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Curious how many people share this opinion, but I think this is extremely good news. I would love to see birth rates drop below replenishment across the globe.

Curious how many people share this opinion, but I think this is extremely good news. I would love to see birth rates drop below replenishment across the globe. We simply don't need billions of humans. We have done, and continue to do major damage to our environment and historically a tiny minority has benefited from the labor of the majority. The people who benefit most from an increasing population are those who exploit people to increase their quality of life in clean sanctuaries while distancing themselves from the effort and waste required to maintain those lifestyles.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
It's tremendous news. The carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people (we're at ~7 billion, and on track to hit ~10 billion by the end of the century due to population momentum). Target total fertility rate should be as close to 1 as possible. This is a subject near and dear to my heart as a systems observation wonk, and have done a tremendous amount of research on the subject. I recommend these two books to those interested: Shrinking-population Economics: Lessons From Japan by Akihiko Matsutani Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman
- prmph 6y ago
  > The carrying capacity of the Earth is closed (sic) to 1 billion I assume you have a reference for this? How do you know the carrying capacity of the earth is close to 1 billion?
- throwaway55554 6y ago
  > The carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people... Where does this come? Is it referenced in the books you mention? I just have never heard this before.
  - alharith 6y ago
    It comes from ideology, not anything backed in evidenced based scientific research.
  - WhompingWindows 6y ago
    Nor have I, it sounds fairly arbitrary to me. I don't think a global society that's structured the proper way need have a maximum population limit. If energy becomes cheaper and cheaper, like with breakthroughs in solar, wind, nuclear, storage, fusion, then it seems to me we could easily support 10 billion people's food and resource needs, given a circular economy which is highly efficient. There's also asteroid mining, carbon capture, vertical farming, high density living like in Asia...there are a lot of efficiencies to be gained in how our population lives.
    - throwaway55554 6y ago
      It's interesting to think about. For instance, how much space do we need per capita? If we were to pack everyone together giving each a 2ft by 2ft space, the current population would take up the space of a large county or two. That's rather fascinating to think about because it isn't a large amount of space. Obviously it isn't sustainable, but our physical size is small. But then you start factoring in food, shelter, water, mental well-being, etc... It would just be interesting to find out how much space we really need per capita thinking along those lines.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    It's referenced in the Countdown book I mention, which includes citations. The author excludes the book from the Internet Archive OpenLibrary, so I can't directly cite the page. I'll have to reply back later when I can grab the book and find the page and citation it refers back to.
  - zhdc1 6y ago
    The median study (according to a UNEP report I found after a quick Google search) puts global carrying capacity between 8 and 16 billion. Source: https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_c...
- rubidium 6y ago
  "the carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people" This is FUD. The carrying capacity of earth is determined by the ingenuity of humanity. It can go poorly for the environment or not, but considering it purely a function of the number of people is Malthusian hogwash.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Sure, and if you're skilled, you can disarm a bomb before it explodes. You're ingenious as a species, but you're still dead. The data does not show that on our current trajectory, we are going to disarm the bomb. Even with COVID-19, we're unable to reduce CO2 emissions to levels needed to avert climate change, without going on ad nauseam about natural resource exhaustion (fish stocks continue to be depleted [1], rapidly exhausting phosphorus reserves for fertilizer [2] and fossil aquifers for agriculture [3], etc). 800 million people out of 7.6 billion are chronically undernourished [4] and your argument is we can still support more people? At what point do people get real that we are burning the gas faster than we can fill the gas tank of the ecosystem engine? Hope is not a strategy, and we are not so ingenuous if we already have so many people struggling to survive. Less people over time (total fertility rate stepdown), less demand on world resources, less suffering. It's that simple. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/fish-stocks-are-used-up-fisheries-subsidies-must-stop/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/fish-stocks-are-used-... [2] https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/phosphorus.html https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/... [3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/5/100505-fossil-water-radioactive-science-environment/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/5/100505-fossil... [4] https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/ https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-a...
    - orwin 6y ago
      Mmm, the phosphorus reserves are doing better than a lot of other ressources. Its trues that _US_ reserves have peaked and will be exhausted soon, but currently China and Australia (from memory) are exporting currently half the world consumption and still have not peaked, while the place with the most reserves should be Morocco [0]. Anyway e is growing and will always be (unless our universe is not isolated) and we will all die even if we manage to: save our planet/move out of our planet/move out of our solar system/move out of our galaxy. I realise that i argued against your point even though i'm quite agreeing with it. Oh well, precision do not hurt anyone. [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/681747/phosphate-rock-reserves-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/681747/phosphate-rock-re...
- Mirioron 6y ago
  What does "carrying capacity" in this case mean? I've seen various numbers quoted on this and they all seem somewhat suspect to me. Humans improve the world for ourselves through work. As time progresses we get better at it and solve various problems. It's not like us consuming resources actually makes the resources disappear from Earth. They're still there, but they simply need more work to be done to be made useful. We extract new resources because it's cheaper, but at some point that'll change. Hopefully that's so far in the future that it's a challenge that's easily met.
  - underbluewaters 6y ago
    Some resources are by definition are not sustainable. Fossil fuels are the best example, since they represent compressed biomass that takes millions of years to produce. The most worrying resource that isn't usually thought of are ecosystem services. The ocean produces an abundance of wild caught food, but also various cycles provide oxygen, consume co2, and coral reefs buffer shorelines against erosion. We degrade those systems with abandon, but they represent trillions in services that likely can't just be replaced with technology.
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      >but they represent trillions in services that likely can't just be replaced with technology. Why not? We probably have a lot of time before they become seriously unavailable. The Earth is huge. Imagine if all oxygen production on Earth stopped tomorrow. We would still have enough oxygen in the atmosphere that would last 1000 years at current consumption (obviously you couldn't live for a 1000 years though). Humanity has progressed immensely in the last 200 years. I can't imagine where we will be in 500.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
In this case, it's a good thing, because the birthrates declined most for women 24 and younger. Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use. Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...not when you're 16 and can't care for them properly. I do think there is value to having a balanced aged pyramid, however. We don't want a China or Japan situation, where there are far too many old people, which would crush the younger members of society under the burden of caring. The one way to counteract that would be immigration, which has been a hot-button issue and is not a given or perfect remedy for population pyramids.
- alehander42 6y ago
  how can a human being be simplifed down to a "lifetime of energy use" and a very carbon-intensive action? I know this language has normalized and that we use it with "good" intentions, but sometimes we sound much more soulless and anti-human than even the language of soviet ideology
  - whateveracct 6y ago
    ecofascism
    - orwin 6y ago
      As long as he does not force you to go along their life choices without a democratic decision, this is not fascism.
      - alehander42 6y ago
        once a political view is widely accepted, it starts getting really easy to force it on people
      - whateveracct 6y ago
        That's true. I'm not saying it's institutional. But we have fascist political forces in America despite the democracy. Same thing. It's a political thing not a structural thing.
ketanmaheshwari 6y ago
I think it is good if the decline happens at a steady rate rather than a sudden drop which will create an imbalance between the number of elderly folks who need support and a younger generation who could provide that support.
- vincentlee 6y ago
  or covid19 could naturally fix the glitch
api 6y ago
I think there are pros and cons. You mention some of the pros. Right now I think the ideal population growth would be slightly below replacement level for a while, and then replacement level once we hit a population that seems to "work." You can't ignore the social problems created by shrinking populations though. A major one is monopolization of high positions in business and politics by an increasingly elderly class that is stuck in an obsolete way of thinking. In America this has given birth to the quip "ok, boomer." I don't like sounding age-ist, but it does seem as if most people stop updating their understanding of the world at some point in their 40s. I don't think it's that older people can't learn. My grandfather taught himself computer programming, called BBSes (at 300 baud!), learned digital/TTL electronics, and learned all kinds of other new stuff in his 60s. It's just that most people don't do this. I think it might be an ego thing. People decide they know it all at some point and stop learning or changing their opinions. It could also have less to do with age than with age plus status. High status people rarely seem to make drastic revisions to their world view because their brain stem is telling them everything they're doing is working. (At least this is the mechanism I suspect exists. It would have survival value to some extent.) So you get entrenched older managerial and political classes that double, triple, and quadruple down on failing policies because the failure has not affected them yet. A second problem is that virtually every society on Earth today uses growth to paper over a range of systemic failings. Instead of dealing with inequality, we use growth. Instead of getting rid of moribund industries we use growth to make new ones while keeping the old stuff around. Growth really does avoid the need to confront a lot of very messy problems. Recent political history has not inspired confidence in me that we can confront these problems any more rationally than people in the past.
- iandanforth 6y ago
  I agree, some further thoughts. The tipping point I'm looking at is when kindred.ai, covariant.ai, google, or similar player nails manipulation. Give me a set of hands that can reliably perform a task in a semi-structured environment 24/7 at 65% the speed of a human and 1B people will be out of work in a decade. This will further increase the wealth of a few and raise the standards of living for many which will increase their rates of consumption. I'd like to see the population decline to balance this expected increase in consumption. As for the gerontocracy problem, the easier it is for me to earn enough live the less I have to worry about who is in charge.
dudul 6y ago
Except that it will probably barely move the needle. The US's contribution to world population growth is negligible compared to Africa's or parts of Asia. That being said, this focus on "population" always sounds a little wrong to me. It's not about how many people are alive, it's about the consumption of resources per person. And by this metric, yes, the US is probably the worst offender. But here is the thing, will childless household/individuals consume less than families?
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Nope. As outlined in another comment, it will be travel and consumption for the sake of the individual, with no thought for what happens to society in 5 decades. Supposedly everything will be fine, since they didn’t “spawn” a “carbon consumer,” and the only problem we face is carbon. It is selfish.
  - underbluewaters 6y ago
    It's almost as if humans consume as many resources as their circumstances allow... We are at global carrying capacity, it just isn't some optimal theoretical limit but one defined by political, historical, and ecological factors.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    It's really the height of hubris to lecture strangers on whether or not they should make the very personal and life long commitment to having children.
xoxoy 6y ago
US birth rates not global
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Global birth rates are racing toward < 2. Almost every nation. We'll get there in a decade or two.
Analemma_ 6y ago
It could be a good thing if we didn't have an economy-- in particular, retirement and health care schemes-- that essentially requires a pyramidal population distribution, and collapses if it goes inverted. We should be working to fix that, but if the inversion happens before the change does, we could be in real trouble.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  Have you looked at the population distribution? To make the 60+ brackets go inverted would require a remarkable improvement in life-extending medical technology. It narrows pretty fast at retirement age.
- josephorjoe 6y ago
  America already has an easy, useful, and generally positive solution to a decline in birthrates: immigration. We'll just need to move beyond the current xenophobia and remember what we use to know.
  - Analemma_ 6y ago
    I mean, I agree, but "just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've had to accept that there's a finite amount of immigration that societies will take before you get a nativist backlash, and that amount appears to be much lower than the amount you need to sustain a healthy demographic pyramid. All the Vox articles in the world about how immigration is a net economic positive don't seem to have made a difference. I don't like it, but you have to work with the political situation you have, not the one you wish you had.
  - cmxch 6y ago
    Then fix the issue of what to do with the displaced (in a way that doesn't presume fault with said displaced persons). Writing people off as this or that is not the answer.
  - jimbob45 6y ago
    Why would the immigrants have any allegiance to the US? If you try to force more immigrants in than can be properly vetted for assimilation, then you're going to get Sharia Law slums and the Irish/Russian/Italian mafia all over again. Should we incentivize our own population to breed or ship in foreigners wholesale? Seems like self-subversion to opt for the latter.
rubber_duck 6y ago
In theory this will suck for you because the entire society is structured so that younger people support the old and reducing the number of people who have to support you is a terrible thing, especially if we continue to rise life expectancy (although suicide/accidents/drugs are doing a fine job at countering this in aggregate). But there is no telling how things will pan out with economy in the future, to what extent will automation increase productivity, etc. Also if the anti-aging research comes through the productive age of individuals could be extended along with longer lifespan. Whatever happens the environment argument is ridiculous, environment has always been unstable, life on earth has been hit by major cataclysmic events throughout the history - the only difference is that historically we couldn't do anything about it - which is changing significantly with technological development. If we don't start decoupling our survival odds from the environmental factors we are going to suffer as a society irregardless of what we do to environment.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  Figuring out how to structure society in a way that doesn't require the young to outnumber the old is a band-aid the species will have to rip off eventually.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  "environment argument is ridiculous" It isn't. The environment isn't unstable right now, it has relatively stable rate of change, and it's predictable. It's just getting worse for our survival as a population. We are using carbon based energy sources too quickly for the environment to follow the natural cycle to sequester it, and as a result we won't be able to feed the existing number of humans. We cannot decouple survival odds from environmental factors. You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations.
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    >You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations. On the timescale of declining birth rates affecting this - this is probably the simplest problem to solve - we have multiple ways reduce environmental impacts on food production with different levels of innovation/change required - from engineering resilient crops and using the same approach as we do now, over vertical farming in controlled environments (still producing the same food but with low surface requirement and isolation from environmental effects), all the way to producing essential nutrients from simple organisms large scale (eg. algae) (here we need to figure out a lot more about nutrition to provide reasonable healthy substitutes over complex food) - this is a matter of economics, scaling, research - not trivial but clearly possible. Building cities able to withstand large scale environmental disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis, temperature control, isolation from air pollutants (eg. radioactive waste in the air), imposing strict bounds on entering/leaving to prevent viruses/bacteria from spreading (through humans and animals) - these are the kinds of things we will need to be able to do in the future - otherwise the next COVID, avian flue, Fukushima or global warming is going to leave us in a shit situation without any way of responding - we will be left in the same shit situation we are now - forced to hide and hope it goes away.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Done. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trend-of-total-fertility-rate-by-world-region-1950-2050_fig1_316363548 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trend-of-total-fertility...
mrfusion 6y ago
Every human born is a super computer with AGI that can be purposed towards improving our situation and solving the mysteries of the universe.
- alex_anglin 6y ago
  If by AGI, you're referring to 'Artificial General Intelligence,' I'm curious to know what you think the Artificial part is.
gtfoutttt 6y ago
Amen
mrfusion 6y ago
On the other hand, what’s the purpose of a universe without humans?
- rtkwe 6y ago
  It's unlikely humans are the only life in the universe and beyond that why does it have to have a purpose.
- cudima 6y ago
  what's the purpose of a universe without elephants?
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  What's the purpose of a universe with humans?
- stuntkite 6y ago
  I don't think it's been proven that human or even earth life is the most effective method the universe has come up with to look at itself. Humans appear to be good at recording the universe's happenings but I haven't seen solid evidence that the record is important on a galactic time scale.
mrfusion 6y ago
A lot of environmentalists think humans are a plague on this planet.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  Well forgive me then if I totally disregard the policy prescriptions of people who hate my species.
keiferski 6y ago
The cause of this is an overemphasis on consumption, not an increase in the number of human beings alive. Ironically this consumption-based mentality is also one cause of the declining birth rates in developed countries. On a material level, potential middle-class parents are vastly better off today than the parents of ~100 years ago. As a percentage of income, food is cheaper, entertainment and education are essentially free (thanks to the Internet), clothing doesn't need to be hand-made, etc. And yet many people don't have kids because they "can't afford it" which basically translates to "can't afford to maintain society's baseline consumption levels." I'm not blaming them, either - this is something that society pushes constantly. Going against that tide is extremely difficult.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  Every problem with modern society becomes worse with more humans. We could cut per capita consumption in half and every additional human would still accelerate climate change.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    I'm talking about cultural trends and consumerism. > Every problem with modern society becomes worse with more humans. No, not necessarily if enough people adopted a minimalist/low carbon emission lifestyle. More people would lead to it becoming a bigger social movement, thus making it more acceptable for 'regular' people to join.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  The cost of rent has increased as a percentage of income. People aren't choosing to not have kids just so they can eat avocado toast.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    The cost of renting what? It used to be considered normal for multiple people to share a room and for children to live with their parents (and grandparents) all under one roof until they got married. Don’t get me wrong - I prefer living alone to having roommates, and certainly prefer having my own private room to sharing it with multiple other people. But this is a very modern expectation. If it were normal for 3-4 people to share a room (as was common in the past), I imagine rent prices would actually be lower today than historically. In any case, rent is really only overinflated in coastal megacities. And rent wasn’t really my main target: there are a whole lot of modern consumption activities considered ‘essential’ which really aren’t in any sense, but have simply become social expectations.
rtkwe 6y ago
A big problem with that is long lifetimes and nice non-poverty level retirements basically require that there be more young people to support the older population in retirement because most people do not make enough to pay for their own retirement through savings.
- gizmo686 6y ago
  Retirement savings is irrelevant. No one saves for retirement by stockpiling cans of food. They save for retirement by stockpiling financial assets that can be exchanged for food when they are retired. They need just as much of a workforce to produce this food if they pay for it through savings as they would if it was provided through a socialist government program. If everyone who retired has "adequate" savings, but their is not a large enough workforce to support them, you will see their buying power fall. Also possible is their buying power would remain, and the buying power of the young workforce would fall as a greater share of goods produced go to retired folks who hoarded financial capital when it was cheaper to do so.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    You're just talking about food, if we were willing to just let the elderly fall to poverty level subsistence it's much easier but that's poverty level which is not what I want in my old age or for anyone in their old age. We grew beyond that as a society for the most part lets not go back to it. There's medical bills, housing (for those who don't own their homes, which will be an increasing percentage as housing prices climb and people keep renting longer), and recreation. > If everyone who retired has "adequate" savings, but their is not a large enough workforce to support them, you will see their buying power fall. Also possible is their buying power would remain, and the buying power of the young workforce would fall as a greater share of goods produced go to retired folks who hoarded financial capital when it was cheaper to do so. That's another reason where you need either a larger working population or a vast excess that gets redistributed to support retirees.
    - gizmo686 6y ago
      I was using food as an example because you could, in principle, stockpile cans of it. I suppose you could argue that some people do stockpile housing for retirement. However, other than that, all they are doing is stockpiling a claim on future productivity. As a matter of policy, we could give every old person such a claim regardless of their savings.
impendia 6y ago
> We simply don't need billions of humans. You make an excellent point, and I'll raise a counterargument. I would claim, simply, that human life is intrinsically a good thing. I believe that my life is worth living, that it is better that I'm alive than if I were dead. I'll presume that everyone who reads this believes the same about their own lives. In that case, the more people alive, the better -- (if all else is equal). That said, the philosopher Derek Parfit anticipated this and raises a counterargument to my argument above, known as the "mere addition paradox". [1] Roughly speaking, it goes as follows. 1. Suppose you have a population of 1,000,000 people, living happy, healthy, productive lives. Let's stipulate that this is a good thing. 2. Now, suppose in addition to this, suppose you have a second population of 1,000,000 people, who lead difficult lives with a lot of hardship, but whose lives are (perhaps barely) worth living. Then, if human life is intrisically good, then it is good that these people also exist. (This is the "mere addition" part.) 3. Given these two populations, equality is a good thing: lower the standard of living of the first million people ever so slightly, and raise the standard of the second group to match the first. This, too, seems to be a good thing. 4. Repeat. Eventually you arrive at a huge population, living lives of misery and squalor which are just slightly better than nothing -- but which one has argued is a better scenario than your original million people. This is the "repugnant conclusion". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
- jonwalch 6y ago
  "I'll presume that everyone who reads this believes the same about their own lives." That's an enormous assumption, in my opinion.
- scottLobster 6y ago
  If nothing else more humans increase our collective potential intelligence to solve problems. It's my my main issue with the anti-natalist movement: If theoretically everyone who believed in climate change agreed that anti-natalism was the solution, by definition within a generation the largest voting block would be the children of climate deniers. Which would actually make climate change much worse. We don't need fewer humans, we need smarter/better institutions and more efficient technology. Every life born is one more potential option for a breakthrough.
jes5199 6y ago
this is happening! Check out “Empty Planet: the Shock of Global Population Decline”. They predict a peak in _global_ population around 2050. The same cultural change is happening world-wide: people are having fewer children, and they’re having them later.
snarf21 6y ago
I agree with you. I don't think the planet can sustain more than about 4B people. As the third world countries get better health care and have better infant mortality, their rates will continue to drop. Additionally, robotics are going to continue to reduce our need for people to do stuff for other people.
pkaye 6y ago
Most western countries are below population replacement fertility rate of 2.1. This also include China at 1.7 and India almost there at 2.2. The countries in Africa are still up there though but they will go down also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
ecoled_ame 6y ago
Amen

toomuchtodo 6y ago

It's tremendous news. The carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people (we're at ~7 billion, and on track to hit ~10 billion by the end of the century due to population momentum). Target total fertility rate should be as close to 1 as possible. This is a subject near and dear to my heart as a systems observation wonk, and have done a tremendous amount of research on the subject. I recommend these two books to those interested: Shrinking-population Economics: Lessons From Japan by Akihiko Matsutani Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

prmph 6y ago
> The carrying capacity of the Earth is closed (sic) to 1 billion I assume you have a reference for this? How do you know the carrying capacity of the earth is close to 1 billion?
throwaway55554 6y ago
> The carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people... Where does this come? Is it referenced in the books you mention? I just have never heard this before.
- alharith 6y ago
  It comes from ideology, not anything backed in evidenced based scientific research.
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Nor have I, it sounds fairly arbitrary to me. I don't think a global society that's structured the proper way need have a maximum population limit. If energy becomes cheaper and cheaper, like with breakthroughs in solar, wind, nuclear, storage, fusion, then it seems to me we could easily support 10 billion people's food and resource needs, given a circular economy which is highly efficient. There's also asteroid mining, carbon capture, vertical farming, high density living like in Asia...there are a lot of efficiencies to be gained in how our population lives.
  - throwaway55554 6y ago
    It's interesting to think about. For instance, how much space do we need per capita? If we were to pack everyone together giving each a 2ft by 2ft space, the current population would take up the space of a large county or two. That's rather fascinating to think about because it isn't a large amount of space. Obviously it isn't sustainable, but our physical size is small. But then you start factoring in food, shelter, water, mental well-being, etc... It would just be interesting to find out how much space we really need per capita thinking along those lines.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  It's referenced in the Countdown book I mention, which includes citations. The author excludes the book from the Internet Archive OpenLibrary, so I can't directly cite the page. I'll have to reply back later when I can grab the book and find the page and citation it refers back to.
- zhdc1 6y ago
  The median study (according to a UNEP report I found after a quick Google search) puts global carrying capacity between 8 and 16 billion. Source: https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_c...
rubidium 6y ago
"the carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people" This is FUD. The carrying capacity of earth is determined by the ingenuity of humanity. It can go poorly for the environment or not, but considering it purely a function of the number of people is Malthusian hogwash.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Sure, and if you're skilled, you can disarm a bomb before it explodes. You're ingenious as a species, but you're still dead. The data does not show that on our current trajectory, we are going to disarm the bomb. Even with COVID-19, we're unable to reduce CO2 emissions to levels needed to avert climate change, without going on ad nauseam about natural resource exhaustion (fish stocks continue to be depleted [1], rapidly exhausting phosphorus reserves for fertilizer [2] and fossil aquifers for agriculture [3], etc). 800 million people out of 7.6 billion are chronically undernourished [4] and your argument is we can still support more people? At what point do people get real that we are burning the gas faster than we can fill the gas tank of the ecosystem engine? Hope is not a strategy, and we are not so ingenuous if we already have so many people struggling to survive. Less people over time (total fertility rate stepdown), less demand on world resources, less suffering. It's that simple. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/fish-stocks-are-used-up-fisheries-subsidies-must-stop/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/fish-stocks-are-used-... [2] https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/phosphorus.html https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/... [3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/5/100505-fossil-water-radioactive-science-environment/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/5/100505-fossil... [4] https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/ https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-a...
  - orwin 6y ago
    Mmm, the phosphorus reserves are doing better than a lot of other ressources. Its trues that _US_ reserves have peaked and will be exhausted soon, but currently China and Australia (from memory) are exporting currently half the world consumption and still have not peaked, while the place with the most reserves should be Morocco [0]. Anyway e is growing and will always be (unless our universe is not isolated) and we will all die even if we manage to: save our planet/move out of our planet/move out of our solar system/move out of our galaxy. I realise that i argued against your point even though i'm quite agreeing with it. Oh well, precision do not hurt anyone. [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/681747/phosphate-rock-reserves-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/681747/phosphate-rock-re...
Mirioron 6y ago
What does "carrying capacity" in this case mean? I've seen various numbers quoted on this and they all seem somewhat suspect to me. Humans improve the world for ourselves through work. As time progresses we get better at it and solve various problems. It's not like us consuming resources actually makes the resources disappear from Earth. They're still there, but they simply need more work to be done to be made useful. We extract new resources because it's cheaper, but at some point that'll change. Hopefully that's so far in the future that it's a challenge that's easily met.
- underbluewaters 6y ago
  Some resources are by definition are not sustainable. Fossil fuels are the best example, since they represent compressed biomass that takes millions of years to produce. The most worrying resource that isn't usually thought of are ecosystem services. The ocean produces an abundance of wild caught food, but also various cycles provide oxygen, consume co2, and coral reefs buffer shorelines against erosion. We degrade those systems with abandon, but they represent trillions in services that likely can't just be replaced with technology.
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    >but they represent trillions in services that likely can't just be replaced with technology. Why not? We probably have a lot of time before they become seriously unavailable. The Earth is huge. Imagine if all oxygen production on Earth stopped tomorrow. We would still have enough oxygen in the atmosphere that would last 1000 years at current consumption (obviously you couldn't live for a 1000 years though). Humanity has progressed immensely in the last 200 years. I can't imagine where we will be in 500.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

In this case, it's a good thing, because the birthrates declined most for women 24 and younger. Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use. Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...not when you're 16 and can't care for them properly. I do think there is value to having a balanced aged pyramid, however. We don't want a China or Japan situation, where there are far too many old people, which would crush the younger members of society under the burden of caring. The one way to counteract that would be immigration, which has been a hot-button issue and is not a given or perfect remedy for population pyramids.

alehander42 6y ago
how can a human being be simplifed down to a "lifetime of energy use" and a very carbon-intensive action? I know this language has normalized and that we use it with "good" intentions, but sometimes we sound much more soulless and anti-human than even the language of soviet ideology
- whateveracct 6y ago
  ecofascism
  - orwin 6y ago
    As long as he does not force you to go along their life choices without a democratic decision, this is not fascism.
    - alehander42 6y ago
      once a political view is widely accepted, it starts getting really easy to force it on people
    - whateveracct 6y ago
      That's true. I'm not saying it's institutional. But we have fascist political forces in America despite the democracy. Same thing. It's a political thing not a structural thing.

ketanmaheshwari 6y ago

I think it is good if the decline happens at a steady rate rather than a sudden drop which will create an imbalance between the number of elderly folks who need support and a younger generation who could provide that support.

vincentlee 6y ago
or covid19 could naturally fix the glitch

api 6y ago

I think there are pros and cons. You mention some of the pros. Right now I think the ideal population growth would be slightly below replacement level for a while, and then replacement level once we hit a population that seems to "work." You can't ignore the social problems created by shrinking populations though. A major one is monopolization of high positions in business and politics by an increasingly elderly class that is stuck in an obsolete way of thinking. In America this has given birth to the quip "ok, boomer." I don't like sounding age-ist, but it does seem as if most people stop updating their understanding of the world at some point in their 40s. I don't think it's that older people can't learn. My grandfather taught himself computer programming, called BBSes (at 300 baud!), learned digital/TTL electronics, and learned all kinds of other new stuff in his 60s. It's just that most people don't do this. I think it might be an ego thing. People decide they know it all at some point and stop learning or changing their opinions. It could also have less to do with age than with age plus status. High status people rarely seem to make drastic revisions to their world view because their brain stem is telling them everything they're doing is working. (At least this is the mechanism I suspect exists. It would have survival value to some extent.) So you get entrenched older managerial and political classes that double, triple, and quadruple down on failing policies because the failure has not affected them yet. A second problem is that virtually every society on Earth today uses growth to paper over a range of systemic failings. Instead of dealing with inequality, we use growth. Instead of getting rid of moribund industries we use growth to make new ones while keeping the old stuff around. Growth really does avoid the need to confront a lot of very messy problems. Recent political history has not inspired confidence in me that we can confront these problems any more rationally than people in the past.

iandanforth 6y ago
I agree, some further thoughts. The tipping point I'm looking at is when kindred.ai, covariant.ai, google, or similar player nails manipulation. Give me a set of hands that can reliably perform a task in a semi-structured environment 24/7 at 65% the speed of a human and 1B people will be out of work in a decade. This will further increase the wealth of a few and raise the standards of living for many which will increase their rates of consumption. I'd like to see the population decline to balance this expected increase in consumption. As for the gerontocracy problem, the easier it is for me to earn enough live the less I have to worry about who is in charge.

dudul 6y ago

Except that it will probably barely move the needle. The US's contribution to world population growth is negligible compared to Africa's or parts of Asia. That being said, this focus on "population" always sounds a little wrong to me. It's not about how many people are alive, it's about the consumption of resources per person. And by this metric, yes, the US is probably the worst offender. But here is the thing, will childless household/individuals consume less than families?

jtbayly 6y ago
Nope. As outlined in another comment, it will be travel and consumption for the sake of the individual, with no thought for what happens to society in 5 decades. Supposedly everything will be fine, since they didn’t “spawn” a “carbon consumer,” and the only problem we face is carbon. It is selfish.
- underbluewaters 6y ago
  It's almost as if humans consume as many resources as their circumstances allow... We are at global carrying capacity, it just isn't some optimal theoretical limit but one defined by political, historical, and ecological factors.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  It's really the height of hubris to lecture strangers on whether or not they should make the very personal and life long commitment to having children.

xoxoy 6y ago

US birth rates not global

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Global birth rates are racing toward < 2. Almost every nation. We'll get there in a decade or two.

Analemma_ 6y ago

It could be a good thing if we didn't have an economy-- in particular, retirement and health care schemes-- that essentially requires a pyramidal population distribution, and collapses if it goes inverted. We should be working to fix that, but if the inversion happens before the change does, we could be in real trouble.

rootusrootus 6y ago
Have you looked at the population distribution? To make the 60+ brackets go inverted would require a remarkable improvement in life-extending medical technology. It narrows pretty fast at retirement age.
josephorjoe 6y ago
America already has an easy, useful, and generally positive solution to a decline in birthrates: immigration. We'll just need to move beyond the current xenophobia and remember what we use to know.
- Analemma_ 6y ago
  I mean, I agree, but "just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've had to accept that there's a finite amount of immigration that societies will take before you get a nativist backlash, and that amount appears to be much lower than the amount you need to sustain a healthy demographic pyramid. All the Vox articles in the world about how immigration is a net economic positive don't seem to have made a difference. I don't like it, but you have to work with the political situation you have, not the one you wish you had.
- cmxch 6y ago
  Then fix the issue of what to do with the displaced (in a way that doesn't presume fault with said displaced persons). Writing people off as this or that is not the answer.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  Why would the immigrants have any allegiance to the US? If you try to force more immigrants in than can be properly vetted for assimilation, then you're going to get Sharia Law slums and the Irish/Russian/Italian mafia all over again. Should we incentivize our own population to breed or ship in foreigners wholesale? Seems like self-subversion to opt for the latter.

rubber_duck 6y ago

In theory this will suck for you because the entire society is structured so that younger people support the old and reducing the number of people who have to support you is a terrible thing, especially if we continue to rise life expectancy (although suicide/accidents/drugs are doing a fine job at countering this in aggregate). But there is no telling how things will pan out with economy in the future, to what extent will automation increase productivity, etc. Also if the anti-aging research comes through the productive age of individuals could be extended along with longer lifespan. Whatever happens the environment argument is ridiculous, environment has always been unstable, life on earth has been hit by major cataclysmic events throughout the history - the only difference is that historically we couldn't do anything about it - which is changing significantly with technological development. If we don't start decoupling our survival odds from the environmental factors we are going to suffer as a society irregardless of what we do to environment.

neutronicus 6y ago
Figuring out how to structure society in a way that doesn't require the young to outnumber the old is a band-aid the species will have to rip off eventually.
throwaway5752 6y ago
"environment argument is ridiculous" It isn't. The environment isn't unstable right now, it has relatively stable rate of change, and it's predictable. It's just getting worse for our survival as a population. We are using carbon based energy sources too quickly for the environment to follow the natural cycle to sequester it, and as a result we won't be able to feed the existing number of humans. We cannot decouple survival odds from environmental factors. You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  >You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations. On the timescale of declining birth rates affecting this - this is probably the simplest problem to solve - we have multiple ways reduce environmental impacts on food production with different levels of innovation/change required - from engineering resilient crops and using the same approach as we do now, over vertical farming in controlled environments (still producing the same food but with low surface requirement and isolation from environmental effects), all the way to producing essential nutrients from simple organisms large scale (eg. algae) (here we need to figure out a lot more about nutrition to provide reasonable healthy substitutes over complex food) - this is a matter of economics, scaling, research - not trivial but clearly possible. Building cities able to withstand large scale environmental disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis, temperature control, isolation from air pollutants (eg. radioactive waste in the air), imposing strict bounds on entering/leaving to prevent viruses/bacteria from spreading (through humans and animals) - these are the kinds of things we will need to be able to do in the future - otherwise the next COVID, avian flue, Fukushima or global warming is going to leave us in a shit situation without any way of responding - we will be left in the same shit situation we are now - forced to hide and hope it goes away.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Done. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trend-of-total-fertility-rate-by-world-region-1950-2050_fig1_316363548 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trend-of-total-fertility...

mrfusion 6y ago

Every human born is a super computer with AGI that can be purposed towards improving our situation and solving the mysteries of the universe.

alex_anglin 6y ago
If by AGI, you're referring to 'Artificial General Intelligence,' I'm curious to know what you think the Artificial part is.

gtfoutttt 6y ago

Amen

mrfusion 6y ago

On the other hand, what’s the purpose of a universe without humans?

rtkwe 6y ago
It's unlikely humans are the only life in the universe and beyond that why does it have to have a purpose.
cudima 6y ago
what's the purpose of a universe without elephants?
0xffff2 6y ago
What's the purpose of a universe with humans?
stuntkite 6y ago
I don't think it's been proven that human or even earth life is the most effective method the universe has come up with to look at itself. Humans appear to be good at recording the universe's happenings but I haven't seen solid evidence that the record is important on a galactic time scale.

mrfusion 6y ago

A lot of environmentalists think humans are a plague on this planet.

tengbretson 6y ago
Well forgive me then if I totally disregard the policy prescriptions of people who hate my species.

keiferski 6y ago

The cause of this is an overemphasis on consumption, not an increase in the number of human beings alive. Ironically this consumption-based mentality is also one cause of the declining birth rates in developed countries. On a material level, potential middle-class parents are vastly better off today than the parents of ~100 years ago. As a percentage of income, food is cheaper, entertainment and education are essentially free (thanks to the Internet), clothing doesn't need to be hand-made, etc. And yet many people don't have kids because they "can't afford it" which basically translates to "can't afford to maintain society's baseline consumption levels." I'm not blaming them, either - this is something that society pushes constantly. Going against that tide is extremely difficult.

bagacrap 6y ago
Every problem with modern society becomes worse with more humans. We could cut per capita consumption in half and every additional human would still accelerate climate change.
- keiferski 6y ago
  I'm talking about cultural trends and consumerism. > Every problem with modern society becomes worse with more humans. No, not necessarily if enough people adopted a minimalist/low carbon emission lifestyle. More people would lead to it becoming a bigger social movement, thus making it more acceptable for 'regular' people to join.
chillwaves 6y ago
The cost of rent has increased as a percentage of income. People aren't choosing to not have kids just so they can eat avocado toast.
- keiferski 6y ago
  The cost of renting what? It used to be considered normal for multiple people to share a room and for children to live with their parents (and grandparents) all under one roof until they got married. Don’t get me wrong - I prefer living alone to having roommates, and certainly prefer having my own private room to sharing it with multiple other people. But this is a very modern expectation. If it were normal for 3-4 people to share a room (as was common in the past), I imagine rent prices would actually be lower today than historically. In any case, rent is really only overinflated in coastal megacities. And rent wasn’t really my main target: there are a whole lot of modern consumption activities considered ‘essential’ which really aren’t in any sense, but have simply become social expectations.

rtkwe 6y ago

A big problem with that is long lifetimes and nice non-poverty level retirements basically require that there be more young people to support the older population in retirement because most people do not make enough to pay for their own retirement through savings.

gizmo686 6y ago
Retirement savings is irrelevant. No one saves for retirement by stockpiling cans of food. They save for retirement by stockpiling financial assets that can be exchanged for food when they are retired. They need just as much of a workforce to produce this food if they pay for it through savings as they would if it was provided through a socialist government program. If everyone who retired has "adequate" savings, but their is not a large enough workforce to support them, you will see their buying power fall. Also possible is their buying power would remain, and the buying power of the young workforce would fall as a greater share of goods produced go to retired folks who hoarded financial capital when it was cheaper to do so.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  You're just talking about food, if we were willing to just let the elderly fall to poverty level subsistence it's much easier but that's poverty level which is not what I want in my old age or for anyone in their old age. We grew beyond that as a society for the most part lets not go back to it. There's medical bills, housing (for those who don't own their homes, which will be an increasing percentage as housing prices climb and people keep renting longer), and recreation. > If everyone who retired has "adequate" savings, but their is not a large enough workforce to support them, you will see their buying power fall. Also possible is their buying power would remain, and the buying power of the young workforce would fall as a greater share of goods produced go to retired folks who hoarded financial capital when it was cheaper to do so. That's another reason where you need either a larger working population or a vast excess that gets redistributed to support retirees.
  - gizmo686 6y ago
    I was using food as an example because you could, in principle, stockpile cans of it. I suppose you could argue that some people do stockpile housing for retirement. However, other than that, all they are doing is stockpiling a claim on future productivity. As a matter of policy, we could give every old person such a claim regardless of their savings.

impendia 6y ago

> We simply don't need billions of humans. You make an excellent point, and I'll raise a counterargument. I would claim, simply, that human life is intrinsically a good thing. I believe that my life is worth living, that it is better that I'm alive than if I were dead. I'll presume that everyone who reads this believes the same about their own lives. In that case, the more people alive, the better -- (if all else is equal). That said, the philosopher Derek Parfit anticipated this and raises a counterargument to my argument above, known as the "mere addition paradox". [1] Roughly speaking, it goes as follows. 1. Suppose you have a population of 1,000,000 people, living happy, healthy, productive lives. Let's stipulate that this is a good thing. 2. Now, suppose in addition to this, suppose you have a second population of 1,000,000 people, who lead difficult lives with a lot of hardship, but whose lives are (perhaps barely) worth living. Then, if human life is intrisically good, then it is good that these people also exist. (This is the "mere addition" part.) 3. Given these two populations, equality is a good thing: lower the standard of living of the first million people ever so slightly, and raise the standard of the second group to match the first. This, too, seems to be a good thing. 4. Repeat. Eventually you arrive at a huge population, living lives of misery and squalor which are just slightly better than nothing -- but which one has argued is a better scenario than your original million people. This is the "repugnant conclusion". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

jonwalch 6y ago
"I'll presume that everyone who reads this believes the same about their own lives." That's an enormous assumption, in my opinion.
scottLobster 6y ago
If nothing else more humans increase our collective potential intelligence to solve problems. It's my my main issue with the anti-natalist movement: If theoretically everyone who believed in climate change agreed that anti-natalism was the solution, by definition within a generation the largest voting block would be the children of climate deniers. Which would actually make climate change much worse. We don't need fewer humans, we need smarter/better institutions and more efficient technology. Every life born is one more potential option for a breakthrough.

jes5199 6y ago

this is happening! Check out “Empty Planet: the Shock of Global Population Decline”. They predict a peak in _global_ population around 2050. The same cultural change is happening world-wide: people are having fewer children, and they’re having them later.

snarf21 6y ago

I agree with you. I don't think the planet can sustain more than about 4B people. As the third world countries get better health care and have better infant mortality, their rates will continue to drop. Additionally, robotics are going to continue to reduce our need for people to do stuff for other people.

pkaye 6y ago

Most western countries are below population replacement fertility rate of 2.1. This also include China at 1.7 and India almost there at 2.2. The countries in Africa are still up there though but they will go down also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

ecoled_ame 6y ago

Amen