"It could have happened some other way" is a non-falsifiable statement. Therefore, it's not really that interesting to talk about. I counter with "It could have happened some other way" with "Prove it."
I don't think that's true - imagine for example we'd run out of oxygen, and had needed to manufacture (extract) it somehow on a large scale to support a growing population: we could falsify it by saying 'no, it was necessary to produce more oxygen than was naturally available'. If we can't find any such way to falsify it, then the point stands.
Your example is not the same. The argument isn’t whether or not producing nitrogen is necessary. The question is whether how we produce nitrogen is necessary or if there is an alternative.
Using your example, it’d be like if we produced oxygen using process X and then saying “process X was necessary to save the species because we would have run out of natural oxygen.” And someone saying “Not necessarily because process X might not be the only way to produce oxygen.”
the original statement implied it couldn't have happened some other way (gotten to population of 8 billion without megacorps), to which I essentially replied "Prove it"
If your reply to my "prove it" is also "prove it" then it would seem we are at an impasse.
> the original statement implied it couldn't have happened some other way (gotten to population of 8 billion without megacorps), to which I essentially replied "Prove it"
The statement is more-or-less obvious if you think about it from a capitalistic economic system. If there was a cheaper way to fix nitrogen, then someone would be using it to undercut Haber-Bosch produced nitrogen and capture the market. So we can conclude that, given scientific knowledge acquired by this point in time, Haber-Bosch is the cheapest way to produce nitrogen. Given that the amount of food that can be produced is a function of the price of the inputs, we couldn't produce as much food if nitrogen was more expensive. If we couldn't produce as much food, then we couldn't support the current population. So, on the balance of probabilities, the statement is self-evident.
>The statement is more-or-less obvious if you think about it from a capitalistic economic system. If there was a cheaper way to fix nitrogen, then someone would be using it to undercut Haber-Bosch produced nitrogen and capture the market.
Haber-Bosch is offered as an example of something needing megacorp scaling to that original statement, obviously from reading the foregoing I never said anything about a replacement for Haber-Bosch.
My admittedly vague statement just meant that hey you need to at least come with a theory as to why whatever allowed us to get to 8 billion could not happen without megacorp scaling. I don't think a linke to Haber-Bosch is an argument for that - the process was developed without megacorp financing as I understood it and then sold to a large corporation (not really megacorp either I think, by normal understanding)
quote: "The process was purchased by the German chemical company BASF, which assigned Carl Bosch the task of scaling up Haber's tabletop machine to industrial-level production"
I suppose the idea is that megacorp needed to run or develop scaling to industrial-level production.
I'm not that averse to the idea, just it seemed in the original form (linked above) quite a bold statement that should at least have some theoretical backing.
Megacorp scaling is all about economies of scale. The connection between economies of scale, lower cost, and high production are all well understood. We can fix more nitrogen, for less money, and produce more food.
Without megacorp scaling, we'd need to spend more money on the same amount of food. Is that possible? Or would a different equilibrium point have been reached? Say, 7 billion instead of 8?
The contention presumably comes from the position of believing that all of these industrial processes and economies of scale could be implemented as well or better by a centralized command economy. You would think that the 20th century debunked such notions, but commies never learn... ...err I mean, true communism has never been tried!
> If there was a cheaper way to fix nitrogen, then someone would be using it to undercut Haber-Bosch produced nitrogen and capture the market.
Unless parts of a capitalist economic system undermines competition in the interest of maximising profits for individual corporations or sectors. Thus there is a fork in this chain of reasoning -- it is not necessarily the case that no alternative method can be found (whether fixing nitrogen specifically or producing food generally), it could also be that such methods aren't developed because they threaten the short-term return on capital. One way to think of capitalism is as an engine optimised to generate and preserve short-term returns on capital.
'Cheapest' is defined in part by the required short-term return on capital. Nothing could be cheaper, from an operational perspective, than letting fields lie fallow. It only becomes expensive when fixed capital absolutely must have its short-term return before any other considerations are taken into account.
Maybe, but industrial processes are changed and made more efficient all the time. Nitrogen is a commodity. Anyone with hydrogen can make it. There's no global cartel forcing everyone to use this specific process.
Arguably there is. The large, multinational, powerful conglomerates that run the fertilizer industry have undoubtedly achieved regulatory capture, and gotten government support to keep upstarts out of the market through onerous safety regulations. Fertilizer explodes, so some of those regulations are even safety related!
Ok. What would a proof of the negative statement look like? I.e. how could you prove Haber-Bosch is the only way of producing nitrogen at scale given what was known in the 20th century?
In this circumstance it might be difficult, but to say there is no way to disprove such a statement is facially absurd. It might be true that there are no other alternatives. It absolutely depends on the circumstance.
It's like asking is there a different way for me to get to work. Either there is or isn't. It's not an infinite universe of probabilities.
Even if the universe of possibilities is not infinite, that doesn't necessarily mean it's possible to know when you know everything, which would be a prerequisite to proving such a statement. And of course, knowing everything is totally infeasible, so you couldn't prove such a statement in practice anyway, even if it were theoretically possible to do so.
I mean, I'd think we were talking more reasonably than that but if you want to turn it into some sort of philosophical question not bound by the physics of our universe, go right ahead...
