I’ve argued this before as something to be hopeful. Fixing specific areas like rivers on fire or polluted lakes or even restoring coral reefs is more possible than most people think. But, global things like how much water there is world wide available for drinking in lakes, reservoirs and aquifers or total top soil everywhere and of course carbon in the atmosphere are different kinds of problems that are not well addressed. The Great Lakes were able to be cleaned up partly because industry and the pollution that went along with it moved from that region to Asia.
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ok, if you don’t have an answer, the biggest consumer spending jump on amazon is for the digital services category. it is not (surprise!) their per capita physical goods consumption. that was true for a young consumer cohort in the 2000s, but people generally increase their consumption during child-raising years. but the trend has in fact reversed. people spend more on higher quality apparel that lasts longer than before, and with better logistics the environmental impact of such goods is lower.
NYC and many other places in the US used to just take a barge a little ways out to sea and dump all the trash from the city. Now we ship trash to Indonesia. That’s part of how the US is cleaner than it used to be.
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Whether digital services have grown faster or not is not really relevant. And, people spending more on higher quality apparel doesn’t follow from anything you said, so, ‘cite’, but good if that’s true.
I’m not really making an anti-delivery take, which is what you seem to be assuming. People were talking about DoorDash and I brought that to packaging…not delivery per se. Driving one truck around delivering stuff is obviously more efficient than everyone driving to the store. But it’s not more efficient than just not buying stuff. And, buying every meal that includes two or three or four layers of packaging is not good either.
ok but sustainable packaging is also solvable
Didn‘t he also make the point that agriculture resulted in the product of food surpluses which allowed societies to afford specialists and in turn more prosperous? This should result in an improvement of the quality of life.
I’m currently reading Slouching Towards Utopia (which is where I cribbed the Malthus stuff from), and it states that those things made only the smallest of improvements over a very long period. It’s much more numbers-based and, presumably, academically researched than Diamond’s stuff. The general premise of the book seems to be very related to the current discussion. I’ve only read the first few chapters so I can’t comment on the whole thing, but it seems to be leaning a lot more towards microbet’s side then CN/VFS.
There’s been a bunch of articles about the book this month if anybody wants to read more about the book. A google news search for ‘Brad DeLong’ will turn up a lot of results.
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To piggy-back on Zikzak, it’s debatable whether the average standard of living of a hunter-gatherer was better or worse than someone living as a serf in 700 AD or as a bricklayer or baker in Ancient Egypt.
Specialists may have increased the availability of consumer goods, but it also led to bureaucrats which led to taxes and organized warfare, which is on top of the increase in diseases from both domestic animals as well as increased living density.
It is pretty funny to see the usual suspects get mad. Malthusian nonsense is not something that fits well on the right/left spectrum. It’s on the JiggsCasey and ZeroHedge vs Everyone else spectrum.
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Guy in the 1790s wrote about something or other
not sure what. But…
https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/22730115653
serious people will laugh at you if you ever suggest that resource depletion might cause problems. And if they say the magic word “Malthusian” they will win.
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Shapiro is right there. It’s kind of sad that you would try to discredit anyone else with a 12 year old Shapiro quote. The link he shared is interesting:
Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.
We weren’t talking about The Population Bomb or Malthus. What I posted was a link to something zz posted which was The Limits To Growth (via the link to Steady State Economy - a theory that the major classical economists talked about (and neo-classical chicago school economists dismissed)), and talked about how it was supported by a 2022 study published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology. But, you have your Shapiro link to a bet.
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How much food and packaging waste is caused by people living alone unnecessarily?
I can assure you my solitude is absolutely necessary.
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Which I responded with how this was “repackaged malthus” - and it is.
And honestly I’m out, the whole you’re just like a ben shapiro quote from 2010 is pathetic and shows you’re too butthurt to actually talk about this reasonably.
And that repackaged non-sense is The Population Bomb, which no one was talking about?
I’m not butthurt. It was just pointed out that your stupid knee jerk reaction about something being Malthusian was something that Ben Shapiro did as well. You making stupid reactionary posts does not hurt my butt.
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Do you imagine my butt is hurt because you think your arguments “Malthusian” “debunked” “Shapiro is right…look at this bet” were defeating me or something?
Oh yeah, your butt is hurt because of a linked tweet that was 10 years old, but your entire point is “lol, look at this 224 year old essay”.
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Packaging is really ridiculous. i can’t believe how much waste I generate sometimes.
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for me right now I actually measured it - it’s 1,5 of those really large (i forget how many gallons) black garbage bags per week right now. I got it under 1 bag this week, but it’s a struggle due to how much i get delivered. That’s like, several hundred pounds of trash per year for just me. lol.
I’ve long wrestled about what I can personally do for the environment. I drive a ridiculous v8 no one has any business driving, given the state of the climate, but I rationalize it by the fact that I drive less than ~4000 miles a year typically, and that could be even way lower if I skipped my quarterly vegas trips. so I think my average carbon output is probably lower than a lot of prius drivers that commute, but w/e.
I no longer believe personal actions really matter with this shit and I’m not willing to shoulder any responsibility for it anymore. my current thing is trying to reduce plastic waste and recycle more, but even that feels a little futile because in CA even if you throw recyclables right in the trash, the garbage companies will recycle it for a profit anyway.
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