I’m surprised too. But I suspect it’s more because it’s a very inconvenient truth: what about factory farms, the suffering we make billions of animals go through so we can eat them cheaply, and having to change our habits to accommodate this reality? It’s way easier and socially accepted to ignore this entirely and assume animals are dumb so it’s ok to keep doing what we do to them.
The broader context is a lot of the Western philosophy we rely on today formed around the same time we started building intricate machines, and those thinkers also wondered whether animals were just really intricate machines. Nothing nefarious. It’s probably fine if we express more gratitude towards these animals like we used to.
Meat, especially beef, is an utterly inefficient way to produce food.
People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.
All food is not fungible, people eat meat because they want to eat meat, not other foods. Given that as a constant, find more efficient ways to make the same end product, because that is much less work than convincing whole swathes of people to want a different end product. Hence, lab-grown meat or plant-based meat have been way more effective at convincing people than decades of campaigning by those who want people to eat less meat.
When the world was much smaller, the same problems persisted. The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland happened not just because crops failed in Ireland. England had enough crops, and the world was ready to sell more, but the British government kept Irish ports closed for imports of foods, and English Protestant farmers were not very keen to sell to Irish Catholics (fun: both considered themselves Christians). Estimated world population at the time was about 1 billion.
Man-made famines are a really common thing all along the human history; just consider the medieval sieges of cities, and routine deliberate destruction of enemy crops. This was happening when the world had merely 300-400M people.
It's not too many people. It's too little wisdom, and too much cruelty, per person.
Then again, if you believe that it's not 'too many people' and you also concede that population will continue growing as it has for the last 650+ years and the planet obviously isn't growing then surely you must also concede that at some point it has to become 'too many people', the only question is when.
No, population growth slowing down has nothing to do with a collective agreement on their being too many people.
It's simply that people in developed countries don't want to deal with the trouble of raising more than 1 or 2 kids because raising kids is difficult and expensive. You need 2 kids to replace the 2 adults, but then you add in other mortality factors and it drops below replacement.
Most of those people aren't agreeing that there are too many people, hell in cases like Japan, even their governments want them to have more children, they're just focusing on what strikes a balance for their comfort.
The population is demonstrably not continuing to grow at the same rates - all but sub-Saharan Africa is at below replacement fertility (and sub-Saharan Africa is also dropping fast), and much of the world today only experiences population growth due to immigration. With China likely now having slipped into decline net of migration, and India having dropped below fertility replacement rates and so only a couple of decades away from population decline, we're 50-100 years away from global population decline without drastic steps.
According to our best estimates we're already past the "peak children". World population growth has been slowing down for decades at this point, it will become negative in second half of this century.
World hunger is not caused by too many people, it's entirely caused by our priorities. World produces more food than it needs and that production grows faster than the population.
The elephant in the room that any discussion about social issues will bend over backwards to avoid mentioning.
Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.
Sure, these conflicts are caused by people, but 'there' s just too many of us' isn't a suppressed thought, just a bad one that we have since moved on from. Overpopulation was a trendy idea in the 70s that inspired many ugly policies, like sterilisation of ethnic minorities.
Poplation growth is slowing down everywhere, in the developed world (which uses the most energy and resources) it's been negative for some time.
Currently there's about 8 billion people, and estimates predict it will stop at 10 billion people and start to derease in the second half of this century.
So you're calling a temporary increase by 25% "elephant in the room", meanwhile the difference between resource consumption in USA (14 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) and the world average (4 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) is over 300%.
It's working everywhere. India dropped below replacement fertility a couple of years ago. The only part of the world left with above replacement growth is sub-Saharan Africa, and even the very highest, like Niger, has seen substantial drops in fertility rates.
If anything we're a few decades away from a rising panic about increasing them again.
> Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen. No, that's not because of offshoring.
These things are caused by economic structure and government policy (independent of population) and technology efficiency (which gets better with more people, not worse). Examples being whether or not you're allowed to build apartments or beef is subsidized.
This is a common sentiment, but I have yet to hear any reasonable proposal for solutions. It certainly is talked about a lot in my experience.
It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it?
1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China.
Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right.
Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide.
It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.
It's a completely fake problem invented in the 70s by the book "The Population Bomb", and if it was true the things in that book would already have happened.
However, the West's strategy of writing moral panic books like this and then not actually reading them did allow us to defeat China (who read the book, actually did it and now has a demographic crisis) so that's something.
The cause and effect is not so clear. China's wealth has also risen substantially, and with it comes fertility decline. E.g. India reached below replacement fertility a couple of years ago without it.
I think it's likely the one child policy contributed a bit, but a substantial part of the decline is clearly also due to economic development.
The solution is talked about and is reasonable - creating western-like living environments in the remaining high fertility rate areas. Higher standard of living and more individual freedom leads to fertility rates near or even below replacement rate.
No, the real problem is there isn't enough people. If one Einstein is born per 1bln people, imagine what kind of progress in culture efficiency, technology, and ideas in general we would make as a species if there was 1T people (tera as in trilion).
None. At our current efficiency levels, 1T of us would destroy our home planet's ability to support ourselves in a week.
If we want to go multiplanetary and support populations of that kind of size, we have to get much better at optimising our footprint. Which probably requires ethical/philosophical innovation as well as hard science/technology. What we have now is too wasteful and inefficient to scale up in that way, indeed so much so that it risks poisoning itself before it's able to develop those capabilities.
You're presuming that Einsteins are born and destined to greatness regardless of their environmental conditions. What if Einsteins require particularly social/environmental conditions to reach their full potential and furthermore, what if those particular conditions cannot arise when people are packed together like sardines in a can?
This statement ignores a ton of other factors, and provides a particularly poor example. What did Einstein do to alleviate hunger? Most of his contributions remain theoretical or applied to things that don't directly help the population (or haven't paid off yet).
Even if you have someone who is intelligent, will their contributions actually make life better for people? Or will their ideas become commercially corrupted and be used for greed (Edison commercialization vs Tesla gifting)? Will they complicate our lives or provide harm along with some benefit (social media, TV, etc)? At such a small rate of the population (using your 1/1 billion), would a truly good idea gain traction? Maybe the idea to eliminate or restrict meat is theoretically a good one. But are you going to convince all the people to support it? Then how much impact will it actually have?
There is no magic solution nor hyper intelligent person that will save us.
But has it helped with living conditions like food and shelter? Sure it's made life easier, even for stuff like tractor positioning for field planting. But I don't see it having a real impact on those sorts of issues. I guess it has made many munitions more accurate and reduced collateral damage.
Have you tried moving through a desert or a steppe in the dead of night, far from human infrastructure? It's damn dark, the land is literally darker than the star-strewn sky. Headlights give you only so much light, for the next 100-150m of the road maximum. Unless it's a really nice, well-maintained road, with reflector posts, etc (and usually it's not), it's really easy to lose your way if you drive a tad too fast. You either crawl, or choose to camp and wait until the morning light.
With a GPS map, you can proceed much more confidently. And a few hours may play a serious role in disaster relief.
So too can the stars, or proper time/speed/direction navigation.
I'm not saying GPS isn't useful. I'm saying it hasn't had a life changing impact for the masses that allows for a larger population (eg it's not providing more food, shelter, etc).
In this day and age, people aren't still starving because the animals and plants don't give up their nutrients easily enough, but because humans trample and prey on humans at worst, or neglect their suffering at best.
And empathy is empathy, I doubt you can outright ignore the suffering of animals while having a whole lot for the suffering of humans.
Less meat consumption should lead to more production and decrease in price of of other types food. Also despite all the suffering in the world people still care very much about the wellbeign of dogs and cats. If anything with inflation and more and more wars around the globe the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
The inputs into meat today are things like soy and feed corn, which aren't particularly good for people. It's not quite as easy as just not eating meat. Many of the farms need to switch to other crops that are healthy which requires different machines, more labor, or other factors. You probably aren't going to see too much drop in other food prices since much of the cost of foods (especially corn and soy related) is in the processing and distribution, not in the actual growing. Then you need to convince people they want to eat whatever the new product is. You could give people something made from scraps similar to dog food, but that's not going to go over well for a bunch of reasons.
> the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year.
It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.
And westerners throw away an obscene amount of edible food on a daily basis. I don’t see how being more compassionate and opting out of participating in animal suffering will make people who don’t have enough to eat have more to eat.
This makes no sense. Animals eat grain. We eat the animal. Animal has to eat 10x the calories in grain for 1x the calories to whoever eats the animal. VS 1x the calories in grain if you skip eating the animal in between.
How smart were those 9 million people? Given that most of them live in zones where they couldn't apply even the simplest agriculture techniques, I would say not much.
