• olalonde 5 hours ago

    Not Paul Ehrlich's worse prediction. His most infamous was that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" in the 1970s[0]. It’s curious how he managed to remain influential despite a track record of such inaccurate forecasts.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich#The_Population...

    • roenxi 5 hours ago

      It depends on whether you are the sort of person who tries to account for recency bias or not. We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period in not just the history of history, but probably also including the unrecorded aeons before humans even existed on earth that there was no particular reason to anticipate at the time.

      If you go with the gut, then sure everything was fine and dandy. But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of humans starve to death.

      So on the one hand, the predictions were completely wrong. On the other, none of the underlying problems have really gone away and any analysis of the future will still conclude that population growth (even flat-lining at this point) is insanely risky in terms of how much human suffering it will eventually lead to. So the people pushing it still have influence. Although I've been a lot more chipper about the situation since it turns out that wealth leads to depopulation which is one of those wonderful and unexpectedly good things. Plus obviously the AI and presumably coming robotics revolution are just absurdly promising.

      • Isamu 5 hours ago

        > But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of people starve to death.

        You’ve piqued my interest, where can I read about this data oriented approach that leads to this conclusion?

        • roenxi 4 hours ago

          Most people live in cities [0] and requires ~2,000 k/cal a day. The systems required to feed people are complex and energy demanding. There are 8 billion humans which is a large number relative to the amount of food we can store.

          It is a matter of time until we have a multi-billion person famine. Hopefully multiple centuries away if the transition away from oil to something else works out. Something like the year without summer [1] could be even more catastrophic, for example. Or wars, particularly of the nuclear variety.

          [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

          • patrickk 2 minutes ago

            The Netherlands managed to dramatically raise crop yields after WWII by intensive farming methods like building a massive amount of greenhouses. The crop yield per hectare is insane as a result. It was as a response to WWII that this system of farming was adopted.

            So if we reach a point of mass starvation many counties will adopt similar strategies and drastically raise crop yields.

            https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33763087

            • lordnacho 2 hours ago

              We seem to be so far past breakeven food/water/warmth that most of our efforts are spent getting all sorts of other stuff, though?

              It's recent, I'll grant you that. I can't even think of when there was rationing in the west? Shortly after the war? At least the current grandparent generation seems to have childhood memories of that.

              But to me, it looks like we've figured out those basic necessities to the point where at least ordinary variation in harvest won't be making us hungry. You could call that being noise proof.

              The danger is that we systematically alter how the planet works, so that is not just bumps in annual crop yields, which we also seem to be doing, but it's not clear that we've messed up our basic necessities pipeline yet. It's also not clear that we'll inevitably do that.

              • jl6 an hour ago

                One risk is that our systems are now extremely efficient, and one aspect of efficiency is that it tends to eliminate “unnecessary” buffers and stockpiles. Just-in-time manufacturing pulls supplies in response to demand. The global food supply chain still has buffers and stockpiles (e.g. grain bins) due to the seasonality of growing, but if hydroponics becomes the dominant method of agriculture (say, in a world with a more chaotic climate that needs to be kept at bay by greenhouses), then highly efficient farmers could optimize out all of their resiliency.

              • braiamp 4 hours ago

                The problem with such prediction is that it presumes that the population would grow at a accelerating pace, while the opposite is happening.

                • xyzzy123 3 hours ago

                  For me it's not about population growth so much as societal risk; our current population is only sustainable due to a complex web of interdependent systems.

                  How often do complex societies break down or decline in such a way that the complex systems which keep our urban populations alive are compromised?

                  • lazide 3 hours ago

                    The more people we have, also the more people we have available to keep these systems running and figure out new replacements. Assuming the caloric ‘profit margin’ stays positive anyway.

            • alex_smart 3 hours ago

              All that is to say that the Malthusians are not just wrong, they are not even wrong.

              • bruce511 4 hours ago

                >> We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period

                This. It's hard to make predictions precisely because the rate of change has been so rapid.

                What is interesting to note though is the varied societal responses to the changes over the last 70 years or so. The US embraced materialism with some reluctant social movement (womens rights, civil rights etc). Europe embraced Socialism (in the sense of Social support, not Communism), the Middle East embraced materialism, but eschewed any form of social development (eg women's rights et al).

                Right now we're in a bit of a rebound phase. Change has come too quickly (especially the last 40 years) so we're seeing pushback on rights (in the US) on social support (in Europe) and a general political swing to the right in lots of places.

                There's a "looking back" element which seeks to slow found societal change even as technology accelerates.

                Predicting what comes next is, well, tricky. But I expect in my lifetime to see global population maximum. I expect to see significant climate change. Both of those will be huge disruptions, and the knock-on effects could be anything

                • tsimionescu 2 hours ago

                  > The US embraced materialism with some reluctant social movement (womens rights, civil rights etc). Europe embraced Socialism (in the sense of Social support, not Communism), the Middle East embraced materialism, but eschewed any form of social development (eg women's rights et al).

                  The US is the most fundamentalist Christian country in the world. There is also a large degree of materialism, but still, only a fraction of the population of the USA even accepts the idea that atheism (a hallmark of materialism) is a legitimate religious position. What the USA has embraced more than anything is consumerism, not materialism.

                  What most of Europe has is called social democracy, socialism is a completely different ideology (workers having majority control of enterprises).

                  The Middle East embraced Islamic fundamentalism, not materialism. You could say that they also embraced consumerism, like the USA. But hardcore Islamic fundamentalism as we see it today in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan is a very recent phenomenon, born of the last fifty years or less (at any wide scale), and it is at a level that consumes entire societies. These Middle East countries didn't eschew progress on women's rights, they actively regressed women's rights to pre-medieval levels. Iran and Afghanistan had the right to vote for women before the USA: they lost it as fundamentalist forces gained power (actually, they still have it in Iran, but it's significantly affected by other lack of freedom).

                  • defrost 2 hours ago

                    > The US is the most fundamentalist Christian country in the world.

                    Due to a large population it leads as the country with the largest absolute number of Christians, sure.

                    In terms of percentage of Christians in the population as a whole, it doesn't even make the top ten list.

                    Vatican City, Timor Leste, American Samoa, Romania, Armenia, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, Greenland, Haiti, and Paraguay all have greater than 95% christian populations.

                    The US has perhaps a 65% Christian population albeit many of whom are in name without being particularly devout.

                    • berdario 42 minutes ago

                      I remember reading about some people joining ISIS for economic reasons, I cannot find the article, but this one makes the same point (that among the other reasons, unemployment is also a factor):

                      https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2014/11/the-ultimate-fat...

                      My point being: being a religious fundamentalist country doesn't require an almost totality of the population to be religious, but just the people who have power (weapons, money, etc.) to be fundamentalist... and the rest of the country to not violently oppose them.

                  • Muromec 4 hours ago

                    We are seeing swingback to the right because the threat of left revolution (instignated or supported by nuclear state out there) is less credible now

                  • olalonde 4 hours ago

                    I disagree that the prosperity we've experienced was truly "unexpected". Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs), and markets innovate in response to scarcity (e.g. the Green Revolution). Technological progress, though unpredictable in its specifics, has consistently been a reliable force for adaptation. Ehrlich's predictions underestimated humanity's resilience, oversimplifying a highly complex system by reducing it to a linear regression.

                    • roenxi 3 hours ago

                      This is that recency bias thing in action. Constant surprising technological progress of the sort we've seen for the last century or two is unprecedented and not at all the sort of thing that is suitable for long term planning. I usually wouldn't bother pointing that out, but there are two points I really want to emphasise as wildly optimistic:

                      > Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs)

                      We didn't have birth control until the 20th century and it is mostly used by people who, historically speaking, are living with resources far in excess of their basic needs. Traditionally the self regulation was that people were born then the ones that couldn't eat enough to survive died.

                      And there is a pretty high risk of not finding stable equilibrium. The logistic map isn't a totally crazy model and displays some rather chaotic behaviour [0]. In practice that looks like a lot of famines.

                      > ... markets innovate in response to scarcity ...

                      Markets have existed forever, usually the innovative response to food scarcity was, once again, people starving to death. It is hard to underline just how weird the Green Revolution is. Obviously a great time to be alive but it is not a normal thing in the human experience.

                      [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#Behavior_dependen...

                      • olalonde 9 minutes ago

                        I’m not sure why you keep invoking "recency bias." When forecasting the near future, as Ehrlich was doing, it’s entirely reasonable to use recent trends as a baseline. Are you suggesting progress might slow to the levels seen in prehistory, antiquity, or the medieval period? That seems highly implausible, barring a catastrophic event that disrupts modern civilization.

                        If anything, you might be underestimating the ongoing momentum of technological progress, which is not just sustaining its pace but accelerating across many fields. Some experts predict AGI is right on the corner - a development that could drastically amplify innovation and potentially eliminate the challenge of food scarcity.

                        Additionally, birth control will only keep becoming increasingly accessible worldwide, enabling more effective regulation of fertility rates in response to resource constraints.

                      • tsimionescu 2 hours ago

                        > Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs)

                        The exact opposite is what we are observing: people in poorer parts of the world, and poor people in richer parts of the world have way more children than people who have all their basic needs met and then some.

                        The best known predictor of average number of children is infant mortality rate: without fail, as infant mortality decreases, average number of children per family decreases as well.

                        • olalonde 34 minutes ago

                          I didn't claim the relationship was linear. People in poorer countries still have relatively abundant food by historical standards and aren't at risk of starvation. However, when food availability drops below a certain threshold, reproduction rates tend to decrease - this is basic ecology. Historically, the most populated regions were also resource-rich, like the fertile river valleys. But we're now living in an era of abundance where even the poorer regions have access to plenty of food.

                        • ekianjo 2 hours ago

                          > people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs

                          Completely disproven by the baby boom era where people were poor in many countries for years after the war but still made a lot of babies. Reality bites hard.

                        • DrNosferatu 4 hours ago

                          > We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period in [History]

                          …on average - inequality has never been so high.

                          • ascorbic 2 hours ago

                            People at every level of income are better off than their equivalent in the same country at every point in history. Once you get past 100 years or so it's not even close. Even the imperfect (to say the least) social safety nets in rich countries today are far above the level they were 100 years ago, and people are better off by almost every measure. Middle class people live like royalty a few hundreds years ago, when it comes to access to healthcare, food, travel, leisure (and that's before we talk about tech).

                            • jmb99 4 hours ago

                              I think there’s a fairly reasonable argument to be made that the (super)majority people today are better off than they would have been 2-500 years ago, at least in most of the world.

                          • palmfacehn an hour ago

                            > It’s curious how he managed to remain influential despite a track record of such inaccurate forecasts.

                            1. Political expediency. Look to the institutions which celebrated his work.

                            2. Easy to understand. Scarcity doom can be sold easily. Simon's ideas require considering or observing second order effects at a minimum.

                            • esperent 4 hours ago

                              From reading around, although I didn't find a definitive source worth sharing here, it seems like across several famines in the 1970s, somewhere in the low tens of millions died, while another several tens of millions came close to starvation.

                              So the prediction was off by an order of magnitude.

                            • rkagerer 17 minutes ago

                              I'd be curious about the results over 1000 years and 10,000 years. In the case of the latter I wonder if the concept of prices as we understand them today will even still be a thing.

                              • glaucon 3 hours ago

                                | If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000

                                I would love to know what it was about England that meant it's end was nigh, I mean what about France, Norway or Belgium ?

                                Also, when he said "England" was he actually referring to the United Kingdom (as Americans often are) or were Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland going to be spared in some way ?

                                • bleuchase 5 hours ago

                                  Good article. I look forward to the day when Ehrlich’s bad ideas are no longer en vogue.

                                  • magic_smoke_ee an hour ago

                                    He was successful at marketing extreme FUD books in the late 60's and early 70's, kind of reminds me of "the impending catastrophe" doomer like Thom Hartmann. Heck, even Jim Morrison had an opinion on the subject.

                                    The reality (WRT to bulk metals) is that we get some "free passes" due to mining technological advancements, and that increased scarcity -> increased costs -> curtails wastes, encourages recycling, and drives substitutes.

                                    More generally, peak production isn't a problem itself, per se. There is concern when there are risks for sudden shocks or collapse. If we suddenly ran out of phosphorous, that would be bad.

                                    I think there is still a lot of waste that could be captured with cleverer engineering, especially ag runoff, in industrial process, and failure to capture material going into landfills. Perhaps in 100 years, we will be mining old landfills for rare earth metals.

                                    • jmount 3 hours ago

                                      For this stability one should consider the minerals are in fact setting the value of currency itself.

                                      • Thomashuet 2 hours ago

                                        The main problem with this is that we're looking at the evolution of inflation-adjusted prices for common ressources. By definition, inflation-adjusted prices for common ressources must be constant, that's how we measure inflation. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the prices do not change much in the long term.

                                        • choeger 5 minutes ago

                                          That's obviously wrong. If one resource gets scarce but retains its use, it will get more expensive compared to other resources that remain plentiful.

                                          All commodities together feed into inflation. So either some will become less expensive or some will outpace inflation.

                                          What we're seeing here is that resource extraction can get better, so resources aren't really scarce. But there are certainly some commodities, not reflected here, that became much cheaper. E.g., corn or meat, so these metals might have become more expensive in relative terms.

                                        • ggm 5 hours ago

                                          Love this. Ehrlich acted from good intent but with a bad case. I like this analysis saying the short term could have had Simons lose if the decade is chosen wrong, but the trend is with Simons.

                                          A lot of battery related FUD recapitulates this, people mistake active mines for available reserves and available reserves for worldwide geology. We aren't running out of the inputs to make batteries we're in supply chain shock not resource limits.

                                          Same with oil and peak oil. We'll never run out of oil.

                                          • chii 3 hours ago

                                            things never really "run out", they just get expensive as availability becomes lower. But some people consider this the same as running out, because it is indistinguishable from running out if you could not afford it.

                                            • ggm 2 hours ago

                                              I think Simons point was that afford and need equipoise. There's also substitution going on all the time, and innovation. Battery chemistry has changed massively over the life of batteries for EV (the thing most often cited as a modern day Ehrlich/Simons bet)

                                              Ehrlich thought need would exceed afford at scale. And that it would have massive societal repercussions. Well, it just didn't historically, and there's no reason to believe the (misnamed) rare earths and metallic ores are limiting things for any reason other than price motivation.

                                              This last decade we had a temporary chip shortage affect car production rates worldwide. Localised supply chains for Diesel additive have been a problem. There were discussions about ring fencing nitrate fertiliser as a strategic supply. None of these are "limits to growth" stories. Capital investment followed.

                                              That said, the price of copper spiked enough to make people start stealing it again worldwide.

                                          • ekianjo 2 hours ago

                                            This only works if you consider the "official inflation rate". We all know that the real inflation is often much higher so the charts would look very different over time.