So, tell me... what's the minimal necessary agricultural footprint for a city of one million human beings.
This is the social sciences are viewed with contempt by the real scientists and engineers, by the way.
This is the social sciences are viewed with contempt by the real scientists and engineers, by the way.
Looking at resource requirements as mapped to land area is highly instructive, and one of the more illuminating exercises I've done is to plot population growth as the falling available land area (for all resource and ecosystem service value afforded) over time. We're well below "40 acres and a mule" --- with 8 billions of souls on Earth, there are about 4.6 acres/person, or 1.86 hectare.
Many of the most interesting and useful analyses of Earth's resource situation provide a similar mapping.
I'm aware of David MacKay's Without the Hot Air which maps just energy use by land area (with a focus on the UK). What becomes painfully evident is that it would be immensely challenging to supply energy equivalent to present utilisation from wind and solar potential of the British Isles alone, meaning something would have to give. (Less energy utilisation, imports from elsewhere, and/or both.) Many industrialised nations face similar challenges.
Vaclav Smil is another, with Energy and History and Energy and Civilization both looking at energy-as-land-use based on 1 kW/m^2 influx (and lesser densities of wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.). Smil is the source of one of the more picturesque descriptions of oil wells: punctiform sources of energy, a hole in the ground a few inches wide through which millions of years of accumulated ancient sunshine spew forth. Combine that with Jeffrey S. Dukes "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686>, which I've posted to HN a few times (limited discussion), to realise that we're consuming fossil fuels at millions of times their rate of formation, a cost utterly unaccounted for in market prices.
(Imagine a YC-funded startup had a similar burn-rate....)
And yes, social sciences, including economics, sociology, political science, and political economy very often utterly ignore these facts, on both the left and right, simply because they're ideologically inconvenient. As I've already commented, my first impression on seeing this item in the HN queue was that it was some far-left woo along the lines of the Jacque Fresco's Venus Project (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project>). Such schemes are often surprisingly similar to right-libertarian theology, as this turned out to be. The physical and natural sciences (physics, chemistry, ecology, environmental studies) are often deeply and legitimately critical of such views.
Mauricio Schoijet's "Limits to Grwoth and the Rise of Catastrophism" (1999) is a good treatment of how both the ideological right and left frequently reject Limits to Growth arguments: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399> <https://doi.org/10.2307/3985399>
Given that the criticism is also being voiced to power, and to interests which are deeply vested in oil and gas, HN is once again disadvantaging the disadvantaged who speak to truth power, and tone-policing them to boot. I know what your justifications for this are, but it remains a very bad look.
Know two things:
- Economics was my own major field of study. I've since taken on a strong interest in sociology (despised by both economists and "real scientists and engineers"), particularly the work of Charles Perrow and Robert K. Merton, which offers insights into organisational behaviour which economics fails to account or allow for. Other significant study was in hard sciences, environmental studies, and ecology. I'm well aware of the conflicts between orthodox economics and these fields, and have spent much of my post-uni life trying to understand why and how this emerged. The works cited by Mirowski, Oreskes, and Conway go a long way to explaining why and how.
- That economics is at odds with basic physics, thermodynamics specifically, and ecology, is extraordinarily well established. It's the foundational basis for a number of heterodox economics disciplines, notably biophysical and ecological economics. There are widely-respected bodies such as the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the more popular Evonomics blog (itself featuring many notable economists as well as other critics) which address this as a major point of study. The mainstream profession periodically goes into hand-wringing mode itself, usually after some economic crisis, usually signaled by The Economist announcing a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. I've been around the profession long enough to have seen a few cycles of this myself, as I commented here three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23941770>
Despite its attitudes and behaviours, Libertarian / Austrian economics is not mainstream, though it certainly tries to portray itself as that. It has had a profound influence on both popular discussion and the economics profession, however, much of that as a deliberate and decades-long (approaching or exceeding century-long) project. Again, Mirowski, Oreskes, and Conway all describe this, amongst many other authors.
The quip was far less a cheap shot than a shorthand. And again, my principle issue is that HN tone-polices criticisms, ignoring its own advice to "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Could the comment have been better? Sure. Most can, certainly my own.
Does it deserve flagging and censure? No.
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.
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?
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.