Razid Khan has a defense of him. But not a very robust one. As I noted to Razid on Twitter, while we are certainly capable of extincting ourselves, it won’t be from resource depletion.
10 thoughts on “Paul Ehrlich”
Comments are closed.
Razid Khan has a defense of him. But not a very robust one. As I noted to Razid on Twitter, while we are certainly capable of extincting ourselves, it won’t be from resource depletion.
Comments are closed.
1) How close to a Dyson Sphere are you? -> Not Very Bloody Close.
2) Well then, that’s precisely how close you are to an actual overall resource crunch. (As opposed to a -localized- or -temporary- one. Which happen all the time.)
As a Dyson sphere building society continues to innovate and optimize ways to create a “sphere” (swarm), the Dyson sphere itself will be a massive source of harvestable resources.
Oh, wait, libertarians prefer creative destruction over just about any other solution. So instead of figuring out how to make the solar collectors half as thick, I bet you’d rather use a solution like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
It’s not so very unusual to be totally wrong and refuse to admit it. It isn’t particularly admirable, though, and it’s rare to get to see such an obvious case.
I’m not worried about falling back into the food-driven Malthusian Trap, but it’s important to realize that there’s a design pattern for this kind of trap that can crop up in lots of different places. All you need is a set of non-linear differential equations where the coupling of one derivative to another can induce boom-bust behavior.
For Malthus, it was an incremental change in food production triggering a much larger population boom, resulting in a collapse when the population outstripped the new production. We escaped that trap when the technology-driven rate of change for food got larger than the coupled population rate of change.
The one that I’m a little worried about now is economic productivity. The current stable state is one where the rate of change in productivity couples beneficially to the growth of jobs in the economy, and hence to the income of average workers. But if automation allows productivity to increase faster than it grows the workforce, you could get the same sort of boom-bust behavior in the job market. You could get a Malthusian trap where we get die-backs because so many people are unemployed that they can’t be supported.
I suspect that there are lots of traps out there like this. Just because it’s not happening with food and other commodities doesn’t mean it won’t crop up somewhere else.
The one that I’m a little worried about now is economic productivity. The current stable state is one where the rate of change in productivity couples beneficially to the growth of jobs in the economy, and hence to the income of average workers. But if automation allows productivity to increase faster than it grows the workforce, you could get the same sort of boom-bust behavior in the job market. You could get a Malthusian trap where we get die-backs because so many people are unemployed that they can’t be supported.
If your society is flexible and you didn’t use the power of the state to push up the boom, then it just shouldn’t be that bad. I think that’s why the 2007-2008 real estate crisis was so bad and the current recoveries in the developed world so poor.
These forces are so far beyond the power of the state to influence them that it might as well not exist. The system is either stable, or it isn’t. No amount of policy is going to make a difference if some set of innovations changes a coupling constant or two.
These forces are so far beyond the power of the state to influence them that it might as well not exist.
There are two obvious counterexamples that come from the very case I mentioned: central bank interest rates and setting low reserve requirements. Very low interest rates helped inflate considerably the real estate market by providing easy access . And 50 to 1 reserve requirements on certain institutions to create and own REITs and similar instruments greatly exaggerated the monetary value of such instruments and how much assets could be created with a fixed amount of capital.
Unfortunately, we have plenty of evidence that while a government can’t magically create free lunch, it can interfere to a profound degree with the economy and people of a society and cause immense harm.
For Malthus, it was an incremental change in food production triggering a much larger population boom, resulting in a collapse when the population outstripped the new production. We escaped that trap when the technology-driven rate of change for food got larger than the coupled population rate of change.
No the problem is Malthus did not realize that the food supply can grow at the same geometric rate humans do. Crops are grown and animals bred not manufactured.
When Malthus was writing, the exponential increase in crop production had barely begun. He may have been wrong even for his time, but he can be forgiven for not recognizing that a trend that had persisted for millennia had suddenly changed. Technology actually changed the equation.
Technology can change other equations, too. I suspect that it will change most for the better, but the possibility that it will change some fundamental dynamic for the worse can’t be ruled out.