Question
Would it be possible for the West to maintain its standard of living in a world with say, only half the population it has now?
Answer
Depends entirely on which half.
Douglas Adams' A, B and C arks carried this thought experiment to interesting extremes. It was a clever plan to get rid of the most useless 1/3 of humanity, but it had certain unintended consequences... won't spoil it for those who haven't yet read the Hitchhiker's Guide.
More seriously, your casual notion of "useful for the economy" is very shaky indeed. In hard times, movies might be the only things keeping people going with a desire to live. They represent our collective imagination. Without Starbucks a lot of really productive people in your sense of the word would be non-functioning zombies.
I think the distinction you are really groping towards is not productive/not productive, but critical services vs. non-critical.
In the long run, nearly everbody has a role to play, including apparently useless parasites of the sort Ayn Randians love to hate.
In the short run though, yeah sure, we could do without movie makers, bloggers, Twitter engineers and so forth. We need farmers, doctors, firemen... the stuff people think of as "essential services."
People who make life possible vs. people who make life meaningful.
But your question is really about resources I think and the comment about "useless" people was a throwaway one.
In terms of resources, how many people the planet can support obviously depends on how much resources we use on average. In terms of just physical space, you could squeeze all human biomass into a pretty small space. 6 billion people, if you gave each a 1m cube space, would all fit into a cube of side 2km.
Food: figures from the Worldwatch Institute's 19 Dimensions of the Population Problem give you an idea of resources needed. I believe a typical North American meat-based diet amounts to about 800 lb of grain a year (since cows basically turn grain into meat at a certain efficiency). A hybrid Italian diet is like 400lb. A primarily vegetarian one is more like 200lb. The minimum land required to grow grain for one person I believe is about 0.22 hectares or something.
You can do similar calculations for other resource variables.
Another data point. I once read that a child in America uses 30x as much resources to grow up as a child in India. A child in India in turn uses like 30x more resources than one in sub-saharan Africa. Forgot the ref.
But basically, thinking about resources in terms of undifferentiated humans is too coarse. You need to think in terms of humans as resource-usage vectors.
Douglas Adams' A, B and C arks carried this thought experiment to interesting extremes. It was a clever plan to get rid of the most useless 1/3 of humanity, but it had certain unintended consequences... won't spoil it for those who haven't yet read the Hitchhiker's Guide.
More seriously, your casual notion of "useful for the economy" is very shaky indeed. In hard times, movies might be the only things keeping people going with a desire to live. They represent our collective imagination. Without Starbucks a lot of really productive people in your sense of the word would be non-functioning zombies.
I think the distinction you are really groping towards is not productive/not productive, but critical services vs. non-critical.
In the long run, nearly everbody has a role to play, including apparently useless parasites of the sort Ayn Randians love to hate.
In the short run though, yeah sure, we could do without movie makers, bloggers, Twitter engineers and so forth. We need farmers, doctors, firemen... the stuff people think of as "essential services."
People who make life possible vs. people who make life meaningful.
But your question is really about resources I think and the comment about "useless" people was a throwaway one.
In terms of resources, how many people the planet can support obviously depends on how much resources we use on average. In terms of just physical space, you could squeeze all human biomass into a pretty small space. 6 billion people, if you gave each a 1m cube space, would all fit into a cube of side 2km.
Food: figures from the Worldwatch Institute's 19 Dimensions of the Population Problem give you an idea of resources needed. I believe a typical North American meat-based diet amounts to about 800 lb of grain a year (since cows basically turn grain into meat at a certain efficiency). A hybrid Italian diet is like 400lb. A primarily vegetarian one is more like 200lb. The minimum land required to grow grain for one person I believe is about 0.22 hectares or something.
You can do similar calculations for other resource variables.
Another data point. I once read that a child in America uses 30x as much resources to grow up as a child in India. A child in India in turn uses like 30x more resources than one in sub-saharan Africa. Forgot the ref.
But basically, thinking about resources in terms of undifferentiated humans is too coarse. You need to think in terms of humans as resource-usage vectors.