(Untitled)

[edith_the_hutt]

"When God saw that the world was so over proud, He sent a dearth on earth, and made it full hard. A bushel of wheat was at four shillings or more, Of which men might have had a quarter before.... And then they turned pale who had laughed so loud, And they became all docile who before were so proud. A man's heart might bleed for to hear the cry Of

Comments

[pavanne]

For starters, there would probably have been collapse in the financial markets as the economy cooled (lots of people dying would almost certainly cool the economy considerably, what with the labour costs of manufactured goods and services rising and the number of customers falling). This would be the end of London, whose wealth is driven by the City, as any kind of power in the world.

Globally, a population decrease would probably ease the energy supply bottleneck, as the main factor in energy supply is investment in infrastructure (ie oil and gas wells and pipelines, the odd wind farm). Hence China and India would probably rise as world powers, freed from the thing that is currently holding them back and still having more people - the new scarce resource- than most other countries.

I think the question of whether a more distributed population would result might depend on whether the financial markets survive the crash at all, since they are one of the major drivers of population concentration (that, and affordable service industries). But since I think the current population concentration may be unsustainable in almost any scenario, am not arguing with 'smaller infrastructures'.

(also, wtf is with the new spell-check function on lj, which doesn't like me using the word 'labour'?)