In Defense of Efficient Inefficiency
How resource wastage has averted a population explosion
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” - Carl Jung
At the peak of the world population growth rate in 1963, with a population of 3.2 billion, the doubling rate of the population was 32 years.1 At that rate, by 2500 there would be so many people that the entire earth’s land surface would resemble a rush hour commuter train on the New York subway.2
Fortunately, in the last 50 years significant strides have been made to reduce human fertility rate. This is largely due to the efforts of a coalition of concerned environmentalists, ecologists & economists holding significant influence on government in the west. They have done much to stymie the flow of industrial progress to the frustration of many technologists3 and accelerationists4 in and around Silicon Valley.5 However, with the ascent of Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy into government to lead a new government efficiency program Department of Government Efficiency, it is clear that the accelerationists have won a significant battle against anti-natalists that should concern us all.
In the 1700s the economist Thomas Malthus introduced the concept of the Malthusian Trap. Malthus observed that, like most species, the total human population up to the medieval period followed a cyclical flow where in good times it would expand and in bad times it would contract. Given a finite amount of land to farm, there was a ceiling as to how much food could be produced, holding the level of technological progress constant. When the population size approached this ceiling, social conditions would deteriorate making war and disease more likely - an increase in the death rate - starting a dip in the population size towards equilibrium. When the population size reaches a trough there is much less competition for resources. People embark on a hopeful period where food and land are plentiful, so they are fruitful and multiply - an increase in the birth rate - starting the cycle anew.
The economic historian David Hackett Fischer in his book The Great Wave studies historical price data from the 12th to the 20th century and provides evidence of the intertwined nature of prices and population growth rates in medieval Europe:
The cause of population growth after about 1460 is not difficult to discover. The prolonged period of economic equilibrium in the fifteenth century had been a time of increasing real wages, and a revolutionary rise in expectations… In the period from 1460 to 1510, millions of men and women throughout Europe freely decided for their own purposes to marry earlier and have many more children.6
Fischer notes that “[c]orrelations between price-movements and population-growth are strong in most periods of world-history”. Even within our own time we can see relationships between cost of living and fertility rates in US cities.7
The industrial revolution led to a massive increase in technological progress and linear increases in the population growth rate (exponential population growth) as the ceiling for the amount of resources that could be produced skyrocketed. Then from the 1920s mass vaccination programs and the discovery of antibiotics led to a significant drop in the death rate and a corresponding exponential increase in the annual growth rate of the world population.
Many who read this may be skeptical of the evidence for environmental causes, so I hope you can suspend disbelief momentarily while I make the argument as to why this should concern us using first principles.
Assuming the following:
1. Humans are earthbound
2. There is some maximum technological limit as to how many resources (food-energy) can be produced for human consumption. Approximately, the total energy hitting the earth’s surface plus latent stored energy on earth from nuclear/fossil fuels etc...
3. There is a limit as to how much shelter can be produced to house the total population. It’s unlikely that the earth’s land surface will significantly increase from the current 30%.
Accelerationists are pursuing space travel and so in the long term future we may be able to siphon off excess population to the rest of the universe. However, while these three premises are true or close to true (the latter two may resemble something more like s-shaped curves than hard ceilings) if the population were to increase at the rate it was in 1963 (2.3%), we would quickly hit against a malthusian ceiling.
Even today, while the population growth rate has fallen off a cliff and continued to decline, the population continues to increase and has just currently passed 8 billion people. But, significantly, there has been a massive drop in the population growth rate.
To understand why there was such a fall in the fertility rate we should examine the history of the last 50-60 years. In the 60s many influential figures started highlighting the issue of exponential growth rates. This coincided with the start of a fall in the population growth rate.
At the level of popular consciousness, the explanations for the falls in fertility rate are that sexual customs around careers and dating have changed and that family planning has become prevalent. No doubt, this is true and we will examine this in future posts, but it is an incomplete story.
Setting aside useful modern sex/gender mythologies, it is clear that men are interested in having sex and women are interested in having children. I am often struck by how broody many women are from an evolutionary perspective. Despite the significant risk placed by giving birth to a woman’s life, many of the most neurotically minded women that I know are absolutely obsessed with having children and satiating their craving for cuteness.8 It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective for such a genetic instinct to have been cultivated. How else could women be incentivized to bear the incredible risks of child birth?
If this instinct is not supressed, women will have more children. One of the many means by which this instinct has been supressed is imposed economic scarcity. Most of us want the best for their children, and as we saw above, when living in periods of scarcity people will limit the number of children they have to concentrate resources into raising a small number of children.
The post WWII period up until the 70s was a historical aberration, with low death rates due to medicinal progress, and high birth rates sustained by an era of unprecedented wealth for many westerners, as much of the West’s industry was revived by a combination of the Bretton Woods system and the Marshal Plan.9
In the late 60s/early 70s things abruptly changed. Workers real disposable income has been significantly depressed across the western world.10 This is the result of a confluence of things, many of which coincidentally start their uptick in this time period. Increasing costs of housing, energy, food, tools, services. Naturally, one of the only class of goods and services that has seen any price deflation in this time period is entertainment.
One of the means of increasing the costs of these different sectors of the economy is planned economic self-sabotage. I recently met a rationalist who was looking to optimize outcomes from education spending. Noting that since the 70s the massive increases in US spending on education has not realized any gains in educational attainment, they had lots of hyper-rational ideas on how we could improve educational attainment. What they failed to understand is that this abysmal ROI on education investment is by design.
The deep state deliberately funnels money into education programs as it’s a fantastic resource sink. We have reached the limits of the improvements we can make in educational outcomes from improving teaching techniques. Our teaching techniques are now so well optimized that educational outcomes are purely a function of genetic inheritance captured by proxies such as IQ or g. But by siphoning resources to these and other bullshit jobs we are taking workers and resources away from productive parts of the economy leading to increases in prices.
Many similar jobs and industries have been cultivated, but by far the most fruitful for controlling the fertility rate is the encouragement of red tape and law-fare.11 Red tape and law-fare has an additional beneficial feature for the controlled self-sabotage of the western economies. It not only takes intelligent workers and resources away from productive parts of the economy but it also actively impedes the productive parts of the economy.
Industry must hire people to cut through copious amounts of red tape. Even then, industry does not control the speed at which it receives the approval from the appropriate government agencies that said red tape has been cut. It did not always take this long to build.
Similarly, whole armies of litigation lawyers work at cancelling industrial and infrastructure projects and other hobby horses. At a minimum, this only slows down industry and adds to costs; at most, projects are completely cancelled after much treasure is spilled on costly legal battles.
The net effect of this is that industrial output is reduced; the western world doesn’t come close to reaching its potential maximum aggregate supply. When this is combined with the increasing demands of a growing population, by the simple laws of supply and demand, prices go up. The cost of living “crisis” blighting much of the western world makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of this parsimonious theory.
One may argue it is too extraordinary to be believed; that the world is too chaotic for such a grand plan; that governments are too incompetent for this level of grand planning, to which I respond that this plan merely requires the configuration of incentives. Once a budget has been defined to throw money at pointless government endeavors like extra education spending and the laws have been set to allow for law-fare battles to delay industry, there will be people happy take advantage of these incentives for their own gain.
There is also precedent for governments trying to control population size since the 60s. In the third world many attempts have been made to provide contraception. Most famously, China had its one-child policy. India has at points partaken in forced sterilization programs.12 Even in western countries such as Denmark/Greenland medical conspiracies have been uncovered to sterilize populations and reduce the fertility rate. Both India and China took measures to reduce their population growth, despite geopolitical imperatives not to. Lets not forget that army size is a significant component of military strength13; presumably they would not have done this without some pact from western countries that they would also manage their population sizes?
Still, many readers may balk at the possibility of such a conspiracy. If so, I ask the reader at the very least to suspend disbelief about such a conspiracy, and assume that the system outlined is the consequence of accident and human irrationality. If the reader agrees that there is a danger that the population size could start to reach a malthusian ceiling, then naturally the reader should concur that the current inefficient system is worth conserving.
Disclaimer: This blog intends to start a monthly discourse with accelerationists on the virtues of realistic ecological conservatism. The ideas that will be discussed are incendiary and may inflame some tempers. As such, in the future once I have started to gain a following I intend to guard my posts behind a paywall. For now, I’m offering readers the opportunity to subscribe at a discounted rate. Forward selectively.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
For my calculation I estimated a New York Subway Train to be packed at 4 people per square meter: https://www.gkstill.com/Support/crowd-density/CrowdDensity-1.html
https://patrickcollison.com/fast
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1719398881870356695?s=20
https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/
David Hackett Fischer (1996). The Great Wave. Oxford University Press
https://www.zillow.com/research/birth-rates-home-values-20165/
See the gender distribution of commenters on videos from family vloggers on YouTube like The Grimwade Gang.
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/chapter-3-the-global-plan.pdf
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
https://order-order.com/2024/11/01/labour-announces-settlement-with-eco-loon-packham/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_case
https://towardsdatascience.com/napoleon-was-the-best-general-ever-and-the-math-proves-it-86efed303eeb