Mike Solana

Patents and not supported his work. By supporting his work many estimates suggest he saved between 1 to 2 billion lives during the 20th century and started the "Green Revolution" which didnt just save lives but directly grew world wide economies by trillions

i didn’t actually know anything about the grain stuff — what are your favorite sources on this?

My understanding is that Malthus wasn’t wrong, we just completely revamped the tech. I think similar happened with “peak oil”.

malthus was absolutely wrong — proven historically and ALSO counterfactually. like, at the time he was writing he was already wrong. check out merchants of despair by @robert_zubrin

If we hadn’t revolutionized the tech, you think Malthus would still have been wildly off? I was under the impression that was *why* we revolutionized it, *how* it’s reasonable to claim we saved billions. Two sides of the same coin.

Btw.. Adam Smith discussed this a bit in wealth of nations and so far his theories have held up pretty well. Basically he argued when economies work well people can make better choices, have more security, and can often make better choices and that large families

Are not as necessary because every family or group need not do everything reducing the need for a large family for labour. Also since people have more time and capital they have more security unlike in earlier times where security came from lots of land, people, and

Stocks of grain. In Smiths theory populations would somewhat self regulate and stabilize and be more resilient to major changes and calamities. He also caveated and explained what could g0 wrong but my favorite comment on this topic is how Mercantilism and monopolies