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Comment by canadiantim | Hacker News Reader

Or biology class to learn that resources grow linearly (arithmetically) but populations grow geometrically (exponentially). So it is possible for everyone to grow exponentially, it's just not sustainable and generally leads to mass famine, disease or war.

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Yet population growth is slowing while our access to resources is growing rapidly.

Human population growth is not exponential. That’s so obvious that it’s hard to take anything about this argument seriously.

Biology isn’t a good proxy for society-scale economic changes.

we had nearly 2 centuries of roughly exponential growth. ended in the 60s but not everyone got the memo

Is "roughly exponential growth" being used as a synonym for "growth"?

Exponential is used as a scare word. It's not just growth, it's exponential growth! Run and scream in fright! Because if you don't do what I say you must do, we are exponentially doomed. Dooooomed!

I've done enough computer science work to be afraid of exponential growth.

i can't speak for everyone, but in the above assertion am using 'roughly exponential' to mean that world population between say 1880 and 1960 followed a curve that is, roughly, exponential, in the technical sense. much of the discourse 50 years ago, e.g. the population bomb, was predicated on this observation.

Rough is doing heavy lifting there, so much so that I suggest it doesn't have any meaning except to say the population was growing. The growth from 1980 to 1960 certainly was not exponential: the percentage growth per year was all over the place, varying on the same time scale as the doubling time (or even faster).

https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8...

I suspect it's not a coincidence that the population bomb scare occurred right after the collapse of European colonialism, although teasing out the causation could be interesting.

Or a transition form exponential to sigmoid grow, if it's slow enough. I remember cases of exponential grow of bacteria in lakes that ends in a disaster, but an unchecked garden will get a lot of plants and tree grow but I think it will stabilize softly.

This is the malthusian argument, and in a vacuum it sounds right but didn’t account for decreasing family size with wealth and the ability of the economy to just barely eke out something like a percent or two of surplus.

In China, the one child policy, for better or worse, was instituted to ensure that gains from industrialization were not eaten up immediately, leaving no surplus for quality of life and reinvestment.

malthus had a point but it is not destiny and the real world reflects that. his was an avoidable trap

now if we can gain control over capitalism we can save the earth

we can save our children/grandchildren from a lot of pain an suffering. The earth will be here long after we are gone.

MBA think: This is my job. All good, as long as _we_ have it good.

There are zero communities larger than a few thousand people that do not think precisely like this

This is every affinity group on the planet including:

Extended families Religious groups Fraternal organzations Mutual aid groups Nation states

It’s also true of fungi, tree systems, bacterial colonies, insect groups…

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