* The setup: Godwin vs. Malthus
    * The year was 1798
        The French Revolution was coming to a close, and the American
        Revolution had ended just 15 years ago. John Locke, David Hume, and Adam
        Smith had just rewritten the whole of political philosophy. To some, it
        seemed that
        humanity was on the verge of a breakthrough. One of those was William
        Godwin.
    * on Godwin
        An iconoclast, one of the founders of anarchism, and a
        believer in the infinite perfectability of mankind, Godwin believed
        that each generation was improving upon the last, and
        he saw no reason why this trend would not continue indefinitely; up to
        and including the perfection of human society.
    * Malthus (:30)
        Opposing this view was the reverend Thomas Robert Malthus.
        A great economist,
        his name suffered the worst fate that history has to offer:
        it was turned into an adjective. To understand what "malthusian" means,
        let's talk about what he wrote in 1798
* The Big Idea
    * Food
        Malthus set out to disprove Godwin, starting with two simple principles:
        
        First, that people need food. And since the amount of farms we have
        are limited by the available land, Malthus reasoned that the food
        supply must only be able to grow linearly.
    * Babies (1:00)
        Second, that people are going to continue having sex (and with it, babies).

        Now, the problem with sex, and babies, at least as far as Malthus is concerned,
        is that each baby can have two babies, each of them can have two more, and so on and so
        forth until you have a world full of babies.
    * linear vs. exponential. Doom!
        Here's a graph of what everybody thinks Malthus was describing.
        Population grows out of control, while food grows slowly. The inevitable
        result is *doom*!!?!

        But that's not what Malthus actually claimed. Instead, he argued that
        population is *limited* by the availability of food.
    * Population graph (1:30)
        When we look at the graph of world population, we see an obvious
        increase in the human growth rate since about 1950. What does that
        mean? Is that the Malthusian bomb that people had been expecting since
        1798?
    * the "Population Bomb"
        That's exactly what Paul Ehrlich claimed in his popular 1968 book
        "The population bomb". In it, he claimed that humanity was quickly outgrowing
        its ability to provide food to its people, and that mass suffering and starvation
        was sure to follow.
    * But Malthus really meant... (2:00)
        But that didn't happen, and Malthus wasn't saying that it would.

        What Malthus was *actually* saying was that humanity grows exponentially
        up to its means of subsistence, and then grows proportionally to it.

        He proposed two mechanisms with which humanity can check its growth.
    * Positive checks 
        Positive checks are deats that limit population due to vice or misery.
        Anybody who dieds due to poverty, starvation, or disease is a victim 
        of a positive check.
    * Technology
        One reason that society has suffered less from starvation and famine
        than we used to is technology. This man,
        Norman Borlaug, was able to spread more productive crops throughout the
        world and is credited with staving off starvation for large parts of the world.
    * Preventive checks (2:30)
        Preventive checks are unique to human experience: only humans have the
        awareness and ability to cease having babies because we believe
        we will not be able to bring them up properly. 
    * Japan population
        However, in the countries of the first world, that growth has begun to level
        off and even to decline. In Japan, Germany, and Italy, the birth rate has
        dipped below the death rate, meaning that populations in those countries are
        beginning to decline. What we're seeing is the population checking itself
        naturally as it arrives near its limit, just as Malthus predicted.
* The possibility of social collapse.
    * 
        So everything's fine, right? If Malthus' theory is correct, humanity should
        just continue on in the world, and our population will automatically correct
        itself to remain near the level the world can sustain.

        Not entirely. Especially as the world grows more interconected and
        interdependent, we run the risk of population collapse.
    * Population collapse (2 slides, 3:30 - 4:00)
        As humanity's ability to produce increased, so has our specialization.
        Modern civilization depends not only on agriculture for food, but 
        extensive systems for carrying and cleaning water, a huge infrastructure
        for generating and carrying electricity, vast transportation networks
        for carrying people and products, networks of wires for carrying
        information between people and computers, huge armies for defending
        ourselves from others, huge political organizations for preventing
        them from attacking each other, and many more technologies both social and 
        technical that sustain our life.
    * So? (4:00)
        Humans, as we've seen, have developed mechanisms for limiting population
        in small amounts. Positive checks and preventive checks have proven 
        sufficient to limit society to living within its means for the last 10,000
        years. But if some large-scale event manages to kick the supports out
        from underneath our system, we have no idea what would happen to
        our modern day society.
* What can we do about social collapse?
    * Short term
        Malthus two principles will continue to hold as far as we can imagine;
        people will continue to mate and have babies, and society will still
        be limited by the means of subsistence.

        So what we can do in the short term is increase research funding for
        new technologies for clean water, clean energy, and clean cities.
        Just as importantly, we can continue to increase our social technology.
    * Social Technology  (4:30)
        What do I mean by "social technology"? I've used that term twice now, but
        when I say "technology" you're probably thinking of breathing tubes or
        computers. What I mean is that social technologies enable us to continue
        producing more with the resources we have, just as the technologies
        given to us by science do.
    * Long term
        colonize other planets, create refuges from large disasters. Mainly
        just allow ourselves to think about what could happen; don't be
        scared of by its "weirdness"
    * Thanks

deleted:
