Population v. Electricity

Metadata

Author: Sam Kahn
Full Title: Population v. Electricity
Category: #articles
URL: https://samkahn.substack.com/p/population-v-electricity

Highlights

But, within that structure, is a curious dynamic. There’s sort of nothing for anybody to do. A very small fraction of the population — only 2% in the United States —is responsible for feeding everyone. Assuming that they keep the food supply open — an important assumption — nation states are able to keep their populations fed, with no particular sweat, and relatively small utilities are able to supply basic needs — the power grid, etc — without asking for all that much from the population as a whole. But in this condition of unimaginable luxury, this loophole in the Malthusian trap for billions and billions of people, it is very difficult for people to come up with any activity in their lives that is of obvious social utility, and anything that seems desirable or fulfilling tends to face unimaginable competition from the hordes of other people who want the same thing. “Demography will play a far greater role in your life than any discipline you’ve mastered here,” Joseph Brodsky told a college graduating class who were expecting to hear about the salutary effects of poetry — what he had in mind was the force of competition on everybody’s life. “Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests….What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely to find room,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset in a very brilliant analysis of the modern world that is at the same time almost vanishingly simple: that there are only so many positions of privilege and not nearly enough to hold the masses and, therefore, the central logic in everybody’s life is that of exclusion.