Malthusianisms

by blasdel • 17 years ago

44 16 17 years ago

tarkin2• 17 years ago

The idea that usage will always fulfill capacity is a little too general for my liking. Sometimes, perhaps often, the case, yes; but always? No. Population decline in Europe despite a very high quality of life and an abundance of resources, anyone?

skorgu• 17 years ago

Populations (apparently) decline until they stop declining: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08...

Edit: Link to Nature not a press release.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

That recent finding still shows decline.

bokonist• 17 years ago

It will be interesting to see how long the population decline lasts for. At some point, ethnic/cultural/religious segments of the population with the highest birthrates will begin to be a large portion of the population. As that happens, birthrates will bottom out and then start to rise back up again.

johnnybgoode• 17 years ago

Indeed. I wonder if they wouldn't decline again after that, though.

rsheridan6• 17 years ago

Already happening in Israel: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4956

jfoutz• 17 years ago

Having children is expensive and a lot of work. The higher the quality of life, the more people want to spend their time doing things other than raising children.

swombat• 17 years ago

Why can’t everyone just agree to a family-friendly, 40-hour workweek? Because then anyone who chose to work a 90-hour week would clean our clocks.

Well, if you look at a fair chunk of Europe, everyone has agreed to work reasonable hours, largely, and the nutters like myself who work their socks off are few and far between. Of course, you could say that the rest of the world is about to clean Europe's clocks, but that's by no means certain.

321abc• 17 years ago

Unfortunately, at least France and Germany seem to want to start emulating the US in this regard. So they're increasing length of their work weeks:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124835745710975827.html

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090731-20935.html

Also muddying the waters is that, by some measures, Americans have more leisure time than Europeans:

http://www.examiner.com/x-14795-Page-One-Examiner~y2009m8d13...

grandpa• 17 years ago

Two economists are walking down the street when they see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk in front of them. The first economist goes to pick up the money but his colleague stops him and tells him not to bother.

"Why not?"

"If it were a real twenty dollar bill, someone would have picked it up already."

wwalker3• 17 years ago

A common thread to these Malthusianisms is that you can't understand dynamic phenomena by assuming they're static.

Something like the number of hours in a work week isn't just a fixed number; it's got a history behind it and driving forces on it that are needed to make sense of its current and future values.

Aaronson implies that he thinks about these situations by trying to figure out what Nash equilibrium they might settle to, but I think even that concept's not general enough. In the real world, people don't make their minds up once and then stay the same afterwards -- they'll change their behavior over time, and not always towards any equilibrium state.

jrp• 17 years ago

Why are freeways crowded?

hristov• 17 years ago

In my opinion Malthus is getting way too much credit considering real life proved him wrong.

The examples provided in the article are actually pretty good and clever examples, but they are accurate because they do not apply to the one thing Malthus talked about -- human populations. If you actually consider human populations, you will quickly discover that all these Malthuisms fall apart pretty quickly. Which makes sense considering humans are complicated beings and not simple autonomons like mice that will breed at any opportunity.

According to Malthus, the richer a population is the more it will grow and it will get poorer, so please do not bother helping poor countries, or poor people. Instead let them be poor so they automatically limit their populations. Oh and also we cannot achieve a great society where there is no poverty, because when there is no poverty people will just starts breeding like rabbits until everyone is poor again.

But of course in real life everything is backwards. The poorer a country is the more its population grows. In a country with income disparity the poor income groups grow much faster than the rich, and sometimes the rich ones do not grow at all.

This planet suffers from population overload but most of it is caused from poor populations (poor countries, or poor groups of rich countries).

If a poor country becomes richer relatively quickly it does not suffer a population explosion. On the contrary, population growth rates plummet and may even go negative. See Japan and South Korea.

So yes, Malthus is not really correct, and yes we can improve society and helping the poor is not a waste of time.

xenophanes• 17 years ago

> In my opinion Malthus is getting way too much credit considering real life proved him wrong.

Additionally, William Godwin refuted his arguments, at the time. But gets no credit.

BTW, no one seems to have mentioned it, but Malthus said that food production grows linearly, whereas human populations grow geometrically, so food production won't be able to keep up.

dmoney• 17 years ago

Am I the only one who's been reading this as "malthusiasms", i.e. anti-enthusiasms?

asdlfj2sd33• 17 years ago

You know what struck me about this? It was really well written. Not the greatest of ideas or observations, but I can't recall the last time I red something on the internet that was this well written!

Malthusianisms

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