Malthus didn’t put up a particular date for his prediction.

  • fake_meows
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    1 month ago

    The LtG showed that if 1972 population had frozen at that level, there was STILL eventually a crash within a few hundred years.

    And they also carefully stated that if you grew population from 1972 to 1990 and then had no further population growth (same idea starting 20 years late), the crash was before 2100. The window for any kind of sustainable population control would have already closed within the next 20 years.

    What you’re outlining is a scenario where let’s say it’s roughly approximate to growing population from 1972 to 2022, then DECREASING population growth. Let’s say if we could snap our fingers and put today’s population of 8.3B to 1990s level of 5.3B, well we can already interpolate from the LtG that this doesn’t get us to 2100, they already spelled that out.

    You need the following : Population rapidly back to 1990 or 1972 levels, double/unlimited resources, pollution controls, increased agriculture etc. Like basically every variable beyond all the most unrealistic scenarios they modelled.

    You’re saying “there is a solution” but I think basically a lot of people would technically need to die somehow, given where we are in this story. So just ethically, no, there isn’t a solution.

    The “voluntarily reduced population” was what they called “perfect birth control”. They showed that this led to a crash also. To really halt population growth into a “steady state” you need to place a strict license on reproduction to get zero growth, like an imposed law or whatever.

    In the paper LtG 30yr recalibration, the model is validated against historical data and basically they say that the boundary in the original model was running out of resources, but in the revised model it’s pollution, but the limits are still in force. Almost all the other variables are in line to the original model. Resources and pollution are the main difference from the 1972 study, and they diverge in opposite directions and basically cancel the effect of the change in the other, so there is no change to the overall summed together story.