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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?

This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.

USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)

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> This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false.

Me having a child would make me poorer. Which is true. Because I'd have to pay for the child's food and living expenses. That's what I meant. It's an individual decision.

>>Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?

>This implies that more people make society poorer.

Not really. The implication is that children’s are a costly investment, and as I see it; there’s a big overlap of people decrying the decline of birth rate, and people supporting politician who support slashing the budget that might help people raising children e.g. school lunch programs.

It makes no difference if society reaps the rewards on the long term if individuals can’t afford to cost that investment because it was decried as an irresponsible decision.

> People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more

This is true only in some regards. There's a finite amount of natural resources that can be extracted from the planet, perhaps most tangible in terms of food. There's only so much more land that can be made into farmland, and it will only produce so much in terms of crop yields. We're already sort of pushing it in this regard. This food needs to be divided among the world population, somehow. Adding more workers won't miraculously double the amount of arable land.

There's only so much food that can be produced before we all need to lower our standard of living to feed everyone. Like yeah we can feed more people that way, but we'd all be eating insect gruel. I don't think that can be regarded as increasing the standard of living.

> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.

Are we ignoring all the human history involving societies that collapsed or went through ecological and/or violent struggles?

Pre-plague Britain had terrible living conditions and over population. Living conditions for the survivors immediately rose after a huge chunk of the population was removed. Other civilizations that were overpopulated had huge amounts of population move to greener pastures, such as the Saxons.

Fish, livestock, forests, land are all finite and we're already consuming them at such rate that by the end of the century our planet will become a desert. Adding a few more billions people won't help the matter. Solar ans other clean energy won't create more food and land. What would help is a drastic novel method of resources management.

> People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more.

Not at all, people don't create resources, we consume resources.

> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down.

As long as we believe in infinite exponential growth. Instead we are starting to hit the wall and it time to stop dreaming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

Oh.. just that problem about our space ship not having infinite resources.. looking into the past won't help for seeing the rebound of the sigmoid curve..

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