alt Hacker NewsThe problems he describes all fit into three buckets
* Insurance industry rent-seeking
* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)
* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)
I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:
https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-...
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How about point 4 - the litigiousness of American society leading to those high insurance costs, given that any accident on a playground can result in a multi million dollar payout?
> I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism
But you do want to assert that it is true, without being aware of its meaning?
Malthusianism is the notion that some people must be poor / hungry because humans choose to reproduce until they reach the limits of the environment to provide for them (especially those Irish potato farmers, according to Malthus), and that increases in productivity will not change this - they will just be absorbed by a growing population (which ought to be 'swept away').
In reality, growing populations have led to more than adequate improvements in food production efficiency and people are choosing to reproduce less rather than more.
There is an excellent summary and rebuttal of Malthusianism in the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George, which offers an alternative view of how supply and demand for finite land (your words) rather than reproductive instinct (Malthusianism) creates poverty.