seems to be way too much fresh snow. Snow doesn’t just occur whenever it’s cold. After all, it’s frozen precipitation – you have to have liquid water in the atmosphere specifically, and it has to be supplied with more liquid water. That occurs via evaporation from…the oceans. If the planet is too frozen to have oceans, then its atmosphere would be very dry, as nearly* all the water would have had fallen out as snow a very long time ago, with nothing to replace it. Meanwhile, snow is inherently transient – if it doesn’t melt and is left to its own devices sub-zero, then gravity causes it to condense to solid ice. (Which is how Greenland and Antarctica can have growing layers of ice, for one – i.e. one Lockheed P-38 Lightning was abandoned due to emergency in Greenland in 1942, and was buried by 82 meters of ice by the time they rediscovered it in late 1980s. Incredibly, they still managed to make that Glacier Girl fly!)
*Not all of it, mind you – there’s apparently still some water-based snow on Mars, but the quantities are effectively microscopic compared to what you see on Hoth.
Just turn down the axial tilt to near-zero (and keep the eccentricity small, as Earth’s is).
A guy named Nikolai Hersfeldt has made quite a few climate simulations with different conditions:
https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2025/05/beyond-koppen-geiger-climate.html
That would eliminate the seasonal differences – but at the cost of making the equatorial-polar differences even more profound. You can see that in Ms. Synnerholm’s link – and I think an earlier BBC article makes that point in even starker terms.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/23degrees/2011/03/what_if_the_earth_had_no_tilt.html
So, even on our planet, you are not going to get anything close to consistent vegetation cover with no axial tilt. Logic dictates that because a planet with no oceans would again lack their thermal buffer, it would be virtually impossible to tune it in such a way that forests/jungles/swamps exist anywhere on it but in a couple of fairly thin bands in the midlatitudes, while the rest is scorching-hot or frozen.
Thank you for the link but I think it is outdated. Nikolai Hersfeldt made a better simulation of a seasonless world in 2023:
https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2022/08/climate-explorations-obliquity.html#0deg
Over the course of 20 years I have made many fictional world maps. I initially did not know about circulation cells. So I just moved the Earth’s climate belts closer to or further from their equator. In some cases I made them wider too. However, they all have a pole-to-equator temperature gradient as well as large bodies of water.
If you’re going to specify Mars, the answer is none. You can’t safely raise children in less than one Earth gravity, their bodies wouldn’t form correctly; any who did survive would then have trouble having children themselves.
Of course we can. Just build the nursery in a centrifuge.
(Actually, how do we know we can’t? We have run many experiments on the ISS, but I doubt that the definitive experiment for this question — putting an adjustable centrifuge there, and repeatedly trying to grow mice, until we find the exact thresholds — has been run, because in that case we would know exactly how many gs we would need.)
There have been experiments hatching/growing birds in space. The zero-G results do not suggest we should be optimistic about other low-gravity cases, but I guess there’s always room for more science.
Wait, zero-g goes a step further. In that case, you don’t have any direction your weight pulls. With, say, 0.5g, there is a consistent and easily detectable direction, just the strength is lower than on earth.
Mars has 38% of the Earth’s gravity.
I would say “the distance and difficulty of true autarky” is quite the understatement! Here’s what Thomas Murphy, the Associate Director of Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at University of California, San Diego, chose to write in a subject-specific chapter of his (free) textbook, Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet
https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions
One day a much richer humanity may decide to terraform mars.
But this happens after we can trivially solve climate change. (There are some geoengineering approaches that look like they would be pretty easy fixes for climate change with current tech. Except for all the political barriers.)
But that day is not today nor tomorrow. In the immediate future, yes it’s impractical, for now.
Erm, currently, by far the most popular geoengineering proposal is solar radiation modification, and a close second is marine cloud brightening. Neither of those actually “fix” climate change for good – merely block off its consequences for as long (and only for as long) as they are active. Relying on them indefinitely is not feasible, so the assumption is if they are deployed then the emissions sooner or later become net negative so that the atmospheric concentrations can be reduced over a long period of time.
The trouble is that it really does have to be a long period of time, because the quantities we have already added to the atmosphere are so immense in absolute terms – literally ~2.6 trillion tonnes of CO2, and counting, while concentrating that from the atmosphere is an absolutely painstaking process. The most optimistic proposal I have seen suggests that we can remove at most 850 billion tonnes over the next 75 years – assuming that about 2% of GDP is allocated to it, and even more power and other resources. Considering that even more will be added to the atmosphere over the next several decades at least, you can see how even this rapid deployment will stretch into ~300 years to get us back to preindustrial levels – so hardly “an easy fix”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20437-0
And yes, it’s weird that they talk about natural gas, but this was their logic.
P.S. If there’s one silver lining of the recent “AI” data center boom, is that it makes these suggestions for carbon capture buildout look less implausible than they did when the above was published 4 years ago.
(There are some geoengineering approaches that look like they would be pretty easy fixes for climate change with current tech. Except for all the political barriers.)
I’m a big geoengineering fan, but I would not say that any of these solutions are “easy”, nor are they costless. As @YARD points out, the solar dimming plan would “fix” the consequences of high [CO2] (some of them, not even all of them), but it would have to be kept up permanently to do that. Actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere can be done, and would be a permanent ‘fix’, but it would take time, hard work and money, so not really “easy” either.
fish crawled out of the ocean, birds took to the air, and humans are making the next logical step to space—continuing the legacy of escaping the bondage of water, land, and finally Earth
People invoking evolution in favor of these kind of simpleminded narratives of progress always kind of irritates me, because evolution certainly isn’t unidirectional. Land-based organisms have returned to the sea, and birds have lost the power of flight, on many, many occasions.
Modern societies largely lack the birth rates to populate a typical sci-fi galaxy.
Therefore any populated sci-fi galaxy must have societies that differ from modern ones in key ways. (Specifically, how many kids they have; how you get there can be variable.)
The fastest population growth ever took place 1960 – 90. Unfortunately, a lot of people still believe the world’s population to grow as it did back then. Not understanding the mathematical difference between different type of growth does not help either. Last summer I visited couple which were once neighbours of me. They were both wrong about global population but in the opposite direction. The woman asked:
“Are we ten billion now?”
Her husband commented:
“I thought we were seven billion.”
My spontaneous reaction to the later was:
“That was in 2012.”
At least this is what I remember we said to each other in Swedish. When I think about it the world’s population may have reached the seven billion mark in 2011. Later the same day I noticed they have a copy of “Factfullness”. It was published posthumously in 2018 by the main author’s son and daughter-in-law. I have red it myself so I know it repeatedly states the world’s population to be seven billion. If I remember it correctly its statistics is from when the world’s population was closer to seven billion. My educated guess is the man having read the book too and not thought about when it was written. Now it exceeds eight billion without him having been aware of it.
I would be surprised if the demographic-transition effect held constant across species, even if we limit ourselves to Earth species.
It is a large numbers argument.
With a million species, it would be likely that at least one would be interested in doing that, assuming it’s physically possible. And we don’t know anything preventing it physically.
Fermi did not make any assumptions about how long a civilization had to expand, as well as assuming forever exponentiating colonization.
If an expanding civilization only has say a hundred thousand years to do it before they somehow run out of the ability to do it, it’s possible that nobody gets to us.
It’s not really a base assumption – that kind of thing is actually been recently explored much more in depth in the paper about the concept of “grabby aliens”.
The point is more: if *some* aliens that do such things exist (which doesn’t seem unlikely – we probably would do such things!) then they would still end up overwhelming the galaxy and being really hard to miss. On cosmic timescales, a few thousand years are nothing – but a civilisation that merely got a few thousand years headstart on us could at this point have a galaxy-spanning empire. The paper actually suggests an anthropic argument – if that’s the case (and of course it doesn’t need to be – there could be a Great Filter, interstellar travel could be impossible, etc), then the only kind of civilizations who could even be around to ask themselves the question, like we do, would HAVE to be among the first to reach that level of technological maturity. Because if they weren’t, they would have learned about the situation simply by seeing their star system flooded with alien ships one day out of almost nowhere.
Kittehs!
This post is a very rare Deveraux L. Climate Change is not projected to only slow the advance of our civilization; everyone credible calls it an existential threat which will most likely mostly eradicate industrial civilization over the course of the next few centuries.
This is in part because the assertion that renewable resources can replace oil is wrong. Renewable resources cannot, for many reasons including how they are produced and transported, and the machinery extracting them is installed, function without oil, coal and gas. And the resources which are needed to create the machinery needed to extract renewable resources *isn’t renewable* – rare earth metals have the same problem of limited availability as oil, gas and coal.
The problem with Malthus is his opinion of how to treat the poor, not his assertion that limited resources should matter in how we think about civilization as a project.
No, credible people do not think that climate change “will most likely mostly eradicate industrial civilization”. That’s absurd doommongering. And completely unnecessary, as if the threat of tens of millions of deaths and billions of people displaced somehow wasn’t bad enough.
I mean, if your own words are taken at face value, then it is hardly unreasonable to wonder to what extent the industrial civilization, which arose with the specific industrial hubs being supplied by the specific areas of resource cultivation and extraction in order to service specific population centers, is going to handle all of that being scrambled by the displacement of such a significant fraction of the total population.
Having said that, this requires accepting said premise in the first place. I.e. you are not actually going to find any references to billions of people being displaced in the general “gold standard” for climate science, the IPCC Assessment Report (currently in its sixth iteration). Specifically, the ~3000-page part* of that report which is actually devoted to “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” mostly uses the word “billion” in the context of financial costs and commitments. When it concerns human populations (very occasionally non-human too – i.e. “Loss of or displacement of 3 billion animals, with possible extinctions” caused by the 2019-2020 Australia wildfires), it is most often in the context of water scarcity, with paragraphs like
Other notable references to billions of people include aspects like “In 2020, almost 11% of the global population—896 million people—resided in C&S [cities and settlements] within the low-elevation coastal zone (LECZ; coastal areas below 10 m of elevation above sea level that are hydrologically connected to the sea; Haasnoot et al., 2021b), a figure which will potentially increase beyond 1 billion by 2050” or “Over 3.3 billion people live in regions that are very highly and highly vulnerable to climate change, while 2 billion people live in regions with low and very low vulnerability.” (Note that the definition of vulnerability is very extensive – i.e. the same report notes that “There are around 3 billion people exposed to dengue today” – which obviously means people who could potentially be infected where they live, rather than an infected population of 3 billion!
Instead, claims of billions of people displaced mostly stem from a five year-old “Future of the human climate niche” paper. Its approach was…dubious, to say the least. While it is absolutely true that heatwaves are both becoming more frequent and severe, and some of these heatwaves could become unsurvivable for healthy humans in the absence of air conditioning, etc.**, which would obviously encourage people to leave, the attempt to convert this idea into average temperature ranges led to truly broken numbers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332224003130
*there are two more, one on the physical science, and the other on how to address it, both of similar size – as well as a synthesis of the three, and condensed summaries of each.)
**(although it is ludicrously unlikely such a heatwave would emerge over a large area as opposed to a small pocket with especially hot microclimate – contra The Ministry for the Future and its 20 million dead Indians (and one European survivor.)
The conversation definitely benefited from this lengthy write up of what happens when you Ctrl+F for “billions” in an ICCP report. Changing “billions of people displaced” to “hundreds of millions” completely changes the point being made after all. I’m sure everyone reading this comment thread will be delighted at having a wall of quoted text to scroll past.
I have been on the internet long enough to notice that some people have a tendency to jump into threads and bring out accusations of downplaying (or even denying) climate change whenever the projections contradict their fantasies, so I decided to include additional quotes to be on the safe side.
It could actually be smaller than that. At least, this was the conclusion of a 2021 paper from the Oxford-published Journal of the European Economic Association .
https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article/20/3/1145/6460489
I’ll note that “significant increases in extreme poverty” are calculated relative to a no-climate change future (where
it’s at 4% by the end of the century.) Otherwise, the value for their “middle-of-the-road scenario” (9.5%) is basically the same as present-day (9.9%, according to OWID.) And that scenario is itself a fairly pessimistic interpretation, since it assumes that emissions will grow at the same rate as they did historically for the rest of the century (which probably causes ~3.5C warming.) It is simply not as absurdly pessimistic as the worst possible >4C scenario where the emissions grow at an accelerating rate (and which does lead to ~13.5% extreme poverty according to their calculations.)
One can add a number of caveats to the above which could increase these values even for lower warming levels, but it’s probably best to be acquainted with the base case first.
To be fair, we can actually generate oil, gas etc. from biomatter ourselves: It’s just not efficient, but if the need is for the *specifics* of fossil fuels, rather than just the energy we get out of it, we can do it. (it’s not even new tech)
It’s so incredibly new tech that both sides of WWII did it to get part of the petrochemical products they lacked!
Looking at the plummeting cost of solar power, petrol-burning cars will in a few years be found mostly in museums.
Last time I looked, the average age of private automobiles registered in the US was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 years. (It’s been slowly and steadily rising across the 21st century.) That suggests the transition to non petrol powered cars will drag out rather longer than you think. There’s a lot of people out there who can’t afford to buy a new car in the “next few years”, and a lot of people whose economic lot requires they keep their cars running as long as humanly possible.
And of course, the availability of charging infrastructure is another can o’ worms.
When I bought my first car in 1982, a mechanic I trusted told me that if a car doesn’t last 100,000 miles you were ripped off, but after that you had no grounds for complaint when it died.
When I talked to him again in the late 90s he said that was no longer true, cars were much better built now.
Of course, that was before everything in a car was computerized, I don’t know how that changes things.
When I bought my first car in 1982, a mechanic I trusted told me that if a car doesn’t last 100,000 miles you were ripped off, but after that you had no grounds for complaint when it died.
I mean, I have a Toyota Corrolla. I’m fully expecting it to last me till 250k miles, maybe 300k if i’m lucky. I got it largely for that reason.
‘Availability of charging infrastructure’ is a longstanding canard; you shouldn’t be embarrassed to be citing it, but only because we’ve all been forced to soak in it for over a generation, and it seems like common sense to people now. Adding a full speed electric car charger is something that can safely be done almost everywhere there’s an electrical grid, and a lot of places where there isn’t one. Contrast this to the ease of installing a gasoline storage tank and keeping it filled. We could see a point surprisingly soon where new gasoline filling stations are only built as part of highway truckstops. Once EVs dominate new sales, it will be only a few years until auto gasoline is bought and sold like marine gasoline is today, and you have to hire a transport company to get your old gasoline car between coasts.
If you are willing to be really flexible about what you define as “a few years”, then sure.
https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
Globally, 4.5% of cars on the road were electric last year. This is still way more than most people ever thought possible by now, but let’s keep it in context.
As you say, it depends on the meaning of “a few years”. But solar costs have fallen by x10 in in 10-15 years. Extrapolating for another 10 years, suggests they will be far cheaper still. Given that solar is competitive with fossil fuels now, we may expect it to dominate in a decade. Given that electric cars are competitive with petrol now, we can expect them to dominate in a decade.
That is a period short by comparison with the “end of the century” timescales in which people talk about global warming.
Flight will be a problem, but we might expect high speed trains to dominate over journeys of a few hundred miles anyway, at least in non-English speaking countries where it is possible to build them.
I would caution that mere extrapolation is often not helpful if you are dealing with an S-curve – as is the case with a lot of technologies. I am really unwilling to go beyond the IPCC figures here. Further, as the others have already noted, it takes quite a while for older vehicles to leave circulation. Here is a paper from earlier in the year.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44333-025-00052-6
“I would caution that mere extrapolation is often not helpful if you are dealing with an S-curve – as is the case with a lot of technologies.”
I imagine it is true with all technologies, on a long enough timescale. But when we have a trend that has lasted for many decades, and no reason to expect it to change in the near future, we should expect it to continue for a least another decade, and that is all we need.
It is not *certain*, and nothing in the future is, but it is the way to bet.
> everyone credible calls it an existential threat which will most likely mostly eradicate industrial civilization over the course of the next few centuries.
why you think this claim is correct?
why you think that “assertion that renewable resources can replace oil is wrong” is a strong claim toward it or in any way sufficient? Even if we needed to stop C02-based warming entirely or get back to say premodern levels, it is entirely possible while continuing to use oil.
BTW, to make that claim strong you would need to prove that synthesis of needed oil is most likely going to be impossible over next centuries.
If someone is so confident about this: I want to refer to “everyone credible” few centuries ago and their worries about coming surely.
> most likely mostly eradicate industrial civilization over the course of the next few centuries
this is blind panic and doom mongering that just diverts attention from actual problems and destroys credibility of people worried by climate change
While theoretically, all of the above is true, I’ll note that the scientists who have dedicated their lives to this do not appear to be confident they already understand how to solve all of these challenges.
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change
Chapter 6: Energy Systems
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_Chapter06.pdf
Some more numbers.
The problem is that I am currently unsure how much “half of current levels” or thereabouts for oil would be when converted into biofuels. If “the synthesis of needed oil” requires enough land to feed, say, 1 billion people (abstract number, but considering the massive differences in energy density, it may not be implausible), and doing so genuinely reduces food availability worldwide, then this could well be described as at least Malthusian-adjacent.
Actually, here is an estimate on biofuels from Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (which I already linked in another comment).
According to the link below, U.S. oil consumption is exactly a fifth of the global figure. Hence, if the world reduces its current oil demand by 80%, it would have to allocate the exact amount of cropland described above in order to replace the rest with corn biofuels. If it reduces it to 10%, then it would be half of that figure, and to 5%, a quarter. (If anyone has a projection where the demand falls to below 5%, I would like to see it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption
As for the other biofuels, the author (again, the Associate Director of Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at University of California, San Diego) notes the following.
Of course, the 18 terawatt figure assumes the replacement of all energy production with biofuels. The author does note that “solar or wind budgets…are 5,000 times and 50 times our demand–not just 5 times as is the
case for all biology”. However, he also notes that the assumption of indefinite exponential growth will soon significantly expand the 18 terawatt figure as well.
> The problem is that I am currently unsure how much “half of current levels” or thereabouts for oil would be when converted into biofuels.
Biofuels are probably not the best way to do this.
Solar powered electrochemical fuel synthesis can easily be 10x more efficient than biofuels, and also doesn’t require fertile growing conditions.
Note that this analysis you quote is not about “over the course of the next few centuries” but much shorter timespans of technological progress.
Looking at how much changed in last 50 or 500 years in that area (or others!) I am sceptical about strong claims that global warming is the largest threat over next “few centuries”. Claims that unspecific “everyone credible” shares this opinion is not really convincing.
About biofuels in current or near-term form being dubious – I entirely agree. But I disagree with claims that over 500 years nothing else surely will not appear.
Well, strictly speaking, there’s not much doubt that a full-scale nuclear war would be significantly more damaging than the realistic projections of climate change. However, “not as bad as thousands of near-simultaneous nuclear detonations” is a rather low bar.
One of the issues with your approach is that while we might well be able to expect significant technological improvements by the next century and beyond,* not only are there still fundamental physical constraints, but additionally, the physics of climate change mean that the current pace of progress, where it’s all about industrial developments and efficiency and all material comforts are sacrosanct, will end up locking in substantially greater impacts in the next century and one after that than what we can expect to see in our lifetimes. For one, consider this paper, which had attempted to give a general overview of the impacts between now and 2500 under the optimistic scenario (one where temperatures never cross 2 C and a lot of people would have to give up meat to achieve that, for one thing), the basically present-day one (~2.7C by 2100, ~4C by 2300, ~4.5C by 2500) and a pessimistic-leaning but still fairly plausible scenario which assumes ~3.2 C by 2100, 4C by 2150, 5C by 2200 and ~6C by 2500.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871
Now, that paper never says that the impacts it describes would lead to “the end of civilization” or anything. At the same time, it still portends stunning and effectively irreversible alterations to human (let alone animal and plant) life. Under their warmest scenario, the U.S. Midwest would become practically tropical by 2500, three-quarters of the Amazon would desertify and much of India would be likely to require “still suit” equivalents to go outside during the hottest month(s) of the year. Such stunning alterations (in addition to, say, the massive flooding of the coastlines, since the sea level rise would almost certainly exceed 10m by then) are hardly something to be nonchalant about. Even if our civilization can accelerate action in the next century after wasting time in this one, carbon capture is a very difficult and effectively multi-century process (see my comment above for the estimated rates even at ~2% of GDP investments), and sea level is even harder to stop because ice has enormous hysteresis. (Heating beyond a certain level can lock in the melting of whole glaciers even if it gets reversed later on.)
*Although, the risk of critical resource bottlenecks means it’s not exactly a sure thing. While there are currently few credible projections of technology being forced to go backwards from resource shortages, I don’t think that risk can be ruled out over multi-century timescales. A scenario where we would have to be experiencing that on top of future climate change consequences like those mentioned above is genuinely terrifying.
Using “most likely mostly eradicate industrial civilization over the course of the next few centuries” as shorthand for “future would be really bad unless we fix it” is not accurate at all.
(And yes, industrial civilization surviving may be still be monstrous and absolutely terrible future – history and fiction provides multitude of examples)
Maybe it is catchy and overall lying propaganda may be more effective*, but it will result in people caring about truth being irritated.
*I suspect that it may give short-term gains, but overall it is ineffective and make people dismiss all your claims and distrust similar claims. (we have seen some of that for global warming – partially it is enemy action, but partially reaction to people being misleading and simply lying or making predictions that turned out to be blatantly false)
> Renewable resources cannot, for many reasons including how they are produced and transported, and the machinery extracting them is installed, function without oil, coal and gas.
> And the resources which are needed to create the machinery needed to extract renewable resources *isn’t renewable* – rare earth metals have the same problem of limited availability as oil, gas and coal.
A lot of this is just “we haven’t transitioned that yet”. Eg electric trucks and electric mining equipment are absolutely possible. But when we are starting out building the first renewables, we need to do that using the existing non-renewable tech to get started.
You can, with existing tech and about 30% efficiency, turn electricity and atmospheric CO2, into oil. This means you don’t need to electrify everything. If there are is an odd few percent of humanities energy needs that can’t be electrified (mining explosives? lubricant oils? Whatever), no worries. We can use renewable electricity to make that.
Then there are the rare earth elements. Despite their name, they aren’t that rare. And these elements aren’t destroyed, this isn’t nuclear. Theoretically all the atoms are still there to recycle.
Besides, there has been recent progress on making strong magnets out of just nitrogen and iron. No rare elements needed. Clever arrangements of common elements are also an option. (We can of course use the rare elements first. While we still have enough of them and haven’t invented the common-element-only renewables.)
And if we have to, nuclear transmutation is a possibility. Especially if you only need a tiny quantity of something rare.
Thanks, very cool post.
I find that i do not share your Optimism about post industrial society beeing viable longterm at all but that is neither here nor there.
It is very viable, just not in the economic model we currenty suffer under.
I agree with the overall point, but it’s a little unfair to ignore the examples of both India and China. They both demonstrate clear Malthusian dynamics. China invented a lot of things, especially farming innovations, but relentless population rise made them poor, crammed on tiny farms, in a few hundred years. One could argue that they are the more typical case, and that Europe cheated its way out via colonialism.
I don’t agree with you. Based on what little information I have, I am fairly certain that Chinese peasants ended up poor and crammed on tiny farms because of a dictatorial government that siphoned off all the surplus to support the luxury of its upper class and imposed orders and policies at its whim and without regard for how viable they actually were.
When would you have considered China poor? China always produced substantial surpluses over subsistence. Maybe their peasant plots of land were smaller than those of a European peasant (although I think that is a southern China phenomenon relating to rice producing more yields per acre than wheat) but China was always able to produce a lot of food to feed its substantial population. All those canals and state investments in transporting food helped a lot.
And China had, from the Chou on, substantial enough surpluses to support a large literate scholarly class and bureaucracy. Han China seems about as wealthy as the Roman Empire, which is a high standard for ancient civilizations. I struggle to understand calling Tang China poor. Song And Yuan China were very wealthy; think Marco Polo’s impressions. I don’t think we can call China poor relative to other states until at least the Manchus, and that is because of stuff happening in early modern Europe.
I know even less about India than I do of China. But these are two places that produce enough food to feed substantial populations and produce luxury goods that other parts of the world really want to trade for. Neither seems poor by pre-modern standards. Certainly not enough to say they show local Malthusian effects from being at the absolute limit of food production to feed the population.
Paul is correct. China was more often than not a wealthy society. I remember hearing of a conference with scholars comparing Europe with China in 1000 AD, and all the China scholars were appalled at the backwardness and poverty of European conditions. Moving forward in time, China was so wealthy in the 18th C that when the British developed a dependency on Chinese tea, they landed in a huge trade deficit because the Chinese weren’t interested in buying any of the goods the British wanted to sell them because they were so inferior. (The British solved the trade deficit issue with opium, which is a story for another day.)
In addition, the Chinese population did not grow inexorably for centuries. It actually stayed very stable for centuries and then boomed in the 1500s. You can see a chart here. https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1950_population.htm
This pattern of population stability despite significant wealth seems to prove our host’s point – Malthus was wrong about his doomsday scenario.
Paul is correct. China was usually much wealthier than Europe through the 18th Century. Plus, Lego GM is incorrect about a constantly increasing population. The Chinese population stayed within a pretty narrow range until 1500, despite times of increasing wealth. After that, it started rising much faster. It’s called the Ming Dynasty Population Boom.
I think South Asia was relatively wealthy by global standards before colonialism.
“When would you have considered China poor? China always produced substantial surpluses over subsistence.”
Correct. Most of which was extracted from the peasants who grew it. The lot of a Chinese emperor was much better than that of a European king; the lot of a Chinese peasant was not better than that of a European one.
Well, they’re certainly not in the Malthusian trap *today*. China has been sub replacement fertility for a while, and India reached sub replacement a year or two ago (some Indian states have been there for decades already).
China’s decreasing population is caused by its one-child policy working too well. India’s is mainly caused by their middle class suffering a cost-of-living crisis. In addition, both countries have shortage of women of fertile age due to decades of widespread sex-selective abortion.
China’s Birth Planning Policy (which was never a one-child policy) should have been ended years earlier than it was. However, the “missing women” claim has been debunked. Sex-selection abortion has been illegal in China for decades.(Not saying it never happens, just that it hasn’t been widespread.) Most of the “missing” females turned out to be due to underreporting, rather than abortion or infanticide.
I may have overestimated the prevalence of sex-selective abortion. This has been illegal in India for quite some time too. However, a lot of Indians in positions of power don’t see the point of following the law. They still takes it for granted the best for themselves as individuals is the best for everyone. I have decided to call their way of thinking about others “hierarchism”:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Hierarchism-and-the-myth-of-ill-will#wbb1
Similarly, a lot of Chinese may not expect to get caught. Have you ever watched “Border Security: Australia’s Front Line”/”Nothing to Declare”? Something recurrently happening in that programme is Chinese taking loads of undeclared food into the country. Food which is amateurishly handled on top of that. I think they wrongfully expect to get away with it.
Just to be clear, underreporting is also terrible for females (it usually undermines access to education and healthcare). It’s just better than being aborted or killed.
Anyway I think both China and India have a noticeable shortage of women of fertile age. Be it due to sex-selective abortions, killing of newborn girls, abandoning of girls to institutions with insufficient resources or deliberately denying little girls health care.
China’s decreasing population is caused by its one-child policy working too well. India’s is mainly caused by their middle class suffering a cost-of-living crisis.
Possibly, but you may be overdetermining things: fertility rates have fallen precipitously in most parts of the world, so India and China are just following the general trend. At this point the thing that needs explanation is why some countries or groups still have high fertility, not why other groups have low ones.
Three Indian states are still above replacement fertility (although they’re big ones), but even the highest is now down to 3.0.
I am puzzled by the claim, “even under ideal nutrition standards, these societies increase in population slowly compared to the rapid sort of exponential growth Malthus was beginning to see in the 1700s”, because as far as I can tell in agrarian societies much before Malthus, nutritional standards were almost *never* ideal. The situation that obtained in North America in particular, where basically everyone could be a “rich peasant” because most of the indigenous population had been wiped out by disease (and the survivors were too few to do much about being pushed off their land), was very rare. I don’t know that even stuff like the Thirty Years War or the Black Death were really comparable.
(Another issue: it’s become something of a pet peeve of mine that discussions of Malthus don’t acknowledge that Malthus himself knew perfectly well there were ways to avoid exponential population growth other than starvation, he just thought most of them were immoral. Which means the problem with him is less getting his fact wrong, and more taking for granted values most of us here reject.)
The point is that population *at no point* reaches a malthusian equilibrium: Generally they seem to either go up or suffer from external shocks (diseases, wars, etc.) we just don’t see the dynamic Malthus points out.
How is that point a counterargument? It is already known that carrying capacity is an approximation, because farming yields are variable year to year, so every few years, a particularly lean harvest comes in, mortality spikes (both general malnutrition-related disease susceptibility and — as had been mentioned in previous discussions — perfectly conscious decisions about which members of the family are the least essential to there being a family ten years in the future). And then the rest of the years, the harvest is not especially poor, or sometimes even quite bountiful, so almost everyone is reasonably fed, mortality is lower for all cohorts — the old people live longer, fewer children succumb to diseases, none are left in the forest — and so the population grows rapidly. So, yes, zooming this far into the events, the population is bouncing on the underside of a fluctuating limit, which every so often shaves off some of the population before it ascends once again. When we talk of a fixed (subject to high/low-equilibrium) carrying capacity, we are deliberately zooming a bit less deep, smoothing out the bouncing, and say that the population grinds against the ceiling. (Incidentally, literal grinding tools aren’t smooth either, they have microscopic cutting edges which individually behave quite a lot like a single-point tool, but in practice we talk about them in a way that describes their combined statistical behavior.) It should be obvious that the larger external shocks, epidemics and wars, behave just the same as the year-by-year micro-shocks. Which is to say, we see exactly the Malthusian dynamic.
Except that we *don’t* see that: We see slow but steady increase in population. (with yes, some variations and shocks) we don’t see the “bouncing around a limit” thing. The population isn’t grinding against a ceiling: It’s going upwards and occasionally reversing course, but overall the trend is still notably upwards.
Europe has a big dip in and around the collapse of the Roman Empire, and during the Black Death but between those points population has *increased* not just recovered: Even the late medieval population collapse recovers relatively quickly and population then keeps slowly rising until it starts skyrocketing with the demographic transition and then grinds to a halt.
China and India both have fairly similar trends: Slow growth with occasional reverses, but still an upward trend. There’s no “stable” level of population.
Imagine you have a flask of microbes, and there is a constant drip of nutrients into the flask. And every day you increase the amount of nutrients by 1%.
It’s true that.
1) The population is constantly rising
2) The population is bumping against the limit.
The limiting factor on the population is food supply, which is slowly increasing.
The point is, if you added much more food one day, the population would rocket up. And each microbe has only just about enough food. (If it had loads of food, it could duplicate every 20 minutes.)
The rate of population growth was, until recently, substantially determined by the growth in food production. Which was slow.
The human reproductive system can double population every 30 years easily enough. Pre-modern agriculture was getting better, but not at anything like that rate.
Malthus did correctly theorize that in particular the education of women would help lowering birthrates.
And put it in practice in his schools.
To the point that a few decades later some of the first feminists were calling themselves ‘Malthusians’.
(He did also believe that the right way to go about it in practical terms was avoidance of sex rather than the use of contraception, but that’s hardly surprising from an Anglican cleric of the Victorian era…)
Since this is the thread of Pedantry: No, Malthus was not of the victorian era, he died in 1834 and his important work was in 1798. What exactly you call his period differs a bit, but he’s definitely pre-victorian.
Victoria : 1837-1901
Damn it, I knew I should have double-checked that, thanks…
So he was “Regency era” ?
I actually always assumed he was earlier than that, mid-1700’s or so. Maybe because he’s often brought up alongside Adam Smith.
Adam Smith wasn’t that much earlier than Malthus. He published Wealth of Nations during the American Revolution. (I remember this because a section about America has a footnote explaining that it was written before the “present disturbances.”)
Bullseye: He’s the generation after Adam Smith and before Queen Victoria, more or less. Malthus is about 40 years younger than Smith and thier seminal works were about 20 years apart.
(more importantly there’s a chunk of *waves hands* Events *waves hands* between them which makes them feel like separate eras despite not being that far off in linear time)
Many anachronisms in made-up stories about historical people are result of someone not checking out when things really happened. Someone might be treated as if the person only existed within the time period he or she is associated with. In reality the period lasted significantly shorter than a human lifetime. (I am assuming normal lifespans of 60 – 70 years for those having reached adulthood.) Or people associated with a longer time period are assumed to have been working adults at the same time. Which does not at all need to have been the case.
This, exactly. He ruled out the obvious solution to the Malthusian problem (contraception).
Thomas Malthus’ correspondence with David Ricardo made him change opinion on the issue of overpopulation being avoidable. He still promoted having less sex to produce fewer children (he himself had three). I consider this method unrealistic but they likely did not realise it back then.
The depopulation of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries saw the population drop by 90 – 95%. I don’t think the Eurasia has suffered anything of comparable. Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe’s population and probably something similar in other densely populated areas. This is known from archaeology to have resulted in a statistically significant increase in standard of living. Here is a map showing population decrease from the Thirty Years’ War:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bev%C3%B6lkerkungsr%C3%BCckgang_im_HRRDN_nach_dem_Drei%C3%9Figj%C3%A4hrigen_Krieg.PNG
I think this covers most of the worst hit area.
The 90/95% figure is a bit misleading AFAIK, in that it applies to some areas. (The carribean islands, and Central Mexico IIRC) I don’t have the exact figures right now but it was a lot more complicated and spread out a process (and complicated by the fact that estimates for pre-columbian population still varies a ton)
One estimate is something like 80% decrease over about a century for Latin America, IIRC, and IIRC. Which as you can imagine is still absolutely catastrophic.
But I think part of the thing to remember is that this is an ongoing population decline over time: Everyone isn’t falling over dead at once.
@Arilou,
The factoid that I always really find really striking is that it’s estimated Peru didn’t reach its pre-columbian population again until the mid 1960s.
It kind of makes sense, though. It took millennia for Peru to get to its pre-Columbian population level; stands to reason that it would take them at least a few centuries to get back to it after taking such a demographic hit.
Estimates of the combined population of the Americas in 1492 vary from 50 to 200 million. To me it seems plausible it was less than that of Ming China at the time. This would put the number in the tens of millions. My numbers for the population decrease is actually what I thought based on a couple of statements I have seen. One is present-day Mexico losing 96% of its population in less than a century. Another is an estimate that 90% of Ancient Pueblo people having no living descendants. So I though the population lose was generally around these numbers. For sure there were no “mysterious disappearances” as some people think.
That fits what I had been told.
In a paper I had once accidentally downloaded when browsing r\AskHistorians (https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/50813/), it is claimed that, based on the study of skeletons, in medieval England girls on average had an age of menarche of between 15 and 16 years and only reached ‘full fertility’, defined in terms of the likelihood of conception, carrying a healthy pregnancy to term, and surviving childbirth, around 20 years. The authors had blamed this on ‘environmental factors such a deficient diet’.
Though, as I am but a layman, I don’t know whether that was a consensus position or controversial.
The professor in an intro biology college course I took in the late 1970s said late menarche was more about lack of fresh food in the winter than anything else. Spending the winter eating just “cornmeal* mush.” That it was a northern European thing, it wasn’t true in Italy even back in ancient Roman times.
* Recall that “corn” means any grain in Europe back in the good old days, not just maize, which isn’t around there before 1500.
North Europeans in the Early Modern period did reach puberty considerably later. However, I think the stated cause is dated history. Kale can be left standing in the garden over the winter. While it would stop growing when temperatures drop below freezing it would rarely go bad. Apples, pears and various tubers would keep until spring under the right conditions (dry and consistently cool). The native cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) has in-built preservative. If kept in jars of boiled water it would keep fresh nearly a year. That said people in densely populated areas ate mostly cereal grain. I think the main reason for later pubescent development was insufficient protein and fat in their diet. This was due to deficit in economic resources rather than anything else.
When I think about it there may have been an overemphasis on fresh food in the 70ies. I have read a popular scientific book from the 70ies writing off the idea of increasing overage heights in Western Europe being caused by changes in diet. The argument was people in the countryside eating fresher foods (in the absence of agrobusiness) yet not being taller. While fresh foods have nutritional advantages over many traditionally preserved ones we have to consider macronutrients too. The main problem of the lower classes in agrarian civilisations was getting enough proteins and essential fats.
The author of the popular scientific book instead explained the historical increase in average height by outbreeding. Since then human populations have turned out to be a lot less genetically isolated than expected. Cultural barriers to interbreeding have not been dense or long-lasting enough to create the “pure-bred” humans imagined by eugenicists. It is also surprising how little interbreeding is needed for clines to arise. Two ethic groups only have to interbreed once a generation to become genetically similar in a few centuries.
Using outbreeding enhancement as prime explanation led to the expectation that average height would continue to increase. This has turned out not to happen. The average height of 18-year-olds in Western Europe stopped to increase in the same decade as the book was published. Turns out the standard of living we got in the 50ies was sufficient for people to reach the maximum height allowed by their genes. These circumstances include a varied diet, most modern vaccines and not having to share bed with someone who is ill. Such physical upbringing conditions allowed nearly everyone to grow as tall as their genes permitted.
It would be best if you provided some citation for your claims about climate change being projected to not cause a decline.
There’s a degree of taking-your-word-for-it when it comes to statements about history, especially when other historians would presumably find your claims uncontroversial. That doesn’t extend to statements about climate science, the need for citations is higher when you make claims about a different field that are not obviously universally-accepted.
Obviously estimates vary, for some unperfect overview see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_analysis_of_climate_change
Say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_analysis_of_climate_change#/media/File:Kotz_2024_global_impact_divergence.png projects 20% loss of income over 80 years.
That is about 0.3% hit to per year economic growth. Which is not so big to overcome.
That is not irrelevant but there are many other major problems of similar importance as a far as economic growth goes. For example if you care about impact to biosphere and cute animals, then “economy overall will still grow” is not sufficient answer, the same goes for islanders living on island barely above sea level and so on.
But as far as economic growth goes: when you look at data of credible studies situation is not as grim as often presented “BIGNUM billion dollars by 2100” is far less scary when you realise it is spread over decades over entire world and starts being lower than many other irritating things.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421523005074
“Researchers disagree on the sign of the net impact, but agree on the order of magnitude: The welfare loss (or gain) caused by climate change is equivalent to the welfare loss caused by an income drop of at most ten percent—a century of climate change is not worse than losing a decade of economic growth.”
Worth noting that the only author of this paper is Richard Tol, who is a bit of a controversial figure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tol
While this particular meta-analysis was peer-reviewed in a seemingly alright journal and does not display obvious bad faith (i.e. he admits all his previous estimates were overly optimistic), it is still undeniable that he leans towards a more optimistic direction more than most in the field would be. At a glance, the meta-analysis seems very heavy on Nordhaus papers – and while the latter did effectively establish the whole field of climate change economical modelling, he also quite literally described himself and fellow “ecomodernists” as “bad boys of environmentalism”.
In fact, a viral paper from a few years back The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change, had mocked Nordhaus’ models for, amongst other things, assuming that climate change would not economically impact work that is done indoors. Admittedly, while that sounds like a crippling flaw, and said paper made its author, Steve Keen, quite famous as far as the environmental science goes, I also believe he’s yet to present an alternate accounting approach – let alone one which would be similarly comprehensive.
> assuming that climate change would not economically impact work that is done indoors
What a Sisyphean effort. Before modeling 80 years into the future, have any of these people tried to apply their genius to a relatively trivial task, modeling today’s economy? Environmental science is not known for making stock market billionaires, but maybe it’s just their virtuous hatred of markets that’s stopping them?
I get the fun of modeling and won’t deny it to anyone. But the whole thing is hopelessly GIGO and if you take any of the outputs seriously, you’re a fool.
Climate is much more predicable than the stock market. There are simplified climate models which can be run on a laptop. But these require the computer to run constantly for days to an end to simulate a couple of decades of climate. I take the result of climate models as a serious possibility.
I was talking about estimating the effect of climate change on the economy, decades out into the future.
Indeed, the lack of citations is extremely unfortunate. Unfortunately, things like this rarely seem to get amended here.
Having said that, the point does not appear to be wrong as far the conventional accounting goes. Here’s an illustrative paragraph.
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Chapter 9: Africa
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_Chapter09.pdf
So according to that, the “natural” increase in African GDP over the next 75 years in the absence of warming is expected to be so high, that it would have to drop by 80% due to warming in order for some African countries to become poorer than they are now. I’ll also note that due to the logarithmic nature of greenhouse effect, “warming >4°C” is considered rather unlikely, particularly by 2100 – fewer than 10% of IPCC climate change experts expect that to happen, even as about half expect 3°C. (Although, 3°C by 2100 quite naturally leads to 4°C by 2200-2300 if further progress stalls out.)
At the same time, it is worth noting that there are some academics who claim far higher damages. They are beloved on the pages of The Guardian, but are clearly quite distant from the mainstream. Adjudicating their arguments is probably beyond the scope of this particular comment.
I don’t think 4°C per century would be possible for technological civilisation to survive. It would be too fast for society to adjust to.
I am curious why you think so given that current technological civilisation exists over much broader climate range.
(note: significantly less cultist claims are much easier to defend)
The problem is that those global warming projections refer, unsurprisingly, to the entire globe – and as was already discussed above, said globe is mostly covered by water and said water acts as a great thermal buffer. Thus, the warming over land is about 1.5X the average warming figure (and over 3X for the poles), so that 4C figure is more like 6C for places where people actually live.
To give an example of what that means, here’s a graph from that 2020-2500 paper I mentioned in my other reply, which depicts how many months a year will have days with peak temperature values greater than 38 C in particular regions of the globe.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/bec10ead-3a48-4bc9-b771-29fa4875752d/gcb15871-fig-0003-m.jpg
Right now, these conditions only really occur in Sahel, parts of Saudi Arabia and Iran or hottest parts of the Australian outback, and even in those, mostly for a month or two in the summer. In the year 2200, when global warming would be ~3.5C under the contemporary scenario and ~5C and the more pessimistic scenario, pretty much the entire northern half of Africa and Australia, as well as much of India, the Middle East and substantial areas of South America would have be experiencing these conditions – and often, for ~3 months (i.e. the entire summer). Under the more pessimistic scenario with ~5C warming, these conditions would be experienced for closer to 6 months (i.e. the entire summer + the adjacent months) in the worst-affected areas. By the year 2500 in the pessimistic scenario where there is ~6C warming, literally most of Africa, most of Australia and almost all of Brazil would experience such conditions for half a year. (And for that matter, half the US would experience them for 1-3 months, as well as PRC’s wealthiest and and most developed area, the eastern coast.) These conditions may not force people to flee to cooler areas (I already noted above that the “climate niche” concept is quite flawed) but they would undoubtedly make them a lot more miserable.
Now, we can compare this with what IPCC report wrote about the impacts in Africa in the passage above, and with another passage, where they wrote the following about global impacts.
About the latter part, one of the most prominent researchers on these “tipping elements” (usually shortened to “tipping points” informally) did say about 4C warming a few years back that “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that” (notoriously, this got misquoted by The Guardian as “a billion people or maybe even half of that”.) His view might be in the minority,but I would not say it’s altogether unreasonable. At the very least, even if the economists say that the conditions above would not end civilization, it’s hard not to see they would increase human misery in ways which the GDP index might not adequately capture.
I was referring to the pace of warming and not the end result. If it happens too quickly the agriculture needed to feed billions of people would not be able to adapt. Which in turn would mean the end of technological civilisation.
@YARD
note that claim was “I don’t think 4°C per century would be possible for technological civilisation to survive.” and I was complaining about accuracy of that one.
“it will not end technological civilisation” or “it will not cause extinction of humanity” does not mean that problem does not exist! I care about much lesser problems! If fact all problems that I care about are smaller!
But cultist doomers making this claims are annoying and just making untrue claims. And it causes people to propose solutions that have effects worse than global warming in the first place.
(if people would be commenting “global warming is unimportant and there is no reason to do much about it” I would argue in a different direction, but…)
(if people would be commenting “global warming is unimportant and there is no reason to do much about it” I would argue in a different direction, but…)
Some very important people, including most importantly the President of the United States, say exactly that (or worse), so one could argue the only way to counter their influence is to go to the opposite extreme. I’m not sure I would agree with that personally, but then again, I’m not sure I would disagree with it, either.
Your president is a living annoyance. He does not know what he is talking about but wrongfully thinks he does.
I think that “possible for technological civilisation to survive” is a very, very high bar, and various horrible scenarios that go WAY beyond current projections don’t come even close to making it impossible for a technological civilization to survive.
Irreversibly losing the majority of our agriculture and most people horribly dying wouldn’t do that – 2 billion people after WW1 definitely was a technological civilization, so if something threatens to bring us back to that (and IMHO worst scenarios considered in the IPCC report don’t), it’s not in the ballpark of making it impossible for a technological civilization to survive.
If most of currently inhabited places became uninhabitable deserts, that’s not in the same ballpark as what you’re suggesting as long as some proportion of global land can be made habitable with achievable technology – even if anything south of Canada and Siberia is a barren desert (which, again, even worst case scenarios don’t expect), that’s horrible but still far from eliminating civilization – a technological civilization can reasonably exist even if it’s limited solely to the north.
Like, noone’s saying that we’re certain that things won’t be horrible; it’s just that you keep systematically using extreme assertions that are like orders of magnitude beyond merely horrible, and *that* isn’t well supported by evidence or realistic extrapolations.
@Mateusz Konieczny
I thought I already made clear I did not agree with that point of the OP in multiple prior comments. The reason I responded at all was more re. your “I am sceptical about strong claims that global warming is the largest threat over next “few centuries”” which seemed to imply you believe in larger threats, and so I noted my disagreement. To me, the only greater risk is nuclear war* – and the trouble is that the two risks do not have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, the people who anticipate the industrial civilization to be “eradicated” generally incorporate world-war level conflicts into their assumptions as well. Hence, I am replying to the comment above, which I think overlaps with this point.
So, as noted above, the worst scenarios do not expect anything even close to this – in particular, “barren deserts” would not happen because the hotter Earth gets, the more water is evaporated from the oceans and then rains back out as precipitation, so while some areas do get more barren than now, the average trend is the opposite. After all, dinosaurs’ much hotter Earth was also much more of a jungle world, rather than a desert one. (Though much of e.g. South America does desertify with high warming, and even moist jungle can still be too hot for humans to survive in during the summer, as described above.)
However, I believe the main difference between you or Mr. Konieczny and someone more like Ms. Synnerholm or the OOP is that you seem to assume that if a scenario where billions of people are facing their lands becoming uninhabitable does occur, then they’ll just accept it and die. In comparison, “collapse” proponents tend to assume a desperate effort of those billions to relocate to the north – which will be met with epic violence. Then, regardless of which side “wins” (and the very logic of agriculture losing capability to support the majority of people means that most of the combatants and their families have to die), it is that violence which will in turn leave even the still-habitable areas too devastated to support the industrial civilization. Then you can add a bunch of other popular-but-dubious narratives (i.e. we have already had a comment suggesting that people’s fertility is permanently lowered by pollution) to complete that mental picture.
The vision above would be particularly plausible if we don’t assume lurid “Camp of the Saints” fantasies of unarmed boats and human waves, but an organized effort by the governments of soon-to-be-uninhabitable states to claim habitable land, where nuclear weapons are the ultimate argument. Nuclear deterrence does not work when the other state is facing extinction anyway, and you can easily imagine a scenario where, if it seems like the literal “Global North” is going to manage to block itself off from the billions soon to die, the latter will just launch all their nukes at it (both from the present-day nuclear states south of habitability line, and any countries which pursued breakout as their final priority) and take everyone down together. Something like that is completely internally consistent with Mad Max, for instance – which still seems to be the main mental model for most people (again, notice how your own mind leapt to barren deserts when imagining the future, not jungles.)
So, to me, this is the reason why the argument “civilization will persist even if billions die in the near future” is not particularly convincing on face value. Maybe it can still be made more plausible than the alternative, but it’s better to not go there and focus on the fact “billions dying” is not considered particularly plausible in the first place. I.e.
This is a convincing narrative on face value, but it’s unclear if it matches the numbers. In comments under Part II of the ongoing Peasant series, we discussed agriculture and climate change quite a bit, and I found a fairly recent paper which argues that by 2100 under SSP5-8.5 (which is actually closer to 5 degrees of warming by 2100 than 4), wheat yields globally would increase by 18%, doing a lot to offset maize yields falling by a quarter. (Rice and soybeans, the other two of the “Big Four” crops, would barely change.) Now, in response, I was presented with a more recent paper which actually finds a ~30% decline for most crops under the same scenario – but it used purely empirical statistical extrapolations from past data, rather than detailed models than the other study, so it’s far from clear if its results are “better”. You can read the full discussion around here.
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/comment-page-1/#comment-85118
*I suppose asteroids and the like can easily be more devastating than anthropogenic climate change, as proven by the Chicxulub impact. However, I also recall that all the asteroids even close to this size that have the slightest risk of impacting Earth in the next few centuries have already been discovered.
I was thinking of how fast farmers can adapt new crops and/or new agricultural methods. Has anyone considered this?
I wonder how the medium term balance between growing energy demand as millions continue to move out of poverty versus new renewables technology is going to play out. The advances in solar for instance justify some optimism but there also are dashed hopes, fusion energy for example is probably doomed to remain a dead end unfortunately. I have to think some OPEC countries for instance would be visibly nervous in case they expected non negligible reductions in oil demand in the near future. Maybe they end up proven wrong, but until then who knows?.
The OPEC sovereign wealth funds have been shoveling money into overseas investment since the 1980s, hedging against the end of oil. They are visibly nervous, but the panic has been running so long now that it’s become invisible.
They’re very nervous. If you’ve ever wondered why Dubai is how it is, that’s why: the Emirate recognizes that oil is not a long term plan for prosperity and is desperately trying to jumpstart a modern service economy that will outlive the oil. Saudi Arabia is similar. Some other oil states (eg, Iran) have more pressing problems, so they’re not doing much planning for the future, but that’s not because they think oil money will last forever.
Well, if only the world’s top climate scientists happened to be writing reports every ~6 years, which also try to address this very thing!
I believe this chapter, “Mitigation and Development Pathways in the Near to Mid-term”, is the most relevant one for this question, but you are welcome to check out the other parts of the report. (Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s one neat, quotable answer because the future is not written – only a balance of possibilities, and the basic balance is already covered by the SSP projections.)
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_Chapter04.pdf
Malthus was groping towards a rather critical ecological concept (and, fundamentally, he IS making an ecological argument), but like a lot of these early attempts he missed the mark. That’s not a problem in and of itself–science very frequently advances via correcting previous errors–but to keep using his work as gospel is a failure.
Specifically, Malthus is approaching the idea of a limiting factor. No species has an infinite number of members; SOMETHING limits all of them. Malthus postulates that this limit is some limiting resource, for reasons that likely seemed sound at the time. Every observed species appeared to be limited by the availability of some resource. The number of cows was limited to the amount of fodder; the number of bunnies is limited by the grass. Makes perfect sense that the same would apply to humans, especially at a time when periodic famine was still part of the human experience.
But closer examination proved that not to be the case in many instances. Some critters are limited by some resource, but others are limited by the surplus being eaten. Others are limited by population density (too many of the organism in an area and you get violent conflicts even if there is enough food for them). Disease was also one–Europe could support far more people during the Black Plague than it actually had, but the Plague kept killing people. The range of potential limiting factors is in fact diverse, and only some of them constitute what can reasonably be called “resources”.
Also, it must be admitted that humans are sentient. This matters, because we can plan ahead and think beyond food/friend/foe/procreate (trying to keep it PG here). We can value things greater than procreation, we can make decisions that will improve the lives of our kin without procreating ourselves, we can go to war and die on some foreign soil, we have all kinds of options. This means that we are entirely capable of CHOOSING to keep our population at a certain level–either individually or by general social consensus (top-down attempts end badly; humans don’t like to be told who to mate with).
To give an example of what I mean: We can decide that “subsistence and a little more” isn’t good enough, and realize that if we have three kids that’s what they’re getting. So we have one–either through abstinence, condoms, or other means of family planning. This results in our offspring having a far better outcome (assuming they survive of course). If enough people do this, you get a society that chooses to contract, despite there being resources to support more people.
Again, Malthus did fine. He did the best he could, with the information he had, which is all we can ask of any researcher. To ignore ecology and sentience in an argument about the ecology of humans in this day and age, however, is on par with believing the Earth is flat in terms of intellectual vacuity.
The problem isn’t that Malthus was wrong, as Bret points out, he was *productively* wrong. (there are some arguments about how some of his arguments have been deployed politically that are uh… not nice, but I don’t think it’s really fair to blame Malthus for that) The problem is that *people keep repeating Malthus arguments* when we know he was wrong. The problem isn’t with Malthus; It’s with us.
Yes, exactly!
Malthus is like Bishop Usher to me. Within their paradigms they at least made a good-faith effort to answer thorny problems in a systematic way. They were wrong; it happens. But…well, you and I have several hundred years of knowledge obtained after they stopped writing to play with. If we haven’t learned anything in the past several centuries, that’s on US, not them. We’re supposed to stand on the shoulders of giants, not bow down to them.
I am not sure if James Ussher was even productively wrong. To me Geology and Palaeontology started with the works of Robert Hooke and Niels Steensen. Both realised fossils had been pats of organisms and rocks forming through natural processes.
Malthus was a rich scion, born to families who had been on the landlord side of the peasant economy for generations. He believed that rural immiseration was the result of competition between members of the lower class rather than a consequence of the extractive regime they were subject to. He was a tendentious researcher and philosopher who always sought to justify and flatter the elite of an imperial society.
Malthus was writing when the idea of exponential growth was new (ish) and that sort of thing practially never happens in any system – certainly not any biological system. A common adjustment taught in introductory differential equations classes – right after deriving exponential growth is to add the idea of competition for resources. A fairly straightforward change to the differential equation gives us instead of Malthusian growth, the idea of ‘carrying capacity’ and a population curve that rises quickly, but then slows as it hits this wall. This turns out to be much more realistic, and you can see the US population of the 1800s following this curve until the advent of internal combustion and the resulting improvements in food production. It’s hard to see what the current carrying capacity is – (1) not really enough data points and (2) food production technology is still improving, so the carrying capacity hasn’t settled yet.
Note – this newer differential equation is called the Logistic Equation. Of course – population dynamics are still more complicated, so there are significantly better actuarial models today than that of Verhulst in 1838, and far better than Malthus 40 years prior.
Exponential growth happens all the time, including in biological systems : it’s what you get when there’s a positive feedback loop.
I guess you mean to say that it typically happens for a short amount of time (because it cannot keep up for long), and/or it’s heavily dampened.
But still, if you look at Lotka–Volterra predator–prey model differential equation examples, the cycles can look very exponential.
@PeakSingularity,
right, he meant that no biological system experiences exponential growth for any extended period of time.
yeah the Malthus only possible right is rich folks are super dicks is the whole thing. artificial constraints and the like. and like only a very small constraint ignoring like 20 billion other things.
fun Y/A novel breeding ground I suppose.
God am I depressed that they changed movie Thanos motivations to that, then bloody Humored it with the water got cleaner line, just let him be a cray-cray that is in love with Death, is that so wrong…..
like that old Spiderman meme with Saruon,
Spider Man: “with that Technology you could cure cancer!!”
Saaruon: ” I dont want to cure Cancer, I want to turn People into Dinosaurs!”
Man knows what he is about.
*Grumble grumble* that meme is so annoying because it’s not even Sauron’s deal! Sauron is a mutant energy vampire who named himself after the LOTR villain!* *Professor Stegron* is the guy who wants to turn people into dinosaurs! But that meme has now forever changed that *grumble grumble*.
* Yes, this is canon.
I don’t normally do this, but it’s “coarseware” not “courseware”. In this case, the misspelling makes it meaningfully difficult to Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo) the word to figure out what Our Author is talking about. (“The Romans had educational software? Huh?”)
Lacking ceramics is something only applying some early farmers. Plus people on islands which had run out of usable clay.
If Malthus said that population cannot expand rapidly and exponentially indefinitely, I don’t think you can disprove him by pointing out that historically population did not expand rapidly and exponentially indefinitely.
You can disprove vulgar Malthusians who claim that average living standards can never get better or worse, by pointing out that historically average living standards have sometimes gotten better or worse, but that is not quite the same thing.
Who said anything about ‘disproving’ Malthus? As I note, his conclusions follow inexorably from his premises, its just that his premises don’t actually hold historically. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, it just means he’s theorizing about a reality that has not, in fact, existed.
” if it is the case that the primary resources to sustain a population grow only linearly, but population grows exponentially, then it must be the case that population will, relatively swiftly, approach the limits of resources, leading to general poverty and immiseration, which in turn provide the check that limits population growth.”
Which of these postulates are we saying was false? He quotes the United States of his day as having the most nearly unchecked growth, and a doubling time of 25 years. That is 16-fold growth in a century., and 250 years to grow thousandfold. I think we can safely state that population did not grow at that rate in Europe for most of historic time. The population growth was checked by some factor.
To quote Malthus on the check:
“The effects of this check remain now to be considered.
Among plants and animals the view of the subject is simple. They are all impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of their species, and this instinct is interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for their offspring. Wherever therefore there is liberty, the power of increase is exerted, and the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment, which is common to animals and plants, and among animals by becoming the prey of others.
The effects of this check on man are more complicated. Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his career and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world for whom he cannot provide the means of subsistence. In a state of equality, this would be the simple question. In the present state of society, other considerations occur. Will he not lower his rank in life? Will he not subject himself to greater difficulties than he at present feels? Will he not be obliged to labour harder? and if he has a large family, will his utmost exertions enable him to support them? May he not see his offspring in rags and misery, and clamouring for bread that he cannot give them? And may he not be reduced to the grating necessity of forfeiting his independence, and of being obliged to the sparing hand of charity for support?”
So Malthus thought the check was people regulating their fertility to prevent their immiseration. Are we disagreeing with that assessment?
If not, where are we saying he was wrong? Which premise was false?
We are in the middle of a series saying that peasants regulated their fertility to prevent their immiseration. We are in a poor position to say that Malthus was wrong to believe that the increase of population was checked by people regulating their fertility to prevent their immiseration.
We might say he would have been wrong to believe that famine was inevitable, but that is not what he claimed to believe.
So which premise was false?
The premise that was false is this:
That is, the exponential population growth that he saw in his particular time period did not continue indefinitely until the resources ran out, but was arrested earlier than that by the effects of education and wealth.
“the effects of education and wealth.”
aka preventive checks talked about by… Malthus.
The “preventive checks” he thought were necessary would have been intentional, public-minded efforts to reduce population growth. Not the self-interested lifestyle changes that actually made the difference.
He was not just neutrally describing phenomena; he was advocating specific public (not necessarily state-led) policy which turned out to be unnecessary.
The entire concept of “population bouncing back” that you talked about earlier is basically Malthusian – in a Malthusian world, for every given socio-technological context and area of countryside, there is a “stable level of population”, and despite disturbances, population will converge to that stable level of population, normally within less than a century.
Of course, as you said, that stable level of population depends on the socio-technological context, which slowly increased as farming got better between 3000 BC and 1700 AD – with some decreases when the social context was disrupted, for example during the fall of Rome.
As I understand it, there is no contradiction in having a stable level of population that varies with time – of course, if the level varies too quickly, then equilibrium will never be achieved, but this seems to be rare throughout pre-industrial history.
This is different from the modern world, where there is no sense of “stable level of population” – if a country is populated or depopulated, there’s no reason to believe that it will “bounce-back” within any time period.
That’s not really what happens though: At least in farming societies population is *rising*. It sometiems suffers setbacks (and then bounces back more quickly) but it’s not *stagnant* European population *doubles* from 1000 to 1500. (and this is despite the Black Death) it doesen’t find a stable level and fluctuate around there.
Merging in thread.
You describe the evidence yourself. There are multiple sharp setbacks of various sizes, from which the population recovers quickly to the carrying capacity (a.k.a. the stable level), which is itself slowly increasing for the reasons Ariel describes: better technology (plows, horse collars, etc.) and better capitalization/organization (more trade, specialization, etc., consider for example the Baltic grain trade). These repeated collapses and dips and setbacks and shocks, and the respective fast recoveries from them constitute the “bouncing below the limit”. Which limit happens, as a separate fact, to be slowly moving upwards.
Likewise, I’m confused as to why the Professor repeatedly mentions infinite time, or multi-millennia timescales. Again, in the case of societies not on the frontier of agriculture (be that the classical Mediterranean or medieval Europe), it only takes a few generations for the population to recover from even very deep shocks. A century is plenty enough time for the Malthusian dynamic to present itself. [Because the equilibrium is noisy with yearly harvest fluctuation, goring oxen, etc.] once we get close to the equilibrium, it doesn’t matter for how long we have been around the equilibrium, or in other words, it cannot be read out from the equilibrium how long we have been there. As a historical limits-of-evidence point: given even an unrealistically complete demographic snapshot, it cannot be reconstructed when the population previously suffered a major shock, and how deep, unless an artifact of its extremely recent happening is observable (“hm, why are there no individuals between ages 6 and 12 in the village?”).
“from which the population recovers quickly to the carrying capacity (a.k.a. the stable level)”
No, that is not the carrying capacity! That’s a separate function of how human reproduction (and mortality) works. When humans suffer a setback that *tends* to be among non-reproducing humans, which means population can bounce back to previous levels fairly quickly. That has nothing to do with the “carrying capacity”, it’s just a matter of how humans are replaced by other humans.
There is no limit, or at least, we’ve never *reached* the limit as an observable thing, rather, what is happening is simply that population growth is messy, and unstable in these kinds of systems. But that messiness does not imply a separate carrying capacity; It’s just that there’s always fluctuations in population growth.
If we try to give a compact description of our population time-series data, we come up with the following:
1) there is an underlying slow-growth trendline;
2) whenever the population is below the slow-growth trendline, it grows quickly; whenever the population is at (read: close to) the slow-growth trendline, it grows slowly;
3) except {uncompressable set of events} where the population falls by some amount, see attached table.
It would be convenient to give a name to the slow-growth trendline, because “slow-growth trendline” is a mouthful. That name can be Gaius. Or it can be notcarrying notcapacity. It doesn’t much matter; the name doesn’t change what it does, which is the important thing.
“There is no limit, or at least, we’ve never *reached* the limit as an observable thing”
Sure, there isn’t a mechanism where if the peasants have a few too many children, suddenly the heavenly trumpets sound and a booming voice announces “thou shalt construct additional pylons” before you can have more children. We merely observe that the dataseries behaves exactly as if the slow-growth trendline formed a limit; and furthermore we observe that when the population is close to the slow-growth trendline, malnutrition is much more common, and more people die to seasonal diseases; and we put two and two together and conclude that, yes, we can from these observations infer the existence of Gaius the notcarrying notcapacity. And obviously this will not be a figure exact down to the single headcount.
There is no limit, or at least, we’ve never *reached* the limit as an observable thing,
Quite a number of Polynesian societies (i.e. societies stuck on self contained islands or archipelagoes where they had no place to expand to) did in fact reach their carrying capacity (and in one or two cases may have actually gone extinct).
I think that for most of the human experience, the march of progress was very slow.
Let us assume, generously, that between 400 CE and 1400 CE the steppe nomads in North America improved their tech level so that it would support twice the population density.
Assuming (also generously) only 30 generations per millennium, that would mean that instead of a steady-state fertility ratio of 2, they could afford a whopping 2.05 kids per woman. It seems unlikely that they managed to achieve exactly that growth rate by pure chance.
Instead, it seems much more likely that under abundance conditions, they would have had a TFR of 2.5 or more, and the non-abundance of land and food cut down their reproductive rate to what the land could bear through a mixture of disease, famine and war.
(For a typical Mesopotamian farmer a few thousand years BCE, I would assume that the story is similar. New tech and hard work to bring new land under cultivation might increase the maximum population density by a factor of 2 per millennium, but it will not increase it by a factor of 800 which would correspond to a TFR of 2.5 for 30 generations.)
However, this does not imply constant misery while everyone is having barely enough to support their life, because of fluctuations in the environment. Instead, people surviving childhood might have an ok-ish life for 6d6 years, and then they spend a few weeks dying of some plague, or get killed in war, or starve as a result of a bad harvest.
Also one of Malthus’ assumptions seems to be that populations will continue to increase exponentially. Since so many industrialized countries are struggling with low birth rates (Korea, Japan, Germany, etc) this assumption seems flawed.
“Meanwhile over on YouTube and coinciding a bit with our discussion of Malthus, Angela Collier has a video on why “dyson spheres are a joke,“3 in the sense that they were quite literally proposed by Freeman J. Dyson as a joke, a deliberate ‘send up’ of the work of some of his colleagues he found silly, rather than ever being a serious suggestion for science fiction super-structures.”
This would be the article in question: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.131.3414.1667
“Abstract
If extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist and have reached a high level of technical development, one by-product of their energy metabolism is likely to be the large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation. It is proposed that a search for sources of infrared radiation should accompany the recently initiated search for interstellar radio communications.”
I cannot read it, and am not going to pay to do so. But every article and essay about Dyson spheres I have read says he was thinking about what an alien civilization might do that was detectable to astronomers on Earth. Well, there is the pollution of their civilization. Even solar panels ultimately turn visible sunlight into IR radiation. In the limit, enough orbiting satellites and space stations would absorb almost all visible light, reemitting it as IR radiation. So you could look for dim stars that emit a lot of IR. Our civilization would not show up like that, but a more advanced one might.
There is a bit in this interview in which he notes it is odd to be famous for something that wasn’t “serious” or “work”, but he doesn’t say he was mocking anyone. And I don’t suppose the reviewers at Science thought he was, either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAIfzUoyhU
Dyson was a physicist and mathematician. If you look at the “serious work” on his Wikipedia page, it involves a lot of fairly terrifying math (by the standards of the rest of us). Suggesting that an astronomer who wanted to look for extrasolar civilizations could look for stars with an excess IR signature wouldn’t require that. On the other hand, it probably wasn’t the sort of article that got you tenure, even in his day.
“we’re not smarter, we just have the luck of a modestly better vantage.”
Well actually, we don’t have childhood iodine deficiency causing goiter and its symptoms; we don’t have, you know, childhood malnutrition and its symptoms; we don’t have rampant childhood hookworm-and-various-other-parasite infections; we don’t have cholera and typhoid and all the other bacterial, viral, etc. infections that probably don’t exactly benefit developing brains either. At least, not (read: rarely) in the developed world; proliferating these benefits worldwide is a slow process but the trend is that it is moving forward.
I think it Bret means the highly educated are not that much smarter. We are more correct not because we are radically smarter but because we as a society have accumulated more knowledge.
Indeed, which is why I started the comment with the infamous “well-actually”. Accumulation of technology, both material (e.g. the spinning wheel) and social (e.g. using courts rather than feuding for dispute-resolution) drives progress the most. There is an excellent rabbit hole here, namely that it is possible for technologies, both “hard” and “soft”, to be lost: from anthropologists finding tribes that forgot how to make fire, through the Royal Navy forgetting how to prevent scurvy and Scott’s antarctic expedition getting it, to criminal gangs — unable to use the regular courts — failing to reinvent them and instead having bloody gang wars. Organized education is notable here because schools are a very adult-labor-efficient way to transmit things such as literacy and “home economics”. Which takes us back to the topic!
Just as the 20th century saw some populations’ average heights increase steeply as a result of improved nutrition and/or public health, it stands to reason that e.g. that Flynn effect is because we kept solving public health issues. My favorite illustration is that nowadays every transportation provider — airlines, railways, buses — uses upholstered fabric seats, which would have been an untenable proposition back when lice and fleas weren’t seriously rare.
I was thinking more in terms of Bret meaning something like: we are more correct not because we are radically smarter but because we have access to more data. This is why you should not trust early attempts at explanation too much. Which is what he accuses Neo-Malthusians of doing.
So the problem with Malthusians (moreso than Malthus) is that they seem to have this idea that an area gets “full” and then population stops increasing (or at least bounces up and down around the stable level) and this… doesen’t seem to happen?
European population history is a pretty clearly upwards pointing one frmo prehistory: Sometimes it dips (the black Death, the Antonine plague and the fall of the roman empire, etc.) but generally it keeps moving upwards. It never stabilizes.
The same is true with India: It shows a pretty consistent upward trend in the population than then rockets off into the stratosphere as the first stage of the demographic transition hits. Same thing in China: The Qing (who admittedly also held larger territory) is about three times the population of the Han. There’s some dips in there as well, but in general *population keeps growing, it does not stabilize*… Until it reaches modern times when the reasons are clearly *not* due to hitting some kind of carrying capacity limit.
The Qing may have had 3 x the population of the Han, but most of China’s population growth during that 2000 years happened after 1500. I’m not saying the population was stable during that time, but the population in the year 1 (mid Han Dynasty) is pretty close to what it is in the year 1000 (Song Dynasty) and even the end of the 14th C (early Ming). It fluctuates between around 50million and 100million for a couple of millennia, and then it takes off in sustained growth around 1500. I would argue that China’s case still disproves Malthus because it got significantly wealthier during those centuries, but the population didn’t explode into misery.
That doesn’t disprove Malthus, because he didn’t say that increasing population must lead to misery. What he said is that the population cannot exceed that permitted by the food supply, and that among humans that leads to people not having children they cannot feed.
I can’t help but feel that critiques of Malthus would be improved if at least some people read his essay before criticising it. Essentially no one does.
Hence why I said “With Malthusians (rather than Malthus)”.
That said I think part of the problem is that while food supply is a bottleneck I don’t think it quite works the way some people think? Like, people are not actually maximizing food supply if that makes sense? They’re making as much food as they expect they’ll need + some for insurance, then they basically stop and do other things. (the problem, and the reason for reoccurring famine is that it is very hard to predict what yield you’re going to end up with) so even in these agricultural societies there is usually “slack” in the *potential* food supply, even if it is innefficient (and might make predicting future harvests even more dicey)
Hence my point that population doesen’t seem to stop at some kind of stable level: It’s a constantly (albeit slowly) rising one, because the actual “cap” on food supply isn’t actually reached, pretty much ever. (though someone pointed out some places like polynesian islands, though my understanding even in those cases that tended to be solved with emigration)
If “by pretty close” you mean “Twice the size”, sure.
My point is that growth is slow (it is slow in most agricultural societies) but it doesen’t really *stop*. Occasionally you get an Event (an epidemic, a famine, a period fo war and calamity) that sets it back but then it starts trundling along again.
No, I picked 3 points in Chinese history when the population was more or less 60-70 million over a really long time. But even more relevant, the size of China changes drastically over that time period. Han China is half the size of Qing China. Now, I know that the a lot of the area “missing” from Han China is sparsely populated mountains and desert, but it would also be missing modern day Fujian and Sichuan. I’m not disagreeing that the population of China increased over time, depending on lots of variables. But the variables are relevant.
I think Song China’s population increased considerably from the late 10th century to the middle of the 13th. Then the Mongols invaded massacring entire cities. Including millions of refugees in areas without any forest to hide in. They would also have destroyed irrigation networks resulting in famines, at least in parts of the south. In the middle of the 14th century Black Death stuck killing a significant part of the population. This led to the Mongol-descended Yuan clan losing power to the Ming clan. The later would have sized control of an area having suffered two demographics catastrophes less than a century apart. The following three centuries were relatively peaceful. No wonder population growth seem to have really taken off during these.
Turns out I misunderstood exactly when events took place. Genghis Khan died from his injury after a hunting accident in 1227. The areas he had conquered were then divided between the sons he had with his first wife. However, these continued to conquer in ways not unlike their father. Eventually the Yuan dynasty was founded by Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai in 1271.
In the middle of the 14th century Black Death struck the more densely populated parts of Eurasia. Only 80 years after the establishment of the Yuan dynasty China politically splintered. This was followed by reunification under the Ming clan in 1368. This dynasty then ruled China until 1644. Turing these 276 years I don’t think there were any major wars. At least not any large enough to be demographically significant.
“So the problem with Malthusians (moreso than Malthus) is that they seem to have this idea that an area gets “full” and then population stops increasing (or at least bounces up and down around the stable level) and this… doesen’t seem to happen?”
It happened in the countries Malthus was discussing i.e. every society in the world in his time or before. He explicitly points out that in the United States the population doubled every 25 years, and had done ever since the first English settlements, with similar increases in every European settlement not subject to tropical diseases. And that it wasn’t doing that in Europe itself for exactly the reasons discussed in https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/.
Specifically: “the conundrum the peasant family finds themselves in is two-fold: on the one hand, they need to have a lot of pregnancies to achieve stable replacement or slow growth, but on the other hand, they still need to suppress normal ‘maximum’ fertility to avoid unsustainable household growth.”
The population was stabilised by people having as many children as possible consistent with keeping their respectability basket. He also pointed out that the same thing happened with the Big Man’s household – it is just that the Big Man had a more impressive and expensive respectability basket to maintain.
The person who claimed that the population would increase unchecked and exponentially until their was a massive genocidal famine was Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s. More than a century after Malthus was dead.
The very brief summary of Malthus I’ve seen has always been “population can grow exponentially, food supply can at best grow linearly”. Slow upward growth is exactly Malthusian: population limited by small improvements to the food supply, well short of reproductive potential without food constraints.
> happens to basically all societies as they grow wealthier and more educated
The question is, how much wealthier and more educated? This becomes concern because some third world countries seem to start to taste demographic transition… without being anywhere close to being as wealthy and as educated as first world countries. Thus, the slowing growth may not actually result from either wealth or education, but instead a crisis affecting humanity as a whole (micro plastics?). It’d be very funny if nuclear war happens and GDP globally drops off a cliff yet growth still declines (after the initial bombing) while there should be baby booming, because human reproductive rate is impaired permanently for some reason.
“how much wealthier and more educated?”
“Somwhere around the level of 19th century europeans”, which is honestly, most people around now.
The “educated” portion seems to be doing more work than the “wealthier” bit. Even middle or lower-middle income societies, once they achieved a certain level of women’s education (e.g. Central America, Southeast Asia etc.), saw fertility rates crash.
It has been said “education is the best contraceptive”. When women get basic education (like five or six years of primary school) it enables them to realise the benefit of having fewer children so they can take better care of them.
The evidence of that is a lot less compelling than commonly believed – even The Guardian had to acknowledge a challenge to the narrative it did more than most to birth into existence.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/05/stable-sperm-counts-in-denmark-cast-doubt-on-spermageddon-fears
The claims of decreasing sperm counts have turned out to be insufficiently evidenced:
https://bigthink.com/health/sperm-count-decline/
@Hafizh Makmur,
Thus, the slowing growth may not actually result from either wealth or education, but instead a crisis affecting humanity as a whole (micro plastics?).
Except that fertility continues to be very high among groups (including in industrialized countries- including in *big cities* in industrialized countries) which have really strong religious or cultural attachment to high fertility. And still fairly high among other groups, including in developed industrial or post industrial countries, which have more general patriarchal norms. There aren’t a lot of such groups (fortunately), which is why fertility rates have fallen so precipitously almost everywhere, but they do show that people today could have high fertility if they wanted to (in general, they don’t).
People never taught about modern contraception still have something like five or six children even if they utilise lactational amenorrhea.
Peak population might even be much lower than10.5 billion. See https://archive.md/GURlL
Sigh.
I presume that you have gotten some very basic “Malthusian arguments” in those comments you (don’t) mention,
but the problem is that by doing this it does make it look like you’re attacking strawmen here…
(a reference to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, seriously ?)
I guess the main issue here is that you cannot resist stepping out of the agrarian context, and make some (very questionable) assumptions about the future !
(I know, I should be probably more specific here, sadly, I barely had time even for this comment. Hopefully next week.)
If you *do* want to discuss (post) modern eras, how about raising the level of the debate, engaging with much more current arguments about these modern issues, picking on someone your own ‘size’, like, say
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/post-index/
?
Or various degrowth literature…
Your comment is purely booing without mentioning anything specific at all.
If you want to complain in way worth treating seriously: please, be more specific.
> make some (very questionable) assumptions about the future !
which ones?
> those comments you (don’t) mention
for reasons that should be entirely self-evidently obvious: to not attack/witch-hunt these people, as ACOUP has not massive but some reach and taking on specific person in comments section does not bring much and can harm them
if you want to find such comments you can trivially find them
That linked video about Dyson spheres was extremely disappointing. It seems she took one sentence of him saying “it was a joke” completely out of context, and then used that as an excuse to bash on one particular tech CEO who was also making a brief off-the-cuff remark.
Watch the whole interview (linked with timestamp) and you can hear Dyson explain himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAIfzUoyhU&t=1264s. His “joke” was in mentioning a biosphere, which I guess was just his way of doing a rough size comparison, but he didn’t intend for it to be taken as a literal sphere of life. He might have also been having some fun using colorful language in this highly speculative one-page paper with almost no citations. Probably a way for him to blow off steam while he was working on the deadly serious and highly classified Project Orion. But he still believed in the underlying idea which (as he explains) is just basic 19th century physics- everything produces waste heat, so a very large alien structure would produce gigantic amounts of waste heat which would be visible to us.
He certainly wasn’t trying to make fun of radio SETI proposals or science fiction. He supported radio SETI, and he admitted that he got the idea for Dyson spheres from reading a sci-fi novel. It would be very out of character for him to write a paper just to make fun of others doing speculative science, and I think it’s mean-spirited to make a long video calling his ideas “stupid” without even seriously engaging with his ideas.
I’m glad to see a comment like this, especially since I suspected her video (at least in part) was what inspired this post. Her dismissal of dyson swarms was particularly insulting, beyond even the abuse of out of context clips and general tone of the video (which had very little of the actual argumentation I would’ve hoped for), with her joke about “what are they going to have stove tops to dissipate the heat” being truly absurd because the answer is almost literally yes. Dyson’s paper is literally about looking for the far infrared waste heat these things would be giving off. The power collectors are usually imagined as literal heat engines, of course they’re radiating it all away that’s how a heat engine works. It’s like she was familiar with the Star Trek version of a dyson sphere and the unserious techbro proposals to build one this decade to power their generative AI servers, and then assumed that everyone talking about this must be a drooling moron or playing a prank on the drooling morons.
My own guess is that the most important trigger (besides the comments on here) had been the recent thread on Bluesky, where our host had argued in favour of liberalism with the standard points about the increase in population wealth, etc.. This included citing data from a whole lot of countries…not generally considered particularly liberal?
https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3lz4n2og6xs2u
One of the replies had brought up a really interesting recent (2023) paper which could well overturn much of the recent series’ foundation if its evidence is taken at face value. (Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century) I still need time to process it, but for now, here’s a notable factoid from the already-linked IPCC AR6 Africa chapter.
In case this requires clarification: “an informal settlement” is bureaucratic euphemism for what most people would call a slum. Is an extra billion people living in slums in 25 years to be considered simply an inevitable consequence of their own population growth and a billion individuals’ decision to move away from subsistence farming? One which has no implications at all for the triumph of liberalism, and will simply be evened out by future development, as those slums will turn to midrises in in 2080s?
I suspect this may not be a very compelling argument then, whether for those very people or for observers at home. It might be a good idea to allocate at least some brainpower to the implications of that.
One of the replies had brought up a really interesting recent (2023) paper which could well overturn much of the recent series’ foundation if its evidence is taken at face value
That is indeed a really interesting paper! I skimmed it and read into a bit, I’ll have to devote a bit more time to it when I’m free.
In general, i do think your point in the last comment thread was very well taken; industrialization, the scientific revolution, liberalism, and capitalism are all separate things, and it’s a big mistake to conflate them just because in many societies they happened to coincide (most importatly, in the first societies to industrialize, like England, America and the Low Countries). The improvements in life expectancy and standard of living due to, say, applying nitrogen fertilizer to crops, or to modern antibiotics or sanitation, or to refrigeration and freezing technology, or to electrical power, or more generally to the advances in our understanding of nature that made these things possible, have nothing to do with either capitalism or liberalism necessarily, and certainly don’t require them. You can be fully ‘modern’ and industrializing without having either of the two.
No, it’s a broader category than just ‘slums.’ This is land with urban habitation patterns (primarily non-agricultural residential lots inhabited by people paid for value-add labor) that lacks a legal local government structure with power and structures dedicated to that urbanized population. So Kowloon Walled City but also Manchester for the 400 years preceding the grant of city status in 1853, and no one in 1850 called Manchester a slum.
“lacks a legal local government structure with power and structures dedicated to that urbanized population”
This explains Manchester’s lack of guild monopolies before those were abolished in Britain.
First comment: the standard description of the demographic transition has a important counterexample. Birth rates in France started falling in the 18th century, before industrialization or a drop in infant mortality. Guillaume Blanc’s 2023 paper, The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France, begins with a quote from Malthus, in fact. Blanc presents preliminary evidence that France’s demographic transition was the result of secularization & anti-clericalism.
A reasonable level of birth control could be achieved using only materials found in the home (mutual masturbation, coitus interruptus–not to mention oral sex, sodomy, or the other thousand & one fun activities that are not PiV), once French people stopped worrying what God wanted them to do. The assumption that premodern people *had* to have as many offspring as possible is not supported by this evidence.
Faustine Perrin (2022) suggests that the Enlightenment/the Revolution/anticlericalism led to a rising level of felt equality for French women in marriages, so that they were better able to assert their desire to bear fewer children.
In the present day, this ties into the work of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, whose article on The Downside of Fertility I just read because she talked about Bujold’s Vorkosigan series in an economics podcast. TLDR: Bearing & raising children is hard work, labor even, and women are reluctant to do it if they don’t have help.
We have to consider the inefficient agricultural methods used in 18th century France. In relation to them the country grew so densely populated the economic situation become uncertain to most. Under such circumstances people tend to abandon organised religion. Which meant more and more people felt free to have non-reproductive sex. This to limit their number of children to what they counted on being able to provide for.
> Assuming we do not nuke ourselves or cook the planet
mentioning global warming here is a bit disappointing given earlier explanation how it is nowhere close to do this – climate change “it will kill us all” doom-mongering is sadly one of more popular anti-scientific trends now. And what more annoying, often masquerading as science-based.
I’d like to learn more about that post hunter gatherer agriculture that is not yet in a form Malthus would recognize. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
If global warming kills most of humanity it would be by being too fast for society to adapt to.
“Now in the long run when just thinking about food production, the Malthusian interaction ought to catch up with us in the long run. The population increases, but the available land supply cannot keep pace – new lands brought under the plow are more marginal than old lands and so on – and so the surplus food per person steadily declines as the population grows until we’re back where we started. Except there are two problems here.
The first is that can take a long time even in a single society, region or state because even under ideal nutrition standards, these societies increase in population slowly compared to the rapid sort of exponential growth Malthus was beginning to see in the 1700s.”
I think they key point here is that Malthus was not Paul Ehrlich. He did not say the population was about to hit a limit and famine would scour the land. He did not say “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Or “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
He said that in long settled countries the population had long since approached the limit and that it was maintained near that limit by people regulating their fertility. Which is exactly the point made in https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/.
Specifically: “the conundrum the peasant family finds themselves in is two-fold: on the one hand, they need to have a lot of pregnancies to achieve stable replacement or slow growth, but on the other hand, they still need to suppress normal ‘maximum’ fertility to avoid unsustainable household growth.”
Malthus also pointed out a counter-intuitive effect of that, which is that even if you redistribute ALL of the Big Mans land to the poorer peasants, although every existing peasant might benefit, the long term result, a generation or two later, will be a larger population of peasants, no better fed than before.
I can’t help but suspect the reason people denounce Malthus is that he argued against disappropriating the rich, rather than for sterilizing the poor.
The thing that you describe as “a counter-intuitive effect” was actually the intuition of Malthus’s elite peers at the time, and remains the intuition of the wealthy today. All of Malthus’s philosophy was an exercise in justifying the position of rentiers, a defense against economic justice and land redistribution. He looked at a society that controlled rural population growth by charging enough rent to make seasonal childhood immunocompromization widespread (with outright deadly famine a regular occurrence), and was moved solely to create intellectual arguments in favor of that arrangement. You’re damn right he’s “denounced” for arguing for the rich, but those rich were already practicing a half-measure of forced sterilization of the poor.
“The thing that you describe as “a counter-intuitive effect” was”
This effect is one you refuse to believe despite providing no evidence or argument against it, and is one you are so sure is obviously untrue that you assume everyone who ever claimed to believe it must be lying. Solely because it is counter to your intuition.
So I think I’m right to call it counter-intuitive.
If you want to prove him wrong about the society he was discussing – the one he was living in – you should provide evidence or rational argument to that effect.
I can think of one piece of evidence to look for. His argument suggests that the living standards of the poorer peasants should not depend on how equally land is distributed among the population. England had single heir inheritance. Thus, the poorest peasants in England inherited *zero* land. Most of France and Catholic Ireland had partible inheritance, at least among the peasants. So they should all inherit some land, if not very much.
Malthus’s argument suggests that even so, the landless “peasants” in England – I suppose “labourers” would be the more common term – would still not be worse of than the poorer peasants in Ireland and France. Your intuition would suggest they would be.
AIUI, most people at the time who compared those countries reported that Malthus was correct and intuition was wrong. If anything, the labourers in England were better off than the peasants in Ireland and France.
That is such an extraordinary number of words to put in my mouth that I cannot actually parse what you believe I think.
You cite several examples where governance regulations enacted by and for the hereditary rich forced peasants into undesirable economic situations, and you seem to think that because there is more than one way to keep the poor poor, there’s some important lesson to be learned from the difference between those methods. I agree that natural experiments can always reveal *something* but I don’t see the relevance.
You stated that breaking up the major estates to redistribute land to peasants would not after two generations result in a peasantry any better off, and you stated that this was a counter-intuitive idea. What you need to understand is that while it may have been counter-intuitive to some revolutionaries, even some of Malthus’s father’s more revolutionary friends, it was absolutely the intuition of the wealthy and the class of rentiers who raised and enriched Malthus from cradle to grave. It remains the intuition of the rich today that distributing enough wealth to a poor family to make them actually not poor anymore will only result in that family being poor again in a generation at best, and Malthus is a much a tool for today’s rich as he was for the rich of his own time.
At the time he was writing, he was well aware that an experiment in massive land distribution was occurring in the Americas, as land held in common by various First Nations polities was seized by colonial governments and redistributed to immigrant farmers. Simply gaining access to that seized wealth was enough to ensure dramatic and durable gains in the standard of living for those families that lasted in the United States until policy changes and subsidies began enabling the land to be reconsolidated under agribusiness conglomerates. Malthus predicted that the US would swiftly transform into the same precarious mass of peasantry struggling under the yoke to raise up a paltry few intellectuals like himself as he had seen when he looked out the windows of his father’s manor as a child; Malthus was wrong about that, and should not be remembered as anything other than wrong.
“At the time he was writing, he was well aware that an experiment in massive land distribution was occurring in the Americas, as land held in common by various First Nations polities was seized by colonial governments and redistributed to immigrant farmers.”
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States
“It is probably a reasonable estimate that the foreign born population in the U.S. reached its minimum in about 1815 at something like 100,000, or 1.4% of the population. By 1815 most of the immigrants that arrived before the American Revolution had died, and there had been almost no new immigration. Nearly all population growth up to 1830 was by internal increase; about 98.5% of the population was native-born.”
In these conditions, in which immigration was demographically negligible, the population went up from 2,148,076 in 1770 to 9,638,453 in 1820. That is a near fivefold increase in 50 years, suggesting a doubling time of less than 25 years.
That was the effect of the massive land distribution in 1800 America.
So if there were a massive land distribution in 1800 Britain we might expect a similar effect, with the population doubling every 25 years until there was no more land in the hands of rich people to redistribute. But since there were 11 million people in 1800 Britain, in 200,000 km2 rather than the 8,000,000km2 of the continental United States, it wouldn’t take long to run out of land.
The problem with taking land from rich British landowners rather than poor American Indians was that the landowners had less than a fortieth as much land to take.
That gives you 5 more doubling periods in America – 125 more years of cheap land for the poor. That suggests the process would end 125 years sooner in Britain. The process ended in America ended less than 125 years later – the frontier closed in 1890.
This is why Malthus didn’t expect the process to last very long in Britain.
“Malthus predicted that the US would swiftly transform into the same precarious mass of peasantry struggling under the yoke to raise up a paltry few intellectuals like himself as he had seen when he looked out the windows of his father’s manor as a child; Malthus was wrong about that, and should not be remembered as anything other than wrong.”
I think he underestimated the agricultural potential of North America. This would have been due to a false analogy with Western Europe. This part of the world had seen much population growth since Black Death. Even the demographic consequences of the Thirty Years’ War would have been compensated for after 150 years. Most was deforested with the few remaining forests and woods growing on marginal land. Such land could not provide much more if cultivated.
The situation in North America was very different. The main reason so little was cultivated was most of the indigenous population having been wiped out by epidemics. Also their staple crops had limited cold tolerance stopping the northward spread of agriculture even before that. If we limit ourselves to what could be cultivated with 18th century European methods much more could than actually was in 1798. The British colony of Canada expanded to the entire area right north of the Great Lakes before independence in 1867. Today the area between Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario is largely cultivated land. I think it stretches a bit further north from there too.
More than half of the land granted to the US by France after independence is suitable for intense agriculture. A few years after the book came out the US bought Louisiana from the no longer politically chaotic France. Out of this at least the areas close to rivers would then have been arable. Parts of the Pacific Northwest, Florida and Texas were annexed during the following decades. Northern Florida and coastal Texas would have been arable too. California was conquered from Mexico and the areas between it, Texas and Louisiana from the indigenous population. Coastal California, the coast of the Pacific Northwest and lower Colombia river valley are suitable for intense agriculture. The reason they did not have agriculture before colonialism is suitable crops not having reached the area.
The westward expansion of agriculture was so large it attracted millions of poor European searching a better life. Increasingly efficient transportation contributed too. While half of all homesteads failed those which did succeed actually got a higher standard of living. This situation with lots of middle class farmers could well have continued until agribusiness took over.
“ensure dramatic and durable gains in the standard of living”
‘durable’ is doing a lot of work here, when we’re talking about a country that had been pushing into vast “empty” land for fewer than two centuries when he wrote, and had less than a century ahead of it before industrialized agriculture (including guano then synthetic fertilizers.)
To really test Malthus’s predictions, we’d want a United States that didn’t advance much beyond 1798 tech. What would we look like today, with 1798 tech, a hundred+ years after the “closing of the frontier”? I’m not going to say I know, but I’m not sure gains would be so durable for the masses. The Dust Bowl comes to mind.
We could compare areas in North America to ones in Europe with similar climate. Then we could look at what population density they had and possibly calculate it from there. I think agriculture would be unsustainable on the prairies of North America without later developed methods and technology.
Every time Paul Ralph Ehrlich is mentioned I can’t help wondering if he has still to realise his predictions did not came true. Not only did faming productivity rise exponentially during the Green Revolution resulting in the world’s population growing even faster than expected. But population booms are generally due to childhood mortality decreasing before birth rates does. When “The Population Bomb” was written the author presupposed the world was already near the limit of agricultural productivity and birth rates would remain high worldwide.
I have commented on this claim when it was brought up in Part II of the series. I noted then that looking at it in this manner rather disregards the costs to the environment (not just climate, but other forms of damage to the ecosystems), but unfortunately, this point is still ignored here.
Perhaps, this paragraph from the IPCC will illustrate the scale of the issue. As noted throughout the thread, the IPCC are anything but alarmist – in fact, left-leaning and pop-science publications are replete with complaints/condemnations of their (perceived) “scientific hesitancy”. In general, their reports emphasize the possibility space and the search for the solutions. The highlighted language is very rare for them – and it ought to give anyone pause.
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Chapter 5: Food, Fibre and Other Ecosystem Products
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_Chapter05.pdf
In case this needs clarification:
“spatially redistributed cropland” = a whole bunch of farmers will need to be told to switch to a different crop or sometimes to stop farming outright. (Particularly if they focus on livestock.)
“dietary changes” = a whole lot of people (almost certainly reaching into hundreds of millions) will have to be told to put that steak down, for good.
I certainly do not recall any post on here acknowledging anything of a kind.
Mm true though there is a whole unfortunate dynamic there relating to a lot of farming in areas like the U.S being corporatized making a lot of study on such dynamics complex. There have actually been more recent studies for mixed crops, permaculture dynamics and restorative practices that I have seen and actually gotten to talk to some growers about but its pretty individual because there wasnt much systemic support for such things.
But yeah a lot of time the actual full implication of externalities gets ignored
The criticism of dyson sphere in the linked video.
Not good. Firstly, they spend big chunks of the video discussing star trek, and the various limitations of Dyson’s paper.
Notice that “the writers of star trek thought …” isn’t an argument about the actual physics. Nor is “in dyson’s origional paper …”
When they do get to the actual physics, the physics isn’t great. Or at least, they are completely ignoring the part of the idea where the dyson sphere is built by intelligent beings.
If you just build a solid sphere, yes it collapses under gravity. This is the physics consequence of a solid sphere, fine as far as it goes.
But, there are ways to prevent this from happening. One is to build a swarm of sattilites, not a solid sphere. Another is to make some maglev train/ particle accelerator hybrid. Another is to make the sphere very thin so solar radiation pressure can hold it up.
3 different solutions. All definitely consistent with known physics, and mostly consistent with known technology.
The criticism of a dyson sphere sounds like “what’s even the point of planes? Do you just fly around in circles forever for the fun of it. Flying takes energy. Sooner or later, those planes are going to run out of energy and crash down to earth.”
It’s a total failure to think “how would someone intelligent solve this problem”.
The person making the video is a professional, PhD physicist, so I am going to guess her physics are probably pretty solid.
If we’re assuming she’s credible based on her Theoretical Physics PhD. without the need to examine any actual arguments, then Freeman Dyson should be at least as credible, and the clip where he called the idea a “joke” was very clearly taken out of context as he follows it up with an explanation of why you might look for dyson spheres. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAIfzUoyhU&t=1264s
If this was all a big prank he was playing on SETI and sci-fi writers, he definitely wasn’t intending to let anyone in on the joke during this interview, which reiterates that the idea was to look for the waste heat of sufficiently large alien civilizations. Please watch the clip with what he says after Dr. Collier cut it off, it does not remotely align with the idea that he wrote the paper to prank SETI and mock their efforts.
I went into that video hoping to hear actual physics arguments and was sorely disappointed. Not only that, but her use of that out of context clip showed a distressing amount of intellectual dishonestly. That the additional context which immediately followed that statement makes absurd the notion that, at least in 2003, Dyson considered his paper to be a joke played at the expense of SETI.
It is really weird to call her physics “pretty solid”, when her argument against Dyson swarm is in its entirety: “its a stupid idea, what would be a point of this?”. She also obsesses about turning Jupiter into satellites without a hint of evidence that e.g. main belt mass wouldn’t be enough (without Ceres obviously, if she is concerned about gravity wells). The entire video is basically just repeatedly calling the idea stupid without any use of actual physics or imagination, just pure strawmanning.
Even linking such shallow rant is below your standards.
Bret is being dangerously optimistic about climate change. It’s going to be absolutely apocalyptic for the billions of the global poor.
Automation is going to cause devastating mass unemployment and unemployability in the developed world, while skyrocketing global animal-product consumption and corresponding anti-biotic overuse are rapidly bringing back the bad old days when we simply had no answer to infectious disease. And the crippling water shortages brought about by a warming climate are only going to make sanitation and hygiene problems so much worse.
The Global South will suffer the worst of it of course, and the billions of heat-exhausted, mal-nourished bodies there will become incubators for new and totally anti-biotic resistant strains of deadly bacteria that will devastate the rest of the world, except of course billionaires and their cronies, who will be safe in their paradise-bunkers.
Alternatively, the Global South will deploy Chinese Solar and Wind at scale and jump up to 2nd world energy levels in less than a generation. And it’s in China’s best interest that this happen on China’s dime. That’s how you win the great power competition of the 21st century and minimize the effects of global warming on the Chinese landscape.
And Chinese nuclear
> Automation is going to cause devastating mass unemployment and unemployability in the developed world
it would be useful to add at least cursory comment why this time it would be a problem, compared from benefits we received so far from automation
(at least make some “this time it will be different” claim, likely something about AI)
So far automation was wonderful.
> It’s going to be absolutely apocalyptic for the billions of the global poor.
Why you think so? Many doomerist global warming claims are frankly as anti-scientific as denial that it happens at all. They only masquerade a bit better as reality-based.
It seems that you were mislead by them, while reality is not as bad (partially, because global poor are so poor that fairly modest improvement in economic situation more than offsets harm caused by global warming)
Automation is going to cause devastating mass unemployment and unemployability in the developed world, while skyrocketing global animal-product consumption and corresponding anti-biotic overuse are rapidly bringing back the bad old days when we simply had no answer to infectious disease. And the crippling water shortages brought about by a warming climate are only going to make sanitation and hygiene problems so much worse.
The Global South will suffer the worst of it of course, and the billions of heat-exhausted, mal-nourished bodies there will become incubators for new and totally anti-biotic resistant strains of deadly bacteria that will devastate the rest of the world, except of course billionaires and their cronies, who will be safe in their paradise-bunkers.
I don’t think any of these things (and they would all be exactly as horrible as you suggest, or worse) are inevitable, we could always take action to address them, but if present trends continue unaddressed, then yes, the future could be exactly as terrible as you imagine.
In particular, the above has a lot of focus on diseases and antimicrobial resistance – which seems to imply undue pessimism about vaccine development.
https://www.who.int/news/item/10-10-2024-better-use-of-vaccines-could-reduce-antibiotic-use-by-2.5-billion-doses-annually–says-who
Even if we extend the 2025 conditions indefinitely and so forget about the U.S. role in the vaccine race entirely, the recent pandemic has had vaccine successes not just from the powerful and well-established players (Germany, the UK, PRC, Russia and eventually India) but even from less-appreciated ones like Kazakhstan and Cuba (in a remarkable example of international cooperation which generally flew under the radar, the latter’s vaccines were then produced under license in Iran). This seems to have more than offset surprising failures in nations which on paper ought to have been in a better position to succeed (i.e. Australia or France). That is a lot of intellectual capital to be put to use – both for addressing the AMR ESCAPEE strains like suggested by the WHO above, and for any future pathogens like Covid.
P.S. And the remarkably poor cost-benefit proposition of recent “AI”, which may be completely unfixable, makes me deeply doubtful of Neko’s claims about automation as well.
I was impressed by the speed of the COVID vaccines too, and the fact they were developed in countries like Cuba as well as in America. (I was not aware about Kazakhstan, thanks for bringing that to my attention). I was thinking more about antibiotic resistance though, which is a separate issue from vaccines.
And I continue to be very concerned and fearful about the effect that automation may have, though I hope you’re right.
That’s the thing; it’s a lot more connected than it would seem at the surface. Please read the WHO link I included above!
As for automation, Ed Zitron in particular had made an extensive case as to why he estimates everything to do with the current LLMs to be a deeply unprofitable dead end. The below may look intimidating at first, but it’s not much longer than what our host usually writes every week. A lot more could be found – from him or other sources.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
(I suppose you could also be referring to the physical-process automation with “dumb” machines, but resource constraints (mineral, base load, etc.) suggest there’s a point for a lot of occupations where it stops being competitive – when an electric car, a military drone and a warehouse robot or whatever all chase after the same type of battery, it’s pretty clear which one will be sacrificed in favour of the existing alternative. Likewise, robots making sandwiches at fast food joints and the like are unlikely to be very popular with the decisionmakers in the long run when the grid of the fully-electrified society will require allocation decisions.)
suggest there’s a point for a lot of occupations where it stops being competitive – when an electric car, a military drone and a warehouse robot or whatever all chase after the same type of battery, it’s pretty clear which one will be sacrificed in favour of the existing alternative.
I certainly hope you’re right!
I think automation will hit a limit at a certain point as well- something that can’t go on forever won’t, and if enough people are unemployed or underemployed it will sooner or later trigger social change (or social collapse, which will lead to some kind of change in its own right). Your scenario is definitely a smoother and less tragic way of getting there though.
That’s the thing; it’s a lot more connected than it would seem at the surface. Please read the WHO link I included above!
That is an interesting article and does indeed make me a bit more hopeful! It’s interesting that they particularly mention tuberculosis, since that’s one of the diseases about which people have been issuing especially dire warnings about antibiotic resistance.
I think the problem with automation is more a matter of culture. There will be increasing technological unemployment while people still believe everyone has to work full time. Viewing work as a moral obligation leads to people being blamed for not finding jobs that does not exist. The real challenge will be giving people something meaningful to do instead of work.
I don’t think the super-rich could survive without the rest of society. They just imagine they could because they don’t think about things like infrastructure.
“Bret is being dangerously optimistic about climate change.”
OIS-11 is used to calibrate GCMs because OIS-11 basically is worst-reasonable-case scenario. Ergo, this statement is wrong.
For those unfamiliar, OIS means Oxygen Isotope Stage. It’s how geologists divide glacial/interglacial cycles. Odd numbers are interglacial periods–ie, periods where the Earth warms up. And while there are some frankly moronic ideas about climate change (“The world is on fire!”), OIS-11 represents what is the worst case within reasonable (read: data-driven) estimates. We are currently in OIS-1.
As far as climate change is concerned, the impacts will be twofold. First, there is the expanding of the tropics/subtropics–ie, where “hot” dominates. (Yes, I’m aware this is an oversimplification). Second, there’s sea level. Both can largely be mitigated by two factors: Technology will allow air conditioning to expand geographically, negating the impacts of hotter environments. And better flood control methods will mitigate the impacts of increases sea level (not really a threat) and storm severity (the real problem). That is, IF people listen to the engineers and geologists.
That’s a pretty damn big “if”. To get a sense of the scale of that “if”, it’s worth noting that I first heard a paper at a Geological Society of America conference discussing how New Orleans would respond to a Category 5 hurricane in 2003, as an undergrad quite, and quite frankly I attended the talk because a girl I have a crush on wanted to see it. My point is , geologists had been telling folks for DECADES what would happen, prior to Katrina. We as a society have spent no small amount of time or treasure understanding precisely what these impacts can be. We also have more or less universally ignored those warnings. (I mention my personal story to illustrate just how contingent my experience was–I didn’t go looking for this talk, this is something that ANY geologist was NECESSRARILY exposed to, one way or another.)
Any disasters due to climate change are not failures of knowledge. They are absolutely failures of will. We know precisely how these things will impact us. If we as a society choose to not respond, well, we have f’ed around and we will, in the fullness of time, find out.
Setting aside just how large sea level rise will get eventually…I am a little surprised to see a geologist be this dismissive of its impacts on groundwater in the coastal areas?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17038-2
However, I’ll have to agree that even in this case, a lot of the irreversible consequences would come down to the “failures of will”.
Further,
…Setting the costs and energy demands aside for a second (let alone the risk of blackouts), there’s the matter of agricultural labour. Unless the implication is that all of it can be done inside air-conditioned tractors and/or with robots/drones, this is a rather large omission. Even in the PRC, they are quite concerned about how agriculture would look like in the North China Plain near the end of the century. I suppose the one other argument is that all the agriculture would instead shift from those areas to Siberia, Canada, etc. (I believe that this is how the more optimistic agricultural projections actually have some yields (i.e. wheat) expand on a global scale with climate change – bypassing the line of criticism which goes, “crops’ resilience to climate is irrelevant once it exceeds that of the humans picking them”.)
“I am a little surprised to see a geologist be this dismissive of its impacts on groundwater in the coastal areas?”
Typical “You didn’t discuss X, therefore you’re dismissive of it” internet-style “argument”….
Rising sea level will impact groundwater, sure, but the real threat to groundwater is overuse. We’re already seeing infiltration of salt water due to over-extraction of fresh water in many places. Sea level rise will exacerbate this, but by itself it wouldn’t be a huge problem. Add overextraction to the mix, and…yeah, it gets bad.
If you think this isn’t discussed, you are wrong. The impacts of overuse of aquifers is something that’s been studied for years, and infiltration of salt water is only one problem it causes. There are areas pumping enough water out of the ground that the ground is sinking, for example.
“….there’s the matter of agricultural labour.”
Agriculture, construction, and a few others. That said, there are ways to mitigate the impacts of increased heat. And we’re not talking huge increases, either. The increases won’t be simple–we can’t assume that a 1 degree rise in temperature globally translates to a 1 degree rise locally–but we’re still not talking about 200 degree days or anything. How to work in hot environments is more or less a solved problem; where I’ve seen heat-related incidents it’s always been because someone didn’t follow the procedures.
With the exception of some marginal areas the world simply won’t get hot enough to not allow crops to grow. The reason crops are going to struggle is shifts in weather patterns. The wheat won’t bake, it’ll dehydrate or drown. This will, quite obviously, necessitate switching crops and growing crops in new areas (please understand this isn’t my entire reasoning, just a very brief summary–I don’t have room to get into C3/C4 plants, the impacts of climate change on soils, how deserts will move, etc). I’m not optimistic about this, by the way. The fact that California continues to grow water-demanding crops despite their chronic water shortages does not say good things about our ability or willingness to adapt.
Further, you’re omitting the deaths from cold. One impact of climate change that we’ve already started to see is a weakened jet stream, which results in arctic air reaching further south, and doing so more often, than in the past. And cold kills more people than heat does.
Indeed. In particular, our neighbour Indonesia is already trying to build a new capital because Jakarta is sinking at a remarkable rate due to that. However, there are a lot more places which, due to this subsidence, are getting flooded faster than sea level rise alone would explain. (I.e. this map depicting the impact of subsidence across the USA’s East Coast.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37853-7/figures/2
We’ll see. People talk about the “lethal” 35°C wet bulb (Tw) a lot, but already the 32°C Tw is generally thought to make strenuous outdoor work impossible. On one hand, it’s true that India and its neighbours already appear to experience these conditions a few days per a year across much of the region – on the other hand, even the near-future increase in those days (and territorial extent) seems considerable.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/e08c47be-d024-4d81-984e-1e4e16cf9063/grl62069-fig-0003-m.jpg
(Unfortunately, the above does not seem to take duration into account. In particular, it shows that 35°C Tw has already been occurring in the region, but obviously it never took place for >6 hours or even close, since otherwise we would have been seeing localized Ministry for the Future-like scenes annually. It’s unclear whether its results are consistent with another paper that only projected 35°C Tw at 2.3°C and only around the Persian Gulf – but seemingly did so specifically for the duration assumed to be lethal to anyone.)
This was the assumption made from the older, less extensive datasets. More recently, an analysis of roughly 1,250 years of ice core records had shown that jet stream variations have a much higher amplitude than we thought, and so it is still within its long-term historical range. It is not expected to weaken beyond that until 2060 at the earliest.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104105118
I do feel sometimes malthusian dynamics do also kind of get used to ignore the patterns of externalities and shifts that are relevant for noting how and where those externalities are distributed. Relevant in ecology of course but its a generally applicable thing that I do also think gets blanketed under malthusianism. Like with coal you could say we havent run out in pure numbers but the cost in disease and impact on local water at the giving mining sights has externalities that increase over time, they just dont spread out to others. Sand is actually another good example, its one of the most important construction materials and we havent run out but we do use so much of it that we destabilize local zones coastally compounding issues of oceanic intrusion due to changing local regimes of water flow. Kind of similar deal inna way with shifting populations pushing out more marginal groups when population pressure rises. The overall pop remains but there is a cost.
Instead of running out of primary resources, world population is expected to peak later this century around 10.5 billion and we already can grow enough food for 10.5 billion people.
I don’t think this is a fair conclusion at all. Food demand is projected to rise much higher than population, because as countries become more developed, they are going to want higher quality food (i.e. more animal protein) which is going to in turn require more edible grain to be devoted to feed.
Notably, the global population is expected to increase from just over 7 billion today to 9.5 billion by 2050, a 35% increase (USCB, 2015). An increasing proportion of the population will be urban, resulting in diets shifting increasingly from staples to processed foods, fortified with more meat and dairy products, which require large amounts of primary foodstuffs to produce. For example, 10 kg of feed is required to produce 1 kg live cattle (Smil, 2000). Thus, an increase in urban population will result in an increased demand for high-quality animal products, requiring an increase in crop production that is substantially faster than that estimated based solely on the projected population growth. This trend is expected to continue, and it is predicted that the world will need 85% more primary foodstuffs by 2050, relative to 2013 (Ray et al., 2013).
So is our current rate of increase in crop yields sufficient to meet this rising demand? It doesn’t seem to be the case. If current rates of crop yield improvement per hectare are simply maintained into the future, supply will fall seriously below demand by 2050 (Figure 1; Ray et al., 2013). The resulting rise in global food prices may have the largest impact in the poorest tropical countries, which have the highest population increases. A compounding factor is that improvement in subsistence crops in these tropical countries is even slower than in our four leading crops. For example, the global average increase in yield per hectare of cassava, a major staple for sub-Saharan Africa, between 1960 and 2010 was 63%. This is less than half of the 171% increase for wheat over the same period (Figure 1). The problem is further compounded by the fact that the rate of improvement in yield of even our major crops in some areas of the globe is stagnating or even moving into reverse (Long, 2014; Long and Ort, 2010; Ray et al., 2012). Indeed, China, India, and Indonesia are the world’s largest producers of rice, where yields per hectare across these countries increased by an average of 36% between 1970 and 1980 but only by 7% between 2000 and 2010 (Long, 2014). When faced with such numbers, one may rightfully ask: why are yield improvements stagnating?
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00306-2?_returnURL=http://linkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867415003062%3Fshowall%3Dtrue&mobileUi=0
When I posted this before, @YARD raised some criticisms of the paper and its estimates (most importantly that it doesn’t take into account potential improvements in feed conversion ratio of livestock), but while I think those alter the conclusions quantitatively, they don’t really change the main message.
I think a world with 9.5 billion people (or for that matter a world with the current 8.1 billion) is undesirable in a lot of other ways, most importantly because of our impact on natural ecosystems and all the other species on the planet (which I think are as valuable as humans are), but that’s of course a subjective preference. The ability to feed 10.5 or even 9.5 billion people though, is nowhere near that subjective and is also nowhere near as assured as Bret thinks.
You can have higher quality food without eating meat. Your average vegetarian in a rich country like the Netherlands or the US eats a lot better than a subsistence farmer. Lab-grown meat is also a possibility, although I’m personally a bit pessimistic.
This is speculation, but if primary feed becomes more scarce, meat will become more expensive, and people will eat less meat, freeing up land for more efficient purposes.
Conventional vegetation to meat methods (that is, livestock munchin’) expect a ratio of 10:1 calories. Relying heavily on plants that aren’t human-edible can make that look better, but usually those grasses just displace human-edible crops anyway. Crickets, however, they give you a ratio under 2:1.
Humanity will figure out solutions to these looming problems, and mostly we already know some viable solutions; we only haven’t saved ourselves yet because saving ourselves would be annoying.
Conventional vegetation to meat methods (that is, livestock munchin’) expect a ratio of 10:1 calories.
Much lower for farmed fish and mollusks (and other cold-blooded organisms, although not that many people eat reptiles, insects etc. in any case), since they have lower metabolic rates.
In some parts of the world people in general happily eat insects. But I don’t feel any particular desire to eat arthropods.
In some parts of the world people in general happily eat insects. But I don’t feel any particular desire to eat arthropods.
I doubt they’re ever going to substitute for a high quality meat or fish dish. But, they might work decently as a substitute for highly processed meat products (as soy and wheat protein already are used for).
A non-negligible part of my fellow Europeans actually believes the animals they are used to eating are the only eatable ones. During the 2013 horse meat scandal some people feared it would be dangerous to eat horse meat. The only danger was the possibility of the horse meat containing traces of a medication illegal to use for animals intended for slaughter. In fact all mammals can be eaten. But this does not have to mean they tase any good.
Then there is the unwarranted fear of being forced or fooled to eat insects:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250904-how-eating-insects-became-a-conspiracy-theory
Knowing how conflicting goals really work don’t expect to ever be forced to eat insects. As long as there is a choice I will prefer to eat soy, some other legumes and mycoprotein. If meat could be cultivated to a sensible price I would eat that too.
People being unable to add as much meat to their diets as they would like is not the same as people starving. If meat prices rise, people will just eat other things.
To say that we can’t feed the world because we can’t put a literal chicken in every pot is like saying we can’t house the world because some people need to live in apartments rather than houses.
If meat prices rise, people will just eat other things.
It’s not that meat prices alone will rise, it’s that the price of things like corn (which can be eaten, or alternatively can be used as feed for pigs, chickens, farmed fish etc.) will rise, and that could put it outside the purchasing power of the poorest slice of the population. You could get around that, in theory, by rationing, but I don’t think that’s either particularly likely nor, in the long term, even all that desirable.
People really value meat, cross culturally, and I’m fairly confident that isn’t going to change, though at the margins you might convince people to eat less of it, to eat it less often, or to switch from one type of animal protein to another.
I’m not really arguing in favor of the conclusions of the paper (the authors are essentially arguing that traditional, Green Revolution style plant breeding innovation have probably maxed out their potential, and that genetic modification targeting photosynthetic pathways is necessary: one could argue on the other hand that no further increases in plant productivity are necessary, and that all that’s really needed are to increase inputs of things like fertilizer and water). I’m more drawing attention to this paper to underscore that it’s not uncontroversially clear that we *are* on track to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050: it’s a matter of live debate.
I don’t think this is the issue the paper is getting at. To me, the point is more that when a country does not produce enough food to feed itself and is reliant on imports, its poorest people are also at the mercy of the decisions made in food-exporter countries. If grain producers in food exporter countries decide they would make more money from selling grain to feed livestock and thus supply wealthier urban dwellers (domestic or foreign) with meat than they would by selling that grain to directly feed the poorest abroad, then there’s practically nothing the latter can do about it.
In fact, we are effectively in this situation already. That is, a third of “global cereal production” goes to feed livestock. That ought to be more than enough grain to properly feed the estimated 700-800 million people across the world who are undernourished – and even if none is left over, that’ll only reduce livestock feed supply by ~15%. Collectively, humanity would rather accept hundreds of millions experiencing regular starvation than lose not even all of its livestock, but a mere sixth of it.
P.S. Though it’s tempting to blame this state of affairs on capitalism, it must be noted that when the World Bank had accessed agriculture in the former Soviet Union immediately after its collapse, they actually found a higher-than-average fraction of grain supply being used for feed.
https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/374461468769887831
Of course, this does not preclude another socialist/communist country from avoiding the same, but it is literal food for thought.
Feeding human-eatable plant parts to livestock is something we need to reduce. I am trying to contribute to this by eating much less meat than when I grew up. When people show an interest in the vegetarian food I frequently eat I explain it to them. This means telling what it is, were I bought it and ho it was cooked. Today I gave and Iranian woman a tip for some tasty falafels. But I otherwise eat a lot of soy products.
P.S. Though it’s tempting to blame this state of affairs on capitalism, it must be noted that when the World Bank had accessed agriculture in the former Soviet Union immediately after its collapse, they actually found a higher-than-average fraction of grain supply being used for feed.
That is a really good point, and deserves some thoughtful response.
While I’m opposed to capitalism, as noted above, I don’t actually think the problem here is reducible to “capitalism”. If a serious food shortage actually does materialize, according to the scenario outlined in the Long et al., paper, it’s going to be because of the confluence of the following:
1) Inherent structural or biochemical limitations mean that the ceiling of crop plant productivity can’t be effectively increased.
2) Productivity in places like Africa and South Asia also can’t be improved by simply using existing elite cultivars and throwing more fertilizer and other inputs at them.
Maybe also:
3) Global warming and other associated environmental factors reduce the threshold of crop productivity even further.
4) We start running into limitations in terms of availability of phosphorus or other nutrients.
Plus the following:
5) People’s demand for animal protein continues to be high,
6) grain prices and allocation decisions are set by the market, and
7) income inequality between and within countries continues to be high or even to increase.
Capitalism is completely irrelevant to factors 1-5, and while factors 6 and 7 are certainly aggravated by capitalism, they weren’t created by it and won’t completely cease to be operative even if capitalism is replaced tomorrow by something else. Income inequality can certainly be reduced, to the point where no one in Africa is genuinely too poor to afford basic food, but it will take a while, and we may or may not get there by 2050. And even if grain allocation is handled by central planners instead of by the market, the planners and their rationing/allocation can only diverge so far from market pricing before they start risking serious consumer dissatisfaction on popular discontent.
Your point about Soviet grain allocation is a good one, and matches up with a point I’ve seen made by both CIA analysts during the Cold War and I think by the cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris. The CIA reports suggested that the Soviets could probably have met their own domestic grain needs, if they gave up on livestock entirely and forced everyone to go vegetarian, but instead they spent precious hard currency on buying grain on the world market so that they could keep meat on the shelves (subject to shortages, but still, on the shelves in some form). They clearly figured that seriously cutting down on the livestock sector would cause even more popular outrage than already existed.
Of course, this does not preclude another socialist/communist country from avoiding the same
I would argue that, but only up to a point. The tradeoffs between food and feed in the Soviet economy were aggravated by the fact that their agricultural sector and in particular the state owned enterprises were always less productive than they should have been. A lot of that was in turn because of specific decisions that could have (and should have) been made differently. Food prices were set too low, farmworker wages were too low, investment in rural areas was too low (probably for political reasons). I don’t think any of that was baked into the cake of communism, since other communist countries like Hungary had agricultural sectors that were much more productive (e.g. here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0305750X85900701.
However, even if you had a counterfactual where communist Hungary was still around by 2050 (or where the Vietnamese government, which is kind of a hybrid of socialism and capitalism right now, decided to move further to the left again), you would still have the tradeoff between allocating grain to food vs. animal feed purposes. Whether that tradeoff is managed by government planners, by agricultural producer’s cooperatives, or by capitalist corporations, it will still exist. The Hungarian officials planning the food sector would still have to decide about whether to donate their grain surplus (or sell at below market prices) to poor African countries, or to use it to feed to livestock domestically, or to sell it to rich countries. And if they decided on the first option, and kept that up for a long time, they’d be risking exactly the kind of popular discontent that governments (of whatever stripe) are always worried about.
The Soviet regime treated supply and demand as if they were always the same. I am not sure if they even knew how many people they had in the country.
The Soviet regime treated supply and demand as if they were always the same.
I don’t think it’s quite that- the Soviets seem to have been well aware that they had food supply problems, and they were also aware that this was largely because food prices, farmworker’s wages, and investment in rural amenities were too low. It was discussed openly in their academic journals and even if it wasn’t, it was obvious from other signals. They just refused to take the necessary steps to solve it, I’m not sure how much of that was for dumb ideological reasons and how much was for dumb political reasons. Maybe @YARD knows?
…The latter is really silly, considering that the USSR had taken a census roughly every decade – in 1926, 1937, 1939, 1959, 1970, 1979 and 1989, to be exact. (There were also two attempts at a census during the Civil War, in 1920 and 1923, which were partial for obvious reasons, and a “micro-census” limited to ~5% of the population was conducted just before Gorbachev took power.)
The former isn’t really true either, but it does contain a nugget of truth. I.e. according to Molotov, one of the core goals of a true communist economy would have been to break the relationship between the supply and demand – and to that end, he welcomed the unrepresentative price-setting. And during the Civil War years, money-printing was theorized to lead to the same goal, but the predictable hyperinflation was disastrous enough that it was never tried again.
The other factor was that it soon became obvious that planning the economy is very hard, and once something which seemed successful started to be done, it kept getting done with little attempt to improve it unless the General Secretary personally demanded something. Stalin demanded much more activity and was more willing to risk things backfiring, but his successors gradually lost the appetite to do the same. (In particular, Khruschev ended up the only Soviet leader to be successfully pushed out of power by internal revolt specifically because he mandated the planting of maize well outside its ideal climatic niche, convinced it would solve the yield gap between the USSR and the USA/Canada. After it had predictably failed and forced the USSR to begin sacrificing its gold reserves to purchase Canadian wheat in order to avoid famine, he was replaced by Brezhnev the following year.)
Another consequence of the leadership becoming comparatively collective and decentralized, particularly in the Brezhnev era, was that without the single will assigning priorities, they were instead assigned relative to which sector had the most clout. In the post-1945 context, military and heavy industry naturally had the most – in order to win the next war, and to do it without Lend-Lease, respectively.* Agriculture was not only secondary to those, but the livestock sector held priority over grain. Even today, some Communist supporters in post-Soviet countries argue that it was acceptable to for the USSR to import grain (reaching about a quarter of all grain in later years, even peaking around a third in one) as long as it only imported ~7% of meat products, and exported some itself – in large part due to those very same grain-fed animals.
Of course, the economics of that never made sense – the below is in Russian, but even looking at the numbers (and the one graph) in the post shows quite quickly how much more had to be spent on importing cereals ~1980 relative to importing meat in 2007. (Admittedly, the entire USSR also had nearly twice the population of Russian Federation in 2007 – but the financial difference seems well above 2X. Besides, the USSR also had additional productive agricultural areas within its borders, and likewise, some of RF’s meat imports would have been considered domestic production in the USSR.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220615142538/https://bash-m-ak.livejournal.com/1475.html
For sure, although I have been thinking more in terms of the USSR adopting Hungarian-like methods back when it could well have had made a difference. As noted above, the USSR ended up making a lot of avoidable errors even during what was in hindsight the peak decade of the “Red Plenty” – ones even more than a few contemporaries had seen coming.** Even a USSR which was otherwise similar but did not have the same ideological commitment to domestic meat over foreign (or, more cynically, equally-entrenched meat producer lobbyists in the Central Committee) would have had almost certainly been able to supply more people with grain abroad.
I think one remarkable aspect of the USSR which often gets forgotten is that in its middle years in particular, it was a state where a considerable fraction of the population were more educated than its leaders. After all, the Revolution and its aftermath did in fact end up destroying or exiling much of the Tsarist educated elite – and though the initial crop of Old Bolsheviks were generally highly educated, Stalin’s purges got rid of most of them and tended to elevate those with limited formal education – even as Stalin himself and his inner circle very much understood the power of literacy, numeracy and hard sciences, and so they designed demanding, broad curricula with 6-day schoolweeks and university weeks. (A tradition which remains in Russia’s more selective/old-fashioned educational establishments to this day.)
So, the core of the planned economy was Gosplan – and its leader during a crucial early 1930s Five-Year period was Kuybyshev, whose only higher education was medical (and he was expelled after a year for revolutionary activities in 1906, after which he spent the entire decade setting up Bolshevik cells here and there, regularly getting caught, exiled somewhere and starting over to get caught and exiled elsewhere again). His successor Valery Mezhlauk, was a history and Latin teacher (almost like our host, come to think of it) and got purged in 1937. After that, most of its remaining leaders got their university degrees well into adulthood after years of literal factory work – typically at hastily assembled “workers’ faculties” which did the best they could, but obviously had no institutional memory.
Gosplan’s last and longest-serving leader, Baibakov (1965-1985 tenure) was educated at an Azerbaijan Petrochemical Institute – which had existed for less than a decade by the time he graduated from it. Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s, these economic papers were written by the people who had graduated young and benefited from at least a generation of largely unbroken institutional memory at their places of higher learning, while the actual economy was led by (an admittedly talented) oil engineer, whose crown achievement was managing to consistently extract oil from the Caucasus in 1942 for as long as possible and then shutting off the wells right before the Germans were due to capture them. A feat of coordination which contributed more to victory than is commonly appreciated (and required personal heroism – at one point, he was even reported killed, as his group operated so close to the frontline, he once had to flee through the woods under heavy fire), but clearly not what the entire Soviet economy needed. (And another example of how wartime experience stimulated over-allocation to that sector.)
*One remarkable stat is that ~55% of the powder and explosives used by the USSR during the war came via Lend-Lease – and likewise for 45% of the prepared shells. Now, on one hand, the Russian Empire also imported ~45% of its powder/explosives during WWI – and more to the point, so did the UK for ~48%! Likewise, while the Russian Empire imported only ~20% of shells, it also used less of them, with wartime production ~10x lower than the USSR and ~4X lower than the British (admittedly, over a shorter period of time, since it fought 1914-1917 and not 1914-1918 or 1941-1945.) A significant reason for these shortfalls was the Czarist nitrocellulose-based powder technology, which had some advantages over the instead of the nitroglycerin-based cordite (i.e. lower barrel tear), but was harder to scale in production, or to adapt to high-performance artillery. Either way, it was one of those things the military leaders never wanted to repeat again.
**I.e. not only was Khruschev’s tenure ended by maize, but he had ordered the clearing and cultivation of a massive amount of previously virgin land – tselina. Besides the obvious environmental destruction, a lot of that land was simply far too marginal to make sense cultivating (i.e. Kazakhstan abandoned a lot of it soon after independence) and even Molotov noted far better results would have been seen with a focus on cultivating smaller-amount of highest yield lands. (although a counterfactual where he got the reigns of power in 1953 might well have led to actual nuclear war – at least, he himself described it as preferable to the end of communism.)
Sorry, I forgot the Soviet-era censuses. Anyway, I consider communism doomed to fail from start:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-origin-and-failure-of-communism#wbb1
note that “we already can grow enough food for 10.5 billion people.” and “we already can grow enough meat for 10.5 billion people.” are not the same claim, and only first was made.
Malthus himself pointed out that people tend not to have children they cannot feed; thus population never actually increases geometrically until suddenly everyone starves to death. What happens is that as is becomes harder to feed your family people have *fewer children*.
This is *exactly* the effect OGH pointed out in https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/.
Specifically: “the conundrum the peasant family finds themselves in is two-fold: on the one hand, they need to have a lot of pregnancies to achieve stable replacement or slow growth, but on the other hand, they still need to suppress normal ‘maximum’ fertility to avoid unsustainable household growth.”
The greater the resource constraint, the greater the fertility suppression.
Incredibly minor nitpick, but the UN population predictions probably overestimate future population growth, as they assume birth rate decline will abruptly stop and then gradually increase. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/birth-rate-population-decline/683333/
If the rate of change of birth rates remains the same (second derivative = 0), the population will peak at around 9 billion in the early 2050s, although that’s probably an underestimate.
States tend to have an aggregate sense that some above-replacement population growth is a valuable state goal, even when most of the people in the state are unwilling to personally engage in creating multi-child families. Once ever other possible and impossible method has been tried, we should expect states to eventually turn to professionalizing childrearing and socializing the cost of childbirth. We know how to do that already, without ‘destroying capitalism’ or whatnot, but we choose not to because Malthus still has such a hold on our aggregate thoughts.
The Atlantic is actually remarkably bad about bias in its articles on academic topics (i.e. “Broken Windows Policing” effectively became a thing only because of them) and this is no exception. You may note that the article is built around the POV of effectively a single researcher (Jesús Fernández-Villaverde), yet his numbers are described as “reality” in the third paragraph even before he is introduced in the fourth. It takes them up until paragraph 14 in order to finally introduce any counterargument – and for some reason, it’s from someone introduced as merely a PhD student. It finally quotes a single sentence from the lead author of the UN projections in paragraph 16…before the article ends three paragraphs later.
Or consider this passage.
Reading that article alone, you would have absolutely no idea that this decontextualized “reality” comes from Population Reference Bureau – an org whose TFR estimates for seemingly every country are much lower than those of any other source – not just the UN, but also the World Bank, Our World in Data, France’s INED and even the CIA World Factbook! (If you check the wikipedia list of TFRs, those orgs’ estimates for Thailand are 1.2, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.54, respectively. Similar gaps occur for every other country mentioned in the article.) Perhaps Fernández-Villaverde has a good explanation why PRB is a superior source to everything else – but the article does not even ask him to justify this choice! (Nor does it ever mention PRB anywhere in the first place – I wonder if the little that is written about it on Wikipedia (i.e. that it was founded by an eugenicist in 1929) has something to do with that.)
And of course, reading the article would leave you with no idea of how much modelling work goes into every projection. Read that carefully, and then reconsider how likely it is that a single iconoclast operating with possibly-cherrypicked data is going to be right.
https://population.un.org/wpp/definition-of-projection-scenarios
Couple of books about the future of industrial civilisation under the effects of climate change:
Climate Wars, Gwynne Dyer, 2010
G Dyer is a journalist who usually writes about international affairs, not a scientist. But he does talk to scientists, especially climate scientists, and summarises their discussions. In this book he also wrote a number of short “what if” scenarios in different parts of the world. Your judgement may differ on how likely any one of them is, but they’re all possible. (And yes one of the more unlikely options is that climate change does cause a massive extinction event of land based multicellular life.)
The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020
Pure near future science fiction. This is actually an optimistic book! Even so, the opening chapter is … really grim. Apparently this book has inspired a lot of unlikely people to become involved in climate change solutions, even high ranking members of the US military.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote that book in frustration of how little is done to slow global warming. He imagines a heat wave in India killing tens of millions, mostly children and the elderly. The Indian government then starts large scale stratospheric aerosol injection. Now the year of the imaginary heat wave has come and India is known not to have the economic resources for that. Moreover, sabotage does not make people turn against the organisations falling victim to it. That is a left-wing extremist pipe-dream.
Got any book recommendations?
I think speculative fiction as in these two books is a good way to introduce people to the idea that they/we can do something about climate change. Not convince them that there is a problem that will affect them/their country, the IPCC Summaries can do that. Not provide an accurate prediction of what will happen under varying changes in climate, the IPCC Report does that. The starting point IMHO is to get people thinking about change, that this is neither “we’re all doomed, I don’t have to do anything” nor “someone else will solve it, I don’t have to do anything”.
Both Gwynne Dyer and Kim Stanley Robinson set out a range of events that could happen and solutions that could be tried. Will they all come true, or all work to prevent disastrous climate change? Of course not.
I think you are giving him too much credit by retroactively reading your own knowledge of how this works into the text of the book, which doesn’t really specify this? Yes, there is the line “All the children were dead, all the old people were dead” – but it’s in the middle of the chapter which concludes with “Everyone was dead.” (Except for the Western POV character, ofc.) After that, it only says that “more people died than in WWI”, and the distribution of that is not clarified.
And it had also come and gone (since the annual peak of the heatwave season in South Asia is already in the rearview mirror) with nothing like that occurring. Which isn’t too surprising, since I do not believe any scientific paper published at the time Robinson was writing his book claimed they were even remotely imminent. The consensus at the time was
Now, a Science paper published a few months before the book (where the quote above comes from) did say that the above was an underestimate, as they were in fact able to detect conditions corresponding to the lethal wet bulb (TW 35°C) threshold – but of course, they haven’t actually killed people en masse like the book describes, because they only occurred at a very small scale and briefly (while the theory is that it would take ~6 hours of these conditions to kill a healthy adult.)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1838
And even that paper suggested it would take at least ~30 more years for the first one of those to occur anywhere in the world.
Moreover, their definition of “regularly” is rather different from one in common use – and they suggest it would start occurring in a rather different region from the one in the book.
(For reference, their grid cells are 80 km by 80 km – i.e. 6400 sq. km, or roughly between the land area of the US states of Connecticut and New Jersey, or nearly half of Northern Ireland, to give another example. Also for reference, 2.3C would be somewhere in the 2060-2070 range at currently projected rates.)
So, altogether, the book kicks off with a severe exaggeration – but of course, that is in habit for Kim Stanley Robinson, whose preceding New York 2140 kicks off with roughly 5X the plausible sea level rise by that date. Like in that case, he would rather twist the science to force his preferred outcome – described with sledgehammer-bluntness as
Hence, I gave up on reading that book fairly early, frustrated by both how ridiculous its exaggerations get at times (i.e. that 2-page chapter with a paragraph-length run-on sentence listing “recent extinctions” – a good number of those species, like the Hispaniolan solenodon, are not only not extinct today, but are actually least concern!) and the lack of refinement in the writing style. Probably the only way I ever finish it would be to publish a blog post series akin to those our host devoted to Gladiator or Rings of Power.
I have not read the book, only a review and an interview with the author. India lacking the resources to counteract global warming in the way described I got from an analysis published by the BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231010-sun-solar-geoengineering-ministry-for-the-future-kim-stanley-robinson
I have greater issues with the description of human behaviour. Why would only one non-indigenous person in an entire affected area come up with an idea making it possible to survive? Why would no others do like him? I am not only a problem-solver but also aware problems can be solved in more than one way. Furthermore, in case of disaster people try to help each other rather than panic like would Hollywood make you believe. Now, India has loads of people only caring about their own cast. However, that does not mean behaving entirely egoistically in case of disaster.
Reading primary sources is a skill for historians, and maybe also for commenting on a historical blog. In this case it’s one paperback book, not a PhD thesis.
As for why one non-indigenous person survives the opening chapter, that’s actually explained in the book. But in part it’s because he needs to, you might as well ask why James Bond doesn’t get shot in the opening sequence of a Bond movie, or Rose didn’t drown when the Titanic sank.
You might think that Indians (sub-continent) would be unable to put aside their differences, or not be technically capable to undertake a geoengineering program, but author KSR does not. In the book Indians, mostly at the government level but also as private individuals are very influential, often world leaders, in making changes to combat global warming.
And again, if you don’t want to read The Ministry of the Future, fine. What would you recommend instead?
Uh, India absolutely has the resources to do solar dimming. One estimate indicates that cooling the planet by 1 degree C would cost about 18 billion dollars per year. If you multiply that by 5 (let’s say we want to cool the planet by several degrees) it would still add up to only 2.5% of India’s current GDP.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba7e7
A new party was voted in, a composite party composed of all kinds of Indians, every religion and caste, urban poor, rural poor, the educated, all banded together by the disaster and determined to make something change. The ruling elite lost legitimacy and hegemony, and the inchoate fractured resistance of victims coalesced in a party called Avasthana, Sanskrit for survival. The world’s biggest democracy, taking a new way.
I have more problems with this idea, and think it says more about Kim Stanley Robinson’s personal wish fulfilment than anything else.
People can come together across ideological lines for a temporary shared purpose, as they did in WWII, but the divisions of ideology, ethnicity/caste, economic status, etc. are still going to be there, waiting to surface one the crisis is past.
Also, committing acts of sabotage or terrorism against a company/institution/organisation does not make the general public turn against the victim. This was tried at least several times in the 20th century by communists. Never did it trigger a revolution in the sense of a popular revolt as the communists believed. The closest they came to success was Cuba in 1959. The county’s military dictator got so terrified by numerous roughly simultaneous acts of terrorism he left. In the resulting power vacuum the communists took over without needing any popular revolt.
The closest they came to success was Cuba in 1959. The county’s military dictator got so terrified by numerous roughly simultaneous acts of terrorism he left. In the resulting power vacuum the communists took over without needing any popular revolt.
To an extent, but that’s an oversimplification. The insurgency didn’t trigger a wholesale popular revolt, but it did (coupled with the government reaction) cause widespread disgust with the government and sympathy for the revolutionaries. Part of the reason that Castro was able to take over seamlessly in the resulting power vacuum is that he was extremely popular in 1958/1959, and that was a result largely of the insurgency and the government reaction to it.
Thank you for the details. I have only been told about the event by my dad who may have oversimplified.
I saw that estimate around the time it was first published. The thing is, if you had read Ms. Synnerholm’s link, you would have seen that there, the person arguing that India lacks the capability to do SRM is Wake Smith, the author of that very same estimate! His point is not about India lacking the funds, but the aviation industry experience to design specialized aircraft and produce them at scale. Let’s just say that the history of Tejas (“Radiant”)* does not fill one with confidence when it comes to producing, in Smith’s words, “a fleet of several hundred large high-altitude jets of a sort that does not currently exist”. It also makes another, really interesting point that atmospheric circulation would prevent India from performing meaningful SRM inside its airspace alone, and it would be forced to cooperate with one of the Southern Hemisphere nations in some way. In all, it’s actually a very interesting article, and it cited a number of papers I have not been aware of earlier.
*You probably know this already, but for other readers: India began development of this fighter plane in mid-1980s, it took off in 2001 (for comparison, F-15’s “start of planning-first flight” timeline was 1965-1972, and Su-27’s was 1969-1977) and finally entered service in 2015 – and even then, fairly few have been built, and a third of the components have been imported. And predictably, it’s largely obsolete nowadays after spending so long in development – its absence during the recent aerial clash with Pakistan had been rather conspicuous. It’s a story somewhat reminiscent of French interwar tank development, when the B-1 design was conceived in 1919, but did not begin production until the mid-1930s at a rate of three per month – peaking at 9/month after the invasion of Poland, in spite (or because of) its production getting split between five companies. (On the bright side, it actually was the world’s heaviest, most powerful tank for a couple of years – although T-34 and KV had already comprehensively exceeded it in the months before France fell, and the upgraded Pz. IV, the Sherman and the Churchill followed a year or two later and made it completely obsolete.)
https://www.slashgear.com/1925355/hal-tejas-aircraft-about-why-failing-to-meet-india-air-force-expectations/
The thing is, if you had read Ms. Synnerholm’s link, you would have seen that there, the person arguing that India lacks the capability to do SRM is Wake Smith, the author of that very same estimate!
@YARD,
I did read it, but I ignored it as kind of irrelevant. I think if India can *afford* to do this kind of thing (they clearly can) and if it feels an existential need to do it (which is looking more likely with every passing year), then they’ll find a way to get it done.
As prestigious as fighter planes are, India’s control over Kashmir, and its ability to deal with occasional outrages by possibly Pakistani-aligned Islamists, are not actually existential threats in the same way that a substantially warmer world would be. If this ever needs to be done, then I’m sure India can figure out how to do it.
India’s southernmost territory is Great Nicobar Island which is at 7 degrees north. I have read that large volcanic eruptions within 15 degrees of the Equator have equal climate effect on both hemispheres. If so collaboration with a southern hemisphere country would not be needed. The problem might be more organisational than technical.
@Mateusz Konieczny
Replying to one of your comments here, because the thread depth got exceeded, and the comment above has a directly relevant point.
See, I would generally assume this too – but the comment above seems to suggest the opposite.
As I just noted, that opening chapter is extremely unlikely – yet, it’s far from clear if a more realistically written book would have had “inspired a lot of unlikely people to become involved in climate change solutions”. Purely as far as the truth is concerned, I would like to write a detailed debunking of the book – but would it ultimately do more harm than good? The fact no such debunking seems to exist already implies every scientist in a position to do so probably thought the risks were too great.
Altogether, while we might wish for things to be otherwise, people in general do not really base their understanding of the world on peer-reviewed literature. They form it on what they learn during their (early) education, combined with what they get from the conventional media directly or indirectly (“getting news via social media” still usually means “reacting to someone who learned something via conventional media first”) and from popular culture. The latter is also generally the most evocative, and therefore the most influential. Our host knows this well – hence all the posts on here devoted to films and TV shows. Yet, even he does not appear to have ever read any part of an IPCC report (at least, there is no evidence of it to be found on the blog). I am sure he’s read news coverage of it, but it’s not really the same.
If anything, I would say even most reporters probably have only passing familiarity with the most condensed IPCC summaries at best – and then they only read scientific papers if they become viral in their social media circle, which is inherently biased. Then, many of the people who are reading the news (and seemingly more than a few writing them, even) seem to take these stories and slot them into a grab bag of dystopias which actually make up the core of their vision of the future. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say there are virtually no remotely popular stories which present the near future (2050s, 2070s, 2150s, etc.) in a way which can be said to be more consistently positive than today. The Ministry for the Future somehow passes for one, even though all it basically does is first create greatly exaggerated negative consequences, and then use that to justify unrealistically smooth solutions overcoming those. So, when another study (inevitably negative, because mildly positive ones are rarely even understandable by reporters) gets splashed across pages, people seem to look at and go – “Ah, that will be another stepping stone on the road to Mad Max.”
I believe that one thing which gave legs to that claim was Mark Lynas’ “Our Final Warning: 6 Degrees of Climate Emergency” book. There, though, it effectively depicted temperatures at 4 degrees jumping almost instantly to 5 and then to 6 because of permafrost and methane hydrates, and such rapid temperature jump is then treated as borderline extinction-causing. If that were to happen, you actually would see superstorms almost akin to what happens on gas giants – the redistribution of heat across air and water masses across such a timescale would be ludicrously huge, and the consequences practically incomprehensible. Of course, the idea it could happen in the first place is based on a mix of exaggerations and long-debunked papers. The gap between what permafrost is actually expected to do and what too many people think it is going to do is comically large. Same goes for nearly every tipping point, for that matter. Just look at the timescales and temperature changes in the table on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system
At the same time, I’ll note that people who believe in don’t just expect (exaggerated) consequences of climate change alone, but also much more conflict, pandemics (see the comment by Neki) and frequently resource scarcity as well. That can change the implications substantially, in ways which most people are ill-equipped to assess (see the thread on inadequacies of current econometrics of climate.) However, this is best discussed in the other thread.
I base most of my ideas of what science says on popular scientific literature. For 20 years I have been struggling to adapt a more eco-friendly lifestyle. When others show interest in doing like me I actively encourage them. This way I try to contribute to the survival of technological civilisation.
No, not really. Many thanks to “Doc Snow” below for taking the plunge and summarizing the book so that I did not have to pay for it in order to see for myself that it is almost entirely obsolete.
https://discover.hubpages.com/literature/Climate-Wars-A-Review
* Scenario One: Appears to be fully based on the pernicious myth of permafrost emissions being powerful enough to have “totally overwhelmed human emissions cuts, and the process has slid beyond human ability to control.” See Wikipedia link in another one of my comments for how (comparatively) weak they actually are.
* Scenario Two: “In 2019, as the Arctic sea ice melts, the Arctic nations—polarized between Russia and NATO in a “Colder War”–squabble over fossil fuel resources, as a militarily powerful China struggles to deal with the internal chaos of massive agricultural failures due to persistent drought.” – while not totally obsolete like the above, we are in 2025, and neither has happened. It might well take another decade for Arctic sea ice to seasonally disappear at least once, and even then, it’ll still reform every winter and be present in more summers than not until we get closer to 3C. PRC agriculture is stronger than ever and conspiracy theories aside, it has the largest foodstuff stockpile in the world. Yes, all polar-adjacent militaries are gradually preparing for conflict in the Arctic, but I don’t know if it deserves much credit just for reflecting that and whiffing much else.
* Scenario Three: This one is interesting.
As we know, much of the above has already happened as far as the border is concerned – and far from Hispanic Americans reacting monolithically in horror, a very significant fraction have supported it. Now, Mexican government hasn’t failed like described in the book – though, I wonder if it ever considers if they could substitute with imports? (And I’ll add that in general, most predictions expect significantly less hunger globally for the foreseeable future, not more.)
Scenario Four: this time, the review author actually handles it for me, noting that it appears to depend partially upon the famous “glaciergate” error in the Working Group II portion of AR4, which incorrectly stated that Himalayan glaciers were to disappear by 2035, rather than 2350 (as estimated in 1996 by hydrologist V.M. Kotlyakov.) I think the timeline might have been brought forward a bit (relative to 2350) since then, but even then, glacier flows would be getting more intense from increased melting until well into the 2nd half of the century. (And afterwards, stronger monsoons would more-or-less compensate. There’s now little doubt overall precipitation in the area would increase.)
Scenario Five: “A Happy Tale.” – Quadruple whammy here. We have Dyer’s failure to anticipate the impact of fracking on oil prices, ludicrously overestimated biofuel capabilities (see the quotation from Energy Ambitions above), “storms and floods” which “kill millions” (apparently, over this decade and the previous one) and a repeat of his overestimation of permafrost’s power. The idea that oil prices at $30/barrel would have caused revolutions in Nigeria and Iran in late 2010s is…I’ll be generous and treat this as a claim for annual average, which technically hasn’t happened since the book was published. However, 2016 and 2020 annual average prices were at ~40$, and some months fell well below 30$ (once as low as 18$.)
Scenario Six: The only one I would credit with actual foresight (“possible political and ideological conflicts in the 2030s and 40s. The heirs of the early-21st-century “Right” are focused on the expansion of nuclear power and on the deployment of geo-engineering schemes intended to buy time to bring down CO2 levels. The “Left” remains bitter that the solutions they had long proposed had been postponed until too late, unhappy about the reliance on nuclear power, and deeply suspicious of geo-engineering”)…but the use of a supervolcano deus ex machina is disappointing and limits its utility.
Scenario Seven: Other than Peter Ward (who hasn’t published anything in many years, AFAIK) I don’t believe there is a single environmental scientist who thinks a “Canfield Ocean” is remotely plausible in present-day or near-future conditions.
All in all, that’s precious little value for a book in the present day.
TWO THOUSAND words in two comments to express “I haven’t read the book, I don’t recommend it” (And judging by the mention of a super volcano for scenario six, I’m not convinced the person you’re copying from did either.)
So, it’s obsolete. Recommend something else!
I am generally a defender of the British Empire, but I will concede probably their worst mistake was embracing these Malthusian ideas at precisely the point in history where they were becoming obsolete.
At which point in time did the British government “embrace” it?
OK, I have a stupid question about Malthus (whom I haven’t read).
Assuming this is what he said:
“if it is the case that the primary resources to sustain a population grow only linearly, but population grows exponentially, then it must be the case that population will, relatively swiftly, approach the limits of resources,”
then, yes, I can see the conclusion follows from premises. And I can see why he thought population would grow exponentially. If every woman has two daughters, then the population doubles every generation; exponential growth.
Very simply, exponential population growth and linear resource growth (1 ration feeds 1 person) looks like this:
Generation 1: 10 people, 50 rations – OK
Generation 2: 20 people, 60 rations – OK
Gen 3: 40 people, 70 rations – OK
Gen 4: 80 people, 80 rations: OK
Gen 5: 160 people, 90 rations: MALTHUSIAN COLLAPSE
But why did he think that resources would grow linearly?
It would seem far more logical to assume that they would either grow exponentially or not at all. If it’s about farming potatoes, then either we’re already growing potatoes on every scrap of land – in which case resources don’t grow at all – or more people means more farmers, which means exponential growth of resources, even if the exponent is lower than it is for population.
What was his argument for linear growth?
Or have I completely misunderstood him?
The original text is available online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population
Thank you.
That’s hilarious because he has no basis for his argument whatever! From Ch.2:
“Let us now take any spot of earth, this Island for instance, and see in what ratio the subsistence it affords can be supposed to increase. We will begin with it under its present state of cultivation. If I allow that by the best possible policy, by breaking up more land, and by great encouragements to agriculture, the produce of this Island may be doubled in the first twenty-five years, I think it will be allowing as much as any person can well demand. In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. It would be contrary to all our knowledge of the qualities of land. The very utmost that we can conceive, is, that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce. Let us then take this for our rule, though certainly far beyond the truth; and allow that, by great exertion, the whole produce of the Island might be increased every twenty-five years, by a quantity of subsistence equal to what it at present produces. The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this. In a few centuries it would make every acre of land in the Island like a garden. Yet this ratio of increase is evidently arithmetical.”
That’s his argument! “I can imagine doubling to 2X. But no way could it double again to 4X. Really, what, 3X sounds like the most? So that’s linear increase.”
Literally the Argument from Incredulity.
According to Malthus’s figures, the population of the United States had been doubling every 25 years since the original settlement, almost entirely due to natural increase.
In a century that is 16-fold growth, possible because the area under cultivation had also increased. If he didn’t believe that Great Britain’s food output could also have grown 16-fold in the same time, would that have been Argument from Personal Incredulity?
In 250 years, that growth rate gives thousandfold growth (1024-fold, if you want to be picky). If he didn’t believe that Great Britain’s food output could also have grown thousandfold in the same time, would that have been Argument from Personal Incredulity?
In 500 years, we get millionfold growth, in a thousand years trillionfold growth.
Should he have said that improved agriculture could have matched that?
At what point in this sequence is he allowed to use Argument from Personal Incredulity?
Should he go with what seems plausible given agricultural practices of the time? I rather get the impression he was.
“Should he go with what seems plausible given agricultural practices of the time? I rather get the impression he was.”
He wasn’t, though. He went with observed evidence for his estimate of maximum population growth rate, as you point out, but for his estimate of increase in agricultural productivity he just seems to have said “linear increase by X every 25 years? Sounds right to me!”
If he’d gone for plausibility he should have been saying something like “well, look, here’s some tithe records of potato yields in a parish in Shropshire that show we were managing 20 bushels an acre in 1725. But by 1750 it was up to 30, and by 1775 it was 40. Same for wheat yields in the farms owned by the Bishop of Ely. Linear increase.”
Also, of course, there is good reason a priori to assume geometrical population growth, but there is no reason a priori to assume that productivity growth should be linear. And there’s very good logical reason to suppose that it is not – after all, if you project a linear sequence back in time, it hits zero. A thousand years ago people were growing something in Shropshire!
Of cause, one can’t extrapolate trends as far as one likes. On closer inspection they turn out not to be that long-lasting. I think the demographic history the British Islands can be described as long periods of slow growth interrupted by major setbacks. The development of better farming methods in the 17th and 18th centuries led to more rapid population growth. People’s diet got more nutritious and food security increased resulting in decreased childhood mortality. Thomas Malthus lived during this population boom and might well have mistaken it for normality.
“linear increase by X every 25 years? Sounds right to me!”
ajay, that doesn’t sound right to me. He is assuming that productivity per acre will go up far faster than it has in the past. He is not picking a number that sounds right, he is picking one that sounds absurdly high.
He is assuming that X calories are produced in Britain each year, but that after the revolution the per-year calories produced will go up by X every 25 years. If they had gone up at that rate in the past, 0 calories would have been produced in Britain 25 years before.
Great Britain’s population went up by <25% during the 18th century. That suggests that calorie production went up by 0.2X in a century, far slower than his assumed rate of X per quarter-century = 4X per century.
He is picking an assumed linear increase after the revolution of 20 times the historical one. He is picking a high rate, presumably because that assumption is most favourable to the Mr Godwin he is arguing against.
I suppose the “Mr Godwin” you refer to is William Godwin who was the father of Mary Shelley. He is the only famous male Godwin who could sensibly have been debating in the late 18th century.
My point is that increases in both agricultural production and population were very much slower before the later half of the 17th century. Early European Farmers reached the British Islands 6000 years ago. However, these practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. Together with high precipitation and often hilly terrain this led to soil erosion. At the end of the Stone Age the British Islands suffered ecological collapse. Furthermore, Europe was hit by its first plague epidemic at about the same time. Combined those resulted in the death of most of British Islands’ population. The vacant areas were taken over by the Indo-European-speaking Beaker Culture. This new group were more herders than farmers. There was not that much land left being arable with their limited technology. Eventually, they gave rise to the Celts.
During Antiquity the Romans conquered what is now England and Wales. They introduced better agricultural practices resulting in considerable population growth there. When they left the urbanised population could no longer be upheld due to the loss of organisation. If Roman-introduced agricultural practices were not lost that would still only have resulted in less than ten percent population loss. The really hard hit came during the 6th century. The volcanic winter of 536 was soon followed by the Plague of Justinian. Those two together may have killed up to half the population.
During the following centuries there was considerable immigration of Germanic-speaking peoples from the European mainland. These settled in most of present-day England where they took over as Big Men. This meant they had lower childhood mortality resulting in a disproportional contribution to the local gene pool. They were the cultural (but not necessarily biological) ancestors of today’s ethnic majority. Even with this immigration population growth was relatively slow. By the late 11th century the population is estimated to have been significantly lower than in Roman times.
New farming practices were developed during the High Middle Ages. As a result the population tripled in nine generations. This despite the volcanic winter of 1258 which would have hit Scotland especially hard. Then the island of Britain suffered a large famine in the early 14th century. That was followed a couple of decades later by Black Death. The later killed a third of Europe’s population. I think this can be applied to most or all of the British Islands too.
The War of the Roses only slowed down population growth instead of reversing it. By the 16th century the British Islands were so deforested people started to use coal and peat as fuel. The English Civil War slowed down population growth as well. However, the poor enforcement of regulations for economic activities during the war allowed a lot of experiments. The development of greatly improved agricultural methods during the following century resulted in a population boom. Thomas Malthus lived during this boom without knowing its beginning or being able to foresee its end.
It seems more like an Argument from Experience Accumulated Over Millenia of Agriculture to me. He doesn’t feel the need to provide a detailed explanation because agriculture was so important, so ubiquitous that you should just know how it works, it was a given. Experience says roughly how much of a multiplier is feasible, as the product total of multiple factors, some of which he mentions. It’s not random numbers but “this is how far we know we can push it but beyond that we’re stumped”.
Of course, it turns out that it was indeed possible to push yields much higher in the end, but that was quite a bit later. People back then could’ve had blind optimism in the Green Revolution, but they sure didn’t know how to make it happen yet. Blind optimism is as useless in practice as blind pessimism – you’re not going to wish hunger away, if you don’t have a plan that you can put into practice, all it’ll accomplish is that you’ll starve happy.
There’s certainly an element of blind pessimism in Malthus but it’s in believing that the short-term trend will assert itself over other ones, not in conclusions made from that short-term trend.
The Green Revolution started in Mexico not long before humanity begin cultivating the last new land suitable for agriculture.
I’ve just had a fairly long post rejected with the word ‘nonce’ in the message, and I didn’t make a copy elsewhere. I think what I wrote was sensible and on topic, and it certainly wasn’t sexual, so could I ask the moderator(s) to have a look, or could someone suggest what I might do
I would suggest that it is that word which triggered the rejection – it has somewhat different meanings in American and British English – but obviously since your second comment made it through, that can’t be the case!
If the comment section has been loaded in the browser for too long without refreshing, attempts to post a new comment will fail and the comment will be lost. When composing a comment first thing in the morning, I have found it valuable to CTRL-A, CTRL-C before clicking out of the box to scroll down the the Reply button.
Just put “nonce technology” into your favourite search engine and you’ll have plenty of reading for long winter evenings.
Very interesting to see Malthus refuted. In fact, one could add that populations did, as a matter of fact, stay constant in many places for a long time (e.g. woodland Eastern North America), and at other times, in other places decreased (e.g. 3rd-5th century AD Western Europe, 7th century Balkans and Poland).
I do think the following sentences very much lack any argumentative support or references: “… at this point it seems very likely that we will have more power-per-person available at that 10.5 billion person peak than we do today. Living standards won’t fall, they’ll continue to rise… “
“The next key primary resource is energy and progress on renewable energy sources is remarkable; at this point it seems very likely that we will have more power-per-person available at that 10.5 billion person peak than we do today. Living standards won’t fall, they’ll continue to rise…””
This seems like an assertion so uncontroversial that it doesn’t really require a citation. World population at present is around 8 billion. Let’s say it peaks at 10.5 billion in 2074. For power per person to be higher in fifty years’ time than today, total generation would need to grow 31% over 50 years, or around half a percent per year. That sounds well within the bounds of plausibility. (Here’s what per-cap electricity has done over the last forty! https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-generation?tab=line&country=~OWID_WRL)
Possibility maybe, but not plausibility. Electricity is the smaller part of our total energy consumption. Deriving even a third or a fourth of our current electricity consumption from intermittent sources is giving the system huge trouble. Imagine deriving all of our current electricity demand from intermittent sources. Then imagine substituting gasoline, diesel, heating, everything by electricity from intermittent sources. All this while oil and good coal are becoming more expensive to extract, and nuclear reactors construction regularly runs over time and over budget. I don’t think that rising standard of living is plausible. You can read older posts on Tom Murphy’s dothemath for, well, the math.
“Possibility maybe, but not plausibility. Electricity is the smaller part of our total energy consumption.”
Fair point, I should have used a chart of total per-capita energy consumption rather than just electricity.
Here’s a chart of total per-capita energy consumption, showing it rising… 31% over the last 50 years. Based on that, I’d say another 31% in the next 50 is entirely plausible.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=line&country=~OWID_WRL
And of course as the energy intensity of GDP decreases, 31% more energy consumption will mean more than 31% increase in output. It’s not plausible to assume that a 30% or more increase in GDP will go along with a decrease in standard of living.
“Deriving even a third or a fourth of our current electricity consumption from intermittent sources is giving the system huge trouble.”
Not really, no. I live in a country where, right now, at this moment, just under a third of electricity comes from intermittent sources. We’re doing fine. Fifteen years ago most of our electricity came from coal and gas, and back then we had twice as many power cuts as we do now, and they lasted twice as long.
Maybe your country is struggling with running a modern electricity grid; mine isn’t, which leads me to suggest this is a skill issue.
I have cited Murphy’s Energy Ambitions in this thread already – though I also have to admit it isn’t perfect. I.e. the section devoted to the demographic transition and how much more extra energy/resources its completion would require appears somewhat outdated relative to recent trends of birthrate declines even in the nations which are quite distant from OECD wealth levels.
Having said that, one does not even have to rely on Murphy to make this kind of an argument; papers like the below are not generally written for fun.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adc9c6
Towards modelling post-growth climate futures: a review of current modelling practices and next steps
Counterpoint:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067
More quotes from the Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism paper – which had been influential enough to inspire a whole recent documentary by a (largely) unrelated team, Future Council.
Furthermore…
Admittedly, the last highlighted part is about as detailed as it gets with its argument regarding renewables specifically. And of course, the thrust of the paper isn’t exactly a mainstream argument;* and it may not help matters that the name of another concept from this paper, “The Great Simplification”, had been adopted by a podcast which seemingly tends to interview whichever environmental scientists happen to have the most extreme views in their field.
*Though hardly a rare one; just before the pandemic (and before the publication of this paper), the European Environmental Bureau (not an official EU body, but a coalition of nearly 200 NGO, mostly in the member countries) had published a document titled Decoupling, Debunked which effectively endorsed a core plank of the paper’s argument. Presumably, their position – “not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown, but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future.” – implies that they do not find our host’s quoted position uncontroversial.
TL; DR. Can you summarise it?
In this comment section, you claim to have read Malthus’ essay up to at least chapter 2 (out of 19). The entire paper above is about as long as 4 chapters of Malthus. You can do it!
Nah. If you can’t summarise it concisely it isn’t worth reading at length.
What is the archaeological evidence of agriculture being 20,000 years old? That would be at about the time of peak of the Last Ice Age. I thought it only dated back to around the time when the Last Ice Age ended (9700 BC).
Thanks for the article, Bret Devereaux. The Malthusian trap is theoretically logical but not inevitable in practice, as progress and increased production can improve living standards.
As for Dyson: I’ve read some of his books, and I never got the idea the sphere/swarm was a joke. He got the idea from Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, and later clarified that it was a swarm, e.g. of habitats and collectors, striving to collect starlight the way that rainforest canopy strives to absorb all sunlight. Not a solid shell, which would be nigh-impossible.
Though Howard Tayler in _Schlock Mercenary_ came up with a third variant: a Dyson bubble, shall we say, a giant thin shell supported by sunlight like a solar sail, possibly with habitats hanging from the bubble. This seems at least moderately possible.
I think this underestimates the usefulness of Malthusian analysis. Population pressure and resource constraints are real and have to be considered. If you want to understand European history, you have to understand the roughly 200 year price and price stability cycles. Population growth and resource constraints are major factors. You can take that kind of model further as Turchin and others have done or you can downplay it as just one set of factors.
The Population Bomb gets bashed a lot, but it’s numerical population predictions still hold up pretty well. I’ll admit that it offered some apocalyptic scenarios, but if you read the latter section on actions to take, you’ll see familiar program of agricultural research and farm support, family planning propaganda and birth control distribution and so on. In general, that advice was taken and it has largely yielded the desired result. Sometimes a warning leads to action and a problem can be averted or at least delayed. Carson predicted a silent spring, but that was averted by banning DDT which was already losing much of its effectiveness by the 1960s.
Even now, we’re seeing Malthusian forces in action with the various conflicts over the Himalayan waters. However these are resolved politically, we are going to see a change in the way water is extracted and used, or we are going to see increased conflict and more water shortages and related crises. There are counterforces that can be applied, but they can have political consequences. It is not an accident that geology has a major influence on voting patterns in England and France.
I think DDT is still used to impregnate mosquito nets.
I think this runs even deeper than Devereaux’s analysis. I once tried to model the expansion of the first wave of foragers into the Americas and figured that with unlimited land and no competition a foraging population might be able to achieve 5%/year population growth. (And hence could sweep the continents in less than 1,000 years.) And the world as a whole achieved 2%/year population growth in the 1960s. Over 20 years, 2%/year gives 48% population increase. But we observe that it took Europe’s total population over 100 years to recover from the Black Death, not 20 or 40. So the crucial question is, given that food production must have been well above Malthusian levels, what was constraining population growth? Certainly it was possible with that level of technology, if everybody wanted to, to restrain birth rates, but why did people want to?
Similarly, Devereaux writes “It is the difference between getting 3,000 calories in a wood-and-plaster building with a terracotta roof, a good collection of coarseware pottery and clean water from an aqueduct versus getting 3,000 calories in a wood-and-mud hut with a thatched roof, no pottery at all and having to pump water at the local well [actually, pull it up with a bucket].”
That seems to be a situation where the “surplus” or “disposable” or “discretionary” income of society is used to make the good buildings and good pots rather than used to make more food. It seems to me that a society is at the “nicer” 3,000-calorie-per-day equilibrium because the structure of society ensures that resources that *could* be used to generate more food generate material goods that make life more comfortable but *do not* enable more population growth. The details of how that happens seems to me to be crucial.
In regard to ancient Rome, it seems that one element of state extraction of surplus, and routing it to non-food consumption, is the requirement for soldiers to supply their own armor. A family might prefer to use the surplus as food to produce more children, but they were given a strong incentive by the state to divert it to arms and armor for their sons when they were conscripted. (Amusingly, a tax they were a lot less likely to shirk on than the typical ancient imperial “tax the peasants and spend it on mercenaries”.)
But the broad question is what factors prevent the surplus being used for food to make more children. It wasn’t simply the preferences of the peasants, because the descendant peasants that preferred children rather than e.g. nice pottery would eventually come to dominate the population. Has anyone studied those mechanisms specifically from that point of view?
Also, I’m amused at all the discussion of fertility control and so few mentions of infanticide, which seems to have been ubiquitous in the pre-modern world.
If killing unwanted babies was accepted or not varied between different societies. By the time of Black Death I think it was illegal in most of Europe. On the other hand people generally want a better life until the point when they don’t need to worry about survival anymore. Only a few greedy or misled people continues to strive for more after that.
If Books Could Kill mentioned!
“How unfortunate that Malthus is dead! The whole world would be laughing at him now! Of course, he had some grounds for his pessimism. I’m even ready to agree with those who consider him a genius.
But he was far too ignorant; he saw absolutely no prospects for the natural sciences. He was one of those unfortunate geniuses who discover the laws of social development precisely at the moment when those laws cease to operate…
I sincerely pity him. After all, to him humanity was nothing but a billion greedily gaping mouths. . He must have lain awake at night in sheer horror. What a monstrous nightmare indeed — a billion ravenous maws, and not a single head!”
Humanity is now thought to have reached one billion during Thomas Malthus’ lifetime. Maybe not quite when “An Essay on the Principle of Population” was published but probably within a decade after that. Who are you quoting?