I don't think it's unduly optimistic to agree with the mindset of "Spaceship Earth":[0]
> It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"
Well, that sounds like an excuse. 1.6bn people are living in poverty via the Human Poverty Index (HPI) measurement, which is defined as less than earing $1.50 a day. Worse, if we raise the value to $2.50 a day, then we're talking almost half the population of Earth! Half of every living and breathing human right now is poor on a level that I can't comprehend.
Oh we can add more and more excuses like bad government, 'lazy' people, people who should 'move to better jobs', etc but it doesn't make a difference. If the political and economic engines of the world can't keep almost 1/3rd of us out of poverty then its time to consider that maybe we know more about the Earth's carrying capacity today than we did 130 years ago and that you can't just wish post-scarcity into existance nor wish away the effects of human economic activity that ultimately hurts us like climate change as a "Chinese hoax."
We probably can continue to add people but we'll just be making larger numbers in each category, mostly poverty and the poor. Hey, I'm doing well because poor countries tend to work for my interests but that's an accident of birth. Unfortunately, not everyone gets to be born into the life of an urban westerner.
Answer: it was much much worse.
Yes, things are bad right now. But in the past things were worse. And now they are getting better, very quickly.
I see no evidence that this trend won't continue.
http://i.imgur.com/cRzjXWQ.png
Sure you can point at some changes but you don't know what is causing them and when they're begin to peter off. We do know that a lot of the poverty fixes of late are almost exclusively linked to the fall of communism in Asia. Now they're all on market economies and we still have 1/3rd poverty and 1/2 living with under $2.50 a day.
Now we've eliminated communism, now what? The market approach has itself bottomed out and even wealthy states are struggling with late stage capitalism which is extremely low growth and rising unemployment and taxation unable to keep up with entitlements. On of the dirty little secrets of capitalism is that rich countries need poor countries to stay rich. You can't just raise everyone up. Limited resources will always mean uneven distributions, the same way economies don't naturally have an even distribution of money/resources.
Also one of the main reasons things are better today is become of liberalism in regards to abortion and the lowered population in especially hopeless areas in the 70s and 80s that led to starvation and resource warfare, thus these people aren't here anymore to pad poverty stats. They're dead. We shouldn't see that as a win for economic prosperity.
You can look at the last 200 years.
Every decade some smart academic makes the same, Malthusian, population bomb, peak oil, or whatever argument.
And every decade that person gets proven wrong, for the last 200 years.
Is this decade different? Are the Malthusians going to proven right NOW even though they have been wrong every single other time they make these predictions? Maybe. But I think I am going to wait a little while before giving that argument any weight at all.
No arguments, no predictions, only evidence.
We are in late stage capitalism once living standards stop going up, and they have yet to do that.
The people who said that third world countries needed to cut birthrates before they could get richer turned out to be right everywhere.
The people that said Bengala-Desh would get to be like Bengala-Desh were right. As were the people who predicted overcrowding and exodus from the Sahel.
Would you rather live in 1950s SF or 2017 sf? Would you rather live in 1950s bengala desh or 2017 Bengala desh?
How about 1950s third word or 2017 third world?
Yes, there are costs to a growth centric economy. But there are also benefits. And apparently the benefits massively outweigh the costs.
I pick 1950s Bengala-Desh because you didn't have to risk your kids lives from flooding because of overpopulation and DDT was just ending the malaria problem (some came back after the ban).
Lots of 1950s third world countries are first world today, like Mexico or Korea. In that case, I'd pick today over 1950s.
There are lots of benefits to growth in per capita income. There are no benefits to growth in GDP from population increase while GDP per capita stagnates.
One doesn't need be a Malthusian to have predicted this. This is a simple consequence of Ricardo's Law of Rent, and the Tragedy of the Commons.
And in fact, the problems have been exacerbated by Malthusian-style rationing (ie Prop 13), the exact opposite of Georgist-style solutions for housing and traffic.
As a Rawlsian, I'm fixated on this very problem, but I'm drawn to solutions that work to tear down the mechanism (in short, open borders) rather than a Malthusian answer (limiting population) that I'm skeptical will do much to end poverty.
Open borders, of course, don't help very much if life is unaffordable once you cross that border. And again I advise looking towards Henry George for solutions to this problem.
If you're going to be pedantic, you could at least be correct.
And what do you mean that conservation of energy doesn't always hold?
>And what do you mean that conservation of energy doesn't always hold?
I mean what I said. Conservation of energy is not a law of nature, it's only a local approximation to the Conservation of the value of the Stress-Energy Tensor. Which when manipulated conservatively, can and does result in the creation and destruction of energy.
Also consider that the carrying capacity of the world isn't fixed, but depends on how good our technology is (with a potential theoretical upper limit). Well tech is improved by people working on and inventing better technology, right? So you get better technology with more people - and with that you can have more people working on better technology. The biggest mistake, and the one all Malthusians made, is to forget that humans are, on average, net produces not net consumers.