how many people?

How many people? where are the economists?

Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, but then also Hong Kong and India. Crises are arising everywhere, social crises that come from economical crises, political crises, environmental crises, which in the end are just one big crisis. We are billions of people in this one planet and a big part of that is walking on the streets of several countries protesting for more of this or more of that, or even less of this other thing or less of that other thing. Protests are not decoration, they are not mechanisms of communication for ideology. Protests have to be mechanisms for physical change. But slow down there, because the success of a protest, meaning undergoing an actual change, depends on the responsibility of the protested as much as it depends on the responsibility of the protester. If it does not succeed, it is the protester’s responsibility as much as it can be up to the protested against.

We all want and need something to have a good life. What is that “something” and what is that “good life”?. Furthermore, there are constraints to that “something for a good life”. One of them is the life of something else that is not us. Why? Because we cannot live if the environment cannot host us, and the environment cannot host us if it doesn’t have other natural resouces, and its resources are also other living and non-living things. And it goes on and on.

This is my attempt to depict the previous paragraph as one optimization problem subject to certain constraints.

Maslow structured the needs of human beings like this (in my own words): 1) Food, water, oxygen, sleep. 2) Security, income, shelter, jobs. 3) Sense of belonging. 4) Self-esteem. 5) Self-development. Now, this holds true for every person living in this world, which could have been a small number but it is not. Satisfying these needs for everyone is the optimization problem. Getting there requires a very complex network of interaction to transfer food, water, ensure incomes, making people love themselves and others and making them develop their skills. However, while natural resouces might be there for us, emotional resources will never be enough for everyone because we all have our own definition of what makes us happy and emotionally satisfied. Therefore, we can all have our own definition, but it will never be possible to satisfy billions of definitions of happiness to the same extent and therefore it is not a lie that even though we can think differently, we cannot pretend to have everything according to our thinking. I think some industries should disappear, but they will not, so this is one desire that I cannot have, I can still desire it and think so, but I can’t have it, unless I go for violence and kill them. To what extent can we give up on satisfying some of our desires? This is also a question for big companies, don’t worry.

The constraints to achieve the optimization of our problem can be framed into 2 categories since Malow’s needs go from physiological to psychological. The environment is not infinite and it can also not be fully exploited. Other species need also part of this planet to live and contribute to sustain it, therefore no, we cannot fully exploit all of the natural resources. Therefore, there is this very fundamental constraint of how much we can extract from Earth to satisfy at least 1 and 2 of the Malow’s needs. Now, the other side of the spectrum poses a constraint that is harder to digest. How do we cope with the emotional needs of everyone? We cannot. As a group we can cope with the physiological needs of everyone and it would help very much if everyone takes responsibility of their emotional needs. Does one million dollars make you happy? well, if there’s not one million, feel happy with less as long as you have food and shelter. But, can we hope to increase our profit so we can have progress and more comfortable lives? Yes, absolutely, but not too fast, not too much at once and most likely not without capitalism. Now, the trade-off applies to bigger matters. Probably the expenditure on the trip to the Moon would have had to be cut down to satisfy food and shelter for others. So we choose. We know that we need to choose, because if there was enough to cope with both, Amstrong would have gone to the moon while other people would have not been dying. We are organized in groups, but Earth concerns humans beings as one. If we want to progress as fast and as much, we cannot pretend to satisfy everyone. It is simply not realistic. Please keep in mind that the trade-off applies to the qualities of “fast” and “much”, not to the presence or absense of economical growth and progress.

There is not absolute good or bad on economical progress. Economy is something created by and for humans. It was not created by fish for fish or by birds for birds or by trees for trees. Therefore, an economy is a dynamic system that primarely needs resources and people. Afterwards it needs other things. But fundamentally, resources and people. Now, this is a big question: Can we control the amount of resources available? Some resources we probably can, other resources we definitely cannot. The existence of natural resources is just not up to us and our mood. However, this is the answer to a second question that I didn’t even ask yet: We can control people. More specifically, we can control the amount of people that we are in the world, provided our awereness. We simply can’t be infinte.

If it weren’t for the amount of people that we are now, we would not be the developed intellectual species that we are now. And we can think that this is something good. But resources are not going to appear proportionally to the amout of people we are. Neither they are easy to distribute when the amount of people increases so fast, because the organization gets extremely complex. Can we be intellectual enough to know how many people we can be to maximize the degree of satisfaction of the 5 needs for everyone subject to constraints? I think we can, but economists need to tell us this. Are we so? No, we are not. Is it a problem of scarcity of resources? To some extent. Is it a problem of distribution of the available resouces? Definitely for many societies.

Wait there because this is not the end of the story. If we have 100 resources and we are 100, it’s probably free to distribute them accordingly. But if we are one billion and we have one billion resources, we’re not taking into account that we need to use some of those resources to organize the distribution of the rest of the resources. Therefore, this means that if we have one billion resources, we cannot simpy be one billion people because there is a cost in making those resources accessible to every single one of us. This, unfortunately for advocates of the problem being only bad distribution, falls back into the scarcity of resources. And if there is scarcity of resources, that only means we are too many people.

This is the way I understand the reality. Should have economists taken the lead studying how many people we can be with the all kinds of resources we have and the systems we need to maintain? Absolutely. We did not think of the resources that were to our scope before we grew so fast and so much in quantity. Now we are facing many crises that are in the end one big crisis. Should the goverments pose a policy on the amount of people we can be? I think they should if humans as humans refuse to be aware of this, as much as we need policies for the protection of the environment at the cost of the profit for industries.

If any experts have different/opposite analyses of this framework, I would be more than happy to learn from them. Thank you for reading this piece of thinking and if wanted, the debate is always open on this side!