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James_Miller comments on Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism - Less Wrong
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Thomas Malthus' view that in the long run we will always be stuck in (what we now call) the Malthusian trap. He would have been right if not for the sustained growth given to us by the industrial revolution.
Not clear his view is erroneous given suitable values for "long run".
How so? Last I checked, human populations could still pop out children if they wanted to faster than the average real global growth rate since the IR of ~2%.
What's relevant to whether we are in a Malthusian trap is the actual birth rate, not what the birth rate would be if people wanted to have far more children.
I'll be more explicit then: the 'sustained growth' is almost irrelevant since per the usual Malthusian mechanisms it is quickly eliminated. What made Malthus wrong, what he was pessimistic about, was whether people would exercise "moral restraint" - in other words, he didn't think the demographic transition would happen. It did, and that's why we're wealthy.
But how do you know it's the "moral restraint" that averted the Malthusian catastrophe, rather than the innovations (by the additional humans) that amplified the effective carrying capacity of available resources? In fact, the moral restraint could be keeping us closer to the catastrophe than if we had been producing more humans.
Because population growth can outpace innovation growth. This is not a hard concept.
I know. But your post seemed to be taking the position in favor of population growth (change) as the relevant factor rather than innovation. I was asking why you (seemed to have) thought that.
Population growth and innovation are two sides of a scissor: innovation drives potential per capita up, population growth drives it down. But the blade of population growth is far bigger than the blade of innovation growth, because everyone can pump out children and few can pump out innovation.
Hence, innovation can be seen as necessary - but it is not sufficient, in the absence of changes to reproductive patterns.
Okay, that's where I disagree: Each additional person is also another coin toss (albeit heavily stacked against us) in the search for innovators. The question then is whether the possible innovations, weighted by probability of a new person being an innovator (and to what extent) favors more or fewer people.
There's no reason why one effect is necessarily greater than the other and hence no reason for the presumption of one blade being larger.
There is no a priori reason, of course. We can imagine a world in which brains were highly efficient and people looked more like elephants, in which one could revolutionize physics every year or so but it takes a decade to push out a calf.
Yet, the world we actually live in doesn't look like that. A woman can (and historically, many have) spend her life in the kitchen making no such technological contributions but having 10 kids. (In fact, one of my great-grandmothers did just that.) It was not China or India which launched the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
I can't prove this, but I believe that in the United States and Western Europe we would still be rich (in the sense that calorie deprivation wouldn't pose a health risk to the vast majority of the population) if the birth rate had stayed the same since Malthus's time.
That makes no sense to argue: Malthus's time was part of the demographic transition. Of course I would agree that if the demographic transition continued post-Malthus - as it did - we would see higher per capita (as we did).
But look up the extremely high birth rates of some times and places (you can borrow some figures from http://www.marathon.uwc.edu/geography/demotrans/demtran.htm ), apply modern United States & Western Europe infant and child mortality rates, and tell me whether the population growth rate is merely much higher than the real economic growth rates of ~2% or extraordinarily higher. You may find it educational.
But I believe that from the point of view of maximizing the per person wealth of the United States and Western Europe the population growth rate has been much, much too low since the industrial revolution. (I admittedly have no citations to back this up.)
Maybe. That's not the same thing as what you said initially, though.
We'll just evolve for restraint not to work any more.
Yes, that's the question: is the demographic transition temporary? I've brought it up before: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5dl/is_kiryas_joel_an_unhappy_place/
(Was there a SMBC comic or something about men evolving a condom-breaking mechanism in their penis?)
We're rapidly evolving condom-not-putting-on mechanism in the brain.
I was always under the impression that what thwarted his hypothesis was the rise of effective and widespread birth control. I remember reading one of his works and noting that it was operating on the assumption that, to reduce birthrate to sustainable levels, sex would have to be reduced, and that was unlikely. It is unlikely, but it's also mostly decoupled from childbirth now, at least in the developed world.
Have I misinterpreted something here?
I believe he considered the possibility of birth control, referring to it as "immorality".
"Watch out for that cliff!"
"It looks pretty far off, and besides, we're turning left soon anyway."
"But we could keep accelerating!"
Your reply seems completely irrelevant to the Malthusian point that population growth can always exceed total factor production, and so it is population growth - or lack of growth - which dominates and determines per capita.