Malthus introduced exponential growth rates, but not equilibria; he assumed a runaway growth would lead to collapse. Logistic functions, which describe equilibrium-finding, were introduced by Pierre Verhulst.
John von Neumann and John Nash deserve some credit for founding game theory; in particular the strategies described are minimax strategies, introduced by von Neumann.
I agree that these aren't Malthusian, and some aren't even true. The ones that are true seem to exemplify incentives and constraints. When you have an incentive to do more, you do more until either the incentive (marginal_benefit - marginal_cost) or your ability to do a little more fades to zero. When the incentives or constraints change, the behavior adapts accordingly. A Malthusian collapse is a special case that is not relevant to most situations of incentives and constraints.
But the reason that Malthus' doom-mongering hasn't come to pass is because he failed to consider that there was sufficient incentive for people to find alternatives, such that they could skirt the constraints.
Malthus said that the carrying capacity of Earth is limited to X because of finite arable land (and so on). But then humans came up with irrigation, and crop rotation, and terracing, and selective breeding, and fertilizers and insecticides, and powered machinery, etc., all of which allowed the Earth to provide for ever-increasing numbers of people.
Malthus saw humanity as limited to subsistence dirt farming, but the people saw the ability to prosper, have large families, etc., as sufficient incentive to invent alternatives. The incentives didn't change, and the constraints only changed so far as did the body of human knowledge.
> But the reason that Malthus' doom-mongering hasn't come to pass is because he failed to consider that there was sufficient incentive for people to find alternatives, such that they could skirt the constraints.
No, his doom-mongering was wrong because the alternative to collapse he laid out as improbable - 'moral restraint' - turned out to actually happen, leading to the very strange phenomenon known as the 'demographic transition'. Which we still don't understand why it happened, how long it will last, or where it will break down and how, so I don't blame Malthus.
I do blame Internet commenters facilely writing off Malthus as falsified by technology. Go actually read his essays! No, some geometric improvements in irrigation and fertilizers do not disprove him. Agriculture is not expanding exponentially: what happened was the population stopped growing as fast as it could. That is all.
the population stopped growing as fast as it could. That is all.
No. Population growth has slowed, but not stopped.
Of the 7 Billion people alive today, how many of them are not better off than virtually anyone of Malthus' day 200 years ago? How many people have no access to antibiotics, running water, and a wealth of conveniences that they take for granted? Yes, there are many people that don't have these advantages. But today, much of the world is better off than virtually anyone from 2 centuries past.
So that's not all, there must be something else.
The Simon/Ehrlich wager did not involve population statistics at all. It involved changes in the prices of commodities.
In other words, Ehrlich (the Malthus disciple) lost the bet because in real life, people find substitutes for resources for which prices are increasing. Thus quantity demanded decreases, and eventually price decreases.
Our ancestors used to hunt whales into oblivion to get (amongst other things) blubber to fuel lamps. But as the whale population decreased, so did the supply of blubber, and thus prices rose. That led to people finding alternative means of lighting, and the end is that we don't hunt whales hardly at all anymore.
Thus, the fact that greater tension between resource availability and quantity demanded lead to increased prices. That causes somebody to say to himself "if people are willing to pay so much for resource X, they'd be willing to pay just a little less to me for an alternative". He figures out how, people switch, and the market for resource X declines.
Assuming, as Malthus did, that people breed at a rate above replacement whenever they have the means to do so(which turns out not to be true these days in many countries, and may turn out not to be true for the world as a whole soon), population growth will eventually reach a rate at which the world would be a ball of humans expanding faster than the speed of light. It's hard to imagine human ingenuity figuring out a way to make that happen. Exponential growth is a bitch. HN readers should understand this, because it's the same thing that makes exponential time algorithms unreasonably slow, no matte what hardware you throw at them.
A century or two of faster than usual technological growth does not falsify Malthus, nor does a hysterical follower like Ehrlich who made predictions that were obviously ludicrous when he made them (he predicted the extinction of marine animal life by 1980 in 1970, which is not justified by anything Malthus wrote). Declining birthrates in the face of prosperity does - if it lasts.
Note that although Simon won the bet, "if you re-round the same bet on a rolling basis.. [Ehrlich] has won by such a big margin in the last decade that it has more or less undone the price gains of the previous century." (quoting Peter Thiel in a debate with George Gilder: Accelerating or Decelerating? The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth http://youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc)
> The Simon/Ehrlich wager did not involve population statistics at all. It involved changes in the prices of commodities. In other words, Ehrlich (the Malthus disciple) lost the bet because in real life, people find substitutes for resources for which prices are increasing. Thus quantity demanded decreases, and eventually price decreases.
> The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade.
>
>Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities. Grantham concludes that the longer-run story of the bet “proves, in fact, both that man is mortal and must make short-term bets, and, more importantly, that Ehrlich’s argument was right (so far).” That final parenthesis, a nod to uncertainty, leaves open the remote possibility that the apparent paradigm shift might still turn out to be just a bubble in commodity prices.
Or
> An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart).
>
> The Cornucopians might argue that today’s metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man’s famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets.
It is true, though, that there is a limit to how much people this planet can reasonably
sustain, and I'd say we're billions over that mark - the only reason the system still
works (barely) is because a large part of the world's population lives in poverty and
hunger.
Optimization will only get you so far. We simply can't optimize away the fact that there
is limited space on this planet and that we're pretty much out of it already. We can't
sustain 7 billion people, tendency growing. Not at a humane average living standard.
I don't think you deserve the downvotes; your point may be valid, even if pessimistic. Just because we've managed to overcome what seemed to be infeasible hurdles doesn't mean we will continue to do so. Of course, just because the new hurdles seem even less feasible doesn't mean we won't overcome them, either. The point being that you'll never know you're at the cusp until you're well into the valley on the other side.
Malthus was wrong about the long-run behavior of populations, but I think it's worthwhile to note that we can feed yesterday's population today. World hunger could have been a solved problem with all the advances that were made. But who has the right to tell you not to breed?
Well, the argument needed to be made because there are so many who subscribe to it.
But the important point that this misses is that the availability of any given resource isn't what's critical, since all throughout history it's been shown that human ingenuity has been able to find alternatives.
The critical factor is that human ingenuity. And because that human factor -- the availability of someone who can figure out that alternative, and who has the incentive to do so -- is growing with the growth of the population, are horizons are only broadening!
Contrary to Malthus, an increasing population is, in the long run, better for mankind's prospects.
I'm not at all sure the last part is true. It's difficult to do experiments in history, of course, but there are historical examples of quite fast-advancing societies with smallish, stable populations, and of not-making-progress societies with large and growing populations. Enough that I doubt any general causal relationship between population growth and technological advances or quality of life.
And the biggest growth is in places where it is least sustainable. However, as far as I understand hunger is not a problem of the quantity of the food, it is a problem of distribution.
I do hold somehow cynical view, that the bigger percentage of humanitarian aid should be in form of condoms, not food.
Why does the quality of a news site like slashdot, digg, reddit, or Hacker News deteriorate until it reaches annoying levels? Because if it didn't, then more and more people would join, reducing the average quality of the participant pool.
which is a good thing considering by the time that happens to reddit, kn0thing will have made his impact, and will be able to do whatever else he wants, and somebody else's site will be the new and popular one (until it is).
The only thing that Reddit has going for it is that has a way to build new communities built in. /r/DepthHub, /r/math, and /r/askscience are doing just fine.
The "only" think Reddit has is an engine to sustainably produce new communities as good as the original Reddit, at the cost of providing a pile of chaff I dislike that thousands of people enjoy?
Perhaps an astrophysicist will one day explain why communities like Reddit tend to implode.
Once the "pressure" of those in the core, which are the ones doing most of the work to keep people in line and promote healthy community behavior, start to fizzle out and aren't replaced, the core will implode and the whole thing will go supernova.
Smaller communities, like smaller stars, seem to have much longer lifespans.
The good news is when a site like Digg or Reddit goes supernova it spreads a lot of well-intentioned people around the greater internet to create their own new communities and start the process all over again.
Not all of these are actually even the case, to say nothing of the responses being correct. For example, wedding clothing isn't that expensive, and the people I've wanted to date have for the most part never been cruel or aloof. Just because an explanation sounds obvious doesn't mean it is correct.
Eh, I think some of these are circumstantial. The dating one probably applies to a very specific type of person. This is the one that does it for me:
Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.
It's all about greed/constraints/pressures/incentives/desires. People want to use water, but people don't have an incentive to keep water use down. Instead, they put pressure on engineers to bring availability up. And when availability, or supply, goes up, demand comes back in to seal the gap.
Economics was aware of overconsumption of underpriced resources before Thomas Malthus. It's not really a Malthusian observation to say that if a good is priced lower than the cost of acquiring it, it will be over-consumed.
Eh, I think some of these are circumstantial. The dating one probably applies to a very specific type of person.
Yeah, some of these are gross oversimplifications; others are just wrong. Take the shaving one for instance. You can get a very close shave and not cut yourself, and have been able to for as long as straight razors have been around. The reason people cut themselves is not because they want a closer shave, they want a shave that takes less time and money. If you didn't cut yourself this time, you obviously didn't go fast enough and don't need to buy a new razor. Razor gets dull and nicks you? Don't sharpen it (that takes time), chuck it in the trash and buy a new one.
And working 90 hour weeks? That assumes that you provide more value for those 90 hours versus 40, which may not always be true. Work smarter not harder.
As for the dating one, cruel, aloof or insensitive people are by definition not the type I would want to date.
Why are our personal reproductive choices so rarely informed by these Malthusian dynamics, let alone by the enormous personal burden involved in raising children? Because a nation/ethnicity/clan/family whose culture is comfortable with honest consideration of such questions does not grow as fast as one in which reproduction is seen as a crucial to identity and survival (both that of the group and that of the individual), and in which critical consideration of reproductive behaviors is rejected as perverse, judgmental or selfish.
Hardin overstated his case, for much better and more nuanced treatments, go to Google Scholar and search for "Elinor Ostrom" "Tragedy of the commons". She won the 2009 Nobel in economics, largely for her work in how "the commons" really are managed.
I heard that for over 100 years the actual speed of traffic in London was 9 miles per hour. If traffic started moving faster, more people drove. If it got slower people wouldn't bother driving. Not sure if it's true or not but it sounds plausible :)
Same thing with matter/antimatter, and "white flight" demographics. Also, the more energy-efficient we make our technology, the more energy we will use in total.
Any tension not in a buffered solution will collapse to dominance by one-side.
This one, though:
> Why can’t everyone just agree to a family-friendly, 40-hour workweek?
You can choose to opt-out of the rat race, and still be happy.
Some other too. Yes, to a first approximation, there are no easy problems (or free lunches), so only attack problems you'd love to solve.
The OP has seriously misunderstood Malthus. Malthus never got to understand that resources are relative and prices too. That's the same problem with people saying we are doomed because oil is finishing: there will be alternatives, prices will go so high to incentive real research on alternative energies.
And the examples are mere examples of economic incentive, not even that clear if you ask me. But then, what do I know, I only studied this stuff.
this one (from the comments) i'd truly never thought of before:
> Why are so many people having to get fertility treatment to have children? Because if they stayed fertile longer, they’d put off having children even more.
For the 'Malthusianisms', I'd agree the name isn't exactly right, and I could quibble with his specific examples. But the observation that things are in their current and often 'sucky' state because some balance between tensions has been reached is often useful.
It can help us get past frustration or superficial ranting about a situation, to investigating the real forces at work. And, while some could take from this analysis fatalism, I think it instead highlights what's necessary to be effective. Simply tugging a little in the direction of one of the existing forces is rarely the best path to change. You've got to approach such dynamically-balanced situations from an oblique angle, and apply other forces/insights to jump it to a new equilibrium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Fran%C3%A7ois_Verhulst
John von Neumann and John Nash deserve some credit for founding game theory; in particular the strategies described are minimax strategies, introduced by von Neumann.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax