Have people who think there are infinite resources and thinking otherwise is neo-Malthusian wrong-headedness, etc - have these people visited China or India, where people - more so the poor people whose case the Malthus-slayers suggest they represent - are in fact running out of earths faster - as in arable land, water, etc.
I can and do see two arguments with the alarm over [effective] resource exhaustion: one, it denies to others the sort of goods/lifestyle that have been enjoyed for decades by some. Second, resource concerns go hand in hand with population control which in turn leads to forced sterilisation and other programmes imposed on the poor. There may be other concerns as well. And they are valid.
But at the same time it seems a stretch of the so-called naturalistic fallacy to ignore the “is” because it limits the “ought”.
Further, if the idea that other groups might desire a life different from our own seems romanticising (because generalising from one’s own desires is the scientific thing to do?), the flip applies as well - why assume that third world citizens want Nanos rather than efficient public transportation like New Yorkers do? Seems to me that latter position is the paternalistic one. The way out of this psycho-analytics, it seems to me, is not to figure out which one of us has the minds of others figured out best, but to define what is a good state of affairs for all, and shoot for that.
—ravi
It is not by chance, I submit, that it was a conservative economist who was taking the optimistic side of the Ehrlich-Simon wager.