 If there is one thing out there that Bill Gates hates even more than the fact that you didn't get your COVID-19 vaccine, it is population growth. It's the fact that there are more people on this planet than there ever have been and they just seem to be increasing and increasing and increasing. There might be billions more people on this planet in the next couple decades. We'll see. But that is one of the biggest concerns of people like Bill Gates. I don't know what exactly to call his type of people. I don't know Ted Talk people. You know what I mean. Rich people who purport to rule the universe by virtue of being famous, right? Those kind of people. Ideas people. There are very few issues more important to them than the idea of overpopulation, which mind you is basically, I mean, you're never going to hear that as an issue from anyone else. Maybe you just live in a crowded city or something like that. But today I want to talk about overpopulation. Where does the concern come from? Is it a legitimate concern? Is it something that we need to be worried about? Is it or is it just a fake meme? Is it just another justification for the elites to do what they want to us? Actually, I mentioned this because it's actually a portion. The idea of population control is very important in conspiracy theory circles, right? A couple of years ago, I did a little video. I was traveling around the country and I stopped in Elberton, Georgia. Now, you might know that that is where the Georgia guide stones are. I don't know if people know what those are, but it's a mysterious monument that was put in there. I want to say around the 90s, I'm not quite sure. Some people call it America's Stonehenge, which I think is a very stupid thing to call it. But it is notable because no one really knows who built it. And you have all these stones with all of these different languages written on them. And in each of the language, they have basically directions for how to run society. And the first one is that the population of the planet should not exceed 500 million. That's half a billion. That's not that much. That's a lot less than what we have now. So because the Georgia guide stones are a big part of conspiracy theories and population growth is frankly, I mean, it's really a hot topic the past couple of years because it's really a forced meme. People like Bill Gates, who has been in the public spotlight for a while, have been forcing it for a long time. So I want to talk about where the idea of overpopulation, where it comes from, and I guess modern discourses on it and whether or not it should be a concern, whether or not it's an issue. We're going to be talking about a couple different books today, books and essays. The first essay should be obvious to anyone who is talking about population growth. It's Robert Malthus or Thomas Robert Malthus. Excuse me. I just want to call him Robert. It just rolls off the tongue more, but Thomas Malthus. He was a writer back in the late 1700s, early 1800s, and he wrote an essay on the principle of population. And when people talk about Malthusianism, they talk about the idea of population being bad or overpopulation is going to cause significant problems. We'll get into that. But I'm also going to talk about other books. In the 20th century, there was a kind of rebirth of Malthusianism, although not necessarily connected with Malthus, per se. There's a book written by a man named Paul Erlich called The Population Bomb. It's a very short book. It's not a very deep book, but it was a highly influential book. And that probably more than anything has been influential on the modern discourse on population. The modern kind of hysteria, like the Bill Gates kind of people, they are very much tapped into this 1960s view of overpopulation as being a big issue, which would later give rise to the global warming stuff and all this kind of stuff. And additionally, I'll talk as a response to at least the Population Bomb. I'm also going to talk about another book by Julian Simon called The Resourceful Earth, which he actually wrote with Herman Kahn, but everyone remembers Julian Simon. We'll talk about all of these people. You don't have to remember the names right now. But either way, so what's the deal with population? Why should anyone care about it? Well, if you have been attached to the internet or attached to first world media in any way, you have probably at some point in your life seen a population growth chart, right? A historical chart of the population of the earth. And it is vexing. It is surprising. It's startling when you first see it, right? Because here's how it goes. Look it up if you want, but I will tell you, I will remind you because I'm sure you've seen it. For all of human history, the human population was very, very low. Okay? You know, maybe a couple hundred thousand, maybe a couple thousand years ago, or maybe not even that far, but a couple hundred years ago we got to, you know, a couple million, things like that. I want to say we first hit a billion people, maybe around 1850, something like that. But since then we've had such massive growth that it's like we're putting on billions every decade or so, right? So when I was a kid, I remember it being a big deal. Oh my goodness, the world population, it just hit six billion. And now I want to say we're about to hit eight billion. It hasn't really been that long. I remember hearing people quote some statistic. I forget exactly what it was, but something like, I'm just going to make it up on my head, but you get the emotional point of it. Something like 95% of all the humans that have ever existed exist right now, something like that. You can look it up if you're actually interested. But, you know, history, humans have not been around in the populations that we think they have been. I mean, at least according to consensus history, we have had this massive increase in population and before that there was a very negligible amount of people on this planet. So when you look at a population growth chart, you see basically nothing for thousands of years and then, you know, things kind of start to go up, but around the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, all of a sudden the population shoots up to some obscene amount, drastically dwarfing everything else, all of human history, right? So that is scary looking when you first look at it, right, obviously. And it goes without saying that the earth is finite, right? I mean, we can't have trillions of people on this planet, right? I mean, we're going to be shoulder to shoulder. That's going to be really bad. We're clearly not going to have enough resources. I mean, we can't just keep having children until we have more humans than atoms in the universe. Like there are some limits. The issue is where is the limit of population growth? Is it something we have to be worried about? Let's talk about our first writing and that is Malthus's, that is Thomas Robert Malthus's essay on the principles of population, okay? And this is right before 1800. This is like 1798, I think. Now, as a background, before we even get into what he says, okay? You have to understand the environment in which he's writing. This is in the aftermath, or not even the aftermath. This is while the French Revolution is unfolding, okay? So I assume everyone knows this, but, you know, the French Revolution was a brief period where France went absolutely insane. They killed their king. They killed lots of other people. They persecuted Catholicism and replaced it with a cult of reason. They renamed all their months based on rational principles. They tried to metricize time. They actually metricized everything. They wanted to overthrow all of society and it actually succeeded in overthrowing everything. And basically a cadre of redditors and comers took over the country and that was the reign of terror where they not just executed all of their political enemies, but eventually they started executing themselves because, you know, I don't know. It was a period of mass hysteria. So I want to say just a couple years before Malthus put out his essay, Ropes Pierre, who was kind of the ringleader of a lot of the revolutionaries, he had actually gotten executed by the other revolutionaries of counter-revolutionary, you know, different things, right? So it was a time of extreme chaos and, of course, in France, there were a lot of sympathizers with the revolution and thought, oh, we are creating this new age of reason. Again, they tried to eradicate Catholicism and replace it with a cult of reason. And then when that fell out of favor, Ropes Pierre created the cult of the supreme being, which was this kind of weird deist cult. Either way, things were nutty, okay? But there were some people in England and other countries who were sympathetic to the French Revolution and thought it was something very exciting, right? And this was, I remember the French Revolution is also, it's really where the concept, or at least when the concept becomes useful, of distinguishing the political left and right, okay? The terms left and right actually come from the French assembly at this period where the right were more conservative, they were more sympathetic to the king, or they were more anti-revolutionary, where the left was, you know, let's chop up everyone's heads and if things are still bad, we just have to chop off a couple more, right? So this was a very fun period for lots of people. It was a very exciting period intellectually, right? And one of the guys in England who was very sympathetic to the French Revolution was William Godwin, okay? And William Godwin was a kind of utopian and of course many of the French Revolutionaries were, in essence, utopian. Their vision was we just have to get rid of all the things in society that I don't like. I don't like the aristocracy. I don't like the religion. I don't like all these other things. I don't like marriage. Let's just get rid of those things and we are going to live in a utopia because that is the natural state of man, et cetera, et cetera. Malthus really thought all of this was very cringe and delusory. Actually, in his, I wrote this down in the essay on population, he actually kind of has a good mockery of this utopianism. I'm going to read this paragraph. He says, A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I can't properly contradict him, but before he can expect to bring any reasonable person over to his opinion, he ought to show that the necks of mankind gradually elongating, that the lips have grown harder and more prominent, that the legs and feet are daily altering their shape, and that hair is beginning to change into stubs and feathers. Until the probability of such, so wonderful a conversion can be shown, it is surely lost time and lost eloquence to expatiate on the happiness of man in such a state, to describe his powers, both of running and flying, to paint him in a condition where the luxuries would be contended, where he would be employed only in collecting the necessaries of life, and where consequently, each man's share of labor would be light, and his portion of leisure ample. So Malthus is lampooning utopians, because they have no... I mean, they are talking about this utopia that will come, but they don't in any way show that it's inevitable, or that it can happen. Everyone at the time period could just look and see the bloodshed of the French Revolution, and see the disasters that were happening. And so Malthus was very skeptical of these type of people. Now, Malthus, again, was critiquing this particular work of William Godwin. And William Godwin is, I guess a guy who's somewhat interesting, he's only remembered for two things. Thing number one is the fact that Malthus wrote this much more famous essay in response to him. And number two is he actually gave birth to Mary Shelley, who would write Frankenstein. So, you know, he's a guy remembered for being related to other famous people, which, you know, I don't want to say that's a bad thing to be remembered for, but, you know, he was a kind of sexual libertine and revolutionary in some ways. You know, he actually kind of had, I don't know, I want to say E. Michael Jones and Libido Dominandi actually goes through his biography and his family's biography, how interesting it is related to the French Revolution and their kind of revolutionary mores and how that served to be kind of a problem for him having children and being loyal to his wife, who actually died in childbirth, giving birth to Mary. But then, as Godwin grew older, he actually became a lot more conservative and was very worried that the same thing would happen to Shelley, that she'd be sort of taken advantage of by a man, things like that. Either way, that's just biographical stuff. You can read about that stuff if you want. You can talk about Godwin. In fact, we're not even here to talk about Malthus. We're here to talk about what his views were. So anyway, Godwin had said something. He had brushed aside the issue of population growth and Malthus wants to address this in a very simple fashion. Here's what Malthus says. Two principles. Two very undeniable principles on first glance. And principle number one is that you can increase the amount of food that a society produces, but food increases arithmetically. Whereas population, you can also increase the population, but population increases geometrically. That is, food production is additive, whereas people production, I mean childbirth, is multiplicative. Now, if you take those two things together, you get a very simple result. And here, I want you to imagine this in the environment where it was first imagined. We have a finite amount of land, and if we want to double our land usage, we have to use twice as much land. It's a very simple thing, and to produce twice as much food, we need twice as much land, except that is a limited commodity. Whereas population is something that, population growth is a function of how much population already exists. It is going to be something that as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the increase will increase more and more. It's an exponential function in some degrees. That's a big issue. What Malthus says is, we might live in a time where maybe we even have increasing standards of living. But what will inevitably happen is that we will try to farm more and more and more land, and that is limited, and it is not actually multiplicative. We are just adding on more land. Whereas population growth is multiplicative. It is not additive. A population will continue to increase, and it will increase faster and faster and faster. So the inevitable result is what? The inevitable result is that any society will get to a point where you have just enough people so that you are maintaining this set carrying capacity of the world. If you had any more people, they would just be starving, and of course everyone who exists in this world is always on the verge of starvation. We are only able to produce just enough food to maintain things. Now, it is kind of remnant. Malthus' view is honestly kind of a cyclical view. I like the memes you see on the internet where people say good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, something like that. Malthus has kind of a similar idea where if you have a period of plenty, that is because you have a lot of food production, but you don't have quite as much population. So population will increase to match that food production faster than it at some point. And then you'll be living at subsistence and then you might have starvation and disease and other things that wipe out the population in lots of bad times. And it's only after those bad times you can have, oh, well, we can still produce all this food even though all these people have died off. And so we actually have a higher standard of living then until the population gets big, et cetera, et cetera. So Malthus kind of had this cyclical view of history where societies are always going to be in this Malthusian trap. They're never going to be able to really become massive and have high standards of living. It's just not, you know, there are just natural principles that are keeping that from happening. I do want to make just a random aside. This will just take a minute. So economics, right? Now Malthus, I should say, is known for this population growth essay, but this was actually a very minor issue in his career. He was a very seasoned economist, had a lot of debates with David Ricardo. I mean, all you libertarians probably know this, blah, blah, blah, says law, all that kind of stuff, right? But Malthus is, Malthus was kind of interesting for other reasons as well. But I will say one note in the population growth essay is the, and I don't think Malthus says this explicitly, but there very much was the assumption, we find an undiscovered continent, right? And we want to start farming there. Obviously, the first place we're going to farm is not on a mountain or in a desert. We're going to find the nice, most fertile farmland and we're going to farm there. And as population gets bigger, as we need to scale things up, we're going to go to less good farming locations. We're going to have suboptimal. It's not just that we're adding plots to our farming. We're actually getting worse and worse plots. You know, per capita, per labor output. There's kind of like a diminishing, diminishing returns to scale in some ways in land production. This was a very common idea at this period as well. So it's not even just that, oh well, land use is additive. It's actually you're adding ever-decreasing amounts because we're moving, if we need to produce more food, we're usually needing to do that in less efficient areas, right? Now, the reason this is interesting for economists is because this idea of diminishing returns to scale is the reason that our supply curves and economic theory go upward. That is the reason that they do that. And the funny thing about that is that if you look at most things in the world, frankly, do not have diminishing returns to scale. They have increasing returns. And so in real life for most goods, really the supply curve should be bending downwards, right? They should be something similar to the demand curve, right? That's actually how things should be. But that is one of those assumptions of neoclassical economics that was really never, I don't know, was really never fixed. I mean, the only modern writer I know of that has written about this that I know of. I mean, there are probably a lot of others. I mean, I don't read that much economic stuff. It's been like 10 years since I've read economic stuff because I find it boring at this point. And his book, Debunking Economics. Now, Steve Keen is one of these post-Keynesian guys. I mean, I don't think he's like MMT or anything, but he's post-Keynesian in that particular school. I think he has a chapter on this talking about how the fact that supply curves are like totally screwed up. I remember noting this when I was an undergrad, like when I was about to finish my degree in economics. Just for my own logical exercises, I started writing a kind of my personal textbook on principles on economics just to kind of rehearse everything in my head. And I got to the supply curve and I tried to reason it through and I was like, wait, this makes no sense. It's exactly backwards. But the reason supply curves go upward is because they're based on this very specific logic to land use. But anyway, that's just a random aside. Now, as it comes to Malthus, Malthus has this debate with Godwin. And Malthus was very reasoned. He probably had better arguments than Godwin. But Malthus and his population growth essay have kind of gone down in history's Hall of Shame as one of the worst predictions ever. I mean, this is like, because of course, Malthus is writing like around 1800 saying that if we have massive population increases, we're going to have massive decreases in the standard of living, in essence. And the irony of it is that if Malthus had written this at any other time in history, if he had written this in 2000 BC or 50 BC or 1000 AD, it would have been everyone to look at, oh yeah, this is great and this is fantastic. I mean, of course, people still acknowledge his work as being good and interesting and it's been very influential. But the thing is, he was writing right before the Industrial Revolution and a lot of technological changes that complicated his model, right? And he's also writing about the use of land use in assuming that you cannot increase the productivity of that land and population growth. And of course, the extra variable that is not included in that is technological change. The fact that you can squeeze a whole lot more out of an acre of land than you could several centuries ago, right? So you can have economies of scale and farming, you can have tractors, you can have modern equipment, varieties that we can plant and do things like that. We even have factory farming of animals and things like this. There are a lot of ways and a lot of this isn't necessarily even necessary, right? Food is I mean, I think a lot of people kind of underestimate the importance of food in limiting population. Really, it's in mortality. That's really the more important thing. But clearly what happened in this period is that the world population explodes. I think I mentioned before I want to say it hit a billion people around 1850. So like 50 years after Malthus was writing this and now it's just I mean, it's eight times that, right? If it's eight billion now. So things have incredibly increased. Now Malthus again, his reputation, I think in the field people respect Malthus because he was a very good economist and thinker, but this is what he's most well known for is this very bad prediction. It's kind of funny because you can actually turn the ostrich analogy around now because now what we're happening is now what's happening is that as population is increasing, we actually see decreasing rates of starvation and infant mortality and public health things and environmental disasters and all this kind of stuff. It's actually decreasing. Really, it is kind of like we're growing. We're becoming ostriches, right? It almost smells like Whig history where our necks are elongating and stuff like that, right? So that's kind of the irony of it. So Malthus was very instrumental in this and he did affect intellectual culture in many ways because of his critique of utopianism and a lot of other of the writers who were critical of the French Revolution. I mean, mind you this was around, I don't know how much people use the term socialism in the late 1700s but this was around the period of the transformation from so-called utopian socialism to so-called scientific socialism, right? Because when people like Marx started writing Marx's problems with the, I mean, Marx, of course, was a socialist and wanted the same thing as the utopian socialists but he had seen people like Malthus write this super mean ostrich analogy and recognized, yeah, well the issue with the utopians is they don't have some kind of rationalization or mechanism for how their utopia is supposed to get here. And Marxism in part is a kind of putting scientific verbiage and stuff like that on top of or trying to make utopianism or at least revolution to be more specific, seem inevitable given certain material conditions. So Malthus and many others affected at least the intellectual environment in that way. You couldn't just be a utopian anymore because you would just get mocked because it was very silly, but nonetheless Malthus he does kind of have a tarnished reputation. Now at this point you might just say well screw it, I guess the Malthusian stuff isn't important, like it's fake, he misunderstood this, like oh he omitted this therefore, you know it doesn't matter at all. But I will say although I'm not really a Malthusian there are other variables at work here that you have to acknowledge. Firstly you know as a fact there will be some kind of limiting factor on human population by definition. We don't have infinite space, we don't have an infinite number of atoms in the universe, we cannot increase population forever and ever amen. There has to be some limiting factor. But I think one thing that I don't know maybe people who aren't more economically minded tend to omit is that it's not like we're just going to wake up one day, let's say we wake up on the day that we reach 8 billion people and then oh my goodness this is too much, now the world is just going to collapse, we don't have enough food at the store, we don't have this, that or the other. It's not really how it works right? Really what happens is you have this gradual movement to increased you know increased scarcity of goods, we can't produce quite enough, you can't have as much surplus prices for things increase prices for energy increase and this is something that happens over a period of decades. Possibly centuries. Now if that were the case we would probably be moving to a kind of carrying capacity but as we see right now technological productivity is still increasing a whole lot faster than everything else and you can look at all the statistics that the UN and all these people, mind you the UN is like a big on population control all these people but they do have statistics and what nearly all of them show is that we are in fact moving to higher material standards of living meaning we have more plastic toys we have enough food, starvation is decreasing in percentages and actually I think depending on how you calculate it in absolute numbers as well even though we have many more people in the world less people are suffering from starvation other things like that. So that's why I think people who want to critique industrialism do it in very superficial ways because they'll just say stuff like whoa man we're going to be poor they're going to be too many people we're going to be living in some kind of cyberpunk you know anchovy apartment kind of thing and you know you can worry about that or whatever but in terms of standard of living industrial society is still producing a whole lot more if you want to critique industrialism there are many grounds on which to critique it here are two good ones good one number one is of course while it gives us many material things it is not psychologically calibrated to us right we are not psychologically calibrated to live in industrial society we are not supposed to live I mean part of human psychology is in fact not necessarily living in struggle but having a life under our control that is not just a function of you know the market wishes and things like that or living in a place where we can control the things around us and we can accomplish things not necessarily living in a pod where we get everything free because I don't know it's just easy we can produce enough right now one of the classic you know there's an old you've probably seen this in memes but there was an old study in the 1960s that's a pretty good example of this and this isn't on humans but this is on rats or mice I should say but there was a guy what was his name I think I wrote it down in my notes here let me pull it up and just oh yes yes yes John Calhoun okay there's a guy named John Calhoun and he did this very famous study where he's like okay here's what we're going to do we're going to take a bunch of mice and I forget how much he started with something like 20 mice and then he created this like mice utopia so they just have they get food all the time whenever they want it they get massive they get massive apartments basically places for them to build nests and hang out with other people and I don't do whatever they want to have fun all day right so he creates this utopia for mice okay now famously what happened is now they have all the food they want so the population increased dramatically right so eventually you got to the point I forget again I forget how many exactly he started with but let's say 20 he goes from 20 mice to I know around 2000 something mice so you have all of these mice and you still have plenty of room for them you have plenty of food and all this kind of stuff and so what ends up happening though is instead of dying a starvation or something or instead of living happy lives what the mice start to do is they start kind of degenerating they stop you know they stop having sex they have more mice they have sex a lot less and when they do and when a female mouse gave birth to children pups I think they call them it would just not really care for them it wouldn't build a nest for them they basically just kind of milled around and did nothing they didn't function as mice anymore all of their needs were taken care of they didn't have anything to do and a lot of them just died died of just kind of boredom more or less right and that is you know that is honestly kind of it's basically a rat metaverse that's basically what the metaverse is it's just like people living in this living in a pod and getting everything they want and doing the equivalent of running on a gerbil wheel to get achievement points or something like that but that's basically what it is either way the point is you know industrial society of course can industrial technology of course can give us many great things but life is not about just fulfilling needs that is not like the goal of it and humans will never function they will never be able to function in an environment like that and whenever they're given the ability of just perfect comfort they will really not choose it I mean this is kind of editorializing but you know there I think a lot of first world problems or people just making problems for themselves for them to solve them because they don't have anything else to do okay so that's ground number one on which you can criticize industrialism but another one which is a lot more practical is the fact that industrial technology generates this world where we are far too reliant materially on people we don't really have any connection with we're not talking about an independent village or an independent community that can kind of provide for everything themselves instead the division of labor and international trade and things like that make an environment where we are very much dependent on what's going on in some other country far far away that we really don't have any control over and that makes the entire world economy and society very fragile now I remember back Adam Smith who of course wrote The Wealth of Nations but he wrote this other work called The Theory of Moral Sentiments okay and in that I'm not going to read it out for you or anything but in it he makes this little note that oh well suppose and of course the book is about moral sentiments so he's talking about suppose that the entire nation of China it just like disappeared in an earthquake everyone in China just died okay and he said something like well you know we would all be we'd hear about it and we'd just be a gas oh my goodness oh this is so terrible there's poor Chinese people oh the frailty of life and you know maybe there would be some kind of commercial effects on trade or something like that but really everyone would just go along and they wouldn't really care it's just like something that doesn't really matter to them and he's talking about something in terms of morality and how people relate to people that they don't know but really the thing is nowadays of China disappeared in a giant earthquake yeah China would be screwed but we might be even more screwed because we now live thanks to industrial technology in a place where we are reliant on extremely separate parties to produce our goods and do things for us and you know frankly if you're in America what exactly does America do what does it produce like Apple DRM Netflix propaganda movies I'm not quite sure what America produces BS jobs I guess they have a lot of those everyone everyone does of course but there is a sense in which industrialism it creates a more fragile world right so you might say something like okay well we can have a higher population because of all this productive technology or I mean a common example that people use is GMOs GMOs like genetically organized organized genetically organized GMO genetically modified organisms I don't know why I wanted to say oh there but crops like that are a great example because what often happens is people will create this great GMO and then plant it in massive fields and it'll just be monocultural they won't have different varieties and if one of those varieties has some kind of issue with it maybe it falls victim to some pestilence that wasn't expected or maybe even you know maybe there's some kind of weird unexpected or unknown health effect to using this GMO if there's something like that it affects everyone drastically much more than if we had a million different kinds of you know seeds of wheat different kind of crops things like that so industrialism gives us a stability but kind of a pseudo stability we can have a much greater standard of living but that actually comes with big risks I mean that's how it is I mean industrial society also has given us nuclear weapons we haven't blown up the world with it but you always have to remember that the potentiality of that is there and that would not exist you know if we didn't have this kind of technology right so that I think is very much a legitimate concern so a couple more notes right before we go to a little break what exactly let's be absolutely clear about what has caused the increase in population because all what we've been talking about is food we've been talking about oh my goodness there's so much more food because of industrial technology and new farming techniques oh my goodness it's great to have all this food this is the thing that causes a higher population it's be it's very important to say that is not the case it might enable I mean it we're not dying of starvation it's a requirement but it's not necessarily the most proximate cause okay and Malthus and other people in that time period of course we're given the we're working on the assumption and of course this you could work on this now for most people in the world they were given the assumption that really humans are always having children about at the same rate okay the rate of people having children did not increase when the population increased what actually increased is the mortality rates significantly went down meaning childhood mortality which was one of the biggest things was in essence eradicated I mean children basically do not die in childbirth and shortly after it used to be that it was really the norm and a lot of times most children would die in the first year of them having been born or they'd be still born or all this kind of stuff and of course sanitation and other things have decreased mortality of people generally a lot many more people live longer partially because that and of course they have more children and so it's important to remember that the increase in population was not caused by people just deciding quote unquote to have more children or something like that but it's caused by a decrease in mortality okay now to us nowadays one thing that has happened since 1900 is the normalization of birth control now it is very important for you to realize as a modern person who is very alienated from this historically that birth control was extremely birth control was basically a detestable thing for prostitutes it would be absolutely obscene for someone even like an atheist or something to use something like birth control in this period it was very rare and people didn't really want like the idea one random note it is very funny when you hear someone like Bill Gates go to Africa and then he's like kind of pissed off and kind of confused why Africans don't want to use birth control like as if like birth control is like I don't know people want to I am really of the persuasion that you have to you have to brainwash someone from the time that they are born that birth control is like something that they want to do I think it's totally a forced meme but it definitely was in the 1900s particularly in Christian countries or frankly any religious country but back when the West was still Christian there was very much this strong anti-birth control animus and birth control was again thought of something for prostitutes and things like that so it was only around the 1900s that people like I was about to say Marla Sanger Margaret Sanger that's a planned parenthood woman and others kind of normalized this idea of using birth control and it's frankly it's gotten ridiculous now because I have I'm not going to say any names but I just know some boomer parents and in an ideal world they would have their children taken away if they did this but I have known of boomer parents who give their teenage daughters birth control so they can suppress their periods because periods are inconvenient I think that's freaking ridiculous and it's nuts that we now live in that world where I don't know either way this is just crazy and especially because all of these birth control chemicals just as an aside there are no longitudinal studies on these things the whole I know that people will say this about other silly new remedies that they're kind of worried about on a COVID-19 vaccine something like that but the same thing is true of birth control like I'm going to go ahead and bet I will put money down on the fact that in 20 years most of the birth control technologies that people are like chemical birth control people are going to know that oh yeah this like sterilizes people or harms them or psychologically or something else in some severe way but that's just a random aside either way that's not what I'm talking about so birth control I will just say is not it's not a variable for most of human history and most of human societies it's a very new thing and it's really still kind of specific to Europe okay or really Europe and white countries and things like that now other we'll get into the population bomb after the break where Paul Ehrlich actually gives a full-throat endorsement of basically sterilizing a bunch of men in India and things like that which actually ended up happening but you know in general up until today like people in Africa they don't give a crap about birth control and they're not going to give a crap about birth control they don't want to do it it's kind of a forced meme that's all I'm trying to say and I think a lot of people will look at these issues and just say why don't you just use birth control because they don't want to use it they want to have children like that's the point you know but either way if you look at statistics now if you want to see how significant birth control has been in changing global population again if you look at like Europeans or let's just say white people including the white people of America and Australia and things like that white people make around 10% of the global population whereas before the birth control era back in you know the 1900s things like that or I mean 1900 not the 1900s but around 1900 before birth control was popularized in these countries the white population was a lot closer to at least the third probably a good bit more okay of the world's population so there's been a very market change in the global population structure because all of these people are just they're stopping having children right and you know a lot of the pop I'm not quite sure if it's still true but there have been periods where people have said basically the United States has no population growth outside of immigration or something like that I don't know if that's true right now but I think it's very close to being that if it isn't true right now but you can get up for yourself if you're actually really interested of course it's not narrowly racial or anything as well because one interesting thing is I might include a link in the description for this as well but immigrants who come to a lot of western countries will adopt similar birthing practices so there were a couple studies on the fertility of Hispanic women who come to the United States they stay here for a generation basically they have fertility just as low as women who were here before as white or black women so that is that's something to think about so there is some sense in which we are kind of like the rat metaverse okay now I know people in their heads are saying oh my goodness I just don't I don't want to have kids for some reason I don't know it's expensive having children is like financially speaking the easiest as it's ever been today because as we just talked about we live in an industrial society that overproduces everything and things like that but nonetheless people are they're having less children and I think a lot of that is kind of like the rat metaverse thing I think a lot of people who there are a lot of people who are not as focused as on continuity and family and things like that they're more focused on is this convenient for me I'm just going to keep eating eating and consuming and things like that right so anyway I think this about it's about time for a break because I want to go ahead and start talking about the other books and I want to do the break before that because it evenly divides everything so I will read a couple of comments and then we'll get back into again Paul Ehrlich's population bomb and Julian Simon's response to the resourceful earth alright time to read some comments so I will go ahead and say the last episode of not related oh you know I didn't even say this is not related but this is not related dot xyz if you're watching this on YouTube or something go there download the previous episodes get on the RSS feed get a RSS feed reader get antenna pod or something and download the episodes anyway um so the last episode on BS jobs was on YouTube at least by far the most popular episode usually when I put them out on YouTube I don't expect them to get any number of views because it's just the still image and you know most people just download the file anyway but for whatever reason I think that video on jobs having no meaning and things like that really struck a chord with people really resonated with a lot and just I think it got over 100,000 views just in the past week or so so it was very popular but weirdly enough I got very few comments via donation and things like that and now lots of people post it you can go look for yourself posted comments on the YouTube video talking about their own BS job experience but not as many comments this time but I or donation comments but I'll read them out either way because I can't help you know I can't be helped to read all of those hundreds of comments on the YouTube video uh so Kwis Kwiliay sends in $5 thanks for the content Luke um Bragedon sends in some XMR greetings from Venisha her heard of Maria Trebin she was a based Christian Austrian, Austrian herbalist her book held through God's pharmacy is easily the first step towards the homeopathy pill uh I don't know anything about her um uh but uh maybe I'll look into her I'm not quite sure um Raphael donates $10 a month, you Luke really enjoy your content sorry this email is all purposefully misspelled really enjoy your content sorry I can't donate much I feel like I don't really care if God exists or he doesn't and I will try to live as independently from a God as possible what are your thoughts on this my thoughts are it doesn't make any sense I don't know if God exists you cannot live independently from him that that is like doesn't anyway uh so $20 from Renee Renee says hey Luke I enjoy your YouTube channel so much that I can't watch myself in the mirror anymore without donating so here I go that said just over a year ago I wrote an open source tool in Bash which I believe is the safest way to store your private data in untrusted cloud environments since I'm better at coding than self promotion this tool uh has been lingering in complete obscurity sense I think it deserves more recognition you can give it a try uh it's called neon N-A-E-O-N uh it has a source forage link here N-A-E-O-N uh yeah I mean I'm inherently skeptical on any attempt to I mean of course you can encrypt things right with your GPT key or something else uh in store in the cloud but like why would you even do that why why would you store it in the cloud store it on a server that you control or put it on the USB drive I'm sure there's some use of that but you know whatever uh I I'm just inherently skeptical of those kind of things uh anonymous since in some XMR should I even keep trying to find a wife when I have an asymmetric face what an asymmetric face and other bad proportions or is it best my best bet to accepting it and keeping out of the gene but okay that's a stupid comment like what he probably intended me for me the to read that on a live stream and roast him for it but um I guess I missed it during the last uh live stream uh let's see what else Tyler since in five bucks no comment on that thank you Tyler and uh it looks like that's about it that yeah those are all the donations um only a couple even though we did our biggest episode yet so uh um either way let's uh let's get on to the business in the 60s the 1960s that is there was a kind of rebirth of Malthusianism and it wasn't but well here's the thing here's the you guys know how the 20th century is it is literally the reddit of centuries because it is just people who don't know anything about anything pretending to be really smart and patting themselves on the back for noticing things that people have been talking about for centuries but they don't know about that because they don't freaking read anything um so the 20th century was marked by many people like this and one of them was Paul Ehrlich who wrote in the 1960s a book called the Population Bomb now um my cynical way of this is a very short book I mean it's much longer than uh Malthus's essay on population um but my my cynical way of describing this book is it is like a dumb down anecdotally based Malthusianism that doesn't even give credence to Malthus who you know anyone who was generally aware in the cultural environment at the time and still now knows about you know Thomas Malthus he's a very important guy um but uh Paul Ehrlich writes this book called the Population Bomb is you know of course Malthus put forth a kind of argument as to why population growth has to be an issue um Ehrlich is more like well in the opening of the book he says well you know if we just keep increasing the population at the same exponential growth curve we're gonna have like you know 600 million trillion people on the planet and we're gonna have to have uh a condo over the entire earth that's like two thousand stories wide blah blah blah all that all that kind or stories high all that kind of it's exactly what I was talking about before where it's just like people extrapolating things and not uh I don't know they don't have a view of marginalism right so it was kind of a silly book but the thing about Ehrlich is he you can look up videos of him if you really want he's kind of charismatic he's one of those guys um he got a significant following like in in kind of green movements in the 1960s and although I've never seen Bill Gates and those kind of people directly mention him I think it's doubtless that because Ehrlich was one of these people who who reinvigorated these ideas or really rediscovered the same ideas without knowing that I guess there was this history behind them um you know they have probably influenced a lot of people like Gates and others but Ehrlich was very famous he went on a bunch of talk shows he wrote for a bunch of uh he would write a bunch of articles for newspapers and stuff like that and he was very widely covered and the also the other thing about Ehrlich is he's he was a little freaking nuts now he's still alive today and he is 100% toned down everything he said because like Malthus Ehrlich well Malthus made kind of one bad prediction he just kind of generalized from one theory and okay there was this technological variable and we couldn't account for that but Ehrlich made a panoply of very specific and very crazy predictions you know the kind of stuff like oh the earth the world is going to collapse by 1985 or something like that or then 2000 and stuff like that and not just that but he I don't I don't want to describe his followers as kind of cult like and they they weren't all following him this is part of a wider you know it's the 1960s everyone was freaking insane back then but um there were a lot of people who endorsed very heinous things to control population and and this kind of this green revolutionary stuff Ehrlich actually even in the New York Times they actually published this article on Ehrlich giving a speech he said a sterility drug in food is hinted by all it just stresses the need to curb population growth so I'll just read out the first couple sentences the possibility the government might have to put a sterility drug in reservoirs and food shipped to foreign countries to limit human multiplication was envisioned today by a leading commentator on the population problem the crusader Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University among a number of commentators who have called attention to the population crisis at the United States Commission for UNESCO opened it on the 13th national conference here today blah blah blah and Ehrlich was actually pretty influential actually it goes down in this article to talk about you know he at least that this event was with one of Nixon's scientific advisors who was also really kind of anti-population growth and things like this now the consummation of all of this during this period was the idea of anti-natalism now Ehrlich himself is not necessarily anti-natalist but it's a much more religious view anti-natalism is really just the idea that people should not ever have children or basically and that comes from two different camps one is the ecological camp the kind of camp that Ehrlich would be in where human population is just getting too big we have too many people we can't support them therefore it's a bad thing to have children okay so that is camp number one and camp number two of anti-natalism which often comes with the first but camp number two is more like human existence itself is suffering or evil or it's killing the planet therefore no one should have children so this is anti-natalism again I'm not telling you Ehrlich believe this because actually I don't know you might be able to find some writing of his that says exactly this but although he was quoted he was quoted as saying something like actually I wrote it down the mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children that is Ehrlich although I looked at the origin of that quote it's often quoted and included in memes I've never actually found the origin of that so take that with a grain of salt either way you read Population Bomb and it actually talks about the idea of sterilization quite frequently and I think I alluded in the original or in the first half of this show that Ehrlich actually talks a lot about sterilization and forced sterilization specifically in India at the period India has always had and I think they still have now a lot of flirtation with the idea of sterilization and they've actually sterilized lots of people in India sometimes without necessarily full consent like without people having a full understanding of what they're doing right so Ehrlich was a big endorser of this kind of stuff which I think even now even in today's population growth hysteria I would feel like Bill Gates would not even say it's good to be sterilized but I don't know you never know now he is telling people to re-engineer their poop and eat it so you never know but either way the interesting thing about Ehrlich is actually not necessarily his views they obviously passed as the decades went on and nothing continued to happen and of course standards of living increased and starvation decreased and all of these many predictions came to fail of Ehrlich the public eye and so people don't necessarily care that much about what he's saying or doing although as I said he's still is alive he's pretty old now but he still is alive and of course in typical fashion he is convinced that the reason that the world has not ended is because he has saved it by raising awareness about population growth even though actually a lot of his population growth predictions are lower than what they actually are in real life so like in the United States there's something like oh my goodness the US population is going to get to like 250 million that's going to be way too much and now we're like at maybe 350 million and I don't know I don't feel cramped maybe someone knows but we're not in as well I guess food prices have gone up but I don't know if that's because of population growth to be honest but either way one of the final events of Ehrlich's public career that he took with a man a bet he took with a man named Julian Simon okay now Julian Simon is kind of like the anti Paul Ehrlich and while Paul Ehrlich was definitely a victim of many I don't want to say absurdities but maybe exaggeration Julian Simon may actually be a victim of exaggeration in the opposite direction but I think his works are worth looking at Julian Simon wrote many responses to Paul Ehrlich's writing and the idea the zero population growth people in general and a lot of them now Julian Simon he was kind of like an economist I want to say he's like a libertarian kind of guy that's the view I get from the way he talked I want to say he was like affiliated with Cato or one of those kind of libertarian I don't know was Cato around back then I just feel like there was some libertarian think tank he was associated with either way Simon's had written this book called the resourceful earth and he also wanted to put Ehrlich's predictions to the to a task so he sat down with Ehrlich and said you pick whatever commodities you want and I am going to bet that all of these commodities are going to be more available more cheap more plentiful in you know 10 or 20 something like that years so they took that bet and Simon of course won okay because although Ehrlich had this idea of scarcity and overpopulation all this kind of stuff in real life again we have massive productivity we have a massive increase in productivity in ways that people in the past couldn't necessarily understand and most of all not everything is constantly falling in price the things that they had bet on and things generally in the economy fell in price and Simon won this but that's kind of boring and dry what is important is the way that Simon looked at his actual critique of Malthusianism and Ehrlichism if you want to call it that Julie and Simon wrote a book not just called the resourceful earth but also a book called the ultimate resource now what is the ultimate resource the ultimate resource in Simon's view is humans humans are actually the ultimate resource and he said kind of tongue in cheek that if you want to solve the world's population problems the best thing you could do is create more humans so you have more people who can figure out how to solve the problem which kind of sounds obviously absurd but Simon's view is that well let's look back to why Malthus failed Malthus failed in making his prediction because you look at a particular variable that is technological change now I've just been saying technological change as if it's just one thing but in reality there are a bajillion different developments that are happening all the time ways of doing things more effectively and getting more out of crops and land and things like that they're happening all the time that are being incrementally discovered and population is not just the pressure to further incentivize people to develop new things to solve these problems but it's also more people working on the problems right now Simon actually has a view not dissimilar to Schumpeter I want to say back in the second episode of not related we talked about Schumpeter I don't know if I mentioned this of him but Schumpeter kind of responded to the idea that oh the like capitalism is going to run out of stuff to do like we're not going to be able to develop more stuff you know we're not going to be able to have global developments and things like that and the thing when you're talking about something like that it's kind of we always have this we don't have hindsight right by definition we cannot see the new developments that are going to occur in the future whereas we can always look at the past and see all that stuff and say oh well it's obvious right and the thing that Schumpeter notes in capitalism socialism and democracy is that the market economy it's not really about just productivity or squeezing more productivity about things it's also about taking things that are not considered natural resources and turning them into natural resources right turning them into things that can be used for something this something that Simon talks about as well right so the classic example would be that nasty gooey liquid that comes out of the ground the black stuff the oil right so oil by itself is pretty freaking useless and kind of nasty if you ever uncover it but of course it has become kind of the basis of a lot of our modern society using it harnessing it for power so one of the most important things it's something that started out as not a resource just some kind of weird thing that was in the ground and we found out how to harness it and similar things we're not really using nuclear power that much but you know it's a similar concept there are a lot of things that are just sitting right in front of us that we we don't know how to exploit or we haven't been able to exploit them but we definitely can so whenever you're going to do the thing that Malthus did and create this model of how population can increase and what its limits are you always have to remember that there are a million black swans I mean you could say white swans because they're good things but there are many new potentialities that will be that will be revealed in the future as we have more development right so at any point in time you can always look at the future and just extrapolate trends and they will look freaking ridiculous that is not that's not a very exciting thing to do that's not a very I don't know it's not eventful it's not really telling you anything because you're just stating the obvious right so Simon's view is that humans are themselves a resource and having these population issues is actually good for technical development and there are always more ways of making things efficiently or just kind of fine tuning things or using new things that are not natural resource or that are not thought of as being resources they're just being out there and repurposing them and getting things out of that so Simon is I will say he is almost I don't know maybe a little too optimistic I'll say that because he actually did say something like oh well you know the earth it can continue to we can have the same population growth rate for like a billion years or something like that and at that point we literally are getting to the point where we have more humans and then there are atoms in the universe like there are still going to be some kinds of limits but I think Simon's view is a lot more robust now this isn't now mind you I will say this this is not to say that we might go some significant periods without enough technological development to keep up with population or other constraints other environmental constraints or things like that but in general I think Simon's idea is that you know as time goes on we can't necessarily extrapolate the trends that we are familiar with they're always going to be more pessimistic than we might otherwise expect right now to come back full circle is population growth an issue is it something we have to be worried about is Bill Gates wasting his time well actually even if population growth over population is not an issue Bill Gates is probably not wasting his time because he can still probably use the issue of population growth cynically to his own advantage but that's neither here nor there I do think by itself population growth is probably not a very important issue in fact if anything the issue of underpopulation is going to become something you hear talked about a whole lot more this is my editorial stance and it is something that I think will probably I'm not going to extrapolate trends because I just talked about how stupid it is to extrapolate trends but I think there's something very worrisome about a lot of developed countries that I've already alluded to the fact that people are no longer functioning as humans anymore they're not getting married and having children and they're just kind of Netflixing and cooming and things like that I view that as fundamentally worrisome that that has been something that's normalized that we are basically living like the rats we are living like the rats in the experiment where they have everything they want John Calhoun's experiment where they have everything they need and therefore they stop reproducing and stop they basically die out because actually in Calhoun's terminology there's this thing called a population sink which maybe you've heard of if you know about demography but historically because cities were such nasty places and there's so much disease and things like that there were termed population sinks because people would be born in the country and you'd have a lot of people born in the country and they move to cities and they basically die that's a population sink but Calhoun created the idea of a behavioral sink and that is what the rat utopia is it's a place where you have everything you want and existence is not really about existing anymore it's just kind of I'm here I don't really care about having children I don't exist for a reason that's it and I am just going to let myself die and in fact I have this very clever overpopulation hysteria in the back of my mind that actually justify I'm actually a noble person for not having children ah yes this is what people a lot of anti-natalists and stuff in modern countries are thinking about and I think it's kind of a rationalization I think if anything people are pulled out of their natural human situations and they are no longer functioning as humans kind of should do so I find that more worrisome than really even overpopulation or even underpopulation is the mere fact that what has happened in industrial societies is inherently worrisome and we don't really know what direction it's going to go I honestly cannot predict and I think anyone who tries to predict it is just kind of fooling themselves I actually wrote down there are a couple of really funny headlines where people are writing about stuff like this specifically like Japan gets a lot of bad press about this here's a headline I'll read half of Japanese couples are in sexless marriages more than 22% of women said they found sex troublesome well 35.2% of men said that work left them too tired for intercourse, right? and that's the kind of stuff that happens and even you look at the United States and it's actually no different Americans will talk like that post their L's like that like Japanese people will but if you look at let's say this is not me giving endorsement to fornication but it can be a proxy for sexual behaviors in general you know which generation is the most sexed who had the most sex? well it was the boomers boomers had lots of sex and this is not me endorsing fornication but over the years even though we live in an increasingly sexualized society where zoomers right now they can watch porn all they want they can pick up tiktok and see unspeakable things on that they are the most sexualized generation but in terms of them actually having sexual contact and sexual behavior with other people like the lowest in a very very long time right? things are keep getting weird and weird it's not even that we are moving to although we are very sexualized we're not even sexual it's just kind of pseudo it's like people who are just they're like the rats who are just like phoning it in actually Calhoun goes into rat behaviors where like men would guard women but they wouldn't actually have intercourse like mice would guard the female mice but they wouldn't actually have intercourse with them weird things like that basically mouse simps really strange either way those are the things I think we really have to worry about in post developed societies kind of population collapse and ending up like the rats so that is what my concern is but that is not to say that there are not some issues with population increases in some place and now I don't endorse any kind of sterilization or anything like that I think it is 100% the right of people to engage in the marital act and have children and I find it suspect if anyone questions that right however I do think that there are many issues that can arise from increased populations and things like that but those are drastically outstretched as far as I can see by the increase to industrial technology and the productivity of it so I guess I am wrapping up this episode of Not Related again go to notrelated.xyz donate.notrelated.xyz to leave a donation and comment you can donate bitcoin and Monero I will probably do some episodes next month I think I have two I have in mind we will see if I will have time I am only barely getting this one at the end of the month I wanted to do that and by the way if you make a pledge the reason I am doing it at the end of the month as the policy is if you sign up for a monthly donation you will only be charged if I do two episodes per month so if I take a month off which I sometimes do you will not be giving me money to do nothing because that is not fair it is not fair for anyone either way have any comments email them or send a donation and I will see you guys next time