Malthusianisms

Well, the argument needed to be made because there are so many who subscribe to it.

But the important point that this misses is that the availability of any given resource isn't what's critical, since all throughout history it's been shown that human ingenuity has been able to find alternatives.

The critical factor is that human ingenuity. And because that human factor -- the availability of someone who can figure out that alternative, and who has the incentive to do so -- is growing with the growth of the population, are horizons are only broadening!

Contrary to Malthus, an increasing population is, in the long run, better for mankind's prospects.

I think he meant "the population stopped (growing as fast as it could)", not "the population (stopped growing) as fast as it could"

Note that although Simon won the bet, "if you re-round the same bet on a rolling basis.. [Ehrlich] has won by such a big margin in the last decade that it has more or less undone the price gains of the previous century." (quoting Peter Thiel in a debate with George Gilder: Accelerating or Decelerating? The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth http://youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc)

Assuming, as Malthus did, that people breed at a rate above replacement whenever they have the means to do so(which turns out not to be true these days in many countries, and may turn out not to be true for the world as a whole soon), population growth will eventually reach a rate at which the world would be a ball of humans expanding faster than the speed of light. It's hard to imagine human ingenuity figuring out a way to make that happen. Exponential growth is a bitch. HN readers should understand this, because it's the same thing that makes exponential time algorithms unreasonably slow, no matte what hardware you throw at them.

A century or two of faster than usual technological growth does not falsify Malthus, nor does a hysterical follower like Ehrlich who made predictions that were obviously ludicrous when he made them (he predicted the extinction of marine animal life by 1980 in 1970, which is not justified by anything Malthus wrote). Declining birthrates in the face of prosperity does - if it lasts.

> The Simon/Ehrlich wager did not involve population statistics at all. It involved changes in the prices of commodities. In other words, Ehrlich (the Malthus disciple) lost the bet because in real life, people find substitutes for resources for which prices are increasing. Thus quantity demanded decreases, and eventually price decreases.

Ehrlich lost the bet technically, but won in spirit; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-granth... :

> The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. > >Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities. Grantham concludes that the longer-run story of the bet “proves, in fact, both that man is mortal and must make short-term bets, and, more importantly, that Ehrlich’s argument was right (so far).” That final parenthesis, a nod to uncertainty, leaves open the remote possibility that the apparent paradigm shift might still turn out to be just a bubble in commodity prices.

Or

> An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart). > > The Cornucopians might argue that today’s metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man’s famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets.

Which supplies a nice graph showing the basket: http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/29...

Perhaps an astrophysicist will one day explain why communities like Reddit tend to implode.

Once the "pressure" of those in the core, which are the ones doing most of the work to keep people in line and promote healthy community behavior, start to fizzle out and aren't replaced, the core will implode and the whole thing will go supernova.

Smaller communities, like smaller stars, seem to have much longer lifespans.

The good news is when a site like Digg or Reddit goes supernova it spreads a lot of well-intentioned people around the greater internet to create their own new communities and start the process all over again.