Ibon wrote:
I posted on another thread something relevant to these comments. In affect, modern civilization for 200 years has continuously won all the battles against Malthusian predictions of collapse only to perhaps eventually lose the war. Ultimately, each adjustment we make through technology to accommodate and enable a growing population to thrive is going to enable the eventual cyclical correction (the war) to be that much more brutal.
Or?
There is an interesting theoretical question that hangs in the air that Cornucopians rarely bring up that I think merits discussion.
Is a falling population due to resource constraints manageable to avoid an all out civilization collapse.
The triage decisions that are made in an emergency room after a bomb or natural disaster, you stabilize the wounded and save the most lives you can knowing you will lose some.
We start to write off the most hopeless unsustainable regions of the world due to political instability, over populated bio-regions of extreme low sustainable carrying capacity, coastal areas due to sea level rise, stopping the flow of immigrants, stopping the flow of food aid, etc. etc.
Wont moral drift result in nation states with abundant resources preserving their core as they allow collapse and barbarianism of regions simply written off? Some of these same nation states will apply this triage within their own borders.
Drifting morally into the territory of writing off whole populations as a triage is something morally unheard of today but maybe quite the status quo in a hundred years.
Wont a Copious Abundance in this future scenario still be preaching abundance where it is still preserved at its core?
Haven't we already started heading down this path?
During most of those two centuries the global population was relatively small, with environmental damage, middle class conveniences, and even the presence of WMDs barely present. In addition, "abundance" during the last few decades meant large numbers in hard drives, and backed up ironically through resources (especially oil) and even manpower available in "barbaric" regions. Another irony is that the economic status of those in power is dependent on decreasing the number of "barbarians" through increased sales of goods and services to growing consumer markets.
In short, the basis of that "core" is a global capitalist economy that requires continuous economic growth, thanks to increasing credit that has to be backed up by increasing production and consumption of goods, dominated by a financial elite which can only thrive through a growing global middle class.
Given a collapse that decreases that population significantly, the "core" will consists of armed groups attacking each other.
