The only hard limit on our resources that we currently know of are the energy output of our sun in the short term and the energy output of reachable stars in the long. We are not constrained on food, space, energy, etc on earth in the short term. We have only artificial political constraints where the stationary bandits ruling the various geopolitical units have subsidized the creation of narratives justifying your constraint. Humans do not consume wealth, they create it.
I think this is both trivially true an irrelevant. The fastest car that we can build is only limited by the speed of light, but we can’t really make cars that fast for a vast number of reasons that I am too lazy to spell out. I am not interested in a theoretical world where if we run out of phosphorus on Earth we just make new atoms using fusion or we make rockets to mine distant asteroids. I’m interested in Earth on the 21st century, where if you interrupt the transit of boats in the Black Sea people in Africa die of hunger. We are, in fact limited in the amount of food we can produce, and although we could increase the amount of the Earth surface devoted to crops, that comes at a high ecological cost. Same thing for many other resources.
We are constrained on food. There is a limited among of land suitable for farming, most of which is in use, a limited amount of fresh water, and we are close to ceilings on optimising agriculture with machinery and fertilisers. The Ukranian war is affecting food security, which means there’s no slack.
The Ukranian war is affecting food security, which means there’s no slack.
This is clearly wrong. We only produce enough food to feed the people who are alive right now, and market (and other) incentives mean it’s not worth it to build in lots of additional redundancy into the system which might come at too high a cost.
One way to think of this is in terms of the long-run price elasticity of supply. How much more wheat do you think the US would produce in ~ 5 years if the government increased agricultural subsidies to double the revenue producers get from the sale of per kg of wheat, for instance? I think a reasonable answer is “more than two times as much”. Given that food is a negligible fraction of US gross domestic product today, the additional benefit from having more people is clearly going to overwhelm the increased relative price of food.
I’m not sure that the production of food is so elastic (it could be, I simply don’t know). A few things make me thing that it is not the case. The crops we use are already very efficient and a big fraction of the soil is already being used for agricultural purposes. I don’t know if you have data to backup that we could easily double the production with incentives.
This paper quotes the long-run price elasticity of wheat growing area at around 0.37, though they acknowledge that there’s significant controversy over these price elasticities and the exact values estimated are highly sensitive to modeling assumptions; from what I can gather the paper is actually on the more pessimistic side of the literature.
That’s just the growing area elasticity; it doesn’t take into account other margins on which you can increase production (such as better tech, more capital investment, productivity gains from having more people etc.), but even at 0.37 a doubling of the price should give you a 30% increase in wheat supply.
The paper also cites elasticities for many different kinds of crops, and the price elasticity of supply for soybeans and wheat is significantly higher than the price elasticity of supply for e.g. rice. This heterogeneity further leads me to believe that there’s another margin we can push on, which is to use crops whose supply is more price elastic as overall crop demand goes up. For example, this paper from Brazil estimates a national long-run soybean price elasticity of supply around 0.8, and in some regions of Brazil the elasticity exceeds 1.
I think I still stand by my prediction that the long-run price elasticity of supply for wheat should be well above 0.37 and slightly above 1, but this would come from pushing on many different margins and not just increasing land use.
This is clearly wrong. We only produce enough food to feed the people who are alive right now, and market (and other) incentives mean it’s not worth it to build in lots of additional redundancy into the system which might come at too high a cost
Of course its worth it...it saves lives. People in the ancient world built grain stores, because they understood that. We switched to a model based on global trade and just-in-time sourcing, which turned out to be fragile in the face of disease and war.
Globally, famines occur, and the war in Ukraine is affecting food supplies in Europe and other places. It’s not affecting the US much, because the US is a long way away, and a big agricultural producer...IE, it’s a special case and not proof that there is always enough food.
Not to be crude, but due to global inequality in income and wealth, it’s quite possible that it’s not worth it to build redundancy to agricultural production in the US in order to save the lives of people in Niger in the event of a global crisis causing disruptions in the supply of food.
When I say “it’s not worth it due to incentives” I mean that it’s not profitable to do so, in the sense that the expected revenue you would get from it is less than the expected cost, or at least you think this is the case. Note that modern financial instruments such as commodity futures and options provide great flexibility to farmers who try to lock in prices in advance or overproduce to meet potential surges in demand.
Globally, famines occur, and the war in Ukraine is affecting food supplies in Europe and other places. It’s not affecting the US much, because the US is a long way away, and a big agricultural producer...IE, it’s a special case and not proof that there is always enough food.
I never said “there’s always enough food”. Saying that “there are sometimes famines, so food is a binding constraint on increasing population right now” is a bad argument. It’s like saying “the US sometimes has power cuts, so power supply is a binding constraint on increasing population”—it doesn’t take into account the cost of having a power grid that operates at 100% reliability at all times, which could plausibly not be worth it from a profit and loss perspective.
It’s worthwhile for a society to do things that prevent members of that society from dying unnecessarily. I wasn’t speaking about the US specifically. I am not USian. The only thing I had to say about the US specifically was to say that it is relatively insulated from the problem. I was saying that society X needs it’s own reserves because the alternative, trying to ship resources from whatever they are cheap, is just too fragile and unreliable...it’s been tried, and failed.
When I say “it’s not worth it due to incentives” I mean that it’s not profitable to do so, in the sense that the expected revenue you would get from it is
I know. I know you are using the “dollar profit” definition of “worth”. Thats not the definition of “worth” that I am using.
it doesn’t take into account the cost of having a power grid that operates at 100% reliability at all times, which could plausibly not be worth it from a profit and loss perspective.
You also need to consider the question of how many people die unnecessarily in a very wealthy country because of an unreliable power supply. People were freezing death in Texas a few years ago.
I don’t think it’s worth continuing this discussion, as I have neither the energy nor the mental bandwidth to put into it right now. You’re going far away from the original claim about whether having more people would make each person better or worse off and discussing things which are quite irrelevant to that question.
This is the second time in this thread you bail out of a discussion this way, which I find extremely rude. Didn’t downvote it the first time but I will this time. I would suggest that next time just simply refrain from replying.
I find your reaction mystifying. Are you seriously downvoting me because I’m being truthful about why I don’t want to continue the discussion? You think it would be nicer to just ghost the person you’re talking to?
To some extent, yeah. If someone ghosts me in a discussion like this I think “ah yes, clearly I have bested them and they have no reply to make” and I feel good about myself. If they say I’m not worth talking to I feel bad about myself.
Of course it may not be a good community norm to do what’s nicer.
I note that your second sentence was kind of a parting blow, saying you’re not going to argue and then making one final argument.
I note that your second sentence was kind of a parting blow, saying you’re not going to argue and then making one final argument.
My argument is not about the object-level, it’s just an explanation of why I think it’s not worth continuing the discussion. I feel I should provide some explanation of why I want to cut the discussion off here, and for me what matters is whether we’re making claims that in principle could be falsified or not, and whether those claims actually relate to the question asked in the post.
For instance, when I give power cuts in the US as an analogy for why food insecurity doesn’t necessarily mean we’re bottlenecked by food supply in growing population, and I get a response that
“You also need to consider the question of how many people die unnecessarily in a very wealthy country because of an unreliable power supply. People were freezing death in Texas a few years ago.”
I mentally check out of the discussion because the counterparty is not even trying to understand my point and how it relates to the question raised by OP. I find conversations of this nature exhausting.
Fwiw, this is the tactic I often use in situations like this.
Yeah, I agree that tactic is better and I could have used it here. Thanks for pointing this out.
The only hard limit on our resources that we currently know of are the energy output of our sun in the short term and the energy output of reachable stars in the long. We are not constrained on food, space, energy, etc on earth in the short term. We have only artificial political constraints where the stationary bandits ruling the various geopolitical units have subsidized the creation of narratives justifying your constraint. Humans do not consume wealth, they create it.
I think this is both trivially true an irrelevant. The fastest car that we can build is only limited by the speed of light, but we can’t really make cars that fast for a vast number of reasons that I am too lazy to spell out. I am not interested in a theoretical world where if we run out of phosphorus on Earth we just make new atoms using fusion or we make rockets to mine distant asteroids. I’m interested in Earth on the 21st century, where if you interrupt the transit of boats in the Black Sea people in Africa die of hunger. We are, in fact limited in the amount of food we can produce, and although we could increase the amount of the Earth surface devoted to crops, that comes at a high ecological cost. Same thing for many other resources.
We are constrained on food. There is a limited among of land suitable for farming, most of which is in use, a limited amount of fresh water, and we are close to ceilings on optimising agriculture with machinery and fertilisers. The Ukranian war is affecting food security, which means there’s no slack.
This is clearly wrong. We only produce enough food to feed the people who are alive right now, and market (and other) incentives mean it’s not worth it to build in lots of additional redundancy into the system which might come at too high a cost.
One way to think of this is in terms of the long-run price elasticity of supply. How much more wheat do you think the US would produce in ~ 5 years if the government increased agricultural subsidies to double the revenue producers get from the sale of per kg of wheat, for instance? I think a reasonable answer is “more than two times as much”. Given that food is a negligible fraction of US gross domestic product today, the additional benefit from having more people is clearly going to overwhelm the increased relative price of food.
I’m not sure that the production of food is so elastic (it could be, I simply don’t know). A few things make me thing that it is not the case. The crops we use are already very efficient and a big fraction of the soil is already being used for agricultural purposes. I don’t know if you have data to backup that we could easily double the production with incentives.
This paper quotes the long-run price elasticity of wheat growing area at around 0.37, though they acknowledge that there’s significant controversy over these price elasticities and the exact values estimated are highly sensitive to modeling assumptions; from what I can gather the paper is actually on the more pessimistic side of the literature.
That’s just the growing area elasticity; it doesn’t take into account other margins on which you can increase production (such as better tech, more capital investment, productivity gains from having more people etc.), but even at 0.37 a doubling of the price should give you a 30% increase in wheat supply.
The paper also cites elasticities for many different kinds of crops, and the price elasticity of supply for soybeans and wheat is significantly higher than the price elasticity of supply for e.g. rice. This heterogeneity further leads me to believe that there’s another margin we can push on, which is to use crops whose supply is more price elastic as overall crop demand goes up. For example, this paper from Brazil estimates a national long-run soybean price elasticity of supply around 0.8, and in some regions of Brazil the elasticity exceeds 1.
I think I still stand by my prediction that the long-run price elasticity of supply for wheat should be well above 0.37 and slightly above 1, but this would come from pushing on many different margins and not just increasing land use.
Thanks, that was very informative! I update towards “it is still possible to produce more food” than we currently are
Of course its worth it...it saves lives. People in the ancient world built grain stores, because they understood that. We switched to a model based on global trade and just-in-time sourcing, which turned out to be fragile in the face of disease and war.
Globally, famines occur, and the war in Ukraine is affecting food supplies in Europe and other places. It’s not affecting the US much, because the US is a long way away, and a big agricultural producer...IE, it’s a special case and not proof that there is always enough food.
Not to be crude, but due to global inequality in income and wealth, it’s quite possible that it’s not worth it to build redundancy to agricultural production in the US in order to save the lives of people in Niger in the event of a global crisis causing disruptions in the supply of food.
When I say “it’s not worth it due to incentives” I mean that it’s not profitable to do so, in the sense that the expected revenue you would get from it is less than the expected cost, or at least you think this is the case. Note that modern financial instruments such as commodity futures and options provide great flexibility to farmers who try to lock in prices in advance or overproduce to meet potential surges in demand.
I never said “there’s always enough food”. Saying that “there are sometimes famines, so food is a binding constraint on increasing population right now” is a bad argument. It’s like saying “the US sometimes has power cuts, so power supply is a binding constraint on increasing population”—it doesn’t take into account the cost of having a power grid that operates at 100% reliability at all times, which could plausibly not be worth it from a profit and loss perspective.
It’s worthwhile for a society to do things that prevent members of that society from dying unnecessarily. I wasn’t speaking about the US specifically. I am not USian. The only thing I had to say about the US specifically was to say that it is relatively insulated from the problem. I was saying that society X needs it’s own reserves because the alternative, trying to ship resources from whatever they are cheap, is just too fragile and unreliable...it’s been tried, and failed.
I know. I know you are using the “dollar profit” definition of “worth”. Thats not the definition of “worth” that I am using.
You also need to consider the question of how many people die unnecessarily in a very wealthy country because of an unreliable power supply. People were freezing death in Texas a few years ago.
I don’t think it’s worth continuing this discussion, as I have neither the energy nor the mental bandwidth to put into it right now. You’re going far away from the original claim about whether having more people would make each person better or worse off and discussing things which are quite irrelevant to that question.
This is the second time in this thread you bail out of a discussion this way, which I find extremely rude. Didn’t downvote it the first time but I will this time. I would suggest that next time just simply refrain from replying.
I find your reaction mystifying. Are you seriously downvoting me because I’m being truthful about why I don’t want to continue the discussion? You think it would be nicer to just ghost the person you’re talking to?
To some extent, yeah. If someone ghosts me in a discussion like this I think “ah yes, clearly I have bested them and they have no reply to make” and I feel good about myself. If they say I’m not worth talking to I feel bad about myself.
Of course it may not be a good community norm to do what’s nicer.
I note that your second sentence was kind of a parting blow, saying you’re not going to argue and then making one final argument.
Fwiw, this is the tactic I often use in situations like this.
My argument is not about the object-level, it’s just an explanation of why I think it’s not worth continuing the discussion. I feel I should provide some explanation of why I want to cut the discussion off here, and for me what matters is whether we’re making claims that in principle could be falsified or not, and whether those claims actually relate to the question asked in the post.
For instance, when I give power cuts in the US as an analogy for why food insecurity doesn’t necessarily mean we’re bottlenecked by food supply in growing population, and I get a response that
“You also need to consider the question of how many people die unnecessarily in a very wealthy country because of an unreliable power supply. People were freezing death in Texas a few years ago.”
I mentally check out of the discussion because the counterparty is not even trying to understand my point and how it relates to the question raised by OP. I find conversations of this nature exhausting.
Yeah, I agree that tactic is better and I could have used it here. Thanks for pointing this out.