The kind of specialized investment required to maintain and develop technology at our current level requires market sizes not much smaller than the current ones (e.g. check out what a modern microchip factory costs.) If we didn’t mind going back to town-blacksmith tech levels, sure, population could get a lot smaller—but that would, among other problems, kill off the idea of meeting everyone’s basic needs.
I think there’s a pretty large range between blacksmith levels and modern society. I’m pretty sure I could be happy living with 50s era technology. I don’t know what strides have been made in medicine and agriculture since than that might be contingent on having 6 billion people instead of 3.
On the other hand, 50s era technology depended heavily on nonrenewable resources. (Not just the obvious fossil fuels either, e.g. I’ve seen it claimed, can’t verify or refute of my own knowledge, that agriculture is going to start running into trouble after another few decades of depletion of phosphate deposits unless we find a solution.)
We have good reason to believe resource depletion problems can be solved if we continue to make progress rapidly enough. But how long a window of time we have, and how long things could be kept ticking along at industrial era tech level, nobody knows, and I’d rather not find out the hard way.
The kind of specialized investment required to maintain and develop technology at our current level requires market sizes not much smaller than the current ones (e.g. check out what a modern microchip factory costs.)
I’ve read this claim many times, but I’ve never seen a convincing argument for what exactly would count as “much smaller.” My impression is that three orders of magnitude smaller would almost certainly be too small, two orders of magnitude possibly also, but I’m not at all sure about one order of magnitude.
Is there some kind of critical analysis of this I can read? What technologies are the most vulnerable to stagnation at lower scales? It seems like a lot of technological progress is one-way, in that markets have already selected for the most efficient form of technology. It could then be scaled down significantly. Computer chips maybe not so much, but what about (say) farming?
I haven’t come across any reasonably complete and in-depth analysis of this (just a bunch of scattered and more or less tangential fragments to which I didn’t keep a list of references) - if anyone else has links to such, I’d be interested in taking a look.
One big problem with regarding technological progress as one-way is that a great deal of technology relies on nonrenewable resources. To take your example of farming, today’s agricultural techniques rely very heavily on fossil fuels and perhaps on less obvious resources: consider phosphate deposits, soil erosion and pesticide resistance—all problems which might be solved easily with sufficiently advanced technology, but not necessarily otherwise.
The conclusion is that it’s hard to know how much time we have, but one thing is clear: stagnation is not stasis. It is, in the end, death.
The kind of specialized investment required to maintain and develop technology at our current level requires market sizes not much smaller than the current ones (e.g. check out what a modern microchip factory costs.) If we didn’t mind going back to town-blacksmith tech levels, sure, population could get a lot smaller—but that would, among other problems, kill off the idea of meeting everyone’s basic needs.
I think there’s a pretty large range between blacksmith levels and modern society. I’m pretty sure I could be happy living with 50s era technology. I don’t know what strides have been made in medicine and agriculture since than that might be contingent on having 6 billion people instead of 3.
On the other hand, 50s era technology depended heavily on nonrenewable resources. (Not just the obvious fossil fuels either, e.g. I’ve seen it claimed, can’t verify or refute of my own knowledge, that agriculture is going to start running into trouble after another few decades of depletion of phosphate deposits unless we find a solution.)
We have good reason to believe resource depletion problems can be solved if we continue to make progress rapidly enough. But how long a window of time we have, and how long things could be kept ticking along at industrial era tech level, nobody knows, and I’d rather not find out the hard way.
rwallace:
I’ve read this claim many times, but I’ve never seen a convincing argument for what exactly would count as “much smaller.” My impression is that three orders of magnitude smaller would almost certainly be too small, two orders of magnitude possibly also, but I’m not at all sure about one order of magnitude.
Is there some kind of critical analysis of this I can read? What technologies are the most vulnerable to stagnation at lower scales? It seems like a lot of technological progress is one-way, in that markets have already selected for the most efficient form of technology. It could then be scaled down significantly. Computer chips maybe not so much, but what about (say) farming?
I haven’t come across any reasonably complete and in-depth analysis of this (just a bunch of scattered and more or less tangential fragments to which I didn’t keep a list of references) - if anyone else has links to such, I’d be interested in taking a look.
One big problem with regarding technological progress as one-way is that a great deal of technology relies on nonrenewable resources. To take your example of farming, today’s agricultural techniques rely very heavily on fossil fuels and perhaps on less obvious resources: consider phosphate deposits, soil erosion and pesticide resistance—all problems which might be solved easily with sufficiently advanced technology, but not necessarily otherwise.
The conclusion is that it’s hard to know how much time we have, but one thing is clear: stagnation is not stasis. It is, in the end, death.