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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Global population is increasing at a rate of >1% per year. We crossed 6 billion in 1999 and 7 billion in 2011. We're now much closer to 8 billion than 7 billion too.

It is hard to imagine scenarios where this magnitude of growth ends well and wedging 'climate' into everything really is making people miss the real problem. The problem is human population growth - it seems quite likely that the future contains seas of blood and withering famines with or without climate change.

Handing out condoms and the pill will do more to help than curtailing fossil fuel usage (which realistically will just bring the suffering on faster). A world of 1 billion people would be a very comfortable world compared to what people put up with now - about a third of them could have a US-level lifestyle and the rest could put up with European standards of living.

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Fertility rates are already plummeting across the planet, and most developed countries already need a steady influx of migrants just to keep their populations steady. The issue is that a baby born today will live for 70-ish years, so there's a large "hump" of overpopulation to deal with before world population growth goes into reverse around 2100.

That "hump going into reverse" theory is predicated on there being no large-scale disaster (war, famine, etc...).

The way things are going, that predicate is rather unlikely.

War or famine would likely speed up reaching that point, not slow it down. Nevertheless, grim Malthusian predictions have been made since the 1700s, and have yet to come to pass.

Developed countries consume the most resources per capita, so their populations could do with a drop - there is no 'need' to keep them steady, but just the opposite.

Developing countries are growing faster than developed countries so their birth rate could do with a drop

As an aside, from what I’ve seen of the USA [0] and Europe [1], Europe is mostly a better place to live, though it is sometimes close.

[0] Bay Area; Central Valley and the mountains on both east and west sides; NorCal; Reno; Salt Lake City; Lower Manhattan; Newark; Providence; Boston/Cambridge & rural coastline in the area

[1] Most of England and Wales, plus Belfast; Paris; Barcelona; South Med coast of Spain; Luxemburg; Amsterdam; the Rhine from the North Sea to Switzerland; Zürich; Bologna; Venice; Stockholm; Helsinki; most major cities in Germany including both Frankfurts; Vienna; Budapest; Athens; Larnaca

If the problem is human population growth then good news, it’s a self limiting problem that won’t outlive the 21st Century.

A world of 1 billion people would be a very comfortable world compared to what people put up with now - this statement is demonstrably false, as such a world existed in 1804, and living conditions were what can only be described as dog poop for almost everyone. 1 billion people is just a figure plucked out of the air, in truth we have no idea what the carrying capacity of the earth is or what the optimal number of people is for long-term human and ecological flourishing.

There are many reasons to hate the human race and to wish billions of people didn’t exist, but philanthropy is not one of them.

The world of 2304 with 1bn humans will be unknowably different from the world of 1804 with 1bn humans. Trying to use the conditions of the past as an axiom in predicting the future is like arguing that a dog will win the Nobel prize because cucumbers are green.

My point was that reducing the human population to 1 billion doesn’t necessarily improve the world, in fact the only known example of a world with 1 billion humans was pretty poor by our standards. Human progress could really improve the 1 billion world of 2304, or it could collapse and conditions end up even worse than the 1804 one. The solution to every problem is not a reduction in human population size.

With that framing we could easily conceive of a pleasant 2304 Earth with 100 billion human inhabitants instead of 1 billion.

Trying to use the conditions of the past as an axiom in predicting the future... Obviously this was a comment on an argument I wasn’t making, but all the same I don’t we can state this quite as strongly. The future and the past are not completely independent of each other, otherwise science and even memory would be impossible. Plenty that is true today was true in 1804 and will hold out to 2304.

> Plenty that is true today was true in 1804 and will hold out to 2304.

Even in man-made paradise man will suffer from things. The things vary but suffering does not.

> Handing out condoms and the pill will do more...

The vast majority of pregnancies are not actually unwanted.

In many poorer countries, children are your pension fund. The only way to humanely lower population growth is to raise living standards.

Luckily, this is happening already - as a consequence, birth rates across the world are now dropping towards replacement levels or below.

"Luckily". Why do people keep seeing this as a positive? Isn't it a disaster? What's the end result of below-replacement birth rates? Extinction? Some new equilibrium where we don't have enough civilization to do social welfare and have to start depending on our own children for old-age care again?

There's no reason to assume lower birth rates would continue all the way to extinction. Even if they don't rise again naturally, they could be raised through explicit policy. In either case, we're a long way from having to worry about extinction due to low birth rates.

Conservative religious minorities (such as Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews) manage to maintain big family sizes and retain 80%+ of their kids in the parents’ religion.

They are small minorities now, but give it a couple of centuries and they may grow to become the majority of the population.

A future dominated by religious conservativism is not the future for which many hope or expect

Just like population growth will not continue indefinitely, neither will population decline.

Below-replacement levels signal that there are a lot of individuals in the pool who are not pre-disposed to reproduce in their current environment.

Over time, this will be selected against, those individuals who are pre-disposed to reproduce will produce more individuals similar to them.

That pre-disposition is genetic to some degree, but it is also cultural. Our society tells women that it's okay to defer birth or to not have children at all. Other societies pressure women to be married with children by the age of 25, before their fertility declines.

From a moral perspective, the former may be preferable, but from a population maintenance perspective, obviously the latter is advantageous.

As for social welfare, obviously there's a looming crisis of elderly care, but it can be mitigated to some degree by immigration.

It's not a problem of amount of resources, it's how they're being used. Have you considered how much waste is produced daily, even just food waste? We all could be living luxuriously if we utilised efficient systems of food production and actually distributed food equally, as an example of just one small aspect.

I remember being a kid working at a bookstore with a cafe, and seeing a homeless man taking the sandwiches tossed out at the end of day from the trash and thinking it's a weird world where if that guy came in 10 minutes before closed and asked for that for free, they'd have to say no way, then ten minutes later they'd throw it in the trash with 4 others that didn't sell that day. I know there's all kinds of factors in play, but it's just weird to think about people being hungry in a world where we throw away so much food.

Population growth and increasing extraction and consumption of natural resources are phenomena that feed each other in a vicious cycle. Note, however, that carbon emission per capita in the US is twice that of China and 8 times that of India [1]. And then you should also take into account that western countries have essentially externalized their carbon emissions to Asian and African countries by moving their manufacturing operations there.

The "very comfortable world" you're describing cannot exist without those billions of poor people slaving away in sweatshops so us westerners can be comfortable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

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