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They are all "solved" now, of course we have a bunch of other problems in their place but I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to solve them as well.
Lack of food, death by common sicknesses, and sanitary problems are solved? What planet do you live on?
I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to lift the rest of the world to our standard.
The history of the industrial revolution and its coincidence with colonialism, and how it has developed into the current situation of economic imperialism, plus an examination of the sheer magnitude of the resources required to maintain a first world existence, juxtaposed with an examination of resource availability, overpopulation and ecological limits should give you a few reasons.
The idea of a "demographic transition" where everyone in the world is able to live at a "First World" standard of living is so fantastic it should be outlawed from the realm of serious discourse. You might as well base your argument on the existence of a benevolent fairy in the sky that guides economic expansion. Hell, maybe you could call it the "invisible hand" or perhaps the "ultimate resource". Economists would be proud.
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The whole "omg the world won't have enough food in the future" is a highly exaggerated argument. Yes the population is increasing at a high rate but the Earth is huge and we still have a lot of land that is not used for much of anything. The problem is what was said before with the resources we have now being underutilized or wasted. Western nations waste A LOT of food. Its a complex issue though as stability in countries were this is happening as well as greed factors influence it a lot.
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On October 29 2009 06:53 integral wrote:Show nested quote +They are all "solved" now, of course we have a bunch of other problems in their place but I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to solve them as well. Lack of food, death by common sicknesses, and sanitary problems are solved? What planet do you live on? Show nested quote +I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to lift the rest of the world to our standard. The history of the industrial revolution and its coincidence with colonialism, and how it has developed into the current situation of economic imperialism, plus an examination of the sheer magnitude of the resources required to maintain a first world existence, juxtaposed with an examination of resource availability, overpopulation and ecological limits should give you a few reasons. .
I thought it was fairly obvious that I was talking about the "western" world in my first statement, and no people don't die from hunger around here. (at least not in numbers worth talking about)
So let's see; you claim that there aren't enough resources. There _is_ enough food, this is simply true at least for the moment.
And even if (which I admit is a real risk) the oceans collapse we will simply have to grow algae and eat them instead. (Tons on projects working on this, most focusing on using them for fuel right now though)
Then we have the question of energy which we as of right now don't have an answer for, however new energy sources have always been developed and will continue to be developed as long as there are people who find science fun. New ideas are tested constantly. Sooner or later one will work, that is just the way it is.
Then we have the issue of rare minerals, and even the not so rare ones which are continually used up and which are absolutely essential. Yes fine, sooner or later we will run out. The rest of the solar system has more than enough though and with an expedition to mars planned within the coming 100 years or so it's only a question or time before we start to extract them.
If someone told the people in europe 500 years ago that there was room for 700 million people all living in comparable luxury there they would have laughed. Advancement is a wonderful thing and during the entire human history it has never ever stopped. No reason to think it will stop now, on the contrary I'd say it's going faster now than ever before.
You think it is naive to belive in progress and new inventions, looking back in history I would say it is naive to not believe in them.
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I'm pretty sure we have more than enough food to feed everyone, but the distribution is very unequal.
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On October 29 2009 04:28 Krikkitone wrote:
First fact
we currently produce enough food for everyone on earth
Current "World" Hunger =/= Global Food shortage
"World" hunger is a strictly local problem... or even more specifically and individual problem... the problem is that people are too poor to buy food.
Basically its an economic issue, the development of countries, and allowing individuals to have economic opportunities. Which means places like many African nations with severe political problems would still have hunger even if the price of bread in the West fell to a penny for a loaf... (actually hunger might even get worse in Africa because the farmers couldn't make enough money)
The Malthusian issue is not a problem because population growth rates have been falling world wide and hunger has been falling worldwide.
The "west" is not growing except through immigration (US is one of a few exceptions and the non-immigration growthrate is very low) and the "nondeveloped world" has decreasing growthrates.
so, population will top out at maybe 10 billion, and there will still be world hunger.... for probably centuries after that, even as food production continues to grow... bcause the problem isn't food production, but distribution.
I totally agree with this.
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Klackon, I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man, and make bald assertions like "that is just the way it works".
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On October 29 2009 06:53 integral wrote:Show nested quote +They are all "solved" now, of course we have a bunch of other problems in their place but I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to solve them as well. Lack of food, death by common sicknesses, and sanitary problems are solved? What planet do you live on?
If for some reason a world superstate was instituted with the political will to make sacrifices in first-world living standards (again, not very realistic, but for the moment I am referring only to the technical feasibility,) it would be possible to bring the entire world up to a pared-down first-world living standard.
By pared-down, I mean after stripping out the luxuries - adequate food (enough to eat), shelter (massive block apartments are good enough), sanitary infrastructure (running water and sewage disposal), education, and basic medicine - so the word "first-world" with its connotations of "American" is fairly misleading; think about bringing the world up to, say, a Croatian living standard. The world is well within its capacity to provide food for its people - eliminating meat production, for starters, would already expand the food that already feeds the world many-fold. Shelter and education can also come without excessive spending. The real big-ticket item is perhaps the infrastructure necessary to provide, say, running water, sewage disposal, and stuff like that, which is not cheap, but if, say, 20% of disposable world GDP was redirected into building infrastructure for third-world countries it could be done.
What we're talking about is not technical impossibility, but political.
On October 29 2009 04:26 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 03:44 WhiteNights wrote:On October 29 2009 03:35 integral wrote:On September 13 2009 17:19 integral wrote:
The population of any species is a function of food supply. Feeding the billions of people has done nothing to reduce the number of starving people, although it has enabled us to produce more billions. Sustaining these additional billions requires more resources than the previous billions. If these additional billions survive to reproduce, even more people are consuming even more resources.
There are more people starving and hungry in the world than ever before.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The only way to end world hunger is for humans to live at their long-term carrying capacity. In this world, that requires a massive die-off. This is only true if the carrying capacity of the earth is less than seven billion, which is as of yet unsubstantiated in this thread. Education and birth control will do nothing to reduce population; there is a biological imperative to reproduce, and those that do not reproduce will be replaced by those who do reproduce. The only solution to the problem of overpopulation there has ever been and ever will be is death. Anything else is wishful thinking with no historical, ecological, or biological basis. As a last-ditch resort, there is state-sponsored fertility control and sterilization. Death camps are a resort even more drastic than those two already drastic measures. The carrying capacity of earth is far, far far less than seven billion people. Defining long-term carrying capacity is far more slippery than is proving that we have overshot it; any population that consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot. If we understand the scope enlargement and the vast increase in composite carrying capacity in light of the resource drawdown of fossil fuels, immediately long-term carrying capacity drops to below what it was before the industrial revolution, due to the ongoing pollution and outright destruction of ecosystems.
If we were, to say, eliminate all consumer goods production and shift that entire monstrously large sector of production elsewhere we could build enough solar plants to move the entire electricity demand of the world onto renewable energy before we ran out of fossil fuel. If for some reason it became necessary, humanity could draw down its level of environmental destruction; yes, at the cost of many first-world living standards, but not enough that we would all starve.
As for "any population which consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot," that would mean that humanity was in overshoot the first time humanity extracted metal from the earth.
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On October 29 2009 07:30 integral wrote:
I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man.
Most of your posts contained random unimportant stuff like "people who don't agree with me on this are ignorant and stupid", written in a bunch of ways (and with nicer english)
The only actual content I found was that there isnt enough resources to go around if everyone want to live at a first world standard. Yes you used words like overpopulation instead, the meaning is the same. And that is what I responded to.
(Plus the part about ecconomic imperialism but while that is a sad and important topic it has nothing to do with the subject so I left it out)
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8751 Posts
On October 29 2009 06:04 integral wrote:
(Can't prove a negative anyway.)
Wtf?
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@biochemist: correct if wrong, but is your point "lets not feed people because hunger will always be a problem and feeding it will just cause exponentially more hungry people" ?
if that is the case, then you should just stop eating now because you will always go hungry later and eating now serves no purpose, you're just wasting resources.
----Unrelated: as many have already pointed out, distribution is the problem, not production. OP seems to be a very misinformed individual.
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If for some reason it became necessary, humanity could draw down its level of environmental destruction The point is that it won't.
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On October 29 2009 08:01 Liquid`NonY wrote:Wtf?
I'm referring to the lack of falsifiability of negative statements. What is confusing?
Falsifiability is pretty important. If something has happened a certain way 500 times, we can reasonably expect it to happen again the 501st time. You can't PROVE it won't be different the 501st time -- it MIGHT be, after all -- but it'd be really stupid to bet on it being any different.
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This thread is SO BAD and has SO MANY know nothings it's unbelievable! People actually think we have a problem producing food, or transporting, or the places where food is needed the most is unstable...cus of what exactly? Answer me that.
Read this - Why Africa depends on handouts
Watch this - Food Inc.
Get educated, my god this thread is...jesus h christ!!!
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Sanya12364 Posts
Never underestimate the hand that political instability has had in making Africa poor. And all those agricultural "foreign aid packages" are roundly refuted by "Give a man a fish... teach a man to fish..."
Gifts of capital investment that Africans want would be far more effective than the direct food packages that have ravaged and destroyed their native agricultural industry.
The second side effect of foreign aid packages is that the lack of accountability in the delivery of said foreign aid packages has promoted even more corruption and political instability in Africa to the detriment of its inhabitants. Direct foreign aid packages delivered through African political entities have done net harm to that continent despite its "good intentions."
Instead, direct individual to individual micro-investments in the form of lending of equipment, capital, and money have done well. Whoever said the problem was political is correct. The primary factor hindering African development are politician - corrupt politicians on both sides. It's best not to let politicians touch the money at all.
Also all these people theorize that for some reason we will all of a sudden wake up one day be out of resources and that somehow it will be a giant shock to everyone that it happened. It's going to happen over the course of several decades. By then either food prices will have risen enough, energy prices will have risen enough, or wars and plagues will have killed enough people that people won't be starving. If over-population is a problem worry about the wars rather than the starvation.
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On October 29 2009 07:38 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 07:30 integral wrote:
I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man. Most of your posts contained random unimportant stuff like "people who don't agree with me on this are ignorant and stupid", written in a bunch of ways (and with nicer english) The only actual content I found was that there isnt enough resources to go around if everyone want to live at a first world standard. Yes you used words like overpopulation instead, the meaning is the same. And that is what I responded to. (Plus the part about ecconomic imperialism but while that is a sad and important topic it has nothing to do with the subject so I left it out)
Yeah, that's pretty much my entire point, that the earth is finite, there are ecological limits, and anyone who thinks differently is making faith-based assertions not grounded in reality.
If you want to argue that the earth can theoretically support more humans, that's fine. The earth probably can: I will not argue with you about the maximum height of the short-term carrying capacity based on windfalls from non-renewable resources. I will, however, point out that this is resource drawdown, that this resource drawdown has led to overshoot, and that the inevitable consequence of overshoot is die-off. This is ecological reality, if you would like to continue to argue against ecological reality with unfounded ignorant conjecture then I cannot have a conversation with you because paradigmatic differences are irreconcilable. As I wrote before, if someone wants to have a discussion about what the long-term carrying capacity of earth actually is, I am more than willing to engage, but, again as I wrote before, I doubt anyone who has posted their conjecture here will enter into that conversation because 1. you have a different paradigm and 2. you have no idea what you're talking about.
Please understand, this is all I can say. I can't have a conversation with someone in a language they do not speak. I try my best not to judge the people who don't speak my language (to extend this metaphor) but from my perspective the only barrier is not being ignorant, so it's kind of hard.
Anyone who really wants to understand anything I've said in this thread should read a population ecology textbook in conjunction with Overshoot by William Catton.
Gotta run for now.
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8751 Posts
On October 29 2009 08:24 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 08:01 Liquid`NonY wrote:On October 29 2009 06:04 integral wrote:
(Can't prove a negative anyway.) Wtf? I'm referring to the lack of falsifiability of negative statements. What is confusing? Falsifiability is pretty important. If something has happened a certain way 500 times, we can reasonably expect it to happen again the 501st time. You can't PROVE it won't be different the 501st time -- it MIGHT be, after all -- but it'd be really stupid to bet on it being any different.
Your attack is on the method of argument by induction. The conclusion being negative is irrelevant. And if you really want to say that arguments by induction aren't worthy of using the word 'proves' then I'm still thinking "Wtf?" with a dash of "whatever"
And when arguing deductively, how about this:
if A, then B
not B
Therefore, not A
I've proven a negative statement!
A = humans invent a means to end world hunger
B = humans are rational
Of course, humans are indeed rational, so my second premise isn't true. But if someone found a true statement that fits for B, then they could prove that humans do not invent a means to end world hunger. I suppose what you want to say now is that whatever anyone ever says fits for B, you will always doubt it. Yeah sure you can doubt anything, down to the idea that our perceptions are totally deceptive and we don't know anything, blah blah blah. But in argument, some things are accepted as true because it's useful and reasonable to do so. When all evidence relevant to a statement is reasonably considered, then it's appropriate to use the word "proves" when that statement logically entails another statement.
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Sanya12364 Posts
You do realize that trade is a stabilizing force in the world, and it smooths out local year to year variations. If there are worldwide variations on massive scale, then we're screwed no matter what. The failure of the Russian famine is due to political forces that prevented trade or corruption that diverted delivery. Not exactly what you might call an ecological phenomenon.
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On October 29 2009 08:43 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 07:38 KlaCkoN wrote:On October 29 2009 07:30 integral wrote:
I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man. Most of your posts contained random unimportant stuff like "people who don't agree with me on this are ignorant and stupid", written in a bunch of ways (and with nicer english) The only actual content I found was that there isnt enough resources to go around if everyone want to live at a first world standard. Yes you used words like overpopulation instead, the meaning is the same. And that is what I responded to. (Plus the part about ecconomic imperialism but while that is a sad and important topic it has nothing to do with the subject so I left it out) Yeah, that's pretty much my entire point, that the earth is finite, there are ecological limits, and anyone who thinks differently is making faith-based assertions not grounded in reality. If you want to argue that the earth can theoretically support more humans, that's fine. The earth probably can: I will not argue with you about the maximum height of the short-term carrying capacity based on windfalls from non-renewable resources. I will, however, point out that this is resource drawdown, that this resource drawdown has led to overshoot, and that the inevitable consequence of overshoot is die-off. This is ecological reality, if you would like to continue to argue against ecological reality with unfounded ignorant conjecture then I cannot have a conversation with you because paradigmatic differences are irreconcilable.
I've been making the point that the carrying capacity of the earth depends on capital and technology level. Theoretically, considering a situation where the entirety of the Gobi Desert has been turned into a massive solar power plant designed to power millions of hydroponic farms, one can *imagine* a long-term carrying capacity of a hundred billion.
The competing factors are:
Increasing human population above long-term carrying capacity.
Decreasing non-renewable resources means short-term carrying capacity cannot be sustained.
Increasing technology and capital level increasing Earth's long-term carrying capacity.
Nonrenewable resource drawdown doesn't need to result in die-off in one of the two following scenarios:
1.) Long-term carrying capacity is increased from below the current population to above the current population, and population control measures are implemented before we hit the absolute limit.
2.) Humanity adjusts consumption patterns in order to sustain more people off of less resources rather than continuing current consumption patterns and allowing people to die off.
Notice that neither of these apply to an ecology where the population in question is unintelligent. Standard ecological theory stating "draw-down implies overshoot inevitably leads to die-off" is predicated on the assumption that renewable long-term carrying capacity is constant, which is true when dealing with creatures which are not humans, and it is this assumption which I am objecting to.
Also, I did post about carrying capacity with respect to living standards and you ignored my previous post.
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On October 29 2009 02:41 plated.rawr wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 02:37 Roffles wrote:
Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
Ending World Hunger is nice, but thinking about population control and how the population could just skyrocket in the future is quite scary. Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll feed himself, then use his newly aquired skills plus natural human greed to strip mine the fish population, causing future starvation. As long as we have a market economy and liberal capitalism, there will always be starvation.
This is wrong on so many levels. A market economy promotes the efficient use of resources through people owning capital and the fruits of their labor- teach a man to fish, give him license to operate a fish farm, and he'll feed himself and a crapton other people while making responsible use of the fish population resource because it belongs to him and his livelyhood depends on it.
You ever seen human greed strip mine the population of cows and chickens of private property?
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Sanya12364 Posts
A lot of unsustainable activity has been promoted politically rather than through natural expression of the free will of people. There is the side-by-side comparison of the activities engaged in by the people of Mongolia with traditional agricultural methods vs their counterparts in Inner Mongolia with government promoted agricultural activities. A lot of unsustainable activities are politically facilitated under the guise of a free market but is instead the plundering of natural resources by some politically connected entity or sanctioned by some ignorant bureaucrat that ignores traditional wisdom accumulated by generations of living experience.
The market is also a powerful force in communicating scarcity and communicating future scarcity. It is why if fossil fuels or food prices were to rise, people would adapt to the rising prices by consuming less. It even means modifying behavior to reproduce less so they don't have to feed as many children. The alternative to the free market solution of communication through pricing is a political solution where it sets one body of people against another i.e. war.
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EPT
