Where did our belief in abundance come from?

Not really; that would require everyone to die. But mostly famines have survivors, and their experience of the famine was not "I don't see what everyone else was complaining about".

Some elements are indeed so abundant that they can be used without any worries, like carbon, iron, aluminum, calcium, sodium and more than a dozen others.

The elements with medium abundance, like lithium, are available in quantities that are many thousand times less than the abundant elements, so even if we should be able to use enough of them to cover all our needs, if such elements would constitute e.g. one percent or more of the average composition of all the things we have, then that would mean that it is likely that they are used in quantities that are too large to be sustainable.

The less abundant elements are available only in quantities that are many million times less than the abundant elements, so they should never be used without first making sure that it is impossible to substitute them.

Nowadays, a lot of people all over the world have to spend a lot of work with the search of more abundant substitutes for less abundant elements.

Much of this work could have been avoided if better choices had been made in the past. The reason why many bad choices have been possible is that the costs for most chemical elements that are included in a product are fake, they include only the smaller cost for mining, processing and transportation before the product is made, without adding the greater costs that would be needed for the recovery of the element from an end-of-life product and for repairing the environmental damage caused by its mining.

The payment of these extra costs has been pushed into the future, when someone else will have to pay them, instead of the users of the elements mined now.

Infanticide as a population control measure was the norm, early Australian explorers recorded about 30% of children being killed and/or eaten business as usual. There is no reason to think they were unique, equilibrium with your food chain is a cruel mistress.

Early stone quarries don't necessarily speak of abundance, it might have been a measure to extract more food out of existing area when time spent hunting/foraging barehanded didn't yield more food.

I don't think that's really true. The species wasn't permanently on the brink of starvation such that they didn't have time to bend down and pick up a stick and use it to add to a shelter or throw at an animal, so in the very literal extreme sense we carry a surplus of energy with us. But the equation isn't necessarily much different between one person dividing their time between making tools and hunting, and a division over a slightly larger group. Efficiency improvements with primitive tools would have been large and quite immediate. Also people would have obvious and immediate specializations before any formal organization. Some would be faster, some stronger, some better climbers, some better at sharpening sticks. So there wouldn't have to be some significant build up of a surplus before pretty sophisticated tool making and division of labor would emerge, IMO.

You are correct that extreme scarcity will kill everyone, but places where extreme scarcity actually happens (e.g. Svalbard or Atacama) were never settled in the first place.

Traditionally inhabited places (prior to the Industrial Revolution) were the ones that could sustain some population indefinitely, and if the situation slowly worsened, people abandoned them and went elsewhere, instead of passively waiting for death. And they took their memories with them.

IMHO abundance solves itself, as population grows past carrying capacity, leading to famine, war, conquest and death. (The cycle being eventually broken by TV then reddit).

Division of labour is only necessary to create time in an economy detached from survival.

Everything eventually becomes rare if not used judiciously. This mindset of unlimited supply is flawed. It leads to the eventual destruction. Probably that's why most ancient civilizations had rules to only take what's needed from the nature.

For example in Western Countries, crabs and lobsters were once seen as "poor man's food". They are now a gourmet luxury item.

It's only not been near-universal to experience at least one severe famine that kills many people you know, in a full human lifespan, in the Western and (relatively—this goes back a while) developed world, since like 1600 (thanks, potatoes and corn!).

Even then, wasting away hungry for entire seasons was still something you were pretty likely experience a few times. Only industrial nitrogen production mostly ended that. Luckily, malaria and cholera and such kept the number of mouths to feed in check, LOL.

The past was horrible.

Current limitations : - Using that almost free energy from the ground changes our environment in a way that threatens our survival (which will have to rely on even more energy expenditure) - What happens when we run out ? (Actually it's more about spending more and more energy for disminishing returns) - Do we have enough to make the transition to renewables/nuclear while shielding ourselves for the currently happening global warming ?

Those forks in the extra bag were probably worth hundreds of dollars each to the office in terms of time and productivity savings from all the effort saved from fork hoarding.

Somehow, this reminds me of David Coperfield:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery"

There's a line you cross - maybe call it "enough" - that has an enormous psychological effect on our well-being.

I think there's a similar sort of effect with the economy. If the economy is good, people (top to bottom) make positive plans for the future, spend with certainty, relax and sleep well.

I have it fixed in my head that progress generally requires an external catalyst. In 2023, it would be very controversial to suggest Europe and the historical colonies are both wealthier as a result.

I have seen how the Spanish destroyed La Paz's natural environment yet it is a bustling city. What do you think?

(I agree the sins of the colonizers and their role in European growth are worth talking about, of course. But the view where they were obviously the key factor behind a phase change in the rate of progress now shared with the majority of the world, that's really alien. I guess we both find each other odd.)

I think the biggest thing we can learn from Malthusean economics is that have a fun last name increases your quotability by 10,000%.

Venezuela is the latest example of a socialist paradise where the children now eat out of garbage cans.

The whole sequential history narrative, the Standard Model, is totally blinkered from its NW european perspective.

"Civilisation," meaning societies that have cities, taxes, writing, big government, roads, aqueducts, and such.... these existed for thousands of years in Egypt, Iraq, India, China, Greece etc. Rome was such a society.

Rome also conquered "The East," and the north african coast... all long established urban "civilisations." When Rome "fell," those civilisations persisted. Persia had "fallen" before them, as had Alexander's empire, Assyria, Babylon, Sumer, etc. etc.

There were good centuries and bad, but they generally stayed "civilised" through thousands of years worth of political turmoil and change. They always had scribes, high priests, princes, infrastructure and such.

England, France, Germany and whatnot.... These were never civilisations. They were, for short periods ruled by Rome. They had some elements of civilisation, but for brief periods with limited reach. It was never culturally rooted or widespread. They were barbarian societies, and continued to be barbarian societies. Writing doesn't "disappear" in europe, it never really existed.

Concepts like Scottish or German renaissance are ridiculous. These were new civilisations being established in previously barbarian societies. They weren't renewing, they were founding.

Urban civilisation is new to NW europe. 200-500 years old. England's "old world civilisation" is only 150 years older than US civilisation.

The Roman Empire reached its maximum geographic extent under Trajan in the first century while the western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, so I’m curious which of these “recently conquered barbarians” you’re referring to.

> the writing that disappeared was the writing that the Roman colonists and state brought with them where they went, including back home.

Who went back home? Any “Roman colonists” at the frontiers of the western empire by the fall of Rome would have been there for centuries; in other words, they were already “at home”. More on this in a bit.

> but throught the middle ages, Christianity kept spreading and by that period of history, where it spread, writing spread too

Christianity was also the Roman state religion at the end of the western empire, and indeed remained the state religion of the eastern empire until it fell to the Ottomans in the 15th century.

Let me give an example tying these points together. The population of Roman Britain had been Roman citizens since 212. Roman troops weren’t withdrawn from Britain until the late 300’s and early 400’s, but by that point the Britons had become a predominantly Christian population that had held Roman citizenship for over a century. So at least in Britain, it was less a story of recently conquered barbarians being left behind by retreating Romans, and more a story of a piece of the Roman Empire being cut off from the rest due to a decline in state capacity.

So what about the writing? We don’t have a lot of surviving examples of it from Britain for another couple of hundred years, which makes it hard to figure out exactly what happened during this period. What we do know is that Angles, Jutes, and Saxons arrived and effectively conquered what is now England. The “Anglo-Saxons” were still Germanic heathens at this point, and while had a runic alphabet of their own, we don’t have any surviving Anglo-Saxon literature from this period. Brittonic people survived, particularly in Wales, and we do have some writings from some of them, such as Gildas. Wikipedia notes the following:

> Gildas's work is important for reasons beyond the historical information he provides. At the time when Gildas was writing Britain was Christian. Gildas uses Latin to address the rulers he excoriates and regards Britons, at least to some degree, as Roman citizens, despite the collapse of central imperial authority. By 597, when St Augustine arrived in Kent, England, or at least most of it, was populated by adherents of Anglo-Saxon paganism, and the new rulers did not think of themselves as Roman citizens.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Excidio_et_Conquestu_Britan...)

Gildas wrote at some point between 490 and 550, and even at this late point you have some Britons who still considered themselves (and one another) to be Romans. In other words, to the degree England becomes “barbarian” (in the sense of “not Roman”), heathen, and illiterate, it’s because it was invaded and conquered by illiterate barbarian heathens, not because the population reverted to their pre-Roman culture.

After that point, I do agree that the spread of Christianity likely reintroduced writing; it’s only after missionaries like Augustine arrive and start to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity that we have any surviving literature written by Anglo-Saxons themselves, whether in Latin or Old English.

We have entire countries stuck in poverty selling their resources (human and natural alike) for a pittance like indentured servants and we have individuals hoarding and amassing more wealth and riches than they could spend or use in a thousand lifetimes.

We also have a global economic system that by necessity wastes these precious resources in products that get shredded without being used, food that gets destroyed without being eaten and machines that are being run without getting to fulfill their purpose.

So on the one hand we have wasteful overproduction for the rich (relatively - which, globally speaking, includes everyone on HN) and on the other we have a handful of the extremely rich (the fraction of a permille of the globally richest people) wasting the equivalent of dozens of poverty lifetimes worth of resources on their fancies. This seems like an easy problem to solve but we need the extreme poverty to maintain the narrative that enables the extremely rich to exist.

In other words, no matter how much we expand the "abundance" we also need to maintain the scarcity because the differential is what enables our economic system and those benefitting from it the most. Those who have the most also have the most to lose from the elimination of scarcity.

We already live in a world of superabundance. It's just not spread evenly.

>And so, amazingly, almost mystically, justifies itself, at least to some degree for some period of time. When humans multiply to the point where they threaten to poison the thin skin of life that sustains them, it may be worth reassessing.

Citation needed Malthusian. This reeks of "We've burned down the house we live in" rhetoric without actually stretching its neck out enough to risk courting a quantified rebuttal.

For the latter, we have fission, fusion and we can grow into space.

For the former: in principle you can create arbitrarily large economic value on arbitrarily small energy budgets (if you have enough time). Getting a bit philosophical and speculative:

Assume computation is one way to create economic value. Eg either because computation is just useful for humans, like today, or because in the future you'll be able to simulate human beings (or other economic actors) directly via computation. Landauer's Principle [0] gives us a physical lower limit on the amount of energy we need to do a single bit operation:

E >= k * T * ln 2

(where k is the Boltzmann constant).

Stripping away all the constants, this tells us that as the universe expands and cools off, computation gets cheaper. The absolute minimum cost of computation is proportional to the ambient temperature of the universe.

As a simple example, you can get an infinite amount of computation out of a single Joule, if you wait for the temperature to half between each operation.

Of course, in practice we are far, far away from the Landauer limit being relevant. And we are far, far away from more conventional limits to economic activity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

> On the sociology side, this article doesn't even question the assumption of "our belief in abundance", a thing that I doubt you'll find much of in places like Izmir, Dhaka and Guayaquil.

İzmir is in Turkey which has seen an enormous increase in welfare over the past 200 years thanks to the Industrial Revolution. In about the last ten years mismanagement has damaged the economy of Turkey. Such a short episode in history might damage people's belief in abundance, but we can hardly blame people who are in dire straits at the moment for holding short-sighted beliefs.

Many people in countries that are doing just fine, like eg the US, also like to engage in gloom and doom mongering.

Coming this August, ideological madlibs.

And, at the species level I'd argue boom-bust is a fine survival pattern, witness plagues of mice and locusts.

Sigmoid or exponent to bust, doesn't have to mean life ends.

Rome as a state existed for multiple tens of generations across plague and famine. 4 per century is normal, a thousand years is 40. Would anyone alive today be able to cast back 40 generations and say "life is hard" at scale?

A thousand years ago we barely had discrete components let alone VLSI. Those monks were bespoke all day long. Machines had few moving parts. Radios weren't invented until the reformation, Linux came along in the age of enlightenment, and nuclear was invented by Victorian times? Wait.. wrong timeline.

The real problem isn't NIMBYs rejecting more housing, it's the NIMBYs not rejecting commercial real estate.

What's the minimum materials needed to build a bridge? (Depends on technology: Design, Materials, etc).

Agricultural footprint is exactly the same – I mean we could build an underground farm from hydroponics if we wanted.

But what does that have to do with Social Sciences? And why contempt? are you saying there is no phenomena in social interaction/groups? Where do you draw that line? Is understanding Ants and Bees contemptible? Just humans? Why?

Nicely put. But bear in mind that agricultural output of a given piece of land varies every year, sometimes greatly. Weather is the farmer's eternal frenemy, but there's also flood, disease, pestilence, vulcanism, ...

> ...are viewed with contempt...

Hard scientists and engineers have good reasons to sneer at much of the social "sciences". But the human and social realities which those folks claim to study are dangerously real.

They're not. They're viewed by contempt by techies with overinflated egos who don't realize that when looking at complex systems outside their area of expertise they're like junior developers coming into a legacy project guffawing at the needless complexity because they don't yet grasp the unwritten requirements that created the scar tissue they see as bad craftmanship.

Actual "real scientists" and "real engineers" understand that the social sciences are amongst the most complex of sciences because they don't have the liberty to run isolated experiments in a vacuum, run simulations and test assumptions with a pen and paper because their field of study encompasses the complexity of the entire human brain and its interaction with everything around us.

Sure, there are thousands and possibly millions of hacks in those fields but there are also thousands and millions of hacks in STEM. Imagine having your entire field judged on the musings and performance of the worst techie you know.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html