Will Thomas Malthus eventually be proven correct?

$$$$$

>inductive reasoning

Yes, people had agricultural revolutions in the past. People also had mass starvation and still do today. You don't know the future you dumb nigger

If its so easy why don't you do it? Who says the yield will be high enough to make it viable?

I mostly agree with . We shouldn't have a collapse as long as food production increases at certain, so that the graph is not linear but disconnected, upwards-sloping line segments.

Population, on the other hand, spikes downwards every now and then with wars. While they aren't a traditional Malthusian collapse, one could argue that they are process by which competition for increasingly scarce resources leads to a lot of lower-class people dying at once. Bernie Sanders tried arguing that a similar competition for water fueled the rise of ISIS, but he was shot down pretty quickly.

It's also important to note that the West has seen stagnating birthrates, which could mean that we're approaching a post-scarcity society, in which distribution of resources will be the biggest issue, not competition. Of course, this a little ways off because of the incredible scarcity of resources in the Third World.

Our carrying capacity is based on a lot more than food these days, user. We're dependent on so many finite resources like oil for a modern mechanized economy, given the short term and flexible nature of the market I doubt we'll really develop sufficient alternative power sources before massive price hikes, at least not without generous r&d grants and subsidiaries that the government won't provide, because they're controlled by the upper classes who naturally hate taxes but remain insulated from problems that affect the common man. I hope you can keep your optimism up when we run out of useful antibiotics you dumbass. Don't forget the depletion of phosphorus and the fact that weapons of mass destruction become evermore powerful in an ongoing red Queen's race, coupled with a growing global population that means more national competition for resources. Keep chanting your mantra that everything is fine and technological advances will pop out of nowhere to save the day.

We already have GM food and have for decades, technically millennia. It's great, but it can't fix every other resource scarcity issue we have.

Syria had a huge water crisis though.

>We're dependent on so many finite resources like oil for a modern mechanized economy, given the short term and flexible nature of the market I doubt we'll really develop sufficient alternative power sources before massive price hikes,
We won't.
This guy made models regarding the possible trajection of the world's standard of living.
Even in the perfect "we get good, sustainable and green tech to perfectly replace our stuff", it won't keep the whole world at the level it is now.
theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jan/19/davos-climate-action-democracy-failure-jorgen-randers

It will never happen, we still don't even farm the majority of the planets empty space. We could probably feed over 20 billion people if we needed to, and world population will eventually level off with national development.

Best example is a town hall meeting where even if your town drafted god tier education budget plans with the best school board admins in the fucking STATE and got the go ahead from nearly everyone for a tax raise to fund said school it only takes a few chuckle fuck to tear it all down on the day to implement or confirm the budget with the most selfish and inane reasons.

There people who'd let the roads rot and school decay to never pay what they think is excessive taxes or burdens them
. This is how climate change talks have always been.

It's better for the lower nations of the world to stay lovers though.

Water man, it comes down to water, not space.

>If its so easy why don't you do it?

Because it's more expensive than non-renewable sources and therefore impossible to make money from until the non-renewable are depleted.

A finite amount of space with a never-ending growth?

You do the math

Here's what you do right. You build some nuclear powerstations in the desert, and use them to make hydrogen.

You then use this hydrogen as fuel to generate electricity for the populous, and the instead of creating greenhouse gasses, like with fossil fuels, you create water.

Most estimates I've read is that the Earth is capable of handling a population of 20 billion, but after that, something is going to have to change.

Not sure how true that is though, after all, nobody can really predict the future.

he already has been proven correct, people just won't listen

Malthus was right. It just happened to les negres so no one cared.

And apparently to les negres-des-patates.

Malthus is literally Alex Jones tier.

>Based on preliminary research for The Ultimate Resource, Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous wager in 1980, betting on a mutually agreed upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990.

>Ehrlich was the author of a popular book, The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon was highly skeptical of such claims.

>Simon had Ehrlich choose five of several commodity metals. Ehrlich chose 5 metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that their prices would go down. Ehrlich bet they would go up.

>The basket of goods, costing $1,000 in 1980, fell in price by over 57% over the following decade. As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.

The Ultimate Resource, by the way, is this idea that when a resource becomes scarce its price goes up, prompting humans to reduce, reuse, recycle, and invent work arounds.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
The Bronze age didn't end because they depleted the world's supply of tin, it ended because more sophisticated metallurgical techniques allowed them to get the same effect with a far more abundant mineral, iron, which until that point was considered a junk metal with no value.

And overpopulation is a myth invented by guys who literally advocated that the poor should be starved off. The fact is that humans are growing more, healthier food using less land, and that in most of the developed world population growth is actually in decline, as urbanization prompts lifestyles not conducive to raising large numbers of children. The human population is expected to stabilize around 2050 and then experience a steep decline.
overpopulationisamyth.com/

The sad thing is that humans will survive, not because we've become better, more responsible people living more sustainably, but because a new technology will allow us to better exploit our surroundings.

We will give up fossil fuels, not because we choose to, but because clean energy becomes cheaper.
We will give up factory farming, not because we make a moral choice not to, but because of cheap lab grown meat.
We will stop multiplying on Earth, because we will find ways to live in space.

Technology will always save us from having to learn our lesson.

Eventually lots of humans will die in some way, and famine will probably be a part of that.

I think that's kind of a cavalier attitude. What about specific irreplaceable resources like for example the Ogallala aquifer which makes farming the great plains possible that are being irreversibly depleted?

>overpopulation is a myth invented by guys who literally advocated that the poor should be starved off.
>developed world population growth is actually in decline
>population is expected to stabilize around 2050 and then experience a steep decline
Oh so as long as you don't "advocate" for 3 billion poor people in "undeveloped" countries but you just allow them to die anyway it's ok? What kind of stupid argument is this? "Oh it's a myth, they just want to persecute people, all the poor people are gonna die anyway so what's the point of making policy that might deal with this."

>We will give up fossil fuels, not because we choose to, but because clean energy becomes cheaper.
But it only became cheaper because we deliberately chose to invest in cleaner running technology.
>We will give up factory farming, not because we make a moral choice not to, but because of cheap lab grown meat.
the alternative is reverting to a system where only the wealthy can afford to eat meat on a regular basis.
>We will stop multiplying on Earth, because we will find ways to live in space.
It's not that we suddenly started having more babies, it''s that we stopped dying like flies from something as simple as an infection.

>Technology will always save us from having to learn our lesson.
That's what education is for.

>Oh so as long as you don't "advocate" for 3 billion poor people in "undeveloped" countries but you just allow them to die anyway it's ok? What kind of stupid argument is this? "Oh it's a myth, they just want to persecute people, all the poor people are gonna die anyway so what's the point of making policy that might deal with this."
Nobody said that they will die off. The decline will happen because of plummeting birthrates below the sustainable 2.1 children that every couple needs to have in order to maintain a stable population. People are no longer living on subsistence farms where they need to have lots of children to shoulder the work load.

What changes between now and 2050 that makes people in third world countries stop having children? A lot of those people literally are subsistence farmers. Those are also the areas with highest population, and highest birth rate.

I'm not an advocate for cavalier attitudes.

My point is that you could use overpopulation as an excuse to kill off 90% of the human population and still have man-made climate change if you didn't target the small minority of people causing the lion's share of the problems.

Resource management and environmental stewardship are not impossible goals, especially if we make the deliberate effort to make the market work for them.

>What changes between now and 2050 that makes people in third world countries stop having children?
Going from developing to developed.

Moving from subsistence farms to suburbs. As farmers they need lots of children to help them around the farm. As working class people a child is a considerable investment of resources so rather than have 7 or 8 children they have 2 or 3

I was going to post something like this.

We are able to produce more more efficiently and a record number of people live healthy, prosperous lives now with 8 billion people than any other time in history. In terms of both percent and absolute value.

All predictions of population growth and resource consumption show there to be no problem. If you're young, it's more likely we may see a declining global population which doesn't have enough economic support for welfare for the elderly (us).

>which doesn't have enough economic support for welfare for the elderly
Of course there is, it's just that entitled ungrateful fucks don't like hearing that they can only change cars every 3 years instead of every 2 years if they must pay grandpa's bills, and they don't want grandpa moving in with them either.
A couple can afford to spend ridiculous amounts raising up to 3 unproductive children without impoverishing themselves and families can easily be larger with some sacrifices. The elderly aren't really more expensive to maintain than children, ergo their adult children can easily support them, especially if they have few children of their own.

>we're going to raise the tax rate by ~10%
>you're not having children anyway! Dealing with it freeloaders

I'm sure that'll go over well.

Also, health care costs are getting higher and higher and people are living longer and longer.

How will colonizing/terraforming Mars factor into this?

>You don't know the future you dumb nigger

You don't either, the thread is asking us to provide an educated guess. The rise of GMOs provides a pretty good foundation for the guess that we'll improve our agricultural production beyond what it presently is.

In most cases historically famines are a consequence of crop failures rather than overpopulation. You could make an argument that if the population was smaller they could have saved enough food to handle that, but a brief contraction due to weather / blight / etc doesn't magically mean you've exceeded what your environment can sustain under normal circumstances.

Which really proves my point. But in the West, we want to argue over whether Islam is barbaric or based. What we should be doing is looking at why people that weren't violent suddenly became violent. Competition for scarce resources.

It will factor in EXTREMELY SLOWLY

>terraforming a cold core planet
lol how's that magnetosphere going?

are you saying that ISIS and islamic terrorism is motivated by a lack of resources in the middle east?

>As farmers they need lots of children to help them around the farm
they don't have children to help them farm, they have children because lack of birth control and in general being underdeveloped societies

There was a cool podcast about it in "stuff you should know"
To give you the short versión:

Nah, its a fucking long process

I am studying ecologist and I know of more examples of populations crashing. One was with moose on an island: they ate everything and created a food shortage, the moose died and the foliage recovered increasing the moose population once again.

I am unsure if it applies to humans though, it is all much more complex.
That was different tho.
I personally doubt it is going to happen.

>>>topic
I suggest reading historian and mathematican Peter Turchin. He suggest that history comes in cycles in which elite overproduction causes problems. I am not willing to spend too much on this, so it is a bad explanation, so I suggest to read his blog:

peterturchin.com/blog/

And if you have access to it his books.

I read Huxley saying that world population was 2 billion and could conceivably hit 4 billion by the end of the 20th century.
When i read it in 1993 world population was well past 4.9 billion and has since hit 7 billion, the exact same proportion of people are starving.
There's never been a shortage of anything yet, we just don't share. The rich 15% of the world (everyone reading this) throws away enough to feed the whole world four times a year. That's after stuffing our faces to the point of ill health.
So no, there is actually no problem, unless you count the fact that everyone wants to live like us and that's impossible, since we don't share and the world can't support 7 billion living in fabulous splendour the way we do.

One of the tenets of "Progress" that constitutes the norm today is the notion that regardless of the finite nature of fossil fuel, we need to keep expanding, keep reaching that next level of unattainable perfection. We will accelerate ourselves into the next world war over contested resources and wonder why we thought this was a sustainable way of life

Do you think it would be anywhere near as bad if the Middle East was as developed as the U.S.?

All the non violent ones ran away/were killed by the violent ones.

Problem is the violent ones are now running away too.

They knew about the risks of planting a single strain of crop, but they were forced to do so because it was the only one productive enough to sustain the exploding population.

Leave overpopulation to me.
>t. Zika virus

Or, y'know, general radicalism incited by either foreign intervention or just general religion nuttery.

I fucking hate materialists

You don't have the money to afford wage laborers so kids are a good substitute and your pension plan too.

i understand that's a benefit of having kids in the long term, when they reach an age, but i doubt people actually plan on having that ridiculous amount of kids, considering they struggle to feed themselves in the first place

Ireland was actually growing more than enough food. The problem was that most of it was being exported, to where it fetched a higher price. The rest was mostly a single variety of potato. That was rot prone. The Irish that didn't starve to death, left for the New World anglo nations.

I agree that lack of birth control and sex education are both hugely important variables in determining the number of children that a woman will have over the course of her life, but it is still the case that there's plenty of stuff that an 11 year old can be doing around the farm to help keep it out of the red, so it's in the farmer's best interest to have lots of children, with 5 or more being fairly typical.

Compare that to someone who lives in the suburbs and has a job with a commute: you can't bring your kid to work with you and there's only so much that they can do around the house to help make ends meet, so it's in the suburbanite's interest to carefully plan when and where they have children, and having too many children can dramatically lower the quality of life for everyone involved, so even welfare queens rarely have more than 5 children.

Again, I'm not saying your point isn't a valid one, I'm just saying that there are real economic reasons why people in developed areas have less children than still developing areas.

actually, there is a real difference. People who live in rural areas tend to start having children around 18-19 years of age while people who live in urban and suburban areas tend to wait until they're around 30

>we could all live in an area the size of Texas
Stopped listening there

Do the math yourself: Texas is 268,581 square miles and there are about 7.48 billion people in the world.

That comes out to a little over 1,000 square feet per person, enough for every man, woman, and child to have their own townhouse, making it roughly comparable to New Jersey in population density.

Of course this just assumes a giant housing complex and doesn't factor resource consumption into the equation, but the point is that humans are not running out of lebensraum

>doesn't factor resource consumption into the equation
That's the most important thing in the equation. It's a myth in a website about exposing a myth

No, it's specifically addressing the concept of lebensraum, or why it's foolish to think that more densely concentrated populations = overpopulated.

Overpopulation is more a statement about the quality of infrastructure, not the absolute number of living humans in a given area.

lol

That isn't the point that people are making about overpopulation though. Malthus didn't say people wouldn't have enough land to provide housing for themselves, it was always about resources.

>it was always about resources.
No, it was always about land use. He figured that food production capacity would expand in a linear fashion while population growth would continue in a quadratic fashion, and that eventually humans would run out of square footage of land to grow food on, but the population growth would continue unabated until the cost of food soared and there was a mass die off, sort of like how in the absence of predators a deer population will expand until it outstrips the resources of its ecosystem and experiences a mass die off.

The thing is, humans are not deers and we are not slaves to a single biome. What the above reasoning fails to take into consideration is that over time human food production becomes more efficient: we're growing more crops that are fuller and larger using less land than before. In most developed countries the government pays its farmers subsidies to maintain the food production infrastructure without growing anything on the land to keep prices at a cost-effective level, to let the soil replenish, and just in case there's an emergency which requires dramatically expanding food production.

Again, I would go back to the example of the transition from the Bronze age to the Iron age: Tin is a scarce mineral, and these societies were already on the verge of maxing out all the tin that they were capable of extracting, which was putting a massive damper on future growth prospects for these societies (and probably part of the reason why they collapsed horribly). What changed was that they gained the technological sophistication to "make do" with a far more abundant mineral.

And the whole point of state-managed capitalism is that it allows us to make these sort of technological transitions without the corresponding horrendous collapse of society.

>humans would run out of square footage of land to grow food on
This is not factored into the Texas myth at all. Will we have enough land to grow food on? It isn't answered, and it is the most important question

Those same "revolutions" are super wasteful and are part of the reason we are running out of clean water.

You have to realize that technology has a tendency to increase consumption, and we're at a point where previously unlimited resources will actually be limited and there's no way to restock them.

>there have been no mass species extinctions

and when there is no work around, this happens t. malthus

We're also rapidly destroying environments.

Bruh just shut up... Fucking smart ass

>Will we have enough land to grow food on? It isn't answered, and it is the most important question
Not by the Texas example, because it's a simple thought experiment to demonstrate why the concept of lebensraum is flawed.

If you want to talk about food production that's a separate issue from the point that the Texas example is making.

And there is an answer to your question, and it is "we already have way more land than we need". At this point what we really need is more fresh water infrastructure.

see
>Ireland was actually growing more than enough food. The problem was that most of it was being exported, to where it fetched a higher price. The rest was mostly a single variety of potato. That was rot prone. The Irish that didn't starve to death, left for the New World anglo nations.

good job
you named a type of reasoning

>At this point what we really need is more fresh water infrastructure
so how do we solve that? water is scarce and i don't see how we can solve it like your bronze to iron age example.

i guess you mean chemically producing fresh water in a big scale

However, due to increased use of air strikes and drone use, a war required to put a large enough dent into the total human population would probably require nuclear warfare.

Crop yields aren't about just land area. They're about fertilizers, water, machines that run on oil and other things that are the result of long chains of production and shipping and make industrial agriculture extremely vulnerable to economic shocks. And if climate shifts change weather patterns and average temperatures the soil quality is rendered irrelevant.

We've pretty much hit the ceiling in modifying crops to produce bigger yields, at this point we can only make them more resilient. I'm not saying there HAS to be a crash, but there inevitably would be if birthrates never started to decline. Technology doesn't simply allow people to pull solutions out of their asses, certainly not on demand.

nothing suprising with this theory. of course one day all resources will end and one day all energy will be transformed to heat and dissipate into the cold of a huge space
death is inevitable, but deferrable. no need to have the apocalypse right tomorrow, as a matter of fact the end of the world has been happening since quite a while and it's slow as fuck

First worlders can manage themselves. We will hit the tipping point before governments start mandating birthrates

One gas to mention that other leas intensive meats cab be used like guinea pigs or insects.

>so how do we solve that? water is scarce and i don't see how we can solve it like your bronze to iron age example.
theguardian.com/sustainable-business/new-water-technologies-save-planet

I don't disagree with you that it's a problem, and that there's more that we should be doing to confront the problem, but I don't see the apocalypse as something inevitable.

>Crop yields aren't about just land area. They're about fertilizers, water, machines that run on oil and other things that are the result of long chains of production and shipping and make industrial agriculture extremely vulnerable to economic shocks. And if climate shifts change weather patterns and average temperatures the soil quality is rendered irrelevant.

I agree with this %100. I didn't say that it was all about land, I said that's what classical overpopulation pseudoscience makes it about.

Still, the reality of farm life in most developed countries is that they depend on subsidies to survive. The reason all this infrastructure is so frail is because without the subsidies, farms would be forced to run at full capacity just to produce enough product to maintain their margins, causing a price crash, followed by widespread bankruptcy and consolidation. So rather than go through these feast-famine cycles, the government regulates the food industry and keeps it stable and operating at below capacity. And yes, long term climate trends are troubling.

>at this point we can only make them more resilient.
That's nothing to sneeze at.

> I'm not saying there HAS to be a crash, but there inevitably would be if birthrates never started to decline.
Birthrates aren't declining or raising, they're stabilizing. What people don't realize is that the population explosion of the past few centuries had less to do with the number of children people were having and more to do with the number of people who were washing their hands before a meal: we figured out how to stop dying in droves. More people were making it to adulthood thanks to advances in medicine and sanitation, but at the same time they were moving off the farm and into the suburbs and having birthrates around or below the 2.1 children that every couple needs to have in order to keep the population stable. Most places in the developed world are below this rate, and rely on immigration to prevail.

developed societies never multiply. As such it is a locust problem - either the locust will be developed, or it must be limited.

>that's what classical overpopulation pseudoscience makes it about.

in the classical model the resource and the land are tied to another. which is pretty much how it used to be.

Well it would be stupid to assume that radicalism and opposition to foreign intervention are important, but both of those are prevalent in Europe too. Ideologues will always exist, but people only follow them when they feel threatened. That's why UKIP doesn't have an army of insurgents.

Most do to radical changes in the environment.