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Relying on a larger and larger population to keep supporting endless growth is not sustainable. I know this is unpopular, but: We need to find a way to sustain

Relying on a larger and larger population to keep supporting endless growth is not sustainable. I know this is unpopular, but: We need to find a way to sustainably live on this planet with a reasonably sized population. People keep talking about how the next generation needs to support all the debt and extravagances of the past generations but this unethical. the next generation was born without first being asked whether they want to take care of so many existing people. finding a sustainable solution would be both more practical and ethical

scanny 7y ago
It comes down to: Are people going to responsibly manage their family sizes at a family scale; if not then either we continue as is, or start going down a dark path. A sticking point also seems to be: Are people who are having lots of children the same people who are consuming middle-income+ levels of resources?
- dmm 7y ago
  Birth rates are below replacement everywhere in the developed world and China and most other places except the middle east and africa. There is no need for forced sterilization or whatever you were alluding to.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    There will be at some point though. Fertility is moderately heritable.
    - esarbe 7y ago
      Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. The use of contraceptives is cultural, not biological. So we'll hit a replacement problem long before natural selection has time to catch up. The replacement issue has already real implications, this will become much more obvious in the course of the next 30 years. Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest.
      - toasterlovin 7y ago
        > Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals? > Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest. Five generations is only 100-150 years. And anyway, we have a precedent for what happens when there is significant population reduction: the Black Death. Life got way better for the vast majority of people who survived that event. So much so that it ended feudalism in most of Europe. The only problem is finding pensions. Oh well. It’s incredibly immoral to yoke our descendants with the responsibility of funding an extended retirement for us.
        newvoiceoldphne 7y ago
        Except for the millions that died.
        sfink 7y ago
        There is a wealth of data now that shows fertility declining with increased standard of living. (Lots of correlations obscure the exact causations, but among the correlations is female economic and social mobility.) Your example is an eminently plausible mechanism for the spread of high fertility via either genetic or social vectors - but given that it contradicts the data, I don't see how it can be any more than an anecdote. Perhaps the grandchildren of large families are sufficiently removed to revert to the social mean? I don't know. As for the Black Death, the personal and societal restrictions that result from not wanting to die from casual contact were probably quite a relief to escape and reverse. I don't know enough about history, but I could imagine that kicking off a positive chain reaction. After a cold season, people love to play in the sun. This part is just speculation on my part, though; you're welcome to continue siding with Thanos.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        The mechanism is that the propensity to have more children is partly genetic. So as people with those genes out-breed the rest of the population, those genes come to predominate in the population. Thus overcoming the demographic transition. Here is a recent paper that models this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... The Black Death is pretty well accepted as a contributor to the end of feudalism. I guess you’re positing that somehow that would be the result of survivors feeling elated at having gotten past the catastrophe (which is a temporary emotion), versus their facing an easier life as a result of 50% of the population dying (an effect which lasts a lifetime). Seems implausible to me. But also, that the reduction in labor supply lead to vastly improved outcomes for laborers is pretty well attested. Lords of the manor started competing for labor because it was scarce. As a result, laborers were able to transition into owning their own property. It was a big deal. And it has to do with permanently reducing the population to well below the Malthusian limit (the plague periodically re-occurred for centuries, culling the population each time).
  - scanny 7y ago
    Let me rephrase: what happens when the developing world, larger in population size, reaches the wealth of the developed world. Has the problem dissipated upon reaching that point?
    - f00zz 7y ago
      Fertility rates have been decreasing rapidly all over the developing world. For instance, in Brazil it went from over 5 to around 1.7 in just 50 years. It has decreased so much that that country's very generous public pension system, created when the median age was around 18, eats most of the government's budget and has all but collapsed (current median age is 37). Back in the 1970s your typical sci-fi dystopia was an overcrowded world. Personally I'm more afraid of a world with ghost cities inhabited by a handful of elderly people
    - ip26 7y ago
      Based on what we know, the global population would crest, and then begin to gradually subside globally. The biggest question would be, what is the peak and is that number tolerable even for a short while.
    - munificent 7y ago
      The evidence is yes. Assuming the developing world also provides access to birth control, allows women to access education and jobs, etc. then it seems that cultures naturally reach a point where the birthrate lowers.
newvoiceoldphne 7y ago
Sure it is. It's only unsustainable if you restrict the population to a limited area (ie - Earth) There may come a time when we don't NEED a larger population to support increasing specialization, but until then a broader population base is needed to foster growth in technology. Not to mention that those 'one in a billion' history changing genius happen in larger numbers when we have more billions...
- klyrs 7y ago
  Exponential growth is unsustainable in a 3D universe with a finite speed of light. Space is not a magical savior
  - philwelch 7y ago
    But we’re nowhere near the theoretical limits of our own solar system yet.
    - tzs 7y ago
      We're closer than most people think. Isaac Asimov's essay "The Power of Progression" from his monthly science column in the May 1960 issue of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and reprinted in the collect "The Stars in Their Courses" in 1971 [1], goes through the math for how long it would take to reach various population levels at the rate the population was growing at the time. It was doubling every 47 years then. That's slowed down to about every 63 years currently, so the times to reach those levels would now be longer, but his original numbers are still instructive for how fast exponential growth can get away from you. Here they are. • Suppose we populated the entire Earth to the density of Manhattan at noon on a typical working day, when it is at its highest density. By "entire Earth" that means covering every square meter of the surface, including the oceans, with people. That would take 585 years. • Suppose that every single star in our galaxy had 10 habitable planets with the same area as Earth, and that we could trivially expand to them. And suppose that there are another hundred billion galaxies with the same number of habitable planets as ours, that we can also expand to. Surely now we are set for billions of years, right? Nope. That just takes 4200 years at the growth rate he used (doubling every 47 years). • OK, suppose we don't limit ourselves to planets. We find some way to tap into hyperspace or something for energy, freeing us to use all the mass in the universe for human bodies. All the stars in all the galaxies converted to humans. Let's multiply the available mass by 100 to account for dust and debris and other interstellar and intergalactic matter. It takes 6700 years to reach that level. • He also looks at how long, given a population that consists just of humans and plants for the humans to eat, limited only by the amount of solar energy and the efficiency of photosynthesis, until we are at the limit. That's 624 years. I've also seen a similar calculation that uses the volume of an average human and the speed of light. I had thought it was in that Asimov essay, but it isn't. That one asks when, if you were to take every human and pack them into the smallest sphere that could them all, would the radius of that sphere have to be increasing faster than the speed of light to accommodate population growth. I don't remember the answer, but I think it was somewhere in the several thousand years range. There's no amount of even remotely plausible technological hand waving one can do to make a case that we could ever actually achieve any of the above, except maybe the "cover the Earth" one. To convert the numbers above to other doubling intervals, just multiply by the doubling interval you want to use, and divide by the one Asimov used (47 years). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Their-Courses-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0586041222 https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Their-Courses-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0...
jjtheblunt 7y ago
besides being unethical, it can't really work, as it's a pyramid scheme, no?
philwelch 7y ago
You can have economic growth without growing population or resource consumption. Either way, that still doesn’t address the problems of population decline.
- fiblye 7y ago
  You can, to an extent. There’s a limit to what one person can buy or contribute to an economy. It’s easier to sell 2 TVs to two people than it is 2 TVs to one person.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Yeah but that one person can have 20 different streaming subscriptions for the TV, for example. Or they could have a really really awesome TV instead of a shitty one. Economic value is somewhat subjective; if people are willing to buy a billion dollars of hats for their video game avatar, that’s a billion dollars of economic activity.
    - fiblye 7y ago
      They can. But there’s only so much TV they can sit down and watch until they start cancelling services they know they don’t use. Growth stops somewhere.
  - triceratops 7y ago
    Productivity increases though, don't rely on population, and are the actual driver of economic growth. Growth due to population increase is the baseline rate and shouldn't count because people aren't more prosperous per-capita.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Productivity increases due to automation go to the owners of capital. Many individual’s productivity is not going up, therefore they are worth less.
pdonis 7y ago
> Relying on a larger and larger population to keep supporting endless growth The article talks about "growth" as though it has to be absolute growth, but it doesn't; it only needs to be per capita growth. If the population is shrinking, absolute growth can be negative but per capita growth can still be positive (all that's necessary is that the rate of absolute decline of the economy is less than the rate of decline of population). In other words, per capita productivity just needs to increase. Which it has been at least since the industrial revolution.
- adverbly 7y ago
  Per capital growth is also not sufficient. Such a metric could easily be achieved by slowly reducing the population to 1. I might propose some analog of total output minus population growth as a better metric.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Per capital growth is also not sufficient. Such a metric could easily be achieved by slowly reducing the population to 1 Only if the 1 person can continue to increase their productivity with nobody else to trade with, which is absurd. Increasing productivity comes from specialization and trade.
xxxpupugo 7y ago
> We need to find a way to sustainably live on this planet with a reasonably sized population Well said. Let's face it. Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of our rapid technological advances comes with industrial revolution. If we think out of box, this might be as well an outlier of our history. Productivity rarely increases this much and drastically through human history, and guess what, the world is fine. We might as well approaching the ultimate limit that we are testing the Earth's very capacity under the name of growth. Maybe acknowledging that technology advances later will slow down (it probably already does), the easy to grab resources are fully utilized, and we might not further optimize our energy efficiency, isn't an abnormal thing in the future. Capitalism is a tool we devised, now it has probably fulfilled its destiny, at least for that time being. And the focus of global governance should shift from being the economical winner to co-exist peacefully and sustainably in a controlled way.
- wozniacki 7y ago
  ...Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of our rapid technological advances comes with industrial revolution. What alternate system would you put in place that has fewer ills that has not been tried before? Capitalism is a tool we devised, now it has probably fulfilled its destiny, at least for that time being. And the focus of global governance should shift from being the economical winner to co-exist peacefully and sustainably in a controlled way. And do you expect the developing economies who stand to greatly benefit from the continued primacy of capitalism as it exists right now, to consent to some new untested system? Keep in mind they are just entering the phase when they can expect to greatly benefit from their favorable demographics while those in the West are facing decline. Do you expect them to willingly come on board this new economic deal, that the West proposes? Do you see no conflict of interests?

scanny 7y ago

It comes down to: Are people going to responsibly manage their family sizes at a family scale; if not then either we continue as is, or start going down a dark path. A sticking point also seems to be: Are people who are having lots of children the same people who are consuming middle-income+ levels of resources?

dmm 7y ago
Birth rates are below replacement everywhere in the developed world and China and most other places except the middle east and africa. There is no need for forced sterilization or whatever you were alluding to.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  There will be at some point though. Fertility is moderately heritable.
  - esarbe 7y ago
    Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. The use of contraceptives is cultural, not biological. So we'll hit a replacement problem long before natural selection has time to catch up. The replacement issue has already real implications, this will become much more obvious in the course of the next 30 years. Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      > Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals? > Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest. Five generations is only 100-150 years. And anyway, we have a precedent for what happens when there is significant population reduction: the Black Death. Life got way better for the vast majority of people who survived that event. So much so that it ended feudalism in most of Europe. The only problem is finding pensions. Oh well. It’s incredibly immoral to yoke our descendants with the responsibility of funding an extended retirement for us.
      - newvoiceoldphne 7y ago
        Except for the millions that died.
      - sfink 7y ago
        There is a wealth of data now that shows fertility declining with increased standard of living. (Lots of correlations obscure the exact causations, but among the correlations is female economic and social mobility.) Your example is an eminently plausible mechanism for the spread of high fertility via either genetic or social vectors - but given that it contradicts the data, I don't see how it can be any more than an anecdote. Perhaps the grandchildren of large families are sufficiently removed to revert to the social mean? I don't know. As for the Black Death, the personal and societal restrictions that result from not wanting to die from casual contact were probably quite a relief to escape and reverse. I don't know enough about history, but I could imagine that kicking off a positive chain reaction. After a cold season, people love to play in the sun. This part is just speculation on my part, though; you're welcome to continue siding with Thanos.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        The mechanism is that the propensity to have more children is partly genetic. So as people with those genes out-breed the rest of the population, those genes come to predominate in the population. Thus overcoming the demographic transition. Here is a recent paper that models this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... The Black Death is pretty well accepted as a contributor to the end of feudalism. I guess you’re positing that somehow that would be the result of survivors feeling elated at having gotten past the catastrophe (which is a temporary emotion), versus their facing an easier life as a result of 50% of the population dying (an effect which lasts a lifetime). Seems implausible to me. But also, that the reduction in labor supply lead to vastly improved outcomes for laborers is pretty well attested. Lords of the manor started competing for labor because it was scarce. As a result, laborers were able to transition into owning their own property. It was a big deal. And it has to do with permanently reducing the population to well below the Malthusian limit (the plague periodically re-occurred for centuries, culling the population each time).
- scanny 7y ago
  Let me rephrase: what happens when the developing world, larger in population size, reaches the wealth of the developed world. Has the problem dissipated upon reaching that point?
  - f00zz 7y ago
    Fertility rates have been decreasing rapidly all over the developing world. For instance, in Brazil it went from over 5 to around 1.7 in just 50 years. It has decreased so much that that country's very generous public pension system, created when the median age was around 18, eats most of the government's budget and has all but collapsed (current median age is 37). Back in the 1970s your typical sci-fi dystopia was an overcrowded world. Personally I'm more afraid of a world with ghost cities inhabited by a handful of elderly people
  - ip26 7y ago
    Based on what we know, the global population would crest, and then begin to gradually subside globally. The biggest question would be, what is the peak and is that number tolerable even for a short while.
  - munificent 7y ago
    The evidence is yes. Assuming the developing world also provides access to birth control, allows women to access education and jobs, etc. then it seems that cultures naturally reach a point where the birthrate lowers.

newvoiceoldphne 7y ago

Sure it is. It's only unsustainable if you restrict the population to a limited area (ie - Earth) There may come a time when we don't NEED a larger population to support increasing specialization, but until then a broader population base is needed to foster growth in technology. Not to mention that those 'one in a billion' history changing genius happen in larger numbers when we have more billions...

klyrs 7y ago
Exponential growth is unsustainable in a 3D universe with a finite speed of light. Space is not a magical savior
- philwelch 7y ago
  But we’re nowhere near the theoretical limits of our own solar system yet.
  - tzs 7y ago
    We're closer than most people think. Isaac Asimov's essay "The Power of Progression" from his monthly science column in the May 1960 issue of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and reprinted in the collect "The Stars in Their Courses" in 1971 [1], goes through the math for how long it would take to reach various population levels at the rate the population was growing at the time. It was doubling every 47 years then. That's slowed down to about every 63 years currently, so the times to reach those levels would now be longer, but his original numbers are still instructive for how fast exponential growth can get away from you. Here they are. • Suppose we populated the entire Earth to the density of Manhattan at noon on a typical working day, when it is at its highest density. By "entire Earth" that means covering every square meter of the surface, including the oceans, with people. That would take 585 years. • Suppose that every single star in our galaxy had 10 habitable planets with the same area as Earth, and that we could trivially expand to them. And suppose that there are another hundred billion galaxies with the same number of habitable planets as ours, that we can also expand to. Surely now we are set for billions of years, right? Nope. That just takes 4200 years at the growth rate he used (doubling every 47 years). • OK, suppose we don't limit ourselves to planets. We find some way to tap into hyperspace or something for energy, freeing us to use all the mass in the universe for human bodies. All the stars in all the galaxies converted to humans. Let's multiply the available mass by 100 to account for dust and debris and other interstellar and intergalactic matter. It takes 6700 years to reach that level. • He also looks at how long, given a population that consists just of humans and plants for the humans to eat, limited only by the amount of solar energy and the efficiency of photosynthesis, until we are at the limit. That's 624 years. I've also seen a similar calculation that uses the volume of an average human and the speed of light. I had thought it was in that Asimov essay, but it isn't. That one asks when, if you were to take every human and pack them into the smallest sphere that could them all, would the radius of that sphere have to be increasing faster than the speed of light to accommodate population growth. I don't remember the answer, but I think it was somewhere in the several thousand years range. There's no amount of even remotely plausible technological hand waving one can do to make a case that we could ever actually achieve any of the above, except maybe the "cover the Earth" one. To convert the numbers above to other doubling intervals, just multiply by the doubling interval you want to use, and divide by the one Asimov used (47 years). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Their-Courses-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0586041222 https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Their-Courses-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0...

jjtheblunt 7y ago

besides being unethical, it can't really work, as it's a pyramid scheme, no?

philwelch 7y ago

You can have economic growth without growing population or resource consumption. Either way, that still doesn’t address the problems of population decline.

fiblye 7y ago
You can, to an extent. There’s a limit to what one person can buy or contribute to an economy. It’s easier to sell 2 TVs to two people than it is 2 TVs to one person.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Yeah but that one person can have 20 different streaming subscriptions for the TV, for example. Or they could have a really really awesome TV instead of a shitty one. Economic value is somewhat subjective; if people are willing to buy a billion dollars of hats for their video game avatar, that’s a billion dollars of economic activity.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    They can. But there’s only so much TV they can sit down and watch until they start cancelling services they know they don’t use. Growth stops somewhere.
- triceratops 7y ago
  Productivity increases though, don't rely on population, and are the actual driver of economic growth. Growth due to population increase is the baseline rate and shouldn't count because people aren't more prosperous per-capita.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Productivity increases due to automation go to the owners of capital. Many individual’s productivity is not going up, therefore they are worth less.

pdonis 7y ago

> Relying on a larger and larger population to keep supporting endless growth The article talks about "growth" as though it has to be absolute growth, but it doesn't; it only needs to be per capita growth. If the population is shrinking, absolute growth can be negative but per capita growth can still be positive (all that's necessary is that the rate of absolute decline of the economy is less than the rate of decline of population). In other words, per capita productivity just needs to increase. Which it has been at least since the industrial revolution.

adverbly 7y ago
Per capital growth is also not sufficient. Such a metric could easily be achieved by slowly reducing the population to 1. I might propose some analog of total output minus population growth as a better metric.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > Per capital growth is also not sufficient. Such a metric could easily be achieved by slowly reducing the population to 1 Only if the 1 person can continue to increase their productivity with nobody else to trade with, which is absurd. Increasing productivity comes from specialization and trade.

xxxpupugo 7y ago

> We need to find a way to sustainably live on this planet with a reasonably sized population Well said. Let's face it. Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of our rapid technological advances comes with industrial revolution. If we think out of box, this might be as well an outlier of our history. Productivity rarely increases this much and drastically through human history, and guess what, the world is fine. We might as well approaching the ultimate limit that we are testing the Earth's very capacity under the name of growth. Maybe acknowledging that technology advances later will slow down (it probably already does), the easy to grab resources are fully utilized, and we might not further optimize our energy efficiency, isn't an abnormal thing in the future. Capitalism is a tool we devised, now it has probably fulfilled its destiny, at least for that time being. And the focus of global governance should shift from being the economical winner to co-exist peacefully and sustainably in a controlled way.

wozniacki 7y ago
...Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of our rapid technological advances comes with industrial revolution. What alternate system would you put in place that has fewer ills that has not been tried before? Capitalism is a tool we devised, now it has probably fulfilled its destiny, at least for that time being. And the focus of global governance should shift from being the economical winner to co-exist peacefully and sustainably in a controlled way. And do you expect the developing economies who stand to greatly benefit from the continued primacy of capitalism as it exists right now, to consent to some new untested system? Keep in mind they are just entering the phase when they can expect to greatly benefit from their favorable demographics while those in the West are facing decline. Do you expect them to willingly come on board this new economic deal, that the West proposes? Do you see no conflict of interests?