I’m bearish on Chinese military capabilities, but even more importantly I disagree on the direction relative power between China and the US is going. I think we have already passed peak-China and it’s all downhill from here.
Overpopulation. I believe we live in a zero-sum world where labor is highly replaceable but resources are limited. China’s has too many people to begin with; its declining birth rate helps to relieve population pressure in the long term but in the mid term the bulk of their population is slowly entering retirement age, creating a huge additional huge burden.
There is no contradiction here. The soaring living standards over the last few centuries is the result of rapid technological advance, which I don’t dispute. What I mean by “overpopulation” is that we would be even better off, have a higher per capita income, if there was less people at the given tech level.
Imagine what would happen if we dialed world population to extremes:
At one end, you would be the only person in the world. Theoretically, all the world’s resources belong to you, making you very rich. But in practice, you will live an impoverished and short life, because you can’t run a modern economy all by yourself to make use of those resources.
At the other end, the world is populated by 200 billion people and everyone is on the brink of starvation, surviving in urban slums on a diet of insects and algae.
Somewhere in the middle, there is an optimum level of population that maximizes wealth per capita. This dynamic is a version of the Laffer curve, which tends to arise whenever two opposing factors are at play: For government tax revenue, it is the diminishing incentive to create wealth vs. the expanding fraction of wealth captured by the state. For aerodynamic resistance in rocketry, it is the decreasing air density vs. the increasing speed of the vehicle. For world’s per capita income, it is the shrinking share of resources per person vs. the soaring economy of scale in production.
Notice that this optimum is decoupled from the absolute per capita income. The world can simultaneously be increasingly overpopulated and improving in terms of living standard because technological dividend is outpacing population growth. It could even be the case that the world is becoming more overpopulated despite population remaining constant, due to automation eating into the marginal utility of labor.
In a further step, I believe there is overpopulation (i.e. oversupply of labor) at all levels, from unskilled labor all the way to the Einsteins of the world. I think the world’s best scientists/engineers are mostly positional goods, similar to the world’s best athletes—in a counterfactual world where they never existed, things would be chugging along at the same pace. This is why I’m not worried at all about the staggering number of university graduates and engineers China is producing each year—all this does is intensify internal competition.
For this reason, I see the post-WW2 globalization of economy as largely a redistribution scheme. I still think it was worthwhile, but only on moral grounds rather than economic self-interest of the powers that promoted globalization. Urbanization and rising living standards are among the most effective methods of hampering population growth, alleviating the problem at the source. Globalization has also been a promoter of peace, thus avoiding burning resources for nothing in wars.
The soaring living standards over the last few centuries is the result of rapid technological advance, which I don’t dispute. What I mean by “overpopulation” is that we would be even better off, have a higher per capita income, if there was less people at the given tech level.
We wouldn’t have the tech level that we have now without billions of people, but I’ll save that argument for later.
Here is a more relevant critique of your position: Notice however that the issue here is per capita income. The relevant metric for wartime capability is a nation’s total productive capacity. Total productive capacity of a nation does increase with population and we can prove this with a simple thought experiment.
New babies are not born with a ticket that entitles them to a percent share of world GDP or land or iron ore. In practice they get a lot of support from their parents if they are to survive, but that’s not really relevant for the purposes of this thought experiment because we can imagine them now at 18 years old and kicked out of the house with no money. Since on average regular people, even people who start out without assets, still find ways to sell their labor on the market for more than it takes for them to survive, we can assume that, on the margin, more workers contribute to China’s economic production. Even if your hypothesis is correct and their existence lowers per capita wealth statistics, they’re not “taking” that land from other people just by being alive—they have to work and trade for it like everybody else. That’s capitalism.
Imagine what would happen if we dialed world population to extremes:
Ok.
At one end, you would be the only person in the world. Theoretically, all the world’s resources belong to you, making you very rich. But in practice, you will live an impoverished and short life, because you can’t run a modern economy all by yourself to make use of those resources.
No, you’re overstating the case. Most of those resources wouldn’t belong to you; at least, they’d remain unavailable to you. This is an important distinction. You wouldn’t even “own” any of those resources because you wouldn’t have the manpower to actually dig them out of the ground or capture them. You would not be able to get any of the sunlight by building solar panels, or extract the coil and oil from the ground. The only resource you’d instantly “own” in a trivial sense would be the stuff that you could walk to and find some way to pick up, like the land in a certain radius around wherever you were.
When you imagine this scenario, I want to make sure you’re not imagining a scenario where everybody in the world disappears, as that’s not an analogous example. The actual world is filled with secondary goods that people built, not just premined coal and oil. The default one person world in your mind’s eye should be Eliezer Yudkowsky transported to 10,000 B.C.E.
At the other end, the world is populated by 200 billion people and everyone is on the brink of starvation, surviving in urban slums on a diet of insects and algae.
This seems like an arbitrary number and I don’t think you actually have any mechanical reason to believe this is the case. I would like to know what you believe are the bottlenecks on, for example, food production and city planning. Why wouldn’t we be able to just scale up the solutions we already have?
Somewhere in the middle, there is an optimum level of population that maximizes wealth per capita. This dynamic is a version of the Laffer curve, which tends to arise whenever two opposing factors are at play: For government tax revenue, it is the diminishing incentive to create wealth vs. the expanding fraction of wealth captured by the state. For aerodynamic resistance in rocketry, it is the decreasing air density vs. the increasing speed of the vehicle. For world’s per capita income, it is the shrinking share of resources per person vs. the soaring economy of scale in production.
Again, this model doesn’t account for the fact that new people can do things like build solar panels, farms, and oil drilling plants that actually “increase” the amount of “basic” resources that the rest of the world has access to. Innovations that increase the yield or make use of these resources better can also functionally be considered the same thing.
In a further step, I believe there is overpopulation (i.e. oversupply of labor) at all levels, from unskilled labor all the way to the Einsteins of the world. I think the world’s best scientists/engineers are mostly positional goods, similar to the world’s best athletes—in a counterfactual world where they never existed, things would be chugging along at the same pace. This is why I’m not worried at all about the staggering number of university graduates and engineers China is producing each year—all this does is intensify internal competition.
You just state this is “what you believe” and don’t explain why you believe it. There are plenty of obscenely rich people in Silicon Valley today who would not win a positional game on business leadership in a million years but got lucky picking a correct idea. Larry and Sergei did not become billionaires by beating other entrepreneurs at a positional game—they became billionaires by creating a trillion-dollar search engine. And if your society mints 50% less entrepreneurs or engineers, you have 50% less opportunities for one of them to spend the trivial amount of resources coding and deploying a test version of Google. The faster the microchip/the microwave/the radio/etc. is developed the faster spinoff technologies can be developed and the more information the rest of the nation has on the search space for new tech. This is how “more people” turns into “proportionally more growth”; not only from the engineering and efficiency gains from regular engineers at Uber/AirBnB/Boeing but also the increased amount of rando startup founders who try their hand at making meme companies.
Perhaps you think scientific understanding is bottlenecked somehow by acceptance from a top cadre of “thought leaders”, and I don’t think I’d disagree in principle, but you also have to admit that it doesn’t seem like the top minds of Ancient Greece don’t seem like they would be able to handle building the atom bomb.
For this reason, I see the post-WW2 globalization of economy as largely a redistribution scheme. I still think it was worthwhile, but only on moral grounds rather than economic self-interest of the powers that promoted globalization. Urbanization and rising living standards are among the most effective methods of hampering population growth, alleviating the problem at the source. Globalization has also been a promoter of peace, thus avoiding burning resources for nothing in wars.
I’m at a loss as to how this is supposed to follow. Do you think globalization causes poorer countries to increase in population and thus use up more global resources? But then this goes back to the fallacy that new people come with a share of world per capita income. The Chinese aren’t using up land Americans owned before they started trading with them.
It’s also just patently false in the short term—when the “post-WW2 globalization of the economy” ceased for Russia it made them poorer.
Here is a more relevant critique of your position: Notice however that the issue here is per capita income. The relevant metric for wartime capability is a nation’s total productive capacity. Total productive capacity of a nation does increase with population and we can prove this with a simple thought experiment.
Point taken. Here is the problem with this argument: labor isn’t the only input to productive capacity, and China’s population is far passed the point where labor is the bottleneck. If China can’t get enough oil, gas and other resources to fuel its industry and feed its people, it won’t matter how many workers it has.
New babies are not born with a ticket that entitles them to a percent share of world GDP or land or iron ore. In practice they get a lot of support from their parents if they are to survive, but that’s not really relevant for the purposes of this thought experiment because we can imagine them now at 18 years old and kicked out of the house with no money. Since on average these new people are still able to sell their labor on the market for more than it takes for them to survive, we can assume that they are contributing to China’s economic size.
If you’re going to use GDP as a proxy for power, well, I regret to tell you that China was by far the largest economy in the world in 1840 when they got their ass kicked by the British, and again in 1860. They lost to Japan in 1894 despite having 5 times the GDP.
No, most of those resources would remain unavailable to you. This is an important distinction. You wouldn’t even “own” any of those resources because you wouldn’t have the manpower to actually dig them out of the ground or capture them. You would not be able to get any of the sunlight by building solar panels, or extract the coil and oil from the ground. The only resource you’d instantly “own” in a trivial sense would be the stuff that you could walk to and find some way to pick up, like the land in a certain radius around wherever you were.
When you imagine this scenario, I want to make sure you’re not imagining a scenario where everybody in the world disappears, as that’s not an analogous example. The actual world is filled with secondary goods that people built, not just premined coal and oil. The default one person world in your mind’s eye should be Eliezer Yudkowsky transported to 10,000 B.C.E.
That… is what I said with “you can’t run a modern economy all by yourself”? Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?
This seems like an arbitrary number and I don’t think you actually have any mechanical reason to believe this is the case. I would like to know what you believe are the hard limits on, for example, food production and city planning. Why wouldn’t we be able to just scale up the solutions we already have?
Correct, it is an arbitrary number. If you’re not convinced that a world with 200 billion people and our current tech level is horrible to live in, take 2 trillion instead. The whole point is to dial the number to the extreme end of things, why bicker about this detail? The reason we can’t just scale up current food production solutions, i.e. farmland, is because half the habitable land on Earth is already used for that purpose.
You just state this is “what you believe” and don’t explain why you believe it. There are plenty of obscenely rich people in Silicon Valley today who would not win a positional game on business leadership in a million years but got lucky picking a correct idea. And if your society mints 50% less entrepreneurs or engineers, you have 50% less opportunities for one of them to spend the trivial amount of resources coding and deploying a test version of Google. The faster the microchip/the microwave/the radio/etc. is developed the faster spinoff technologies can be developed and the more information the rest of the nation has on the search space for new tech.
I believe what I wrote because what you theorized has not come true in China or elsewhere. Shockingly little technological progress has happened in the last 20 years despite record levels of university graduates all around, this fact has merely been obfuscated by catch-up growth in China and other developing countries—a growth model that I predict can’t be copied any more by e.g. India.
I’m at a loss as to how this is supposed to follow. Do you think globalization causes poorer countries to increase in population and thus use up more global resources?
No, quite the opposite. Globalization reduces population by making poorer countries wealthier, which is good both directly and indirectly.
But then this goes back to the fallacy that new people come with a share of world per capita income. The Chinese aren’t using up land Americans owned before they started trading with them.
They can compete for limited resources with their labor and thereby acquire a share of world per capita income.
Point taken. Here is the problem with this argument: labor isn’t the only input to productive capacity, and China’s population is far passed the point where labor is the bottleneck. If China can’t get enough oil, gas and other resources to fuel its industry and feed its people, it won’t matter how many workers it has.
As far as I can tell, we can settle this entire debate with one concrete question: of all the consumer goods China’s/Your/My population(s) are buying, what percent of their value is due to the basic inputs like rented land and minerals, and what percent of their value is due to labor? Then apply your laffer curve and we will be able to calculate exaclty when new people “should” reduce per capita income statistics.
Correct, it is an arbitrary number. If you’re not convinced that a world with 200 billion people and our current tech level is horrible to live in, take 2 trillion instead. The whole point is to dial the number to the extreme end of things, why bicker about this detail? The reason we can’t just scale up current food production solutions, i.e. farmland, is because half the habitable land on Earth is already used for that purpose.
Well, partly because it sounded wrong and I like to bicker, and partly because the specific numbers are important. You’re making a specific claim about 7 billion people being “too much”; I was wondering if you had any modeling behind this.
If you’re going to use GDP as a proxy for power, well, I regret to tell you that China was by far the largest economy in the world in 1840 when they got their ass kicked by the British, and again in 1860. They lost to Japan in 1894 despite having 5 times the GDP.
I used the term “productive capacity” to more closely hint that that it’s something more like “GDP per capita—subsistence income”. Obviously if you’re spending 90% of your economic and productive resources keeping your own population alive, or if your state doesn’t have the political will/infrastructure to tax that income, then that GDP can’t easily be reallocated towards wartime spending. In modern economies we have a lot more wiggleroom and so GDP itself more closely approximates “wartime production power”.
Of course it’s not the only thing. Governors can just fail to use the resources they have to protect their citizens. But spare change to buy guns, missiles, etc. is a resource.
That… is what I said with “you can’t run a modern economy all by yourself”? Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?
I’m doing this to point out that the “laffer curve” idea is flawed. Increases in population can also increase basic resources per capita by allowing society to scale up extraction and mint engineers that make efficiency and usage gains.
They can compete for limited resources with their labor and thereby acquire a share of world per capita income.
And again I’m confused. What’s the problem here? In order to “acquire” that “share”, China has to buy those resources from the United States, with something of equivalent or better value—mainly the fruits of their labor. They are not gifted that land from the United States as a trophy for being economically globalized, they enhanced their nation’s productivity and now they are buying it with all of those secondary goods they’re making, goods that we value as much more than the land itself. This is just a misunderstanding of how markets work.
As I already explained, in the long term the decreasing population is indeed a boon for China, but it takes several generations for this to take effect, and in the mid term they will be struggling with the burden of massive numbers of retirees just as Japan has struggled.
I’m thinking #1 cannot possibly be your actual view. Are you trolling? What do you think the “schelling” army+support staff size that can defeat any larger army is?
War isn’t an RTS game, especially modern war. What do you expect the potentially 100 million strong Chinese army to do? Charge into Vietnam? Swim to the Strait of Malacca? China has always been the world’s most populous nation yet that did nothing to change the fact that it basically lost every single war from 1840 − 1945. Or for that matter, look at how China was frequently raided and sometimes even conquered in its ancient history by numerically vastly inferior nomadic tribes.
I’m bearish on Chinese military capabilities, but even more importantly I disagree on the direction relative power between China and the US is going. I think we have already passed peak-China and it’s all downhill from here.
Why do you think that ? Simply through pure economic growth I’d expect them to continue improving...
Overpopulation. I believe we live in a zero-sum world where labor is highly replaceable but resources are limited. China’s has too many people to begin with; its declining birth rate helps to relieve population pressure in the long term but in the mid term the bulk of their population is slowly entering retirement age, creating a huge additional huge burden.
How is this possible if world population has been soaring along with per capita income/living standards for the last three hundred years?
There is no contradiction here. The soaring living standards over the last few centuries is the result of rapid technological advance, which I don’t dispute. What I mean by “overpopulation” is that we would be even better off, have a higher per capita income, if there was less people at the given tech level.
Imagine what would happen if we dialed world population to extremes:
At one end, you would be the only person in the world. Theoretically, all the world’s resources belong to you, making you very rich. But in practice, you will live an impoverished and short life, because you can’t run a modern economy all by yourself to make use of those resources.
At the other end, the world is populated by 200 billion people and everyone is on the brink of starvation, surviving in urban slums on a diet of insects and algae.
Somewhere in the middle, there is an optimum level of population that maximizes wealth per capita. This dynamic is a version of the Laffer curve, which tends to arise whenever two opposing factors are at play: For government tax revenue, it is the diminishing incentive to create wealth vs. the expanding fraction of wealth captured by the state. For aerodynamic resistance in rocketry, it is the decreasing air density vs. the increasing speed of the vehicle. For world’s per capita income, it is the shrinking share of resources per person vs. the soaring economy of scale in production.
Notice that this optimum is decoupled from the absolute per capita income. The world can simultaneously be increasingly overpopulated and improving in terms of living standard because technological dividend is outpacing population growth. It could even be the case that the world is becoming more overpopulated despite population remaining constant, due to automation eating into the marginal utility of labor.
In a further step, I believe there is overpopulation (i.e. oversupply of labor) at all levels, from unskilled labor all the way to the Einsteins of the world. I think the world’s best scientists/engineers are mostly positional goods, similar to the world’s best athletes—in a counterfactual world where they never existed, things would be chugging along at the same pace. This is why I’m not worried at all about the staggering number of university graduates and engineers China is producing each year—all this does is intensify internal competition.
For this reason, I see the post-WW2 globalization of economy as largely a redistribution scheme. I still think it was worthwhile, but only on moral grounds rather than economic self-interest of the powers that promoted globalization. Urbanization and rising living standards are among the most effective methods of hampering population growth, alleviating the problem at the source. Globalization has also been a promoter of peace, thus avoiding burning resources for nothing in wars.
We wouldn’t have the tech level that we have now without billions of people, but I’ll save that argument for later.
Here is a more relevant critique of your position: Notice however that the issue here is per capita income. The relevant metric for wartime capability is a nation’s total productive capacity. Total productive capacity of a nation does increase with population and we can prove this with a simple thought experiment.
New babies are not born with a ticket that entitles them to a percent share of world GDP or land or iron ore. In practice they get a lot of support from their parents if they are to survive, but that’s not really relevant for the purposes of this thought experiment because we can imagine them now at 18 years old and kicked out of the house with no money. Since on average regular people, even people who start out without assets, still find ways to sell their labor on the market for more than it takes for them to survive, we can assume that, on the margin, more workers contribute to China’s economic production. Even if your hypothesis is correct and their existence lowers per capita wealth statistics, they’re not “taking” that land from other people just by being alive—they have to work and trade for it like everybody else. That’s capitalism.
Ok.
No, you’re overstating the case. Most of those resources wouldn’t belong to you; at least, they’d remain unavailable to you. This is an important distinction. You wouldn’t even “own” any of those resources because you wouldn’t have the manpower to actually dig them out of the ground or capture them. You would not be able to get any of the sunlight by building solar panels, or extract the coil and oil from the ground. The only resource you’d instantly “own” in a trivial sense would be the stuff that you could walk to and find some way to pick up, like the land in a certain radius around wherever you were.
When you imagine this scenario, I want to make sure you’re not imagining a scenario where everybody in the world disappears, as that’s not an analogous example. The actual world is filled with secondary goods that people built, not just premined coal and oil. The default one person world in your mind’s eye should be Eliezer Yudkowsky transported to 10,000 B.C.E.
This seems like an arbitrary number and I don’t think you actually have any mechanical reason to believe this is the case. I would like to know what you believe are the bottlenecks on, for example, food production and city planning. Why wouldn’t we be able to just scale up the solutions we already have?
Again, this model doesn’t account for the fact that new people can do things like build solar panels, farms, and oil drilling plants that actually “increase” the amount of “basic” resources that the rest of the world has access to. Innovations that increase the yield or make use of these resources better can also functionally be considered the same thing.
You just state this is “what you believe” and don’t explain why you believe it. There are plenty of obscenely rich people in Silicon Valley today who would not win a positional game on business leadership in a million years but got lucky picking a correct idea. Larry and Sergei did not become billionaires by beating other entrepreneurs at a positional game—they became billionaires by creating a trillion-dollar search engine. And if your society mints 50% less entrepreneurs or engineers, you have 50% less opportunities for one of them to spend the trivial amount of resources coding and deploying a test version of Google. The faster the microchip/the microwave/the radio/etc. is developed the faster spinoff technologies can be developed and the more information the rest of the nation has on the search space for new tech. This is how “more people” turns into “proportionally more growth”; not only from the engineering and efficiency gains from regular engineers at Uber/AirBnB/Boeing but also the increased amount of rando startup founders who try their hand at making meme companies.
Perhaps you think scientific understanding is bottlenecked somehow by acceptance from a top cadre of “thought leaders”, and I don’t think I’d disagree in principle, but you also have to admit that it doesn’t seem like the top minds of Ancient Greece don’t seem like they would be able to handle building the atom bomb.
I’m at a loss as to how this is supposed to follow. Do you think globalization causes poorer countries to increase in population and thus use up more global resources? But then this goes back to the fallacy that new people come with a share of world per capita income. The Chinese aren’t using up land Americans owned before they started trading with them.
It’s also just patently false in the short term—when the “post-WW2 globalization of the economy” ceased for Russia it made them poorer.
Point taken. Here is the problem with this argument: labor isn’t the only input to productive capacity, and China’s population is far passed the point where labor is the bottleneck. If China can’t get enough oil, gas and other resources to fuel its industry and feed its people, it won’t matter how many workers it has.
If you’re going to use GDP as a proxy for power, well, I regret to tell you that China was by far the largest economy in the world in 1840 when they got their ass kicked by the British, and again in 1860. They lost to Japan in 1894 despite having 5 times the GDP.
That… is what I said with “you can’t run a modern economy all by yourself”? Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?
Correct, it is an arbitrary number. If you’re not convinced that a world with 200 billion people and our current tech level is horrible to live in, take 2 trillion instead. The whole point is to dial the number to the extreme end of things, why bicker about this detail? The reason we can’t just scale up current food production solutions, i.e. farmland, is because half the habitable land on Earth is already used for that purpose.
I believe what I wrote because what you theorized has not come true in China or elsewhere. Shockingly little technological progress has happened in the last 20 years despite record levels of university graduates all around, this fact has merely been obfuscated by catch-up growth in China and other developing countries—a growth model that I predict can’t be copied any more by e.g. India.
No, quite the opposite. Globalization reduces population by making poorer countries wealthier, which is good both directly and indirectly.
They can compete for limited resources with their labor and thereby acquire a share of world per capita income.
As far as I can tell, we can settle this entire debate with one concrete question: of all the consumer goods China’s/Your/My population(s) are buying, what percent of their value is due to the basic inputs like rented land and minerals, and what percent of their value is due to labor? Then apply your laffer curve and we will be able to calculate exaclty when new people “should” reduce per capita income statistics.
Well, partly because it sounded wrong and I like to bicker, and partly because the specific numbers are important. You’re making a specific claim about 7 billion people being “too much”; I was wondering if you had any modeling behind this.
I used the term “productive capacity” to more closely hint that that it’s something more like “GDP per capita—subsistence income”. Obviously if you’re spending 90% of your economic and productive resources keeping your own population alive, or if your state doesn’t have the political will/infrastructure to tax that income, then that GDP can’t easily be reallocated towards wartime spending. In modern economies we have a lot more wiggleroom and so GDP itself more closely approximates “wartime production power”.
Of course it’s not the only thing. Governors can just fail to use the resources they have to protect their citizens. But spare change to buy guns, missiles, etc. is a resource.
I’m doing this to point out that the “laffer curve” idea is flawed. Increases in population can also increase basic resources per capita by allowing society to scale up extraction and mint engineers that make efficiency and usage gains.
Doing multiple comments to keep track of different threads.
And again I’m confused. What’s the problem here? In order to “acquire” that “share”, China has to buy those resources from the United States, with something of equivalent or better value—mainly the fruits of their labor. They are not gifted that land from the United States as a trophy for being economically globalized, they enhanced their nation’s productivity and now they are buying it with all of those secondary goods they’re making, goods that we value as much more than the land itself. This is just a misunderstanding of how markets work.
To be clear: you think:
Having more people to fight your war is a liability.
At the same time, even though China is decreasing in population, “it’s all downhill from here” for chinese military capability.
Absolutely. More mouths to feed.
As I already explained, in the long term the decreasing population is indeed a boon for China, but it takes several generations for this to take effect, and in the mid term they will be struggling with the burden of massive numbers of retirees just as Japan has struggled.
I’m thinking #1 cannot possibly be your actual view. Are you trolling? What do you think the “schelling” army+support staff size that can defeat any larger army is?
War isn’t an RTS game, especially modern war. What do you expect the potentially 100 million strong Chinese army to do? Charge into Vietnam? Swim to the Strait of Malacca? China has always been the world’s most populous nation yet that did nothing to change the fact that it basically lost every single war from 1840 − 1945. Or for that matter, look at how China was frequently raided and sometimes even conquered in its ancient history by numerically vastly inferior nomadic tribes.