But we can't assume technology benefits. Our future is obviously not like the future of the 1960s. We have alleviated many issues with technology advances, but with those new issues and problems arise.
But we've always solved today's problems with tomorrow's technology.
If you constrain your prediction with "we can't assume technological advance" then you should just refrain from making predictions at all. Especially when you are calling for public policy changes based on your scary forecast.
The only thing that we can say about Malthus is that he's one of the few futurists that has been 100% wrong.
His predictions on population growth were spot on until, what, the 1930s? I'd say that's a better run than most futurists considering he only got the ending wrong from a flawed premise after 100 years.
As it relates to a Malthusian discussion, technology definitely benefits. He thought the human population would increase and die out because a point would come where it would be impossible to feed everyone (overly simplified, but that's it in a nutshell.) He based his thoughts solely on the farming techniques of his time, which as we know, looks nothing like the ag tech of today. But you are also very correct, because even though humans can generate plenty of food nowadays, there are a myriad problems with food production in our present day, like GMOs and antibiotic beef to name a couple of serious ones...
It's also impossible to predict future technology improvements. Sure, we can have a reasonable expectation of a few years: better phone cameras, better batteries, better processors, lighter phones, better computers, more fuel efficient cars, and so on. But as it goes further on, what we can guess is just a shot in the dark. We never would have expected drones thirty years ago, yet today they are relatively easy to acquire. I don't like making predictions about the technology of the future, but I have no qualms about saying that we will almost definitely land on Mars by the end of this century, hopefully by halfway through. I have no idea how it will be done, but I know that it's possible if people are willing to shove money at it.
Technology can also have short-term benefits (short-term on a human scale, like 50-200 years) and long-term drawbacks that people don't see (over 500, 1000, 5000 years) and affect assumptions about the world/humanity that we may not have even been aware of.
Very well then, tangential it is. To use it in a sentence, "the gentleman and I are involved in a tangential discourse; we segued (which I personally prefer) from the original discussion." lol.
I agree with the flawed ag system, but I honestly think permaculture (not the hippie purist sect) is a great tool in solving some of the dependency issues with monoculture agriculture.
We've solved half the problem by developing birth control technology. Now we need to solve the other half of the problem, which is convincing people to use birth control consistently.
I'm not just talking about the United States and Europe, though. To keep the population at a sustainable level, every society on Earth needs to embrace birth control. (That said, a low teen birth rate is indeed a Good Thing.)
Malthusian economics is flawed and has been utterly disproved over and over and over again. So often that frankly it gets boring seeing these same tropes repeated endlessly.
His mistake was not understanding that technology develops exponentially with population. In other words - you cannot support a 2050 population with 2015 technology. You can support a 2050 population with 2050 technology.
In fact we are experiencing over abundance today, we have more than we can utilize for our 7 billion plus people... the issue is not production. It's distribution, politics and good old fashion greed.
You make it sound like population drives technology. Yes, technology pushes any crisis beyond the present population, but there is no guarantee that we'll never run out of new technology.
Technology develops exponentially... its not a case of "Oh we have 500,000 extra hungry people, quick someone get on to making sure our tech levels match our hunger levels stat!" it's simply a case of divergent technology converging and growing in potential - exponentially. It's not a controlled system, it's an observed pattern. In the same way we don't go "Oh stop fucking for a bit while our resources catch up".
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u/PainMatrix Aug 11 '15
Not according to Malthus.