> Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly
Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?
Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?
I've grown convinced people are overwhelmingly an asset. In a rough sense that means they/we produce more value than they consume on average.
I think debates about population size are mostly really about this difference.
The "debate" for many people is whether this simplistic economic model can be used at all. They say that value is multi-dimensional, and those value dimensions are not fungible. Concretely, if making a medicine factory results in the extinction of a specie, you can't say that it is okay, because the benefit of the former is incomparable to the loss of the latter.
Coming to population, more humans mean more destruction of ecosystems. And it is not clear whether destroying ecosystems can be fungibly compared to the additional human economic value those extra humans create. It's not about more or less, it the incomparability of the two.
[1] but not necessarily what you meant
[2] Just to be clear, the economics discipline already has a wealth of research that humans cannot in fact consistently assign absolute or relative dollar values to the same thing. Yet our political-economy and popular conceptions have this as a central assumption.
This argues against something I didn't say and don't believe.
And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very very fast. The burdens are really piling up.
I'm not saying we need less population at present.
I'm just saying that at some point the cost outweighs the benefit. And humanity has been trying pretty hard to go toward that point.
Do you really think it will always, always be better to have more people? If you say no to this, then you don't get to say we're on different sides of the line. If you say yes, then you need to explain how that's physically possible.
Not that there is anything wrong with disagreeing with me on this.
Two point as a taste:
1. One way more people is always better is in invention. Ten billon heads invent more than one.
2. People always worry that with more people there will be food shortage. They are also always empirically wrong. Because food is made by people! Twice as many people means twice as many farmers!
I don't think we even have a way to put one billion people to work on optimized farms. More labor won't lead to more full mouths.
As an example of costs catching up, going from 20% of land to 30% of land needing to be optimized farms used to feed people directly? That's easy enough, and those numbers would support more people than we have today. Going from 80% to 90%, however, is extremely worrying. And we could go from the former to the latter and past it very fast too.
It’s not the number of humans, it’s the age distribution of those humans + where they live.
Put another way: you can “feel” like the world needs fewer people, but you’re probably not going to like what your world looks like when that desire comes true.
Pensions is a big one, another one is care for elders.
It's not a problem if we had eased up to say 1 billion and stayed there, but the rate of change is quite abrupt.
And it is very, very ,very clear this is a horribly stupid and shortsighted thing to do. It is simply impossible to have constant growth, clearly it is unsustainable.
The system HAS to change. It might be from a slow and steady decline, or it might be a very abrupt change, but it's going to change one way or another.
The real problem is the transition period where there are more unproductive people than not, because the stock of existing people is still here. That's why a crashing population is bad.
If this is the case, even a steady state would mean a lowered standard of living.
It's hard to know, as our societies have decided to reduce costs on the front end (lowered birth rate) rather than on the back end (decreased longevity). That's understandable as someone who is never born doesn't suffer, but it's the worse solution from a social maintenance standpoint.
Assuming we only get this planet though, I suppose it couldn't've gone like this forever haha.
Further, people alive in 2300 will be decedents of people who chose to have kids generation after generation despite living in an industrialized environment. That self selection both in terms of DNA and culture means a population bounce back becomes increasingly likely over time especially as fewer people means less pollution and less competition for resources.
Humanity might even end up cycling through industrialization, collapse, hunter gatherers, agriculture, industrialization, multiple times before settling on some stable equilibrium. You just can’t extrapolate exponential curves indefinitely when they depend on the population size.
TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV, since the optimal solution seems relentless expansionism like a virus.
I do, because second-person collectively-singular Humanity is a living thing all its own, and the more humans there are the more alive We are. Your argument is the anthropological equivalent of “640K ought to be enough for anybody”.
Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's something that needs higher population.
I don't see how higher population necessarily makes humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems like saying that an individual human is more human if they weigh more.
Try ketamine some time with good sensory deprivation — comfy bed, silk sleep mask, ear plugs :)
In your world governments forceably breed humans like chickens in massive factory farms churning out people to the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't want to live there and I sure as hell don't find it moral.
The whole point is that if you accept the fact that expanding population is good a priori, this leads to stupid conclusions by the tyranny of exponential growth. Who cares if the average person is a slave when you have several hundred billion of them. Who cares if mothers die horribly after being forced to carry child after child.
Personally I think the only consistent viewpoint is some form of logarithmic population * average well being metric to measure utility. From that perspective, I have no clue how a policy maker should act today. Hopefully smarter minds than mine figure it out!
Maybe if you're evil enough to not care about any individual human's quality of life. Is there a word for the logical fallacy where you argue against the most absurd possible interpretation of a person's beliefs in order to feel no guilt for disregarding them?
This is the standard issue with any aggregate utilitarianism theories of morality.
https://utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/
It's a stupid idea that's been soundly rejected because it posits arbitrarily bad living conditions since "anything" is better than nothing.