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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

My "modest proposal" for humane population reduction is: every individual is born with the right to have one child. A couple then, can have two children, which is below the natural replacement rate of 2.1 leading to a gradual reduction in human population naturally. People who don't want to have kids or can't for whatever reason could sell their right to others who want to have more than their normal allotment while maintaining the lower-than-natural replacement rate. There are other complexities that would need to be considered and managed but it seems to me to be the most ethical way to reduce population, if that is desired.

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I hope by "modest proposal" you mean "satirical take meant to show how awful people are being", which is the whole point of the original modest proposal.

The big issue isn't the number of people, but the amount of energy and resources they require. The carbon emissions per 1000 people in India is 0.922 metric tons a year. For the United States that number is 19.86 metric tons a year. That's a difference of over 21 times. To put it another way, preventing a single US birth is the equivalent of preventing 21 births in India.

Focusing on the raw population is, and always has been, a distraction that high consuming countries use to ignore their own role in our current environment. This isn't to say that populations should rise forever, but it's pretty common for countries that reach higher levels of developments to have their population growth level off. Reducing poverty is by far the best and most ethical way to combat booming population growth.

True. My modest proposal is that we increase population at least to 100 billion (= 100 000 000 000) - or even more!

Number of people does not matter.

I don't see why I want to reduce human population.

The real problem isn't population but our insane demand and energy intensive process needed to support the lifestyle of the global wealthy.

Put it this way: Cars required insurance, road infrastructure, gasoline or battery, steel, electronics, etc to make car a viable transportation option both for logistics and to drive people around in general.

Whereas we could have invested in rails which required less of everything to do the same thing. Even better if we use bicycles more, which is the most efficient form of transportation.

A car is a luxury that we made into a requirement pretty much everywhere in north America, which in turn makes our lifestyle more expensive than it needed to be.

So, in short, we should reduce the demand of unnecessary products(like cars). Then we can think about to make stuff in a more efficient manner and more green manner, or find more efficient products, such as using heat pumps.

> A car is a luxury that we made into a requirement pretty much everywhere in north America, which in turn makes our lifestyle more expensive than it needed to be. So, in short, we should reduce the demand of unnecessary products(like cars).

This is a nice halfpinion, but the entire country can't essentially be some monolithic ecumenopolis like Mega-City One or Coruscant. I'd think most people here would love to see a few more efficient transportation options, more walkable suburbs, and other things you're describing, but there's certain infrastructure that can't really work in a suburban or rural setting. Cars, or something very much like them, are a necessity in areas where food is grown and everything is spread out.

Personally speaking, I'm not worried about the general theme of overpopulation/climate change because nuclear energy has already solved human needs.

> So, in short, we should reduce the demand of unnecessary products(like cars).

Yeah, good luck with that.

I live in city in India with relatively less population density than most metropolitan cities and my colleagues want to buy cars because "it'll be easier to drive".

The city of Bangalore is notorious for its insanely bad traffic and yet I've heard people living still wanting to purchase cars. The reason is that "it's better to be inside a car in traffic than outside".

If nothing else, people fall back to "what if there's a medical emergency?"

It feels like there's no escaping cars.

You think this is ethical? Clearly you have a very different ethics that I do. Also, this propsal is unnecessary and shows complete lack of demographic transition - we already know how to stop population growth in an ethical way and that is to improve healthcare, education (especially women), and general economic welfare. No other solutions necessary, nor have proven to be effective.

The enforcement of this ends up treating all the corner cases in really inhumane ways. And in order to even get there you need to go through the more progressive stage of actually making sure that contraception and abortion are available.

Have you just described what went on in China?

It was an equal system. But you've just missed out the bit on what options are available to those that are a bit more equal and what happens to those that violate the rule.

You lost me at "selling their right". It is important to understand that "selling" and "right" should not appear in the same sentence when the said right is being addressed as a basic right. It opens room for abuse even in well administered jurisdictions.

You don't need a modest proposal for human population reduction. As soon as having a lot of children stop being a necessity for survival in old age, population naturally seems to stop at an average of two children simply because for most it's not enjoyable to have more.

That's a really weird idea of 'ethics'. How would you enforce this policy? You can't ethically take away 'extra' kids, you can't reasonably fine them, nor can you prevent extra kids from being born.

Any system capable of enforcing any of the above methods would inevitably be a severe ethical violation of some form.

Does not work. Education and access to medicine does.

Well I agree that those work as well. I am afraid your post is too pithy about "does not work" to credit that bit though.

As we have seen in China, if you limit the number of children people become selective about them. In this case in regards to gender, which will develop into a large problem for the country in the future because they now have very unbalanced demographics. This will doom a lot of people to have no partner.

China’s birth rate is arguably declining because basic needs (housing) and child needs (education and child care) became expensive, applying back pressure on fertility (which is why the CCP and Xi is pushing “common prosperity” hard). People are selective on children already, which I don’t see a problem with; this is a natural result of a free society with healthcare where you can selectively terminate pregnancies you don’t want. During IVF, we were offered the option to sequence the genome of candidate embryos and pick which we wanted based on traits. The future is now.

If this creates cohorts without the ability to partner up, them the breaks of free will and socioeconomic forces. Population ballooned, and it will be painful as it contracts. Humanity ran up the credit card of population growth, and it will have to be paid back (socioeconomically speaking, with unrest and economic contraction) .

People did abort girls more than boys so that there now are about 30% more boys than girls. Aborting girls was mainly done due to cultural and financial issues. This is nothing short of a catastrophe for the younger generation.

“What is the future owed?” is a complex issue. It’s an intergenerational compact, and the scope boundary is going to be fuzzy. I would argue future generations are owed robust human rights, a reasonably clean and non polluted environment, and the opportunity to live a purposeful life with dignity. Ensuring someone has a partner would fall out of scope.

I admit we’ve sort of painted ourselves into a corner and the deleveraging is going to be a bit wild over the next few decades.

I think what was taken from these generations compares to humanities darkest chapters. Fact remains that government cannot really control how people conceive children and it should not. Education can support people making individual choices.

What's your proposal for handling births that exceed allotment?

Stew, probably.

The Chinese had effective ways of dealing with excess births during the 1 child policy era.

Mussolini was known to be effective in keeping the trains on time, too.

I actually don't think overpopulation is the problem. It's the way we're going about resource usage that's the problem. If people stayed home more, grow food and instead of focus on society feeding them, they feed themselves we wouldn't be inundated with non-stop scale issues. As insane as it sounds distributed technologies seem to be saving tech - it can save humanity too. We just don't train people to be like that. Instead we teach greed and outperforming the next guy.

Overpopulation is not a problem because the current population is under the limit of the amount of people the Earth can feed and most models think the current trend will reverse before we pass that point. For the rest, you have it backward. The only reason we can feed that many people is the green revolution. Subsistence farming is simply not productive enough. It would have led to famine as soon as sixty years ago.

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