I’m curious to know if the author has spent any significant time in any place that is going to feel the brunt of the climate catastrophe. I’d invite them to spend a couple months in Delhi or Dhaka and then take another pass at this think piece. Or maybe they’re cool with taking in a few hundred million climate refugees into the US and just didn’t mention it, as many parts of South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa will have wet bulb temperatures that are unsurvivable in the next few decades.
Also, some parts just are off:
“A bigger society has more cuisines, more architectural styles, more types of fashion, more sub-genres of entertainment.” Then why are tons of languages on the verge of extinction? Why do so many apartments around the world look like IKEA exploded in it? How come the weaver I visited in Lombok is making patterns and cuts for westerners rather than their traditional stuff, and he himself was just wearing basic tshirts? How come the clothing store across from the spot I stayed at in south Goa was selling Jack Daniel’s t-shirts rather than traditional crafts? How come every gen z person is wearing what I wore in middle and high school? It’s not like SHEIN is making new niche styles for people.
“Better matching to careers” Tell that to the young men in Algiers that asked us for directions to any consulate that would maybe help them get a work visa to leave since there’s no work. Or any of the migrants getting on dangerous boats to cross the Mediterranean to do whatever work they can find. Every cousin of mine that can leave has left. There are plenty of geniuses sitting around without many options just because of where they were born, we don’t need more population to get more geniuses if we’re not even working with what we’ve got.
I’ll give him the niche markets one, though that’s more a function of communication via the Internet than it is about population numbers go up.
I don’t know, it’s hard to take a think piece like this seriously. It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche. Living in a luxury Airbnb in Canggu doesn’t count. Happy to be wrong though.
> It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche.
Even a "privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US" would be feeling the brunt of a growing population in his wallet. More people = more demand for land = higher land prices = higher housing costs. Even in my somewhat-minor metropolitan region of the US am I feeling it.
There are of course approaches to solve that issue (cough coughhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_taxcough coughhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgismcough cough), but the exact sort of person who'd benefit from population growth under the socioeconomic status quo is also in all likelihood someone with a vested material interest in opposing said approaches - that is: someone who owns land and seeks to profit from said ownership, be it by renting it to others or by speculating on its future sale price.
> Georgism isnt a viable solution for the modern world where a majority of the economy is services or knowledge work.
You need land for datacenters and offices. There is zero economic activity that doesn't use land in at least some capacity. That's indeed the very basis of Georgism's viability, including in the present day.
And even if there was some tech company that used zero land whatsoever, there are plenty of other things with inelastic supply that would confer the same benefits if taxed by value; IP addresses and domain names both come to mind.
> 100% of the tax falls on use of physical goods
Correction: 100% of the tax falls on landowners, while 0% falls on everyone else.
> Of course this sounds attractive for tech workers
It should sound attractive to literally everyone whose wealth derives primarily or entirely from their own labor.
> who would live nearly tax free under such a system
That depends on their living arrangements. If they're renting, then yes, it'd be entirely tax free, as it would be for every other renter. If they own their own homes, then it depends on location; given equal physical characteristics, a plot of land in Downtown is more valuable than a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, and so would be the tax on that value.
>Correction: 100% of the tax falls on landowners, while 0% falls on everyone else.
The way you approach this seems to assume that any Georgist taxes get passed on to corporations & owners, but not individuals. A data center would bear the cost of taxes for land and construction materials based on their availability and demand even if the land and building were rented. Similarly, taxes of land, water, fertilizer, metals, would be passed on to the consumer.
At the end of the day, Georgism boils down to a material use and consumption tax.
Because there is no Georgist tax for capital gains or income, A janitor would pay the same tax as a CEO if they personally use and consume the same amount of raw materials. A stock trader making 1B/year pays the same as a carpenter, maybe less because the carpenter need more physical materials to work like wood & nails, while the stock trader just sends a few megabytes down the wires.
Much of what humans exchange for value does not have a strong relation to scarce physical materials, primarily labor and money. The incomes of Apple or Google are not proportional to their material use, just like the the incomes of hyper billionaires is not proportional to their cheeseburger consumption. ( e.g. Musk's income is maybe that of 500,000 Americans, but he doesn't use as much land, eat as much food, or use as much fuel as 500,000 people).
This is why a georgist tax regime is very regressive (which isnt inherently a bad thing). I just dont think it is a great social equalizer many proponents claim.
More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom.
This doesn't mean people, we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions.
I live in a single state with a tiny population that mines and ships 16x more raw iron ore, almost a billion tonnes per annum, than peak annual iron ore mining in the entire USofA ever. We also mine a millions of tonnes of other resources. This is entirely down to bigger machines, smarter technology, and factors that don't require more people.
The arguments presented here for even more people on the globe are sketchy at best, no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.
The 2 most prominent proponents of this idea happen to have the resources (money) that will allow them to avoid most of the downsides a larger population would create. Great for them bad for me. There are plenty enough geniuses in existence today. They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have. As others have pointed out consideration of of negative effects are totally absent.
Will technology allow us to sustain larger populations - likely but at what cost.
Don't you think those bad leaders would've had a harder time coming into power if there had been less contention over resources?
If it's clear that there's plenty to go around you can just abandon a bad leader. If not, then maybe tolerating them is a necessary evil (because they control the food).
We have an abundance of resources, and ship things like food and medicine all over the world. But because of shitty leaders access is the issue. So the only way to address the issue is to get more resources sourced locally.
> If it's clear that there's plenty to go around you can just abandon a bad leader.
> the only way to address the issue is to get more resources sourced locally.
I don't know about "only", but I agree that that's the best move: Fewer labyrinthine dependencies, more providing directly for yourself and your neighbors.
But isn't the difficulty of that proposition a direct function of population density? If "locally" means 1000 people on 100 acres, that's a lot different than if "locally" means 10000 people on 10 acres.
---
To put it differently, premises:
1. The planet can sustain 100M of us
2. The planet cannot sustain 100B of us
3. There is uncertainty about whether the planet can sustain 8B of us
Conclusion:
The safer direction for our population to go is down.
>Don't you think those bad leaders would've had a harder time coming into power if there had been less contention over resources?
No. For most of human history we've been lead by shitty autocratic leaders. Now, when there's too little to go around we're more apt to go to war and/or have population migrations which is a different subject.
How about providing concrete methods for reducing population? Exactly how do you propose to reduce population and who should be forced to not have children first? Should we assume that you will lead by example?
Now the issue is both OP and you are taking one of the trend lines rather than looking at the projection spread. Ops seems slightly off as the UN numbers are showing 10B max and 7.4B min.
Alternative 1: we achieve 6 billion in 2300 because we cannot sustain 7 billion
Alternative 2: we achieve 5 billion in 2300 because we chose to
The quality of life in alternative 2 is higher because we're not right up against constraints that limit us. People feel more secure because there's less contention over resources, they're more likely to take risks like trying new ways of doing things, etc. There's a greater potential for discovery.
So the problem is that if we let nature force us into Alternative 1, we're in for a worse time than we otherwise would be.
Not rich people, but people in consumerist societies.
Consumerism as a way of life is hostile to having children. Consumerism construes all of life, and the purpose of life, as consumption and in hedonistic terms. It means that sexual intercourse and sexual relationships are perversely construed in terms of consumption. A sign of this is the 20th century normalization of contraception, where the intrinsically procreative end of sexual intercourse is intentionally and explicitly blocked and frustrated in order to center pleasure (the irony of hedonism is that it actually makes sex less enjoyable, as pleasure sought for its own sake undermines itself, but I digress). In a healthy sexual relationship, children are a welcome result of sexual union. In a consumerist relationship, they are an impediment to hedonistic consumerist indulgence, so much so that abortion is sought when contraception fails. Even the notion of lifelong marriage stands in the way of the consumerist juggernaut, as commitment to one's spouse means denying yourself countless, admittedly shallow and selfish sexual encounters. Consumerism is an agent of social and individual decay.
Furthermore, children cost money. The money you could spend on consumption, on that new Mercedes, may need to go toward the good of a child, which, according to a consumerist calculus, is lost. And how can you keep up with the Jones' when the measure of wealth aren't children, but more stuff? The poor may have had more children in consumerist societies, because various luxuries are out of their reach anyway, so the dilemma doesn't manifest as much. Also, the fish tends to rot from the head down, so it takes a while for the habits of those further up the economic ladder to trickle down.
Of course, not everyone must have children, but healthy societies do tend to have many. If it were simply the case of the former, we would not see the hostility we see toward the latter.
I think it has been demonstrated multiple times in various places that empowerment of women and access to birth control ultimately stabilizes population growth. [1] There is no need to have a program or have governments decide who and how. People naturally do it on their own given the means.
There are a lot of ways to contribute to society without contributing a person, but many parts of our culture consider these ways to be somehow secondary. If we can change this, we can reduce our population without forbidding anyone from having children.
For starters, I think we should increase tax benefits for people who don't have dependents and who are participating in research, or teaching, or nurshing, or ... create a list of activities which we want to see more of but that the market does not prioritize. Let's celebrate, and empower, individuals who take the time they would be spending on their own kids, and instead spend it on solving society's problems.
This would increase the likelihood that somebody without children has the kind of impact which makes them a role model for existing children. This will help erode the idea that people who chose not to have children are somehow defective and will decrease the likelihood that a person decides to have kids.
I have three children, not unusual for my culture. My community's gardener has 14 children, low for his culture but he's still young. He's only on his second wife and he just passed 40 years old.
Are you going to tell him that he needs to change his culture? Arguably he could have a lot to say about our culture spewing out hydrocarbons being damaging to the planet, which would be justified far before we criticise his reproduction.
>Are you going to tell him that he needs to change his culture
If you're going to life a modern lifestyle, yes 100%. Modern human lifestyles are hyper energy/resource intensive. The reason people had 14 kids back when is 1. most of the kids died, and 2, the kids were work resources. If 1 and 2 no longer hold, then yea, change.
I would bet the reason was women did not have an option to say no to having 14 kids.
Although, in this supposed gardener’s culture, one guy had multiple wives, and that is obviously not a dynamic that leads to a steady, peaceful society based on all the prevailing customs around the world.
I've spoken to a few Bedouin women, though less than men. I've never heard any say that they are unhappy with the quantity of children they raise. That's their culture, why would they be unhappy?
One thing that I've heard them say they are unhappy about are the marrying of additional wives. One particular conversation was with two wives of the same man. The older wife said that she did not want her husband to marry, but over time she began to like the younger wife. In the particular case of the gardener, his first wife told him to marry because the first two children were born unhealthy.
I'd say about half the Bedouins I speak to have multiple wives.
> That's their culture, why would they be unhappy?
Because you have no reason to assume they would tell you the truth, or that they are not lying even to themselves. Actions speak louder than words, and 99% of women who attain financial and physical security choose to not have 14, or even 4 kids.
As recently as the generation that was born before WWII, even the Boomers, were born into relatively large families. The idea that they hated having so many children would have been foreign to them. On the contrary, it gave them meaning. Family and community life was vibrant. Now, things are desolate. We live in a culture of death.
I am not patronizing anyone. I am just presenting statistics, and the possibilities for why they are what they are. By far, most (almost all) women who have access to financial independence, physical security, and access to contraception CHOOSE to have 0, 1, 2, or maybe 3 kids.
No one tells them they cannot have 8 or 14 kids. But after having seen what a woman goes through during pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and child rearing, I would easily say that I would also choose 0, 1, 2, or 3 kids. Certainly not double digits.
> There are plenty enough geniuses in existence today. They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have
I’m pretty sure that the shitty conditions are not caused by a too large population of humans more broadly. If society took the wealth of a few billionaires and distributed it to the most impoverished I think a lot of our overpopulation woes would vanish overnight. Things like tuberculosis medicine costing hundreds of dollars isn’t a population problem.
People always look for the one size fits all solutions and or reasons for problems. There are multiple reasons for shitty conditions just as there are multiple reasons for homelessness. That is why these problems seem so intractable IMHO. I seriously doubt cramming another billion or so people onto the planet is going to improve those conditions. At least I have not read a convincing argument for it.
I think people totally underestimate how the current 9 Billion inhabitants of this planet are depleting our oceans of living things and how large a percentage of those inhabitants depend upon the ocean for food. Sounds like one of those externalities Economist only account for after the fact. Ooops - To bad for you starving children in (put your starving country here).
> If society took the wealth of a few billionaires and distributed it to the most impoverished I think a lot of our overpopulation woes would vanish overnight.
Maybe, maybe not. Most of impoverished people I know are impoverished because they continue to act irresponsibly with money. Just giving them money without education, handholding and a lot of coaching about how to spend money will mean that money will be distrobuted back away into society and eventually the rich will return to being rich. Of course not everyone is like that, but I'd say 80%. By just redistributing wealth, after 5 years we would reduce amount of poor people by 20%. That's why it's so hard to fight poorness. They require a lot more than just money.
And where are those mining machines that allow this to occur manufactured? How about all the components of the mining machines? The locomotives that take all that iron ore to port? The port infrastructure? The ships that transport the ore to its overseas customers?
WA and its mining wealth and efficiency wouldn't exist without a global market for both its supply and demand.
Look at all the people involved in machine manufacture, transport, mining, etc. for sure.
The point being made is that more and more tonnes of raw material are being shipped to smelters per person than ever before.
Automation is still advancing so this will only increase, automation is also advancing in processing and production - we no longer need vast numbers of people to produce a billion tonnes of steel, and the number currently required is still falling.
No the automation would not increase if population would fall, because there would be less demand for iron ore. Your machines would rust away and the knowledge to make them would get lost. We are not living in Star trek utopia where with a push of a button a machine makes whatever you want. Less people means less specialization, less creativity and less activity.
Even if the population suddenly stabilised overnight mining automation would continue to increase in order to meet the rising per capita demand from global population.
It's already rising to meet the transition from fossil fuel energy to other sources.
We are living in a world where 60+ year olds like myself increased per capita throughput in exploration, extraction, processing and production. Much of this creative activity that sees results today came from a time 40 years ago when there were far fewer people than today.
None of what you said would be possible with a dwindling population. We do not live in a Star trek utopia where at press of a button every wish is synthesized by a machine. More people can simply get more done.
There is a good reason why most of the stuff, new discoveries and technologies come from big countries and not from small ones.
Even rich countries per capita with small population size do not build huge infrastructure projects, do not send stuff and people in space, do not have sophisticated armies,...
All of this was put in motion with a population much smaller than todays.
The bulk of it was achieved with a population smaller than todays.
The ongoing work being planned doesn't require the population to grow, there is demand enough from a growing proportion wanting a greater standard of living and a world making a massive transition in base energy.
>> All of this was put in motion with a population much smaller than todays.
Your logic is circular. Because we can go all the way back to first few humans ever to exist and say they put it into motion, therefore a small group of couple of hundred of people is enough. Or go into other direction and dream what new wonders the next 40 years would bring with the rising population.
>> The ongoing work being planned doesn't require the population to grow, there is demand enough from a growing proportion wanting a greater standard of living and a world making a massive transition in base energy.
It doesn't have to grow, but we are not talking about growing we are talking about shrinking.
We are not talking about shrinking back to zero, I am talking about world population finding a sustainable balnce, say five or seven billion by 2300 or so.
You can access annual reports and technical reports on pretty much all the major mine sites about the globe, capital investments, plant sizes, work forces, etc.
then expand outwards mapping supply chain networks, etc. You know, the usual legwork.
It’s possible that the machines are operating on a type of population arbitrage principle.
E.g. with much smaller markets, many small components will be uneconomical to build and will not be available to the complex machinery required to mine at scale. Therefore, they will break down and be replaced by much less efficient but easier to maintain equipment thus decreasing quality of life for everyone in a negative feedback loop.
(I’m a proponent of this belief, and expect it to apply to the semiconductor industry as well, esp. as SK/APEC engineers start to retire en masse.)
> no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.
Those arguments are addressed in the second paragraph:
> Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age. The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue.
The current pressures global populations face due to water access and increased insulation in the atmosphere are not ones that can be magically waved away by technology in short order as population increases and increases the scale of those issues.
Of course there are other challenges, but those two suffice for now.
Cures both the water crisis and climate crisis while also allowing unlimited population growth with increased consumption expectations across the planet?
This depends what you mean by 'solutions'. Burning resources of the planet is not a solution, it's a delay tactic that is only buying you time. Nuclear has it's own host of problems, even the modern ones.
Also no mention of the outlier downsides. More research geniuses also means more psychopaths and rapists. The question is whether one's positives outweigh the other's negatives.
What about a genius-psychopath rapist? (Have to be careful of the grammar there because I want to be clear that I mean a rapist who is also a genius and psychopath, not a genius who targets psychopath rapists).
I kid, but a lot of the top Nazis were geniuses by IQ; I don't know that there's any reason to believe that virtue and genius are correlated, which is only one of the reasons I think this whole conversation is a bit goofy. It honestly feels like yet another weirdo billionaire rationalization for why the line must always go up.
If "more people" was always better then India and Africa should be much richer than Europe.
A lack of people can be an innovation driver: "hiring people is too expensive, so we have to automate everything", i.e. innovation is a must for survival.
Your reasoning is just historically uninformed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio.... There are at least a few generations of lag time between a population boom and economic effects, but Europe's former population size (and density) was the key to its current prosperity.
France would likely be more populous and therefore richer than Germany, had it not secularized earlier and thereby reduced its fertility rate. With all of Europe being highly secular and extremely low fertility, it will (sadly) lose much of its prosperity and cultural significance. Negative TFR societies are simply not sustainable - they will by definition collapse unless they aggressively revert the trend.
Industrial revolution was the key to Europe’s current prosperity. Without it, it was going in the direction of mass starvation, because old farming methods weren’t able to sustain the growing population. The increased population would have been a disaster without the industrial revolution.
It’s the reason England crushed China, even though England’s population has always been microscopic in comparison to that of China.
At some point you also need resources. A lot of the invention necessity + nothing can lead to already exists.
You can "invent" a lever or pulley out of random objects that you already have. It may make your task easier, but it won't be world changing.
Necessity (read, pending starvation) may lead to a desperate search for Other People's Money to bring a concept to fruition, but it's not quite the same thing.
Have you noticed how many Indian and Chinese geniuses there are? They are making the whole world better for everyone. Africa needs better education systems and we'll all be able to benefit from the abundance of African geniuses too.
We are still bound by labor amount, but now it's mostly the intellectual labor.
The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge, in the widest sense. Solving current challenges faster is often only possible by applying a larger amount of thinking to them.
The US, at least, seems to be past peak intellectual labor. Somewhere between 30% - 60% of people with STEM degrees don't work in jobs that need them.[1] Bloomberg has worse numbers for degrees generally.[2] "A quarter of grads over the age of 25 make less than $35,000 a year, with many close to the poverty level."
It's entirely possible that the economic reward for intelligence is decreasing.
Up until 1920 or so, what employers wanted was physical robustness and reliability.
There was a period when intelligence was prized, probably beginning post-WWII.
That may be over.
Amazon's fulfillment operations represent today's corporate ideal - "Machines should think, people should work." They want physical robustness and reliability in their employees.
Not original thinking.
I disagree with this take. There are so many variables like job availability in area where person wants to live, graduation does not mean one is fit for job, job openings are for experienced positions and openings for recent grads are almost non existent.
If there are only openings for experienced people, as a recent grad you take whatever else you can find. Then people just get stuck in whatever they got as first job because they get experience there and get value.
It also doesn’t say what STEM people end up with - I bet a lot is clerical job and not moving boxes for Amazon or flipping burgers.
A lot of STEM jobs are bullshit. Intellectual grunt work. Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative. And a lot of the "innovation" in tech over the last years has been a rehash of ideas from the 60s.
Fixing bugs is useful, but if that's all someone does, that usually means the company's development process is bad. The developer of code should be ensuring it's bug-free, along with the rest of their team (i.e. code reviews, unit testing, system testing, etc.), not committing a bunch of crap to master and then expecting others to fix all their bugs.
And the amount of productive thinking is depending on the fraction of the total sum that goes into zero sum games like advertising and finance. No, I'm not saying that those don't have any utility, they do, but that utility has a clear "good enough" limit and more brains trying to maximise their piece of the pie does not make the pie any bigger.
> The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge
It seems to me that most of today's high impact "minds" come from relatively wealthy families compared to the world's average. They come from a small pool of candidates, compared to the vast world population as a whole that don't have the same opportunities. We basically throw away potential geniuses.
If we reduced poverty, corruption and unemployment, and made higher education available for everyone, we would increase that pool by billions of people.
We don't need more people in the world - what we need is to give those that are already here the opportunity to nurture their minds and have a place where they can apply them
After all, buildings and higher density is possible, transit is possible.
Where I live (sao paulo) there are many people on the streets. However, there is housing for all of them. That just lies empty. For speculation and seeking higher rents. For airbnb and skirting renters protection laws.
We don't have too much people, we have capital that is too accumulated at the top and that expects too high returns
The amount of people living in good conditions is also higher than it ever was. In fact the % of people living poverty world wide is decreasing while world population is increasing.
That depends a lot on how you define "good conditions".
My grandparents did not have television or computers, but they (and most people from their village) had a much bigger house and garden than I could ever afford and they were eating much better food than I can find anywhere in a city now, despite having nominally much lower revenues than I have today.
Some of their tastiest fruit cultivars might have completely disappeared, because I have never seen them again in any place, for many decades.
It is true that the percentage of people who are so poor that they fear not having food enough to survive and not having where to sleep has decreased, but the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.
The problem of the space for houses is much less obvious in USA or Canada, which are huge in comparison with their populations, than in most other countries, which have much higher human densities.
> the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.
Doubt it. Regular folks have access to foods like tropical fruits that would have been a complete luxury back then, even for rich people. Also diversity of cuisines; even rural towns have Thai and Indian food now.
Probably average home size is bigger now, too, and they are more comfortable. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true even in Europe and Asia.
This has nothing to do with reality other than the N=1 sample of your grandparents.
How can anyone believe this is beyond me. The entire line of thought is just so utterly clueless.
If you go back 50 years the average person worked a mindless factory job, never traveled very far, never went out to eat.
Work your boring/mindless job, come home to your small house and drink yourself to sleep while watching some shitty sitcoms on TV. Or you could go to the bar on the way home from your mindless job. Take your pick.
> It is true that the percentage of people who are so poor that they fear not having food enough to survive and not having where to sleep has decreased, but the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.
Assuming you're right, the utility of the former is much greater than the disutility of the latter.
Re: cultivars. Some have probably died out. Others have probably gotten better. Look at apples; my parents talk about how the only apples they had were red delicious and granny smith. Now we have insane diversity of delicious apples without even having to grow them ourselves.
I traveled through a town in California known for it's apple orchards. There, I ate a 'Hawkeye' apple, which was said to be an ancestor of the 'Red Delicious'.
The 'Hawkeye' isn't my new favorite, but was good enough to appreciate how much it's shameful descendent had dishonored the name of this otherwise respectable apple family.
The Red Delicious was made not for taste, but for durability: it has exceptionally long shelf life, so it's excellent for shipping to far-away places, including overseas, and it doesn't require refrigeration.
Most likely, the ancestor doesn't keep or ship that well.
There's a reason no one who actually likes apples buys Red Delicious these days; they buy one of the better varieties like Gala or Fuji or Honeycrisp or many others. Red Delicious still sell in huge quantities in the US, though, mainly to institutions like schools and hospitals. When the person selecting your meal cares more about cost than taste, you get Red Delicious.
Also, Americans throughout much of the 20th century had very poor culinary tastes. That only started changing in the 1980s, and got much better by the 2000s. So for a long time, Americans were perfectly happy to eat the nasty Red Delicious apples.
And you can still get Hawkeye. In fact, you can probably look up and find hundreds of heirloom apple types, pick any three at random, and go get them within a few days if they're in season.
Let's steelman for the author at this point. Suppose we are still in the exponential or at least linear phase of returns to scale for human productivity improvement and economic growth, with appreciable runway left on both factors. Does that remove the contradiction, and thus the author's claims are now better supported?
This is true only to some degree, there are always limits to growth.
These limits are actually very far away, most of the trouble is caused by the funny rationing/commons depletion system we call capitalism.
The predicted 10-12 billion humans should have more than enough everything. We don't because capital and access are rationed.
We’re at 8 billion people. Obtain 3% annual population growth and continue for 20 years you’re already at 14 billion. 30 years you get to 19 billion. If those numbers don’t seem like they’re within the limits to growth as you see them, keep adding decades and soon you’ll reach a number that probably is. The point here being that the limits may be far away numerically, but at modest growth rates we will hit any conceivable one. We are going to have to adapt to stable or declining population rates at some point, and this seems like a particularly good time to do it.
This is such a weird take because every other system except capitalism did not produce enough resources to let there be 8 bn people, and capitalism did produce them and also made the people vastly richer than the 1 bn there were before.
We're (as in humanity) still trying 'domesticated capitalism' for example in china. There are alternatives to laissez-faire, the current (bad) state of affairs is part of a trend for laissez-faire starting in the 70s.
We do need innovation in tech, and in supply chains, and in products, and for that capitalism is wonderful
We do not need innovation in how to ignore labour laws (uber) renters protections (airbnb). We do not need lower marginal top tax rates, and accumulation in the 1%.
We also need innovation in how to stop runaway capitalist cycles (and, again, I am hoping western democracies will learn from china how to do that before it is too late)
By my reckoning, when 90% of online comments mention "capitalism" they are describing the extractive process of taking worker surplus in the Marxian sense, which rent-seeking effectively is, not the freedom to allocate capital to accomplish value-additive projects, processes, and products.
The prior has a _lot_ of bad outcomes. Check out Nestle's impact to the world.
The latter has a _lot_ of good outcomes, but it easily opens up to the former.
> we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions.
You're committing the same kind of error as the Malthusians. They assume conditions, technology, and accessible resources are fixed. You assume that the labor to be done is fixed.
By your reasoning, the invention of the dishwasher should have led to a permanent increase of unemployment, putting all the dishwashers out of work. But that didn't happen. Instead, it created an industry, a supply chain, a whole market around the dishwasher. Labor-saving tech creates new forms of labor, but you won't notice that if you assume a fixed state of the world and focus only on the immediate effects of a technology.
"More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom."
Yes, a small tribe couldn't have enslaved large groups to form the majority of the labor base. Societal advances are easy to achieve if you usurp resources from a marginalized group and force them to work on your projects. I would hope that we have learned that's not the right model to pursue.
Whilst I don't agree with the article, you're ignoring that these epic machines you talk of are the product of a much larger population. These megamachines wouldn't exist, or at least not all the types of machines, if not for us having billions of people on the planet.
Australia lags behind other countries in certain technology, but not in mining technology. There's sufficient expertise in a population of a few million. (Of course, there's a disproportionate amount of mining engineering experts in Perth.)
Australia in general, and my specific mining state in particular, over produces food - again with a small population, again with big industrial scale machines.
The thing about technology is it allows fewer people to achieve far more .. including build and maintain more technology per capita.
>> Australia in general, and my specific mining state in particular, over produces food - again with a small population, again with big industrial scale machines.
Great, and what about everything else on this world you need. Do you also build computers and network equipment to access hacker news? The problem with technology is that it requires specialized knowledge which in turn requires people who specialize in it. There is a good reason why small disconnected communities stay the way they are and do not advance.
The problem is really negative externality and pollution caused by production and consumption. That's really the core issue of our global economy and technological landscape, and probably the greatest constraint that limits us from expanding resource extraction.
Humanity is a civilization that lives on resource consumption of truly tiny amount of energy and materials compared to the whole that's available within this solar system.
There's a long narrow expensive isthmus between the gravity well of Earth and the rest of the solar system.
Colonies elsewhere are a fine idea if the goal is to expand the footprint of humans but there's limited prospect of that moving significant numbers off of the planet or improving the environmental balance here.
More people does not necessarily mean more laborers. It also means more consumers. Without more consumers we humans would not be incentivized to mine so much. Without the need to mine so much engineers would not have invented more efficient ways to mine. So on and so forth...
Eh, this isn't exactly correct. While yes, owning so many pairs of socks is of limited utility to me, in general individual greed is hard to sate.
So yea while another pair of pants won't do me any good, I'll take another house, another trip, another ... whatever. But this starts to shift the resource load to other places. Such as national parks getting flooded out with people. With actual property for things to be built on to become scare. Removal of the natural world to stick in more human development.
I think they're not specifically talking about human labor, though that is a factor. I think they're just acknowledging the fact that all ideas come out of human minds. The more minds, the more ideas, and ideas are almost always solutions to problems.
if you compare those two examples (from ancient egypt and yours) then you also have to count all those people developing, maintaining and providing services for the machinery you use.
It’s either labor or capital (to buy/dev those machines). Frankly, if it’s capital and we haven’t transitioned to something closer to socialism or even communism, it isn’t going to end very well for us workers.
Oh, I don’t think it would work very well now. My point is when capital is so powerful that workers aren’t really needed anymore. Then something drastic has to happen, because at that point capitalism can’t push society forward anymore (given the incentives it works with).
intelligence is a lottery at birth, assuming the education system is good enough at identify talents of all kind. and with the world especially Asian countries better at this, I think we do need more human to maintain the current talents pool.
There is a part of genetics, like most things, but if you look at past geniuses, there is a common pattern, wealthy enough families able to afford tutors.
No, it certainly does not. Obviously, a higher socioeconomic background means increased resources and dedicated attention to education which certainly helps, but genius, in the true sense of the word needs a good starting foundation, and that probably has a significant genetic component.
Nikola Tesla, Einstein, Ramanujan were all child prodigies without exceptional access to tutors and other educational resources.
If tutoring could produce geniuses (160 IQ) we would have a billion dollar industry around it instead of snake oil companies like Luminosity.
Einstein actually did have a tutor (Max Talmey). Any access to tutors at the time was exceptional, as the majority of families could not afford that.
Einstein was also raised in a family that can not be described as average.
His father had an interest in mathematics and founded 2 electrical engineering companies
His mother was well-educated and worked as a piano player. She made Albert begin violin lessons at the age of five.
It seems to me that Albert Einstein did not grow up under average conditions. His family had some financial issues, but was able to give him a good education.
The only reason that tutoring is not more widely used is because it has scaling issues.
You need one very experienced, patient and skilled tutor for each kid. The cost would be unbearable except for the wealthiest families.
And of course, while it will consistently improve the skills and mental abilities of the tutored kid, it won't produce a genius every time, there are many out-of-control factors, including genetics but also related to early life, bacteria and viruses infections can slow/stunt the growth of an immature body, and impact all its functions.
i don't agree with the genetic argument but with your other point.
producing geniuses is not a billion dollar industry because we don't yet even know how to teach to that. but that doesn't mean that we could not improve teaching and peoples potential massively.
china used to have a billion dollar tutoring industry (ok, i don't know if it was a billion, but china is huge so it's possible) until a change of laws shut it down.
but this chinese tutoring industry was not aimed at producing geniuses. instead it was aimed at exploiting parents, extracting their money without providing any real value except putting pressure on the children to perform.
It was aimed at improving performance on state mandated standardized tests. They were effective, but if everyone did them, the curve was just shifted and no one seemed to benefit in particular (but society is arguably better off if everyone is higher IQ).
that was what they were selling, but apart from the problem of everyone doing it, there were also many shady operations to outright scams that never even intended to provide the value they promised.
yes, but this only goes as far as being able to explain the difference between humans and other animals. it doesn't at all explain the differences between different humans because other factors are so strong that so far we have not been able to isolate genetic differences as a factor in human intelligence. even twin studies have been flawed in this regard.
If we had to wager whether there was any genetic component to intelligence differences among humans, I think the safe wager is on “there is some” over “there is none”.
yes, but i'd also wager that it is completely drowned out by other factors. if genetics improve my intelligence by 1% and teaching can improve it by 10% then what's the point?
those genetics will only be a factor among those receiving no teaching at all, or those who receive the maximum teaching possible. but they will hardly factor in in the middle of the bell curve where every genetic advantage by one person can be outdone by another one putting in more effort. the difference then between you and me will be that your genetic advantage will allow you to reach the same result as me with less effort. there is practically no benefit for you. or the advantage is so small that we won't even notice most of the time. if at all.
any model that relies on genetic advantages as a factor only works if we assume that those naturally more intelligent automatically bubble to the top and are not held back by other factors, all which have the potential to nullify any advantages they may have had
I disagree with the last paragraph. If there are four factors that all combine to create an outcome, we don’t ignore factor 1 just because factors 2-4 can nullify any advantage.
My garden grows based on light, CO2, macro nutrients, and water. We don’t say “CO2 is not a factor in plant growth because deficits in water, nutrients, and light can prevent it from showing in overall outcome.”
but that depends on how large the factor actually is. if it were 10% or more, then sure. but the fact that the very existence of a genetic factor is put into question, suggests that the factor, if it exists, is so small that it really is negligible.
another reason why we can ignore a genetic factor is that we can not influence it. or, that trying to influence it carries serious ethical implications.
it is also to small to serve as a tool to predict future performance.
the potential of humanity is largely underutilized. the reason we need geniuses now is because our current way of teaching is not enabling peoples potential as well as it could. it doesn't even take individual tutoring. better teaching methods such as montessori, project based learning, smaller groups (say a 10 to 1 ratio in class compared to the 50 to 1 ratio i see in china and other countries i have visited) would be a massive increase in the quality of education creating a potential way beyond what a doubling of the number of geniuses could ever achieve.
research is mixed about small class sizes (maybe 1 in 10 as you said, on 1 in 5, would be beneficial but there is very little difference between 1 in 20 and 1 in 50). Not a rebuttal, just adding some info
Lots of people get tutored without becoming geniuses, hence tutoring isn't enough to make geniuses. Also many geniuses didn't have tutoring, they need wealthy enough families to afford public school which used to be a high bar but today most people gets it even if you include poor countries.
> they need wealthy enough families to afford public school
Note that what the UK origin term “public schools” means is not the same as what that means in other countries, which can confuse these discussions in a global forum. (In the US, we’d call that “private school”.)
"One argument for a larger population is based on utilitarianism, specifically the version of it that says that what is good is the sum total of happiness across all humans."
Utilitarianism doesn't say that 'good is the sum total of happiness across all humans' but rather it says it's 'the greatest good for the greatest number', which is substantially different, so this is a distortion of the facts. I would refer the author to the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill especially his work Utilitarianism.
"If each additional life adds to the cosmic scoreboard of goodness, then it’s obviously better to have more people (unless they are so miserable that their lives are literally not worth living)."
I can't be bothered to debate population argument in detail again as it always polarizes and ends up in unresolved arguments—except to say the author doesn't seem to have enough understanding about the implications of exponential growth.
The facts are clear even to Blind Freddy that the resources and environmental problems presently being experienced are caused by excessive demands on the planet's resources.
Of course the elephant in the room is the world's population but any serious discussion about that is verboten in the public discourse.
> Utilitarianism doesn't say that 'good is the sum total of happiness across all humans' but rather it says it's 'the greatest good for the greatest number', which is substantially different, so this is a distortion of the facts. I would refer the author to the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill especially his work Utilitarianism.
That's why the author mentions "specifically the version" of utilitarianism which does sum happiness across people (it's called Total Utilitarianism, by contrast with Average Utilitarianism). "The greatest good for the greatest number" is ambiguous, later thinkers have parsed it out in different ways.
Put two philosophers in a room and have them discuss utilitarianism and you'll end up with twenty opinions. Average utilitarianism is just one of its later fallouts. (I needn't tell you how unpopular utilitarianism is with many philosophers and others—especially in this era).
Fact is, the author used the splinter view to further his argument which hasn't worked. Given other weaknesses he would have been better to ignore utilitarianism altogether.
I think your last paragraph sums up the article very well. One question remainins: did the author succeed in convincing himself?
It's a fluff piece based on naming a few patterns that could be used as arguments for more humans, not an exploration of the problem space. For example he does not even mention that one pattern that has accompanied humanity through all of history: population control through war. When it's too crowded for young humans to live like their parents and grandparents did, they are easy to rile up against some other group and then the population level resets.
I'd suggest the answer to the question you posed is likely 'yes'. The points the author raises under More options tells me much about the person he is and I've encountered his type before and they think like that.
As I said I don't see much point in discussing population as much as I'd like to. With the world as it is, it's easy to be disparaging against those who argue for a larger population and that we'll always find or develop more resources but it serves no purpose when those who are in favor hold those views as beliefs rather than having arrived at them objectively.
We shouldn't forget there's long social and religious traditions concerning fecundity and 'go forth and multiply', and these beliefs are deeply ingrained in much of the population. Also, one has to be heartless not to feel very sorry for a grieving couple who've been told by an IVF clinic they can't have any children even if that would benefit the planet. Much of the world's population see the biological urge to multiply as normal and fundamental so it's understandable why those who question the doctrine such as Paul Ehrlich and Jane Goodall have been verbally pilloried over the years. Their message is repugnant even if correct.
That said, we need the discussion and we need to listen to Ehrlich et al but it's not going to happen for reasons stated. What I find most disconcerting and hypocritical are environmentalists and groups like Greenpeace arguing about pollution, limited resources and environmental issues whilst they blatantly ignore the population 'elephant'. When asked why they've been known to say "it's too hot handle, we wouldn't touch it with a barge pole."
I'd like to discuss your point about population control through war as history of warfare is an interest of mine but it's too big to post here.
What strikes me about this recent wave of pro-natalism is how banal and devoid of serious argument it is.
Just to mention a few things, any ethical system of a mature civilization should have something to say about the entire biosphere, not just homo sapiens. The article doesn't lose a word on the fate of any other species on this planet, and I don't know how one can even have this discussion without recognizing that we're only one of the many inhabitants here. If you're going to propose an entire world view based on some superficial notion of self-interest you can justify anything.
For a worldview that leans so heavily into utilitarianism it's very odd to ignore most sentient life on earth. I invite the author to visit a large scale factory farm to see the "technological progress" in action that sustains 8 billion people and then to ponder how that squares with his own supposed standard for ethical progress.
Second point is this naive Steve Pinker-esque belief in "progress" to begin with. If you're going to argue that "more geniuses" and "more ethnic restaurants" constitute some deep and authentic moral progress for human civilization you have your work cut out for you, most people on the planet don't share that value system, and it's not obvious that anyone should buy into it without justification. It's almost naive to the point of being tautological, where "progress" is when more people do more things, and therefore having more progress is having more people.
This may be a bit reductive but the article is basically saying that the larger the population the quicker progress and innovation will occur. What’s unclear though is if this progress and innovation leads to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As we’ve seen lately, the opposite could also be true. With climate change on the horizon, we may have even reached peak human happiness sometime in the late 20th century
Progress and innovation absolutely does lead to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As an example, absolute number of people living in extreme poverty started to sharply decline at the start of the 21st century: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre....
That chart does abysmally little to support your claim, for a few reasons.
1) How many of those people in the green live on less than $5 a day? $1.90 per day is an absurd and arbitrary limit which feels cherry picked to make a Pinker-esque pleasing chart.
2) It hardly goes back in time. I'd like to know how happy hunter-gatherers were 20k years ago. Maybe I could go ask the North Sentinelese but I think building a time machine might be easier than getting a straight answer from them.
This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today.
At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the world economy. But the unintended consequences were devastating. Resource extraction has been catastrophic, of course, as has the destruction of natural habitats that come from population explosion, the accelerated extinction of animals, and the potentially apocalyptic global warming that has resulted both directly and indirectly.
Demographers predict a population collapse (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human...) that could see the world drop under 2 billion again, but without help, it will probably come too late to save the planet as we know it now. We should be doing everything possible to discourage birthrates and get the only habitable planet in our known universe back to a sustainable equilibrium.
What is your source for the planet only being able to support one billion people? That's a very bold statement, given that we are currently at eight billion and have fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability.
Of course sustainability is not a guaranteed outcome, it will require making good decisions, but I'm sure that a "mere" one billion people would also be unsustainable with sufficiently poor decisions.
We don't have "fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability."
We're in the middle of the Holocene Extinction, that some call the Anthropocene Extinction - the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth, and the first to be caused by a single species. Global warming has long since passed its tipping point, we're simply in a harm reduction phase right now and it's a race to see if we can even avoid the eventual collapse of the entire food chain.
The world population didn't reach one billion people until about the year 1800, and two billion by the 1920s. When I say that it can only support one billion people, I'm referring to what was possible before the Haber-Bosch process revolutionized farming and made it possible to grow enough food for 8 billion today.
I'll concede that the number might even be as high as 2 billion or so. Beyond that, we have to employ technologies that upset the ecological balance of the planet, leading to mass extinctions, loss of natural habitat, carbon emissions, and other harmful activities at a planetary scale.
The estimates are all over the place, but the idea is that resources are finite including space. This is one of the reasons that there is a growing trend of anti immigration even among the left. (Not my opinion since I was an immigrant.)
This idea that we should depopulate is the terrifying perspective. People have been crying that the sky is falling since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. There is no "saving the planet as we know it now". The planet is ever-changing, and has never been static.
There are certainly dangers to the path we're on that we have to mitigate, but depopulation is not one of the solutions.
This argument is equating human perspectives of the world to physical realities.
Ancient populations certainly left their mask, Romans deforested Europe for the sake of glass making. But that is nothing compared to the resource extraction and ndustrial waste that support the world 9 billion people.
Willing it away with "the sky has always been falling" is denialism at best.
I acknowledged the real dangers like climate change in my original post. I simply don't agree that the other issues you mention are actual dangers. Your argument that these are problems is a naturalistic fallacy.
It’s not terrifying because it has been happening since the 1950s. One theory is that as countries industrialize, their males become less fertile over subsequent generations. (This theory accounts for socioeconomic changes like abortion and being too poor to afford children.) It’s not too surprising given chemicals like BPA aka synthetic estrogen is so pervasive that now it’s in clothes and paper receipts. Almost no country is safe except for a few in central Africa
They account for socioeconomic changes like abortion and birth control ie these trends started long before the sexual revolution and long before abortion was even legal. It is not a “deeply wrong conclusion” unless no one bother to read any of it. Completely ignoring the endocrine disrupter pollution just shows you completely ignored my comment.
I know, declining male fertility is such a nice talking point, you know men being less manly and all that.
Funny so, that while micro plastics and whatnot sure are ugly and cannot be ignored, all other studies do not mention male fertility as a root cause, but rather:
- urbanization and changes in lifestyle
- women pursuing a life other than being a mother
- birth control (the reason why birth control reduces the number of kids per couple should be obvious...)
- economic incentives change from large families (old style, labour intensive farming) to smaller families (industrial labour and office work in cities)
That’s a moot point. Yes, socioeconomic factors do negatively affect birth rates, but what you don't understand is that even before those socioeconomic factors were in play, male fertility was already on the decline. A good example is Canada. Before contraceptives were popular, before abortion was legal, and before economic incentives for having nuclear families disappeared; they already lost the ability to replenish their population in 1972 (birthrates fell below 2.1), meaning their birthrates were already declining during decades of an optimal socioeconomic environment. ie that’s what it means when the male infertility studies accounted for socioeconomic factors.
1972? So, after the sexual revolution, the pill, emancipaction, the beginning of urbanization (which really started in the early 60s), the rise of automated agriculture, the beginning of women having real career opportunities as part of the work force and both, a rise of the industrial and service sectors of the economy.
All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down. But sure, it was male fertility that caused all of that...
Thats when the sexual revolution happened in the US. As I’ve already mentioned in my previous comment, in Canada it started later than 1972. Even then, the effects of the sexual revolution shouldn’t be immediate, so it’s obvious that something else was at play since birthrates actually started to go down in the early 1950s. It just came to an irreversible head in 1972
> All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down.
There are still a lot of places where abortion and contraception are both frowned upon and aren’t even legal, yet they still experienced lower birth rates. Again, socioeconomic factors have been accounted for
We don't need to encourage it, birth control and capitalism have already produced a depopulation trend in all developed countries. It's not a good thing.
It's not a good thing because???? I'll accept a well reasoned argument, but you've not presented any yet in this discussion and engaged in your own naturalistic fallacies. If you're using the reason that "Wanting to breed is natural" then surmise that you've never been involved in animal husbandry before. Nor have you studied mammal populations between species, especially those that have boom and bust cycles.
The article outlines plenty of good reasons, that's why we're discussing it. Most depopulation scenarios are nightmares (wars, famines, genocides), and even the good ones are very, very unpleasant (disproportionate resources must be directed towards caring for the aging population, leaving little labour for maintenance of existing infrastructure, let alone development).
It seems like you didn’t finish your response… Why is depopulation terrifying? And why shouldn’t we be concerned about resource constraints? Malthus being wrong implies nothing about the future.
Or it's a cute term for oppressing people to a degree that they don't want to follow natural instincts to procreate. For instance, developed nations economically penalize parenthood to such an extent that native birth rate is now below replacement in all of them with only a few exceptions.
This seems to me only partially true. Sure if everyone had one-percenter level resources they'd be more inclined to procreate, though the cultural change and the shifted focus to individualism and one's own experience in life (YOLO thinking, if I may) probably has as much or even more effect on it.
As an anecdata, most people I know are somewhere on the low-class to upper-mid class, and the ones who want kids seem to always have at least one, consequences be damned, and the ones who don't, often don't put a price tag on it and merely use it as an excuse if they feel pressured.
Also the `natural instinct` may not be a given here, since up until recently the instinct to have sex and procreate meant the same results for humans just like other animals, which no longer holds true either.
>Sure if everyone had one-percenter level resources they'd be more inclined to procreate
When we look at actual billionaires, we don't see huge fertility levels. Maybe on average a bit higher than the average couple today, but nothing really significant. It's not like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have been trying to compete with the Duggars.
The only thing more resources do is allow people to have the number of kids they truly would like to have. Most women really don't want to squeeze 15 kids out of their vaginas, and are generally happy with 2 or maybe 3.
That birth rates go down withe conomic prosperity has nothing to do with government oppression... That talking point is utter BS, and close to the conspiracy theory of the great "replacement" ...
Wouldn't most of the so-called "West" already be in the process of depopulation, based on current birthrates, if not for immigration from other regions?
Long term? Yes. Long term as in "by 2100". Until then, the more immediate issue is the aging population, making everything from health care to retirement financing (the public, European-style models), in the current form difficult. This was a topic already discussed in the late 80s to a degree to be part of classes when I was in my very early teens.
Migration helped to mitigate that. Regarding fertility rates so, the developed West is just ahead of the curve. With economic growth and stability, the rest of the world is following the same curve Europe and the US do for quite a while.
I think, that ultimately, global population will stabilize, including individual countries. There will be dips and spikes, as usual, overall so we should be fine as a species.
How to support the elderly in a world where the same GDP is produced by less and less working age people is a question so: using salaries as a basis for social securoty and public health care won't really work as well anymore. Taxing corporations and wealth (as in really wealthy, being a paper millionaire just because you happen to own a house does not qualify) is one option.
The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous
We have a greed, fear and distribution problem, not a production problem
Nobody needs a Ferrari when there’s still politically unstable regions of the world that could use the energy and care that went into creating such luxuries
And yes work and energy are fungible, so every minute and joule spent creating an NFT could have been spent talking with a homeless person or taking someone in off the street for a night (often that’s all it takes).
Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it
>Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it
What kind of backwards ass thinking is this. I mean, stop and think for at least one second before typing things like this.
If I'm living hand to mouth, as in if I stop farming my own food I'll quickly starve it would be stupid to, one, stop growing my own stuff because I'll starve otherwise, and two, not complain about the situation because it's a terrible place to be.
By complaining someone with wealthy, time, and intelligence may be able to find a solution that I can implement into my life without causing a death spiral.
How could you possibly interpret what I wrote as an exhortation against the poor?
Should I specifically explicate the groups that this exhortation is targeted to?
Use your judgement based on the content and context instead of requiring me to think for you and fully solve all of the questions you might have.
Do you own a Ferrari? Are you taking the Delta flight? Can you extrapolate from those two examples of egregious veblen good luxuries (Veblen himself writkng a thourough exhortation himself!) to think of other ones which do or do not apply to you and then you determine whether that applies?
No, “Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you are actively fixing it” is _explicitly_ excluding everyone who isn’t wealthy enough to do so.
Try reading your own words once in a while rather than pretending that you intended something all along and everyone else should have the same context in your head.
Sure, there's plenty of inequality and bad[1] resource allocation throughout the planet.
>The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous
We definitely are beyond the carrying capacity of the world, if we want to guarantee a high standard of life for everybody here. 99.9999% of humans will lack the chance of being able to experience the upcoming eclipse from a plane, would you argue that's an unfair scenario?
>Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it.
I absolutely like this comment because that's the way I also go through life, since if one doesn't practice what they preach, one would be just another meek hypocrite, of which we already have an overpopulation of. I can presume, then, that you are doing your part to solve the "greed, fear and distribution" problem you mention, by lowering the amount of resources you consume to one that is typical of what the vast majority of the planet lives on?
Nobody needs drones and a robot pet when there’s still politically unstable regions of the world that could use the energy and care that went into creating such luxuries. [2]
What I'm saying between lines is that almost nobody with a high standard of life would be willing to give up on whatever luxuries they enjoy to give a chance to "some other people in a remote place" which is a very abstract concept and quite detached from one's own reality.
You like drones and robots, right? That's good, not an issue with that on itself. Now give 8 billion people drones and robots, that's where your logic comes down. If we only had drones and robots for 0.1% of the total population, who should get to enjoy them? Then this whole thing gets hairy. And bringing more people into the equation will not alleviate that problem, it would only make it worse.
Unfortunately you keep making it a "you" thing with your argument and are ignorant of the situation. These are robots I use for work that I keep in my house.
There is nothing wrong with that Delta eclipse viewing flight so long as they had mandated direct air carbon capture offsets to offset the flight. The fact that they haven't is the problem, not the flight itself. Take issue with the externalities dumped elsewhere, not on the activity. If you pay the fully loaded costs, by all means, partake in your CO2 emission activity (beef, air travel, etc). Current DAC cost is ~$800-1300/ton of CO2 sequestered. That is the cost of these activities. The fact that people don't want to pay that for luxury activities is the greed, not the activity itself.
Humanity has been living on credit by way of not paying fully loaded costs, in a variety of ways (entitlement programs and economic systems depending on never ending growth, CO2 emissions and cheap energy, plastics, and so on). The bill is coming due, and there will be sadness.
> Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it
I am sure it is highly variable, but I wonder what the cost of negative soil CO2 sequestration techniques like biochar, is these days? Or even just land use improvements to sequester more CO2, seems like lower hanging fruit than DAC.
May be so, since humans are humans and do human lies.
I think in a perfect world that land rehabilitation and land CO2 sequestration projects coupled with solar+wind+nuclear+geo+friends energy would get us to carbon neutral much faster than DAC, but hopefully I am wrong and DAC can be scaled up without exorbitantly high costs.
Often all it takes to get someone into a better life position is listening to their story and finding the space to help as much as you can.
I helped my friend J get out of the woods two years ago, and I’m currently working with my new friends “R” and “M” and “D” (not going to out them) to get them permanent housing or vehicles.
All from just a simple conversation seeing how they were living and taking them through what they need to get back on their feet.
Start with his firs real argument: "More Geniuses" and the resultant more good inventions, etc.
Then consider the corollary is more stupidity, adn the quote attrib to Einstein:
>> "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe!"
The damage wreaked by more stupid people can, and historically has repeatedly overcome the good done by geniuses.
The author also overlooks the ability of current and emerging technology to magnify the effect of genius, starting with Steve Jobs' 'computers are bicycles for the mind' analogy.
No need to continue with the rest of this shallow drivel arguing to create a disaster. Wow.
In my opinion, this thinking is wholesale incorrect and actually terrifies me more. Yes, there is global warming. Yes, it is extremely concerning, and leads to countless endangerment, extinction, and coastal/island loss etc…it will cost untold
billions to mitigate its effects in even a handful of cities like Miami, Venice, etc…
But, exactly why should people have fewer kids? It’s the large, sweeping, gubernatorial and industrial changes and innovations that drive meaningful shifts in sustainability (with downstream effects on consumer sustainability i.e. cheaper EVs heat pumps and solar panels = greener consumer behavior). If we have fewer kids, that’ll just add to our problems - we’ll have climate change and accelerated economic collapse. If you survey people from developing countries on the anti-natal perspective, who emit a fraction of the C02 that people in developed countries do, they might find it borderline pathological. Malthus was dead wrong, and his intellectual successors continue to be wrong, just with more cope. I have no reason to believe that will change.
Anyway, people who think that having fewer kids is as much of a disaster as climate change will continue to have kids. People who think that they should go against their core reproductive instinct in order to save the planet (???) will not have successors, if their behavior is consistent with their ideology. It is only the children of the former who’ll be able to evaluate the outcome. I assume they’ll be generally thankful that they’re alive to evaluate anything in the first place. I also assume that they won’t be living in a literal hellscape - point me to
any credible literature which portends that for people living in the United States in 2100 (because that’s where most people on HN live - there are people today that live in a hellscape, they don’t even have to wait for 2100, but it’s not predominately due to overpopulation).
I strongly disagree, while technology clearly helped us growing, there are always tradeoffs, even agriculture is not ideal. We can solve some problems but it is almost never « for free » and the cost is newer problems to solve. I think there is a compounding effect with population growth, and I don’t think that population can grow forever on a single planet, that is nonsense.
How much is enough? My intuition is that population stability is more important than actual number, but between 2 Billions and 10Billions is likely the sweet spot.
I was thinking along those lines. No reason given for the number, pretty much pulled it out of thin air.
When I was growing up we were told we would have too much population and wouldn't be able to feed ourselves. Now obesity seems like a bigger problem. Obviously infinite growth isn't possible, but where the actual number lies, I honestly have no idea.
I often wonder how much the average return on the stock market, which everyone with a retirement plan depends on, has simply been a function of a population growth.
If the population shrinks, economies will have to contract, the market will need to fall in proportion to the people available to buy stuff, and the compound interest gravy train for a comfortable retirement will end. This is my selfish reason for wanting more people.
This is based on nothing but my own rumination. I’d love to be proven wrong, as this worries me.
It's worth considering that stock market valuations are supposed to be driven by revenue and profit, not by population (valuations have gotten completely out of whack since the financial system effectively broke in 2008). There are multiple ways to do this - one is certainly to increase the population, but another is to increase productivity per person in conjunction with expenditure per person. i.e. The same number of people doing more with less and living more lavish lifestyles as a result.
Or, the majority working more than ever, and a vanishingly small amount of people living increasingly lavishly. I see no reason to believe the current systemic factors that drive the growth of wealth disparity will slow down or reverse.
The problem is entitlement programs likes socialized health care and pension programs like social security. When retirees begin to outnumber working adults, the system will start to collapse. Maybe countries will adapt? Japan and China are at the forefront of the age demographic bomb. They are about 30-40 years ahead of us in experiencing this problem. The US and Canada has been able to counter it much longer than anyone else primarily due to our origins in and experience with immigration. No other countries on earth can compete with either the US or Canada when it comes to assimilation of immigrants.
How much of this is due to globalization and Americans buying a lot of products from Japan? If the global population reaches a peak, or population growth is centered in areas without much money, would that still hold up?
> Economies of scale. In particular, often total costs are a combination of fixed and variable costs. The more output, the more the fixed costs can be amortized, lowering average cost.
Except that after a certain point total costs increase again as the raw inputs become more scarce and expensive to obtain.
Some of the underlying logic here feels suspect to me.
Sure, more people likely leads to more production of non-rival goods, but more people will also make rival goods more scarce and harder to come by. Sure, some rival goods will be replaced by non-rival goods, but it's hard to imagine eliminating them entirely.
I don't really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new/better/less-scarce resources every time we find that whatever we're using today is going to run out. As a bit of an extreme example, there is only so much matter in the universe, and even if we find a way to convert any kind of matter into any other with minimal energy expenditure, if the population keeps growing and growing, eventually there will not be enough matter for further growth. I suppose then the author might suggest that we will find loopholes in the laws of thermodynamics that allows us to create matter from nothing, but at some point you have to admit that this is the fictioniest of science fiction and isn't something we can support with what we know today.
Then there's just plain old shitty human nature. The larger an individual society is, the more people are going to be at the bottom of it, falling through the cracks. There will always be people who want more wealth and more power, and someone -- more and more someones, really -- has to suffer for it. THe idealist in me wants to imagine a post-scarcity society, but I'm not sure I have it in me anymore to believe in such a thing; we have the ability to feed every person on Earth, today, and yet we don't do it, because those in power are selfish and more concerned with their stock prices than in actually helping fellow humans (and we, the unwashed masses, constantly enable them). I don't have much optimism that this will change, ever; even if it does, I expect that to take millennia, at best.
On another tack: we have so many people in the world who are unhappy, beaten down, in poverty, hungry, unhoused today. Maybe we should fix that before working to grow our population more and more and more.
Having said that, I do agree that it's preposterous to think that the ideal size of humanity is a half billion, or even a couple billion, as the author points out others have suggested. We have, so far, overcome resource limitations, and likely will be able to continue to do so for some time. I'm just skeptical of how long we can continue to do that.
Matters in the universe is a lot. Ditto the amount of energy. People may argue that unlimited growth is unsustainable, and I agree.
But what people don't realize is just...how much resources there is and how much just sits there being wasted by being radiated and hitting inert rocks and gases.
The problem is not resource availability(of which they are abundant and uselessly radiating out), or even engineering or economic challenges. It's political. If you take care of the politics, the world is your oyster, and you can have as many billions of people you want within physics and economic reasons.
there are so many good comments like this one that are being downvoted without any explanation why. what is wrong with this argument?
there was an article (on HN even i think) some time ago that showed how big of an area of solar panels we would need to place in the sahara desert to solve the worlds energy problems. it was tiny compared to the whole area of the desert. sure, there is still a problem of distribution, but really, this energy problem should be solvable.
the space problem is a bit different. we probably don't want to turn the whole planet into high density housing, even if we could energy wise, but the only thing getting in the way of solving the problems we have is politics as in unwillingness to cooperate for the greater benefit of the world instead of for selfish reasons.
the space problem is a bit different. we probably don't want to turn the whole planet into high density housing, even if we could energy wise, but the only thing getting in the way of solving the problems we have is politics as in unwillingness to cooperate for the greater benefit of the world instead of for selfish reasons.
People don't have a good grasp on the space issue because they hadn't play with the math, or investigated our terribly inefficient and often ugly land usage pattern.
When I think of space, I think about acrologies, hardly high density dystopian hellscape. We would realistically construct them over time in module instead of trying to do monolithic designs that I often see proposed.
You want the largest viable population. That is, a population below carrying capacity.
A population over carrying capacity just consumes the environment that sustains it and dies off collectively.
Today we are over carrying capacity at a global level, and many regions are also over carrying capacity at a local level.
The population centers built around groundwater aquifers pumped aggresively, overfishing, or dying topsoil, which are most of them, are doomed.
Unless there is an innovation that unlocks rapid topsoil regeneration, freshwater replenishment, and plentiful food sources covering the growing global demand for fish, at scale and meeting market demand at low prices, humanity is bound to have a conflict over the remaining resources.
More geniuses — there are plenty of talented "brains" that simply never get a chance due to malnutrition, disease, lack of education and opportunity. We'd have far more of them if we could provide a higher minimum standard of living throughout the entire world.
Interesting that another account posted this exact response slightly further up.
It's a non sequitur designed to degrade the conversation and it implies that having reservations about constant growth within the current paradigm is somehow akin to desiring large scale mass killing?
It is a sincere and honest question. Misplaced concern about overpopulation has already caused world bank loans to be tied to population management quotas, which have been met through the creative means of forced sterilization of indigenous/minority women in Central America and South Asia. AKA literal genocide.
A political movement to “decrease the Earth’s population” is extremely bizarre and troubling, and deserves being called out for what it is.
Cool, then we're on the same page for other ecology management issues too, right? All of that "let's sell licenses for hunting other animals" we should simply stop, right? We should just let the world sort itself out since we've never had any success in managing populations of other animals either through protection or hunting, right?
Humans are not some unique, special animal. We're a very invasive, ecology modifying organism. We already have rules on where humans can and cannot live, where resource extraction can happen and how much. It may be uncomfortable to consider, but yes, we absolutely should manage our own population so we don't fuck up our one, and only, spaceship that's flying through a universe that is very hostile for us.
Metastatic growth is simply unsustainable. Running our civilization like a capitalistic business ignoring externalities and borrowing against the future that needs constant growth to sustain isn't a great idea. That will crash.
Speaking of that, the rate of growth has been reduced, and in most places in the world, the fertility rate is below replacement levels (yes, including Africa and the Muslim world).
So we're going to see peak Earth population, and a start of its decline, in a few decades.
I think only a very small number of people are encouraging unsustainable growth and I doubt many people are having kids because of it. The earths population is growing because people, particularly people in the 3rd world have a good amount of kids.
Respectfully, I think you are over complicating the situation. People in many parts of the world, simply enjoy sex and having kids. Not due to lack of birth control, simply due to the desire to have children. Its that simple. Its only when you make it to the first world with our stresses and self induced neurosis does the fertility rate fall.
Humans are part of nature and one of our instincts is to reproduce.
Of the 190+ countries across the globe it appears that the Central African Republic is the only (at the very least one of the few) country that does not have a fertility rate (in births per woman) that is not trending down:
Unfortunately, this is not the end game yet. The end game is "breeder tribe" subcultures who raise their children to reject the idea that that two or three children might be enough. Those subcultures will be immune to change as long as there is still enough "them" around for "us vs them" to keep "we're the ones with the children" a core of their identity.
I write "subculture", because they exist in many different cultures. Perhaps literally everywhere where voluntary low birth rate happens at all. (I don't know of a breeder subculture in Japan, but I'd be surprised if it did not exist. We certainly do have them here in Germany, and they scare the shit out of regular people in the rural regions they colonize, with their "everything Nazi except the Hakenkreuz")
Back to end game: the current set of what people consider human rights ("have children and raise them however you like") seems to make it inevitable that those subcultures thrive until they aren't sub anymore. Participate in the breeding race or you're out. It's almost as if back when they declared human rights they accidentally enshrined the very foundation of Nazi ideology when they tried to keep that from happening ever again.
But then on the other hand, the actual text of the declaration makes very little mention of procreation. All those who cry "but human rights!" whenever the topic comes up seem to base their argument on (or be mislead by, I guess most seem to assume that it's a straight forward article resembling "go forth and multiply", I know I did before looking it up). I'd love to see some discussion of de-sanctifying the presumed right to "sire and ideologize an army" (I wish I was exaggerating..) before things get so ugly that the discussion will include radical swings of the pendulum to the other side. Perhaps a viable diplomatic approach could be more explicit protection for the first two children, and in exchange less article 26.3 beyond that threshold? We certainly should not try to actively solve breeder subcultures, but we should give them less to hide behind.
Sorry, they are all Nazi even if they don't know it yet. Put two breeder subcultures in the same room and it's about Lebensraum in no time.
PS: and that's not a coincidence. Any would be breeder subculture that does not sufficiently discourage outside marriage would see too many of its children defecting to the general population. They'd be out-bred by breeder subcultures that do. Seen across a several generations time window, it's a "survival of the close-mindedests" situation.
this is one of the fastest growing populations in the US, and they are notoriously pacifistic, to the point of forbidding mustaches because they are associated with the military
> During the French and Indian War, the Hochstetler Massacre occurred: Local tribes attacked the Jacob Hochstetler homestead in the Northkill settlement on September 19, 1757. The sons of the family took their weapons but father Jacob did not allow them to shoot due to the Anabaptist doctrine of nonresistance.[10] Jacob Sr.'s wife, Anna (Lorentz) Hochstetler, a daughter (name unknown) and Jacob Jr. were killed by the Native Americans. Jacob Sr. and sons Joseph and Christian were taken captive. Jacob escaped after about eight months, but the boys were held for several years.[150] When freed, both of these sons joined the church and one of them became a minister
Our climate and ecosystems. See any introductory 101 ecology class where you learn all about the trivial ways populations can grow, fluctuate and crash. Disease, access to "energy", reproductive strategy and potential, population demographics, ecosystem stability, all existed with out humans around.
Perhaps the big reason to have fewer humans around is that we inject "chaos" into many of these well understood dynamics, creating instability in them, which does, and will, continue to produce a lot of suffering. Assuming humans (animals) are somehow immune to what the rest of life on this world has to deal with (we can invent our away around these problems) is akin to believing in gods, and perhaps that might not end well.
Will "Our climate and ecosystems" have human representatives who relay these decisions and enforce them?
"akin to believing in gods, and perhaps that might not end well"
Mankind has believed in gods since essentially the beginning, hundreds of thousands of years and during that time has risen to become the dominant species on the planet. During this rise, human quality of life, and life expectation have continues to improve reaching its current high point. Anyone telling you different is a victim of political propaganda. There are always hot spots on the earth but overall we are doing great.
Note: There have been a couple of empires that were openly athiestic, the USSR and Communist China. How did that work out for its peoples?
> Will "Our climate and ecosystems" have human representatives who relay these decisions and enforce them?
You mean things like earthquake detectors, disease monitoring, our weather services, climate predictions, air-quality testing, lead in your water testing? Then yes.
> has risen to become the dominant species
How do you define "dominant"? Homo sapiens is not not dominant in many ways: 1) in numbers; 2) in evolutionary lifespan (not even remotely closer there); 3) in genetic diversity; 4) our ability to independently produce our own food (photosynthesis, fungal detrivores), 5) lifespan; 6) ability to communicate via chemicals; 7) etc. etc. Perhaps you mean "in our ability to destroy"?
> this rise, human quality of life, and life expectation have continues to improve reaching its current high point
I say this to every single evangelical who comes to my door and says "You have to admit things are getting worse."
Acknowledging that we are better off than ever (I'd literally be dead multiple times over if not for modern science) doesn't have to be logically inconsistent with "we're going to hit a limit with how much better we can be if we don't stop messing up our ecosystems, in fact I suspect that the places that are "the best" have their hands in both pies.
I'm not going to disparage human religion, but when push comes to shove I'm going to look to science, technology and a better understanding of our world as a whole, particular how evolution led to species interacting with one another as the route to maximize our "greatness".
"I'm not going to disparage human religion, but when push comes to shove I'm going to look to science, technology and a better understanding of our world as a whole, particular how evolution led to species interacting with one another as the route to maximize our "greatness"."
We are on the same page here. I fully believe that no matter what happens we will be able to figure it out. I have essentially zero concern for global warming because of that. We will adapt. I am very optimistic on our future as a species.
We cannot stop fossil fuels currently as the third world has not yet reaped the benefits of cheap fuel that the first world has. We would be asking them to cripple their potential. Technology will eventually make renewables as cheap as coal / oil and then globally we will switch. Just a matter of time.
The choice has already been made long ago. The more industrialized the country, the less fertile males of that country become. Only small parts of Africa have been immune to this phenomenon. I believe we started seeing it in action starting in the 1950s
You could start by not incentivizing population growth as many states do. Why does every response to "we should probably not multiply exponentially" need to be some variation of "oH sO YoU wANt GENOCIDE?!?!11"
Because a lot of the degrowth movement does want radical population decrease that we are never likely to see without such drastic measures. Those harmful ideas need to be countered before they become reality.
I sincerely hope that in 50 years when the concern over population growth has been shown to be misguided, just as it has in the last 200 years since Malthus predicted the Earth could only support a few hundred million people, you won’t be sad and alone regretting a missed opportunity.
It seems to me that you guys inadvertently expose a kind of fundamental selfishness when you post like this. Like, it sounds as if a significant part of your reasoning on having children is the belief that you are creating a person who will be biologically obligated to like you and fulfil your emotional needs - thereby saving yourself from being sad and alone.
I don't think it's common for child free people to share this belief. I would even hazard a guess that for many this train of thought is more associated with how they feel about pressure from their own parents to fulfil their emotional needs by creating more new people.
That kind of self-interested argument doesn't land very convincingly on people who feel that their future state of being sad and alone or not is their responsibility and nobody else's.
Well that’s not how I think about children, or how very many if any parents I know think about children. The entire premise of your comment is way off base.
I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.
The problem here is with the distribution of future geniuses. More likely than not they will be born into a population with low education. The probability of nurturing this talent for the betterment of mankind will be low. In highly educated populations, the birth rate is normally low.
If you were serious about this line of argument you would be appalled by the massive waste of potential in today's population, so many wasted brains especially in the "third world", and you would be an advocate for global wealth redistribution, generous welfare, increased spending on education, better nutrition, reduction of pollution that affects health, etc.
The only way you could possibly argue that more humans is good if you also believe that it’s perfectly fine to wipe out all other species on the planet. The most true thing about this thread is the word selfish.
I doubt things scale this way. There are only so many opportunities to have impact. I don't think increasing the random generation of geniuses would have that much of an impact compared to an increase in quality of life for a smaller number of people.
The problem is that infrastructure doesn't scale nearly as quickly as birth rates, let alone immigration. Cities are getting overcrowded, and many, many attempts by many different countries have proven the difficulty of bootstrapping new cities in the middle of otherwise economically underperforming land, like agricultural fields or even desert. Pretty much every existing major city is bursting at the seams: insufficient housing, insufficient transportation infrastructure, insufficient utility infrastructure.
> Pretty much every existing major city is bursting at the seams: insufficient housing, insufficient transportation infrastructure, insufficient utility infrastructure.
Definitely a problem in Canada, but fortunately our government seemingly follows OP's ridiculous logic, and plans to continue increasing our population by 1.3% every year, via an aggressive immigration push. Never mind ensuring we have housing for them or anything.
The limitations on building infrastructure are artificially imposed by NIMBYs. We have the technological ability to quickly build large amounts of housing and other infrastructure and we used to do so before we let the NIMBYs grind everything to a halt over the past few decades.
Not only are cities in America not overcrowded, almost all of them are extremely low density sprawl. There is like 1 city in America with a respectable level of density. The average American city would be much nicer and much more livable if they quadrupled the number of people living there.
Hypothetically more of these cities could start to build out subway, light rail, heavy rail networks; which would support higher density. But American cities don't seem to be capable of that. Maybe it's a lack of money, maybe a lack of political will, maybe it's American car culture. But it's irrelevant. It takes a really long time to build out that infrastructure, and in the meantime, the city has the infrastructure that it has, which is insufficient for keeping both housing costs and commuting times down.
Cities aren't overcrowded, not even close, but cars sure do take a lot of space, especially with laws and regulations that required excess parking spaces.
But I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument. While there are certainly more people in absolute numbers living in poverty than there were 2000 years ago, the percentage of people in bad shape is probably lower. And many versions of "bad shape" today is probably still a lot better than the average at many points in history.
That leads to a philosophical argument, though: is it better to have more people, with a higher proportion that are happy and doing well, or to have fewer people, with a higher proportion that hare unhappy and doing poorly, if in the second case, the absolute number of people in bad shape is fewer? I think it's reasonable to disagree on which is better; there's no objective truth there.
I think the argument is that the marginal utility/productivity of a person > the resources it costs to sustain a body, even if that body is minimally productive (i.e. subsistence farmer). I think we're better off trying to improve ratio of estimated 2B subsistence farmers that can be replaced with (generously) 100m farmers + machines, and try to figure out how to improve productivity of rest. IMO there are still so many existing poor people, and for purpose of this argument, non/under-consumers, that there's ample (billions of low HDI/low productive workers globally) of untapped demand that can be uplifted to drive growth in all the big things this article calls for. The argument would be different if global human capita productivity is already optimized/maximized and adding more bodies is the only way to raise ceiling, but we're not even close.
Many of those who want to have more kids can’t afford it. Plain and simple. In conversations like this, people often skip over this reality which always surprises me. Instead, they seem to focus on winning the ideological battle of what the ideal world should be.
This could easily all be arguments for why you personally should want a more equitable world where we don’t have a Third world full of unhappiness and wasted tallent.
The combined population of those countries is 2.8 billion. For your assertion to be true, 71% of those countries would have had to have been in poverty in the recent past and now are not.
You got about a billion in China, they were at the bottom end of the country gdp per capita rankings, now they are well into the upper half. The commenter probably assumed India did a similar journey, but India is still full of poverty and not even close to China, so yeah probably less than two billions combined but definitely more than a billion.
As long as we're in the pedantic mode: "More than a billion" could mean from 1 billion up to 1.99 billion. You need at least 2 billions to be able to add the -s
The poster you replied to wrote "so yeah probably less than two billions combine", so that actually means you could not use the "-s" ending in this case.
To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.
Which is all rather not the point because that's not what I said. I said "Billions have been lifted out of poverty." The meaning of that statement is: "the count of people who have been lifted out of poverty is measured with the 'billion' unit." That even includes 1 billion, exactly. If I had said "it numbers in the thousands", then 1,000 would have been an acceptable value, as would 9,9999.
But see my other comment. The number of people in India and China who have been lifted out of poverty in the last ~50 years or so is much more than a billion.
> To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.
To be pedantic, “billions” is used without a specific number as a general measure of broad scale, but with any specific number, it is just “billion”, not “billions”. “billions of dollars” is fine, but “1.0000000001 billion” or “2 billion” or “999.999999999 billion”; none of the last three take an “s” at the end.
The PPP adjusted value within India is 3.5 versus the dollar in the US so the per capita GDP for India is closer to $12,000 per citizen, not all that far away from chinas’s $17,000.
I mean India went from 11th to 5th largest economy in the span of a decade and it continues to grow consistently at around 7%. It has pulled 400 million people out of poverty in the last 10 years so it is a part of the story.
Before capitalism all of the world was "Third world". And the equity you get without capitalism is everybody being equally poor. And then millions die, like in every attempt to build communism in past century.
That's certainly true and remains an unacceptable state of the world, but it's also true that globally, it's a steadily decreasing number, even under conditions of population growth.
Seems to be fixated on the idea that only Human Resources matter at the expense of all other resources.
Our current population is being propped up by all number of finite resources, most significantly oil, for which we have no certainty of finding more supply of in the future. With a higher population, we're depleting those resources faster.
It may in fact be better to get to a lower level of population which is long-term stable. We are aggressively burning through our natural resources and while humanity won't go extinct our population is doomed to absolutely plummet during an age of poverty.
> Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age.
I think the OP would say oil is "basically not a catastrophic resource shortage." This seems like a typical misinterpretation of exponential growth as linear growth. There's literally fixed mass on the planet. Growth cannot continue forever no matter how many geniuses it might produce.
When it comes to our ability to just find a substitute, past results don't predict future results. The author is like somebody who thinks because a stock went up in the past it's a good buy without looking at the fundamentals.
Oil made the 20th century absolutely explode in terms of population growth, we went from less than 2B to more than 6B in the 20th century and 8B now. Whale oil, elephant tusks, and seabird guano did nothing like that. How does one reasonably expect to replace a miracle? Electrification comes nowhere close, not that it isn't worth doing.
>First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions.
There might be 1,000 certified geniuses per billion, but we are still slaves to probability. That genius might be born in the slums of Calcutta or in the middle of the Amazon rainforest or in the vastness of the Mongolian steppes. I guess the hope would be that 3 or 4 might have the luck to be born to a middle class or higher family in the first world.
Also, whatever this dude wants, the world is in major decline. For example, because of China's one child policy, their population will be halved in 50 or 70 years and nothing can stop that. Japan has a high over 40 population, Italy, Germany, Spain, and especially South Korea. Russia has been declining in population and with the war, the best and brightest have left Russia, never to return (they are devoloping lives, wives, children wherever they are now), and the meat grinder of the war. Same with Ukraine.
The same thing happened in ancient Rome as well. It got so expensive to raise a child in Rome (yes, inflation existed back then as well), because of money pouring into the administrative city of Rome - for the same reason now in the first world, that people stopped having children. Even back then they had rudimentary birth control. The Roman Emperors gave all kinds of incentives for families to have children - grants and tax reductions, but it was not enough.
Too much of a single thing is usually not good. Wild populations of animals have diminished rapidly. More people also means less space for the dwindling wild populations. Making all life on earth one species is not a good idea, one dimensional thinking is usually detrimental to the system.
Have you ever driven across the US? There is an unfathomable amount of open space. Same in most countries, aside from maybe Europe. We are nowhere close to running out of land.
yes, but do we want to turn all that land into high density housing? (ok, i exaggerate but) there are tangible benefits from leaving spaces open and untouched.
I mean, it is plausible op meant nature, but they asked about not high density housing
I for one see a lot of value in yet another big congested city, and very little value in a forest (only instrumental value, to keep humans, dogs and a handful of other preferred species alive) -- I would prefer the big city not to be as congested, and I would keep some forest as a tourism destination for people who like that, and also enough forest to not cause harm to the "humans and dogs" populatin, but that is that -- instrumental forest, not as an end goal
The population already exists. But we don’t see that many geniuses working on ambitious projects because they are working minimum wage jobs or wasting away without education in Africa, India, China, or downtown LA. We don’t have a population problem, just a utilization problem.
Oh, this is such a cliché, like all contemporary geniuses do is maximizing CTR...
Many others are doing R&D for companies producing harmful products (both for humans and the environment, even when they love to make people think they are not eco-unfriendly (looking at you, Elmo Musk)), figuring out how to "maximize profitability", even if said profitability comes from pushing people into debt, or simply keeping silent and inactive on meetings where very harmful decisions are made.
Yes, geniuses working on electric vehicle technology or reducing space launch costs for Elmo Musk are just like the geniuses optimizing ad technology to maximize clickthrough-rate.
You make fun of click-through rates because it sounds stupid and irrelevant.
Now, I’m not saying it’s like building the pyramids, inventing General Relativity, or landing on the moon.
And yes we all hate ads and 99% of them are junk.
But online ads have been revolutionizing the economy. Matching consumers and producers have always been extremely non-trivial and an economically critical activity.
You used to have to go to the mall to discover and buy things. That mall was a huge gatekeeper for producers trying to offer goods on the market and a major point of inefficiency. Now anyone can put up ads and start selling with a vastly smaller distribution budget.
Just think of having a small percentage multiplier on the entire economy. Just think of the implications for social equity - you used to have to be well-connected and well-funded to have any hope of starting a business and getting into Walmart.
Wow, I get it is an opinion piece so it shouldn't be fact-checked, but still, what an absolutely ignorant and naive take on the subject.
It seems like the author has never come across the concept of what a "Behavioral sink" is, which is not really hard to find/understand; as well as the many other sources of data, experiments and thoughts that would easily invalidate the purported benefits he portrays.
"More geniuses, more R&D investment, more ambitious projects, better aesthetics, better careers, more niche communities, more niche markets"; no correlation between this and population size. If you take a look at the most populated cities on Earth, about 8/10 are FAR from being "an aesthetic population center where people live happy and fulfilled lives, with artists and geniuses together to improve human progress". Had the author not traveled outside the US ever in life?
"but that's due to economic and social factors that have kept them subdued for centuries"
1. It's not ...
2. ... even if it was, why would a larger population get rid of those issues instead of making them worse?
Never ever thought I'd see this argument. It's amusing in the same way you would be if you saw someone intentionally throw off all their safety gear before attempting a dangerous activity "just because". Or even better "Aim for the Bushes Scene" -- check it out, a new approach to population management.
"Growth" - everything in this world is about "growth" - if your economy is not "growing" it is a disaster, thus you import more people because people == "growth".
Despite the fact that growth is bad for the environment and espite constant "growth" for decades our problems have not been solved.
> The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue.
In defense of that statement, it says "not fixed", not "unlimited". But that's of course what he meant...
Carrying capacity can also be temporarily distorted. How much effective carrying capacity would we see if tomorrow there suddenly were not any hydrocarbons from the past? Yeah, I'm old enough to remember "peak oil", that time when we knew full well about the greenhouse effect, but enjoyed distracting us with doomsday scenarios about not enough "new" oil getting prospected.
So the author mentions a sustainable population level but does absolutely no research into what level is sustainable, nor talk about it at all in their own argument.
And of course we see no mention of obvious counterpoints. More geniuses, ok. But how about more psychopaths? Not just from a pure numbers perspective, but higher psychopathology rates correlate with higher living densities, which are sure to increase when increasing the population significantly.
Arguments about more people meaning more cuisine need much greater support. It seems much of the culinary development flourished because of isolation first followed by globalization. What we've seen more recently seems to be less new styles or dishes and more homogenization of existing styles. Much of the exposure to other cuisines is actually from negatives like war and famine, both from occupation, refugees, and warriors returning home with newly acquired tastes. And of course many of these conflicts were around scarcity of resources especially during transitional times when switching from one resource/tech to another.
Like they say in the market, past returns are not indicicators of future returns. Blindly relying on benefits of infinite technology growth exceeding the rate of population demands is not a compelling argument.
I think the best reason for a lower population is that in the age of AI having 8 billion people of every persuasion with access to a wealth of destructive information and accelerated research it's inevitable someone is going to start a fire we can't put out. Be it a grey goo scenario, a weaponized or misaligned super intelligence or a bioweapon or lab accident which I'm certain covid was. Our best shot right now at surviving the next 50 years is to reduce our population and hope that proportionally reduces the risk of an existential threat by self replicating means. A nuclear war might actually save our species. Is that a radical point of view? Pretty sure the logic is sound at least
Not selfish enough, sorry. Empower the human, regardless of total fertility rate decline trajectory (~40% of global annual pregnancies are unintended; assuming reproductive wishes are affirmed [less or no children], extrapolate future total fertility rate accordingly [points down]).
> bigger societies are better for everyone.
This does not appear to be the case based on the evidence. Bigger societies are better for those in political power, with economic control, and anyone who is a beneficiary of excess/surplus. We should do what is best for the human, not the machine. We already do not properly provide for hundreds of millions of people.
The argument is that more people is better. The Earth carries 8 billion people today, headed toward 10-11 billion by 2100. Why are there so many people? Unintended pregnancies. Less unintended pregnancies (empowered women, family planning, etc) constrains the pipeline of aggregate suffering (because the evidence is clear we're not going to do anything about it current state; why would we presume something would be done future state?) and human impact (less people = reduced aggregate impact). Fertility rate is falling rapidly everywhere in the world, somewhat slower in Africa, but evidence indicates the decline is locked in.
Atmospheric CO2 budget busted, six out of nine planetary boundaries busted, hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty, and climate change costs are going to be incredible (mitigation, migration and aid, etc). We Are Here. Someone advocating for more people for the goals TFA puts forth? They are either wildly selfish or wildly ignorant. When talking heads, politicians, or business leaders fret about a compressing population pyramid, they worry about labor costs, GDP, economic indicators, growth, and maintaining a status quo. They are worried that capitalism succeeded due to growth externalities and surplus labor. They don't care about the human, they care about the juice they've been squeezing. The US has constructed society as a human factory farm [1], for example. They don't value humans here today, and they want more?
(please let me know if I have left any gaps in building context up wrt the mental model on this topic, I can provide additional citations for any assertions I've made)
Surplus labor is power to those in power. Scarce labor empowers the individual. Compressing demographics is good for the individual, but bad for economic and political systems.
This is true to an extent but we have never really seen an information economy with a global labour scarcity. If we look at "advanced" economies with physical labour scarcities we see infrastructure deficits and inflation in asset prices.
Having worked behind a computer and behind hammers, saws, on ladders, et cetera I think that political/economic collapse might not be ideal. With that said perhaps my socialist history teachers couldn't overcome the immense power of British propaganda against revolution.
If current state is a form of economic slavery, alternatives may be welcome. Depends on your point of view I suppose, as well as your role and position in the system. Some may welcome decline over current state and the cost it imposes.
I am shocked by the overwhelming negative comments
I do not think the author is arguing for mindlessly expanding the population disregarding our current consequences. I think his concern is that people seem to have forgotten that population growth is generally very good in most situations, especially in the long term. So instead of promoting de-growth as the solution to our problems, we should be trying to solve our current, and temporary, bad externalities of our growing population (climate change, loss of biodiversity), and that is a technological problem
The author’s third point, “More progress’, is what I find the most compelling. We tend to think of ourselves living in a techno utopia, but in my view we are barely out of the dark ages. Disease and poverty still run rampant and our lives are frustratingly short. There are people personally close to me that live in chronic pain; there are healthy people in their 20s that die from cancer; our understanding of biology and physiology is so poor we currently can’t help this people. Broad technological progress is the only answer and this will require talented people.
"And yet, there are good reasons for thinking that precisely the opposite is true: the more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found."
Choked up while reading
"A 2022 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research compares U.S. states and shows that ageing is already a persistent drag on economic growth and productivity; when the proportion of the population over 60 years old increases by 10 percent, economic growth (GDP per capita) decreases by 5.5 percent and productivity by almost 4 percent."
The endless-growth mindset will eventually be viewed as a mental illness. We pity hoarders, but we somehow look up to the unreasonably wealthy, even though they are eerily similar in their attitude and behaviour towards "their precious".
If you look at a graph of human population over the last 1000 years [1] (and since -10000AD if you want [2]), it looks eerily like a stock market chart that has temporarily spiked before crashing back down to a more reasonable valuation.
Over the ages, we've had many population declines [3] but they've tended to be smaller and smaller (relatively to the total population). Is there a massive "correction" coming, as challenges of carrying capacity, climate change, global conflict and disease rear their ugly heads? Hard to say.
Regardless - I object to using the word "progress" as a stand-in for "more". It hardly ever is.
If more people means more geniuses we should be getting new groundbreaking insights about fundamental physics every year.
We don't because the resource of human learnable undiscovered physics was kind of limited resource that kinda ran out.
In the spirit of the article we replaced one resource with another. So now most of our numerous geniuses instead of discovering how to steal more from the universe learn how to steal more from consumers in investment banks, marketing companies and tech giants.
Yes, but how many geniuses will live in squalor and never be given the proper environment to thrive?
I know I'd rather there be geniuses but who are given a life to support their growth and contributions, of which perhaps half really realize their potential, than more geniuses where most struggle to find even the basic necessities, let alone the support and resources needed for their talents to flourish. It's not just about the quantity of geniuses that a larger population might yield, but the quality of life and opportunities available to them.
Having a high number of geniuses doesn't automatically translate to societal progress or innovation if the conditions aren't conducive to their development. It's essential to create an environment where potential can be recognized and nurtured. This means investing in education, healthcare, and social programs that help identify and support individuals with extraordinary abilities, regardless of their background. The goal should be to maximize the potential of every individual, not just increase the population in hopes of statistically getting more geniuses.
Kind of like self-flagellating climate doomers who don't think (or perhaps don't care) about the implications of destroying social safety nets and overall quality of life for future generations, right. It may be too late to convince millenials that they're doing a far better job at dooming their children and grandchildren than they think baby boomers did to them, but for those with a more open mind it's good to see things from a different perspective once in a while.
This is a good example of a very narrow human centric view that captures why its bad to try to maximize for particular made up metrics, such as human utility. It also a wonderfully hare brained view of technolocial innovation that disregards the dark sides, material input, or externalities at all.
Certainly, it was just more of a general criticism toward such a view, as leading to long term degradation of the world. I totally get how humans would always protitize humanity first, but in the long term we have some issues such as overfishing, global warming, biodiversity loss etc. as a result. But the esiest would of course to not belive in thos issues, and have cool toys
Or we can assume that the state of the world before humans was a state that we have deviated from though human agency, and it is reasonable to remedy some of that irreversible trajectory would be a good cause that some other intelligent species could undertake after we're gone.
The first known extinction event was caused by cyanobacteria that released vast amounts oxygen (highly toxic chemical) into the atmosphere. It killed most of the anaerobic life, clearly "deviating from the previous state of the world". The time has come to "remedy some of that irreversible trajectory".
The whole notion that the "current trajectory" is somehow objectively bad is ridiculous. It may be bad for humans though.
I think you can define degradation. I can make objective claims that less biodiversity is worse than more biodiversity and use it to measure degradation without humans around. I can measure this degradation in planets without humans or model out the degradation in a future where humans are extinct, and call certain situations objectively worse than others under that yardstick.
Maybe I misunderstood because it seems you're claiming if there's no humans around it's impossible to model any phenomena, but we possess abstract thought to make up those situations and define things like degradation in the absence of humans.
> I can make objective claims that less biodiversity is worse than more biodiversity and use it to measure degradation without humans around.
While the amount of biodiversity can be measured objectively, the notion of it being "good" is completely made up. You need humans to judge what's "good" and which means that for any "good" kind of future humans are essential and are more important than say biodiversity.
If biodiversity is good (and I say it is, but it’s a human judgement), then human civilization is also good, and for the same reason: it represents life, complexity, activity, and progress.
What you described is still human centric. Nature has survived several extinction level events and I’m sure it will survive more.
If humanity changes the current environment enough, then it will no longer be the once ideal environment to that continues to sustain humanity indefinitely.
Going on a tangent, a lot of environmentalists have a marketing problem.
Sure! On the other hand, if we kill ourselves off before that happens, for example by making the planet unlivable for humans, then that chance is also gone. Getting to that level of technological advancement is a marathon, not a sprint.
As i replied to the sibling comment, coming from another species perspective it would be reasonable to assume that a world optimized to fulfill the need of another species, such as humans would be seen as negative. It's not like they can enact their discontent, so i would argue we have to account for other species as well when we remodel the natural world.
Evolutionary adaptation takes a while, so its not nice to change things fast.
> As a human, I have a human-centric mindset. I don’t want to live in the forest with rain filling up my mud floor. I like nice things.
I think the whole discussion is about which amount of humans on this planet would maximize the probability of having nice things for each individual. Certainly it would be hard for you to have nice things when there is only a million humans on Earth, but probably even more so if there is a trillion of them around.
There would be some significant tradeoffs necessary for maintaining a trillion people population on Earth no matter the energy cost. Even if you assume cheap and abundant cold fusion energy source, living in mcmansion and eating avocado toasts with wild salmon is likely out of the question.
I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question.
And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.
> I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question.
Some purely technological problems are hard to solve. There is already a market for (very expensive) meat substitutes and they taste like crap. If you are talking about some sci-fi "replicator" tech that will just "synthesize" you and avocado, then I'm not sure how achievable that is in short or medium-term irrespective to energy prices.
> And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.
Much better for whom? OP said they like "nice things". I would also prefer avocados to spaceships since I'm not that interested in space travel without FTL.
> There is already a market for (very expensive) meat substitutes and they taste like crap.
Impossible is pretty decent tasting for ground beef substitute, IMO. The pricing is currently not competitive or inline with its utility value, but I could see that changing much faster than any colonize-space or make earth pleasant for 12 billion people projects.
> Much better for whom? OP said they like "nice things". I would also prefer avocados to spaceships since I'm not that interested in space travel without FTL.
For humans and for avocados. The sun is doomed and so are they, unless we manage to scale our available energy by many orders of magnitude.
As a human I like nice things too. But increasing human population even more by decreasing animal diversity I see as a bigger threat to livability on earth.
> Instead, I’m going to argue that a larger population is better for every individual—that there are selfish reasons to want more humans.
I'd say yes, and that this person assumes we are all economists. The 'selfish' part also assumes that economy-boosting reasons for wanting more humans is what would make us indiidually happy
Progress isn't infinite, status is often a zero-sum competition, and exponential economic growth is something that only people who are bad-at-math want (and should they be doing economics?). Also, the whole essay is begging-the-question; so much of the argument is <<we need more people because "more is better".
Its been fascinating reading through this thread and seeing real world examples of deccelerationism and the despair and pessimism that drives it and those calling for more people, accelerationism and the overall hope for humanity that they carry. Deccelerationism is just depression and surrender.
I don't think something like what happened due to COVID is related to that. That was a matter of poor logistics, not of scarcity of resources.
I believe the author is talking about things like "we need lots of mineral foobar to sustain us, and at our current population growth, we'll run out in five years!" ---> "oh neat, we can substitute mineral barbaz, plus a little cheap processing, and we have enough to last us thousands of years".
In this case, "resource" is defined more as "raw materials that we can feasibly and economically access". Being unable to meet demand for computer chips because your global supply chain suffered a shock isn't the same thing.
A concrete example of how we've overcome the possibility of a catastrophic resource shortage is advances in drilling and mining. Oil and natural gas reserves that were not feasible to pump out of the ground 50 years ago are now being harvested. The claims of "peak oil" turned out to be irrelevant; we have plenty, and as we "run low", we go after reserves that are harder to get to.
And this process continues: even if it weren't a good idea to stop burning oil and natgas for climate-change reasons, sure, eventually those wells will run dry, or harvesting will become so expensive that it no one would be able to afford to drive their cars or heat their homes anymore. So instead we develop and refine technologies (solar and wind farms, more and more efficient heat pumps, EVs, etc.) that change the game entirely. (Still waiting on Mr. Fusion, though.)
> Oil and natural gas reserves that were not feasible to pump out of the ground 50 years ago are now being harvested.
This is a bad example. We are doing this because we are desperate. The easy and cheap to access oil sources are nearly gone. What we have left is expensive to reach and process oil. Peak oil is still an issue as well as Peak [insert natural resource]. Our natural resources like fresh water are finite.
Because people do irresponsible, selfish things, and in many cases fail to consider how their actions can negatively impact others.
Not saying that having more or fewer or no kids is going to have a negative impact. But if it was important for humanity to encourage more or fewer or no kids, I think it's pretty natural that there would be campaigns (funded by governments and NGOs alike) to push people in the direction that was supposed to be better.
That's pretty much the entire purpose of any kind of public policy. In theory, anyway.
People saying "he doesn't address the downsides" could read the three pages on the same site which do address the downsides, and which are prominently linked right at the start of the essay:
Everything in those links could have been more concisely expressed in a single sentence, short enough even to make a pithy quote, drawn from one of them:
"The question of severe externalities is interesting and difficult, but let’s set it aside for the moment."
That’s completely untrue. For, example, the first of them has a lot of interesting and relevant history about how the decline of one scarce resource motivates the search for others.
If you insist we also talk about the tendentiously presentist and heavily cherry-picked historiography here on display, then I suppose we can do that. Given your apparent partiality, though, I don't know why you'd want to.
Does AI/Robotics counter a lot of OPs arguments?
AI in 50 years time could be totally mind blowing.
And there could be all kinds of robots running around by then.
I think the human population going down to 2-5 billion is a good thing.
Quality always trumps quantity, but management can make or break situations. If you're yourself exceptional but have control over a primitive civilization, you're doing okay. But if you're not a stellar performer who manages to control an advanced civilization, you've really pulled something off. All these questions about population always skirt around eugenics, but there's a good case to be made for encouraging population growth of a people that's respectful towards others and tries to minimize social conflicts. Such people are found everywhere in the world, "race" notwithstanding.
I'm shocked at the comments in a great way. Usually this place is full of frothing-at-mouth pro-natalism. Even the AI hype cycle is finally shutting up. Miracles do happen.
These all have the same fundamental error -- the presumption that progress and faster progress is desirable. With today's luxuries but half the people, everyone could live pretty well, and have meaningful work. Genuinely, if we focused less on driving progress at all costs and focused more on "well being for all", we wouldn't even need to reduce the population. We have the capacity to provide a safe, comfortable, low effort society for everyone today. We just choose not to arrange ourselves to pursue it.
The thing that bothers me about this line of argument is...there already are a lot of people! We've had _massive_ population growth over the past few centuries, especially in the last 100 years or so. We have 8 _billion_ people now...and I personally don't see a lot of the benefits that the author talks about. I really don't think going from 8 billion to 10 billion or 16 billion or even 50 billion people would really make a meaningful difference in "the number of geniuses" or the number of people to populate a subreddit for a niche hobby, to draw on two of his examples. We have lots of geniuses now and we have lots of people on subreddits already.
We can already see that many (most?) societies are really quite bad at dividing finite resources/wealth/capital/land/etc. in an efficient (let alone equitable) manner among the billions of people in the world today. Are we really supposed to believe that resource management would magically become better/more efficient/more equitable somehow with even more people to divide them between? My hunch is that the vast majority of new people that got added to the global population would be relatively quite poor, whereas the global number of billionaires and millionaires would stay relatively flat.
Yes things like whale oil and bat guano are resources we've progressed past the need for...but we can't progress past the need for land. Or water. Both of which are in relatively short supply for many people, especially in places that are more desirable to live.
Large population centers have historically tended to form where they are for a reason (proximity to water, natural resources, natural recreation/beauty, desirable weather/climate, etc.), and most of the world's large cities are already pretty tapped out in terms of population. You can't magically fit a billion extra people in New York or Shanghai or Paris without it having disastrous repercussions for the people already there (and the new people). Sure we could build new massive cities in presently rural/unpopulated areas, but I think there's a reason that lots of people don't live in those places now, and if a billion-person city was shoved into South Dakota (to use an example of a very sparsely populated place) out of necessity, I'd imagine many people wouldn't be too happy about having to live there.
To be very clear (and preempt any bad-faith readings of this), I'm not endorsing the view of dramatic population reduction or anything like that. I'm just saying that the idea that massive population growth is always an inherent good strikes me as quite wrongheaded.
These resources are abundantly available on Earth and endlessly recyclable. It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.
At some point, your problem will be heat, not energy, because roughly speaking humans are 100 watts space heater, never mind all the heat generated from making food, transport infrastructure, industrial production and extraction.
If you take a look at cities and how they're constructed, it's really a 2.5D map. The road corridor are frequently ground level, maybe two or threes. Then we build towers and buildings. So what we created are artificial canyons in cities, but we don't build entire floor of cities.
So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.
So in that sense, space isn't probably an issue.
Humans are actually pretty space efficient. What's not space efficient is all the expensive infrastructures such as cars and roads.
What will be the most challenging for us is really political, not engineering or economics or space or energy.
> It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.
And we're doing a pretty poor job at solving those problems today, for many people at the lower end of the wealth & income spectrum. What makes you think adding more people will magically fix those issues?
I don't think anyone is arguing that it's technically impossible to fix issues like this and have a much larger population, with everyone housed, clothed, fed, and even more than that, happy. But humans -- especially those with wealth and power -- are a selfish bunch, and we are pretty bad at sharing when the goal is to raise other people up.
I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.
The continued comfort and wealth of the haves will always be a priority, at the expense of the have-nots. Eventual post-scarcity increasingly feels like a pipe dream to me.
> So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.
That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.
I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.
It's really not a problem of economics. It's entirely a political problem.
That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.
Not everybody care for natural sunlight. I certainly don't. Moreover, I see sunlight hitting the roof of my non-solar paneled house as uselessly bouncing and heating things up unnecessarily. Just another resources to be used and transformed into something more our liking.
If you're talking about open space for a sufficient definition of open space floor plan, then it's a question of engineering.
Is there any discussion of how we would do this in the article, or is it entirely fantastical discussions of what is possible, and how great the world could be?
Arguments like "more progress" and "more geniuses" would make sense only if global population manages "geniuses" and "progress" efficiently. Which in fact is completely opposite. Homo sapiens brains are evolved for small population size, and unable to comprehend the modern structures involving millions of people.
As a consequence, billions of already existing humans still don't have access to proper education, economy or tech scene to unlock their potential. So the more humans you bring, the more potential Einsteins will stuck in Congolese villages, that's it.
Even "developed" countries, from what I observe are quite far from the ideal talent-unlocking - they still have crowded classes, non-motivated teachers and fixed curriculum. So millions will be (and already are) also stuck in "boring 9-5" "paying their student debs" even don't knowing their full potential.
Policy positions get all kinds of promoters for all kinds of different reasons. A position can and should be rejected purely on the basis that the 'wrong' kinds of people support it. It can be considered again when the right kinds of people start supporting it. This is how you don't put total rank assholes in power, and also how enormous assholes game the system to get in power.
If you own a bar and a group of neo-Nazis come in, you have to throw them out. If you don't throw them out, then they will turn your normal bar into a neo-Nazi hangout. Neutrality isn't an option when violence is a possible result.
We need more time to deal with finite resources and pollution. A larger population would decrease the time we would have to find solutions. Even if most of the current world population lived sustainably, we would still need 2.5 earths to support the current population size indefinitely. I believe that we need about 6.5 earths at the moment.
Maybe if we had off world colonies this would be a good opinion, but this blog post is just a bad argument
If there were only two people both of you would be living in a cave and foraging for berries because you can't sustain technological civilization with two people. You wouldn't even be capable of creating pollution.
Prehistoric people set fire to a lot of forests, I for one would definitely find a way to emit pollution in this scenario if I had a few spare minutes.
Oh, you underestimate how much damage a pair of sufficiently malicious humans can inflict, especially if we assume that they are the last remaining members of a once highly technological civilization rather than ancient cavemen.
So the cave you've been hiding in happens to be filled with long-forgotten Soviet nuclear material, which you think might help you get rid of the hungry pack of wolves outside...
Luckily, population growth is dampened by the housing market, modulo transportation technology. No natalist policy can change that, when young adults are living with their parents because they can’t afford housing, they are not going to make babies.
This is not education and wealth, or at least only indirectly as those are related to living in large crowded cities.
>More geniuses
First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions.
>If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all.
The same is valid for psychopaths and other bad people.
how about a principled calculation of the planet carrying capacity for humans, Based on water, agriculture and industry requirements ? I mean we already have states fighting over water rights to rivers. I suspect we can’t go much higher than a 100 billion. But resources are already being diverted towards silicon life. from here I suspect we go towards 50/50 human / silicon . Until the silicon declares independence.
> If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all.
That’s just making up numbers. The author has shown absolutely no basis for the argument that for every million people born, one of them will be a genius with the intellect and opportunities to advance humanity and offset the harm of the other 999999 and then some.
We, as in humanity, haven't even figured out how to support the people we already have. We never have. Even without the threat of climate change, billions are under-nourished.
High tech might alleviate some issues, but the root cause could be addressed through existing social technology. For example, say we had AGI robots that could do all the work that humans do today - if owned only by rich capitalists, the quality of life for many may actually drop. But, combined with land value taxes and universal basic income, the result would likely be an increase quality of life (unless it turns out humans are willing to keep increasing population as long as the amount of aggregate suffering is below a certain level). AGI robots don't necessarily make things better. But social tech like LVT+UBI could meaningfully make things better, and, it could do it today (without the need for more "geniuses").
I really believed this argument growing up in a white, middle class household in the 1980s. I’m more skeptical now, after two decades of helping build our current technocracy. I think there is a sweet spot between the dystopian lawlessness of prehistory and early human history, and the dystopian future of rapacious consumption and late stage capitalism.
I think we could apply Brook's law[0] here. "Throw more scientists/engineers at the problem" doesn't mean that problem will be solved faster.
Moreover, he assumes that increasing number of people will result in higher number of geniuses, but "Correlation does not imply causation".
Ok, even if we assume, that number of exceptionally smart humans will increase. We have limited resources of our planet and industries. Having even more people will most likely lower the average standard of living. Wouldn't it be harder to find those geniuses if most of the population are homeless, drug addicts and living in slums?
Duh. Of course I should want a bigger population: more market for my business, more chances for me to mate, and more people I can talk to and learn from.
graph go up means world more gooder - that's the real simpletons reasoning, a literal moron writing that more people equals a better world, an idiot who disregards social and economic reasons why we can't have so called "geniuses. we're currently around 8 billion people on the planet, there's enough "genius" and "talent" out there, they just lack access to education, to jobs, to clean water and nutritious food. there's probably more that one person who could add value to the world who's stuck gluing sneakers for cents a day somewhere. I guess it gets the unfuckable right wing natalists going and it's the easier to understand solution for these 'tards, because really solving the problem requires actual effort and intelligence.
What is this drivel of nonsense. We’ve been combating overpopulation, the population and natural destruction cause by overpopulation. And now you have nut bags like this? What is this industrial revolution's swan song?
This author is completely out of touch. Species are hopelessly in decline; climate change is causing havoc for many already. The last thing this planet needs is more consumers.
He's very hopeful about the future of a growing population and how it can create more geniuses that can save us. He points to more people finding us more Einsteins, but he neglects to acknowledge we are just as likely to find more Hitlers, antisocials, narcissists, terrorists, serial killers and school shooters as well.
Nearly everything in our modern world is made worse with more people. Our human habitat is being depleted, our healthy food sources are becoming scarce, and we scorch the land and the air to provide modern necessities to all. We go to war over resources, and our ever-growing need for energy results in a Chernobyl or Fukushima or Exxon Valdez or Gulf War far too often.
I don't want more humans per se. I want more humans to have access to a life of dignity where their basic needs are met and there's absolutely no reason why every human currently on Earth can't have that. The only reason they don't is we choose to withold it from them.
Why? Capitalism. So a tiny few people can hoard even more wealth. Also, much of the talk around more people is strictly self-serving: to preserve and create even more concentrated wealth (by creating more humans to exploit) and the preservation of power structures by maintaining certain ethnic majorities.
In much of the world we have what I've seen called a "hopelessness crisis" and it goes well beyond people not having children because they simply can't afford to. Many people now believe they'll never have security so what's the point in doing anything? Particularly anything long-term. Why should someone who struggles to have enough to eat and put a roof over their head care about, say, the long-term risks of climate change? Particularly when we, as a society, have chosen to deny that person housing and food security. As a planet, we produce enough food to feed everyone and enough wealth to provide shelter for everyone.
Now this also touches on how many people the Earth could support. Many argue the Earth is overcrowded. That's simply not true. We're not far from the point where quite literally trillions of people could be supported comfortably on Earth.
The human world survived just fine when there was 1% of the current population.
The whole idea that we "can't afford to take care of so many old people" is premised on the assumption that Elon and Bozo need 2/3 of the world's economic output, and the other 1/3 should be spent bombing each other.
The idea that the consumption/person is declining is also bullshit. As 3rd world countries see how 1st world populations are living, they also want these opulent lifestyles.
The physical world (you know, the one that "might be a simulation" and is ignored in favor of twerk tic and fortnight) cannot support the world's 3rd world residents going through the same consumption bender that the 1st world has gone through in the last 50-100 years.
We need to stop breeding people, just like we need to stop breeding dogs and cows...
In 100 years when the population is back below 1 billion, then we can worry about under-population...
yeah let's trash the planet at an even higher rate. let's set up more slaughterhouses to kill animals to feed all these new people, because we sure don't have enough of those /s
Probably in prison (or dead) (or dead in prison with the authorities refusing to relinquish your body to your family for "reasons"). Especially if by Snowdens you're specifically referring to whistleblowers/leakers of state secrets rather than anyone speaking truth to power.
Recognizing that there are lots of Snowdens out there, I was referring to a different one and half expected that to be lost on some HN members and on everyone who hasn't read the story.
It's another case of IYKYK. Like an almost secret handshake between those who have something in common but have never met. Or a shared recollection that manifests as a hearty chuckle as the memories come back into focus.
I would think increasing immigration would actually achieve that better, at least when we're talking about immigration from places with worse access to education to places with better education.
Better-educated people (especially women) seem to tend to have fewer babies. (Note that I'm not making a value judgment here.)
And beyond that, to avoid demographic shocks, you probably do want to bring in new people from elsewhere to help care for the aging population that's now much larger than the young population, after the birth rate has been below replacement for long enough.
Granted this is a zero-sum game: countries that lose their young people will end up being worse off, while those that aggressively pursue new sources for immigration will benefit.
We always talk about taking care of the aging population without talking about the other side of the coin, society also have to take care of the kids, the cost is somewhat ignored as those kids will turn into adults at some point, but it is still part of the chain.
The arguments in the linked article all seem rooted in a traditional Western weltanschauung.
This worldview is increasingly characterized (not without basis) as racist, sexist and fascist, mostly by critics whose personal positive contributions to human improvement are unclear.
I'm not driving this bus; I just seem to be going under it.
Maybe after the societal collapse the survivors can agree that the Critical Theory folks were mistaken?
I strongly disagree with the article but what's with the ad hominim? - "...mostly by critics whose personal positive contributions to human improvement are unclear"
We're way past population levels where the traditional reaction to dissatisfaction with circumstances lets you pack up your tribe and move away to somewhere else. Everything is fenced in, and we are our own worst enemies. If you are nice or powerless you get trampled by the not so nice.
Maybe we'll adjust to a society that's equitable, for some high value of e. If so, I think we'll have evolved into something not human any more. Humans don't do nice.
Right now, it looks more like we're on the way to becoming morlocks and eloi.
> Right now, it looks more like we're on the way to becoming morlocks and eloi.
Why the adhominem? not that I disagree with your point (especially with disrespect to the purported elite critics in my original post) but yes: these generalizations can be seen as unfair.
But that is the point of generalizations: they are a shoe fitting a slice of audience.
I tend agree with the article. If you want to know the overarching issue confronting humanity, it is loss of individual liberty coupled with loss of interest in the proper family.
Every ersatz, hedonistic substitute pushed by our purported elite is designed to produce some techno-utopia with a thin globalist ruling class and a controlled, limited population of bipedal livestock.
That is, the world is to be one large plantation run by The Cool People from their Tower of Babel, of whom I am not one.
Also, some parts just are off:
“A bigger society has more cuisines, more architectural styles, more types of fashion, more sub-genres of entertainment.” Then why are tons of languages on the verge of extinction? Why do so many apartments around the world look like IKEA exploded in it? How come the weaver I visited in Lombok is making patterns and cuts for westerners rather than their traditional stuff, and he himself was just wearing basic tshirts? How come the clothing store across from the spot I stayed at in south Goa was selling Jack Daniel’s t-shirts rather than traditional crafts? How come every gen z person is wearing what I wore in middle and high school? It’s not like SHEIN is making new niche styles for people.
“Better matching to careers” Tell that to the young men in Algiers that asked us for directions to any consulate that would maybe help them get a work visa to leave since there’s no work. Or any of the migrants getting on dangerous boats to cross the Mediterranean to do whatever work they can find. Every cousin of mine that can leave has left. There are plenty of geniuses sitting around without many options just because of where they were born, we don’t need more population to get more geniuses if we’re not even working with what we’ve got.
I’ll give him the niche markets one, though that’s more a function of communication via the Internet than it is about population numbers go up.
I don’t know, it’s hard to take a think piece like this seriously. It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche. Living in a luxury Airbnb in Canggu doesn’t count. Happy to be wrong though.