Creutzer comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: tut 08 January 2014 12:14PM

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Comment author: Alsadius 12 January 2014 05:33:49AM *  3 points [-]

We are currently producing enough food to feed the highest population the Earth is expected to ever at any point have. We are doing so in perfectly sustainable fashion. Malthus is dead.

Edit: For clarity, the sustainable fashion I refer to may involve shifts to less meat consumption, between different sorts of crops, or the substitution of machinery with more labour, to deal with various future crises. Modern crops and farming knowledge alone, which should both survive even a collapse of civilization largely intact, ought to be enough to feed any projected human population. It's theoretically possible for Mathus to come back, but the conditions that would lead to it are so unlikely that for the purposes of ordinary debate it can safely be said to be a fixed problem.

Comment author: Creutzer 12 January 2014 05:36:10PM 1 point [-]

We are, in point of fact, not feeding that population you are talking about. We are feeding merely a part of it.

Comment author: Alsadius 14 January 2014 11:48:13PM *  3 points [-]

We're feeding essentially all of it - out of a world population of over 7,000,000,000, about 400,000 die of malnutrition per year. World food production per person is as high as it's ever been, over 2700 calories per person per day(which is really not a starvation diet). The ones who aren't getting fed are dying for logistical, financial, and administrative reasons, not because there's any sort of global food shortage.