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RobinHanson comments on Non-Malthusian Scenarios - Less Wrong
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The concept of near subsistence income is robust to aggregating smaller individuals into larger individuals. However you group or divide very poor folk, they remain very poor.
Very well, at what level is the earth now? At subsistence, above, or below?
I said at OB; median is 5-10 times, mean is about 20 times.
I can't find the post on OB that you're referring to, otherwise I would reply there.
Do these (5-20) figures disagree with estimates that humanity is consuming more "ecological services" than the rest of Earth's ecology can renew?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
I'm just trying to understand how you compute "income" and "subsistence" for entities like "earth as a whole". From your tone it ought to be easy, but there isn't really money, or trade, at this level of organization. Earth as a whole doesn't buy things from other entities, not with money, nor with barter, so I don't see how to compute those numbers. The best parallel I can see between human-scale economics and earth-scale is "sustainability". If a human's income exceeds subsistence, then I'd say they were in a good situation regarding sustainability. However, the ecological-footprint figures argue that earth as a whole is in a bad situation regarding sustainability.
The usual methods use market prices, which of course would not be available if the Earth had no internal smaller units trading.