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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

So Malthus was in a sense right, as the “too many people” issue has showed up constantly since he wrote his stuff. And before anyone comes and tells me that “he was wrong because the Earth can sustain 8-9 billion humans, like it does right now”, I’ll say that there’s no way Earth’s actual ecosystem can sustain a major part of that population regularly eating beef, or regularly flying, or having scattered individual houses instead of buildings with tens or more flats each etc.

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You're awfully pessimistic and ignoring human creativity. And also human capacity for accepting compromises.

When Malthus lived, there were about 1 billion people. It's hard to estimate, but I'd guess at most 10% of those were living non-miserable lives, so about 100 million people at most.

Now the world middle class is 4 billion (40x) and the world upper class is probably around half a billion people (5x). I'm willing to bet that each and every one of those middle class individuals live better lives than the upper class of his time. We've been able to scale that 40x in 200 years. Despite wars, natural disasters, social strife, etc.

We're pretty resilient.

> You're awfully pessimistic and ignoring human creativity. And also human capacity for accepting compromises.

Sure we might manage to live with 10 billion people on the planet, maybe even more. But why would we want to? I see no value in having more people on the planet. If anything it only reduces the value of each individual.

I'm not saying that I want more people (or fewer people) on the planet.

It's just a fact. We're 8 billion and we'll probably be 11 billion when we reach peak population.

> I see no value in having more people on the planet.

I have to point out that you say this as a person on this planet :-)

> I see no value in having more people on the planet. If anything it only reduces the value of each individual.

Does it? A group of people who just know how to raise and care for nerfs may not be worth anything to me. But add a bunch more people who know how to turn nerf wool into a high-quality textile and I start to value the nerf herders a lot more.

We have also incurred some ecological debt.

Which as things get more extreme we'll pay off. At this point we're at the "asking nicely" phase, but it will become "at gunpoint" if this doesn't work out.

Let us hope so. Your comparison is apt, but let us not forget that even at gunpoint, some people aren't in a position to pay and their bodies later get dumped into the harbor by the mob.

Where there is a debt, there might be a later bankruptcy.

Malthus’ argument fits your later points, but not why a sub-population is experiencing unemployment. Unlike food, jobs don’t grow on trees.

I'd say this is effectively the opposite of Malthus, since too much food (or rather too many products in general) kills jobs, and more fundamentally, kills the ability to earn rent from investments.

I don’t think that’s how economies work, but I accept I am likely to have a very flawed understanding of the field.

More people means more potential consumers, surely? So the only way there could be “too many people” is if the market is dominated by goods which have a high one-off cost and trivial per-unit costs, such as software or other digital goods?

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