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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

In the end, Earth is an economically closed system, and what everyone collectively earns and spends must be in some balance. In that light, I’m not sure the total number of people is a problem, barring overpopulation.

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That idea is incompatible with all mainstream economic science. Economies are not closed systems, wealth can be created and destroyed. This is, for example, why industrialization led to wealthier societies. The productivity gains created more wealth per person. Likewise, you can bomb a city and a lot of wealth will be destroyed.

What you all are discussing is specifically the jobs market, which is a much more narrow issue. The biggest problem with employment is matching worker skill to the available jobs.

I didn’t mean to imply that there is a conservation of wealth. I meant that there is no exchange with participants outside of the population of Earth; and at any given time, if you want people to be able to spend x, they must also be able to earn x. And if you have an economy that works with a population of n, then in principle the same should be possible with a population of (say) 2n, because you can just imagine having the first one twice independently side-by-side. The only hard limit is when you exceed Earth’s resources, hence overpopulation. But we’re not there yet, and according to projections we also won’t reach it this century. The reason for our present difficulties is not that there are too many people.

> But we’re not there yet, and according to projections we also won’t reach it this century

The best projections we have say our population will likely inflect downwards by the end of this century. In other words, we probably won’t even reach overpopulation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_gr...

We don’t know what will happen over the following centuries, so I wouldn’t make any predictions beyond the current one.

It would seems like you are both right.

Money does not, however, measure wealth. Satisfaction of needs does.

That is where industrialization came in. And that might also be why we will see a stagnation of wealth.

There are not many needs that need to be solved (from a commodity point of view).

Current needs are more of a social and spiritual nature, and the markets are not efficient at providing to these.

Thermodynamics is the enemy of all "economic$cience". There can only be peace if the physicsdepartment, the messenger of reality, is brought down in armed struggle.

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