Well, I don’t see how that can turn dystopian at all…
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Lithium is about 17ppm of the Earth’s crust. Lead is about 10ppm.
Tin is only about 2.2ppm yet I haven’t heard of anyone predicting the imminent demise of tin cans or saying that we won’t be able to manufacture any more electronic gadgets because we won’t have any solder.
Lithium is simply difficult to extract because it doesn’t occur in high concentrations in many places. So it is simply a question of how much money and energy you are willing to devote to refining.
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And then:
For now. But there’s evidence that’s all about to come crashing down.
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This kind of attitude is common for those who don’t do physically demanding work for a living, and don’t have a lot of friends or family who do. But a huge percentage of the workforce is made of people who spend their prime years harvesting crops, driving trucks, working in warehouses, etc. That takes a serious toll on the body and asking those people to work an extra 5 years or so just because the average life span has gone up (even if their individual life spans probably won’t- check out differences in demographics) is inhumane. You would just be forcing ever greater numbers of people onto disability, anyway.
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This has been debunked by the actual numbers of every society that has undergone demographic transition.
I’m just not sold on this. Due to our own actions, oceans are acidifying, which is leading to a collapse in fish populations that we don’t really know the endpoint of, and much of the world is dependent on the ocean for most of its food. Extreme weather events - drought and flooding- are becoming more common, and neither are good for food production at the scale to which we’ve become accustomed. And we’re already at a point where, even if we were to entirely stop the output of carbon right now today, we’d still see increasing warming.
Zero carbon today won’t happen, though. In the US, we just elected a president who will actively do everything he can to make climate change worse. If people actually understood solar, they would realize it employs more people per unit energy. But that information is something that is obscured from people, and will keep poor people left unemployed in dirty energy sectors from demanding regulation on fossil fuels. I honestly don’t know what is going to happen. I don’t know what the effect of a deceptive oligarch determined to lift up his buddies in a dying industry is going to be. But I have a hard time seeing how it can be anything other than a lot of death. It might not be well-described as Malthusian, since the populations who will be hit hardest will not be the ones over-extending their resources.
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And the extra Soylent Grey can be used to reduce the ecological footprint of the young!
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I think that you and @andy_hilmer may be driving at slightly different points:
It does seem to be the case that, if given the option, humans aren’t all that interested in spewing babies into a morass of misery, starvation, and mortality.
However, ‘if given the option’ usually involves improvements in standard of living that allow substantially greater resource consumption per person. Having a zillion starving babies isn’t a very popular hobby: owning a lot of energy-intensive widgets, eating delicious animals, etc. are very popular with those who can afford it.
Malthus gave us too little credit in terms of willingness to just walk away from futile overbreeding; but (while he did overlap reasonably well with the beginning of the industrial revolution) he was arguably insufficiently imaginative to grasp the sheer scale of a wealthy and technologically advanced society’s ability to demand resources.
I’d be inclined to agree that various deeply ugly resource/carrying capacity crunches are uncomfortably possible; but that the ones you could reasonably identify as ‘Malthusian’ seem less likely. There have been some local examples of population increase outstripping arable land and things ending badly(Rwanda, say, definitely wasn’t helped by ethnic divisions; but the steep declines in arable land per-capita in the lead-up to the bloodletting can’t have improved matters); but on the whole we’ve been able to push agricultural productivity further than he gave us credit for(albeit by drawing heavily on resources he mostly hadn’t considered; like Haber process nitrogen); and more or less voluntarily curb population growth more effectively than he gave us credit for(albeit only in the context of quality-of-life improvements also underwritten by resources he mostly didn’t consider).
Unless you want to use ‘Malthusian’ very, very, generally; there is a decent argument to be made that we dodged that bullet; but there is also a decent argument to be made that we did so by throwing petrochemicals at the problem on a scale that his slightly-coal-powered worldview would have found almost unimaginable; which appears to have its own unpleasant downsides.
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I agree that there is a problem with resource use, but population isn’t necessarily it. The Malthus idea is old and broken, but it’s still out there for people to navigate past, kind of like the Rutherford model of orbiting electrons.
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And this is all the stuff that should be automated and a lot of it is getting that way.
We should be trying to NOT WORK as much as possible doubly so for this kind of thing, at least not work at things to just pay the rent/food/utility bills.
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I agree, but what’s the alternative? In order to not have to work to live, we need to completely overhaul and restructure how our society functions. At this point, we barely have the political will to do things like give all Americans the basics, easy access to health care or roads that aren’t falling apart. I like the idea of everyone not having to work to live, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument about how we get there, ya know?
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Therein like the rub…
I wish I knew. Not sure we will completely get there either. Ditching the stupid Protestant work ethic that is so ingrained in America would be a good start though.
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I’d argue it has more to do with capitalism itself and how it structures daily life. But the protestant work ethic is certainly part and parcel of that.
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I am not sure what a Protestant work ethic is.
I think in general work ethic is good. Mine is terrible (I say as I type this at work). Not just for work work, but for doing something creative in my spare time, or something I should do around the house.
But on the flip side, people working themselves into the ground, 60 hour work weeks, not seeing their family is bad.
But I do find it funny about people complaining others don’t work hard enough. I think that is one of those things that every generation complains about. There is an archive of interviews with past slaves taken in the 30s. These were actual slaves giving first hand accounts and sharing their current wisdom and opinions. It seem surreal that several of them complained that people today (in the 1930s) don’t want to do any work.
The ‘protestant work ethic’ is a drive to work as much as possible and complain as little as possible, for as long as possible. It comes from a basic belief that everyone should work, now what counts as work is subjective, so it plays into the meritocracy concept. If someone doesn’t have a (real) job, they have failed in their duties as a human being and are deserving of whatever horrors await them in poverty. If someone has a job, but they can’t afford to live, then they aren’t working hard enough, because you reap what you sew (sow?). If someone has great wealth, then they deserve it, because they must have earned it, unless they have opinions you don’t agree with, in which case they are scum.
IIRC: The protestant work ethic arose from the idea that one could better one’s situation in their lifetime rather than awaiting rewards in the afterlife (which was considered (by the Protestants) to be a tenet of Catholicism (and they weren’t entirely wrong, divine right and such)) The idea is a good one, that you have the power to change your life for the better, because you should have that power. The problems arise when there are forces other than yourself working for their own betterment (potentially at your expense) which then use this ethic to keep people on endless treadmills. In theory, the free market gives you options so you can switch to a better treadmill, but in reality the free market isn’t really free, it’s a construct of the most powerful forces within the market.
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Survival requires some flexibility. People don’t have to keep doing the work they were doing at 18. Experienced, older people can still contribute to society in ways which reduce the load on welfare. I don’t see a problem with that.
Its the low birth rate that’s the real problem in Japan, coupled with practically no immigration. Since the Japanese live longer than people in any other country on average, the country’s median age is high too (currently the second-highest in the world after Monaco) and will certainly be higher in the future.
What this means is that robotics is critically important to Japan so that lifelike robots will be able to take care of old people there since in the future there literally won’t be enough younger people to do it.
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One contributing factor is it’s very difficult to legally immigrate to Japan. Sure, you can live there indefinitely (as long as your visa is renewed) but the nationality law mandates one must renounce all other citizenship - which most people do not want to do. It can also take upwards of 10 years in some cases.
Plus, you will forever be a gaijin, no matter how long you live there.
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