Regarding Ethiopia, we may be comparing apples to oranges as 1. Most Ethiopians are subsistence farmers. 2. Most agricultural work is still carried out with oxen or by hand (petroleum products are little used, and many people buy few imported foodstuffs).
N.B: I'm not saying they're not import dependent (up to 20 million Ethiopians depend directly on aid, certainly, in bad years) and, whereas the population is today said to be 120 million, the same landmass was estimated to contain around 4 million inhabitants at the beginning of the 20th century.
As to electric vehicles in Ethiopia... I'm very sure that piece of legislation will be abrogated. I'd give it two years at most, perhaps less: too complex, too expensive, not fixable and frequent power cuts in the country (you'll never see the electric equivalent of the baby Fiats, Peugeot 405 and Beetles you still find in Addis or Harar, after 50 years of service or more).
Ps: Regarding depopulation in general, this study comparing birth rates per vaccination status, in the Czech Republic, commented on by John Campbell, may be of interest:
My note on Ethiopia was a little tongue-in-cheek, of course. But not completely: a land of subsistence farmers is better equipped to survive an oil crash than our industrialized agriculture. And their population density is not so high, Ethiopia is a huge country. About electric cars, I think in the near future it will be impossible to import non-electric ones with China dominating the market and rapidly moving to an all-electric road transportation system And, finally, yes, I know that paper. What's impressive in these things is how so many people can still say in complete seriousness that "the vaccines saved us". Actually, not just many people, a large majority of them.
I can well imagine countries such as Ethiopia experiencing 'peak car' due to what you're saying (most vehicles are second-hand imports). Indeed, I could see the same phenomenon happening in... Europe! (cars becoming luxury items for most of the population that is). Ethiopia may be empty, but it is mostly not suitable for concentrated numbers of people and has been called 'the most inhabited mountain in the world' for this reason (very fertile areas could be compared to, say, Rwanda).
That's right. There is a whole chapter on Ethiopia in my book. Their population has been shooting up at an unbelievably high rate and, unfortunately, with so many young women around, it won't stop growing so soon. That is, if they have enough food to keep them alive. But I have to say that my impression is that Ethiopians are smart and tough people, well suited to weather hard times. Just think that in 1936, the Italian army could subjugate them only by using poison gas! Tough people, indeed.
PS: While I do agree in many respects with your comment about subsistence farmers being better equipped to survive an oil crash (for one, not only are people 'hardier', able to put up with a lot more, as well as being self-reliant and capable of survival in environments that they master, but they've also maintained robust societies, with families and social groups that function better than most similar structures in the West).
On the other hand, regarding your comment about France entering turmoil every time the population exceeded 30 million, do note that while France is 'only' at twice their historical high nowadays, Ethiopia's population has been multiplied by perhaps...thirty over the last hundred and twenty years. The country has been beset by civil wars since 2020.
Consider US after fracking dies abruptly due to depletion in the nearest future and all of a sudden there is no oil. The same goes for their land. By and large it's essentially worthless without modern equipment, fertilizers, and GMO seeds. And don't get me started on underground aquifiers depletion. The situation needs to be assessed independently looking at each region. Also if you move abroad, you are a stranger, and so will be eaten first in resource wars. Last but not least don't task AI with doing stuff. It's bullshitting you.
AI is a tool. If you use it correctly, it is a very useful tool. But your point is correct. The aquifer problem in the US is enormous. Let's say that, at least, they have plenty more space than we have in Europe
One of the conclusions is that if the West comes to its senses (ends the war industry and expands "defense" to emergency (repair, aid) and infrastructure maintenance), that would change collapse scenarios entirely.
What remains and still worsens is climate: the jet stream (both hemispheres) deformation which can result in more events like this:
A recent yet undocumented phenomenon is the change in trade winds. Here (Central America) there are periods they're nonexistent. Due to local topography, not a big issue yet but for regions where rain (monsoon) has a high dependency on trade wind this will be a problem.
One could define Confucianism as observation based behavioral science optimized for cooperation. Kim Il Sung must have realized the innate human tendency for worship / religion so the modern version of Confucianism includes that (but in a way that can't be hijacked by the West).
The contrast with the West couldn't be greater, as there, instead of cooperating in the interest of country / population, politicians are adversaries, even trying to outlaw those against their private 'war industry & big pharma' interests.
IMHO this is at the base of issues like deteriorating health, resource depletion and climate.
How much the North Korean societal model was seen as a danger for the racketeering club is shown in this article:
Again an inspiring contribution. Where else can one read such things???
Now one can ask: Who will starve first in a given country?
Many mammals and primates live in some sort of societies where males avoid perpetual fights over ranks by agreeing about a more permanent hierarchy, which then determines who has most or more access to females and to preferred feeding places and food.
Some days ago I came across an interesting idea - if I remember correctly in the leftist Sepolskys book -"Behave". There its said that this is a mechanism whereby such mammalian and primate societies can adapt to changing abundance of resources: In case of scarcity the hierarchy will provide that the lowest classes starve first and without fuss.
Thanks, Lukas. I am working at the chapter on exactly this subject on my book. There is an adaptation mechanism, but it doesn't have to be overestimated.
To answer the first question, yes, Malthus was right.
Just as Darwin understood the general principle governing evolution, Malthus understood the principle governing overshoot.
But both might had some fine details wrong, allowing critics to discard their ideas. And, more to the point, both had their theory used, instrumentalized and distorted for political ends, resulting in a very strong polarization of opinions. Only Malthus never had the chance Darwin had with genetics to prove beyond reasonable doubts that he had the right intuition.
Now, if one takes Peter Turchin's works, he showed that during the Middle Age and before the Industrial Revolution, France experienced a civil war every time the population reached between 20 and 30 millions people. That's an other way to asses overshoot. And while we can always hope that this ecological limit can be extended a bit by maintaining or developing certain agricultural technologies, it is very difficult to imagine how the current French population could be fed without fossil-fuel inputs.
PS : Confucianism might give China an age-old tendency to benevolence but more recent history shown that its tendency toward communism ended up working exactly the other way. And actually, it might well be the difference between the short term survival of as many individuals as possible and the longer term survival of the political system and social order whatever the human cost. Enough to think twice before immigrating over there I guess.
I spent a lot of time in China in the early '00's ( we were busily outsourcing American jobs and it seemed like a good idea at the time). My buddy XXXXX, who was born in Hubei and my other buddy YYYYY who was born in Szechuan referred to Wen Jiabao as the "emperor" of the Maoist Dynasty.
They were usually drunk at the time and looked around to make certain that no one could hear what they said to the lǎowài.
“Communist” is a slippery term. China today is a totalitarian surveillance state. The CCP will not hesitate to starve millions if that’s what it takes to maintain power. I see nothing “Confucian” in the government of China. Viewing the CCP as even slightly benevolent is naive.
Have you visited China or lived there? How many Chinese people have told you they are “happy with their government”? Sorry but I think you have been reading CCP propaganda.
I haven't been there, but I've hosted Chinese exchange students.
One of our students had lived her entire life in downtown Shanghai.
When she went outside our rural house for the first time at night, she looked up, and her jaw dropped. She stood there, transfixed, for some time. She had never seen stars!
Then she went back in and resumed her life of 4-6 Scamazon packages of clothing and makeup a week. We called her our "uber-consumer".
Her and her family were mostly indifferent to their government. They were quite "happy" that they were able to enjoy all the finer points of modern civilization, and were mostly unaware of political events, which were not carried in their versions of social media.
I think Malthus didn't really understand the concept of "overshoot" -- if you read what he wrote, you see that he thought that famines would stop population growth near the carrying capacity (he didn't use this term, of course) and cause it to stay there. In other words, Malthus was not a catastrophist!
Yes, I guess you're right, maybe not overshoot per se. But the carrying capacity concept.
Beside, on the long term, populations tend to oscillate around the limit defined by the average carrying capacity of their environment. With scarcity if not famine being the norm.
Rural subsistence farmers in third-world nations may have a better time of it than those in even large industrial nations with lots of industrial farmland.
For one thing, land that has been industrially farmed for four generations is "worn out". Without a continuous dose of artificial fertilizers and herbicides, it won't continue to supply even half the food it currently does.
For another, despite the scorn heaped on it by the technical cognizante, growing food is a skill — one that relatively few have today. It may take quite a few years of making mistakes before one can supply even a small portion of their daily food needs.
No, I don't advocate emigrating to third-world countries to learn how to farm. You can start in a high-rise apartment, with sprouts on a window sill, or runner beans on a balcony. Someone with suburban soil has even more space for learning, while saving their pennies to get access to a larger, more sustainable setting — possibly in conjunction with others of like mind.
There may soon be two types of people: those who have taken personal control of their food supply, and the hungry. (Oh, there's always "door number three": working for food on land controlled by the local feudal lord.)
Grow food. Now. Avoid the rush.
I've seen the future, and it is powered by current photosynthesis. I'm just not sure I see *any* people there.
What in Dog's name makes you think the output of an automated word guessing machine is in any way worth the electricity taken to generate it, let alone the time of your readers to read it?
I sincerely hope you check every reference the stupid machine shoves in your face, to see that they actually exist and say what the guessing machine arrangement of words represents they say.
FFS, they're a con and in no way do what the sales idiots say they do...
Во имя Бога, Les. Look at the numbers: AIs use no more than a few tenths of a percent of the world's primary energy, less than 1% of the world's electric power. Think how much energy they can save us in terms of time, useless trips, doing the wrong things, and so on. They are not stupid. The more I use them, the more I realize their incredible power. Yes, sometimes they go astray, sometimes they hallucinate. But it is the same, and much worse, for humans.
My opinion is that they aren't perfect, but they are probably above average compared to a liberal arts undergraduate attempting to do some research.
AI is a tool, how you put it to use is what is important. I definitely think that it gives better results than average. Especially when you force it to print out sources where it derived its automated plagiarism.
Sneer all you want, I tend to use electric sanders when I am working with wood and wire feed is referable to rod welding. Know your tools is all I am saying.
The question remains: will we know what to do with our problems when there is not enough energy to run AI?
Perhaps you still know how to use sandpaper. But will the next generation?
I just listened to a CBC program on "adulting", what young people, who have had helicopter parents and technology do everything for them, what they call the process of learning things like laundry, cooking, and cleaning. They have not been taught basic problem solving, and many of them simply call their parents, who give them "A, B, C" step-by-step instructions, which still doesn't teach them how to problem-solve.
My Dad taught me efficient use of sandpaper, *and* how to fix a car… and how to build a house. The next generation is going to need such skills, and more.
Someone told me that the Ireland famine was a result of England refusing to let them eat their own food:
"In History Ireland magazine (1997, issue 5, pp. 32-36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer and Drew University professor, relates her findings: “Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 gallons. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.”"
If true this means that the ones who starve are the ones who don't have guns.
"Malthus has been buried again. (This is the 174th year in which that redoubtable economist has been interred. We may take it as certain that anyone who has to be buried 174 times cannot be wholly dead.)" — Garrett Hardin, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, November 1972, p23, date: 1972-11
He argues persuasively for private ownership, claiming that it gives the owners a sense of responsibility for that which they own, since their income is dependent on taking care of the resource they own.
However, Hardin overlooks that property has become a commodity, and even ordinary people view their home more for its increase in value over time than they do for the current value (housing) it provides.
I've come to view this "passive capitalism" as morally corrupt, and have totally divested from such things as stocks, and live in a co-op where home appreciation is limited to the rate of inflation.
Hardin's concerns seem to mostly lie with the anonymous masses of the needy, and how they can overwhelm the "life boat" of those who have plenty. Yet he ignores the anonymous masses of those who treat property merely as an investment, and who have no interest in properly maintaining that property.
For some 293,000 years of human history, we have gathered in clans, tribes, and villages of no more than about 150 people (Dunbar's Number). This is the greatest number of others with which one can maintain separate relationships.
Groups under ~150 do not have any problem with "the tragedy of the commons", because they all know each other. Peer pressure and the threat of expulsion keep people from free-loading. For most of human history, being expelled from your tribe was a death sentence.
I have no solutions for this predicament, except that someday, humanity must withdraw from our current energy high, at which point our numbers may decline to such an extent that we can once again have a healthy relationship between the haves and the have-nots.
ugo are you not afraid that your book trust ai to much because ai bots can make mistakes i did ask grok once will we always by able to make digital accounts because identification methods can run out to create them like emailadresses or biometrie it said we will always find new identification methods to make accounts but this is not true because i asked microsoft support the same question and the person was working in it he said identification methids can run out and if you look at chatgpt it says it can make mistakes
Malthus was right, and he did mean well, but coal being used to mine coal changed the equation after he worked the problem.
A Carrington event would do us all in, and we may even be a bit overdue.
Here, let this cheer you up, slo-mo of Macron, Merz and Starmer high on coke and they let the press cameras in before they stashed it. Macron grabs Starmer, then the baggie and looks sheepish. Merz grabs the coke spoon in both hands, then looks to see if anybody noticed. https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/1921551299222339977
Of course! But, please, read carefully my text. The question is not food PRODUCTION. The question is food SUPPLY. If you have no money to buy food, it will rot in the fields, or inside the precision fermentation reactors
We'll, the local powers to be would not want social rebellion either, so we can imagine that food stamps and basic supplies will be given to avoid unrest (unless you're in Gaza or similar situations).
Autarchical nations tend to be quite expansionistic, from Rome to the Axis to the USA all who think that can "live by themselves" need to continually expand: self-reliance is a homeostatic process and as living beings homeostasis need to pump entropy outside.
Entropy rules and will be the ultimate winner, Greeks used the myth of Kronos to explain this, life cheat around the rules pumping but is time limited, there is no "perfect strategy" that is always winning so we have evolution as a strategy to explore and adapt. A nation is an "individual" composed by his cells (humans) organized as organs and systems an as any individual have a "life cycle" that go from birth to inevitable death, also have something similar to phases in his life, youth, maturity, old age and senescence.
To me, this phases seems to mimic the biological ones really well but what is difficult to see is who we are talking about: nation could die and rebirth without any formal change in confines, structure or similar, we had seen this when czarist Russia become the core of URSS changing only names to positions in the structure or with the European nations after WW2. Circumstances also play a mayor role, Russia (Russian Federation) was a net importer of grains but from 2006 did a lot to become a net exporter and did it, same could be for other countries as well as an evolutionary response to circumstances, today may be more useful to specialize in hi value productions that are nutritional poor but if famine or similar kick in could be an adaptation, Ireland famine was not governed by total collapse of food production but by economic imperative dictated by the status as a colony: grains were the wealth of England and was not given to Irish for profit reasons, the famine was manmade and triggered a reaction that lasted until 2000 with the end of The Troubles!
Malthus was right in the confine of his own assumptions, today we have a more refined method in the Logistic Function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function) that is quite more adherent to reality, he has begun to analyze mathematically a process and did a good job at it, but his work was incomplete. What we can derive today is that no autarchy could be lasting, any system is vulnerable to black swan events that could not be mitigated in the confine of the system itself, the minimal dimension to something like this is the entire planet and also this is not a real insurance because we had 5 mayor max extinction events on planetary scale anyone with a complete reset of life of the planet!
Hi Ugo,
Regarding Ethiopia, we may be comparing apples to oranges as 1. Most Ethiopians are subsistence farmers. 2. Most agricultural work is still carried out with oxen or by hand (petroleum products are little used, and many people buy few imported foodstuffs).
N.B: I'm not saying they're not import dependent (up to 20 million Ethiopians depend directly on aid, certainly, in bad years) and, whereas the population is today said to be 120 million, the same landmass was estimated to contain around 4 million inhabitants at the beginning of the 20th century.
As to electric vehicles in Ethiopia... I'm very sure that piece of legislation will be abrogated. I'd give it two years at most, perhaps less: too complex, too expensive, not fixable and frequent power cuts in the country (you'll never see the electric equivalent of the baby Fiats, Peugeot 405 and Beetles you still find in Addis or Harar, after 50 years of service or more).
Ps: Regarding depopulation in general, this study comparing birth rates per vaccination status, in the Czech Republic, commented on by John Campbell, may be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C4P3sxXiUA
If this study is correct, the population crash in the West will be incredibly rapid.
My note on Ethiopia was a little tongue-in-cheek, of course. But not completely: a land of subsistence farmers is better equipped to survive an oil crash than our industrialized agriculture. And their population density is not so high, Ethiopia is a huge country. About electric cars, I think in the near future it will be impossible to import non-electric ones with China dominating the market and rapidly moving to an all-electric road transportation system And, finally, yes, I know that paper. What's impressive in these things is how so many people can still say in complete seriousness that "the vaccines saved us". Actually, not just many people, a large majority of them.
I can well imagine countries such as Ethiopia experiencing 'peak car' due to what you're saying (most vehicles are second-hand imports). Indeed, I could see the same phenomenon happening in... Europe! (cars becoming luxury items for most of the population that is). Ethiopia may be empty, but it is mostly not suitable for concentrated numbers of people and has been called 'the most inhabited mountain in the world' for this reason (very fertile areas could be compared to, say, Rwanda).
That's right. There is a whole chapter on Ethiopia in my book. Their population has been shooting up at an unbelievably high rate and, unfortunately, with so many young women around, it won't stop growing so soon. That is, if they have enough food to keep them alive. But I have to say that my impression is that Ethiopians are smart and tough people, well suited to weather hard times. Just think that in 1936, the Italian army could subjugate them only by using poison gas! Tough people, indeed.
PS: While I do agree in many respects with your comment about subsistence farmers being better equipped to survive an oil crash (for one, not only are people 'hardier', able to put up with a lot more, as well as being self-reliant and capable of survival in environments that they master, but they've also maintained robust societies, with families and social groups that function better than most similar structures in the West).
On the other hand, regarding your comment about France entering turmoil every time the population exceeded 30 million, do note that while France is 'only' at twice their historical high nowadays, Ethiopia's population has been multiplied by perhaps...thirty over the last hundred and twenty years. The country has been beset by civil wars since 2020.
Consider US after fracking dies abruptly due to depletion in the nearest future and all of a sudden there is no oil. The same goes for their land. By and large it's essentially worthless without modern equipment, fertilizers, and GMO seeds. And don't get me started on underground aquifiers depletion. The situation needs to be assessed independently looking at each region. Also if you move abroad, you are a stranger, and so will be eaten first in resource wars. Last but not least don't task AI with doing stuff. It's bullshitting you.
AI is a tool. If you use it correctly, it is a very useful tool. But your point is correct. The aquifer problem in the US is enormous. Let's say that, at least, they have plenty more space than we have in Europe
Probably North Korea was the first country to adopt and develop self-reliance (Juche).
https://www.thoughtco.com/juche-195633
An unexpected result, the country now is a much appreciated ally of the Russian Federation.
Self-reliance re food is an interesting list:
https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/which-country-is-most-self-sufficient-in-food/
and somewhat different from overall self-sufficiency.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2022/02/15/most-self-sufficient-economies-in-the-world/
One of the conclusions is that if the West comes to its senses (ends the war industry and expands "defense" to emergency (repair, aid) and infrastructure maintenance), that would change collapse scenarios entirely.
What remains and still worsens is climate: the jet stream (both hemispheres) deformation which can result in more events like this:
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/causes-of-the-russian-heat-wave-and-pakistani-floods.html
A recent yet undocumented phenomenon is the change in trade winds. Here (Central America) there are periods they're nonexistent. Due to local topography, not a big issue yet but for regions where rain (monsoon) has a high dependency on trade wind this will be a problem.
North Korea is consistently reviled and demonized by the Western propaganda. Which makes me think that it cannot be so bad as they say it is.
One could define Confucianism as observation based behavioral science optimized for cooperation. Kim Il Sung must have realized the innate human tendency for worship / religion so the modern version of Confucianism includes that (but in a way that can't be hijacked by the West).
The contrast with the West couldn't be greater, as there, instead of cooperating in the interest of country / population, politicians are adversaries, even trying to outlaw those against their private 'war industry & big pharma' interests.
IMHO this is at the base of issues like deteriorating health, resource depletion and climate.
How much the North Korean societal model was seen as a danger for the racketeering club is shown in this article:
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/01/north-korea-un-security-councils-killer-resolution15-to-0-choking-a-country-into-submission/
Again an inspiring contribution. Where else can one read such things???
Now one can ask: Who will starve first in a given country?
Many mammals and primates live in some sort of societies where males avoid perpetual fights over ranks by agreeing about a more permanent hierarchy, which then determines who has most or more access to females and to preferred feeding places and food.
Some days ago I came across an interesting idea - if I remember correctly in the leftist Sepolskys book -"Behave". There its said that this is a mechanism whereby such mammalian and primate societies can adapt to changing abundance of resources: In case of scarcity the hierarchy will provide that the lowest classes starve first and without fuss.
Food for thought for the new pope.
Thanks, Lukas. I am working at the chapter on exactly this subject on my book. There is an adaptation mechanism, but it doesn't have to be overestimated.
To answer the first question, yes, Malthus was right.
Just as Darwin understood the general principle governing evolution, Malthus understood the principle governing overshoot.
But both might had some fine details wrong, allowing critics to discard their ideas. And, more to the point, both had their theory used, instrumentalized and distorted for political ends, resulting in a very strong polarization of opinions. Only Malthus never had the chance Darwin had with genetics to prove beyond reasonable doubts that he had the right intuition.
Now, if one takes Peter Turchin's works, he showed that during the Middle Age and before the Industrial Revolution, France experienced a civil war every time the population reached between 20 and 30 millions people. That's an other way to asses overshoot. And while we can always hope that this ecological limit can be extended a bit by maintaining or developing certain agricultural technologies, it is very difficult to imagine how the current French population could be fed without fossil-fuel inputs.
PS : Confucianism might give China an age-old tendency to benevolence but more recent history shown that its tendency toward communism ended up working exactly the other way. And actually, it might well be the difference between the short term survival of as many individuals as possible and the longer term survival of the political system and social order whatever the human cost. Enough to think twice before immigrating over there I guess.
Honestly, I don't see any communism in China, except for red flags. The Chinese Communist Party should change its name to "Chinese Confucian Party"
I spent a lot of time in China in the early '00's ( we were busily outsourcing American jobs and it seemed like a good idea at the time). My buddy XXXXX, who was born in Hubei and my other buddy YYYYY who was born in Szechuan referred to Wen Jiabao as the "emperor" of the Maoist Dynasty.
They were usually drunk at the time and looked around to make certain that no one could hear what they said to the lǎowài.
“Communist” is a slippery term. China today is a totalitarian surveillance state. The CCP will not hesitate to starve millions if that’s what it takes to maintain power. I see nothing “Confucian” in the government of China. Viewing the CCP as even slightly benevolent is naive.
Maybe. What I can say, though, is that the Chinese seem to be much happier with their government than we are with ours.
Have you visited China or lived there? How many Chinese people have told you they are “happy with their government”? Sorry but I think you have been reading CCP propaganda.
I haven't been there, but I've hosted Chinese exchange students.
One of our students had lived her entire life in downtown Shanghai.
When she went outside our rural house for the first time at night, she looked up, and her jaw dropped. She stood there, transfixed, for some time. She had never seen stars!
Then she went back in and resumed her life of 4-6 Scamazon packages of clothing and makeup a week. We called her our "uber-consumer".
Her and her family were mostly indifferent to their government. They were quite "happy" that they were able to enjoy all the finer points of modern civilization, and were mostly unaware of political events, which were not carried in their versions of social media.
I think Malthus didn't really understand the concept of "overshoot" -- if you read what he wrote, you see that he thought that famines would stop population growth near the carrying capacity (he didn't use this term, of course) and cause it to stay there. In other words, Malthus was not a catastrophist!
Yes, I guess you're right, maybe not overshoot per se. But the carrying capacity concept.
Beside, on the long term, populations tend to oscillate around the limit defined by the average carrying capacity of their environment. With scarcity if not famine being the norm.
Hasn't this work already been done using prof. Rees and collegues ecological overshoot methodology to calculate overshoot by country?
Yes, my calculations move along the same line of thought. But I focused on a specific section of the problem
Rural subsistence farmers in third-world nations may have a better time of it than those in even large industrial nations with lots of industrial farmland.
For one thing, land that has been industrially farmed for four generations is "worn out". Without a continuous dose of artificial fertilizers and herbicides, it won't continue to supply even half the food it currently does.
For another, despite the scorn heaped on it by the technical cognizante, growing food is a skill — one that relatively few have today. It may take quite a few years of making mistakes before one can supply even a small portion of their daily food needs.
No, I don't advocate emigrating to third-world countries to learn how to farm. You can start in a high-rise apartment, with sprouts on a window sill, or runner beans on a balcony. Someone with suburban soil has even more space for learning, while saving their pennies to get access to a larger, more sustainable setting — possibly in conjunction with others of like mind.
There may soon be two types of people: those who have taken personal control of their food supply, and the hungry. (Oh, there's always "door number three": working for food on land controlled by the local feudal lord.)
Grow food. Now. Avoid the rush.
I've seen the future, and it is powered by current photosynthesis. I'm just not sure I see *any* people there.
Ugo,
What in Dog's name makes you think the output of an automated word guessing machine is in any way worth the electricity taken to generate it, let alone the time of your readers to read it?
I sincerely hope you check every reference the stupid machine shoves in your face, to see that they actually exist and say what the guessing machine arrangement of words represents they say.
FFS, they're a con and in no way do what the sales idiots say they do...
Во имя Бога, Les. Look at the numbers: AIs use no more than a few tenths of a percent of the world's primary energy, less than 1% of the world's electric power. Think how much energy they can save us in terms of time, useless trips, doing the wrong things, and so on. They are not stupid. The more I use them, the more I realize their incredible power. Yes, sometimes they go astray, sometimes they hallucinate. But it is the same, and much worse, for humans.
My opinion is that they aren't perfect, but they are probably above average compared to a liberal arts undergraduate attempting to do some research.
AI is a tool, how you put it to use is what is important. I definitely think that it gives better results than average. Especially when you force it to print out sources where it derived its automated plagiarism.
Sneer all you want, I tend to use electric sanders when I am working with wood and wire feed is referable to rod welding. Know your tools is all I am saying.
The question remains: will we know what to do with our problems when there is not enough energy to run AI?
Perhaps you still know how to use sandpaper. But will the next generation?
I just listened to a CBC program on "adulting", what young people, who have had helicopter parents and technology do everything for them, what they call the process of learning things like laundry, cooking, and cleaning. They have not been taught basic problem solving, and many of them simply call their parents, who give them "A, B, C" step-by-step instructions, which still doesn't teach them how to problem-solve.
My Dad taught me efficient use of sandpaper, *and* how to fix a car… and how to build a house. The next generation is going to need such skills, and more.
Someone told me that the Ireland famine was a result of England refusing to let them eat their own food:
"In History Ireland magazine (1997, issue 5, pp. 32-36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer and Drew University professor, relates her findings: “Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 gallons. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.”"
If true this means that the ones who starve are the ones who don't have guns.
I don't see a button to buy you a coffee. In any case, thanks for the post on a topic the vast majority avoid completely.
Just click on the boxed text! And thanks!
Done! Consider putting the Buy Me A Coffee logo in the box to make it more obvious. ☺️
Thanks! Will see to do that
"Malthus has been buried again. (This is the 174th year in which that redoubtable economist has been interred. We may take it as certain that anyone who has to be buried 174 times cannot be wholly dead.)" — Garrett Hardin, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, November 1972, p23, date: 1972-11
I just heard his name in the wicked problems podcast in relation to … https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1100/Hardin.pdf
Hardin is best know for "Tragedy of the Commons" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) which he references in your linked paper.
He argues persuasively for private ownership, claiming that it gives the owners a sense of responsibility for that which they own, since their income is dependent on taking care of the resource they own.
However, Hardin overlooks that property has become a commodity, and even ordinary people view their home more for its increase in value over time than they do for the current value (housing) it provides.
I've come to view this "passive capitalism" as morally corrupt, and have totally divested from such things as stocks, and live in a co-op where home appreciation is limited to the rate of inflation.
Hardin's concerns seem to mostly lie with the anonymous masses of the needy, and how they can overwhelm the "life boat" of those who have plenty. Yet he ignores the anonymous masses of those who treat property merely as an investment, and who have no interest in properly maintaining that property.
For some 293,000 years of human history, we have gathered in clans, tribes, and villages of no more than about 150 people (Dunbar's Number). This is the greatest number of others with which one can maintain separate relationships.
Groups under ~150 do not have any problem with "the tragedy of the commons", because they all know each other. Peer pressure and the threat of expulsion keep people from free-loading. For most of human history, being expelled from your tribe was a death sentence.
I have no solutions for this predicament, except that someday, humanity must withdraw from our current energy high, at which point our numbers may decline to such an extent that we can once again have a healthy relationship between the haves and the have-nots.
first it is a demographic collapse now it is again a resource collapse what will it by now it can not change every week i guess ?
Gaia knows best
ugo are you not afraid that your book trust ai to much because ai bots can make mistakes i did ask grok once will we always by able to make digital accounts because identification methods can run out to create them like emailadresses or biometrie it said we will always find new identification methods to make accounts but this is not true because i asked microsoft support the same question and the person was working in it he said identification methids can run out and if you look at chatgpt it says it can make mistakes
Malthus was right, and he did mean well, but coal being used to mine coal changed the equation after he worked the problem.
A Carrington event would do us all in, and we may even be a bit overdue.
Here, let this cheer you up, slo-mo of Macron, Merz and Starmer high on coke and they let the press cameras in before they stashed it. Macron grabs Starmer, then the baggie and looks sheepish. Merz grabs the coke spoon in both hands, then looks to see if anybody noticed. https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/1921551299222339977
You've heard about factories making proteins from microbial reactors out of renewable energy? https://www.solein.com/blog/factory-01-where-the-sun-never-sets-on-harvest-season
Of course! But, please, read carefully my text. The question is not food PRODUCTION. The question is food SUPPLY. If you have no money to buy food, it will rot in the fields, or inside the precision fermentation reactors
We'll, the local powers to be would not want social rebellion either, so we can imagine that food stamps and basic supplies will be given to avoid unrest (unless you're in Gaza or similar situations).
Thinking of writing a fiction book to renew the genre, Ugo? ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green )
You are an optimist, Oli.
Autarchical nations tend to be quite expansionistic, from Rome to the Axis to the USA all who think that can "live by themselves" need to continually expand: self-reliance is a homeostatic process and as living beings homeostasis need to pump entropy outside.
Entropy rules and will be the ultimate winner, Greeks used the myth of Kronos to explain this, life cheat around the rules pumping but is time limited, there is no "perfect strategy" that is always winning so we have evolution as a strategy to explore and adapt. A nation is an "individual" composed by his cells (humans) organized as organs and systems an as any individual have a "life cycle" that go from birth to inevitable death, also have something similar to phases in his life, youth, maturity, old age and senescence.
To me, this phases seems to mimic the biological ones really well but what is difficult to see is who we are talking about: nation could die and rebirth without any formal change in confines, structure or similar, we had seen this when czarist Russia become the core of URSS changing only names to positions in the structure or with the European nations after WW2. Circumstances also play a mayor role, Russia (Russian Federation) was a net importer of grains but from 2006 did a lot to become a net exporter and did it, same could be for other countries as well as an evolutionary response to circumstances, today may be more useful to specialize in hi value productions that are nutritional poor but if famine or similar kick in could be an adaptation, Ireland famine was not governed by total collapse of food production but by economic imperative dictated by the status as a colony: grains were the wealth of England and was not given to Irish for profit reasons, the famine was manmade and triggered a reaction that lasted until 2000 with the end of The Troubles!
Malthus was right in the confine of his own assumptions, today we have a more refined method in the Logistic Function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function) that is quite more adherent to reality, he has begun to analyze mathematically a process and did a good job at it, but his work was incomplete. What we can derive today is that no autarchy could be lasting, any system is vulnerable to black swan events that could not be mitigated in the confine of the system itself, the minimal dimension to something like this is the entire planet and also this is not a real insurance because we had 5 mayor max extinction events on planetary scale anyone with a complete reset of life of the planet!
An interesting synchronicity: this morning my Inbox included a link not only to Dr. Bardi's article, but also this one, on much the same subject, from another writer I like: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/05/a-tree-huggers-parable.html
Molto grazie, Dr. Bardi for sharing your thoughts with the rest of us!