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the problem may not be population numbers per se, but the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.
yes, the privileged few consume the most and do the most damage by a massive margin, albeit that "few" is now circa 1bn people.
ChasnotRobert-
I went to school with an American kid whose family was old money, somewhere in the mid 9 figures back in the 90s. They had an advance team of designers and chefs who would deploy to their summer/winter/Alps/etc. home before the family arrived, and furnish the house and wardrobes. Everything from the swim trunks to the tennis whites (in case they felt like playing tennis at all) was new. The pantry was of course stocked with more fresh food than they and their visitors could eat. When the holiday was over, it would all stay at the house and be distributed among the staff or simply binned.
For one of their friends’ birthdays, the parents took the friend group to the Caribbean, and hired a company to design and implement a week-long pirate adventure trip for the kids (muppet treasure island had come out recently). The children’s adventure cost $50,000 and involved actors, trained parrots, sailboats, period correct bespoke costumes for the kids, muskets firing blanks…
Worth considering that musk and bezos have an additional 000 to their name. The consumption of the ultra-wealthy is truly beyond what most people can imagine.
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the problem may not be population numbers per se, but the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.
It's well-established that the main driver of extreme population growth is poverty. Obviously, public health is a complex subject, and you need to factor in the impact of hygiene, etc., but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology (understood in the modern sense; I guess you could also interpret traditional modes of sustainable agriculture like in India and China as technology).
yes, the privileged few consume the most and do the most damage by a massive margin, albeit that "few" is now circa 1bn people.
I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption. Astonishingly, the worst polluters are just a few thousand people. That's not to try and oversimplify it; of course it has an impact if 'ordinary' Westerners fly to the Maldives on holiday. However, we're talking about people who take at least several flights a week. The ratio of that to an 'ordinary' Western household is mind-boggling.
Obviously, even if all those people changed their ways, it would still leave that kind of 'lifestyle' as 'aspirational' and the cycle would begin all over again of people jockeying to get into that kind of position and perpetuate the nonsense that got us here in the first place.
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the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.
If anything, we've seen a really strong decoupling in the wealthiest nations to the point where fertility rates have declined pretty rapidly. Maybe Malthus had a point in earlier industrial stages before the 20th century, but even then it was divisive to say the least. After rapid urbanisation and birth control, it seems like most people just don't really want to have more than two kids, which is what we'd need to exceed replacement rate. It doesn't really look like that's anything to do with resources aside from, maybe, land, which tends to have the effect of declining rather than increasing fertility rates.
That's all to say that, today, thankfully, we get to side step all of the nasty stuff that Malthusianism and obsession with population control started:
[Malthus'] scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations' family size, including forced sterilizations.
The belief that “those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak” led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science. For example, the English Poor Law implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food to the poor was severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty. The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.”
(From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-still-wrong/)
I mean, this is still the same argument about benefits that many are having today, but we're still facing declining fertility rates:
based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty
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Make tool use illegal. Use the Banhammer to ban hammers.
Muc-ed-off
Oliver Schick
slippers
dancing james
The problem is absolutely not overpopulation. It's excessive and constant use of machines--transportation machines, computers (wrongly considered to be a universal tool), industrial agriculture, and depleting the natural world through destructive practices like monocultures and deep-sea trawling. It's been shown that a lot of the damage caused by aviation, for instance, is caused by relatively few frequent fliers, etc. The lifestyles of the vast majority of the population—people who live in warm areas, who still share more things communally, are (materially) relatively poor, don't travel much, etc.—are not a problem. All this is of course undermined by all the seductive nonsense about modernism, as it has been for the past 200 years, by hyper-individualism, 'bucket list' desperation, bad and unjust government, wars and violent repression (with the exception of the World Wars, I don't think anything much has changed there compared to past times, though), and so on. But yeah, let's distract from the real problem and claim that it's poor(er) people who cause it, it might just get us off the hook.