
Malthusianisms - blasdel
http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418
======
grandpa
Two economists are walking down the street when they see a $20 bill lying on
the sidewalk in front of them. The first economist goes to pick up the money
but his colleague stops him and tells him not to bother.

"Why not?"

"If it were a real twenty dollar bill, someone would have picked it up
already."

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swombat
_Why can’t everyone just agree to a family-friendly, 40-hour workweek? Because
then anyone who chose to work a 90-hour week would clean our clocks._

Well, if you look at a fair chunk of Europe, everyone _has_ agreed to work
reasonable hours, largely, and the nutters like myself who work their socks
off are few and far between. Of course, you could say that the rest of the
world is about to clean Europe's clocks, but that's by no means certain.

~~~
321abc
Unfortunately, at least France and Germany seem to want to start emulating the
US in this regard. So they're increasing length of their work weeks:

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124835745710975827.html>

<http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090731-20935.html>

Also muddying the waters is that, by some measures, Americans have more
leisure time than Europeans:

[http://www.examiner.com/x-14795-Page-One-
Examiner~y2009m8d13...](http://www.examiner.com/x-14795-Page-One-
Examiner~y2009m8d13-Those-ever-longer-working-hours-of-Americans)

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hristov
In my opinion Malthus is getting way too much credit considering real life
proved him wrong.

The examples provided in the article are actually pretty good and clever
examples, but they are accurate because they do not apply to the one thing
Malthus talked about -- human populations. If you actually consider human
populations, you will quickly discover that all these Malthuisms fall apart
pretty quickly. Which makes sense considering humans are complicated beings
and not simple autonomons like mice that will breed at any opportunity.

According to Malthus, the richer a population is the more it will grow and it
will get poorer, so please do not bother helping poor countries, or poor
people. Instead let them be poor so they automatically limit their
populations. Oh and also we cannot achieve a great society where there is no
poverty, because when there is no poverty people will just starts breeding
like rabbits until everyone is poor again.

But of course in real life everything is backwards. The poorer a country is
the more its population grows. In a country with income disparity the poor
income groups grow much faster than the rich, and sometimes the rich ones do
not grow at all.

This planet suffers from population overload but most of it is caused from
poor populations (poor countries, or poor groups of rich countries).

If a poor country becomes richer relatively quickly it does not suffer a
population explosion. On the contrary, population growth rates plummet and may
even go negative. See Japan and South Korea.

So yes, Malthus is not really correct, and yes we can improve society and
helping the poor is not a waste of time.

~~~
xenophanes
> In my opinion Malthus is getting way too much credit considering real life
> proved him wrong.

Additionally, William Godwin refuted his arguments, at the time. But gets no
credit.

BTW, no one seems to have mentioned it, but Malthus said that food production
grows linearly, whereas human populations grow geometrically, so food
production won't be able to keep up.

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wwalker3
A common thread to these Malthusianisms is that you can't understand dynamic
phenomena by assuming they're static.

Something like the number of hours in a work week isn't just a fixed number;
it's got a history behind it and driving forces on it that are needed to make
sense of its current and future values.

Aaronson implies that he thinks about these situations by trying to figure out
what Nash equilibrium they might settle to, but I think even that concept's
not general enough. In the real world, people don't make their minds up once
and then stay the same afterwards -- they'll change their behavior over time,
and not always towards any equilibrium state.

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tarkin2
The idea that usage will always fulfill capacity is a little too general for
my liking. Sometimes, perhaps often, the case, yes; but always? No. Population
decline in Europe despite a very high quality of life and an abundance of
resources, anyone?

~~~
bokonist
It will be interesting to see how long the population decline lasts for. At
some point, ethnic/cultural/religious segments of the population with the
highest birthrates will begin to be a large portion of the population. As that
happens, birthrates will bottom out and then start to rise back up again.

~~~
rsheridan6
Already happening in Israel:
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4956>

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asdlfj2sd33
You know what struck me about this? It was really well written. Not the
greatest of ideas or observations, but I can't recall the last time I red
something on the internet that was this well written!

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jrp
Why are freeways crowded?

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dmoney
Am I the only one who's been reading this as "malthusiasms", i.e. anti-
enthusiasms?

