Am I misreading you, or are you actually comparing the living standards of Kiryas Joel with a Malthusian equilibrium?!
Kiryas Joel is, by definition, not in a Malthusian equilibrium because their population is expanding.*
However, they are far closer to Hanson’s future Malthusian equilibrium than your average American community; probably they are the closest**. And so they are interesting from the utilitarian welfare point of view.
I’m not sure you understand Malthusian economics very well. A ‘subsistence wage’ is an arbitrary culturally set wage anywhere above whatever amount is required to not starve to death. Subsistence wages can vary dramatically, and can even fall over time. (Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms points out that some African countries are actually worse off in per-capita wealth than they were millennia ago because modern medicine let their subsistence wage fall even further.) If I may quote one of the experts, David Ricardo, on what a subsistence wage is:
It is not to be understood that the natural price of labor, estimated even in food and necessaries, is absolutely fixed and constant. It varies at different times in the same country, and very materially differs in different countries. It essentially depends on the habits and customs of the people. An English laborer would consider his wages under their natural rate, and too scanty to support a family, if they enabled him to purchase no other food than potatoes, and to live in no better habitation than a mud cabin; yet these moderate demands of nature are often deemed sufficient in countries where ‘man’s life is cheap’, and his wants easily satisfied. Many of the conveniences now enjoyed in an English cottage, would have been thought luxuries in an earlier period of our history.
The inhabitants of Kiryas Joel clearly have a different subsistence wage than surrounding middle-class citizens because children are not a productive investment, and children use up resources that could go to the parents’ subsistence.
Their salaries and wealth are not considered enough—by the outsiders—to raise a family properly, hence the whole discussion about whether Something Ought To Be Done and whether they are really that poor. Pace Ricardo, we are the English laborers who consider the Kiryas Joel incomes too potatoey to raise a family—yet manifestly, they are doing so.
* Caveat: if I understand the models right, there are ways involving the death rate that a population can be temporarily expanding but still in an equilibrium. They wouldn’t apply here.
** I wouldn’t be surprised if a polygamous Mormon sect somewhere was beating Kiryas Joel. But there are better stats and articles on them.
However, they are far closer to Hanson’s future Malthusian equilibrium than your average American community; probably they are the closest**. And so they are interesting from the utilitarian welfare point of view.
Looking for a community in modern-day U.S. that is the closest to a Malthusian equilibrium is kind of like looking at the members of a billionaire country club and asking whose circumstances are closest to those of a homeless beggar. Technically, the question might have a well-defined answer, but it won’t give you any insight into the life of actual beggars.
Hell, I’ve lived in circumstances that make Kiryas Joel look like a billionaire country club in comparison, and it would be delusional for me to draw conclusions about Malthusian life based on my experiences.
I’m not sure you understand Malthusian economics very well. A ‘subsistence wage’ is an arbitrary culturally set wage anywhere above whatever amount is required to not starve to death.
I understand that. (In fact, the insight goes back even before Ricardo and Malthus, at least back to Adam Smith’s concept of “the lowest [wage] rate which is consistent with common humanity.”)
However, this wage is “culturally set” insofar as people may limit their reproduction because they have a culturally set minimum standard for forming families. Theoretically, it is possible that a wealthy society might be in a Malthusian equilibrium because people would like to reproduce more but have very high minimum standards for per-capita family wealth. (Note that this is distinct from the still largely mysterious reasons for the modern demographic transition.) However, in practice, every historical society stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium has been unspeakably poor by the modern developed world standards, and the future Hansonian uploads would be in an even worse situation, given the incentive to multiply them to use up every bit of the available resources. (As John Derbyshire once quipped, “The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!”)
Thus, looking for someone in modern-day U.S. whose experience might give you insight into the historical Malthusian life, let alone the Malthusian life of future uploads, really is like looking for that poorest billionaire in a country club when you want insight into the life of beggars.
Theoretically, it is possible that a wealthy society might be in a Malthusian equilibrium because people would like to reproduce more but have very high minimum standards for per-capita family wealth.
This society would not be evolutionarily stable since the members with the lowest standards will reproduce more causing the minimum standard to decrease. This process will continue until it reaches the point where standards are so low that any additional children would simply starve to death.
I can’t see anything obviously wrong in that reasoning, but in Italy that situation has more-or-less obtained for decades and I can’t see any sign of such a process happening.
I guess what’s happening is some process preventing the standards of some members to fall much below the standards of the rest of the society. (If you know your children will be ostracized by their peers, making their life much harder, unless they wear expensive clothes, have expensive toys, etc., then you might not want your children to wear cheap clothes and have cheap toys, even if in isolation they’d enjoy them just as much as expensive ones.)
It’d be interesting to know what is going on. If you argue from a sort of Malthusian ideological-lowering-of-subsistence-wages, that doesn’t explain it since the subsistence wage is still way below the regular wage and ought to allow indefinite over-reproduction of the subpopulation. And these subpopulations often isolate themselves from the world and denigrate it as much as possible, so the world’s standards shouldn’t matter too much to them.
My own suspicion is that there’s some sort of diseconomy of scale to these subpopulations: they grow like gangbusters but the growth tapers off until total retention rate matches overall population growth rate.
But I don’t know this for sure. I don’t know that members start leaving the large subpopulation for the main population at sufficient rates to offset the fertility, or why the leaving rates would change as the group grows. Certainly the Amish seem to be continuing to grow without a problem. It may be that there’s a certain formula (decentralization?) which only a few have hit upon recently.
Yes, but evolution is much slower than cultural change. In principle, it is possible that a society might have very high and very uniform standards for the minimum wealth per child, so that it would take a very long time before evolution undermined these standards noticeably. In the meantime, it would make sense to speak of a Malthusian equilibrium.
In reality, of course, such a situation is highly improbable and (to my knowledge) not attested historically. So it’s not really a mistake to equate a Malthusian equilibrium with awful poverty and constant threat of famine. (The latter would of course also have its analogues in a Malthusian upload society, which are not hard to imagine.)
Kiryas Joel is, by definition, not in a Malthusian equilibrium because their population is expanding.*
However, they are far closer to Hanson’s future Malthusian equilibrium than your average American community; probably they are the closest**. And so they are interesting from the utilitarian welfare point of view.
I’m not sure you understand Malthusian economics very well. A ‘subsistence wage’ is an arbitrary culturally set wage anywhere above whatever amount is required to not starve to death. Subsistence wages can vary dramatically, and can even fall over time. (Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms points out that some African countries are actually worse off in per-capita wealth than they were millennia ago because modern medicine let their subsistence wage fall even further.) If I may quote one of the experts, David Ricardo, on what a subsistence wage is:
The inhabitants of Kiryas Joel clearly have a different subsistence wage than surrounding middle-class citizens because children are not a productive investment, and children use up resources that could go to the parents’ subsistence.
Their salaries and wealth are not considered enough—by the outsiders—to raise a family properly, hence the whole discussion about whether Something Ought To Be Done and whether they are really that poor. Pace Ricardo, we are the English laborers who consider the Kiryas Joel incomes too potatoey to raise a family—yet manifestly, they are doing so.
* Caveat: if I understand the models right, there are ways involving the death rate that a population can be temporarily expanding but still in an equilibrium. They wouldn’t apply here.
** I wouldn’t be surprised if a polygamous Mormon sect somewhere was beating Kiryas Joel. But there are better stats and articles on them.
Looking for a community in modern-day U.S. that is the closest to a Malthusian equilibrium is kind of like looking at the members of a billionaire country club and asking whose circumstances are closest to those of a homeless beggar. Technically, the question might have a well-defined answer, but it won’t give you any insight into the life of actual beggars.
Hell, I’ve lived in circumstances that make Kiryas Joel look like a billionaire country club in comparison, and it would be delusional for me to draw conclusions about Malthusian life based on my experiences.
I understand that. (In fact, the insight goes back even before Ricardo and Malthus, at least back to Adam Smith’s concept of “the lowest [wage] rate which is consistent with common humanity.”)
However, this wage is “culturally set” insofar as people may limit their reproduction because they have a culturally set minimum standard for forming families. Theoretically, it is possible that a wealthy society might be in a Malthusian equilibrium because people would like to reproduce more but have very high minimum standards for per-capita family wealth. (Note that this is distinct from the still largely mysterious reasons for the modern demographic transition.) However, in practice, every historical society stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium has been unspeakably poor by the modern developed world standards, and the future Hansonian uploads would be in an even worse situation, given the incentive to multiply them to use up every bit of the available resources. (As John Derbyshire once quipped, “The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!”)
Thus, looking for someone in modern-day U.S. whose experience might give you insight into the historical Malthusian life, let alone the Malthusian life of future uploads, really is like looking for that poorest billionaire in a country club when you want insight into the life of beggars.
This society would not be evolutionarily stable since the members with the lowest standards will reproduce more causing the minimum standard to decrease. This process will continue until it reaches the point where standards are so low that any additional children would simply starve to death.
I can’t see anything obviously wrong in that reasoning, but in Italy that situation has more-or-less obtained for decades and I can’t see any sign of such a process happening.
I guess what’s happening is some process preventing the standards of some members to fall much below the standards of the rest of the society. (If you know your children will be ostracized by their peers, making their life much harder, unless they wear expensive clothes, have expensive toys, etc., then you might not want your children to wear cheap clothes and have cheap toys, even if in isolation they’d enjoy them just as much as expensive ones.)
It’d be interesting to know what is going on. If you argue from a sort of Malthusian ideological-lowering-of-subsistence-wages, that doesn’t explain it since the subsistence wage is still way below the regular wage and ought to allow indefinite over-reproduction of the subpopulation. And these subpopulations often isolate themselves from the world and denigrate it as much as possible, so the world’s standards shouldn’t matter too much to them.
My own suspicion is that there’s some sort of diseconomy of scale to these subpopulations: they grow like gangbusters but the growth tapers off until total retention rate matches overall population growth rate.
But I don’t know this for sure. I don’t know that members start leaving the large subpopulation for the main population at sufficient rates to offset the fertility, or why the leaving rates would change as the group grows. Certainly the Amish seem to be continuing to grow without a problem. It may be that there’s a certain formula (decentralization?) which only a few have hit upon recently.
Yes, but evolution is much slower than cultural change. In principle, it is possible that a society might have very high and very uniform standards for the minimum wealth per child, so that it would take a very long time before evolution undermined these standards noticeably. In the meantime, it would make sense to speak of a Malthusian equilibrium.
In reality, of course, such a situation is highly improbable and (to my knowledge) not attested historically. So it’s not really a mistake to equate a Malthusian equilibrium with awful poverty and constant threat of famine. (The latter would of course also have its analogues in a Malthusian upload society, which are not hard to imagine.)
I wasn’t referring simply to biological evolution.
Fair enough, but that’s basically what I also mean when I say that the scenario is possible in principle but extremely unlikely in practice.