5 ms·

I'd like to hear arguments on why more people is a good thing. Everything indicates less people was better. edit: Extra points for not using ponzinomics to jus

by aliqot 4y ago

I'd like to hear arguments on why more people is a good thing. Everything indicates less people was better. edit: Extra points for not using ponzinomics to justify it.

clircle 4y ago
Better divisions of labor
atemerev 4y ago
Consumption. "Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption. I am not saying that we should stop economic growth, but we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world, at least not making this obligatory.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Are you asserting more people is a good thing or a bad thing? I'm looking for those who assert it is a good thing. You said "we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world" which to me suggests it is not a good thing.
  - atemerev 4y ago
    Population growth is outside moral judgement. If there are more people, it's fine, we should engineer the way to accomodating them without damaging the environment too much. If there are less people being born, this is also fine, as human population is sort of self-regulating in this regard. Perhaps there is also some engineering needed to adjust for this scenario as well. But neither growth nor decline are to be regulated in any way.
- agent008t 4y ago
  > "Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption That cannot possibly be true. A single person can consume a huge amount of resources - far more than any of us currently does. For example, by setting a building on fire, you have consumed that building. We already have a near-infinite capacity for consumption. Or did you mean something different? If so, could you please explain it better? How can economic growth rely on increasing consumption? Because I would love to consume a yacht - where do I sign up to help economic growth by consuming one?
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
All our economical and political systems are based on growth, and it's very hard to sustain growth if you don't have growing resources (energy, mineral, etc) input, innovation and population. If the population goes down, the system will go through a phase of chaos before stabilising (E.G: retirement systems will default, factories will not have enought workers, companies not enought clients, loan will not get repaid...), and people are very afraid of that. Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently. I would argue exponential growth being exponentially hard to maintain, the chances that the system collapse are the highest anyway. Better that it does with a decline in population than a decline in resources. We can stabilitise and recover more easily from the first, than from the other one. There were several times in the history of humanity when we here just a few millions. If we plan, we can even control the fall instead of going full throttle. But we won't plan, nobody wants to vote for the end of the good times. We will protest, fight to keep the growth, and we will crash. We always do.
- atemerev 4y ago
  Stability is overrated.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    Periods of stability are necessary, but constant stability is undesirable, and idealised. However, unstability means immediate (albeit necessary) pain, which nobody wants to opt in.
- Retric 4y ago
  >All our economic and political systems are based on growth Hardly, you can find plenty of societies that operated at a steady state or even a decline. Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency. Companies don’t become more efficient than their competitors for all time, they become more or less efficient as new management and workers take over. Look at the biggest companies from 1920’s and most have failed or been taken over. Shrinking populations don’t inherently destroy retirement systems they at most force people to work longer or receive fewer benefits. Social security for example hands people about a 10x benefit range based on contributions but if the minimum acceptable benefit is X, there isn’t an inherent need to hand out more than that.
prottog 4y ago
It's better for the people who are alive who otherwise wouldn't be. There will be a higher sum total of people who live, laugh, love.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  If there is much more mouths to feed that food, people will not laught a lot, and not love for very long.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Each "mouth" has a chance of yielding infinitely scalable innovation. For example, the Haber-Bosch process supplies 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues. Check out the book "Abundance" by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.
    - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
      Innovation can't break the laws of thermodynamics. If a resource is finite, you are basically betting the future of the specie on its ability to find a substitute before we run out, in the context of an exponentially growing chance of failure. Right now we are betting we can find a substitute to fossil fuel before we run out of it, while exponentially consumming more energy. We haven't so far, since nothing comes close to the logistic practically, chemical flexibility and energy density of fossil fuel. But even if we fail at that, we can recover. We have less performant alternatives that are enough so sustain humanity, albeit not at the current level of productivity (after all, we currently build nuclear plants and wind turbines using fossil fuel). It's less true for soil we can live and growth food on, water we can drink, air we can breath, since those are complex systems. It's very easy to bring out that it's not a zero sum game when you can type on a computer and order delivery food. But somebody in the desert will have a very different idea of the practicality of the claim. There are many possible configurations where we end up with the equivalent of the desert of some sort for some very important resources given our population size. Claiming we are sure to be able to innovate ourself out of those possibilities is naive, and frankly, arrogant. I'm sure somebody used that argument on the Easter Island.
ch4s3 4y ago
You can arrive at this from many systems of values. If you value human happiness then more people even if a little less happy margins means more human happiness. If you value more innovation and progress then more people give you more opportunities for some innovative genius to come along. If you value human life as intrinsically valuable then more is straightforwardly better. Clearly I’m boiling down more complicated arguments to one sentence descriptions but I think the point is clear. Many human centered value systems can lead you to value more human life. If you have misanthropic values, then the opposite.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
More people indefinitely is a bad thing. But unless "less people" means "kill the old people", the transition period to less people is an inverted pyramid, with more old people than young. And given how many human resources old people need to stay comfortable that will be a horrible world.
hnuser847 4y ago
Cities are nations are currently built to support X number of people. If the population drastically decreases, the infrastructure won't automatically scale down with the population, so a smaller number of people will need to fund the maintenance of the existing infrastructure. Imagine the what happened to Detroit, but at the scale of an entire country. Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people. If people stop having a kids, the age demographics of a country will switch from a pyramid shape to obelisk shape, with a smaller number of young people funding the retirement of a larger slice of old people. Young people will be forced to pay significantly higher taxes or retired people will be forced to relinquish some or all of their retirement benefits. Neither solution will result in a happy society.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people. I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view. 1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced. 2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable.
  - hnuser847 4y ago
    > I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view. Here's the definition of Ponzi scheme from Wikipedia: "A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors." Social security operates in the same way. It pays earlier investors (old people) with funds from more recent investors (young people). Like a Ponzi scheme, it can only maintain stability with ever larger numbers of new investors. If the demographics shift to a much older population due to a low birth rate, there won't be enough new investors to keep the scheme going. > 1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced. This is exactly the scenario that's predicted to play out in South Korea, which currently has a birth rate of 0.81. https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/south-koreas-demographic-trends-continue-to-decline/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/south-koreas-demographic-tre... "Workers between ages of 25-49, those who are in their prime working years, however, are expected to decline from 36.8 percent of the population to 23.1 percent by 2050." "Based on current trends, Statistics Korea estimates that senior citizens will account for 30 percent of the population in 2036 and 40 percent by 2051." The US isn't nearly as bad in terms of birth rates, but the decline in birth rates is a global trend that shows no signs of stopping. > 2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable. Social security IS inherently unstable, in that it will cease to be funded if there aren't enough young people.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
In theory, as technology becomes more and more advanced, you can have enough specialists to fill a very large number of very deep supply chains. When you have a primitive society, you just need a "wood guy", a "stone guy" and a "plants guy". If you want to have fancy computers, you need things like "high pressure silane pump control loop guy". Though I'm pretty sure the number of people needed to maintain the current level of technology is substantially less than 7 billion, because a lot of those people are stuck in subsistence farming and basically don't contribute to industry.
dsign 4y ago
It is a matter of faith. Some people will believe that a rustic life is paradise. Most people who have experienced such life by necessity disagree. Some people may believe that they have it as good as it gets and would want no more. Three different doctrines. For those in the "Progress church", there is always space for improvement. And under the assumption that we are the ruling intellect, then more people is needed to design more things that don't exist yet. Things: space-ships, space habitats, alternate biologies, video-games, new forms of VR, virtual worlds, new drugs, new lifestyles, new social orders, new ... Yes, we could and should get more working minds by simply improving standards of living all around the world, but there is a limit to that. There is a material argument for not having more people and their creations: our tiny-winy planet and our ecosystems can't support them. But there is so much perfectly useless and boring dust out there...
osigurdson 4y ago
Because humans are awesome.
fennecfoxen 4y ago
People are great. Each person has intrinsic dignity and worth. Economic studies on safety and medicine spending and the like show us the demonstrated value of the lived experience of a single person is worth millions. All else being equal — a major caveat, of course — more people is better. Imagine walking up to an arbitrary random person and saying “the world would be better off if you don’t exist.” Or better, imagine someone doing that to you. Not out of malice, not because you’re a bad person, not because you waste resources, just out of the premise that fewer people is a better thing intrinsically. That’d be a load of crap, right? Quod eras demonstrandum.
- kypro 4y ago
  Assume you're on an island with a finite amount of food, now run this experiment again. The optimal number of humans depends on how finite resources are in an environment. Adding an extra person to an island with a shortage of resources would likely increase human suffering.
  - thefz 4y ago
    Animals have been adjusting their numbers according to availability of resources since the start. Humans found a way out of this but I fear that we are going to fall back into it very soon.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    When you assume things that are not true, you get wrong answers.
  - soupfordummies 4y ago
    Assume you're on the island and all n people on the island with you are smashing coconuts all day long just to have enough sustenance. But maybe person n+1 is able to start catching fish... I think there's more variables and it's possible our finite resources are more than enough to sustain everyone. However, they may not be enough to sustain endless growth of capital.
kmeisthax 4y ago
Smaller birth cohorts have less political power in a democracy. So regardless of the absolute scale of human civilization, shrinking birth rates means the children who do get born have less power relative to their parents until their parents die. For context, the "Baby Boomers" were only overtaken in population by "Millenials" two years ago. That's a very long time for a group of people to enjoy political power owing purely due to when they were born. This means that political establishments become gerontocratic, as there are simply more old people to vote themselves into power. The population-equals-power dynamic also plays out on smaller scales, too. Countries with shrinking populations are at risk of being invaded or having their economies collapse. I'm not going to argue in favor of infinite growth[0], but I will point out that certain things we are accustomed to require a minimum amount of people on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. We can see this in rural America, which has been sucked dry of its population. The only people who still live in small towns are the people who are unwilling or unable to leave, and many towns have collapsed purely due to lack of people living in them. [0] Though I do want to point out that I haven't seen a good argument as to why degrowth won't come commensurate with a massive surge in ethnonationalism. The only society I can think of that was wholly devoid of economic growth was pre-Meiji-era Japan, and that was the result of literally sealing the country off for centuries, banning an entire religion, and enforcing a very rigid political hierarchy.
hackeraccount 4y ago
If you think things are as good as they can be then you don't need more people. If you want to improve things each person you add is a chance to come up with a solution.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  In reality, most of the human population is not looking for solutions. Countries with more population are not necessarily better than countries with smaller populations. IMO, the best strategy is not playing number games and improve your current population instead, that way you increase the likelihood of problem solvers without increasing the pressure on the environment and the average quality of life.
tomjen3 4y ago
I have no idea what you mean by your made up word, but the simple fact is that people produce things of value, on average at least, and that means that more humans are valuable. Then there is the power-law concern: while the typical human is producing things of value, some people are producing things of extreme value, such as break-through scientific and engineering, which benefits humans immensely. This means that more humans can make more valuable things, and that by having fewer people we also have a higher chance to miss those exceptional humans. None of this really should be in dispute for people on these boards. Also while some years sucked, if you picked the high point of any five year period you will find that in almost all things the current period is the best. I will except only privacy.

by aliqot 4y ago

I'd like to hear arguments on why more people is a good thing. Everything indicates less people was better. edit: Extra points for not using ponzinomics to justify it.

clircle 4y ago

Better divisions of labor

atemerev 4y ago

Consumption. "Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption. I am not saying that we should stop economic growth, but we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world, at least not making this obligatory.

aliqot 4y ago
Are you asserting more people is a good thing or a bad thing? I'm looking for those who assert it is a good thing. You said "we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world" which to me suggests it is not a good thing.
- atemerev 4y ago
  Population growth is outside moral judgement. If there are more people, it's fine, we should engineer the way to accomodating them without damaging the environment too much. If there are less people being born, this is also fine, as human population is sort of self-regulating in this regard. Perhaps there is also some engineering needed to adjust for this scenario as well. But neither growth nor decline are to be regulated in any way.
agent008t 4y ago
> "Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption That cannot possibly be true. A single person can consume a huge amount of resources - far more than any of us currently does. For example, by setting a building on fire, you have consumed that building. We already have a near-infinite capacity for consumption. Or did you mean something different? If so, could you please explain it better? How can economic growth rely on increasing consumption? Because I would love to consume a yacht - where do I sign up to help economic growth by consuming one?

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

All our economical and political systems are based on growth, and it's very hard to sustain growth if you don't have growing resources (energy, mineral, etc) input, innovation and population. If the population goes down, the system will go through a phase of chaos before stabilising (E.G: retirement systems will default, factories will not have enought workers, companies not enought clients, loan will not get repaid...), and people are very afraid of that. Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently. I would argue exponential growth being exponentially hard to maintain, the chances that the system collapse are the highest anyway. Better that it does with a decline in population than a decline in resources. We can stabilitise and recover more easily from the first, than from the other one. There were several times in the history of humanity when we here just a few millions. If we plan, we can even control the fall instead of going full throttle. But we won't plan, nobody wants to vote for the end of the good times. We will protest, fight to keep the growth, and we will crash. We always do.

atemerev 4y ago
Stability is overrated.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Periods of stability are necessary, but constant stability is undesirable, and idealised. However, unstability means immediate (albeit necessary) pain, which nobody wants to opt in.
Retric 4y ago
>All our economic and political systems are based on growth Hardly, you can find plenty of societies that operated at a steady state or even a decline. Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency. Companies don’t become more efficient than their competitors for all time, they become more or less efficient as new management and workers take over. Look at the biggest companies from 1920’s and most have failed or been taken over. Shrinking populations don’t inherently destroy retirement systems they at most force people to work longer or receive fewer benefits. Social security for example hands people about a 10x benefit range based on contributions but if the minimum acceptable benefit is X, there isn’t an inherent need to hand out more than that.

prottog 4y ago

It's better for the people who are alive who otherwise wouldn't be. There will be a higher sum total of people who live, laugh, love.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
If there is much more mouths to feed that food, people will not laught a lot, and not love for very long.
- danuker 4y ago
  Each "mouth" has a chance of yielding infinitely scalable innovation. For example, the Haber-Bosch process supplies 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues. Check out the book "Abundance" by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    Innovation can't break the laws of thermodynamics. If a resource is finite, you are basically betting the future of the specie on its ability to find a substitute before we run out, in the context of an exponentially growing chance of failure. Right now we are betting we can find a substitute to fossil fuel before we run out of it, while exponentially consumming more energy. We haven't so far, since nothing comes close to the logistic practically, chemical flexibility and energy density of fossil fuel. But even if we fail at that, we can recover. We have less performant alternatives that are enough so sustain humanity, albeit not at the current level of productivity (after all, we currently build nuclear plants and wind turbines using fossil fuel). It's less true for soil we can live and growth food on, water we can drink, air we can breath, since those are complex systems. It's very easy to bring out that it's not a zero sum game when you can type on a computer and order delivery food. But somebody in the desert will have a very different idea of the practicality of the claim. There are many possible configurations where we end up with the equivalent of the desert of some sort for some very important resources given our population size. Claiming we are sure to be able to innovate ourself out of those possibilities is naive, and frankly, arrogant. I'm sure somebody used that argument on the Easter Island.

ch4s3 4y ago

You can arrive at this from many systems of values. If you value human happiness then more people even if a little less happy margins means more human happiness. If you value more innovation and progress then more people give you more opportunities for some innovative genius to come along. If you value human life as intrinsically valuable then more is straightforwardly better. Clearly I’m boiling down more complicated arguments to one sentence descriptions but I think the point is clear. Many human centered value systems can lead you to value more human life. If you have misanthropic values, then the opposite.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

More people indefinitely is a bad thing. But unless "less people" means "kill the old people", the transition period to less people is an inverted pyramid, with more old people than young. And given how many human resources old people need to stay comfortable that will be a horrible world.

hnuser847 4y ago

Cities are nations are currently built to support X number of people. If the population drastically decreases, the infrastructure won't automatically scale down with the population, so a smaller number of people will need to fund the maintenance of the existing infrastructure. Imagine the what happened to Detroit, but at the scale of an entire country. Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people. If people stop having a kids, the age demographics of a country will switch from a pyramid shape to obelisk shape, with a smaller number of young people funding the retirement of a larger slice of old people. Young people will be forced to pay significantly higher taxes or retired people will be forced to relinquish some or all of their retirement benefits. Neither solution will result in a happy society.

falcolas 4y ago
> Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people. I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view. 1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced. 2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable.
- hnuser847 4y ago
  > I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view. Here's the definition of Ponzi scheme from Wikipedia: "A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors." Social security operates in the same way. It pays earlier investors (old people) with funds from more recent investors (young people). Like a Ponzi scheme, it can only maintain stability with ever larger numbers of new investors. If the demographics shift to a much older population due to a low birth rate, there won't be enough new investors to keep the scheme going. > 1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced. This is exactly the scenario that's predicted to play out in South Korea, which currently has a birth rate of 0.81. https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/south-koreas-demographic-trends-continue-to-decline/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/south-koreas-demographic-tre... "Workers between ages of 25-49, those who are in their prime working years, however, are expected to decline from 36.8 percent of the population to 23.1 percent by 2050." "Based on current trends, Statistics Korea estimates that senior citizens will account for 30 percent of the population in 2036 and 40 percent by 2051." The US isn't nearly as bad in terms of birth rates, but the decline in birth rates is a global trend that shows no signs of stopping. > 2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable. Social security IS inherently unstable, in that it will cease to be funded if there aren't enough young people.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

In theory, as technology becomes more and more advanced, you can have enough specialists to fill a very large number of very deep supply chains. When you have a primitive society, you just need a "wood guy", a "stone guy" and a "plants guy". If you want to have fancy computers, you need things like "high pressure silane pump control loop guy". Though I'm pretty sure the number of people needed to maintain the current level of technology is substantially less than 7 billion, because a lot of those people are stuck in subsistence farming and basically don't contribute to industry.

dsign 4y ago

It is a matter of faith. Some people will believe that a rustic life is paradise. Most people who have experienced such life by necessity disagree. Some people may believe that they have it as good as it gets and would want no more. Three different doctrines. For those in the "Progress church", there is always space for improvement. And under the assumption that we are the ruling intellect, then more people is needed to design more things that don't exist yet. Things: space-ships, space habitats, alternate biologies, video-games, new forms of VR, virtual worlds, new drugs, new lifestyles, new social orders, new ... Yes, we could and should get more working minds by simply improving standards of living all around the world, but there is a limit to that. There is a material argument for not having more people and their creations: our tiny-winy planet and our ecosystems can't support them. But there is so much perfectly useless and boring dust out there...

osigurdson 4y ago

Because humans are awesome.

fennecfoxen 4y ago

People are great. Each person has intrinsic dignity and worth. Economic studies on safety and medicine spending and the like show us the demonstrated value of the lived experience of a single person is worth millions. All else being equal — a major caveat, of course — more people is better. Imagine walking up to an arbitrary random person and saying “the world would be better off if you don’t exist.” Or better, imagine someone doing that to you. Not out of malice, not because you’re a bad person, not because you waste resources, just out of the premise that fewer people is a better thing intrinsically. That’d be a load of crap, right? Quod eras demonstrandum.

kypro 4y ago
Assume you're on an island with a finite amount of food, now run this experiment again. The optimal number of humans depends on how finite resources are in an environment. Adding an extra person to an island with a shortage of resources would likely increase human suffering.
- thefz 4y ago
  Animals have been adjusting their numbers according to availability of resources since the start. Humans found a way out of this but I fear that we are going to fall back into it very soon.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tomjen3 4y ago
  When you assume things that are not true, you get wrong answers.
- soupfordummies 4y ago
  Assume you're on the island and all n people on the island with you are smashing coconuts all day long just to have enough sustenance. But maybe person n+1 is able to start catching fish... I think there's more variables and it's possible our finite resources are more than enough to sustain everyone. However, they may not be enough to sustain endless growth of capital.

kmeisthax 4y ago

Smaller birth cohorts have less political power in a democracy. So regardless of the absolute scale of human civilization, shrinking birth rates means the children who do get born have less power relative to their parents until their parents die. For context, the "Baby Boomers" were only overtaken in population by "Millenials" two years ago. That's a very long time for a group of people to enjoy political power owing purely due to when they were born. This means that political establishments become gerontocratic, as there are simply more old people to vote themselves into power. The population-equals-power dynamic also plays out on smaller scales, too. Countries with shrinking populations are at risk of being invaded or having their economies collapse. I'm not going to argue in favor of infinite growth[0], but I will point out that certain things we are accustomed to require a minimum amount of people on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. We can see this in rural America, which has been sucked dry of its population. The only people who still live in small towns are the people who are unwilling or unable to leave, and many towns have collapsed purely due to lack of people living in them. [0] Though I do want to point out that I haven't seen a good argument as to why degrowth won't come commensurate with a massive surge in ethnonationalism. The only society I can think of that was wholly devoid of economic growth was pre-Meiji-era Japan, and that was the result of literally sealing the country off for centuries, banning an entire religion, and enforcing a very rigid political hierarchy.

hackeraccount 4y ago

If you think things are as good as they can be then you don't need more people. If you want to improve things each person you add is a chance to come up with a solution.

ASalazarMX 4y ago
In reality, most of the human population is not looking for solutions. Countries with more population are not necessarily better than countries with smaller populations. IMO, the best strategy is not playing number games and improve your current population instead, that way you increase the likelihood of problem solvers without increasing the pressure on the environment and the average quality of life.

tomjen3 4y ago

I have no idea what you mean by your made up word, but the simple fact is that people produce things of value, on average at least, and that means that more humans are valuable. Then there is the power-law concern: while the typical human is producing things of value, some people are producing things of extreme value, such as break-through scientific and engineering, which benefits humans immensely. This means that more humans can make more valuable things, and that by having fewer people we also have a higher chance to miss those exceptional humans. None of this really should be in dispute for people on these boards. Also while some years sucked, if you picked the high point of any five year period you will find that in almost all things the current period is the best. I will except only privacy.