Malthusianisms

"Why not?"

"If it were a real twenty dollar bill, someone would have picked it up already."

Well, if you look at a fair chunk of Europe, everyone has agreed to work reasonable hours, largely, and the nutters like myself who work their socks off are few and far between. Of course, you could say that the rest of the world is about to clean Europe's clocks, but that's by no means certain.

The examples provided in the article are actually pretty good and clever examples, but they are accurate because they do not apply to the one thing Malthus talked about -- human populations. If you actually consider human populations, you will quickly discover that all these Malthuisms fall apart pretty quickly. Which makes sense considering humans are complicated beings and not simple autonomons like mice that will breed at any opportunity.

According to Malthus, the richer a population is the more it will grow and it will get poorer, so please do not bother helping poor countries, or poor people. Instead let them be poor so they automatically limit their populations. Oh and also we cannot achieve a great society where there is no poverty, because when there is no poverty people will just starts breeding like rabbits until everyone is poor again.

But of course in real life everything is backwards. The poorer a country is the more its population grows. In a country with income disparity the poor income groups grow much faster than the rich, and sometimes the rich ones do not grow at all.

This planet suffers from population overload but most of it is caused from poor populations (poor countries, or poor groups of rich countries).

If a poor country becomes richer relatively quickly it does not suffer a population explosion. On the contrary, population growth rates plummet and may even go negative. See Japan and South Korea.

So yes, Malthus is not really correct, and yes we can improve society and helping the poor is not a waste of time.

Something like the number of hours in a work week isn't just a fixed number; it's got a history behind it and driving forces on it that are needed to make sense of its current and future values.

Aaronson implies that he thinks about these situations by trying to figure out what Nash equilibrium they might settle to, but I think even that concept's not general enough. In the real world, people don't make their minds up once and then stay the same afterwards -- they'll change their behavior over time, and not always towards any equilibrium state.