4 ms·
It's time to question economic growth. We cannot change the whole economy with a green one, we simply don't have the resources. This is just one example of many
by lpcam33 8y ago
It's time to question economic growth. We cannot change the whole economy with a green one, we simply don't have the resources. This is just one example of many. What we need it's to take care of what we have right now and create conditions for people to have a good live regardless the economy is growing or not.
- maxerickson 8y agoFirst step to creating conditions for 7 or 8 billion people to have good lives is to massively grow the economy.
- FooHentai 8y agoCongrats you grew the economy. Now you have 16 billion people.
- BaesRule 8y agoWe see lower birth rates when countries grow richer. People have a lot more kids when there's a high chance a lot of their kids won't live long enough to support their parents in old age. Also in richer countries people aren't relying on their kids to support them in old age as much as in poorer countries.
- quotemstr 8y agoNo, FooHentai is right. We're screwed, Malthus-style, in the long run no matter what we do. The problem is that while modernism does tend to moderate fertility, it doesn't do so across the board. Some subgroups nevertheless have fertility far above replacement, and the exponential growth function tells us that these high-fertility groups will come to dominate the population. In other words, selection pressure ---biological, cultural, doesn't matter --- always wins in the end. Mother nature has the last laugh.
- guntars 8y agoOh, please mention some of these subgroups by name.
- quotemstr 8y agoThe point I'm making is independent of whatever trap you're trying to set --- the specific groups don't matter. As long as some group has high fertility and is able to pass on this high fertility to future generations, the dynamic I'm describing applies.
- guntars 8y agoYour reasoning just reminded me of that of some confused individuals that see everything in purely biological terms. Fertility alone isn’t some silver bullet for the success of a population, even for bacteria and ever more so for people. Why isn’t there already a dominant Uber-fertile group?
- maxerickson 8y agoSo far the evidence is that prosperity reduces (and even reverses) population growth.
- FooHentai 8y agoCorrelation is not causation
- maxerickson 8y agoShish kebab is skewered, grilled meat.
- Gibbon1 8y agoDoesn't work is massively growing the economy pulls the roof over our head. Considering if we do the worlds poor are the ones to suffer. That 3 bedroom ranch style house in Bangladesh doesn't help anyone if it's under 2m of sea water.
- Turing_Machine 8y agoThe only possible way that the billions of people in the Third World will ever have anything approaching a "good life" is by massive economic growth.