The article describes a 0.2% annual loss. Is that so bad?
"In his 2014 book Bending Adversity, Pilling grapples with the cognitive dissonance at the heart of 21st-century Japan: is it a harbinger of global stagnation? Or is it a model of global sustainability? In the book’s most-quoted passage, a British MP, on arriving in Tokyo in the early 2000s and surveying its lively environs, is reported to have said: “If this is a recession, I want one.”
Sorry. Not buying it. Growth is an ok thing as it happens, but as populations increase demand for resources such as land and water produce pressures that only get worse with more people. There's a reason you can sell a parking spot in Hong Kong for half a million dollars but can buy a lot of land in Canada or something for next to nothing. China was wrong to stop the 1-child policy. I'd like to see it implemented globally. Along with that I'd like to far reduce immigration to the United States (I'm just using the US as an example since I currently live here) as I don't want to see the population continue to grow. In the long run, population growth is good for me as a property owner and somebody with wealth, as prices on things like water and homes won't affect me, but I'm not selfish and I want people to not have to struggle to obtain basic resources or housing.
I don't think that's what topspin said. Topspin said prosperity stops population growth. Topspin did not say that population growth causes prosperity. "Growth!", as topspin puts it, is not the same thing as population growth. it's my understanding that as peoples become richer, they have fewer children [1]. That's the cause and effect I believe Topspin was highlighting. Having fewer children does not cause a people to become rich.
And to add, it's a problem that wealthy people aren't having children, because they are in the best position to educate and provide for them.
First, we don't need more mining, we need much less, preferably zero. We've extracted enough resources from the earth's crust, and mining has a huge environmental toll. We should be doing a far better job recycling, and we should be getting the rest from asteroids or the Moon. (I'll make exceptions for some things which are literally as common as dirt, such as silicates/sand/etc., though even here there's some problems with overconsumption.)
More people don't necessarily need to consume more resources. We should be living more sustainably, with less consumption per person. Living the way a typical suburban American lives is totally unsustainable, and grossly wasteful. We need to have smaller habitats in large, shared buildings (i.e. we should be living in urban high-rises, but well-built ones, not like those crappy ones in the UK), and we shouldn't have personally-owned vehicles, and instead should be using SkyTran PRT to get around quickly and cheaply with very low energy usage. Note that I'm all for the option of ownership of those housing units, just that we need more condos and fewer standalone houses; renting property has its own set of problems.
As for home prices, the main problem there is that investors are allowed to buy residential property. Ban that, and especially ban ownership by foreigners, and that'll fix that problem quickly. Housing prices have been inflated because of too much "investment" by various moneyed interests, such as wealthy foreigners looking for stable places to park their money outside their own country. This isn't helpful to the people who actually live in a place, as they're now competing with a huge number of outsiders (both inside and outside their country) when bidding on a housing unit to buy. This phenomenon simply didn't exist in the US a few decades or more ago. Vancouver Canada I believe recently enacted a law penalizing house owners who didn't actually make use of the house, as so many houses were sitting empty, owned by Chinese investors.
As to wealthy people having children, that's a non-sequitur: wealthy people are such a small portion of the population that even if they all had 6 kids, it wouldn't make a detectable difference. It's the middle class that you want having kids.
I don't disagree. We will have some mining forever though, whether that's here on earth or elsewhere.
> We should be living more sustainably, with less consumption per person.
I hope I didn't give you the impression that I think the opposite of that. I am all for sustainability. Including population sustainability.
> As to wealthy people having children, that's a non-sequitur: wealthy people are such a small portion of the population that even if they all had 6 kids, it wouldn't make a detectable difference. It's the middle class that you want having kids.
? I want fewer kids and fewer people. I want those with the means to (rich or upper middle class) to have kids, at least until we get the population of the planet much lower. So yes, a small amount of people having a few kids isn't a non-sequitur at all.
> No POVs
Dude/dude-ette... you should read my posts! I'm all for that :)
Thanks for your perspective.
Yes, of course; the need for raw materials is never-ending. I just want mining on Earth to mostly stop, or at least be done in the most environmentally-sustaining way possible. Moving a lot of mining offworld would accomplish this.
>I want those with the means to (rich or upper middle class) to have kids
I'm not so sure this is such a great idea. Rich people can already have all the kids they want; it's not like financial concerns are holding them back from it. And I don't see how they're going to do a better job of it than regular middle-class people; in fact, rich people generally seem to be much worse and more sociopathic human beings, and their kids frequently come out awful--look at Paris Hilton for instance. I don't see why we should be encouraging them to have more; we don't need more sociopaths in the world. And again, there's so few wealthy people it wouldn't make a significant difference.
Population stagnation could potentially lead to worldwide cultural stagnation, which would result in humans never getting off the planet and eventually getting wiped out somehow.
I understand the population piece, but I don't understand the cultural piece. Japan has stagnated, and it's clearly culturally vibrant. On the other hand, the United States brings in immigrants and is growing, yet I'm constantly scolded and reminded that I have no culture since I'm just a white person.
Oh, and back to the population piece. We're approaching 8 billion. How do you feel about, say, 3-4 billion? I mean, it seems like that's a pretty good number of people to get things done. We'd have less people doing menial work (or not working) and we'd have more essential and necessary work, wouldn't we?