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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is right that comparatively few people have really bent their heads around this. But I am reminded of the Club of Rome studies in the 1970s, when a more Malthusian future seemed inevitable.

Trends don't necessarily continue; very often, they change the circumstance that gave rise to the trend in some way. When populations are half what they are now, housing will likely be cheaper, wages higher, the share of wealth controlled by the elderly lower. Maybe that will change the trend.

Interesting times coming. Not necessarily happy ones, but.

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A lot of the 19th and 20th century thinking on population growth was completely up-ended by several major advances: first the Haber-Bosch process of fixing atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia/fertilizer (and now "Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process"), then the discovery of antibiotics (which basically enables modern surgery), modern sanitization, and so on. And since then we've been changing things so fast that I don't think it's easy to predict what things will look like 3 generations from now. What happens if we figure out fusion in 100 years, and fusion power does to several other industries what Haber-Bosch did for agriculture? What if we figure out some major part of human cell senescence and people live to 200-300?

Interesting times coming, to be sure. But I'm a bit more optimistic. We figure things out, eventually.

I don't know that I'm pessimistic. I think it is hard to forecast. Fusion has been coming in 50 years for at least 60 years. Antibiotics increasingly face problems with resistant strains. Etc.

> When populations are half what they are now, housing will likely be cheaper

I thought like this, but pondering a bit, climate change and associated sea level rise will probably destroy many coastal properties where a lot of people live today, so I suspect this alone will delay housing affordability return for at least one generation. See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/28/coastal-communities...

When populations are half what they are now, housing will be much lower than half the capacity of what it is now. Housing requires constant expensive maintenance (as anyone with a house will quickly point out), but when population is half what it is now it won't be a random sampling of our current population. It will overwhelmingly be geriatric and unable to perform the maintenance that keeps houses from crumbling into the ground.

Nothing about a shrinking population makes for a strong economy.

Nah. It will happen gradually and the existence of older housing that is still viable if not work-free will reduce the costs. Older people will for sure be spending some saved wealth on this, and worker wages will go up.

Well, that's a separate issue. Even if true, it will make the situation less bad than it otherwise would be.

But disasters don't usually make things that bad in the longer term -- the big effect is that it forces us to spend money, which tends to improve the economy, at a cost to stored wealth.

Abandoned houses with no youthful labor to repair will have little value as a place to live. It’s not like available housing in Montana will change prices near NYC.

It would be wise to build today for service life of whatever is being built (housing, infrastructure, etc) that anticipates many less humans available in the future to maintain.

That just front-loads a cost that is no more affordable today than it will be later. Everything is so expensive now that we're constantly trying to cut corners just to be able to pay for it. We can't add another 80% (or more) to that so that old geezers 100 years from now won't have to put new shingles on the roof.

Building for longer lifespans is generally fairly cheap. You’d be amazed with how far a 10% larger budget can take you, but builders are selling to buyers who don’t really understand the trade offs.

Skyscrapers are inherently more expensive to build and maintain than smaller buildings, so a significantly smaller global population gets more efficient housing automatically.

The way it works in the western world is that small population areas are so low density its mainly detached single family buildings. Many old and poorly insulated by todays standards. Not a lot of very small attached building style towns and villages being made these days. People like space it seems over absolute efficiency.

Labor prices will go up but scarcity will go down. People will end up doing more of their own labor, in all likelihood, but I still think it is likely to help.

> When populations are half what they are now

The people in charge in the west are not going to let this happen. Look at Canada.

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