Yeah but DLS would be a significant downgrade for many people, who already fight the suggestion to only eat meat six days a week tooth and nail.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6013539/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10537420/
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.3c03957/suppl_file/es3c03957_si_001.pdf
Things that count as DLS:
- 10 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 4 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
- 2100 kcal/day
- 1400 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
- 1 washing machine per 20 ppl
- 2.4 kg clothing / year
- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
- 1 laptop per 4 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 150 hr/year.
I’m gonna need a lot more than 10 square meters of space if everyone is changing their shirts twice a week. Yuck.
On top of that, sharing 1 washing machine for 20 fucking people?
In what world do the people writing this live? Have they never lived in an apartment building with shared laundry? The machines are never kept clean because people are fucking animals.
What a stupidly naive study lmao.
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
They live in a world where 700 million people are currently starving. Do you think you care about the washing machines if your children have nothing to eat?
The state of my washing machine doesn’t have to change if we just tax billionaires.
You could double everything in this post too and that’s only 60% consumption.
- 20 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 2 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
- 4200 kcal/day
- 2800 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
- 1 washing machine per 10 ppl
- 2.4 kg clothing / 6 months
- wear tops for 1.5 days and bottoms for 7.5 days without washing
- 1 laptop per 2 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 300 hr/year.
That seems a lot more reasonable to me and we still come in under carrying capacity
A simpler solution is to simply abolish wealth hoarding, impose sensible consumption limits (so, no cars or commercial plane travel, no meat, no 800 watt gaming rigs), and continue to encourage population decline. Boom, everyone is healthy, the air is clean, and you can keep your house.
I always wonder what happens if commercial air travel is banned. Cruise ships are obviously worse for the environment than planes, but are there ships that are fast enough to be feasible for people traveling for less than a month while actually being sustainable or are the americas and Australia just going to be effectively isolated from Eurasia and Africa?
It’s worth it if it’s the only way to survive, obviously, but I wonder what the effects would be. I’m a transatlantic immigrant, and I’d be willing to take a three month trip by ship to visit my family once a decade or so, but I can’t imagine most people wanting or being able to do that.
that’s how you start a civil war. lots of people will rebel against oppression
And that’s why our species will die in the muck after we drain this planet of everything it needs to support our lives
Humanity won’t develop altruistic tendencies at the last second, I mean ffs we haven’t yet in all of recorded history, so why in the our final 50 years of climate apocalypse and resource wars, would we?
We deserve to die off and we should, our species is terrible. All fantasies otherwise are illogical.
our species isn’t more or less terrible like any other species on this planet that was able to utilize ressources better. for example trees: when they came along the absolutely strangled the planet, until their waste product (oxygen) became so concentrated that todays humans would die of it. even their corpses littered the floor in meter thick layers! (that’s what todays coal is). I’m pretty sure that during this change biodiversity took a hard crash until life was able to adapt.
this continued until finally a bacterium developed the ability to degrade cellulose. i’m pretty sure the trees weren’t too happy about that one, it must have been a massacre.
the same story happens in every bottle of juice: bacteria grow inside, exhausting all available ressources, culminating in a mass dieoff with a few scavengers left over. It’s just a question if our intelligence allows us to take a different path or not.
I wonder if they think the down votes make your statement less true.
voting by emotion
Any animal that would fight against sensible restrictions like these, which seek to make the earth livable for their children and grandchildren, is rabid and should be extirpated.
we should kill people who use commercial airlines
What a wild take.
And leftists wonder why they have a hard time attracting others to their causes.
What the fuck.
That’s just an insane anprim moron, ignore him, even amongst extremists that guy is just an idiot.
And kill all the pets I assume.
Or at least feed the dogs plant based and phase out having cat as pets. IIRC it’s 20% of all livestock in the US that’s killed just for cats and dogs and about 70% of that 20% is for dogs on top of my head. Dog can live fine if not better on a well formulated plant based dog food. Just look at some of the reviews for Purina HA Vegetarian (it’s vegan btw) dog food. A lot of dog owners cured the gastro intestinal and lot of other problems their dogs had with it. I’m not affiliated. There are other well formulated plant based foods like AMI successfully used by many dog owners. Just seen a video on “The Dodo” of a dog who was at the verge of being put down because of weight loss till the veterinary got the idea the dog could have a meat allergy and advised said Purina food. The dog is now healthy and thriving again. That diet change on a global scale would take a huge burden off of the environment.
no livestock is slaughtered as cat food. pet food is a byproduct of human food production.
The catastrophic aspect to cats is the absolutely incomprehensible amounts of birds stray and outdoor cats kill every year (outdoor cats don’t even eat most of their kills often).
I love cats, but cat owners must begin to find ways to let their beloved furry friends experience the outdoors that doesn’t lead to ecocide. Cat leashes, large screened enclosures on a porch, whatever works.
- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
It is for the good of all people that this is not the case for me…
I’m actually in favor of keeping a lifestyle that wastes a lot of resources simply for the point that it guarantees that in times of crises, of unexpected shortages of products, there will still be enough products going around to sustain us.
I am amazed by all the people that, when faced with having to give up some of the first-world luxury they are used to, flip completely in their head. It is the opposite of not-in-my-backyard: Don’t take from my backyard, pls.
Yes, I would rather have the current distribution continue, where hundreds of millions are literally starving, where there are people who would kill to live like this, where people are walking through the desert and taking dinghies over oceans for shit like this, just so I can have my amenities.
Absolutely wild. We’re so doomed.
where hundreds of millions are literally starving, […] just so I can have my amenities.
Note that other people’s suffering is not always directly related to our lifestyle.
Explain to me how the sudanese war is caused by our consumption of meat?
Oh come on, that is a pretty flawed argument. “Tell me, how me doing this particular, isolated thing, is directly causing this complicated big thing, otherwise you are wrong”.
But we are not arguing that: We are arguing about, what if I had a magical button that would magically give everyone in the world access to the “decent living standards” and nothing more? Would it be ethical, would you push this button? Even if you are, right now, way above the line?
And to that I say, yes, if it was possible to do this, I believe it would be the right thing to do. And I believe that anyone arguing we should not press the button, because pushing this button is hurting their lifestyle, is arguing that billions of people deserve to live a much worse life for being in the wrong place so that we can have our lifestyle.
Of course I do not have such a button. That is not the point.
Why are you amazed? Have you lived your whole life under a rock? People have always been like this, it’s never been hidden or even remotely pretended otherwise.
The same paper addresses this directly. 86% of human beings live below this standard of living today.
I’d argue that’s a downgrade for most people. I personally exceed all of those bullet points and the idea of coming close to most of them sounds like Hell to me. If it meant 8.5 billion people met those standards, I could make the sacrifice, but it would be awful.
Can you imagine if everyone you met was wearing a 3 days dirty shirt? Do other not sweat? And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
I’m a woman with a relatively large frame (~65kg/180cm) who used to do 14 hours of hard cardio a week. At that time, my recommendation was 2250, the first time in my life it had exceeded 2k. For smaller women, the recommendation is sometimes much lower. My stepsister is about 45kg and 155cm tall and her calculated daily calorie burn is like 1300. My ex boyfriend’s mom was told not to go over 1200, which I thought was the lower limit for humans generally- things are different when you’re a short, post-menopausal woman.
All that is to say, it’s probably an average of 2100 calories, spread between people who need on average 1400-1800 calories and those who need 2000-2400
I can attest that i definitely eat less than 2000 kcal per day on average. But:
I read a study (done by the CIA, ironically) a while ago that said sth like the average caloric intake for americans is like 3500 kcal/day, while for USSR people it is 3200 kcal/day, and concluded that people in the USSR eat healthier.
The study was done in the time of the USSR.
I’m gonna look for it now.
Edit: it’s here
Well that is more a report than a study, but that is pretty interesting, saving that.
Though 3500 and 3200 seem absolutely fucking wild to me. I am a 184cm, 96kg (not fit anymore but used to work out 6 days a week for 2-3hrs) and if I eat more than 2200 per day not-active (I got used to weighing every gram of food during cuts) I gain weight. I find it hard to believe that 3500 and 3200 was average then as there were significantly less obese people then.
Yeah i still can’t really wrap my mind around it. I suspect it might be caused by the fact that there were a lot more manual blue-collar labour back then being done? But i’m not sure.
Coming to that conclusion based purely on amount of calories is incredibly stupid
actually if you read the paper it goes into more detail than just calories
That’s fair. My take was shallow and I was thinking more from personal experience. I’m ~200lbs and burn over 100 kcal every mile I run, and am a distance athlete. If I jog 6 miles or bike 20+, I have to replace that for proper recovery.
I shouldn’t say most people, but a large amount of people need more than 2100 kcal if they are active.
It’s honestly wild the difference in caloric requirements based on age and sex/gender (I don’t know how much is due to size/hormones, so I don’t know where trans people’s requirements would be) even before factoring in activity level, so it’s entirely reasonable not to realize the difference.
For trans people it depends.
If you’re just starting estrogen-oriented HRT and you’re at a weight considered ideal for your pre-HRT body, then it is helpful to actually gain a few kg of fat, together with weekly hours of intense activity (like running, bicycling, squatting and planks, hip thrusts) coupled with moderate activity (like walking half an hour everyday) Then fat redistribution will be more effectively towards a )( body shape, with breast growth improved during the first year(?). Progesterone may aid in the last as well. This guide may help.
For testosterone-oriented HRT, I’m less certain, though I assume the fat redistribution’s accent is more strongly on fat loss, and exercise for muscle growth. Lifting, bench presses, planking, and the like for \/ bodies. Don’t forget leg day! Here’s a good training scheme.
That said, everyone has their own goals; important imo is that one remains healthy. A good diet is balanced and lowly processed, containing plenty vegetables and some proteins and water. And have a rest day. A nice fist rule is 4 days of exercise anywhere in the week and a day or two of relative rest.
A body fat percent healthy for all people (binary and nonbinary) would be around 14-25%. If you can get pregnant (and seek to do so), it’s better to be a little higher in this range, because during pregnancy, your body will prioritise the embryonic/fetal needs more than yours.
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
“Averages are reduced by the relatively lower requirements of infants and children.”
The other question is: where are we living? It takes a lot more resources to live in Canada than it does to live in a warm climate to the south. Does that mean we all have to abandon Canada and crowd ourselves into the hot equatorial regions?
Otherwise those numbers seem like a huge downgrade for even working class Canadians. It goes to show you that Canada is a truly rich country and all but the least fortunate here have far more resources than someone living in the poorest countries in the world.
Yeah, that list sounds like literal prison. That’s a hard sell for a good chunk of people.
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
Prison in a hot climate with no AC. No thanks!
They talk about it in the PDF. Basically its a weighted average. Some people live in colder climates and need more heating/clothes, others need less. It then averages out to those numbers.
So it’s not really giving everyone in the world an exactly equal share of resources. Not to mention there’s a natural component to inequality that’s independent of resources: location. A 10 m^2 per person shack is a lot more bearable on a beach in Southern California than it is in a desert or an insect-infested swamp.
Its not about giving people resources, merely estimating what it would take for everyone to meet DLS requirements if they live where they currently live.
Their idea of ‘decent’ is disgusting.
well then you’ll enjoy thinking about how most people on earth don’t meet that standard, so maybe it’s time we give up some of our luxuries so the rest of planet earth can stop living in abject suffering?
I won’t be giving up anything so someone in a country I have zero responsibility for can have something they, their people and their government didn’t earn.
Their problem, they can fix it. Or not. I really don’t give a shit.
oh goodie, you’re just a terrible person then
You’re a naive fool.
sure, better that than hateful.
There’s nothing hateful about putting my family, community and country first.
Maybe more people would enjoy better living standards if they did the same.
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
Their idea of decent is a dream for a good chunk of the world population. We’re the privileged ones. People kill to live like us.
There was 3.7 billion people when I was born. Since I’m still alive we can guess that’s within a human lifetime.
Since I was born, 73% of the animals on Earth are gone. Our ecosystems are already crashed, and no one notices.
Remember COVID? When everyone stayed home and quit buying shit, laid low? Remember Venice seeing dolphins in the streets and Asians seeing mountains you couldn’t see before? Remember how quiet it was?
SOCIETY can provide, EARTH cannot. Y’all gonna have to die. But hey, between global warming and tanking birth rates fucking our economies in both holes, win, win! The contraction will be of Biblical proportions. I won’t live it, my kids will. Good luck kids!
Good riddance, those animals would only get in the way of any future, cyberpunk dystopia or venus cloud city dnb compilation thumbnail luxury space communism.
I don’t think really that a majority of the population is going to die. I do think significant numbers of deaths will happen around the equator at some point in the near future and spark a functionally unstoppable wave of immigration towards the earth’s poles. This will result in its own strife but again will only cause a small percentage of more of the population to die.
Thing’s will eventually stabilize as human civilization adapts and green energy and carbon capture take off. Most of the population will survive but almost everyone’s QoL will be NOTABLY worse by various conventional metrics. Though likely better in specific ways due to certain medical and automation advancements.
Expect birthrates to continue to drop globally however and the earth’s eco system will drastically change and become much less healthy. Most of existing humanity will cling to life though.
And what makes you think society is suddenly going to change (any moment now?) and your kids would have a better life, would just everyone keep having kids?🤔
I think the thing you have to ask yourself is “would i want to be born today” that will tell you whether you should have kids.
I mean i honestly am quite fine and i think there were always stupid people, but that doesn’t make me wanna have kids? I was also just curious about the argument for kids to save the economy?
I won’t live it, my kids will. Good luck kids!
One of the many reasons I didn’t have kids.
The bulk of labor under capitalism goes toward maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity, not supporting wellbeing.
Define ‘decent living standards’.
I’m sure they define that in the study if you read it
Well would you look at that, it sure does.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
Recent empirical studies have established the minimum set of specific goods and services that are necessary for people to achieve decent-living standards (DLS), including nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc. This basket of goods and services has been developed through an extensive literature (e.g., Rao and Min, 2017, Rao et al., 2019) and is summarized in Table 1, following Millward-Hopkins (2022).
Looking at Table 1 that’s definitely acceptable. It skips a lot of things but that’s why they say 30% with spare room for luxuries.
The study does, in fact. Or actually, bare minimum living standards:
Quoting from the article:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension.”
It’s disturbing, how many people eagerly embrace eugenics and anti-natalism as long as they can cite a left-wing cause like ecology as their reason
How are the two on the same level?
Antinatalism is a strawman slur against anyone that questions the viability of infinite growth.
So what is calling anyone who has a child a breeder?
Gee, I dunno, maybe everyone having 3 or more kids in the long term will lead to overpopulation issues we cannot resolve even with improved technology.
No it won’t. Learn 2 Read.
I agree that we can support everyone on earth if we change our social, economic, and political systems.
I also think it is good that voluntary population decline is already happening and seems likely to continue in many industrialized nations.
From what i’ve heard, with the aging population in developed countries and the birthrate getting lower due to longer life expectancy, population should soon stabilise itself around 10 billions. Seems viable.
It is true there are too many billionaires. We can provide everyone, if some of them also need 10 private jets.
I know the world has more than enough resources and productivity for everyone on it to live comfortably without overworking, but 30% is the lowest figure I’ve ever seen. Would like to know where that came from. I’ve seen so many widely varying estimates of everything.
There is a source where the text was taken from at the bottom.
Thank you, dumb me missed it. Their paper talks a lot about measuring poverty. Earlier research showed poverty in China being high in the 80s under socialism and decreasing in the 90s when they became more capitalist. But the formulas for calculating that involved the prices of all consumer goods, including things like airline tickets, cars, big TVs, etc. But If you take these authors’ approach and ignore the prices of things poor people never buy, the math shows poverty being very low in the 80s and rising dramatically in the 90s, because introducing more capitalism brought down the cost of middle-class and luxury goods but increased the cost of the basics.
I recommend reading the image to find the source
Someone else posted what it means. It means 10m² living space per person, 4 people share 20m² for bathroom and kitchen, you don’t eat meat, you wash tops every ~3 days and bottoms every ~14 days(laundry is shared with ~20 people). Something like 4 people are expected to share a laptop with specs that were cutting edge 15 years ago(a “gaming pc” would only be able to be used for ~150 hours per year).
It is a MAJOR downgrade from how most people live, even those in poverty, and is just not appealing to all but the most minimalist of people. It’s more akin to living in an RV or “van life”(except you’re not supposed to have a car in this situation either - public transportation only).
Well, thanks for sharing misinformation.
Meanwhile, in the actual study (provided free via any search engine of your choice):
Also directly from the study you didn’t read:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension.”
So no, nobody is coming to take your gaming rig, and no, the majority of people on Earth would get an UPGRADE in living conditions, not a downgrade.
Here is a link if you cannot access a search engine.
So you’re a condescending asshole. That’s all. I’m not gonna engage with you further. Have a day as wonderful as yourself. I will note that everything is said was in your picture. Douche.
This is one of the things that pisses me off about the Star Trek “fans” who point to the Replicator tech (which wasn’t introduced until the Next Generation series) as the reason humanity was able to end scarcity. No, it absolutely was not what ended scarcity in the Star Trek universe. What ended scarcity was the absolute end of capitalism. We have now and have had for over a century, the capability to end world hunger and provide housing for every man woman and child on the planet. We don’t do it because it would remove the overinflated value of those things as well as the obscene wealth of the rich.
Capitalism requires scarcity as its engine.
When scarcity is threatened, it is called the capitalist dirty word “commodity”.
It means there is no more profit in that.Even if that wasn’t true, do you know how much energy it takes to turn energy into mass (unless I don’t understand the tech and it works like a 3D printer or something). If a society has this much (free or at least affordable) energy, even without a replicator there is so much abundance.
Oh, I know!
wE sHoULd KiLl HalF oF ThEm
The number of people basically advocating for this in the comments is honestly depressing
I was going to say “No one is saying that”, but there are many going down that road.
The preferable approach is degrowth. A lower birthrate leading to a smaller population with no deaths required, just vastly fewer births and lower consumption until human civilization can not only fit with our planetary boundaries, but restore a lot of wildlife and wildlands, then stabilize at a population and consumption that is healthy and comfortable.
I’m not keen on a society were seniors are the majority of the population, it would be a disaster.
It’s not as much a disaster as you seem to think.
Surely, you’d have a lot of people who are not in the active workforce. But due to automation + AI, we’re going to see a mass layoff crisis in the next 10 years anyway, so if people retire, that’s a good thing that young people can find workplaces.
Also it should be noted that large swaths of the population didn’t participate in the economy back in the 19th century, when 1/3 of people was below 15 years of age. Still the world didn’t end because of that, the opposite, that’s when growth really set it. The lesson to learn here is that a large active workforce is not required to have a good economy.
I’m not keen on a society dominated by resource exhaustion, grossly exceeded planetary boundaries leading to ecological overshoot and collapse and billions of early deaths due to climate change, pollution and conflict as everyone fights for whatever is left.
An againg society is a necessary step towards a sustainable population. Anything other than a sustainable population (number of people x consumption amount) will, by definition, not be sustained. A collapse will be chaotic and devastating. A managed descent of degrowth will have difficulties but could save humanity and the biosphere as we know it.
Anyone have a good pdf source on this research?
How did they calculate that? I don’t believe it.
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/124460/1/Hinckel_how-much-growth-is-required--published.pdf
Hickel serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is legit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Hickel
Ah hes a degrowther, makes sense. I read through his paper and I really don’t think its realistic or thought provoking. It lacks humanity and applies a utilitarian solution. Its the same as saying we have x humans producing co2 lets reduce the number of humans but instead of humans its goods he deems to be unnecessary.
His entire premise is based on what he thinks a person needs to live a good life. But lifes just not that simple and people all around the world NEED different things this type of strict partitioning fails when applied to the entire world. Part of what makes our current system work is that its dynamic, people create goods they want and those who also want those goods buy them.
What on Earth are you on about?
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have.
How the hell do you get from that to some sort of paranoid fantasy where everyone gets exactly the same thing?
Uh I disagree. The author is suggesting we could cut 70% of the worlds industry because he thinks that represents a good enough standard of living. If he was suggesting that everyone be brought up to the minimum standard then he wouldnt be suggesting large scale degrowth.
Which paper are you getting this from?
Technically, earth’s land area is big enough to sustain around 24 billion people. Consider this diagram:
It shows that we’re using around 50% of all habitable land for agriculture. Most of the land that we aren’t using is either high up in the mountains (where terrain isn’t flat and you can’t use heavy machinery) or in the tropical regions on Earth close to the equator (south america, central africa, indonesia), or in areas where it’s too cold for agriculture (sibiria, canada). so you can’t really use more agricultural land than we’re already using without cutting down the rainforest.
In the diagram it also says that we’re using only 23% of agricultural land for crops which produce 83% of all calories. If we used close to 100% of agricultural land for crops, it would produce approximately 320% of calories currently being produced, so yes, we could feed 3x the population this way.
However, it must be noted that there’s significant fluctuation in food production per km², for example due to volcanic eruptions. So it’s better to leave a certain buffer to the maximum amount of people you could feed in one year, because food shortages in another year would otherwise lead to bad famines.
Did you know 90% of Earth’s topsoil is at risk of depletion by 2050? It might throw a wrench into this perfect utopia being planned here.
what is soil erosion and why is it relevant? i’ve never heard of it
Top soil is what food grows in. Without top soil, we can’t grow food.
Does this assume instant, frictionless transportation of goods?
Maybe you should read the paper and find out.
Why? I’m not the one using it to justify an argument.
Because it would be a more efficient way to understand their actual methodology than posting random guesses on a comment thread?
It’s not my job to make your point. You don’t get free labor.
It’s not my job to read papers for you. You don’t get free labor
So you didn’t read it either? Interesting.
Nope, guess you’re going to have to read it yourself to find out if they’re assuming instant, frictionless transport of goods.
Transportation of goods is mostly a capitalist issue. You don’t need to cover a cucumber with plastic and ship it half way across the world, while selling the local ones to richer countries. The same goes for the vast majority of “goods”. Remove all of that greedy, superfluous shit, and you’re left with minimal shipping needs.
It’s wild that many people on Lemmy dont understand that many things, while completely and absolutely unnecessary, also bring a lot of joy to people.
Cracking a bottle of beaujolais alongside a dish made from Chinese and Korean ingredients while listening to South American vinyl on my Japanese speakers is part of the spice of life.
I get that I could live like a 12th century peasant, only consume things I grow myself and use clothing I can make by hand, but Jesus christ, that’s fucking insane.
Living isnt just about living, its about knowing and enjoying other cultures and the world itself. This study sound like they’d have you live in a cave with no ac while only eating flavorless locally sourced paste.
How boring and repulsive.
Most of what the study is proposing would be a modest decrease in living standards in developed countries, for a drastic increase in living standards everywhere else. It’s not asking you to give up luxury, only for the rate of new luxury to decrease slightly as surplus is more evenly distributed.
I mean, I get that you don’t like how they talk on Lemmy about it, but the quote from the study even talks about how the surplus could be used for additional consumption and everything. Study is here
I think we all have different things we want in life and with such a big surplus there is room for most of us to regularly enjoy that. I do not believe that they argue that we will NEVER be able to enjoy different food. That is as you have mentioned not functional or good for people to work together and live together. Disregarding the many people with different cultures that have moved somewhere else.
I think the study more clearly argues that we can afford to take care of everyone on the world if we wanted to. That there is a viable way and that that way is not as you are implying necessarily a deprived space with tight margins. Because living is about more than slaving away like a 12th century peasant to accumulate more wealth for a king somewhere far off.
It’s wild how you went from shipping plastic wrapped cucumbers across the world while exporting local ones, to your bougie bs…
We get it, you’re a spoiled first worlder
And bunch of other sacrifices. One of the points was also about everyone living in a city close by. The study is not applicable to real life, it’s utopia scenario. One of the biggest problems isn’t even resources, but co2 production.
I dunno, I think it would be perfectly doable with good public transit.
Don’t have many big cities, but have mid-sized cities near-ish, and smaller towns near the mid-sized ones. A sort of ‘web’ of cities, if you will.
what you’re describing is called “multigrid” system.
you have grids of varying size, all overlapping each other.
examples:
notice the streets make some kind of “grid” on the landscape
Yes, exactly this was what I was thinking about.
