[04] Malthusian Traps
Title Card
YouTube Link
Status
Released
Transcription
Air Date
Oct 3, 2023
Target: 30-45 minutes
Script
Intro
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ZFi: GM and welcome to Moloch Traps, our new podcast here at From Aa to Zzz. I’m ZFi, this Zombie Shepherd, and we’re excited to be bringing you this new show in collaboration with BanklessDAO and its Audio/Visual team. To be clear, opinions in this series expressed by either of us are our own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of BanklessDAO at large.
This week, we will continue to study and discuss excerpts from the "Meditations on Moloch" essay, written by Scott Alexander. The essay provides examples of multi-polar traps and delves into various instances from history, biology, and economics to illustrate how competition often results in collective harm.
In today’s episode we’ll discuss the concept of Malthusian Traps. Let’s start with Alexander’s words on this example.
Segment 2 — Malthusian Traps
ZFi:
(reading from Meditations)
Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH).
You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.
A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.
In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.
If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.
For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.
Segment 3 — Open Discussion
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Zombie Shepherd notes:
ZFi notes:
escape @ industrial revolution
- what if its only a perceived escape?q
- i think the ceiling just raised and we’ll hit that limit again
- malthus assumes linear growth in food production, AND assumes the slope, AND assumes the slope never changes
- makes sense based on the time period he was observing
- the only way to produce more food was to plant another farm plot, assuming the labor exists to work that plot
- technology has changed the slope of that production rate
- exponential population growth makes sense
Conclusion
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Zombie Shepherd: (start and then hand off as appropriate)
Summary
What would YOU do? @listener?
Outro
Zombie Shepherd:
Thanks for watching today’s episode of Moloch Traps. We hope you enjoy this series. As always, none of what we say is legal or financial advice, and we encourage listeners to do their own research in these areas before making any related decisions.
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