Overpopulation : Malthus Being Wrong Doesn't Make You Right
As a geoist and an anarchist, I believe that a lot of inequality and human misery is directly attributable to the state and the way property rights in natural opportunities are handled. However, in both those respective camps I find myself an outlier because I still believe that ecological overshoot is an actual phenomenon and likely existential threat to humanity. Malthus didn't correctly anticipate the discovery of additional power sources, and couldn't see the contributions people like Norman Borlaug made through genetically engineering crops. Malthus' thesis about linear production versus exponential consumption rates was incorrect. People who were causing misery through privilege were willing to fund him to draw attention away from their misdeeds to lay the blame on something as unsympathetic and unyielding as nature.
That all of the preceding about Malthus is true doesn't mean, however, that the concepts of overpopulation and ecological overshoot are incorrect, not applicable to humans, or not a risk which bears investigation. I find that many in the liberty movement want to declare the concept of overpopulation dead and buried with Malthus. I think I understand why - they feel they must deny it for voluntaryism to be tenable. They attack a strawman version of it so they can hold onto their belief that top-down coordinated efforts may not be necessary for the survival of the human race at anything close to a standard of living and population which exists now. While I have no love of top-down and state-sponsored systems, I'm not arrogant enough to assert that, because I don't like those types of solutions, they cannot address any problem or that any problem which seemingly could be addressed by them does not exist.
That all of the preceding about Malthus is true doesn't mean, however, that the concepts of overpopulation and ecological overshoot are incorrect, not applicable to humans, or not a risk which bears investigation. I find that many in the liberty movement want to declare the concept of overpopulation dead and buried with Malthus. I think I understand why - they feel they must deny it for voluntaryism to be tenable. They attack a strawman version of it so they can hold onto their belief that top-down coordinated efforts may not be necessary for the survival of the human race at anything close to a standard of living and population which exists now. While I have no love of top-down and state-sponsored systems, I'm not arrogant enough to assert that, because I don't like those types of solutions, they cannot address any problem or that any problem which seemingly could be addressed by them does not exist.
What Overpopulation is and what it Isn't
Maybe I haven't been looking in the right place, but I've never seen an attempt to refute the concepts of overpopulation and ecological overshoot which wasn't based on attacking a strawman or didn't bring in tangential issues. The arguments usually have one or more of the following components:
There are 7 billion people alive on the Earth now, so Earth can support 7 billion people
This is the primary misunderstanding of the concept of overpopulation. This view assumes that overpopulation is a function which takes in the number of creatures and spits out a boolean value. It further assumes that, if a certain number of individuals can be supported in the present, there'll be no problem in the future.
Overpopulation is not such a function. It takes at least five parameters and spits out a boolean. Here are six parameters:
1,000 people living in the fertile crescent isn't overpopulation. 1,000 people living on a 2 acre island would almost certainly be so. An area can support far fewer people living first world lifestyles (50-100 full-time energy slaves) than ones living like the typical African bushman. Societies with low energy- or resource-to-desire-satisfaction and without substitution options, and societies without roughly equal distribution of and without low barriers to entry for wealth-creating opportunities are also likely to support far fewer people with the same resources.
Overpopulation also considers the amount of time a population can be sustained, though one could argue this ties into "the resources in an area" bullet point. Right now, humans are drawing down oil reserves which have taken millions of years to form. 7 billion people can probably be sustained until the energy returned on energy invested from oil becomes nearly 1:1. Substitution may allow the population to continue using a new energy source... it MAY - not will.
The concept of overshoot requires a time dimension. Given widely known technology, humans are in overshoot now. That means that, without finding a new energy source or drastically lowering the ecological footprint per person (aka having a shittier lifestyle), expanding to other planets or asteroids and shipping part of the current population there, there is simply NOT going to be 7 billion humans alive simultaneously within 100 years: the current number of humans on Earth is simply not sustainable.
The birth rate is decreasing, so there's no problem
It is true that the birth rate is declining. But the population is still increasing, just more slowly. You know, birth rate being a derivative of population and all. Whether it decreases faster than life extension and life saving technologies reduce the death rate remains to be seen, but I suspect it will. I refuse to say that there is no problem when the Earth is in ecological overshoot NOW by the metrics of energy use and ecosystem service use, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, etc.
Eugenicists back overpopulation theory
Yes, they did and still do. That asshole Hitler ruined eugenics for a long time - at least human eugenics, I don't see people besides PeTA bitching about dog breeding. Regardless of your feelings on eugenics, it is a fallacy to declare something true or false solely because of who backs or opposes that thing.
God will solve it / the dominion argument
Firstly, god doesn't exist. Secondly, humans are not outside of the biosphere. It's true that humans are more intelligent than the other terran species and we can actually turn increases in population into increases in wealth whereas other species can only compete for what's already there. That doesn't mean humans are likely to survive without the current ecosystem services that "spaceship Earth" provides.
Statists need a crisis so the state can be the cure, furthering their philosophy
Whether they do or not, crises are often used to justify the state. But that doesn't mean that all the crises they bring up are fake - just that they are unimaginative.
Technology will save us - humans aren't bounded
I have a special section on this below...
Markets will save us
Markets and property rights help. A lot. Don't get me wrong. But they are but one factor.
All of the current misery / inequality / etc. is due to the state
Nope.
Having children is a right
One only need look at the differences in scrutiny between adopting and having your own children to see that most people hold procreation as sacred. We'd be a pretty unsuccessful species if we didn't feel strongly about it. But rights are whatever people decide they are, and circumstances can cause peoples' opinions on the matter to change. Already people are seeing those like Octomom as disgusting even if they completely fund and take care of large families without state assistance. It's not like people need that many kids to work on the farm anymore, and there are no longer fatal childhood diseases making large families a necessity to "sneak some through into adulthood."
Constant growth is necessary, without a population increase who will support the older generations?
This is a problem with the economy, then. Positive feedback loops are by their nature unstable. The same people who say that technology will solve the overpopulation problem don't believe it can solve an underpopulation problem? I lay a lot of blame on Julian Simon who declared that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource.
The entire population of Earth could fit inside Texas and have a decent sized house with a quarter acre(?) plot, therefore overpopulation is a myth
I have a section on this below too...
Abortion is evil
Fine, then you offer to take care of the children others don't want to have! Oh, I don't see any takers. Yeah, so shut the fuck up.
Every new child is a blessing - they might cure cancer or be the next Einstein, also division of labor
There are either two choices and both of them don't cause the above to follow...
The first is that the future worth to society from a child is largely environmental, in which case people have a rational interest in preventing those who have more children then they can take care of from having children because those children are likely to grow up to suck.
The second is that the future worth to society from a child is largely genetic, in which case people have a rational interest in preventing those with low IQs or other "suck-correlates" from having children because those children are likely to grow up to suck.
You're going to need to birth a lot of mediocre people to get the one Einstein or cancer curer, and those people are going to come with their own interests and competition for scarce resources. It's almost certainly more rational to find ways to make existing people more intelligent or useful to others because they're already causing conflicts.
For the record, the estimated variability for IQ due to genetics is 70% regardless of what egalitarians or the (ex-)liar Stephen J. Gould would have you believe.
Doomer and "disasturbaters" have been wrong SOOOOO many times
Yes they have. Disaster sells because there's a part of the human psyche which loves seeing things get knocked down. It's also escapist fantasy for those who feel marginalized by the current system - if it collapses, they can rebuild society in their own image or go all "army of one" (obligatory German Shepard not included). Plus, fear sells Berkey water filters. That doesn't mean the fundamentals aren't there.
Paul Ehrlich lost a bet to Julian Simon
Yes he did, but he would've won the second bet. There are certain things which haven't proven (reasonably) substitutable yet - petroleum being one of them. Rare earth minerals and arable land being a few others. Ehrlich was ignoring Simon's point about price rises signaling others to invest effort to reduce scarcity by increased efficiency, alternate sourcing, or substitution. Simon was ignoring the premise that did doesn't imply will: just because a certain class of problems were solved in the past, doesn't mean that that same class of problems will be soluble in the future in all circumstances.
I don't know how decentralized, voluntaryist systems can address overpopulation, therefore it doesn't exist.
This, I suspect, is the real cause of a lot of animosity towards the theories of overpopulation, climate change, etc. They represent gigantic problems that are not immediately noticeable and whose causes and effects are not directly quantifiable nor attributable to certain individuals or groups. The standard "pollution torts" mantra won't cut it for that reason. It also won't cut it because, even if it could work, nearly all the remaining physical commons would have to be privatized and, even with LVT, but especially without it, that world would suck to live in.
This is a case of "I like liberty, therefore liberty works." If you point out something that liberty doesn't work for, rather than owning their values and saying "gee, you're right, but I still value liberty higher than X" most will say "no, it'll work... somehow" or "X isn't a real problem."
There are 7 billion people alive on the Earth now, so Earth can support 7 billion people
This is the primary misunderstanding of the concept of overpopulation. This view assumes that overpopulation is a function which takes in the number of creatures and spits out a boolean value. It further assumes that, if a certain number of individuals can be supported in the present, there'll be no problem in the future.
Overpopulation is not such a function. It takes at least five parameters and spits out a boolean. Here are six parameters:
- Number of creatures (usually of a single species) in an area
- An area and its resources
- The standard of living of those creatures - or you could say average ecological footprint per individual
- The technology and substitution options available to those creatures
- The system of property norms and distribution of wealth and opportunities
- A timeframe
1,000 people living in the fertile crescent isn't overpopulation. 1,000 people living on a 2 acre island would almost certainly be so. An area can support far fewer people living first world lifestyles (50-100 full-time energy slaves) than ones living like the typical African bushman. Societies with low energy- or resource-to-desire-satisfaction and without substitution options, and societies without roughly equal distribution of and without low barriers to entry for wealth-creating opportunities are also likely to support far fewer people with the same resources.
Overpopulation also considers the amount of time a population can be sustained, though one could argue this ties into "the resources in an area" bullet point. Right now, humans are drawing down oil reserves which have taken millions of years to form. 7 billion people can probably be sustained until the energy returned on energy invested from oil becomes nearly 1:1. Substitution may allow the population to continue using a new energy source... it MAY - not will.
The concept of overshoot requires a time dimension. Given widely known technology, humans are in overshoot now. That means that, without finding a new energy source or drastically lowering the ecological footprint per person (aka having a shittier lifestyle), expanding to other planets or asteroids and shipping part of the current population there, there is simply NOT going to be 7 billion humans alive simultaneously within 100 years: the current number of humans on Earth is simply not sustainable.
The birth rate is decreasing, so there's no problem
It is true that the birth rate is declining. But the population is still increasing, just more slowly. You know, birth rate being a derivative of population and all. Whether it decreases faster than life extension and life saving technologies reduce the death rate remains to be seen, but I suspect it will. I refuse to say that there is no problem when the Earth is in ecological overshoot NOW by the metrics of energy use and ecosystem service use, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, etc.
Eugenicists back overpopulation theory
Yes, they did and still do. That asshole Hitler ruined eugenics for a long time - at least human eugenics, I don't see people besides PeTA bitching about dog breeding. Regardless of your feelings on eugenics, it is a fallacy to declare something true or false solely because of who backs or opposes that thing.
God will solve it / the dominion argument
Firstly, god doesn't exist. Secondly, humans are not outside of the biosphere. It's true that humans are more intelligent than the other terran species and we can actually turn increases in population into increases in wealth whereas other species can only compete for what's already there. That doesn't mean humans are likely to survive without the current ecosystem services that "spaceship Earth" provides.
Statists need a crisis so the state can be the cure, furthering their philosophy
Whether they do or not, crises are often used to justify the state. But that doesn't mean that all the crises they bring up are fake - just that they are unimaginative.
Technology will save us - humans aren't bounded
I have a special section on this below...
Markets will save us
Markets and property rights help. A lot. Don't get me wrong. But they are but one factor.
All of the current misery / inequality / etc. is due to the state
Nope.
Having children is a right
One only need look at the differences in scrutiny between adopting and having your own children to see that most people hold procreation as sacred. We'd be a pretty unsuccessful species if we didn't feel strongly about it. But rights are whatever people decide they are, and circumstances can cause peoples' opinions on the matter to change. Already people are seeing those like Octomom as disgusting even if they completely fund and take care of large families without state assistance. It's not like people need that many kids to work on the farm anymore, and there are no longer fatal childhood diseases making large families a necessity to "sneak some through into adulthood."
Constant growth is necessary, without a population increase who will support the older generations?
This is a problem with the economy, then. Positive feedback loops are by their nature unstable. The same people who say that technology will solve the overpopulation problem don't believe it can solve an underpopulation problem? I lay a lot of blame on Julian Simon who declared that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource.
The entire population of Earth could fit inside Texas and have a decent sized house with a quarter acre(?) plot, therefore overpopulation is a myth
I have a section on this below too...
Abortion is evil
Fine, then you offer to take care of the children others don't want to have! Oh, I don't see any takers. Yeah, so shut the fuck up.
Every new child is a blessing - they might cure cancer or be the next Einstein, also division of labor
There are either two choices and both of them don't cause the above to follow...
The first is that the future worth to society from a child is largely environmental, in which case people have a rational interest in preventing those who have more children then they can take care of from having children because those children are likely to grow up to suck.
The second is that the future worth to society from a child is largely genetic, in which case people have a rational interest in preventing those with low IQs or other "suck-correlates" from having children because those children are likely to grow up to suck.
You're going to need to birth a lot of mediocre people to get the one Einstein or cancer curer, and those people are going to come with their own interests and competition for scarce resources. It's almost certainly more rational to find ways to make existing people more intelligent or useful to others because they're already causing conflicts.
For the record, the estimated variability for IQ due to genetics is 70% regardless of what egalitarians or the (ex-)liar Stephen J. Gould would have you believe.
Doomer and "disasturbaters" have been wrong SOOOOO many times
Yes they have. Disaster sells because there's a part of the human psyche which loves seeing things get knocked down. It's also escapist fantasy for those who feel marginalized by the current system - if it collapses, they can rebuild society in their own image or go all "army of one" (obligatory German Shepard not included). Plus, fear sells Berkey water filters. That doesn't mean the fundamentals aren't there.
Paul Ehrlich lost a bet to Julian Simon
Yes he did, but he would've won the second bet. There are certain things which haven't proven (reasonably) substitutable yet - petroleum being one of them. Rare earth minerals and arable land being a few others. Ehrlich was ignoring Simon's point about price rises signaling others to invest effort to reduce scarcity by increased efficiency, alternate sourcing, or substitution. Simon was ignoring the premise that did doesn't imply will: just because a certain class of problems were solved in the past, doesn't mean that that same class of problems will be soluble in the future in all circumstances.
I don't know how decentralized, voluntaryist systems can address overpopulation, therefore it doesn't exist.
This, I suspect, is the real cause of a lot of animosity towards the theories of overpopulation, climate change, etc. They represent gigantic problems that are not immediately noticeable and whose causes and effects are not directly quantifiable nor attributable to certain individuals or groups. The standard "pollution torts" mantra won't cut it for that reason. It also won't cut it because, even if it could work, nearly all the remaining physical commons would have to be privatized and, even with LVT, but especially without it, that world would suck to live in.
This is a case of "I like liberty, therefore liberty works." If you point out something that liberty doesn't work for, rather than owning their values and saying "gee, you're right, but I still value liberty higher than X" most will say "no, it'll work... somehow" or "X isn't a real problem."
On Technology: Did doesn't Imply Will
Go to overpopulationisamyth.com or pop.org (I wonder how much they had to shell out for that domain name) and you will be met with pleasant videos and essays pointing out how the doomers were wrong about pretty much every mass disaster they saw coming down the pike. Ignored is that most of them would've been right if something hadn't changed which means that, with the input parameters at the time the world was overpopulated but that markets, per Julian Simon's assertion, actually do work (bounded by physics of course).
The mistake is assuming that human ingenuity is always a bailout. Being a doomer isn't healthy, but neither is being a pollyanna. Do you know what allows technology to advance? Many things, from the system of government to how transparent and peer-reviewed things are, but I'll focus on two which are important for a discussion about sustainability:
I doubt that many cornucopians would deny the first - their thesis rests on human ingenuity being the ultimate resource. The problem is that population-driven technology becomes a trap which needs more of the problem to cure itself. Hence all the bitching and doom and gloom about declining birth rates.
Human intelligence is fairly narrowly bounded and has been for thousands of years. There may be humans who are very intelligent compared to other humans, but compared to what true A.I. could offer, all humans are dumbasses. To better exploit control over the material universe, disciplines must be refined and ever more data collected. While tools for expressing and correlating this data have gotten a lot better, there is only so much of the big picture any given human can understand. Hence specialization (sorry Heinlein). 100 years ago, I could've specialized in information technology. All of it. Today, I do some middleware. The only way to have a company which can competently provide a complete solution to customers is to hire others who understand other parts of the discipline.
Unfortunately those others use resources which increases conflicts and necessitates more rules, more arbitration in fuzzy areas, and more technology to keep everyone alive. And that technology requires more understanding of reality which requires more brains because no one brain can hold all of that information. And thus the population-technology trap is born.
Energy is the ultimate limiting factor on how comfortably an individual can live and how complex a society can be. Collapse can really be described as a radical simplification of society. In a simple society, farmer or hunter is a job, doctor is a job, soldier is a job. Pretty much everything else is not necessary for survival. And, even within the disciplines, a lot of "information triage" can be practiced. In a simplified society, people don't need to grow garlic or cilantro or do reconstructive surgery or practice anesthesiology.
An ever decreasing percentage of energy is used to advance technology as population increases. Continuously larger percentages must be used to resolve and manage conflicts and keep people alive long enough to come up with the ideas which allow the planet to sustain that amount of people. How much of an individual's life is devoted to providing the next great answer to the pressing problems? Well, not when they're children. Probably not when they're elderly. How much during any given day? I mean, what are you doing right now? Probably sitting in a heated or cooled house with the lights on, having eaten meat for at least one meal today (which is very ecologically taxing).
The mistake is assuming that human ingenuity is always a bailout. Being a doomer isn't healthy, but neither is being a pollyanna. Do you know what allows technology to advance? Many things, from the system of government to how transparent and peer-reviewed things are, but I'll focus on two which are important for a discussion about sustainability:
- Population and division of labor
- Energy inputs
I doubt that many cornucopians would deny the first - their thesis rests on human ingenuity being the ultimate resource. The problem is that population-driven technology becomes a trap which needs more of the problem to cure itself. Hence all the bitching and doom and gloom about declining birth rates.
Human intelligence is fairly narrowly bounded and has been for thousands of years. There may be humans who are very intelligent compared to other humans, but compared to what true A.I. could offer, all humans are dumbasses. To better exploit control over the material universe, disciplines must be refined and ever more data collected. While tools for expressing and correlating this data have gotten a lot better, there is only so much of the big picture any given human can understand. Hence specialization (sorry Heinlein). 100 years ago, I could've specialized in information technology. All of it. Today, I do some middleware. The only way to have a company which can competently provide a complete solution to customers is to hire others who understand other parts of the discipline.
Unfortunately those others use resources which increases conflicts and necessitates more rules, more arbitration in fuzzy areas, and more technology to keep everyone alive. And that technology requires more understanding of reality which requires more brains because no one brain can hold all of that information. And thus the population-technology trap is born.
Energy is the ultimate limiting factor on how comfortably an individual can live and how complex a society can be. Collapse can really be described as a radical simplification of society. In a simple society, farmer or hunter is a job, doctor is a job, soldier is a job. Pretty much everything else is not necessary for survival. And, even within the disciplines, a lot of "information triage" can be practiced. In a simplified society, people don't need to grow garlic or cilantro or do reconstructive surgery or practice anesthesiology.
An ever decreasing percentage of energy is used to advance technology as population increases. Continuously larger percentages must be used to resolve and manage conflicts and keep people alive long enough to come up with the ideas which allow the planet to sustain that amount of people. How much of an individual's life is devoted to providing the next great answer to the pressing problems? Well, not when they're children. Probably not when they're elderly. How much during any given day? I mean, what are you doing right now? Probably sitting in a heated or cooled house with the lights on, having eaten meat for at least one meal today (which is very ecologically taxing).
Under the Dome and the Rebuttal of the "Texas Argument"
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As promised earlier, I will point out the absurdity of the "everyone on Earth could fit into an area the size of Texas and have a small yard with a garden" argument. The unstated presumption is that people could live their current lifestyle while all being crammed into Texas. Where would all the wastewater be dumped? How would the Ogallala aquifer not be rather quickly drawn down, and how would everyone in Texas get access to it considering it lies mostly under the northwest, "chimney" portion of Texas. Pipes? Okay, where are you getting the metal? How are you refining it; where is the energy coming from? Oil? Texas doesn't have that much left.
There's a TV show called Under the Dome based on a Stephen King book (I guess screenwriters are finally realizing that most Stephen King's great books come out as crummy made-for-TV movies, so they might as well try to make it a TV show instead). |
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In it, someone or something places an impenetrable dome around a town. Suddenly people can't get water, any (new) food they can't farm, insulin, etc. But I thought they were all living in that town! They physically resided in that town (except when they left to go to work), but their ecological footprint extended outside of the dome. If that wasn't the case, the dome wouldn't cause additional conflict.
Put a dome around Texas right now. Hell, just wall it in and shoot down any aircraft which tries to cross over the wall and anyone who tries to tunnel under it. Make a wall in the aquifer between Texas and Oklahoma / New Mexico. You should also put a roof on it so people don't get air and sunlight from outside of Texas. Make sure to cut any and all wires, oil and gas, water and sewer pipelines leading into and out of the state. Since the population in Texas is only 26 million or approximately one third of one percent of the population of Earth, people should be able to live quite well (ignoring the psychological effects of not being able to communicate with friends and family outside of Texas).
If you think that'd work for a second then you're broken. I'll even relax the situation. Humans can't really affect the sun and the sunlight will hit regardless. Fine, put a clear roof over Texas and make it high enough that evaporation can lead to rain, but no free air from outside. That could be a problem considering that 20% of the oxygen on Earth supposedly comes from the Amazon rainforest and 50% comes from phytoplankton, though I guess Texas could get a small sliver of ocean as part of its "property."
For all you libertarian types, even if everything else got solved, no gun ranges. Can't shoot a rifle if everyone lives within yelling distance of one another. Hell, you can't really have any privacy, vehicles, or make noise during the night. You know... city rules.
Put a dome around Texas right now. Hell, just wall it in and shoot down any aircraft which tries to cross over the wall and anyone who tries to tunnel under it. Make a wall in the aquifer between Texas and Oklahoma / New Mexico. You should also put a roof on it so people don't get air and sunlight from outside of Texas. Make sure to cut any and all wires, oil and gas, water and sewer pipelines leading into and out of the state. Since the population in Texas is only 26 million or approximately one third of one percent of the population of Earth, people should be able to live quite well (ignoring the psychological effects of not being able to communicate with friends and family outside of Texas).
If you think that'd work for a second then you're broken. I'll even relax the situation. Humans can't really affect the sun and the sunlight will hit regardless. Fine, put a clear roof over Texas and make it high enough that evaporation can lead to rain, but no free air from outside. That could be a problem considering that 20% of the oxygen on Earth supposedly comes from the Amazon rainforest and 50% comes from phytoplankton, though I guess Texas could get a small sliver of ocean as part of its "property."
For all you libertarian types, even if everything else got solved, no gun ranges. Can't shoot a rifle if everyone lives within yelling distance of one another. Hell, you can't really have any privacy, vehicles, or make noise during the night. You know... city rules.
Scarcity Exists and it Sucks
Progressives stupidly believe that scarcity doesn't exist. Cornucopians stupidly ignore it because technology. When pressed, I often hear the solution of "property rights" trotted out. I firmly believe that property rights are a great invention, but they're an invention made to solve a problem - they're not an end in themselves no matter what the self-ownership deontological folks want to believe. If scarcity didn't exist, property norms would be unnecessary. With scarcity comes conflict, and conflicts have to be reasonably and predictably settled for societies to remain stable and foster the three big T's which allow them to function: truth, trust, and trade.
Property makes the best out of a shit situation, but it's not better than the conflict not existing in the first place.
Property makes the best out of a shit situation, but it's not better than the conflict not existing in the first place.
| Scenario | Person A | Person B | Ranking by Person A |
| Fight | Wounded, killed, or jerk-ass | Wounded, killed, or jerk-ass | Shite unless they're a competent sociopath |
| Bargain | Thing or money/time/something else | Thing or money/time/something else | Meh. Sucks if you don't have anything to offer |
| No conflict | Thing AND money/time/something else | N/A | Yay! |
The only way the third scenario would suck more than any of the others is if the conflict caused by additional people is more than offset by the benefits they provide through division of labor or some other consideration. Those points certainly exist or people wouldn't voluntarily form dense communities in the first place. But I assert that the opposite points exist too (either actually or abstractly) - the loss of freedom in dense communities is very real and freedom can be valued more strongly than getting a slightly cheaper iPhone because there are more workers in the world.
Parable of the Bathroom, Parable of the City
Issac Asmiov came up with a parallel between overpopulation and the use of a bathroom. Someone told me he later recanted his position on overpopulation, but it doesn't matter. He's correct about what he says in that video. More people means more conflicts. More conflicts means more rules and efforts directed to preventing and arbitrating those conflicts. More conflicts means more crime. More people means that each individual is worth less in the eyes of others who don't know him or her because there are plenty of others who have the same skillset and the degrees of separation are likely to be greater.
I live in the country on 16 acres. I used to live in the city (well, a quasi-city of 30,000). In the country, I can ride my ATV more or less whenever I want. I can have bonfires without a permit (not legally, I suppose, but no one will ever catch me). I can redirect the thousands of gallons of water in my pond to whatever purpose I want. I can raise pigs and the smell will dissipate before it reaches my neighbors. I can shoot my rifle into a backstop and not have to worry about someone appearing between me and the target. I can piss through hundreds of dollars in fireworks on the fourth of July. I can let my animals roam. I can walk outside naked. I can hole up and not have to see another person for months.
In the city I could do none of that. I benefitted from more access to culture, restaurants, and music, as well as being nearer to others, but I had less freedom to exclude myself from others or to take actions which would conflict with the wishes of those around me. Property rights couldn't give me those freedoms, unless I had more property like I do in the country, it could only provide a framework for mitigating conflicts and for assigning fault after the fact.
It's no coincidence that cities are less libertarian than the country - people often want rules imposed BEFORE the fact. In small communities, people can know and trust restaurant owners. In the city, everyone's a stranger to everyone else and people gravitate toward trusting health inspectors. No raising your own animals in the city - that's how diseases get spread, not to mention the smell. I wouldn't be surprised if forced vaccinations become a thing in the city since herd immunity is especially important where human contact is the greatest.
Property rights sensibly limit what one can do by saying, in effect, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. But your range of motion is going to be greatly impacted when there are noses everywhere.
I live in the country on 16 acres. I used to live in the city (well, a quasi-city of 30,000). In the country, I can ride my ATV more or less whenever I want. I can have bonfires without a permit (not legally, I suppose, but no one will ever catch me). I can redirect the thousands of gallons of water in my pond to whatever purpose I want. I can raise pigs and the smell will dissipate before it reaches my neighbors. I can shoot my rifle into a backstop and not have to worry about someone appearing between me and the target. I can piss through hundreds of dollars in fireworks on the fourth of July. I can let my animals roam. I can walk outside naked. I can hole up and not have to see another person for months.
In the city I could do none of that. I benefitted from more access to culture, restaurants, and music, as well as being nearer to others, but I had less freedom to exclude myself from others or to take actions which would conflict with the wishes of those around me. Property rights couldn't give me those freedoms, unless I had more property like I do in the country, it could only provide a framework for mitigating conflicts and for assigning fault after the fact.
It's no coincidence that cities are less libertarian than the country - people often want rules imposed BEFORE the fact. In small communities, people can know and trust restaurant owners. In the city, everyone's a stranger to everyone else and people gravitate toward trusting health inspectors. No raising your own animals in the city - that's how diseases get spread, not to mention the smell. I wouldn't be surprised if forced vaccinations become a thing in the city since herd immunity is especially important where human contact is the greatest.
Property rights sensibly limit what one can do by saying, in effect, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. But your range of motion is going to be greatly impacted when there are noses everywhere.
Why are Some Libertarians both Cornucopian AND Anti-Solution?
This is truly puzzling to me. I'm a fan of organic food, though the USDA label is effectively useless, but I also am not knee-jerk against GMOs. Normal Borlaug did more for humanity than just about any human I can think of and he did so through, GASP!, genetic engineering - though back then it was called selective breeding. Nowadays, technology allows people to be better at it and allows cloning and chimeras. But many cornucopian libertarians are against this despite it being exactly what they are saying would happen - human ingenuity solving problems. You don't get to say "yay ingenuity" but then say "nah" to the solutions.
Same thing with the recent push for smart electrical meters. But privacy! Well, you get either more people or more privacy, not both. More people means more work and money spent for meter readers, so smart meters make more sense. That saves money and redirects meter readers to more productive fields... right? Right?
Vaccinations? More people in constant contact with one another, the faster diseases spread and the more important herd immunity becomes.
And, of course, the paleo diet. Hey, I'm not saying it doesn't work. But people go overboard on the meat... and you know how expensive meat is to produce? You won't be doing that when the costs are internalized - at least not with this many people around.
You're allowed to like things more than the population problem getting solved - meat, privacy, no mandatory vaccinations, "pure food" whatever the fuck that means. But maybe those things are the solutions. If they are, you can't have your cake and eat it.
Same thing with the recent push for smart electrical meters. But privacy! Well, you get either more people or more privacy, not both. More people means more work and money spent for meter readers, so smart meters make more sense. That saves money and redirects meter readers to more productive fields... right? Right?
Vaccinations? More people in constant contact with one another, the faster diseases spread and the more important herd immunity becomes.
And, of course, the paleo diet. Hey, I'm not saying it doesn't work. But people go overboard on the meat... and you know how expensive meat is to produce? You won't be doing that when the costs are internalized - at least not with this many people around.
You're allowed to like things more than the population problem getting solved - meat, privacy, no mandatory vaccinations, "pure food" whatever the fuck that means. But maybe those things are the solutions. If they are, you can't have your cake and eat it.
Orderly Drawdown versus Crash Course
Overshoot always gets solved. Humans aren't special here. The one area humans are special is that we have the ability to think very far in advance even if hyperbolic discounting doesn't make that happen very often. Even though I'm a moral relativist, I still believe that most humans have certain values in common - that is there are some states of affairs which would be considered "bad" by nearly all humans. Starvation and war/slaughter are two which are directly attributable to "not enough to go around." Whatever property rights you think are justified ultimately require people to respect them to be functional. In a choice between respecting homesteading and starvation, an-cap goes right out the window. Might is the ultimate determinant of who survives.
Given that's almost certainly what will happen in an overshoot collapse and given that one can't depend on technology to save the day especially if the technology requires additional population to develop, the choices are:
Hint: #2 is the sane one. The problem is it might justify state intervention until there are ways to large-scale organize people without a state.
Given that's almost certainly what will happen in an overshoot collapse and given that one can't depend on technology to save the day especially if the technology requires additional population to develop, the choices are:
- Plan to die before things get bad - so long suckers! Though you'd be an asshole if you have children, then.
- An orderly drawdown of population consistent with property rights, human dignity, etc.
- "Nature will figure it out" but you can't make any appeals to rights in that situation
Hint: #2 is the sane one. The problem is it might justify state intervention until there are ways to large-scale organize people without a state.
