Well, yes. But that'd require fair, sensible distribution and use of available resources, and then how would we be able to support the ability of a handful of billionaires to subvert our democracies for their own gain? /s
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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How does that quote go? Something like: the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.
We wanted Star Trek, but we got Shadowrun.
Where's me cyberdeck
it's called a phone and it can tiktok speed up version family guy + subway surfer + minecraft parkour
I've seen this before. Last time I looked, it required that everyone live in cities with good public transportation. It also didn't factor in modern necessities like air conditioning (which will be actually necessary in many more parts of the world due to global warming).
Basically, for this to work, everyone needs to live in 2-bedroom apartments... Without air conditioning or anything like a desktop PC. You'd have a small refrigerator and heat your food with a microwave (and nothing else because stovetop and ovens use up too much energy).
It also makes huge assumptions about the availability of food, where it can be grown, and that all the necessary nutrients/fertilizer are already present in the soil and that transporting/processing things like grain is super short distance/cheap.
Also, communism. It requires functioning communism. That everyone will be ok with it and there will be no wars over resources/land.
It requires strict rationing. Everyone gets their fair share, and no one gets multiples of what other people get.
Not only that, but all 8.5 billion would also need to be willing to stop any "lifestyle inflation". It's not just about accepting it for a day, it's about adjusting to that being the norm for themselves and for their kids into the foreseeable future.
A question that I frequently ask when presented this is "what would you personally be willing to give up?" Of course it is important to realize that some of it is systemic and not within the average person's control (e.g. car-centric infrastructure)
Right. I think there are a lot of people who would be happy to give up something, but would need big societal changes first. Like, giving up driving a car, but would need cities to be designed more like Europe where it's possible to get by without a car. Or, living in a more efficient high-rise apartment building vs. a less efficient detached house, but would need building codes and standards to be better so they weren't constantly being annoyed by a noisy neighbour, or having to put up with smells from other apartments.
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Kind of what I was getting at with my comments. The median standard of living doesn't have to be bad or even particularly uncomfortable, but it would require everyone who lives above that median to be knocked down to it and be okay with that. Which they won't. Meaning it will require force.
Thats the part that sucks. For super poor people this is great. For those of us already in a decent house, it would be a lot worse. I For one cant live in apartments, unless I was absolutely close to homeless.
Although, if we took the billionaires down a notch I bet a lot more people could also have houses.
would you not accept going from a house to something less decent if it came with the likelihood that everyone in the world would have housing, food, and security?
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Yes this lowest-common-denominator life we’d all be living would save billions suffering through abject poverty but none of those people are here, reading this right now. Everyone reading this would probably see a lifestyle decline. I always have to laugh when anyone in Europe or the US blab as if they are part of the 90%. We are 10%ers every one of us.
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What are "Decent Living Standards?"
I'd bet that they're at least one step down from what the usual Westerner is accustomed to.
I bet you are basing your concept of the "usual" Westerner on your own experience, and you might be surprised at how the actual average person lives even in the "West".
But to answer your question, the article defines decent living standards as:
nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc.
Nutritious food is unavailable to an alarming number of Americans, transit is a mess and almost exclusively car-centered, healthcare and education are severely stratified along economic conditions, and almost everything on that list is a commodity. The USA has sanitation systems almost everywhere, but that's just because rich poop and poor poop all smells like poop. Wherever the wealthy can isolate their own sanitation, they do.
Out of that the US lacks health care for all, and it lacks transit pretty much everywhere outside of the large cities. Even the cities pretty much have nothing that reaches all the way out to the suburbs.
Where I live, you have to have a car to have a decent quality of life. People give up their homes before they give up their cars. So transportation needs to be addressed in order to have the quality of life promised. Most of the places that are food insecure are all about politics and bad people blocking food resources rather than the food not being available.
That's exactly what the article proposed:
'Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity, depending on our assumptions about distribution and technological deployment. "
So if you and everyone are willing to live on 30% less "money", worldwide poverty would be eliminated.
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We are living in a false-scarcity society when we could be living in a post-scarcity one.
This a thousand times. The world is throwing away resources at an astounding rate while people are sick, homeless and starving because of numbers on digital ledgers. We need to drop the whole idea of money. It's served its purpose, run its course and has since turned into a life on this planet threatening perversion.
"I have a magical reality-changing glove. Should I change the nature of beings to want to share for the benefit of all? Nah, I'm gonna remove a random half of them from existence. It's clearly the ONLY thing I could possibly do to solve the problem! I'm so smart and awesome!"
Does anybody have sources around this stat? I fully believe it, but I'd like to have references to point to for myself in the future
There's a source in the image. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
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I'm skeptical. I just skimmed the paper, but most of it seems to be taking a financial/macro-economic perspective without too much analysis on individual resources availability and the damage just current levels of output are causing to our environment/resources. I've seen other research that claim we are already over the carrying capacity of Earth, some say by a large margin (e.g. carrying capacity is 2 billion people). I'm pretty sure humans are already using (and degrading) the majority of Earth's arable land, for instance.
Be a lot less far from carrying capacity if people even tried to be sustainable.):
We have already enough resources for everyone. It is just that the 1% is hoarding all of it.
Our problem is distribution. It's a hard problem to solve but it's much better than the easy solution.
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Resources aren't evenly distributed naturally, some area may not have enough resources.
It takes more resources to get more resources, we may be measuring 30% of total resources, but not 30% of resource capacity.
I'm fine with population control, but it should be implemented willingly at an individual level, and pushed via education and community acceptance. I catch a small amount of flak for not having kids, but wife catches a lot more.
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The problem is a combination of intrinsic psychological biases of those with means. Once they reach a certain threshold, they become driven to keep accumulating until they own everything. Gotta catch 'em all.
This threshold is likely different for everyone, and may not be related to other thresholds of accumulation, such as:
- When you have everything you want, except to upscale your stuff.
- When you make more money than you can spend on personal expenses, including renting Venice for a wedding.
- When you make more then you can spend on ther unrelated threshold where you can't possibly spend all your income without purchasing billion-dollar companies
Some capitalists are self aware enough to recognize the impulse is not sustainable, (also that profits are better had with happy workers) which often comes from having risen to wealth from more modest means. (But not always).
At any rate, rich dudes who drop billions into massive public improvement projects are rare, and when they do they tend to see it as revenue source, or at least something to exploit to improve their brand image.
So the next step for society is to discover a sociological technique that allows rich guys to think I have enough, to drop their surplus into the hands of the community (say the general fund of the local governing body)
That or accept that we are too simple a species to navigate some very imminent great filters. We may not count as a space-faring civilization that might encounter other space-faring civilizations.
This is not a new idea. Fourth International–Posadism opined that developing communism (or a refinement thereof) would be a prerequisite for space colonization. I'd argue changing from capitalism is a prerequisite for societal sustainability more than a couple of centuries from now.
[screaming in inefficiency]
We have more than enough to make sure everyone has more than enough. Poverty is deliberate and premeditated.
How do we know who to give food to of people aren't competing against each other to hoard as much wealth as they can?
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This somehow completely disregards the most critical side-effect of overpolulation esepcially when you calculate in dying oceans and trees.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
The sustainable capacity was calculated to be around 2 billion. This is not affected by food output.
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It is definitely possible a "decent" living standard is lower in their minds then mine or yours or ours. I am very curious
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