Warning and spoilers for infinity war incoming
Look at all the YouTube channels just
Starving for clicks too many channels to watch them all but to snuff them all out at once
Instantly that isn't mercy with a snap of my fingers half of all YouTube channels will disappear
[song]
At last I could sit contentedly and watches oh
No, no, they all had second channels
Hello Internet
Welcome to film theory where let's be honest here for a second atop YouTube channel getting dusted overnight
It's probably the single best way to get people reinter ested when they were just starting to get more to the youtuber
You know what wasn't boring though
Infinity war I gotta be honest. It was so much better than I expected
It was such a well-balanced movie the perfect mix of action
Humor and drama all that and they crammed 60 characters in without making it feel rushed or bloated
It was so good
It had to have had Superman wetting his tighty whities or tiny reddys
I suppose perhaps most impressive of all was Panos easily one of Marvel's best villains nay best
Characters for being this big bad bad Titan, he was surprisingly relatable and sympathetic
well as much as he can be sympathetic and relatable for someone looking to wipe out half the population of the
Galaxy if you're still with us, but haven't seen the movie yet because all the theaters are still sold out
Let me catch you up Thanos the giant purple
blue
Sari pink Doc fine Thanos the rainbow type watched as his planet became
overpopulated and started to run out of basic resources police suggested a random culling of half his planet's population the other Titans found this
suggestion
so they ignored it eventually the planet couldn't find a solution and destroyed itself in the process leaving Thanos with the
universe's biggest case of i-told-you-so
so to prevent other planets from experiencing the same fate big Papa Thanos made it his life's work to
randomly eliminate half the life of the universe
He mentions that he's done it once before on gamora's home planet of sin, and then it worked out pretty well
Since I don't have the clip from the movie since it's still in theaters to prove it. Here's a dramatic recreation of that scene
I was a child when you took me I see
Smoking a lot I see you
What what's wrong with my shadows?
What do you want my Santa you're here? Do you want me to be Gamora and you be Thanos here
Let's do it that way then I was a child when you took me our serve, dude
No, no, we were happy at my home play
Going to bed hungry
Scrounging for scrubs your planet was on the brink of collapse
I was the one who stopped that you know
What's happened since then the children born know nothing but full bellies and clear skies
It's some paradise because you murdered half the planet a small price to pay for salvation
You're insane
And Earth is next on his hit list at the end of infinity war
We actually see nanos succeed though
of course that random cooling process just so happens to specifically target those characters whose contracts aren't about to expire but you know what we're
Gonna give vanos benefit of the doubt here in a sum that he isn't secretly working for some dark secret Overlord
but here's the thing for as
Absolutely insane as Thanos his plan sounds and for as much as we as an audience
Don't believe what he's saying about the state of gamora's whole world if you stop and look at the economics statistics
And historical precedents Thanos may actually be right
You heard that correctly?
When you're up the numbers it turns out that Thanos the mad tight the data be as bad as you might think
First let's talk population growth since that's the underlying driver of all the economics here
there are two main population growth models that exist today the
exponential growth model and the logistic growth model the exponential model basically says that as the population grows the
rate at which it grows will continue to increase and get faster basically doubling every generation and this
Kinda makes sense. Right if I have two kids at each one of those two kids have two kids now
There's four those four kids each themselves have two kids and now there's eight each
Generation doubles or in science class how you learn that one bacteria dividing
Every twenty minutes could produce five
Thousand billion billion bacteria in just one day then you leave class if you never touch a doorknob again
But you can see that for humans. This doesn't really work
We all have different numbers of kids or no kids
Or we live in a place in the world where it's illegal to have more than one kid as a result
There's the logistic population models where population growth begins slowing at a certain point reaching some type of upper limit called the carrying capacity
Usually this is the result of environmental factors in the case of bacteria. It might be the walls of the petri dish
You just run on a roof and for a lot of demographers the people who study human populations
they believe we have a carrying capacity to
specifically around 11 to 12 billion people now that sounds like it's a lot but remember we're at
7.3 billion people right now
So we're actually not that far away the idea that we would slowly approach
The carrying capacity of Earth was first posited by 18th century demographer Thomas Malthus
If you want to learn more about Malthus and the philosophy of Thanos watch the musical Urinetown anyone anyone No
No one's interested in a delightful musical romp through a world where you have to pay to pee fine then watch the wisecrack channel
Who did an excellent video on that very topic that you could watch right here after the theory is over. Don't worry
I'll link to it during the end screen so you won't forget to watch it
The TLDR of Malthus is theory or Malthusian ism. Is that quote?
The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce
Systems for man or as Thanos put it. It's simple calculus
This universe has finite resources finite if life is left unchecked life will cease to exist
It means correcting but Thanos factored in something that mult has didn't and that is
carrying capacity with humans
Our carrying capacity of eleven to twelve billion comes less from the restrictions of the environment and more from our own economic behavior
the global birth rate has been dropping since the UN started keeping track of it back in the 1950s falling from
37.2 births per thousand people in 1952 1955 to
19:4 births per thousand people as recently as 2010 to 2015 that is a huge difference and he can't blame declining
resources for it since over the same period of the gross world product increased over nineteen times from about four trillion to about
77 trillion, so what's the problem here?
Well, it's infant mortality, or should I say lack thereof?
it may seem strange that more babies living would actually cause a
Population to decrease but here's the thing your great-great grandparents lived in a much rougher world than we do
they lived at a time where unfortunately it was just very
Unusual for all your children to live into maturity each child that did live
however could help you work your land or manage your home when it was unlikely that you could afford to hire much labor on your
Own you could also marry your children off for dowry Zoar political capital and because of all of this it was socially advantageous
To have as many children as possible
however
nowadays
There are just far fewer economic advantages to having kids which is admittedly a terrific thing for me to be saying when my wife is
Praying rn8. But seriously, it's true. There aren't our e's anymore
if anything your child is likely to cost you money on the wedding and the
education and while they live in your basement looking for a job and
Speaking of that time is another key factor here as the amount of time that we spend raising
Each child has historically trended upwards if your medieval father didn't show up to your Pony League
Dousing tournament because it was too busy fighting the Crusades whipping the serfdom into shape literally and figuratively. Well, that was just
Expected but if your modern-day father here in 2018 misses just one little league baseball game because of his work
You're gonna get yourself a Lifetime movie of the week. He was so neglected as a child
We can actually see this playing out on the world stage today where many of the most economically developed countries
Populations are stalling Japan had record low numbers of children at just around
15 million this year and in Europe, the average couple only has one point six children that's not even enough to replace the existing
Generation collectively this means that the human population is no longer growing exponentially like many of the fear-mongering
news outlets proclaim impact since
1960 we've had absolutely zero
exponential growth whatsoever
We've had an absolutely linear growth and this is the crux of tanis's plan
You see if the human population we're still growing exponentially
Well, then Thanos his plan would have only set the world's population back by a single generation or about 25 years
But because our birth rate is dropping and our population growth is linear
It's a good indicator that we've moved past the midpoint of this logistic curve known as the point of maximum
Growth what that means is that Humanity is done growing at this accelerated rate and instead we're moving towards a flat no growth population
In short it doesn't really matter how many people live on earth as long as we're able to sustain our current lifestyle
So if you cut the population in half at this period in time you effectively also cut the maximum population in half
Meaning that thanasis plan would actually have a permanent impact
So for a guy who looks like a linebacker who's taking one too many hits to the face
He's actually really thought this out on top of all this in Santos as model the scientific and cultural
Advances that have been made aren't removed from the world
and so the world even theory continues forward at about the same rate of
Advancement just with a carrying capacity of 6 billion instead of about 11 billion
Its experian by the way fewer people that we have on earth today
Even though I was researching this I couldn't believe it. I was a bit skeptical so I kept digging
you see tano's employs basic laws of supply and demand to say that when half the demand is
Moved by removing half the population crisis should plummets. This seemed to me like it was a bit of an oversimplification
But believe it or not historical evidence supports Thanos in this too now
There's obviously no real-world example, where half the population literally disappeared in a snap
But we do have a very well-documented situation
Where about a third of Europe died in a matter of a few years the black death?
There are some very interesting things that happen to the European economy as a result of the Black Death
That weirdly made some European lives better and I can already hear the vitriol in the comments. Let me make it clear
No one here is saying yay black death. Whoo. What a great idea
This is all in the name of social science and Marvel movies this economic history article on the Black Death notes that the general
Wages rose by 40 percent in the years following the Black Death while at the same time rents for property actually
plummeted as there were fewer people to occupy houses or work land this meant that the demand for
Houses fell and as a result of falling demand the price of homes
Followed suit since people needed to farm less land to feed fewer people land that was once needed for crops before was suddenly
diversified into ranching increasing the supply of manure and meat which in turn increased the output of the land that
Existed had even further drove down food costs food prices dropped about 15%
On the whole in the years immediately after the plague to lower food costs lower
housing costs and higher wages the people that were left
kinda
Benefited from all of that death thanos that his twisted brain could conceivably call that a paradise where those who remained thrived
Who knows maybe in this situation of millennial would actually be able to afford a house?
So are we looking at a potentially real victory here under Thanos as rule
Well, it's kind of hard to know for sure because when it comes to economics
There are all sorts of dominoes knocked down the line that can cause a massive amount of blowback with a huge global
Crisis like Thanos says snap and falling prices
It changes the picture for a lot of these same issues for instance with the costs of having a kid much lower and a huge
Depopulation of earth people would likely feel afraid sure to have more kids than they currently do potentially pushing the carrying capacity
higher than where it currently is as we jumpstart our growth rates again China now less concerned with
Overpopulation would start to loosen their population control laws as well as many of the other
Environmental laws that may be helping to slow the effects of things like global warming today
And the rest of the world would probably follow suit also interestingly enough earth would most likely close off its doors
its atmosphere space port things
basically
It wouldn't let other aliens in because you know the first few aliens to make it to earth all tried to kill us
That sort of xenophobia would likely Center its back in terms of becoming culturally integrated into the rest of the galaxy too bad
You can't build a wall around an entire planet
actually
I think you can it's called a forcefield economic solutions aren't a snap literally or figuratively the fun thing about this episode
Is that it was a fun thought experiment. It doesn't matter
It was simply a test of math and statistics
But at the end of the day human life is priceless killing off half a population is never a solution plus
Let's all face it
There's no denying that Thanos is definitively a mad Titan because guess what there is an easy solution here
You just snap your fingers and double everything or why stop there. You make it infinite
Seriously Thanos you have yourself a gauntlet of unstoppable power think outside the box, but hey
that's just a theory a film theory and
Remember that wisecrack video I mentioned midway through the episode. Boom. There. It is on screen
I love the guys over at wisecrack. And if you enjoyed these sorts of pop-culture thought experiments
Well, then you're gonna love their channel. This is their assessment of the philosophy of Thanos, which is insanely interesting
So honestly do yourselves a favor if you enjoyed this video?
Which obviously you did you made it to the very end of it. Click the button you see on screen right now
Give it a watch learn something new and told that matpat said yeah, give the video a watch if you enjoy it
Give them a subscribe
They're what most deserving channels on YouTube producing some of the smartest content out there at a time
When honestly the algorithm makes it really hard to do smart educational content
So show them some love and that's about it in case you missed it
Here's my prediction theory on Deadpool, which we'll see if it comes true and then couple days and I will see you all next Tuesday