The Malthusian Zero-Sum "resource" myth vs human ingenuity

[ygolo]

I feel like many people look at the "resources" we as humanity has a zero-sum game. They believe: There's only so much, and those who get more are only taking from those who get less.

I want to challenge that assumption directly. The following are the results of human ingenuity, not laws of physics or biology.

Press Kit: Moore’s Law

The past, present and future of Gordon Moore’s golden rule for the semiconductor industry.

www.intel.com

Edholm's law - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Swanson's law - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Crop Yields

Increasing crop yields is crucial to improve food security, living standards, and reduce human impacts on the environment.

ourworldindata.org

Carlson curve - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[ygolo]

The last post were more established trends.

There some other things more emerging.

Making Meat Affordable: Progress Since The $330,000 Lab-Grown Burger

In 2013, the world’s first lab-grown burger was served at a London news conference, and it cost $330,000 to create.

www.forbes.com

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cell-cultivated-meat-hits-menus-investors-see-scaling-next-hurdle-2023-07-20/#:~:text=Believer%20CEO%20Gustavo%20Burger%20said,get%20solved%2C%22%20he%20said.

Lab-Grown Meat Techniques Aren't New, but the Scale Required Will Be

Scientists have been culturing animal cells in artificial environments since the 1950s.

www.foodmanufacturing.com

 

[ygolo]

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/publications/illustrating-progress-towards-fusion-energy-breakeven-and-gain

60 years of progress

Here you can read a brief recounting of the history of nuclear fusion and milestones that happened around the world.

www.iter.org

Progress is Being Made in Fusion | Climatebase

Fusion projects around the world have recently reported some impressive things and it could promise a future of abundant, clean energy.

climatebase.org

 

[ygolo]

The alternative to relying on human ingenuity is to crowd together in angry mobs to try to take more from the other angry mobs than they take from you.

This will not end well.

 

[The Cat]

You're forgetting arguably the most important role... The Creature. You can't have an angry mob with a creature to rally against. I have it on good authority that the Monsters are due on Maple Street any time now.

 

[ygolo]

You're forgetting arguably the most important role... The Creature. You can't have an angry mob with a creature to rally against. I have it on good authority that the Monsters are due on Maple Street any time now.

I don't catch your meaning. Be plain, please. What is The Creature?

Are you pro zero-sum resources world, resigned to it being the only world possible, or what?

 

[ygolo]

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/05/world-prosperity-4-key-data-points-you-need-to-understand/

The number of people living in prosperity is growing by about 85 million every year.

They don't set a high bar for this, but given the growing population, believing in zero-sum "resources" cannot be a tenable position according to the data.

The issue, of course, is that inequality is indeed still a problem. It's less dire, however, if we could figure out how to use ingenuity to grow our "resources."

The alternative to growing our resources is to fight amongst ourselves to get more of our perceived "limited resources."

Again, this path will not end well.

 

[Lark]

Malthusian thinking is just class struggle, blaming the worst examples of what the social system can produce with personalities all bent out of shape for their own misfortune and saying it threatens everyone else that they exist at all, the best thing for them and everyone else is that they perish.

This thinking is behind A SHIT TON of the ideas which seem to be trending on both the left and the right wing.

Is it the result of some shady secret authority? I think unlikely, although elitism will generate this type of thing, considering all of the "out groups" to be "perishers" and wanting to accelerate their demise, or at the very, very least not impede it.

That elitism could be genuine elitism, the billionaires, or it could be the sham elitism of the trailer trash who imagine they are a rung above their neighbours because of their skin tone or faith community.

It's likely to be the convergence of, literally dozens, different racist, sectarian and other similar styles of thinking translating into explicit or implicit political tendencies, who then act in bad faith and manage to influence a lot of sincere but shallow element of the actual mainstream.

Its why abortion and euthenasia are trending, popular, its why governments or insurance companies wont bankroll life saving or perserving care and treatment, definitely not cures, but it will fund death clinics, it saves money right? These perishers are just "useless eaters" anyway, who'd have thought this long after WW2 that the Nazis had actually won, it was all just in slow motion.

And in it all, whether its a left topic or right topic, it will be smuggled in under the banner of "autonomy", "personal choice", "free choice", "choice", "human rights", "freedom", "no one will interfer with me" but it will, ultimately, boil down, one way or another to "permanently damaged capacity to reproduce", "childlessness", "accelerated illness", "death".

In the late fifties and early sixties Erich Fromm called it out as a "syndrome of decay" or "syndrome of death", based on some observations by Marx and Freud, and its only gotten worse.

 

[ygolo]

Malthusian thinking is just class struggle, blaming the worst examples of what the social system can produce with personalities all bent out of shape for their own misfortune and saying it threatens everyone else that they exist at all, the best thing for them and everyone else is that they perish.

This thinking is behind A SHIT TON of the ideas which seem to be trending on both the left and the right wing.

Is it the result of some shady secret authority? I think unlikely, although elitism will generate this type of thing, considering all of the "out groups" to be "perishers" and wanting to accelerate their demise, or at the very, very least not impede it.

That elitism could be genuine elitism, the billionaires, or it could be the sham elitism of the trailer trash who imagine they are a rung above their neighbours because of their skin tone or faith community.

It's likely to be the convergence of, literally dozens, different racist, sectarian and other similar styles of thinking translating into explicit or implicit political tendencies, who then act in bad faith and manage to influence a lot of sincere but shallow element of the actual mainstream.

Its why abortion and euthenasia are trending, popular, its why governments or insurance companies wont bankroll life saving or perserving care and treatment, definitely not cures, but it will fund death clinics, it saves money right? These perishers are just "useless eaters" anyway, who'd have thought this long after WW2 that the Nazis had actually won, it was all just in slow motion.

And in it all, whether its a left topic or right topic, it will be smuggled in under the banner of "autonomy", "personal choice", "free choice", "choice", "human rights", "freedom", "no one will interfer with me" but it will, ultimately, boil down, one way or another to "permanently damaged capacity to reproduce", "childlessness", "accelerated illness", "death".

In the late fifties and early sixties Erich Fromm called it out as a "syndrome of decay" or "syndrome of death", based on some observations by Marx and Freud, and its only gotten worse.

I think class struggles are a legitimate grievance. There's plenty of evidence that generational upward mobility has slowed significantly in the OECD countries, and definitely the USA.

We can take multiple approaches to fixing this problem. What I'm saying is that making it easier those on the lower rungs to move up dramatically while simultaneously growing the resources available for humanity as a whole is one of my favorite options for fixing things.

One way of thinking about about this is creating and capturing value. If you create value where there was none before, instead of extracting value, you are growing the "resources."

If you capture less than you create, then you'd be giving more than taking.

But if this becomes impossible to support yourself in this endeavor for people, even when creating value, if you need to capture more just to survive, we're still essentially in zero-sum game territory.

Obviously, end consumption as an activity is only possible after the capture of value. In accounting terms, it cannot directly tell you as an individual how much value you created. The flip side is, we're reliant on consumption demand as the aggregate measure of economic health. It's a puzzle for me.

 

[ygolo]

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf

I think the above source gives some interesting points about the labor a person needs for light.

I think on major issue is that a lot of the things we've been increasing resources on are higher up on Maslow's hierarchy, so while lighting takes ever decreasing labor to obtain, its not as fundamental as shelter.

Food, long run, has been needing decreasing labor (with short-term reversal).

If some group can figure out how put shelter on a curve of requiring ever decreasing labor to obtain, rather than the ever increasing trajectory it's on, I think it would go a long way towards relieving the zero-sum, or in the case of shelter, decreasing sum, tensions in the world.

Shelter seems to be the main place where we're on a regressive trajectory for human ingenuity vs Malthusian dynamics. "We don't produce new land." But it's shelter we need not land directly.

I know I made another thread about this very topic. I know Land Value Return Recovery(Georgism more generally) has been proposed as one possible policy change (with evidence it works).

I know that pre-fab, modular homes falls way short of any sort of solution.

There's one direction of innovation that's promising.

EarthGrid™ Plasma Tunnel-Boring Technology

EarthGrid™ is developing the world’s first way to tunnel, trench, and excavate using our patented plasma tunnel-boring technology.

earthgrid.io

I don't know much about this particular company, so whether it will create more than extract is a question.

However, in terms of shelter, it's not just about the shell (modular homes), it's about the plumbing, the electricity, the transportation, the services, more generally, being built quickly and responsibly.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I feel like many people look at the "resources" we as humanity has a zero-sum game. They believe: There's only so much, and those who get more are only taking from those who get less.

I want to challenge that assumption directly. The following are the results of human ingenuity, not laws of physics or biology.

Press Kit: Moore’s Law

The past, present and future of Gordon Moore’s golden rule for the semiconductor industry.

www.intel.com

Edholm's law - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Swanson's law - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Crop Yields

Increasing crop yields is crucial to improve food security, living standards, and reduce human impacts on the environment.

ourworldindata.org

Carlson curve - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Many of these are about cost or other things that aren't directly related to size, which relates to the amount of material used. I suppose most of these involve one form of resource or another, but what I would like to know about is physical resources. It would be great if the number of physical resources was actually not limited and therefore it was not necessary for conflicts to start over them, but I'm a little skeptical. What do you think helps to disprove the scarcity of physical resources, beyond some applications of Moore's law?

 

[ygolo]

Many of these are about cost or other things that aren't directly related to size, which relates to the amount of material used. I suppose most of these involve one form of resource or another, but what I would like to know about is physical resources. It would be great if the number of physical resources was actually not limited and therefore it was not necessary for conflicts to start over them, but I'm a little skeptical. What do you think helps to disprove the scarcity of physical resources, beyond some applications of Moore's law?

Every single one of the laws mentioned use fewer marginal physical resources per amount of output. That's why the costs go down.

Edit: Maybe I don't completely understand your objection. But if you can get same utility with fewer resources, then it puts less of a strain on the resources. People need the utility, not the resources directly. Reference the human need for shelter, not land.

 

[ygolo]

Canada firm compresses spherical tokamak plasma in a world-first

General Fusion attained world-first achievements using its uniquely practical Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology.

interestingengineering.com

Human ingenuity alone won't save us, but those calling to cut out that part of our humanity will surely doom us.

Let's call these people techno-pesimissts. Like so much of what's happening these days, the don't define themselves in any way other than be opposing something. But the implications are that they are pro-zero sum(or worse).

 

[ygolo]

Frontiers | Impact of digital technology on carbon emissions: Evidence from Chinese cities

IntroductionPromoting the development of digital technology is an important step in meeting the challenge of global climate change and achieving carbon peaki...

www.frontiersin.org

Again, these advances won't be enough, but those calling to end this activity will doom us.

 

[The Cat]

Unfortunately, Doom is good for business. Lots of money to be made in doom.

 

[ygolo]

Unfortunately, Doom is good for business. Lots of money to be made in doom.

The cynical part of me thinks techno-pesimissts really would prefer a doomed world where they have higher status, than anything that seems like hope for solutions.

 

[The Cat]

Doom, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

The only certainty is this: We can't keep the lights on forever. Eventually humanity will have to relearn what it is to live in a world of darkness.

 

[ygolo]

Doom, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

The only certainty is this: We can't keep the lights on forever. Eventually humanity will have to relearn what it is to live in a world of darkness.

Humanity as a whole is a different matter than human beings in particular. Humans die. By the time the world is dark, will any humans live there?

At some point, the sun will swallow the Earth, and the universe as a whole will die.

Let's just say we have a choice to grow, lessen our use of, or renew our resources and allow humans to go forth and be prosperous as well. Or we can resign to zero-sum or a decreasing utility available per person.

More, less, or the same amount of human flourishing. That is our choice.

At least in the aggregate, over the long run, the data shows we've chosen more human flourishing to date. Let's hope to keep it that way.

 

[ygolo]

https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/future-technology-22-ideas-about-to-change-our-world

 

[ygolo]

Proof that life is getting better for humanity, in 5 charts

A short-term perspective means we forget how much progress has been made in reducing poverty and mortality rates — and in much else.

www.vox.com

The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it

Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.

ourworldindata.org