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I have two conflicting thoughts about this: 1) I controversially think the world is currently underpopulated. Yes, as a species we need to get our pollution an

by Mizza 7y ago

I have two conflicting thoughts about this: 1) I controversially think the world is currently underpopulated. Yes, as a species we need to get our pollution and resource management under control, but we need to do that at any population size. Once pollution and water is properly handled with technology, there should be enough landmass to handle 20B+ people. That's 10 billion extra potential scientists and artists to propel our species forward. 2) I am terrified that the idea that populations stabilize once a certain level of development and women's education is reached is false and not culturally universal. It seems like a very important untested assumption. If it isn't true, and we continue to see exponential population growth in developed second world countries but not in first world countries, I think that the disruption to the status quo and fear of aggression could lead to massive global wars of the kind we've never seen before.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
The current population uses more resources than sustainable each and every year, and does so at increasing rate. Species, habitats and forests are going at unprecedented rate. We show no signs at all of handling soil, pollution and water properly. Yet you conclude there's not enough of us ruining the place yet?
- Wintamute 7y ago
  No signs at all? All green technology, efficiency improvement and conservation initiatives globally add up to zero in your book? Most reasonable people agree there's much more to be done, perhaps that we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what should be done, but to dismiss it is absurd. We should celebrate and applaud initiatives that are heading in the right direction - for example, UK power plants recently went 5 days with zero coal burning emissions, the longest coal free streak since the industrial revolution.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    All those people in India/China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars, and absent a force restricting them from it, they’re going to trend towards it as they get richer. Actually, best hope might be concentrating all jobs in very urban areas and making it costly to get into relationships/have children so women themselves opt out of it and drop the birth rate as they wouldn’t be able to afford the amenities they want.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > those people in India/China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars Source? The world’s population is urbanising. That trend shows no sign of slowing.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        I don't have a good source, other than experience of myself, family, and friends. But once people's kids reach school age, I don't see families sticking around inner cities unless they can afford private school and a nice big apartment, or they're too poor to move out to suburbs where they can stretch out and have some space. The world is urbanizing, but perhaps that is also one of the causes of declining birth rates, as it's not as desirable to raise a family in small, urban apartments.
    - thefounder 7y ago
      Birth rates decrease in developed worlds anyway.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Below replacement levels? Also, is that going to be common across all cultures?
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Not zero, but miles from enough. It's a game of brinkmanship with real action pushed far into the future. Certainly UK is dropping coal quickly, and I'm not dismissing that. Yet government has made onshore wind, and domestic solar far more difficult. They're promoting biomass - via imported mature cut wood, and encouraging gas. Drax is still our biggest emitter and an environmental mess. Farming is continuing to ignore decades-long warnings of soil decline, forests globally are still being clear cut and burned for cattle or palm oil. Recycling has become "export the problem and forget about it". Wind, solar and electric vehicles have become viable, yet despite that, overall emissions are still increasing. So beginning to scratch the surface is about right. Real government actions are still avoided.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Real government action harms the greatest consumers of resources most, those people have the resources to buy politicians. It ain't going to happen easily when the rich-and-powerful's self interests are served by maintaining a foil, a semblance, of environmental concern. Great, you're recycling the plastic food trays your meat is shipped half-way around the World in. Now, ditch the car and use public transport; change your company marketing processes to prefer economy to profit ... oh that's right, you're too important to have to do those sorts of things.
  - piokoch 7y ago
    Yes, but that's because large percentage (70% what I can remember) came from nuclear power plants. If it hadn't been for the "green" movement who spent past 30 years fighting "dangers" of atomic energy maybe we would have been in totally different place and we wouldn't have to worry about global warming, air pollution, etc.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      UK nuclear never gets over about 20-25%. The current - and still ongoing - UK coal-free run, has been on the back of gas (30%), wind(25%) and nuclear(20%). Overall figures as obviously wind and solar can vary widely on individual days. Biomass and solar, and a little bit of hydro make up the rest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_electricity_production_by_source.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/... Almost 11 days without coal: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/may/25/the-power-switch-tracking-britains-record-coal-free-run https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...
- Mizza 7y ago
  Problems are soluble. This is the first time our species has encountered this problem, and will solve it or we will die. I think we will solve it. Regardless, we need to solve it at 8 billion or 20 billion. The thing that will solve it is people, and we need more of them and more of them working on the problem.
- krzyk 7y ago
  > Species, habitats and forests are going at unprecedented rate. Do you have a source for that claim? What I see is that more and more species are put under protection, which wasn't the case e.g. in 19th century.
flr03 7y ago
I don't get the point about women education, can you elaborate ?
- Mizza 7y ago
  I've read that the education of women seems to be the thing which has the biggest impact on lowering birth rates in developing nations. Educated women can work better jobs and leave the home more. I'd guess that part of it is also basic sex education about reproduction and contraception, as well as delaying when they start having children if they're still in school.
  - tropo 7y ago
    Well we had this article, severely flagged it seems, about a guy who raised 12 children. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027423 His "wife has several degrees in math, accounting, business, statistics" according to another article he wrote: https://qz.com/248623/how-to-talk-to-your-adult-children-so-they-might-actually-listen/ https://qz.com/248623/how-to-talk-to-your-adult-children-so-... His kids all went off to college, married likewise, and are now popping out grandkids at an astonishing rate. His youngest kids are still in college, and already his 12 kids have given him 18 grandkids. That is 1.5 each, after an average of about 7 years post-college life. If that keeps up, it'll be about 4.5 each in that generation, which is a regression to the mean but still quite large for modern America. So yes, culture (or DNA) matters more than education.
- Jedd 7y ago
  The late, great Christopher Hitchens spoke frequently about this subject -- and it's as good an introduction as any to the hypothesis. Do a web search on, say: christopher hitchens empowerment of women ... and watch a few videos where the explanation is eloquently and humorously laid out, along with some reasons why certain parts of various societies are not keen on it happening.
saagarjha 7y ago
> It seems like a very important untested assumption. Hasn't it pretty well tested as countries have industrialized in the last century?
- Mizza 7y ago
  In Western countries that place a high value on equality (Europe/US) and countries with strong authoritarian governments (China). I think it's a big untested assumption to assume that what happened in Norway will happen in India and Nigeria.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    It's already happened in India, and is well underway in Nigeria: 1. India's fertility rate decreased from 5.91 to 2.33 from 1960 to 2016. 2. Nigeria's fertility rate has decreased more slowly, but that reflects the lower state of development in Nigeria. It's moving along the same curve as all the other developing countries moved along. The countries around Nigeria that have developed further have seen the same dramatic drops in fertility rate that countries elsewhere in the world have seen. https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&tunit=Y&pit=-302817600000&ind=false&icfg&iconSize=0.5 https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
peteradio 7y ago
I don't believe having 10 billion extra potential scientists would improve outcome. Division of labor is always the hard part, there isn't a shortage of smart people.
dexen 7y ago
>2) relation between women's education and total fertility Going by this map from 2018 [1], we can safely call it tested and confirmed in pretty much every country where women's education is the rule rather than the exception. Even India is marked as under 3. And the charts I've been shown recently (unfortunately can't find the link right now) were showing downward trends for several middle eastern countries too. I'm not quite sure it's a healthy tread overall; there's just too many conflicting voices on that. Probably good half of them are boomers afraid of their super safe investment in real estate turning not so hot in the end. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fertility_rate_world_map_2.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fertility_rate_world_map_...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ahje 7y ago
  >Probably good half of them are boomers afraid of their super save investment in real estate turning not so hot in the end. It's not just about that; many boomers are justifiably worried about what will happen to them when they grow old and can't take care of themselves. The real-estate investments were probably supposed to fund their own vision of their last years and now they're realising they might be stuck with no money, no family to support them, while sitting in some prime real estate that nobody wants. In hindsight, I do wonder what the hell my grandparents' generation was thinking back in the day; one would think that they would have realised that women taking part in the work force, legalized abortion and proper distribution of contraceptives would result in lower birth-rates, but no, they had to build a house of cards with nothing to keep it standing except for constant population growth.
trashtester 7y ago
Imagine that this was another species (species H), and we look at the development as biologists: Phase 1) Species H is a very successful species, and the population is growing exponentially. Phase 2) The rapid growth is introducing harmful elements into the environment: - Poisons that harm fertility directly (Birth Control) - Social changes that negatively affect natural reproductive behaviours (including, but limited to porn and increasing autonomy for females) - Various poisons that reduce general health (such as sugar). Note that these changes to the enviornment do not include any of the main causes that normally cause a limitation to a population size, such as: - Lack of resources, primarily food - Predation by other species - Competition by more successful species. Unless the population size started to approach an evolutionary bottleneck size (a few thousand individuals left), a biologist would expect species H to eventually overcome these changes, and resume expeonential growth in phase 3.
- WA 7y ago
  Fails short, because for all species but humans, reproduction/offspring is kind of the main goal in life. Humans have a lot of other interests, and having children comes with huge tradeoffs in "lifestyle". Also, they can actively avoid pregnancy. Which other species does that? Edit: What would phase 3 eventually be, if you overcame all obstacles, but children still take away from other activities? I think this reason alone is enough that most people will be happy with roughly 2 children. Enough to fulfill the desire for children, leaving room for all other things in life.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Natural populations are indeed either exponentially growing or death-limited. The difference is that we've seen what "death-limited" means for humans, and we have the consciousness to be horrified by it. Infant and maternal death on the one hand, wars and massacres on the other, disease as an omnipresent risk. In the old R/K model, we've started at K-selection and moved even further in that direction.
- DocTomoe 7y ago
  > a biologist would expect species H to eventually overcome these changes, and resume expeonential growth in phase 3. Actually, what we have seen in experiments like these is complete societal collapse followed by population collapse. See John B. Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiments. It might well be that we are the "beautiful ones"
Creationer 7y ago
Not all cultures and peoples are equal. The inherent and social capability to conduct cutting-edge science is not widespread. Historically it seems that only Europeans, Asians, and for a time Middle Easterners have been able to make significant and lasting contributions. The notable missing piece here is Africa - which is where a significant part of population growth is occurring.
DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
This data strongly suggests that the "demographic transition" is universal: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&tunit=Y&pit=-302817600000&ind=false&icfg&iconSize=0.5 https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

by Mizza 7y ago

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

The current population uses more resources than sustainable each and every year, and does so at increasing rate. Species, habitats and forests are going at unprecedented rate. We show no signs at all of handling soil, pollution and water properly. Yet you conclude there's not enough of us ruining the place yet?

Wintamute 7y ago
No signs at all? All green technology, efficiency improvement and conservation initiatives globally add up to zero in your book? Most reasonable people agree there's much more to be done, perhaps that we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what should be done, but to dismiss it is absurd. We should celebrate and applaud initiatives that are heading in the right direction - for example, UK power plants recently went 5 days with zero coal burning emissions, the longest coal free streak since the industrial revolution.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  All those people in India/China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars, and absent a force restricting them from it, they’re going to trend towards it as they get richer. Actually, best hope might be concentrating all jobs in very urban areas and making it costly to get into relationships/have children so women themselves opt out of it and drop the birth rate as they wouldn’t be able to afford the amenities they want.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > those people in India/China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars Source? The world’s population is urbanising. That trend shows no sign of slowing.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      I don't have a good source, other than experience of myself, family, and friends. But once people's kids reach school age, I don't see families sticking around inner cities unless they can afford private school and a nice big apartment, or they're too poor to move out to suburbs where they can stretch out and have some space. The world is urbanizing, but perhaps that is also one of the causes of declining birth rates, as it's not as desirable to raise a family in small, urban apartments.
  - thefounder 7y ago
    Birth rates decrease in developed worlds anyway.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Below replacement levels? Also, is that going to be common across all cultures?
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Not zero, but miles from enough. It's a game of brinkmanship with real action pushed far into the future. Certainly UK is dropping coal quickly, and I'm not dismissing that. Yet government has made onshore wind, and domestic solar far more difficult. They're promoting biomass - via imported mature cut wood, and encouraging gas. Drax is still our biggest emitter and an environmental mess. Farming is continuing to ignore decades-long warnings of soil decline, forests globally are still being clear cut and burned for cattle or palm oil. Recycling has become "export the problem and forget about it". Wind, solar and electric vehicles have become viable, yet despite that, overall emissions are still increasing. So beginning to scratch the surface is about right. Real government actions are still avoided.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Real government action harms the greatest consumers of resources most, those people have the resources to buy politicians. It ain't going to happen easily when the rich-and-powerful's self interests are served by maintaining a foil, a semblance, of environmental concern. Great, you're recycling the plastic food trays your meat is shipped half-way around the World in. Now, ditch the car and use public transport; change your company marketing processes to prefer economy to profit ... oh that's right, you're too important to have to do those sorts of things.
- piokoch 7y ago
  Yes, but that's because large percentage (70% what I can remember) came from nuclear power plants. If it hadn't been for the "green" movement who spent past 30 years fighting "dangers" of atomic energy maybe we would have been in totally different place and we wouldn't have to worry about global warming, air pollution, etc.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    UK nuclear never gets over about 20-25%. The current - and still ongoing - UK coal-free run, has been on the back of gas (30%), wind(25%) and nuclear(20%). Overall figures as obviously wind and solar can vary widely on individual days. Biomass and solar, and a little bit of hydro make up the rest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_electricity_production_by_source.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/... Almost 11 days without coal: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/may/25/the-power-switch-tracking-britains-record-coal-free-run https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...
Mizza 7y ago
Problems are soluble. This is the first time our species has encountered this problem, and will solve it or we will die. I think we will solve it. Regardless, we need to solve it at 8 billion or 20 billion. The thing that will solve it is people, and we need more of them and more of them working on the problem.
krzyk 7y ago
> Species, habitats and forests are going at unprecedented rate. Do you have a source for that claim? What I see is that more and more species are put under protection, which wasn't the case e.g. in 19th century.

flr03 7y ago

I don't get the point about women education, can you elaborate ?

Mizza 7y ago
I've read that the education of women seems to be the thing which has the biggest impact on lowering birth rates in developing nations. Educated women can work better jobs and leave the home more. I'd guess that part of it is also basic sex education about reproduction and contraception, as well as delaying when they start having children if they're still in school.
- tropo 7y ago
  Well we had this article, severely flagged it seems, about a guy who raised 12 children. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027423 His "wife has several degrees in math, accounting, business, statistics" according to another article he wrote: https://qz.com/248623/how-to-talk-to-your-adult-children-so-they-might-actually-listen/ https://qz.com/248623/how-to-talk-to-your-adult-children-so-... His kids all went off to college, married likewise, and are now popping out grandkids at an astonishing rate. His youngest kids are still in college, and already his 12 kids have given him 18 grandkids. That is 1.5 each, after an average of about 7 years post-college life. If that keeps up, it'll be about 4.5 each in that generation, which is a regression to the mean but still quite large for modern America. So yes, culture (or DNA) matters more than education.
Jedd 7y ago
The late, great Christopher Hitchens spoke frequently about this subject -- and it's as good an introduction as any to the hypothesis. Do a web search on, say: christopher hitchens empowerment of women ... and watch a few videos where the explanation is eloquently and humorously laid out, along with some reasons why certain parts of various societies are not keen on it happening.

saagarjha 7y ago

> It seems like a very important untested assumption. Hasn't it pretty well tested as countries have industrialized in the last century?

Mizza 7y ago
In Western countries that place a high value on equality (Europe/US) and countries with strong authoritarian governments (China). I think it's a big untested assumption to assume that what happened in Norway will happen in India and Nigeria.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  It's already happened in India, and is well underway in Nigeria: 1. India's fertility rate decreased from 5.91 to 2.33 from 1960 to 2016. 2. Nigeria's fertility rate has decreased more slowly, but that reflects the lower state of development in Nigeria. It's moving along the same curve as all the other developing countries moved along. The countries around Nigeria that have developed further have seen the same dramatic drops in fertility rate that countries elsewhere in the world have seen. https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&tunit=Y&pit=-302817600000&ind=false&icfg&iconSize=0.5 https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

peteradio 7y ago

I don't believe having 10 billion extra potential scientists would improve outcome. Division of labor is always the hard part, there isn't a shortage of smart people.

dexen 7y ago

>2) relation between women's education and total fertility Going by this map from 2018 [1], we can safely call it tested and confirmed in pretty much every country where women's education is the rule rather than the exception. Even India is marked as under 3. And the charts I've been shown recently (unfortunately can't find the link right now) were showing downward trends for several middle eastern countries too. I'm not quite sure it's a healthy tread overall; there's just too many conflicting voices on that. Probably good half of them are boomers afraid of their super safe investment in real estate turning not so hot in the end. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fertility_rate_world_map_2.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fertility_rate_world_map_...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ahje 7y ago
>Probably good half of them are boomers afraid of their super save investment in real estate turning not so hot in the end. It's not just about that; many boomers are justifiably worried about what will happen to them when they grow old and can't take care of themselves. The real-estate investments were probably supposed to fund their own vision of their last years and now they're realising they might be stuck with no money, no family to support them, while sitting in some prime real estate that nobody wants. In hindsight, I do wonder what the hell my grandparents' generation was thinking back in the day; one would think that they would have realised that women taking part in the work force, legalized abortion and proper distribution of contraceptives would result in lower birth-rates, but no, they had to build a house of cards with nothing to keep it standing except for constant population growth.

trashtester 7y ago

Imagine that this was another species (species H), and we look at the development as biologists: Phase 1) Species H is a very successful species, and the population is growing exponentially. Phase 2) The rapid growth is introducing harmful elements into the environment: - Poisons that harm fertility directly (Birth Control) - Social changes that negatively affect natural reproductive behaviours (including, but limited to porn and increasing autonomy for females) - Various poisons that reduce general health (such as sugar). Note that these changes to the enviornment do not include any of the main causes that normally cause a limitation to a population size, such as: - Lack of resources, primarily food - Predation by other species - Competition by more successful species. Unless the population size started to approach an evolutionary bottleneck size (a few thousand individuals left), a biologist would expect species H to eventually overcome these changes, and resume expeonential growth in phase 3.

WA 7y ago
Fails short, because for all species but humans, reproduction/offspring is kind of the main goal in life. Humans have a lot of other interests, and having children comes with huge tradeoffs in "lifestyle". Also, they can actively avoid pregnancy. Which other species does that? Edit: What would phase 3 eventually be, if you overcame all obstacles, but children still take away from other activities? I think this reason alone is enough that most people will be happy with roughly 2 children. Enough to fulfill the desire for children, leaving room for all other things in life.
pjc50 7y ago
Natural populations are indeed either exponentially growing or death-limited. The difference is that we've seen what "death-limited" means for humans, and we have the consciousness to be horrified by it. Infant and maternal death on the one hand, wars and massacres on the other, disease as an omnipresent risk. In the old R/K model, we've started at K-selection and moved even further in that direction.
DocTomoe 7y ago
> a biologist would expect species H to eventually overcome these changes, and resume expeonential growth in phase 3. Actually, what we have seen in experiments like these is complete societal collapse followed by population collapse. See John B. Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiments. It might well be that we are the "beautiful ones"

Creationer 7y ago

Not all cultures and peoples are equal. The inherent and social capability to conduct cutting-edge science is not widespread. Historically it seems that only Europeans, Asians, and for a time Middle Easterners have been able to make significant and lasting contributions. The notable missing piece here is Africa - which is where a significant part of population growth is occurring.

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago

This data strongly suggests that the "demographic transition" is universal: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&tunit=Y&pit=-302817600000&ind=false&icfg&iconSize=0.5 https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...