The bulk of labor under capitalism goes toward maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity, not supporting wellbeing.
Most of the 8 billon people are living in the third world and which less resources waste, most recources a wasted by less than 10% of the world population.
Reading the study I get the following remarks:
Living space, not great. 60m2 for a 4 person family. That’s tight. I live alone in a 90m2 house and I could use more space, do they want me to live in a 15m2 house or do they want to force to share living space? Sorry but I won’t compromise there. I prefer people having less children that me having to live as ants in a colony.
That is just a personal pick with the DLS minimum requirements chosen.
But still forgetting that. The reasoning is extremely faulty. Most of their argumentation heavy lifting is just relied to Millward-Hopkins (2022) paper establishing that 14.7 GJ per person anually is enough. That paper is just a work of fantasy. For reference, and taking the same paper numbers. Current energy usage (with all the exiting poverty) is 80 GJ/cap. Paleolitic use of energy was 5 GJ. Author is proposing that we could live ok with just triple paleolitic energy. That paper just oversees a lot of what people need to live in a function society to get completely irrational numbers on what energy cap we could assume to produce a good life.
Then on materials used. The paper assumes all the world shifting to vegetarian diet, everyone living on multiresidential buildings, somehow wood as the main building material (I don’t know how they even reconcile that with multiresidential buildings…). And half of cars usage shifting to public transport How to achieve this in rural areas it’s not mentioned at all).
A big notice needs to be done that both papers what are actually doing is basically taking China economy (greatly praised in the introduction) and assuming that all the world should live like that. And yes, probably the world could have 30 billion inhabitants if we accept to be all like China, who would we export to achieve that economic model if we all have a export based economy? who knows, probably the martians. And even then, while a lot of “ticks” on what a decent level of life quality apparently seems to be ticked, many people in western countries would not consider that quality life, but a very restrictive and deprived life standard.
I’m still on the boat the people having less children is a better approach to great lives without destroying the planet. At some point a cap on world population need to be made, it really add that much that the cap is 30 billion instead of maybe 5 billion? It’s certainly not a cap in the number of social iterations a person can have, but numbers give for plenty of friends. And at the end it’s not even a cap on “how many children” can people have, as once the cap is reach the number of children will be needed to cap the same to achieve stability. It’s just a cap on “when people can still be having lots of kids”. Boomer approach to “let’s have children now” and expect that my kids won’t want to have as many children as I have now.
Also another big pick I have with the article is that it blames the current level of inefficiency to private jets, suvs, and industrial meat. But instead of making the rational approach of taking thise appart from the current economy and calculate what the results will be. Parts from zero building the requirements out of their list. Making the previous complaint about those luxury items out of place completely. On a personal note I would reduce or completely eliminate many of those listed “super luxury” items. But I have the feel (just a feel because neither me not the author have studied this) that the results of global energy and material usage won’t drop that much, certainly not at the levels proposed by the authors with their approach.
Gonna quote the study again:
“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.”
Firstly- Are you so selfish that you refuse to change anything about your lifestyle in order to provide people with an absolute minimum standard of life - a standard that you have identified as abhorently poor by your standards?
Secondly- Change on your part may not even be required. Tax on production (i.e. corporations) would cover the majority of it, and the rerouting of production from useless things like casinos and yachts would cover the rest.
Finally- additional taxes and such would not even be required for many changes, just spending more efficiently. As an example- Very rural places all over the world have train and bus service. It’s a matter of choice that the US doesn’t, not a matter of practicality. We spend all of our money on highways instead, which are far more expensive per person per mile. Investing in rail, like Europe and China have done, provides far more use for far more people.
I said in other comment. I’m not in the US, I’m in europe we have one of the best train networks of the world. Public transport is funded by the government so is cheaper, even completely free in some cases.
People living in rural areas still chose cars while they have the free will to do so.
If as a species we cannot find the way to make that work there’s no incentive for us to keep trying. Luckily I’m sure it’s possible, that people say it’s not just because propaganda (as I said mostly because the voting split rural/urban). We have achieve harder things as a species. Surely we can have people in rural areas still using cars (electric cars for instance) without dooming humankind to extinction.
You’re not really considering the article in the context of what it’s arguing against, which is the implicit position of the World Bank that someone is not “poor” if they’re living on the equivalent of over $3.00 per day (as of 2025). The standard that Hickel et al. are proposing, while low by Western standards, is still much higher than what billions of people are currently experiencing.
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
Where did you get the idea that this was malthusian? Hickel advocates for a more efficient distribution of resources, not to cut thr world population in half so gringos can keep their 4 cars and lawn.
How are the two on the same level?
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.
But have you considered youtubers that spend 100kg of beef to make a funny video?
what tf kind of game controller is that? three vertical buttons??
