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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

This is well meaning but ridiculous. The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. More births are decidedly unhelpful. This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal. Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration. Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty.

As far as I can see there isn't enough for everyone to do now anyway, even before AI really comes into its own.

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> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita.

Aside from fossil fuels, no, this is not the biggest problem. And for fossil fuels it's more a problem of lack of disposal resource for the CO2, not the fossil fuels themselves.

> Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty.

The industrial revolution increased productivity x100 and poverty still exists. We could materially solve it right now, easily. It's designed to be like that

Depends on definiton of poverty. In many places, it has moved from living in objectively deprived conditions, to just being in the bottom centiles of population.

> Depends on definiton of poverty.

People dying of hunger, people not having clean water, people dying because the $5 antibiotic shot isn't available in their country, &c.

I don't care about relative poverty here, aka poverty threshold, which is by definition a moving threshold. For exemple in France the poverty threshold is defined as 60% of the median income, it doesn't tell you much about the "real" poverty

It's not designed like that. If there were no poverty in the world, GDP would be much higher and opportunities for trade much bigger - but how to get there is anyone's guess.

> If there were no poverty in the world, GDP would be much higher and opportunities for trade much bigger

It's almost as if GDP doesn't mean jack shit since it's been completely misused from its intended purpose

Not sure I understand your point in relation to mine.

Generally, GDP means a lot in relation to other indicators (including those for well-being).

Nope, GDP is a completely outdated and next to useless metric, as any metric is when it becomes a target instead of a measurement. Some countries include illegal prostitution and illegal drug traffic in their GDP for exemple.

GDP was an OK metric in a post war industrial world, not in whatever we could call what we're dealing with since the 90s, and even more since most of our "production" are services, GDP was just not meant to deal with that, not in any way that is meaningful to us in this discussion (and on top of that it is much better at measuring quantities than qualities)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gdp-is-the-wrong-...

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-ke....

Criticism of GDP is old and, yet, it endures and correlates well with a lot relevant things. So, I'd not ignore or discard it.

It's the economic equivalent of assessing productivity of a developper by the number of commits a they push.

Like yeah sure it tells you things, a very narrow set on things

Not really.

Well no, no we can't. That has been one of the issues that comes up every time someone does a quick check of what it would take for everyone to live even an average North American lifestyle, let alone something considered very comfortable by a US standard.

We don't have the coal, we don't have the oil, we don't have the copper, the steel, the yadda yadda. Earth overshoot day was apparently last month. Less births is almost literally the only humane way I can think of to improve on that situation. That or cheap energy; the situation is hopeful on that front but we don't need to purposefully goose the birth rate since maybe something will go wrong with plan A.

> an average North American lifestyle

That's very very very far from poverty...

What about everyone living like the average eastern european ? That's already a 2-10x drop of wealth, still far from poverty

There’s an inhuman way as well: the US, faced with declining standard of living, decides to use the fact that it has 12 super aircraft carriers and the 1, 2, 4, and 6th largest air forces - to ensure that standard of living stays where it is.

Who said we’d choose the humane option?

> we don't have the steel

We have the steel, there is no way we run out of it, we could wrap the entire earth in steel coating and still not run out, and that is just what we have easily available.

By definition there will be no poverty when all resources are distributed equally, which will never happen.

That's "poverty" as in "poverty threshold", that's not the only definition of the word.

You're talking about "I can't buy the brand new iphone max pro" poverty while we have the "I will lose my hands to leprosy because the 10$ antibiotics were too expensive" poverty

My apologies. I stand corrected.

The share of the world population in extreme poverty has gone down by about 80% since 1960. And the number of people in extreme poverty has gone down by about 2/3 since 1970.

It's getting better. Not as fast as it could or should, but it's getting better!!

Is it truly getting better, though, when the engine of improvement depends on ecological overshoot? We cannot sustain this; we're not even trying.

A gambler living the high life in Vegas, all paid for by opening one new credit card after another, would undoubtedly tell you that his life is getting better, too.

“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

Malthusian takes like this are incorrect. I'd like to see where you were informed how "more births are decidedly unhelpful."

> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita.

People keep saying this, but it’s been proven wrong over and over again since the 19th century. Malthus was wrong.

> This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal.

It’s not “nature.” It’s the result of anti-natalist eugenics ideology created by mainline Protestants in the 20th century in response to a moral panic about rising Catholic and black populations. They exported that ideology around the world through NGOs in the form of population control ideology. (My dad started his career at a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Bangladesh figuring out how to have less Bangladeshis. Planned Parenthood, of course, was started by Margaret Sanger, an Episcopalian and eugenicist.) East Asian countries that bought that ideology are now desperately trying to reverse the effects.

> Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration.

You can’t maintain a developed society with mass immigration. Sweden and Denmark have already reverse course on immigration and I expect the rest of Western Europe will follow.

1) I instinctively agree with 'roenxi', but I'd also agree that I don't have a solid basis for this belief. Could you expand on your claim that Malthus was wrong, as opposed to just too early in his prediction?

2) Have even lawyers like you dropped the 'fewer' vs 'less' distinction? I would have thought that you were old and conservative enough that 'less Bangladeshis' would be to grating to write. :)

Malthusians repeatedly fail to account for technological advancement. There's numerous studies estimating the carrying capacity of earth at above 10-20 billion (figures we likely will never reach): https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_C... (see p. 3).

When my dad was born in 1951, Bangladesh had a population of 38 million. People already thought it was full. Now, it has a population of 171 million. At the same time, infant mortality decreased by 7/8ths, so it is now lower in Bangladesh than it was in the U.S. in the 1960s. The country is now self-sufficient in the production of rice, fish, and vegetables. And Bangladesh hasn't even begun to maximize technology. The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, despite being 1/3 the size of Bangladesh (which itself is only a bit bigger than Virginia): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/net....

Regarding "fewer" versus "lesser": I'm usually pretty pedantic about that, but I think my brain fed me "lesser" to convey, in the context of that sentence, how population control advocates tend to view Asians as an undifferentiated mass.

> There's numerous studies estimating the carrying capacity of earth at above 10-20 billion (figures we likely will never reach): https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_C... (see p. 3).

But the majority [0] of studies on p. 3 suggest the carrying capacity is 8 billion or less. And I suspect that if we dig most of those studies aren't anticipating everyone lives with an overwhelming abundance of material comfort. We've already got more people on the globe than we know what to do with.

[0] Technical correctness, the best type.

My point is that higher ceilings are plausible given certain assumptions. And I expect technological improvement will make those more aggressive assumptions into realistic and likely ones.

The url doesn’t work

The one in the GP worked for me: https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_C...

Thanks!

> 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty.

1-2 billion people living a jet-set lifestyle would be far harder on our planet than 10 billion not.

> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita.

Just incredibly wrong about this

Scarcity arguments have always been the domain of fear mongers. A much more concrete problem is the environmental impact of resource availability, the opposite of what you are saying. As the world gets richer, we will succeed at providing material wealth to the growing population... But at what cost?

It is desirable to limit population growth nonetheless, and I think this will happen naturally, although possibly not soon enough.

I don't have any magic bullet for reducing population growth; helping the poor get wealthier and more educated faster should help bring birth rates to just below the 2.1 children per couple (replacement rate) and get us to a soft landing.

> Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration

This directly leads to political instability and lowered wages for the local population, and is decidedly not helpful.

Why in the world should we engineer a society that is not self replicating, and burden our children with lower wages, just to save big businesses (who are the only people who thrive when importing labor).

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