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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

World population is still increasing.

It's climbed from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 7.8 billion in 2020.

If world poulation halved we'd still be at 1975 population levels .. a time when the world functioned.

> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.

We live on a finite planet with limited resources, the notion of unlimited growth being essential for continued status quo is flawed thinking.

Our greatest challenge as a species on this planet is to learn how to live well within our means.

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Your reasoning is very flawed for a single reason. If by let’s say 2075 the population was reduced to 1975 levels, the demographics would still differ widely.

1. Age distribution would look like an inverted pyramid instead of a pyramid

2. The geographical, racial/ethnical and cultural demographics would also look like the totally different. The share of global population of the global south, which is currently highly dysfunctional, would be drastically more important, especially in the younger age groups.

Note that the increase of wealth of the “third world” is mainly due to China / India, followed a bit by Indonesia / Bangladesh / Vietnam. Nearly all of them have already a TFR < 2.1

Other countries’ economies even lost complexity and the share of their economies that are basically commodity exports increased

> racial/ethnical and cultural demographics would also look like the totally different

Why is this a problem?

Not an issue per se. It shows the limit of the analogy used by defrost to justify such a world would be as functional as 1975’s was.

The basic assumption that the two situations are similar is just… false

Four billion is a goal that doesn't happen overnight, ergo it takes decades to get there during which time global education continues to improve and the application of automation to bulk resource handling increases.

Today, in my state, we extract and move more raw iron ore for steel production per year by a considerable factor more than the US ever achieved, and with far fewer people per tonne - largely due to better techniques and automation.

If you look about the world as it is you will realise that we are capable of having greater production and better lifestyles across the globe with a lower population and less by product from consumption than we do today.

The means and levels of consumption today are problematic to say the least.

> If world poulation halved we'd still be at 1975 population levels .. a time when the world functioned.

The prosperity was much lower than. The scientific advancement even lower.

We won't lose knowledge by returning to 1975 population numbers, nor will we lose the ability to expand our scientific understanding.

The knowledge gains of recent decades did not ride on the back of population growth.

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