I kinda went on a little research spree on economics this afternoon but at one point I figured it’s probably good to know if it’s possible for, say, at least 98% of people on earth to live a happy fulfilled life at all.
I know there’s plenty of people who’d be more than happy to have literally nothing more than a house, food and water, but that still leaves a whole lot of people who want other things in life.
Do we have any metrics or data on wether the earth can sustain roughly 8 billion humans?
Not only are there enough, but the world’s population may have peaked long ago at a much lower number if things had been better distributed.
I would think it would cost more to keep the elite’s boot on the throat of the masses. Makes no sense.
Yes, absolutley without question we can. And it wouldn’t even take that much resources.
The most recent wide scale study that was done was focused entirely on the world’s “needs” being satisfied in addition to basic resources like food and water.
The conclusion: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.
Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries.
With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large increases in total global throughput and output.
Yes, there is. The problem is that the rich hoard resources, like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. This is a feature of capitalism.
It’s kind of a feature of humanity. That’s been going on since there were resources to hoard, and any people with the capability and will to hoard them.
Money is a placeholder for labor. If you distribute all their money, the same labor needs to get done.
It absolutely helps, but it can’t make everyone rich because by definition “rich” requires living off the work of others. (I’m using the word rich losely to mean comfortable.) What it can do is raise the bottom 10% out of poverty.
The US consumes at a level unsustainable by the Earth. Bezos’s billions doesn’t mean he consumes a billion cheeseburgers a day. His personal waste is huge but tiny when compared the the total of 350m Americans.
I don’t agree with this.
We as a society are productive enough that we could absolutely work a lot less individually and still have all our needs and comforts met (which is what the OP was asking)
don’t forget the 1/3rd or sonething of all food harvested and cooked and packaged and shipped that gets thrown into dumpsters that the same billionare’s stolen capital “safeguard” from those impoverished and starving. we could sustain more people by literally not throwing actual food into actual trash.
It’s not just food, either. There’s tons and tons of clothing and just “discontinued” products that are destroyed.
Luxury goods are so wasteful. A $5,000.00 handbag costs as much to make as a $50.00 bag. It’s all in the name.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes that extra money buys ethical labor practices, sustainable material sourcing, quality workmanship and item longevity. Not always, there are plenty of scammy “luxury” goods, but there are plenty of brands that are considered luxury simply because they aren’t fast fashion and are buy-it-for-life quality.
While this is all theoretical, I agree with you. I think there are so many jobs that either currently don’t need to exist or jobs that could be replaced with robots or AI in the near future that it frees up people to focus on culture and innovation. Instead of focusing on maximum output, we can create only what is needed and let people relax more and enjoy life. Imagine instead of 1 person working 40 hours a week, you have 4 people working 10 hours a week. Everyone can contribute and also have plenty of time for themselves. This of course is only possible with guaranteed food and shelter for all. But one can dream.
The lowest-hanging fruit are jobs that exist solely to work against other jobs, e.g. the entire health insurance industry vs. literally every medical professional.
As someone who works in healthcare, I couldn’t agree more. I’ll be very happy to give up my job if it means we can all have healthcare.
You’re the same as literally every other person in the field with whom I’ve ever talked to about this. And it’s been a lot.
Rich and comfortable are definitely not synonyms. Rich is a relative descriptor that basically means to have more than other people, so obviously, we can’t all be rich. Comfortable is a state descriptor - shelter, food & clothing needs met, children provided for, time and resources for relaxation - everyone can have that.
Billionaires don’t earn their money though. It’s stolen in the form of low wages and denied pay increases.
Not really. Billionaires don’t have a checking account with billions of dollars in it that they stole from their workers. The vast majority of their wealth is locked in non-liquid investment vehicles. If they actually tried to cash those in at once, they’d only get a fraction of that wealth.
The big problem is banks will loan them money based on those non-liquid assets and it’s not taxed as income.
That value could be dispensed fairly to workers. Jeff Bezos essentially gets paid in AMZN stock, and there’s no reason that stock could not be dispensed to workers just the same. 10, 100, 1000 shares to each of the 1M employees, every year. The fact that Bezos and his fellow capitalists have kept all of the business value to themselves and not shared it with their workers is how they have hoarded/stolen the value of their employees’ labor.
This sounds like some theory you find in a school textbook that doesnt match reality…
Most people just need somewhere to live and enough food to have the basics met. We dont need to be Jeff Bezoz. But so many people dont even have the basics.
If we were a group living in the jungle, it would be like one of us owning a proper house with maids and others sleeping in tents.
That one guy would quickly be dragged out and made to sleep with the pigs because of his greedy selfish behavior, while the house would be shared by everyone else so they can also be comfortable.
That is what is fair. We know society is extreamly unfair now and it will continue to become even more so, because the power to actually do something physical about it has disappeared in this age. Before, you would have revolutions.
Providing the basics is why I said taking the wealth and giving it to the poor would work.
However “comfortable” is middle class, the majority of the US population, and that’s not ecologically sustainable.
No.
First of all, it takes just as much labor to make a product that lasts fifty years as it does to make a product that lasts five years. Most things today are designed to fall apart and be replaced. If we made cars and appliances that lasted, there’d be less demand for new things. A lot of the current economy is designed to be wasteful.
Second, they’ve already detected asteroids that are loaded with all the minerals we’d need. Back at the height of the Veitnam War the US was launching a Gemini mission about six times a year. Getting people up there might take a decade, but the payoff would be worth it.
Finally, OP didn’t say ‘rich’ they said ‘comfortable.’
If we made cars and appliances that lasted, …
We do. Cars especially, today, are vastly more efficient, reliable, longer-lived, and safer than cars even 30 years ago. Appliances, too.
First of all, it takes just as much labor to make a product that lasts fifty years as it does to make a product that lasts five years.
While product obsolescence and built to expire is a huge problem, it is absolutely untrue to the point of absurdity to claim that making a product that lasts 50 years costs the same as a 5 year lifespan product.
We don’t even have the materials science to engineer an led diode that doesn’t decrease in brightness over 50 years to be able to build one. You can beef up the components and heat sinks so they last 20, but the emitter will still be a fraction of its original brightness. The same goes for everything else.
Back in the day, people could take tubes from their TVs and radios to a shop, test them, and buy replacement parts. How much tech do you own that can be easily replaced with a screwdriver?
Look at things like furniture and clothing. If you paid half a dollar for a shirt in 1930, you expected to be able to wear it to the coal mine every day for years. When was the last time you saw shoes for sale that could be resoled?
Back in the day, people could take tubes from their TVs and radios to a shop, test them, and buy replacement parts.
Did you learn that from me? I posted it a few weeks ago:
Sorry, but no.
It was a super common thing; plenty of places had them. Talk to any CRT or old radio enthusiast, or anyone over 55, and they’ll tell you about it.
Ah yes labor must exist in the context of wealth generation…
I’m just saying average Americans, the comfortable class, exist on the backs of millions of global workers living in poverty.
The claim that everyone can live like a fat American isn’t ecologically sustainable.
Just Americans, eh? The poor here in America also exist on the backs of global workers living in poverty because of the rich. We absolutely could all have food and shelter and healthcare. If that’s what you think fat Americans have I’ve got bad news for you, bud.
People tend to forget about that part. Money is what is exchanged with you for your labor and then you exchange that for goods. Sure an increase in funds would mean a bunch of people could live better for a while. But then trash would pile up, waste water would become a monumental issue. A lot of gross, vile, disgusting, and extremely necessary work would suddenly stop getting done.
Everyone likes to pretend that they’d be willing to step up and tackle those jobs. But they really won’t. I’m positive that the percentage of people willing to do those jobs for enough resources to live comfortably is in the single digits. I know damn sure the amount of doctors willing to work for a one bedroom, one car, and enough food living situation is in the single digits.
There are people picking up trash, cleaning restrooms, changing bed pans, repairing infrastructure, teaching children how to read, giving legal aid and providing medical care all for free. It’s called volunteering and millions upon millions upon millions of people do it every day. Hospitals, schools, soup kitchens, nature conservancies, youth sports, and museums all rely heavily upon volunteers. Organizations like Habit for Humanity, Doctors without boarders, Red Cross, Red Crescent, Meals on Wheels, Second Harvest, and Rotary International are largely staffed by volunteers. Those who give of themselves know this to be true.
When we’re talking raw resources that can potentially be turned into things needed to provide for the people, then yes there is easily enough. Today you have a lot of people living on a subsistence level, but also a ton of potential arable land, resources to be mined, production to be refocused that can provide for said people.
However, unless we get rid of capitalism (tired trope but hopefully I can provide substance below), then even in the best case scenario of how capitalism can develop from here on will this idea of “providing for everyone” remain impossible.
The main issue here isn’t “the rich” or them not being taxed (which others blame in the thread), but how capitalist mode of production fundamentally organizes production - goods aren’t produced to satisfy human needs (use value), but strictly for profit (exchange value) as commodities, to be bought and sold.
If you have millions of malnourished lower-class people and a million middle and upper strata demanding more luxuries, the latter’s demand will always be prioritized while the former’s will until things get desperate that production for them finally leads to desired margins and profit rates. Why produce cheap commodities whose main buyers have very limited purchasing power (therefore a low cap on growth) when a business can produce a commodity that turns more profit and whose buyers are more wealthy, leading to more potential growth?
That’s not to mention overproduction, the need of a reserve army of labor which are unemployed people kept on a brink of poverty to compete in the labor market to keep wages down and therefore profit up, and many other funny things. To change this fundamentally, one would have to ditch production for profit and instead replace it with production to satisfy human needs via economic planning - anything short of that is not enough and results in “capitalism coated in X”.
Yes there is. we’ve had some bad habits that are not sustainable but we generally already know a better approach that is.
We can do it if we wanted to, and we are actually making progress in transitioning to more sustainable approaches. However I’m Not as optimistic about whether we will, or whether we will before our bad practices cause newer and greater challenges
At the risk of sounding like a conservative, most people do find meaning in doing work and would not be content to lay around eating and watching TikTok forever. Just because someone does not find meaning in laboring to make their bosses wealthy does not mean they don’t find meaning in the work itself.
For example I think a lot of “low level” jobs would be quite enjoyable and rewarding if we weren’t forced to do them in order to survive. I’m thinking things like carpentry, running a small grocery store or even waiting tables.
So to answer your question, yes, the Earth can provide far more than every person needs to live a fulfilling life because all we need is food, shelter, community and freedom to find how we can best contribute. Those things are not expensive or resource intensive. But they are kept from us and replaced with plastic things we don’t need in order to further enrich a small few.
That didn’t sound conservative. I will just add performing/art, including literature, picking up trash in the neighborhood, visiting and doing small chores for those who can’t is work.
to add to this excellent reply: we are drastically losing resources by that very same plastic & pollution & climate change. so this way ahead we lose earth’s capacity to sustain this amount of people, inevitably.
the oligarchs are the richest- every year breaking record wealth in human history- and the least efficient in using that wealth and the most delusional. that Jeff Bezos is intent of living on Mars - a planet without the earth’s abundance. that’s like a noob on easy mode with power leveled allies always helping out in coop asking you trust they can take on the hardest difficulty of a game solo. no track record of success in this world, delusional to think mars isna solution
I think the saying “money doesn’t bring happiness” is one of those unlearnable lessons - something you’ll never truly believe until you experience it firsthand.
I’m self-employed contractor and find my work quite meaningful, yet I still dream of living off passive income and never having to work again. But honestly, I’m almost certain my life would spiral out of control if that ever became reality. Work is what the rest of my life is built around - it’s why I get up in the morning. I’d like to think I’d find meaning elsewhere, and maybe that’s true, but I’m skeptical. I’m almost certainly just kidding myself when I think that I would. I’d just sit at home smoking weed and watching YouTube videos.
I don’t think work itself is the problem - it’s the soul-crushing drudgery people are forced to endure to survive, where there’s no sense of meaning or gratitude. Especially in jobs where you can’t even see the results of what you’ve done. If you’re sweeping streets, at least you’re outdoors, you talk to people, and at the end of the day you can see what you accomplished. But if you spend eight hours entering numbers into Excel in a toxic office environment, then of course it feels meaningless.
Enough money can remove the barriers to happiness.
If I suddenly had enough money to not need to work on order to survive, I would still “work,” except it would be on my own terms, not someone else’s. There are loads of things I want to do and not enough time to do them. I dream of being able to prioritize my own time for myself rather than needing to sell a third of my life to a megacorp for bread.
I think the saying “money doesn’t bring happiness” is one of those unlearnable lessons - something you’ll never truly believe until you experience it firsthand.
“All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.” - Spike Milligan
I’d like to think I’d find meaning elsewhere, and maybe that’s true, but I’m skeptical. I’m almost certainly just kidding myself when I think that I would. I’d just sit at home smoking weed and watching YouTube videos.
But if that’s what you enjoyed then that is what you’d do and it would make you happy. If it didn’t make you happy you wouldn’t do it. So maybe that’s how your life after work would start, but if you became restless and stopped enjoying it you have your background in contracting and you’d probably take on some more enjoyable creative aspect of that role.
In the end your life doesn’t only have meaning if it’s defined by a job title, it’s defined by how you live it. It doesn’t even need to have “meaning” outside of your own enjoyment of life.
But if that’s what you enjoyed then that is what you’d do and it would make you happy.
I disagree. It might be enjoyable in the moment, but looking back, it wouldn’t be something I’m glad I did. Happiness is a fleeting emotion - what most people actually want is a deeper sense of contentment. And I don’t think chasing hedonistic pleasures gives us that.
I don’t look back fondly on the countless hours I’ve wasted staring at screens, but I do cherish the memories of doing difficult, effortful things - even the ones that weren’t all that enjoyable in the moment - because they left me feeling satisfied and proud afterward.
If it didn’t make you happy you wouldn’t do it.
That’s not really how people work though. There’s a ton of other motivations than happiness.
Shit man, I don’t even know what would make me happy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
recent estimates of Earth’s carrying capacity run from two to four billion people, depending on how optimistic researchers are about the prospects for international cooperation to solve problems requiring collective action.
Yes and no. It really depends on what you mean by “comfortable and happy”.
There are people living in developing areas of the world who still essentially live as peasant farmers or unskilled laborors. They live on less than $2 per day, and scratch by day by day with barely enough to eat. And some of those people are happy. And many of those people live under authoritarian, kleptocratic regimes. If everyone lived like those people and was able to be happy in the same way, then yes, the earth could sustainably support the whole population we have now and more.
On the other hand, we can imagine what would happen if this was the case. Everyone is content and happy living as a subsistance farmer, and everyone has kids at exactly the population replacement rate. Well, at some point someone will notice that they like it when other people like them. Like, they really, really like it. And they notice that other people like them more when they have and do cool things that other people want to do - like travelling to Bali or riding jet skis. So they go jet skiing in Bali so they can show all their friends in Nebraska the photos and have everyone tell them how cool they are. But a funny thing happens - while they are in Bali jet skiing, they meet a bunch of people who go paragliding in France. So now they want to go paragliding in France, since they also want these people to like them.
This is the basic concept of the social heirarchy, and it is pretty much universal across human societies. In societies with extremely rigid heirarchies, you are born into your caste and know it can never change. Some people will find comfort in this (“since I can’t change it, one less thing to worry about”), while others will hate it. But in societies with fluid social heirarchies, most people find themselves motivated to move up or at least maintain their position in the heirarchy. And since even if you don’t care about moving up, when you notice others around you moving up it feels like getting left behind. And how do you signal your position in the heirarchy? Via ostentatious displays of wealth, luxury, and niche social knowledge. Via this mechanism, the total resource consumption of humanity would gradually rise until something stopped it.
Define comfortable and happy?
Because the most uncomfortable and unhappiest people I know… are the richest. They are have millions but are still desperately trying to get more money and feel no matter how large their lifestyle is, it is inadequate compared to someone else who has it ‘better’.
They also have tall fences, cameras, and private security systems to ‘protect’ themselves from everyone else… despite have never ever been the victims of crime… where as people like me have none of that.
All of human history exists because we solved scarcity.
The past 12,000 years has been trying to convince the hoarding assholes to stop making life shitty for everyone else.
You shouldn’t just be mad, you should feel the injustice of it all in your ancestral bones.
We currently produce food for about 10 billion people and waste about half of it. What does that tell you?
Maybe one starting point is the 2 tones of CO₂ estimated to be the annual budget per person to stay at 1.5°C of global warming (already passed). For people living in rich countries, staying under the 2t requires active efforts, it’s possible since developing countries do it, but they are often considered too much of a hassle by the average rich country person: little to no individual car, little to no plane, home energy performance investments, smaller home, less animal food, shopping local etc.
As far as I understand, for the basic needs, it’s totally possible to sustain the demographic peak that should be around 10 billion humans in 2100. But certainly not with the current level of resources consumption in rich countries.
See also the 8 other planetary boundaries that we would need to respect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, biogeochemical flows in the nitrogen cycle, excess global freshwater use, land system change, the erosion of biosphere integrity, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosol loading.
That depends on the definition of comfortably and happy. Everyone probably couldn’t live at the level of an upper middle class American, for example.
I don’t think they’d want to. upper middle class americans are the most miserable people I know. They live in a constant state of anxiety and stress and are often struggling with bills because they overconsume.
Yes and yes.
