Hacker News Reader

Comment by drchewbacca | Hacker News Reader

Overpopulation is such a hard conversation to have. I think a lot of people get scared that even talking about it will lead to calls for a genocide and therefore want to not even begin talking about it.

There are a lot of positive things that can be done, for example educating women.

I'm not sure if anyone has seen these calls to action but it sounds like there are problems ahead with such a large population.

https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/call-action-scientist...

View on HN

It's a hard conversation because of the mechanics of how the human species works. If one group of people decides to take action and promote infertility, it will simply be replaced by the neighboring group of people who continue having high fertility. We have only globally enforced infertility or mass death of fertile populations as our long term options. It's depressing. If any group continues being highly fertile, they will inherit the earth. The authority necessary to prevent high fertility among all people is dystopian beyond belief.

You would have to take some form of positive action, for example improve women's rights, to do so. But the problem is that this will reach only the more open minded parts of the population, which again will result in the other part (often religious fundamentalists or simply less educated parts of the population) inheriting the earth. It's a grim situation.

Right. Malthus gets the last laugh in the end, doesn't he? The carrying capacity of the Earth is finite, and even if you're able to educate and incentive 99% of the population into holding fertility constant, that other 1% will grow to dominate the population, since selection pressure operates on whatever it is inside of us that makes us want to have more or fewer children.

The only alternative is ongoing state control over reproduction, and even that just delays the inevitable.

Well, all high growth populations have eventually slowed their population growth as gdp capita and mean years of schooling increased

The Amish don't seem particularly interested in this effect: they're growing rapidly. Same thing with the Haredi. This effect whereby "all high growth populations have eventually slowed their population growth as gdp capita and mean years of schooling increased" is a temporary phenomenon we observe while natural selection does its work and selects for those who are able to resist the fecundity-reducing effects of modernity --- people like the Amish and the Haredi.

A lot of advanced economies have low, or even negative, birth rates and they don't have repressive policies nor have even particularly tried to make things that way. So there may be positive ways of encouraging a low birth rate without the need for harsh enforcement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com