Well, yes. But that'd require fair, sensible distribution and use of available resources, and then how would we be able to support the ability of a handful of billionaires to subvert our democracies for their own gain? /s
I've seen this before. Last time I looked, it required that everyone live in cities with good public transportation. It also didn't factor in modern necessities like air conditioning (which will be actually necessary in many more parts of the world due to global warming).
Basically, for this to work, everyone needs to live in 2-bedroom apartments... Without air conditioning or anything like a desktop PC. You'd have a small refrigerator and heat your food with a microwave (and nothing else because stovetop and ovens use up too much energy).
It also makes huge assumptions about the availability of food, where it can be grown, and that all the necessary nutrients/fertilizer are already present in the soil and that transporting/processing things like grain is super short distance/cheap.
Also, communism. It requires functioning communism. That everyone will be ok with it and there will be no wars over resources/land.
Not only that, but all 8.5 billion would also need to be willing to stop any "lifestyle inflation". It's not just about accepting it for a day, it's about adjusting to that being the norm for themselves and for their kids into the foreseeable future.
A question that I frequently ask when presented this is "what would you personally be willing to give up?" Of course it is important to realize that some of it is systemic and not within the average person's control (e.g. car-centric infrastructure)
Right. I think there are a lot of people who would be happy to give up something, but would need big societal changes first. Like, giving up driving a car, but would need cities to be designed more like Europe where it's possible to get by without a car. Or, living in a more efficient high-rise apartment building vs. a less efficient detached house, but would need building codes and standards to be better so they weren't constantly being annoyed by a noisy neighbour, or having to put up with smells from other apartments.
This is the answer. I have a nonstandard sleep cycle (I worked nights for a decade) and that alone keeps me out of apartments. I refuse to subject a downstairs neighbor to me being most awake at 1am, and I likewise can't sleep when my neighbors are awake.
Yeah, I have a different sleep schedule too. But, it doesn't mean that I can't live in apartment. It just means I can't live in a poorly built apartment with bad sound isolation between floors.
I've been in high quality apartments where you could never hear the neighbours at all. The problem is, there's no requirement to build them like that, and it's much cheaper not to, so they don't tend to do it. If I could be guaranteed not to be disturbed, I'd probably prefer a high-rise. But, I've had too many bad experiences with loud neighbours, or with air leakage so I could smell it when my neighbours were smoking.
Kind of what I was getting at with my comments. The median standard of living doesn't have to be bad or even particularly uncomfortable, but it would require everyone who lives above that median to be knocked down to it and be okay with that. Which they won't. Meaning it will require force.
Yes this lowest-common-denominator life we’d all be living would save billions suffering through abject poverty but none of those people are here, reading this right now. Everyone reading this would probably see a lifestyle decline. I always have to laugh when anyone in Europe or the US blab as if they are part of the 90%. We are 10%ers every one of us.
Thats the part that sucks. For super poor people this is great. For those of us already in a decent house, it would be a lot worse. I For one cant live in apartments, unless I was absolutely close to homeless.
Although, if we took the billionaires down a notch I bet a lot more people could also have houses.
would you not accept going from a house to something less decent if it came with the likelihood that everyone in the world would have housing, food, and security?
Thats a good question, but let me also ask this: is every single human equal? I hate to break it to you, but there are people providing a lot more value to the world than a taco bell worker. So yes, I think the taco bell worker deserves a surviveable wage while they study to be greater and have social safety nets in place to assist. However if they only aspire to stay at taco bell, smoke weed and play cod all night after work, that is fine, but to be fair to others who aspired to be greater, the taco bell worker doesn't deserve as much as them.
Before you call me an old boomer-i actually know people who live the above life and im sorry, they don't deserve to have more than a small apartment. Which maybe is fine with them ! But no, im not going to give up my place to benefit those who aren't attributing as much. Notice, I didn't say they aren't deserving of fair and affordable housing and safety nets.
I used to work in contract law at an insurance company (not a lawyer), and I was paid well to do highly specialized work. I now work behind the counter at a bakery and I get to help people feed their families. I unquestionably provide more actual value to the world through my current job than my previous one.
Id agree with you there! But youre actively bettering the community and improving quality of life, you deserve to have a comfortable living situation for that. You can't just give houses and money to lazy or addicted people, that doesnt solve the issue is what im saying.
Do you like taco bell? Do you see value in fast food existing as a convenience?
If you think that fast food jobs shouldn't exist at all (and everyone should have the means and the free time to make food at home, with accommodations for those who physically can't cook for themselves), I have more sympathy with your position (even though I still disagree with some of your opinions). But if you want fast food, retail, or any similar services to keep existing, someone will always have to work in those poorly-valued jobs. And I don't think they deserve less than the rest of us.
Tbh I think the average fast food employee works a hell of a lot harder during their shift than I do at mine. I'm sitting at my desk typing on social media right now; the guy at the taco bell next door is standing in a hot kitchen, pumping out quesadillas for hours. Sure, my job requires more specific skills, but now that I already have those skills, I'm not laboring more strenuously to use them. If my education had been free, and I didn't need a higher wage to pay off my student debt/catch up for the years I hadn't spent working? I don't think I'd "deserve" more than the taco bell guy.
I do like it on occasion yes, and those workers deserve a living wage. They don't deserve the luxuries of life that a doctor has, however.
Id agree the "hardness" of a job is difficult to quantify. A job where you sit at a computer all day but talk to people and run large projects to build houses or factories or anything like that, will pay more than a fast food person. They both are working, but it's different. Could the fast food employee design an electrical system for a food facility ? No. Could the electrical engineer work fast food? Almost definitely yes.
They don't deserve the luxuries of life that a doctor has, however.
I see your position, but respectfully disagree. I appreciate that we may want to incentivize people to be doctors, but the gifts of civilization have been hard won by the labour of all workers over the years, and IMHO on paper should be available to all. It's not about deserving.
Now, in practice is a good doctor more likely to enjoy the charity of the community, and occupy a special status because of their critical role? Undoubtedly. IMHO in a world where creature comforts are guaranteed, these specials perks would be a huge boon.
And besides, I think most people only want lots of money because it helps insulate them from the ravages of our current system when they're old and unable to work. If we didn't have to worry about how to survive after our working years I think collecting excess wealth would have a lot less appeal.
PS. Personally I think there are enough people drawn to medicine that it wouldn't be hard to fill those spots with free education. But we may have to really incentivize people to work dirty jobs like sewage.
PPS. for incentives, maybe it's something like fewer weekly hours, or your time counts 1.5 to double towards your pension, so you can retire earlier.
And yes, a lot of people tend to ignore that the crap jobs that need to be done wont get done without monetary incentive. So im glad you mentioned that point
And I don’t think they deserve less than the rest of us.
So the Doctor that studied for 16 hours a day while I played video games and then worked 16 hour shifts at the hospital during residency for 5 years while I worked 7 hours shifts at Taco Bell should be paid the same as me?
Capitalism has perverse unjust rewards but that doesn't make the opposite just either.
Interesting take. I don't believe it's an all or nothing question. But I think we can all agree that a lazy-by-choice person doesnt deserve as much as someone who went to school for 6 years to be a doctor. Now.the lazy person doesn't deserve prison or to be homeless. But if you think both people need to live in a 1 bedroom apartment for things to be equal, thats actually oppression, not equality.
My main disagreement with your point is the word "deserve". I don't actually have a problem with an economic system that rewards some activities more than others, as long as there's a humane baseline for everyone. But I think that's absolutely an economic choice, and not the only reasonable one.
"Deserve" implies to me that there's a moral system judging one activity as more worthy, or better, than another; rather than simply being more valuable to a particular economic model. It seems like a short step from that to deciding some people are more worthy than others.
The only problem is really consent and the propaganda against these goals. E.g. Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that. With Kite Power you already have unlimited energy.
And you could build a huge apartment block surrounded by nature, growing food directly around you and sharing infrastructure. Everyone could get a luxurious apartment with high ceilings and a killer view for everyone. If drastically less people need to commute to work, we wouldn't need to live in a city. You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time. To enjoy life, to study and learn for free, to raise your children in peace. Not consumerism. Let the masses produce VR games if they have too much free time.
I also disagree that it requires full on communism, a UBI or expanded bill of rights for the human necessities to reach a decent living standard (DLS) could work too. You'd just heavily regulate, ban industrial meat production, bad advertising to avoid consumerism etc.
Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that.
The entire world doesn't have the climate of Japan where it's possible to live in an apartment without AC and heat. No amount of design can ameliorate 38C high humidity.
growing food directly around you
Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It's the system we already have.
You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.
That's not a technological solution to cooking. That's social which is far harder if not impossible to overcome.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.
That doesn't follow. The same work needs to be done, if not more because reducing energy means reducing automation so people have to work to make up the difference.
Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It’s the system we already have.
We're probably talking about different things, like "you can't grow almonds or citrus fruit locally". But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere, it's just a question of population density. Your food staple would simply be what kind of calorie crop grows locally, plus vegetables and greenhouses for exotic fruit.
And yeah, all of this is a social solution through and though. Like you'd want to encourage people to help plant and harvest. But this might differ from of community to community. Some might want to use more automation with robotics. You really don't want a uniform regime. One man's utopia is another man's gulag.
People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria for each apartment block and robots delivering inside the building like a hotel. This would still be drastic reduction, even compared to shopping by car. Going shopping by foot or bike in your local city neighborhood is probably still more, because you don't have to transport the harvested food using trucks but process it locally.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.
That doesn’t follow. The same work needs to be done
No it doesn't! We can drastically reduce the amount of work that needs to be done! That is the whole point! You can look at it as capitalism being incredibly inefficient. Or incredibly efficient at creating unequal conditions benefiting those with capital (and vastly inefficient conditions for those without).
A major driver of this is advertising or "brainwashing" people to buy garbage they don't need. Or the advertising industry itself - think of the stock value of all the social and TV media, it is completely financed by advertising, and all the downstream industry that is fed by it. All that is waste!
Or planned obsolescence, purposefully producing goods and appliances that break within one or two year.
Or things like a byzantine tax code, or complicated laws. Or regulations or land ownership preventing efficient reorganization of cities or infrastructure.
PS: And yeah the obvious impossibility is that those who own and profit from all these inefficiency would never allow this. But we shouldn't forget or deny it's possible.
But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere
That's subsistence living. No one wants to go back to that. Nor is anyone stopping you from living that way. Land is cheap in the middle of nowhere. Communes exist everywhere.
People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria
A communal cafeteria isn't what people do when "going out". If it was what people wanted, there would be more cafeterias and fewer restaurants.
A major driver of this is advertising or "brainwashing" people to buy garbage they don't need.
It's easy to think that everyone is sheep except for yourself. I've now come to believe that consumerism is fundamental to human nature, not advertising changing humans. The proof is thousands of years of pre capitalism artifacts from archeology sites. People have always liked unnecessary "stuff". People have always liked fashion and trends. People are going to be rampant consumers even if advertising and marketing were stopped tomorrow. It's their nature.
I don't disagree. Like Nietche said: "I shop, therefor I am" haha. Also:
Any argument you make that increases the risk of genocide is wrong.
I agree that hedonism is a fundamental part of human nature, but not exclusively or in this extreme. Lets agree "Extreme Consumerism" on the current level is destructive, genocidal and not healthy for us. People also need a planet to live on, and want a world where their children can grow up without being consumed by advertising, self-marketing or endlessly distracted by tasty nonsense.
Advertising is the primary "infection vector" that makes people think that what they shop is their identity. It also doesn't require full on socialism to prevent the genocidal effects of unbridled consumerism.
I do believe we can achieve a modest level of hedonism where this "DLS" becomes something more luxurious than our current living standards. Working only 20 hours a week, having a luxury apartment with an awesome look on nature or on a green city. With the current technology, the "one mobile phone and one laptop per person on earth" isn't more sustainable than a gaming PC.
There are many destructive or abhorrent things that are part of human nature that we as rational individuals want to control in a society. I believe video games or virtual worlds with full "deep dive VR" is where we could explore and satisfy our less savory natures. But we can't let it influence us like the toxic male teenage gamer culture has by now. The "sheepism" is real, unless you think MAGA is fine. But it's mostly driven by dire outlook on material conditions.
Fundamentally, we can't keep going as we have. It doesn't matter if nobody "wants" the party to stop. It has to. And the study in OP gives us strong evidence that it is possible to achieve at least a decent living standard without exterminating ourselves.
Humans only really need 7 or so fundamental: Food / water, shelter / housing, safety, community, healthcare, communication, education / news. If we can get those with working only very little, living mostly a life of leisure, that's already luxury. Everything on top of that advanced technology can give us is gravy.
Like building tons of greenhouses to grow food beyond "subsistence farming" locally and using simple farming robots that are not harder to assemble than 3D printers, or genetically engineering food.
What technology can't give us is a culture where greed and politics doesn't lead to irrational, undesirable and unequal outcomes. Or maybe our new savior ChatGPT can haha.
This doesn't mean we wouldn't have access to computers. We just wouldn't individually have personal computers all to ourselves unless you were someone who actually worked in the tech industry and needed constant access to perform your job duties.
This a thousand times. The world is throwing away resources at an astounding rate while people are sick, homeless and starving because of numbers on digital ledgers. We need to drop the whole idea of money. It's served its purpose, run its course and has since turned into a life on this planet threatening perversion.
I think money existed well before false-scarcity. It is the wrong enemy. I know close to nothing about economy so I would trust economists like Varoufakis and the like.
I bet you are basing your concept of the "usual" Westerner on your own experience, and you might be surprised at how the actual average person lives even in the "West".
But to answer your question, the article defines decent living standards as:
nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc.
Nutritious food is unavailable to an alarming number of Americans, transit is a mess and almost exclusively car-centered, healthcare and education are severely stratified along economic conditions, and almost everything on that list is a commodity. The USA has sanitation systems almost everywhere, but that's just because rich poop and poor poop all smells like poop. Wherever the wealthy can isolate their own sanitation, they do.
Out of that the US lacks health care for all, and it lacks transit pretty much everywhere outside of the large cities. Even the cities pretty much have nothing that reaches all the way out to the suburbs.
Where I live, you have to have a car to have a decent quality of life. People give up their homes before they give up their cars. So transportation needs to be addressed in order to have the quality of life promised. Most of the places that are food insecure are all about politics and bad people blocking food resources rather than the food not being available.
'Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity, depending on our assumptions about distribution and technological deployment. "
So if you and everyone are willing to live on 30% less "money", worldwide poverty would be eliminated.
That is definitely not what is presented in what you quoted.
Out of our current productive capabilities (how much money is "created" if you want), we would only need 30% of it to get 8.5 billion people to a "decent living standard".
That isnt a 30% reduction, it's only needing to make 30% of what we already are doing.
That's the same thing. The paper is arguing against the need to increase production vs redistribution of what is currently produced.
That isnt a 30% reduction, it's only needing to make 30% of what we already are doing.
Where does that 30% come from? They are explicitly saying that their analysis isn't about increasing production of anything. Redistribution means taking away from the rich developed population to give to the poor. They said take 30% and redistribute it. If you are on Lemmy, that includes you.
That is not my interpretation on the paper. It's not taking 30% and spreading it. It's we only ever needed to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed for everyone to reach those standards.
"Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments."
It’s not taking 30% and spreading it. It’s we only ever needed to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed for everyone to reach those standards.
I don't understand what you mean by those two sentences. They seem to be in conflict with each other.
You have 100 coins. To say we need to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed means you now have only 70 coins.
"leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.”
You had 100 coins and now you have 70. You can still buy luxuries but 30% less than what you had before it was redistributed.
I think my sticking point is that it's not 30 of your coins, necessarily. This is probably where I'm going wrong, but I might only have 100 coins, but there's a multitude of people that have 1,000 coins, and some still that have 10,000 coins.
I feel like I'm muddling up production/living standards and just plain wealth, but not every individual would need to give 30%. There would be a total amount equaling 30% that is re-allocated.
The article was about production, not wealth. While Bezos certainly uses 1000x the production compared to a regular person, he doesn't use the 1Billion times that his wealth represents. He doesn't eat 1B cheeseburgers every day. So while you'd get more out of the 30% of extremely wealthy, it wouldn't be proportional to their wealth and there's only .1% of the population that's in that category.
Westerners eat meat everyday, nearly everyone drives cars everywhere, they buy heaps of cheap clothes and electronics made by slave or near-slave labor, they drink coffee and eat chocolate grown by the same. They go on expensive, polluting and disruptive globetrotting vacations. You think all that and more will stick around in a more equitable society?
I'm sorry I wasn't inclusive enough in my chastising, Commissar. It'll be the same story for them, too.
If we take all the type of living standards into consideration from all over the world
Then I guess the median living standards would be the living standards of the middle class people of countries like Indian, Brazil and all (the developing countries basically)
"I have a magical reality-changing glove. Should I change the nature of beings to want to share for the benefit of all? Nah, I'm gonna remove a random half of them from existence. It's clearly the ONLY thing I could possibly do to solve the problem! I'm so smart and awesome!"
Fine, then he can change it so people only need half the resources. There are innumerable other options that don't involve killing people when you have a reality altering glove.
I'm skeptical. I just skimmed the paper, but most of it seems to be taking a financial/macro-economic perspective without too much analysis on individual resources availability and the damage just current levels of output are causing to our environment/resources. I've seen other research that claim we are already over the carrying capacity of Earth, some say by a large margin (e.g. carrying capacity is 2 billion people). I'm pretty sure humans are already using (and degrading) the majority of Earth's arable land, for instance.
This is a major flaw in science and basic economic comprehension. You could grow enough potatoes to feed the world enough calories with just the area of France. We could build huge apartment blocks surrounded by farmland and connected via tiny mono rails. We could build apartments and appliances and computers that last for a century. We could genetically engineer microalgae to taste like pancake butter. If we half the number of required workers, we'd save a mountain of resources on commute. We could design everything to be recyclable. Wind energy with Kites Power gives us near unlimited energy. Our footprint could be tiny but with the luxury of free time, learning, arts and living in a community and in nature.
We are nowhere near carrying capacity, we're just over because we waste so much on consumerism, planned obsolescence, unsustainable crops and artificial scarcity.
Our civilization is a fucking joke but science treats current conditions as if they were normal and immutable.
Scientists know we need to change but unfortunately if we don't present our research in terms of how it will benefit the economy, those who actually control if things will change simply ignore it because their power of authority is based on the strength of the economy.
It really fucking sucks. I have a degree in conservation science, and we were literally taught to always consider the economic perspective because that's literally the only part anyone with any power to affect legislation or industry practices will pay attention to it.
because their power of authority is based on the strength of the economy
Yeah I feel like this is the biggest open secret we never talk about. Like ideology is just a lie, like a nursery rhyme we repeat to keep calm, but completely irrelevant in the face of how well people are doing economically.
But it's been shown that a serious green new deal or "war economy" would be great for the economy. Just not for the pocket books of those who own "the world" like factories or are part of the value chain that is based on either fossil fuel or industrial processes that emit greenhouse gases otherwise.
Basically we could have looked at the previous investments and business value that would be lost or be "redistributed" if we had adapted. Like every long term investment in the world is at risk. It could be in the order of the value of the whole world, and that's the "power" this idea of climate adaptation was up against.
I saw this infographic posted a few days ago and it's a bit misleading. The percentages are based on biomass, not population. I also don't remember what the original source is, and it looks like it got cropped off the one you posted here. If you remember the source, could you link it?
Yes, and combined with the data presented by OP, we can readily see that this absolutely does not need to be the case.
Combine these again with food waste data and you will see that the majority of those animals will be slaughtered only for the products made from them to wind up being thrown away without ever having been used. We (capitalist owners of industry) demand the slaughter of these animals en masse knowing full well that most of what comes from the act won't sell simply because there is a slim chance that it might sell, and we (society as a whole which has the capability of governance) have failed to make it cost prohibitive to do so. It's fucking disgusting.
There is absolutely no justification, other than to chase the profit incentive which I do not consider valid, for our practices in animal husbandry that have led to the overpopulation of certain species.
Yeah the picture doesn't really present the issue. The 60% livestock isn't comparable to wild life. It's much worse than that.
I could also say that 100% of bricks are man made and there are no wild bricks.
Similarly, live stock is a product, that shouldn't and wouldn't exist in the first place. It does not represent animals in a way that is comparable to wild life that have full lives.
The 60% livestock does not live long happy lives. It's constantly being replaced by new livestock.
So sure at any given moment there might be 60% mass of animals classified as livestock, but if we were to count the actual number of animals over a year, it would be closer to 100%.
So what you're saying is that earth under 8-9 billion people isn't sustainable and we need to start sacrificing our cars and meat due to overpolulation?
I mean those are good decisions anyway, I would 1000% rather take 30 minute nap on a train/bys or ride a bike/electric motorcycle on the way to work than sit in traffic for an hour. As for meat, I'm not vegan, but I could be if seiten was more common.
There is almost no public transport outside cities. I don't remember the last time I had the opportunity to use one.
As for meat, I'm not vegan, but I could be if seiten was more common.
It's not just meat. Milk, cheese and related products (pizza?), clothing, oils, gas production, ectera ectera. Even fertilizer for crops. I'd rather have sustainable earth population than give up things that make me happy
Have you tried the alternatives lately? Impossible meat is indistinguishable from the real thing, and Quorn combined with some marmite or chicken flavoring is an excellent affordable alternative to beef and chicken.
Plant milks are pretty damn good, vegan cheese is getting close.
The others I'm a little surprised make you happier than alternatives. Plant fibers are the bomb for clothes, gas production is... Not something I associate with happiness. Mushroom leather is looking very promising as a replacement for animal leather.
There is almost no public transport outside cities
Having public transit to drive you around would make 99.9999% of people happier than fighting the rest in traffic.
Japan has unmanned stations in the boonies where its just 1 line that splits at stations for trains to pass. They run regular service through tiny towns this way. Elsewhere and in the event more rural areas, buses and vans fill that role.
Bicycles and mopeds can move >10x more people per lane of road and requires <1/10th the pavement for parking. You dont understand what a blight cars are on urban development and human health until you've spent time in places with effective public transit.
The meat thing is a little more subjective, IDK how far off we are from being able to reasonably get rid of all animal products, but there are certainly areas it can be decreased without negatively affecting peoples standard of living.
so you rather genocide billions of people than give up minor comforts ?
(hyperbole)
on a different note there are a lot of things that can and have to be changed to live sustainably but these changes have to be addressed systematically
How about "we should regulate our birth rates and constant population growth for your capitalist machine is not a healthy way forward for this planet for literally anyone living here except for the rich" instead of your "so you want a genocide?"
The problem stopping distribution to where stuff is needed is money, the people who have it, the people who owe it, the funny patterns it makes on stock markets, in hedge funds etc.
Money was ok as a means to allow people to exchange their different trades into things they need to live. But it has moved so far beyond that it has become ridiculous.
Resources aren't evenly distributed naturally, some area may not have enough resources.
It takes more resources to get more resources, we may be measuring 30% of total resources, but not 30% of resource capacity.
I'm fine with population control, but it should be implemented willingly at an individual level, and pushed via education and community acceptance. I catch a small amount of flak for not having kids, but wife catches a lot more.
Not sure what you're trying to say, but the paper assumes current population trends and means 30% of currently available resources in 2025 would be enough to give everyone a decent living standard (DLS) in 2050. We have everything we need to do this right now.
A replacement birthrate leads to a more stable society. The elderly who are unable to work and ill need to be cared for. If ever fewer young and able people have to take care of ever more elderly, it won’t have a good outcome. Not having children of your own is being a burden on society.
A replacement birthrate leads to a more stable society
Only if you assume that the amount of production for a hour of labor stays the same. Workers today accomplish much more in a given time period than workers 65 years ago. The problem is that value is horded instead of being made available to the people that created it.
Feeding an elderly person, washing them, changing their diapers takes the same amount of time as it did 150 years ago. Due to better health care and longer lives, the total cost of elderly health care and pensions eat up a lot of that productivity gain.
That's certainly not true. We now have washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, kitchen machines, gas or electric stoves, food delivery services etc. All this makes carrying for others easier. Plus being more efficient at paid work could be translated into less working hours, thus more time to care for others instead of more money captured by capitalists.
Nope. Absolutely wrong. You can cook food faster than you could 150 years ago using microwaves, induction cook tops, non-stick pan and other advancements in kitchen tech. Modern care aids reduce the time it takes to wash a person, and allows them to wash themselves much later in life before they need partial or full assistance. Modern adult diapers come off easier, seal better, and absorb more, so they have fewer blow-outs and it takes fewer wipes to clean up a person.
Edit: let's also add that better productivity in other areas enables fewer people do more work, which (should) free up a larger portion of the population for elder-care.
You realize 150 years ago was the year before the telephone was invented, right? Most houses didn't even have electricity back then.
I was an in-home caregiver before COVID, and we certainly didn't have to warm water on a wood fired stove to bathe the clients with. I didn't have to scrub the laundry with a washboard, we had a laundry machine. I could call 911 without interrupting CPR, which wouldn't have been possible even 50 years ago.
If ever fewer young and able people have to take care of ever more elderly, it won’t have a good outcome.
It takes fewer resources to care for elderly than raise children. Not raising a child means there's a surplus to care for the elderly. Then the elderly die leaving more surplus behind. It's not only a theoretical based on money but we have all of history that shows this truth. For example WW2 killed the most productive members of society leaving only the elderly to be cared for. The result was a global economic boom.
The problem is a combination of intrinsic psychological biases of those with means. Once they reach a certain threshold, they become driven to keep accumulating until they own everything. Gotta catch 'em all.
This threshold is likely different for everyone, and may not be related to other thresholds of accumulation, such as:
When you have everything you want, except to upscale your stuff.
When you make more money than you can spend on personal expenses, including renting Venice for a wedding.
When you make more then you can spend [on large business transactions, unrelated to the] threshold where you can't possibly spend all your income without purchasing billion-dollar companies
Some capitalists are self aware enough to recognize the impulse is not sustainable, (also that profits are better had with happy workers) which often comes from having risen to wealth from more modest means. (But not always).
At any rate, rich dudes who drop billions into massive public improvement projects are rare, and when they do they tend to see it as revenue source, or at least something to exploit to improve their brand image.
So the next step for society is to discover a sociological technique that allows rich guys to think I have enough, to drop their surplus into the hands of the community (say the general fund of the local governing body)
That or accept that we are too simple a species to navigate some very imminent great filters. We may not count as a space-faring civilization that might encounter other space-faring civilizations.
This is not a new idea. Fourth International–Posadism opined that developing communism (or a refinement thereof) would be a prerequisite for space colonization. I'd argue changing from capitalism is a prerequisite for societal sustainability more than a couple of centuries from now.
No u don't understand I need to be mean to others it's just how it is I don't make the rules. Wanting the best for everyone and working to achieve that is when it's Not Realistic and the more you are not finding excuses to hurt others the more Not Realistic it is. Hope this helps
I think that humanity only optimized for quantity of life, not quality of life in the last 200 years. That doesn't really make sense. All of our needs can be fulfilled with 30% of the current workforce.
I agree with this, but I still feel there are too many people. Like we don't need 8.5 billion. We could use so much less stuff if we just stopped fucking so much. We could REDUCE the size of our grid significantly. That seems like a good goal.
Btw genocide is a dumb way to achieve this. Plenty easy to just let people live to death since you can provide for 3x the number of people.
Edit: I thought I made it clear with the above line, but I'm not suggesting fucking eugenics. How do you get that from what I said..? I literally specified the fucking opposite. Unless people view any form of population controls in any sense to be eugenics. Which is just fucking braindead.
Providing people with high standard of living lowers birth rates. It's a well established effect, every single country with high standard of living has low birthrates. Providing people with sexual education and sexual health also lowers birth rates. Educated people that have easy access to birth control will have fewer children.
Provide people with education and things they need and overpopulation is an issue that fixes itself.
That sounds like a great way to reduce the population. I don't understand why when I say that we should have less people, everyone assumes I mean like next year. Fucking generations away we will have less people. That's good. We don't have to abuse or hurt or even cajole people into it.
The most effective way of population control is education, curbing of religious influences and raising of living standards.
Just look up "demographic change". In the 1880, German fertility rates were between 5.5 and 5. That's on par with modern day Niger and Mali, some of the most fertile nations in the world. As soon as the mortality rates of German children dropped and a social net was established, rates fell. And this has happened all over the world.
Unless we get taken in by abrahamic fertility cults again, a healthier, better educated and equal society will stabilize the world's population at around 9 billion. And we can easily support them, if we work towards it. No need for pseudoeugenics or other population control mechanisms.
I think im the only one who agrees with you...we don't need this many people, and no one asks to be born. This doesn't mean we kill off people already here at all. Just stop feeling like kids are a requirement to live, or adopt.
Think about it. One person. Has 4 kids. Each kid wants their own house. Then each of those kids has kids that want their own house. None of that is sustainable. We wouldn't have to all live in 1 bedroom apartments if there were less people.
I agree. The earth's population has nearly doubled since I was a kid, with no particular planning or preparation, and now that food and housing shortages have gotten unbearably bad, we're told that we can't go back to having less people or everything will collapse, as though the planet is a MLM company.
You can't just declare that there are too many people and then expect some other faceless masses to go do the dying somewhere else. If you actually want to lower birth rates, you need to invest in public education and healthcare, and you need to have a plan to care for the unbalanced number of elderly retirees.
Did I say we don't fucking do that? Did I say that I expect some faceless group to be shot in the hills? Or was that your first thought as to the only solution possible?
We already don't care for our aging population well at all. Reducing population requires way more planning and resources than you think. Nations that are actually losing population are really struggling with this reality.
I agree, they are struggling under capitalism. But a shrinking population doesn't necessitate suffering. At least not any more, where we could provide for our elderly with great efficiency if we were inclined to do so. It would not turn a profit, but some things are important in life.
No, but I didn't say that either. You did say to just people die from living. Old people need young people to support them. If everyone just stops fucking, as you suggested, society would collapse under the weight of all the suffering of old people. Those will be your grandparents and then your parents and then you, and probably your kids, too, because that sort of disaster lasts a long time.
It’s got most of the same issues as eugenics - yeah, it’d be nice if nobody had to suffer obvious and objective genetic diseases but it consistently immediately turns into “well but I think being a red head is a genetic disease”. You have to consider how a solution can be achieved to really weigh its benefit versus alternatives.
We can feed everybody by Luigi-ing a rounding error’s worth of billionaires. Or we can reduce global population by a factor of 10, which is almost certainly going to disproportionately favor rich white dudes, do nothing to that handful of sociopaths, and they’ll still burn the planet to the ground.
Ok but I never said anything about eugenics or a specific peoples. I said "we should have less people." And everyone got upset assuming I want to genocide the undesirables.
I literally just don't think we need 8 billion people. In no way did I suggest that we do it in a specific way or targeting specific people. Just a general 25-40% reduction in population over a few generations.
Literally all that needs to happen is more birth control for everyone. Not forced.
The issue is people have gone down this line of thinking dozens of times and it always ends the same way. Your inability to see that is how we get there.
“Raise the standard of living for everyone and population will level out” is a perfectly reasonable angle. Just say that, because it’s dangerous to leave open ended.
I mean I understand that people are racist pieces of shit and will attempt to hijack absolutely anything that exists to pervert it into a mechanism of hate. But like.... We can could at least try to better the world.
I think that not having such a massive population devouring the ecosystem would be beneficial in the long term. That can be affected in a multitude of ways but mostly by getting the people alive right now to manage their consumption. Once the "line go down" from that, the generations long dastardly project of ...checks notes...educating people and providing them with medical care as needed, the population will in all probably go down as a matter of course.
I wonder how much of the problem would be avoided if the top personal CO2 emissions per capita were capped at Scandinavian upper middle-class level since 1970 (imported CO2 included). Flying on vacation only occasionally, comfy car yes, SUV just if needed, nice modern house yes, wasteful lack of insulation no, buy what you need and treat yourself to some fashion, electronics etc. yes, mindless consumerism no. Just a comfy standard of living.
I wonder if the mindless consumerism in certain countries with insane emissions per capita makes up a big part of the problem, or if the sheer number of "decent standard of living" would have pushed us over the edge anyway.
Scholars, the real deal, are rare for a reason - few people choose knowledge over wealth and power. There lies the crux of the matter, since anyone who pursues the other two paths would be the antithesis of the system so designed.
It's a nice model, but it runs too counter to human nature to work; and there is precious little (if anything) that can change the nature of a species as expansive as humanity.
You need to read more anthropology studies on how society developed across hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that is "human nature" is that we will do what we view as best for our interests.
Those interests are entirely dependent upon the systems we live under. Change the overarching systems that dictate our lives and people's behavior will change with it.
If anything, the current society we live in has us far removed from our "natural" behavior and, instead, forces us to go against that nature in order to meet our needs under these oppressive and exploitative systems that have only existed for barely a fraction of humanity's existence.
We'll agree to disagree I think - unless you are a specialist in anthropology (a doctorate perhaps?), in which case I'm happy to cede my position to your expertise.
Well, yes. But that'd require fair, sensible distribution and use of available resources, and then how would we be able to support the ability of a handful of billionaires to subvert our democracies for their own gain? /s
How does that quote go? Something like: the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.
We wanted Star Trek, but we got Shadowrun.
Where's me cyberdeck
it's called a phone and it can tiktok speed up version family guy + subway surfer + minecraft parkour
posted from my steamdeck
Touché...
I've seen this before. Last time I looked, it required that everyone live in cities with good public transportation. It also didn't factor in modern necessities like air conditioning (which will be actually necessary in many more parts of the world due to global warming).
Basically, for this to work, everyone needs to live in 2-bedroom apartments... Without air conditioning or anything like a desktop PC. You'd have a small refrigerator and heat your food with a microwave (and nothing else because stovetop and ovens use up too much energy).
It also makes huge assumptions about the availability of food, where it can be grown, and that all the necessary nutrients/fertilizer are already present in the soil and that transporting/processing things like grain is super short distance/cheap.
Also, communism. It requires functioning communism. That everyone will be ok with it and there will be no wars over resources/land.
It requires strict rationing. Everyone gets their fair share, and no one gets multiples of what other people get.
Not only that, but all 8.5 billion would also need to be willing to stop any "lifestyle inflation". It's not just about accepting it for a day, it's about adjusting to that being the norm for themselves and for their kids into the foreseeable future.
A question that I frequently ask when presented this is "what would you personally be willing to give up?" Of course it is important to realize that some of it is systemic and not within the average person's control (e.g. car-centric infrastructure)
Right. I think there are a lot of people who would be happy to give up something, but would need big societal changes first. Like, giving up driving a car, but would need cities to be designed more like Europe where it's possible to get by without a car. Or, living in a more efficient high-rise apartment building vs. a less efficient detached house, but would need building codes and standards to be better so they weren't constantly being annoyed by a noisy neighbour, or having to put up with smells from other apartments.
This is the answer. I have a nonstandard sleep cycle (I worked nights for a decade) and that alone keeps me out of apartments. I refuse to subject a downstairs neighbor to me being most awake at 1am, and I likewise can't sleep when my neighbors are awake.
Yeah, I have a different sleep schedule too. But, it doesn't mean that I can't live in apartment. It just means I can't live in a poorly built apartment with bad sound isolation between floors.
I've been in high quality apartments where you could never hear the neighbours at all. The problem is, there's no requirement to build them like that, and it's much cheaper not to, so they don't tend to do it. If I could be guaranteed not to be disturbed, I'd probably prefer a high-rise. But, I've had too many bad experiences with loud neighbours, or with air leakage so I could smell it when my neighbours were smoking.
Technically, I could live in an apartment. But I can't afford a nice one, so I can't live in an apartment, haha.
How is strict rationing to provide for everyone not communism?
Just boiling down and highlighting the key point in a "how will this personally affect me" sort of way.
Kind of what I was getting at with my comments. The median standard of living doesn't have to be bad or even particularly uncomfortable, but it would require everyone who lives above that median to be knocked down to it and be okay with that. Which they won't. Meaning it will require force.
Yes this lowest-common-denominator life we’d all be living would save billions suffering through abject poverty but none of those people are here, reading this right now. Everyone reading this would probably see a lifestyle decline. I always have to laugh when anyone in Europe or the US blab as if they are part of the 90%. We are 10%ers every one of us.
Thats the part that sucks. For super poor people this is great. For those of us already in a decent house, it would be a lot worse. I For one cant live in apartments, unless I was absolutely close to homeless.
Although, if we took the billionaires down a notch I bet a lot more people could also have houses.
would you not accept going from a house to something less decent if it came with the likelihood that everyone in the world would have housing, food, and security?
It'd definitely be a tough choice, but I hope I'd be able to make it
Thats a good question, but let me also ask this: is every single human equal? I hate to break it to you, but there are people providing a lot more value to the world than a taco bell worker. So yes, I think the taco bell worker deserves a surviveable wage while they study to be greater and have social safety nets in place to assist. However if they only aspire to stay at taco bell, smoke weed and play cod all night after work, that is fine, but to be fair to others who aspired to be greater, the taco bell worker doesn't deserve as much as them.
Before you call me an old boomer-i actually know people who live the above life and im sorry, they don't deserve to have more than a small apartment. Which maybe is fine with them ! But no, im not going to give up my place to benefit those who aren't attributing as much. Notice, I didn't say they aren't deserving of fair and affordable housing and safety nets.
yeah
Good argument. Your statement solves all our issues. How can people not see this isn't a black and white issue? It can however be put simply:
Billionaires shouldn't exist.
Everyone deserves a living wage (NOT access to all life's luxuries)
If you feel like busting your ass working or saving money, you should be ABLE to afford the luxuries you want.
I used to work in contract law at an insurance company (not a lawyer), and I was paid well to do highly specialized work. I now work behind the counter at a bakery and I get to help people feed their families. I unquestionably provide more actual value to the world through my current job than my previous one.
Id agree with you there! But youre actively bettering the community and improving quality of life, you deserve to have a comfortable living situation for that. You can't just give houses and money to lazy or addicted people, that doesnt solve the issue is what im saying.
Do you like taco bell? Do you see value in fast food existing as a convenience?
If you think that fast food jobs shouldn't exist at all (and everyone should have the means and the free time to make food at home, with accommodations for those who physically can't cook for themselves), I have more sympathy with your position (even though I still disagree with some of your opinions). But if you want fast food, retail, or any similar services to keep existing, someone will always have to work in those poorly-valued jobs. And I don't think they deserve less than the rest of us.
Tbh I think the average fast food employee works a hell of a lot harder during their shift than I do at mine. I'm sitting at my desk typing on social media right now; the guy at the taco bell next door is standing in a hot kitchen, pumping out quesadillas for hours. Sure, my job requires more specific skills, but now that I already have those skills, I'm not laboring more strenuously to use them. If my education had been free, and I didn't need a higher wage to pay off my student debt/catch up for the years I hadn't spent working? I don't think I'd "deserve" more than the taco bell guy.
I do like it on occasion yes, and those workers deserve a living wage. They don't deserve the luxuries of life that a doctor has, however.
Id agree the "hardness" of a job is difficult to quantify. A job where you sit at a computer all day but talk to people and run large projects to build houses or factories or anything like that, will pay more than a fast food person. They both are working, but it's different. Could the fast food employee design an electrical system for a food facility ? No. Could the electrical engineer work fast food? Almost definitely yes.
I see your position, but respectfully disagree. I appreciate that we may want to incentivize people to be doctors, but the gifts of civilization have been hard won by the labour of all workers over the years, and IMHO on paper should be available to all. It's not about deserving.
Now, in practice is a good doctor more likely to enjoy the charity of the community, and occupy a special status because of their critical role? Undoubtedly. IMHO in a world where creature comforts are guaranteed, these specials perks would be a huge boon.
And besides, I think most people only want lots of money because it helps insulate them from the ravages of our current system when they're old and unable to work. If we didn't have to worry about how to survive after our working years I think collecting excess wealth would have a lot less appeal.
PS. Personally I think there are enough people drawn to medicine that it wouldn't be hard to fill those spots with free education. But we may have to really incentivize people to work dirty jobs like sewage.
PPS. for incentives, maybe it's something like fewer weekly hours, or your time counts 1.5 to double towards your pension, so you can retire earlier.
I agree with you. You have my vote!
And yes, a lot of people tend to ignore that the crap jobs that need to be done wont get done without monetary incentive. So im glad you mentioned that point
So the Doctor that studied for 16 hours a day while I played video games and then worked 16 hour shifts at the hospital during residency for 5 years while I worked 7 hours shifts at Taco Bell should be paid the same as me?
Capitalism has perverse unjust rewards but that doesn't make the opposite just either.
Yes. Why is this even a question?
Interesting take. I don't believe it's an all or nothing question. But I think we can all agree that a lazy-by-choice person doesnt deserve as much as someone who went to school for 6 years to be a doctor. Now.the lazy person doesn't deserve prison or to be homeless. But if you think both people need to live in a 1 bedroom apartment for things to be equal, thats actually oppression, not equality.
My main disagreement with your point is the word "deserve". I don't actually have a problem with an economic system that rewards some activities more than others, as long as there's a humane baseline for everyone. But I think that's absolutely an economic choice, and not the only reasonable one.
"Deserve" implies to me that there's a moral system judging one activity as more worthy, or better, than another; rather than simply being more valuable to a particular economic model. It seems like a short step from that to deciding some people are more worthy than others.
Agree, poor word choice. I just meant that yes some jobs are more economically beneficial. You can't pay an artist the same as a sewage worker.
That's only semantics. You agree with the OP, you only don't like the wording.
The only problem is really consent and the propaganda against these goals. E.g. Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that. With Kite Power you already have unlimited energy.
And you could build a huge apartment block surrounded by nature, growing food directly around you and sharing infrastructure. Everyone could get a luxurious apartment with high ceilings and a killer view for everyone. If drastically less people need to commute to work, we wouldn't need to live in a city. You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time. To enjoy life, to study and learn for free, to raise your children in peace. Not consumerism. Let the masses produce VR games if they have too much free time.
I also disagree that it requires full on communism, a UBI or expanded bill of rights for the human necessities to reach a decent living standard (DLS) could work too. You'd just heavily regulate, ban industrial meat production, bad advertising to avoid consumerism etc.
The entire world doesn't have the climate of Japan where it's possible to live in an apartment without AC and heat. No amount of design can ameliorate 38C high humidity.
Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It's the system we already have.
That's not a technological solution to cooking. That's social which is far harder if not impossible to overcome.
That doesn't follow. The same work needs to be done, if not more because reducing energy means reducing automation so people have to work to make up the difference.
We're probably talking about different things, like "you can't grow almonds or citrus fruit locally". But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere, it's just a question of population density. Your food staple would simply be what kind of calorie crop grows locally, plus vegetables and greenhouses for exotic fruit.
And yeah, all of this is a social solution through and though. Like you'd want to encourage people to help plant and harvest. But this might differ from of community to community. Some might want to use more automation with robotics. You really don't want a uniform regime. One man's utopia is another man's gulag.
People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria for each apartment block and robots delivering inside the building like a hotel. This would still be drastic reduction, even compared to shopping by car. Going shopping by foot or bike in your local city neighborhood is probably still more, because you don't have to transport the harvested food using trucks but process it locally.
No it doesn't! We can drastically reduce the amount of work that needs to be done! That is the whole point! You can look at it as capitalism being incredibly inefficient. Or incredibly efficient at creating unequal conditions benefiting those with capital (and vastly inefficient conditions for those without).
A major driver of this is advertising or "brainwashing" people to buy garbage they don't need. Or the advertising industry itself - think of the stock value of all the social and TV media, it is completely financed by advertising, and all the downstream industry that is fed by it. All that is waste!
Or planned obsolescence, purposefully producing goods and appliances that break within one or two year.
Or things like a byzantine tax code, or complicated laws. Or regulations or land ownership preventing efficient reorganization of cities or infrastructure.
PS: And yeah the obvious impossibility is that those who own and profit from all these inefficiency would never allow this. But we shouldn't forget or deny it's possible.
That's subsistence living. No one wants to go back to that. Nor is anyone stopping you from living that way. Land is cheap in the middle of nowhere. Communes exist everywhere.
A communal cafeteria isn't what people do when "going out". If it was what people wanted, there would be more cafeterias and fewer restaurants.
It's easy to think that everyone is sheep except for yourself. I've now come to believe that consumerism is fundamental to human nature, not advertising changing humans. The proof is thousands of years of pre capitalism artifacts from archeology sites. People have always liked unnecessary "stuff". People have always liked fashion and trends. People are going to be rampant consumers even if advertising and marketing were stopped tomorrow. It's their nature.
I don't disagree. Like Nietche said: "I shop, therefor I am" haha. Also:
Any argument you make that increases the risk of genocide is wrong.
I agree that hedonism is a fundamental part of human nature, but not exclusively or in this extreme. Lets agree "Extreme Consumerism" on the current level is destructive, genocidal and not healthy for us. People also need a planet to live on, and want a world where their children can grow up without being consumed by advertising, self-marketing or endlessly distracted by tasty nonsense.
Advertising is the primary "infection vector" that makes people think that what they shop is their identity. It also doesn't require full on socialism to prevent the genocidal effects of unbridled consumerism.
I do believe we can achieve a modest level of hedonism where this "DLS" becomes something more luxurious than our current living standards. Working only 20 hours a week, having a luxury apartment with an awesome look on nature or on a green city. With the current technology, the "one mobile phone and one laptop per person on earth" isn't more sustainable than a gaming PC.
There are many destructive or abhorrent things that are part of human nature that we as rational individuals want to control in a society. I believe video games or virtual worlds with full "deep dive VR" is where we could explore and satisfy our less savory natures. But we can't let it influence us like the toxic male teenage gamer culture has by now. The "sheepism" is real, unless you think MAGA is fine. But it's mostly driven by dire outlook on material conditions.
Fundamentally, we can't keep going as we have. It doesn't matter if nobody "wants" the party to stop. It has to. And the study in OP gives us strong evidence that it is possible to achieve at least a decent living standard without exterminating ourselves.
Humans only really need 7 or so fundamental: Food / water, shelter / housing, safety, community, healthcare, communication, education / news. If we can get those with working only very little, living mostly a life of leisure, that's already luxury. Everything on top of that advanced technology can give us is gravy.
Like building tons of greenhouses to grow food beyond "subsistence farming" locally and using simple farming robots that are not harder to assemble than 3D printers, or genetically engineering food.
What technology can't give us is a culture where greed and politics doesn't lead to irrational, undesirable and unequal outcomes. Or maybe our new savior ChatGPT can haha.
gulp
This doesn't mean we wouldn't have access to computers. We just wouldn't individually have personal computers all to ourselves unless you were someone who actually worked in the tech industry and needed constant access to perform your job duties.
A planned economy that functions at optimum efficiency is a communists wet dream of course.
We are living in a false-scarcity society when we could be living in a post-scarcity one.
This a thousand times. The world is throwing away resources at an astounding rate while people are sick, homeless and starving because of numbers on digital ledgers. We need to drop the whole idea of money. It's served its purpose, run its course and has since turned into a life on this planet threatening perversion.
I think money existed well before false-scarcity. It is the wrong enemy. I know close to nothing about economy so I would trust economists like Varoufakis and the like.
That's true, but it's served it's purpose and it's time has passed.
What are "Decent Living Standards?"
I'd bet that they're at least one step down from what the usual Westerner is accustomed to.
I bet you are basing your concept of the "usual" Westerner on your own experience, and you might be surprised at how the actual average person lives even in the "West".
But to answer your question, the article defines decent living standards as:
Nutritious food is unavailable to an alarming number of Americans, transit is a mess and almost exclusively car-centered, healthcare and education are severely stratified along economic conditions, and almost everything on that list is a commodity. The USA has sanitation systems almost everywhere, but that's just because rich poop and poor poop all smells like poop. Wherever the wealthy can isolate their own sanitation, they do.
Out of that the US lacks health care for all, and it lacks transit pretty much everywhere outside of the large cities. Even the cities pretty much have nothing that reaches all the way out to the suburbs.
Where I live, you have to have a car to have a decent quality of life. People give up their homes before they give up their cars. So transportation needs to be addressed in order to have the quality of life promised. Most of the places that are food insecure are all about politics and bad people blocking food resources rather than the food not being available.
That's exactly what the article proposed:
'Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity, depending on our assumptions about distribution and technological deployment. "
So if you and everyone are willing to live on 30% less "money", worldwide poverty would be eliminated.
That is definitely not what is presented in what you quoted.
Out of our current productive capabilities (how much money is "created" if you want), we would only need 30% of it to get 8.5 billion people to a "decent living standard".
That isnt a 30% reduction, it's only needing to make 30% of what we already are doing.
That's the same thing. The paper is arguing against the need to increase production vs redistribution of what is currently produced.
Where does that 30% come from? They are explicitly saying that their analysis isn't about increasing production of anything. Redistribution means taking away from the rich developed population to give to the poor. They said take 30% and redistribute it. If you are on Lemmy, that includes you.
That is not my interpretation on the paper. It's not taking 30% and spreading it. It's we only ever needed to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed for everyone to reach those standards.
"Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments."
I don't understand what you mean by those two sentences. They seem to be in conflict with each other.
You have 100 coins. To say we need to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed means you now have only 70 coins.
"leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.”
You had 100 coins and now you have 70. You can still buy luxuries but 30% less than what you had before it was redistributed.
I think my sticking point is that it's not 30 of your coins, necessarily. This is probably where I'm going wrong, but I might only have 100 coins, but there's a multitude of people that have 1,000 coins, and some still that have 10,000 coins.
I feel like I'm muddling up production/living standards and just plain wealth, but not every individual would need to give 30%. There would be a total amount equaling 30% that is re-allocated.
The article was about production, not wealth. While Bezos certainly uses 1000x the production compared to a regular person, he doesn't use the 1Billion times that his wealth represents. He doesn't eat 1B cheeseburgers every day. So while you'd get more out of the 30% of extremely wealthy, it wouldn't be proportional to their wealth and there's only .1% of the population that's in that category.
Jesus christ dude give it a rest.
Easterners have running water, they have cell phones, they make trash that goes to landfills, they also have A/C systems, they drive cars
When I read "West", I read "developed world".
Japan, South Korea, Tawain, etc, are as developed as the West. Most of China is now too, but there are billions more that aren't developed.
"Global north" is probably a better term to describe level of development. "West" also includes a cultural component.
Westerners eat meat everyday, nearly everyone drives cars everywhere, they buy heaps of cheap clothes and electronics made by slave or near-slave labor, they drink coffee and eat chocolate grown by the same. They go on expensive, polluting and disruptive globetrotting vacations. You think all that and more will stick around in a more equitable society?
I'm sorry I wasn't inclusive enough in my chastising, Commissar. It'll be the same story for them, too.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-017-1650-0
If we take all the type of living standards into consideration from all over the world
Then I guess the median living standards would be the living standards of the middle class people of countries like Indian, Brazil and all (the developing countries basically)
"I have a magical reality-changing glove. Should I change the nature of beings to want to share for the benefit of all? Nah, I'm gonna remove a random half of them from existence. It's clearly the ONLY thing I could possibly do to solve the problem! I'm so smart and awesome!"
yeah the false dichotomy represented by Thanos is the propaganda.
Changing people to share wouldn't stop environmental collapse caused by overpopulation.
He wanted people to see the improvement and freely choose to not repeat the problem.
Fine, then he can change it so people only need half the resources. There are innumerable other options that don't involve killing people when you have a reality altering glove.
I'm skeptical. I just skimmed the paper, but most of it seems to be taking a financial/macro-economic perspective without too much analysis on individual resources availability and the damage just current levels of output are causing to our environment/resources. I've seen other research that claim we are already over the carrying capacity of Earth, some say by a large margin (e.g. carrying capacity is 2 billion people). I'm pretty sure humans are already using (and degrading) the majority of Earth's arable land, for instance.
This is a major flaw in science and basic economic comprehension. You could grow enough potatoes to feed the world enough calories with just the area of France. We could build huge apartment blocks surrounded by farmland and connected via tiny mono rails. We could build apartments and appliances and computers that last for a century. We could genetically engineer microalgae to taste like pancake butter. If we half the number of required workers, we'd save a mountain of resources on commute. We could design everything to be recyclable. Wind energy with Kites Power gives us near unlimited energy. Our footprint could be tiny but with the luxury of free time, learning, arts and living in a community and in nature.
We are nowhere near carrying capacity, we're just over because we waste so much on consumerism, planned obsolescence, unsustainable crops and artificial scarcity.
Our civilization is a fucking joke but science treats current conditions as if they were normal and immutable.
Scientists know we need to change but unfortunately if we don't present our research in terms of how it will benefit the economy, those who actually control if things will change simply ignore it because their power of authority is based on the strength of the economy.
It really fucking sucks. I have a degree in conservation science, and we were literally taught to always consider the economic perspective because that's literally the only part anyone with any power to affect legislation or industry practices will pay attention to it.
Yeah I feel like this is the biggest open secret we never talk about. Like ideology is just a lie, like a nursery rhyme we repeat to keep calm, but completely irrelevant in the face of how well people are doing economically.
But it's been shown that a serious green new deal or "war economy" would be great for the economy. Just not for the pocket books of those who own "the world" like factories or are part of the value chain that is based on either fossil fuel or industrial processes that emit greenhouse gases otherwise.
Basically we could have looked at the previous investments and business value that would be lost or be "redistributed" if we had adapted. Like every long term investment in the world is at risk. It could be in the order of the value of the whole world, and that's the "power" this idea of climate adaptation was up against.
Be a lot less far from carrying capacity if people even tried to be sustainable.):
We have already enough resources for everyone. It is just that the 1% is hoarding all of it.
Does anybody have sources around this stat? I fully believe it, but I'd like to have references to point to for myself in the future
There's a source in the image. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
Oh good to know i just don't know how to read
If you live in the US, have you considered running for office?
I saw this infographic posted a few days ago and it's a bit misleading. The percentages are based on biomass, not population. I also don't remember what the original source is, and it looks like it got cropped off the one you posted here. If you remember the source, could you link it?
Oh I got it from here but I tracked it down with a Google search.
I can't say if this is the original source but maybe. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Biomass VS population makes some sense though. Having a million ants would be sure, lots, but having a million elephants would be WTF wholy shit!
Yes, and combined with the data presented by OP, we can readily see that this absolutely does not need to be the case.
Combine these again with food waste data and you will see that the majority of those animals will be slaughtered only for the products made from them to wind up being thrown away without ever having been used. We (capitalist owners of industry) demand the slaughter of these animals en masse knowing full well that most of what comes from the act won't sell simply because there is a slim chance that it might sell, and we (society as a whole which has the capability of governance) have failed to make it cost prohibitive to do so. It's fucking disgusting.
There is absolutely no justification, other than to chase the profit incentive which I do not consider valid, for our practices in animal husbandry that have led to the overpopulation of certain species.
Yeah the picture doesn't really present the issue. The 60% livestock isn't comparable to wild life. It's much worse than that.
I could also say that 100% of bricks are man made and there are no wild bricks.
Similarly, live stock is a product, that shouldn't and wouldn't exist in the first place. It does not represent animals in a way that is comparable to wild life that have full lives.
The 60% livestock does not live long happy lives. It's constantly being replaced by new livestock.
So sure at any given moment there might be 60% mass of animals classified as livestock, but if we were to count the actual number of animals over a year, it would be closer to 100%.
This somehow completely disregards the most critical side-effect of overpolulation esepcially when you calculate in dying oceans and trees.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
The sustainable capacity was calculated to be around 2 billion. This is not affected by food output.
So farm less cattle and get away from fossil fuels.
So what you're saying is that earth under 8-9 billion people isn't sustainable and we need to start sacrificing our cars and meat due to overpolulation?
I mean those are good decisions anyway, I would 1000% rather take 30 minute nap on a train/bys or ride a bike/electric motorcycle on the way to work than sit in traffic for an hour. As for meat, I'm not vegan, but I could be if seiten was more common.
There is almost no public transport outside cities. I don't remember the last time I had the opportunity to use one.
It's not just meat. Milk, cheese and related products (pizza?), clothing, oils, gas production, ectera ectera. Even fertilizer for crops. I'd rather have sustainable earth population than give up things that make me happy
Have you tried the alternatives lately? Impossible meat is indistinguishable from the real thing, and Quorn combined with some marmite or chicken flavoring is an excellent affordable alternative to beef and chicken.
Plant milks are pretty damn good, vegan cheese is getting close.
The others I'm a little surprised make you happier than alternatives. Plant fibers are the bomb for clothes, gas production is... Not something I associate with happiness. Mushroom leather is looking very promising as a replacement for animal leather.
Plant oils are easily as good as animal fats.
Having public transit to drive you around would make 99.9999% of people happier than fighting the rest in traffic.
Japan has unmanned stations in the boonies where its just 1 line that splits at stations for trains to pass. They run regular service through tiny towns this way. Elsewhere and in the event more rural areas, buses and vans fill that role.
Bicycles and mopeds can move >10x more people per lane of road and requires <1/10th the pavement for parking. You dont understand what a blight cars are on urban development and human health until you've spent time in places with effective public transit.
The meat thing is a little more subjective, IDK how far off we are from being able to reasonably get rid of all animal products, but there are certainly areas it can be decreased without negatively affecting peoples standard of living.
so you rather genocide billions of people than give up minor comforts ?
(hyperbole)
on a different note there are a lot of things that can and have to be changed to live sustainably but these changes have to be addressed systematically
How about "we should regulate our birth rates and constant population growth for your capitalist machine is not a healthy way forward for this planet for literally anyone living here except for the rich" instead of your "so you want a genocide?"
My capitalist machiene?
Our problem is distribution. It's a hard problem to solve but it's much better than the easy solution.
The problem stopping distribution to where stuff is needed is money, the people who have it, the people who owe it, the funny patterns it makes on stock markets, in hedge funds etc.
Money was ok as a means to allow people to exchange their different trades into things they need to live. But it has moved so far beyond that it has become ridiculous.
Resources aren't evenly distributed naturally, some area may not have enough resources.
It takes more resources to get more resources, we may be measuring 30% of total resources, but not 30% of resource capacity.
I'm fine with population control, but it should be implemented willingly at an individual level, and pushed via education and community acceptance. I catch a small amount of flak for not having kids, but wife catches a lot more.
Not sure what you're trying to say, but the paper assumes current population trends and means 30% of currently available resources in 2025 would be enough to give everyone a decent living standard (DLS) in 2050. We have everything we need to do this right now.
A replacement birthrate leads to a more stable society. The elderly who are unable to work and ill need to be cared for. If ever fewer young and able people have to take care of ever more elderly, it won’t have a good outcome. Not having children of your own is being a burden on society.
damn, don't replace anti-natalism with forced natalism. Thanks.
No force involved. Lots of people are drags on society in different ways without that being illegal.
Friend, social pressure is a form of coercion.
Only if you assume that the amount of production for a hour of labor stays the same. Workers today accomplish much more in a given time period than workers 65 years ago. The problem is that value is horded instead of being made available to the people that created it.
Feeding an elderly person, washing them, changing their diapers takes the same amount of time as it did 150 years ago. Due to better health care and longer lives, the total cost of elderly health care and pensions eat up a lot of that productivity gain.
That's certainly not true. We now have washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, kitchen machines, gas or electric stoves, food delivery services etc. All this makes carrying for others easier. Plus being more efficient at paid work could be translated into less working hours, thus more time to care for others instead of more money captured by capitalists.
Nope. Absolutely wrong. You can cook food faster than you could 150 years ago using microwaves, induction cook tops, non-stick pan and other advancements in kitchen tech. Modern care aids reduce the time it takes to wash a person, and allows them to wash themselves much later in life before they need partial or full assistance. Modern adult diapers come off easier, seal better, and absorb more, so they have fewer blow-outs and it takes fewer wipes to clean up a person.
Edit: let's also add that better productivity in other areas enables fewer people do more work, which (should) free up a larger portion of the population for elder-care.
You realize 150 years ago was the year before the telephone was invented, right? Most houses didn't even have electricity back then.
I was an in-home caregiver before COVID, and we certainly didn't have to warm water on a wood fired stove to bathe the clients with. I didn't have to scrub the laundry with a washboard, we had a laundry machine. I could call 911 without interrupting CPR, which wouldn't have been possible even 50 years ago.
It takes fewer resources to care for elderly than raise children. Not raising a child means there's a surplus to care for the elderly. Then the elderly die leaving more surplus behind. It's not only a theoretical based on money but we have all of history that shows this truth. For example WW2 killed the most productive members of society leaving only the elderly to be cared for. The result was a global economic boom.
The problem is a combination of intrinsic psychological biases of those with means. Once they reach a certain threshold, they become driven to keep accumulating until they own everything. Gotta catch 'em all.
This threshold is likely different for everyone, and may not be related to other thresholds of accumulation, such as:
Some capitalists are self aware enough to recognize the impulse is not sustainable, (also that profits are better had with happy workers) which often comes from having risen to wealth from more modest means. (But not always).
At any rate, rich dudes who drop billions into massive public improvement projects are rare, and when they do they tend to see it as revenue source, or at least something to exploit to improve their brand image.
So the next step for society is to discover a sociological technique that allows rich guys to think I have enough, to drop their surplus into the hands of the community (say the general fund of the local governing body)
That or accept that we are too simple a species to navigate some very imminent great filters. We may not count as a space-faring civilization that might encounter other space-faring civilizations.
This is not a new idea. Fourth International–Posadism opined that developing communism (or a refinement thereof) would be a prerequisite for space colonization. I'd argue changing from capitalism is a prerequisite for societal sustainability more than a couple of centuries from now.
It's over, I've made you into the Adidas tracksuit wojak and me into the cute nonbinary vibes wojak
[screaming in inefficiency]
We have more than enough to make sure everyone has more than enough. Poverty is deliberate and premeditated.
How do we know who to give food to of people aren't competing against each other to hoard as much wealth as they can?
Earlobe to bellybutton depth ratio. If the number is odd, you get tacos. If it's even, you get tacos. Other options also available.
No u don't understand I need to be mean to others it's just how it is I don't make the rules. Wanting the best for everyone and working to achieve that is when it's Not Realistic and the more you are not finding excuses to hurt others the more Not Realistic it is. Hope this helps
It is definitely possible a "decent" living standard is lower in their minds then mine or yours or ours. I am very curious
No no, there Are too many people... just of a specific social class.
Not once have I cried for a dead fascist. But I'm sure there is one that will bring me to tears, gotta keep trying.
Fascists, Oligarchs, go through them all and you'll find a reason to shed tears at the end.
Multiple things can be true at once.
I think that humanity only optimized for quantity of life, not quality of life in the last 200 years. That doesn't really make sense. All of our needs can be fulfilled with 30% of the current workforce.
I agree with this, but I still feel there are too many people. Like we don't need 8.5 billion. We could use so much less stuff if we just stopped fucking so much. We could REDUCE the size of our grid significantly. That seems like a good goal.
Btw genocide is a dumb way to achieve this. Plenty easy to just let people live to death since you can provide for 3x the number of people.
Edit: I thought I made it clear with the above line, but I'm not suggesting fucking eugenics. How do you get that from what I said..? I literally specified the fucking opposite. Unless people view any form of population controls in any sense to be eugenics. Which is just fucking braindead.
Providing people with high standard of living lowers birth rates. It's a well established effect, every single country with high standard of living has low birthrates. Providing people with sexual education and sexual health also lowers birth rates. Educated people that have easy access to birth control will have fewer children.
Provide people with education and things they need and overpopulation is an issue that fixes itself.
That sounds like a great way to reduce the population. I don't understand why when I say that we should have less people, everyone assumes I mean like next year. Fucking generations away we will have less people. That's good. We don't have to abuse or hurt or even cajole people into it.
Because, as a general rule, people are bad at long-term thinking. Either that, or they are intentionally being obtuse.
Congratulations, now you are depleting our planet's resources even faster.
The most effective way of population control is education, curbing of religious influences and raising of living standards. Just look up "demographic change". In the 1880, German fertility rates were between 5.5 and 5. That's on par with modern day Niger and Mali, some of the most fertile nations in the world. As soon as the mortality rates of German children dropped and a social net was established, rates fell. And this has happened all over the world. Unless we get taken in by abrahamic fertility cults again, a healthier, better educated and equal society will stabilize the world's population at around 9 billion. And we can easily support them, if we work towards it. No need for pseudoeugenics or other population control mechanisms.
I think im the only one who agrees with you...we don't need this many people, and no one asks to be born. This doesn't mean we kill off people already here at all. Just stop feeling like kids are a requirement to live, or adopt.
Think about it. One person. Has 4 kids. Each kid wants their own house. Then each of those kids has kids that want their own house. None of that is sustainable. We wouldn't have to all live in 1 bedroom apartments if there were less people.
I agree. The earth's population has nearly doubled since I was a kid, with no particular planning or preparation, and now that food and housing shortages have gotten unbearably bad, we're told that we can't go back to having less people or everything will collapse, as though the planet is a MLM company.
You can't just declare that there are too many people and then expect some other faceless masses to go do the dying somewhere else. If you actually want to lower birth rates, you need to invest in public education and healthcare, and you need to have a plan to care for the unbalanced number of elderly retirees.
Did I say we don't fucking do that? Did I say that I expect some faceless group to be shot in the hills? Or was that your first thought as to the only solution possible?
Really it just speaks to your own mind.
We already don't care for our aging population well at all. Reducing population requires way more planning and resources than you think. Nations that are actually losing population are really struggling with this reality.
I agree, they are struggling under capitalism. But a shrinking population doesn't necessitate suffering. At least not any more, where we could provide for our elderly with great efficiency if we were inclined to do so. It would not turn a profit, but some things are important in life.
No, but I didn't say that either. You did say to just people die from living. Old people need young people to support them. If everyone just stops fucking, as you suggested, society would collapse under the weight of all the suffering of old people. Those will be your grandparents and then your parents and then you, and probably your kids, too, because that sort of disaster lasts a long time.
I meant we let people live out their lives, and eventually die. Not cut off their medicine. Jesus dude...
It’s got most of the same issues as eugenics - yeah, it’d be nice if nobody had to suffer obvious and objective genetic diseases but it consistently immediately turns into “well but I think being a red head is a genetic disease”. You have to consider how a solution can be achieved to really weigh its benefit versus alternatives.
We can feed everybody by Luigi-ing a rounding error’s worth of billionaires. Or we can reduce global population by a factor of 10, which is almost certainly going to disproportionately favor rich white dudes, do nothing to that handful of sociopaths, and they’ll still burn the planet to the ground.
Ok but I never said anything about eugenics or a specific peoples. I said "we should have less people." And everyone got upset assuming I want to genocide the undesirables.
I literally just don't think we need 8 billion people. In no way did I suggest that we do it in a specific way or targeting specific people. Just a general 25-40% reduction in population over a few generations.
Literally all that needs to happen is more birth control for everyone. Not forced.
Idk why everyone gets so incensed by this.
The issue is people have gone down this line of thinking dozens of times and it always ends the same way. Your inability to see that is how we get there.
Population is dropping in developed countries. Nothing needs to be done but let nature take its course. That's not anyone deciding anything.
“Raise the standard of living for everyone and population will level out” is a perfectly reasonable angle. Just say that, because it’s dangerous to leave open ended.
The OP specifically said "just stop fucking so much"
No one said or even implied eugenics.
Go back to reddit please
I mean I understand that people are racist pieces of shit and will attempt to hijack absolutely anything that exists to pervert it into a mechanism of hate. But like.... We can could at least try to better the world.
I think that not having such a massive population devouring the ecosystem would be beneficial in the long term. That can be affected in a multitude of ways but mostly by getting the people alive right now to manage their consumption. Once the "line go down" from that, the generations long dastardly project of ...checks notes...educating people and providing them with medical care as needed, the population will in all probably go down as a matter of course.
There's actually enough liveable land for every adult on earth to have 2 acres worth.
Ok, you can get the stuff near the north pole.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
I wonder how much of the problem would be avoided if the top personal CO2 emissions per capita were capped at Scandinavian upper middle-class level since 1970 (imported CO2 included). Flying on vacation only occasionally, comfy car yes, SUV just if needed, nice modern house yes, wasteful lack of insulation no, buy what you need and treat yourself to some fashion, electronics etc. yes, mindless consumerism no. Just a comfy standard of living.
I wonder if the mindless consumerism in certain countries with insane emissions per capita makes up a big part of the problem, or if the sheer number of "decent standard of living" would have pushed us over the edge anyway.
Scholars, the real deal, are rare for a reason - few people choose knowledge over wealth and power. There lies the crux of the matter, since anyone who pursues the other two paths would be the antithesis of the system so designed.
It's a nice model, but it runs too counter to human nature to work; and there is precious little (if anything) that can change the nature of a species as expansive as humanity.
You need to read more anthropology studies on how society developed across hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that is "human nature" is that we will do what we view as best for our interests.
Those interests are entirely dependent upon the systems we live under. Change the overarching systems that dictate our lives and people's behavior will change with it.
If anything, the current society we live in has us far removed from our "natural" behavior and, instead, forces us to go against that nature in order to meet our needs under these oppressive and exploitative systems that have only existed for barely a fraction of humanity's existence.
We'll agree to disagree I think - unless you are a specialist in anthropology (a doctorate perhaps?), in which case I'm happy to cede my position to your expertise.
No, but PhD anthropologist David Graeber wrote an entire series of books in the subject, from which I gained my perspective.
Here is a small quote from him.
there is no such thing as human nature
That girl is totally cute. Her hair is just like mine (well, mine is 20% longer but still)
is she a character from somewhere? Can i find more from her?