Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Given our demonstrated inability to act as responsible stewards for the limited resources available to us on this planet—not to mention one another in the face of this scarcity—perhaps we would stand a better chance of being a healthier and happier society as a population of 700 million rather than 7 billion?

To be clear, I understand that getting there will be undeniably painful given our economic systems’ expectations of and reliance upon indefinite and unlimited growth. But such an outcome may be unavoidable in any case and it’s one I’d rather see us plan for and soften the impact of than continue to rush blindly into.

I just don’t believe any more that the Earth can support the number of people we have at anything vaguely shaped like a modern Western lifestyle for much longer. We can and should continue to try to reduce our rate of consumption. But we’re too big at this point to have many good solutions left. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re running out of usable sand.

I decided to have children early, my first at 25 and I tapped out at 3. I would have been happy with less, God knows how much easier my life would be if I didn't have to deal with that part of life. Maybe I would have continued my postdoc longer, wouldn't have to worry about buying a house big enough, and being tied down.

Most people say kids are worth it, and it teaches you something about yourself, and that's certainly true. It's not a requirement though to have that appreciation, but I think there is actual utility to bringing healthy adjusted kids into the worth. Maybe we will reach some sort of grand equilibrium in the future with everyone having exactly 2 kids (more likely we go down a different path before then), but now is not that time. We have a lot of challenges, and unless people actually make the sacrifices and try and raise kids better than themselves, they're going to be better adapted to the future world than we are.

I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million? Maybe just one atomic family (though that would be biblically fucked up), maybe a small town of 2000 would make more sense, add in a few for redundancy, more than enough sand to go around, we'll just run the whole thing. Getting down to 700 million you realize would entail forced castration for almost everyone, are you imagining some dystopian society where we castrate and separate into breeders? I just don't see how your solution is at all plausible in the first place. I'm sure we have 700 million people alive no now under 20. So what's the plan, create a political party?

There is no need to specifically pursue this policy: it works out this way economically anyway. As it getting harder and less convenient to have children, populations growth slows down. If there will be time of prosperity ahead, it will pick up.

The wealthier the population, the fewer kids people need.

> I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million?

I’m not advocating for that number as a limit. I’m proposing we consider that a smaller population in general may be a good thing over the long run. A factor of ten was simply an easy value to reach for to jumpstart a discussion.

Pretty much any country that approaches development and has equal rights for women leads to a birth rate bellow replacement level. You don't need to castrate anyone, you give women education, birth control, require dual incomes to effectively survive as a family unit, equal rights and an (semi-)urban lifestyle and it pretty much shakes out to that automatically. Eventually the issue will be to have enough children, and an economic model that that can deal with shrinking old populations without horrific consequences.

There is only 77 countries that are above the replacement rate and it's going down everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

The main problem with degrowth is that it's typically a losing strategy when there are competitors that choose growth.

This would definity create some issues if the change would be fast but also there would be some possitive side effects where it would solve few problems, e.g. if population over time decreases by 50% suddenly current real estates problems would be much easier to solve.

Who's going to do the maintenance on the existing housing stock? Who's going to demolish the decrepit and abandoned buildings?

Real estate is not really a space problem; we have a lot of nice, uninhabited land all over the globe. The problem is that people want to live near denser areas for various reasons and reducing the world population will (probably) only reduce the number of dense areas, but not the housing problem within them.

I suspect these two problems are not as unrelated as they initially seem. My criticism is of modern western lifestyle where value is the unit dollar. I fully agree with your premise. But I’m not sure I feel good about the answer being “population regulation” (which has it’s own implementation issues). There has to be another way…

I’m not suggesting we cap the number of children. I’m saying that it’s maybe not a bad thing in the long run if more and more people choose not to have kids (or choose to have fewer).

When the sand market reaches a certain point, enterprising people will discover new sources of sand.

Degrowth doesn't work. We take a huge hit in our standard of living if we decrease the number of people on the planet.

And you don’t anticipate the same thing happening anyway as we find fewer and fewer economically-viable resources each year?

We are blowing through the financial inheritance left to us and sooner or later that well will run dry (to wantonly mix metaphors).

This is flat out incorrect. Depopulation events (like plague) in over-populated areas historically led to higher standard of living for the remaining.

Depends how it happens.

To put it callously, old people can't work much and consume lots of resources, so a plague that kills them off (however sad) actually makes life easier for everyone else.

But lower fertility rates have the opposite effect, the ratio of old people to young people increases, which is why it makes things harder.

There's a good chance AI and robotics can replace a big portion of human workforce. If that happens, then the high ratio of old people to young is no longer a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com