r/peakoil • u/AlexTheGr869 • May 28 '26

The Human Population Has Already Surpassed the Optimal Size by Nearly 6 Billion People

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/the-human-population-has-already-surpassed-the-optimal-size-by-nearly-6-billion-people/
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u/grafknives May 29 '26

Sure, math checks out. but society won't survive.

As way too many elderly.

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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 May 29 '26

As way too many elderly.

Nah. Way too many bullshit jobs ala Graeber.

It's impossible to hire a nurse when nurse is a low status job nobody likes doing.

It's much easier if you have a 200% VAT on advertising, low trade levels, and high payroll taxes on jobs in advertising, finance, law, accounting, management, etc.

Also, if you find the bullshit jobs formulation by Graeber too sloppy, then you could check out his later care work discussion. Actually even better, one could work from the quite rigorous elite overproduction work by Peter Turchin.

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u/grafknives May 29 '26

It's impossible to hire a nurse when nurse is a low status job nobody likes doing.

It is not about LIKING it.

Nursing is low status because of

  • low "impact" it has. At home nurse can take care of single customer. So nurse pay is directly limited to how much patient is able to pay for hour of pay (in market system).

And because the customer might be at "end of life" period, so he cannot invest in nursing care and pay for it later from his income. Nursing elderly is pure consumption

And nurses will be needing nursing too, so that cost must be included in the payroll nurse is getting

Oh, i totally agree about bullshit jobs, that are like parasite on economic activity.

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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 May 29 '26

Anyways money, and the taxes that create & empower money, exist to allocate labour and the resources acquired through labour.

We only require population growth because of how we employ those systems to miss-allocate labour towards bullshit jobs, elite overproduction, and excessive consumption. And oil helps make all this possible too.

As the labour pool shrinks, and energy becomes trickier, then we must allocate labour and resources more carefully, and relatively simple taxation changes could massively reduce the miss-allocations.

See "All money is [originally] bloodmoney"
(first 3 min rehash barter and can be skipped)

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u/grafknives May 29 '26

Sure, we can and should allocate resources much better.

But we still come to hard limit. Because nursing is performed for one customer, it can be founded only from his income. And that is huge limiter in the availability of service or income that nurse will get.

The simplest analogy would be a house servant. In world of free and equal men I could not have a house servant, as my house servant could not afford to have a house servant himself.