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Selfish reasons to want more humans

• totetsu 3y ago
  This could easily all be arguments for why you personally should want a more equitable world where we don’t have a Third world full of unhappiness and wasted tallent.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    Why not both?
    • deprecative 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • chr1 3y ago
        Before capitalism all of the world was "Third world". And the equity you get without capitalism is everybody being equally poor. And then millions die, like in every attempt to build communism in past century.
        • waffleiron 3y ago
          I know it’s unfashionable to say on a venture capitalist forum, but millions die under capitalism too.
          • lars512 3y ago
            That's certainly true and remains an unacceptable state of the world, but it's also true that globally, it's a steadily decreasing number, even under conditions of population growth. E.g. looking at child mortality over time https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-deaths-igme-data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-deaths-igme-data
          • Thiez 3y ago
            And in same (many?) cases it's intentional, e.g. by overthrowing governments so the West has cheaper oil, gas, or bananas (Guatemala).
  • adastra22 3y ago
    Billions have been lifted out of poverty in China and India alone. Africa is next. The problem is not too many people. If anything, people who think there are too many people are a problem.
    • healsdata 3y ago
      The combined population of those countries is 2.8 billion. For your assertion to be true, 71% of those countries would have had to have been in poverty in the recent past and now are not.
      • Jensson 3y ago
        You got about a billion in China, they were at the bottom end of the country gdp per capita rankings, now they are well into the upper half. The commenter probably assumed India did a similar journey, but India is still full of poverty and not even close to China, so yeah probably less than two billions combined but definitely more than a billion.
        • adastra22 3y ago
          "More than a billion" is enough to add the -s in English grammar.
          • throwaway047278 3y ago
            As long as we're in the pedantic mode: "More than a billion" could mean from 1 billion up to 1.99 billion. You need at least 2 billions to be able to add the -s The poster you replied to wrote "so yeah probably less than two billions combine", so that actually means you could not use the "-s" ending in this case.
            • adastra22 3y ago
              To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s. Which is all rather not the point because that's not what I said. I said "Billions have been lifted out of poverty." The meaning of that statement is: "the count of people who have been lifted out of poverty is measured with the 'billion' unit." That even includes 1 billion, exactly. If I had said "it numbers in the thousands", then 1,000 would have been an acceptable value, as would 9,9999. But see my other comment. The number of people in India and China who have been lifted out of poverty in the last ~50 years or so is much more than a billion.
• fungiblecog 3y ago
  Wow, it’s so easy when you don’t have to consider downsides!
  • slily 3y ago
    Kind of like self-flagellating climate doomers who don't think (or perhaps don't care) about the implications of destroying social safety nets and overall quality of life for future generations, right. It may be too late to convince millenials that they're doing a far better job at dooming their children and grandchildren than they think baby boomers did to them, but for those with a more open mind it's good to see things from a different perspective once in a while.
• throwawa14223 3y ago
  On the other hand if there are only two people you can probably pollute as much as you are capable of without worrying (too much).
  • esoterica 3y ago
    If there were only two people both of you would be living in a cave and foraging for berries because you can't sustain technological civilization with two people. You wouldn't even be capable of creating pollution.
    • kijin 3y ago
      Oh, you underestimate how much damage a pair of sufficiently malicious humans can inflict, especially if we assume that they are the last remaining members of a once highly technological civilization rather than ancient cavemen. So the cave you've been hiding in happens to be filled with long-forgotten Soviet nuclear material, which you think might help you get rid of the hungry pack of wolves outside...
    • card_zero 3y ago
      Prehistoric people set fire to a lot of forests, I for one would definitely find a way to emit pollution in this scenario if I had a few spare minutes.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• flatline 3y ago
  I really believed this argument growing up in a white, middle class household in the 1980s. I’m more skeptical now, after two decades of helping build our current technocracy. I think there is a sweet spot between the dystopian lawlessness of prehistory and early human history, and the dystopian future of rapacious consumption and late stage capitalism.
  • nine_k 3y ago
    In the words "mindless consumption" the problem is not with "consumption" but with "mindless". If you ask people in the third world, they badly want and need higher levels of consumption. And they will attain it, barring some global catastrophe.
• leonomad 3y ago
  Would all this matter in an era of super-AI?
• leonomad 3y ago
  What do you suggest? Gas chambers?
  • stephc_int13 3y ago
    Reducing population is as simple as making less babies. Not encouraging natality, large families, and reducing immigration.
    • Zetobal 3y ago
      If you look at the data from the iwf you'll see that as soon as woman get access to education the birth rates sink dramatically...
    • kelnos 3y ago
      I would think increasing immigration would actually achieve that better, at least when we're talking about immigration from places with worse access to education to places with better education. Better-educated people (especially women) seem to tend to have fewer babies. (Note that I'm not making a value judgment here.) And beyond that, to avoid demographic shocks, you probably do want to bring in new people from elsewhere to help care for the aging population that's now much larger than the young population, after the birth rate has been below replacement for long enough. Granted this is a zero-sum game: countries that lose their young people will end up being worse off, while those that aggressively pursue new sources for immigration will benefit.
      • stephc_int13 3y ago
        We always talk about taking care of the aging population without talking about the other side of the coin, society also have to take care of the kids, the cost is somewhat ignored as those kids will turn into adults at some point, but it is still part of the chain.
• Zetobal 3y ago
  Jason Crawford...
  • LAC-Tech 3y ago
    tell us more!
    • Zetobal 3y ago
      He wants to be a scientist but is just a mediocre SciFi author.
• lazy_afternoons 3y ago
  There has not been a single country so far whose GDP and overall wellness decreased with increase in population.
  • thefaux 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
    • lazy_afternoons 3y ago
      I don't see how a famine due to bad policy is relavant here.
    • abigail95 3y ago
      That was the deepest recession China has ever had?
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    Black Death. cheap labour -> throw more people at old sol'ns -> stagnation dear labour -> find new, more productive sol'ns -> progress
• stephc_int13 3y ago
  I strongly disagree, while technology clearly helped us growing, there are always tradeoffs, even agriculture is not ideal. We can solve some problems but it is almost never « for free » and the cost is newer problems to solve. I think there is a compounding effect with population growth, and I don’t think that population can grow forever on a single planet, that is nonsense. How much is enough? My intuition is that population stability is more important than actual number, but between 2 Billions and 10Billions is likely the sweet spot.
  • alexey-salmin 3y ago
    You just looked at the current number, arbitrarily added some margin on both sides and assumed it's the "sweet spot". Congratulations, you're at the same level of thinking as 17th, 18th and 19th centuries philosophers.
    • collyw 3y ago
      I was thinking along those lines. No reason given for the number, pretty much pulled it out of thin air. When I was growing up we were told we would have too much population and wouldn't be able to feed ourselves. Now obesity seems like a bigger problem. Obviously infinite growth isn't possible, but where the actual number lies, I honestly have no idea.
• defrost 3y ago
  More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom. This doesn't mean people, we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions. I live in a single state with a tiny population that mines and ships 16x more raw iron ore, almost a billion tonnes per annum, than peak annual iron ore mining in the entire USofA ever. We also mine a millions of tonnes of other resources. This is entirely down to bigger machines, smarter technology, and factors that don't require more people. The arguments presented here for even more people on the globe are sketchy at best, no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    It’s either labor or capital (to buy/dev those machines). Frankly, if it’s capital and we haven’t transitioned to something closer to socialism or even communism, it isn’t going to end very well for us workers.
    • sokoloff 3y ago
      History suggests that communism doesn’t end very well for workers, arguably even less well.
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Oh, I don’t think it would work very well now. My point is when capital is so powerful that workers aren’t really needed anymore. Then something drastic has to happen, because at that point capitalism can’t push society forward anymore (given the incentives it works with).
  • Boatfaceing 3y ago
    [dead]
• chaostheory 3y ago
  We need more time to deal with finite resources and pollution. A larger population would decrease the time we would have to find solutions. Even if most of the current world population lived sustainably, we would still need 2.5 earths to support the current population size indefinitely. I believe that we need about 6.5 earths at the moment. Maybe if we had off world colonies this would be a good opinion, but this blog post is just a bad argument
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Wrong. You want the largest viable population. That is, a population below carrying capacity. A population over carrying capacity just consumes the environment that sustains it and dies off collectively. Today we are over carrying capacity at a global level, and many regions are also over carrying capacity at a local level. The population centers built around groundwater aquifers pumped aggresively, overfishing, or dying topsoil, which are most of them, are doomed. Unless there is an innovation that unlocks rapid topsoil regeneration, freshwater replenishment, and plentiful food sources covering the growing global demand for fish, at scale and meeting market demand at low prices, humanity is bound to have a conflict over the remaining resources.
• toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Not selfish enough, sorry. Empower the human, regardless of total fertility rate decline trajectory (~40% of global annual pregnancies are unintended; assuming reproductive wishes are affirmed [less or no children], extrapolate future total fertility rate accordingly [points down]). > bigger societies are better for everyone. This does not appear to be the case based on the evidence. Bigger societies are better for those in political power, with economic control, and anyone who is a beneficiary of excess/surplus. We should do what is best for the human, not the machine. We already do not properly provide for hundreds of millions of people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen... ("Wikipedia: Human impact on the environment") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environment#/media/File:20200118_Global_warming_and_climate_change_-_vertical_block_diagram_-_causes_effects_feedback.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen... ("Wikipedia: Climate Change Flowchart") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries ("Wikipedia: Planetary boundaries") https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Planetary+boundaries&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ("HN: Planetary boundaries search") https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#empowerment-of-women https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#empowerment-of-wom... ("Our World in Data: Fertility Rate - Empowerment of Women") https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-united-states https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u... ("Guttmacher Institute: Unintended Pregnancy in the United States") https://www.unfpa.org/press/nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-unintended-global-crisis-says-new-unfpa-report https://www.unfpa.org/press/nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-... ("UNFPA: Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended—a global crisis, says new UNFPA report") https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-poverty-facts https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-... ("Fast facts: Global poverty") (thesis arrived at by a preponderance of all available information)
  • Affric 3y ago
    You’ve got that there are a lot of unintended pregnancies. You’ve got that there is an impact on the environment by humanity. That does not an argument make as much as the points in TFA.
• EchoChamberMan 3y ago
  Is there any discussion of how we would do this in the article, or is it entirely fantastical discussions of what is possible, and how great the world could be?
• aborsy 3y ago
  The population growth rate needs to be controlled, even reduced, to reduce the pressure on natural resources and slow down the climate change. John Baez, mathematician at UCR, talks about this approach among a number of others, such as, reducing air travel for conferences.
  • adastra22 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • nine_k 3y ago
      Real gentlemen start with themselves. Not having children is one such choice.
      • adastra22 3y ago
        I sincerely hope that in 50 years when the concern over population growth has been shown to be misguided, just as it has in the last 200 years since Malthus predicted the Earth could only support a few hundred million people, you won’t be sad and alone regretting a missed opportunity.
        • nine_k 3y ago
          As a father of two, I also hope for a non-doom scenario.
        • amenhotep 3y ago
          It seems to me that you guys inadvertently expose a kind of fundamental selfishness when you post like this. Like, it sounds as if a significant part of your reasoning on having children is the belief that you are creating a person who will be biologically obligated to like you and fulfil your emotional needs - thereby saving yourself from being sad and alone. I don't think it's common for child free people to share this belief. I would even hazard a guess that for many this train of thought is more associated with how they feel about pressure from their own parents to fulfil their emotional needs by creating more new people. That kind of self-interested argument doesn't land very convincingly on people who feel that their future state of being sad and alone or not is their responsibility and nobody else's.
• greesil 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure there's too many people on this rock already
• android42 3y ago
  > Economies of scale. In particular, often total costs are a combination of fixed and variable costs. The more output, the more the fixed costs can be amortized, lowering average cost. Except that after a certain point total costs increase again as the raw inputs become more scarce and expensive to obtain.
  • zeroCalories 3y ago
    If resources becomes scarce, don't worry. We've just crashed the market on human value, so we can make up for it with lower wages and longer hours.
  • Sammi 3y ago
    Then we should grow so we can mine asteroids.
• tracerbulletx 3y ago
  I doubt things scale this way. There are only so many opportunities to have impact. I don't think increasing the random generation of geniuses would have that much of an impact compared to an increase in quality of life for a smaller number of people.
• RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  > and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age is this really true? there were tons of supply-line problems during covid for example I feel like to make this point you would have to define "catastrophic" and "resource" and "shortage" extremely narrowly.
  • kelnos 3y ago
    I don't think something like what happened due to COVID is related to that. That was a matter of poor logistics, not of scarcity of resources. I believe the author is talking about things like "we need lots of mineral foobar to sustain us, and at our current population growth, we'll run out in five years!" ---> "oh neat, we can substitute mineral barbaz, plus a little cheap processing, and we have enough to last us thousands of years". In this case, "resource" is defined more as "raw materials that we can feasibly and economically access". Being unable to meet demand for computer chips because your global supply chain suffered a shock isn't the same thing. A concrete example of how we've overcome the possibility of a catastrophic resource shortage is advances in drilling and mining. Oil and natural gas reserves that were not feasible to pump out of the ground 50 years ago are now being harvested. The claims of "peak oil" turned out to be irrelevant; we have plenty, and as we "run low", we go after reserves that are harder to get to. And this process continues: even if it weren't a good idea to stop burning oil and natgas for climate-change reasons, sure, eventually those wells will run dry, or harvesting will become so expensive that it no one would be able to afford to drive their cars or heat their homes anymore. So instead we develop and refine technologies (solar and wind farms, more and more efficient heat pumps, EVs, etc.) that change the game entirely. (Still waiting on Mr. Fusion, though.)
    • chaostheory 3y ago
      > Oil and natural gas reserves that were not feasible to pump out of the ground 50 years ago are now being harvested. This is a bad example. We are doing this because we are desperate. The easy and cheap to access oil sources are nearly gone. What we have left is expensive to reach and process oil. Peak oil is still an issue as well as Peak [insert natural resource]. Our natural resources like fresh water are finite.
• smitty1e 3y ago
  The arguments in the linked article all seem rooted in a traditional Western weltanschauung. This worldview is increasingly characterized (not without basis) as racist, sexist and fascist, mostly by critics whose personal positive contributions to human improvement are unclear. I'm not driving this bus; I just seem to be going under it. Maybe after the societal collapse the survivors can agree that the Critical Theory folks were mistaken?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • jocoda 3y ago
    I strongly disagree with the article but what's with the ad hominim? - "...mostly by critics whose personal positive contributions to human improvement are unclear" We're way past population levels where the traditional reaction to dissatisfaction with circumstances lets you pack up your tribe and move away to somewhere else. Everything is fenced in, and we are our own worst enemies. If you are nice or powerless you get trampled by the not so nice. Maybe we'll adjust to a society that's equitable, for some high value of e. If so, I think we'll have evolved into something not human any more. Humans don't do nice. Right now, it looks more like we're on the way to becoming morlocks and eloi.
    • smitty1e 3y ago
      > Right now, it looks more like we're on the way to becoming morlocks and eloi. Why the ad hominem? not that I disagree with your point (especially with disrespect to the purported elite critics in my original post) but yes: these generalizations can be seen as unfair. But that is the point of generalizations: they are a shoe fitting a slice of audience. I tend agree with the article. If you want to know the overarching issue confronting humanity, it is loss of individual liberty coupled with loss of interest in the proper family. Every ersatz, hedonistic substitute pushed by our purported elite is designed to produce some techno-utopia with a thin globalist ruling class and a controlled, limited population of bipedal livestock. That is, the world is to be one large plantation run by The Cool People from their Tower of Babel, of whom I am not one.
• Depurator 3y ago
  This is a good example of a very narrow human centric view that captures why its bad to try to maximize for particular made up metrics, such as human utility. It also a wonderfully hare brained view of technolocial innovation that disregards the dark sides, material input, or externalities at all. Is this person an economist or something?
  • hazbot 3y ago
    I think they are quite upfront about their values, and I suspect they would quite likely be OK with being labelled human-centric, as would I!
    • Depurator 3y ago
      Certainly, it was just more of a general criticism toward such a view, as leading to long term degradation of the world. I totally get how humans would always protitize humanity first, but in the long term we have some issues such as overfishing, global warming, biodiversity loss etc. as a result. But the esiest would of course to not belive in thos issues, and have cool toys
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • chaostheory 3y ago
        What you described is still human centric. Nature has survived several extinction level events and I’m sure it will survive more. If humanity changes the current environment enough, then it will no longer be the once ideal environment to that continues to sustain humanity indefinitely. Going on a tangent, a lot of environmentalists have a marketing problem.
        • luckystarr 3y ago
          Nature will die with 100% certainty. That is a verified fact due to the coming life-cycle changes of our sun. Nothing will survive that. Only humans have a chance to save "nature" by bringing life along to the stars. Not sure if we will be able to pull it off, but I see no other option.
• solatic 3y ago
  The problem is that infrastructure doesn't scale nearly as quickly as birth rates, let alone immigration. Cities are getting overcrowded, and many, many attempts by many different countries have proven the difficulty of bootstrapping new cities in the middle of otherwise economically underperforming land, like agricultural fields or even desert. Pretty much every existing major city is bursting at the seams: insufficient housing, insufficient transportation infrastructure, insufficient utility infrastructure.
  • kiba 3y ago
    Cities aren't overcrowded, not even close, but cars sure do take a lot of space, especially with laws and regulations that required excess parking spaces.
  • esoterica 3y ago
    The limitations on building infrastructure are artificially imposed by NIMBYs. We have the technological ability to quickly build large amounts of housing and other infrastructure and we used to do so before we let the NIMBYs grind everything to a halt over the past few decades. Not only are cities in America not overcrowded, almost all of them are extremely low density sprawl. There is like 1 city in America with a respectable level of density. The average American city would be much nicer and much more livable if they quadrupled the number of people living there.
    • solatic 3y ago
      > low density sprawl Hypothetically more of these cities could start to build out subway, light rail, heavy rail networks; which would support higher density. But American cities don't seem to be capable of that. Maybe it's a lack of money, maybe a lack of political will, maybe it's American car culture. But it's irrelevant. It takes a really long time to build out that infrastructure, and in the meantime, the city has the infrastructure that it has, which is insufficient for keeping both housing costs and commuting times down.
  • 2four2 3y ago
    I'm skeptical that every major existing city is busting at the seams.... What's the metric here? Cities have been crowded for centuries.
• breeding4u 3y ago
  [flagged]
• throwaway295729 3y ago
  This may be a bit reductive but the article is basically saying that the larger the population the quicker progress and innovation will occur. What’s unclear though is if this progress and innovation leads to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As we’ve seen lately, the opposite could also be true. With climate change on the horizon, we may have even reached peak human happiness sometime in the late 20th century
  • Zababa 3y ago
    Progress and innovation absolutely does lead to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As an example, absolute number of people living in extreme poverty started to sharply decline at the start of the 21st century: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre....
    • skulk 3y ago
      That chart does abysmally little to support your claim, for a few reasons. 1) How many of those people in the green live on less than $5 a day? $1.90 per day is an absurd and arbitrary limit which feels cherry picked to make a Pinker-esque pleasing chart. 2) It hardly goes back in time. I'd like to know how happy hunter-gatherers were 20k years ago. Maybe I could go ask the North Sentinelese but I think building a time machine might be easier than getting a straight answer from them.
• gwelson 3y ago
  The thing that bothers me about this line of argument is...there already are a lot of people! We've had _massive_ population growth over the past few centuries, especially in the last 100 years or so. We have 8 _billion_ people now...and I personally don't see a lot of the benefits that the author talks about. I really don't think going from 8 billion to 10 billion or 16 billion or even 50 billion people would really make a meaningful difference in "the number of geniuses" or the number of people to populate a subreddit for a niche hobby, to draw on two of his examples. We have lots of geniuses now and we have lots of people on subreddits already. We can already see that many (most?) societies are really quite bad at dividing finite resources/wealth/capital/land/etc. in an efficient (let alone equitable) manner among the billions of people in the world today. Are we really supposed to believe that resource management would magically become better/more efficient/more equitable somehow with even more people to divide them between? My hunch is that the vast majority of new people that got added to the global population would be relatively quite poor, whereas the global number of billionaires and millionaires would stay relatively flat. Yes things like whale oil and bat guano are resources we've progressed past the need for...but we can't progress past the need for land. Or water. Both of which are in relatively short supply for many people, especially in places that are more desirable to live. Large population centers have historically tended to form where they are for a reason (proximity to water, natural resources, natural recreation/beauty, desirable weather/climate, etc.), and most of the world's large cities are already pretty tapped out in terms of population. You can't magically fit a billion extra people in New York or Shanghai or Paris without it having disastrous repercussions for the people already there (and the new people). Sure we could build new massive cities in presently rural/unpopulated areas, but I think there's a reason that lots of people don't live in those places now, and if a billion-person city was shoved into South Dakota (to use an example of a very sparsely populated place) out of necessity, I'd imagine many people wouldn't be too happy about having to live there. To be very clear (and preempt any bad-faith readings of this), I'm not endorsing the view of dramatic population reduction or anything like that. I'm just saying that the idea that massive population growth is always an inherent good strikes me as quite wrongheaded.
  • kiba 3y ago
    These resources are abundantly available on Earth and endlessly recyclable. It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality. At some point, your problem will be heat, not energy, because roughly speaking humans are 100 watts space heater, never mind all the heat generated from making food, transport infrastructure, industrial production and extraction. If you take a look at cities and how they're constructed, it's really a 2.5D map. The road corridor are frequently ground level, maybe two or threes. Then we build towers and buildings. So what we created are artificial canyons in cities, but we don't build entire floor of cities. So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area. So in that sense, space isn't probably an issue. Humans are actually pretty space efficient. What's not space efficient is all the expensive infrastructures such as cars and roads. What will be the most challenging for us is really political, not engineering or economics or space or energy.
• darth_avocado 3y ago
  The population already exists. But we don’t see that many geniuses working on ambitious projects because they are working minimum wage jobs or wasting away without education in Africa, India, China, or downtown LA. We don’t have a population problem, just a utilization problem.
  • gherkinnn 3y ago
    And in other parts of the world, geniuses are found, educated, only to waste away optimising ads on websites.
    • moravak1984 3y ago
      Oh, this is such a cliché, like all contemporary geniuses do is maximizing CTR... Many others are doing R&D for companies producing harmful products (both for humans and the environment, even when they love to make people think they are not eco-unfriendly (looking at you, Elmo Musk)), figuring out how to "maximize profitability", even if said profitability comes from pushing people into debt, or simply keeping silent and inactive on meetings where very harmful decisions are made.
      • usui 3y ago
        Yes, geniuses working on electric vehicle technology or reducing space launch costs for Elmo Musk are just like the geniuses optimizing ad technology to maximize clickthrough-rate.
    • FredPret 3y ago
      You make fun of click-through rates because it sounds stupid and irrelevant. Now, I’m not saying it’s like building the pyramids, inventing General Relativity, or landing on the moon. And yes we all hate ads and 99% of them are junk. But online ads have been revolutionizing the economy. Matching consumers and producers have always been extremely non-trivial and an economically critical activity. You used to have to go to the mall to discover and buy things. That mall was a huge gatekeeper for producers trying to offer goods on the market and a major point of inefficiency. Now anyone can put up ads and start selling with a vastly smaller distribution budget. Just think of having a small percentage multiplier on the entire economy. Just think of the implications for social equity - you used to have to be well-connected and well-funded to have any hope of starting a business and getting into Walmart.
• PKop 3y ago
  I want a smaller human population.
• Proven 3y ago
  [dead]
• aaron695 3y ago
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• maxglute 3y ago
  >A bigger world is better for everyone Current world isn't good enough for everyone.
  • kelnos 3y ago
    Yep, maybe we should focus on fixing that first. But I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument. While there are certainly more people in absolute numbers living in poverty than there were 2000 years ago, the percentage of people in bad shape is probably lower. And many versions of "bad shape" today is probably still a lot better than the average at many points in history. That leads to a philosophical argument, though: is it better to have more people, with a higher proportion that are happy and doing well, or to have fewer people, with a higher proportion that hare unhappy and doing poorly, if in the second case, the absolute number of people in bad shape is fewer? I think it's reasonable to disagree on which is better; there's no objective truth there.
    • maxglute 3y ago
      I think the argument is that the marginal utility/productivity of a person > the resources it costs to sustain a body, even if that body is minimally productive (i.e. subsistence farmer). I think we're better off trying to improve ratio of estimated 2B subsistence farmers that can be replaced with (generously) 100m farmers + machines, and try to figure out how to improve productivity of rest. IMO there are still so many existing poor people, and for purpose of this argument, non/under-consumers, that there's ample (billions of low HDI/low productive workers globally) of untapped demand that can be uplifted to drive growth in all the big things this article calls for. The argument would be different if global human capita productivity is already optimized/maximized and adding more bodies is the only way to raise ceiling, but we're not even close.
      • savingsPossible 3y ago
        You are arguing for a different optimization strategy Let's! Your optimization strategy can be tried, is being tried, and is yielding results. Por que no los dos, though?
• zeroCalories 3y ago
  Wrong. Other people should have fewer kids and fade away. My people must continue grow and prosper. It's simple.
• osigurdson 3y ago
  How about instead of telling people to have more kids or less kids, we let them do whatever they feel like?
  • kelnos 3y ago
    Because people do irresponsible, selfish things, and in many cases fail to consider how their actions can negatively impact others. Not saying that having more or fewer or no kids is going to have a negative impact. But if it was important for humanity to encourage more or fewer or no kids, I think it's pretty natural that there would be campaigns (funded by governments and NGOs alike) to push people in the direction that was supposed to be better. That's pretty much the entire purpose of any kind of public policy. In theory, anyway.
    • osigurdson 3y ago
      Who decides if something is "important for humanity"?
• Affric 3y ago
  > More geniuses I am going to hazard a guess that we aren’t missing the underlying number of geniuses. We are probably wasting a lot of potential geniuses. > More progress Unless the limiting factor isn’t those factors. > More options The west has more options than ever. We also have more people without purpose than ever before. We aren’t lacking people. > Deeper patterns We all want rival goods. Shelter. Clothing. Food. That’s not even getting to diseconomies of scale. The population debate is fraught with charlatans.
• y0ssar1an 3y ago
  yeah let's trash the planet at an even higher rate. let's set up more slaughterhouses to kill animals to feed all these new people, because we sure don't have enough of those /s
  • doodlebugging 3y ago
    OT but I was just wondering, where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
    • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Probably in prison (or dead) (or dead in prison with the authorities refusing to relinquish your body to your family for "reasons"). Especially if by Snowdens you're specifically referring to whistleblowers/leakers of state secrets rather than anyone speaking truth to power.
      • doodlebugging 3y ago
        Recognizing that there are lots of Snowdens out there, I was referring to a different one and half expected that to be lost on some HN members and on everyone who hasn't read the story. It's another case of IYKYK. Like an almost secret handshake between those who have something in common but have never met. Or a shared recollection that manifests as a hearty chuckle as the memories come back into focus.
• BenFranklin100 3y ago
  The author’s third point, “More progress’, is what I find the most compelling. We tend to think of ourselves living in a techno utopia, but in my view we are barely out of the dark ages. Disease and poverty still run rampant and our lives are frustratingly short. There are people personally close to me that live in chronic pain; there are healthy people in their 20s that die from cancer; our understanding of biology and physiology is so poor we currently can’t help this people. Broad technological progress is the only answer and this will require talented people.
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    We have many more potentially talented people already, than we either develop or employ.
• kelnos 3y ago
  Some of the underlying logic here feels suspect to me. Sure, more people likely leads to more production of non-rival goods, but more people will also make rival goods more scarce and harder to come by. Sure, some rival goods will be replaced by non-rival goods, but it's hard to imagine eliminating them entirely. I don't really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new/better/less-scarce resources every time we find that whatever we're using today is going to run out. As a bit of an extreme example, there is only so much matter in the universe, and even if we find a way to convert any kind of matter into any other with minimal energy expenditure, if the population keeps growing and growing, eventually there will not be enough matter for further growth. I suppose then the author might suggest that we will find loopholes in the laws of thermodynamics that allows us to create matter from nothing, but at some point you have to admit that this is the fictioniest of science fiction and isn't something we can support with what we know today. Then there's just plain old shitty human nature. The larger an individual society is, the more people are going to be at the bottom of it, falling through the cracks. There will always be people who want more wealth and more power, and someone -- more and more someones, really -- has to suffer for it. THe idealist in me wants to imagine a post-scarcity society, but I'm not sure I have it in me anymore to believe in such a thing; we have the ability to feed every person on Earth, today, and yet we don't do it, because those in power are selfish and more concerned with their stock prices than in actually helping fellow humans (and we, the unwashed masses, constantly enable them). I don't have much optimism that this will change, ever; even if it does, I expect that to take millennia, at best. On another tack: we have so many people in the world who are unhappy, beaten down, in poverty, hungry, unhoused today. Maybe we should fix that before working to grow our population more and more and more. Having said that, I do agree that it's preposterous to think that the ideal size of humanity is a half billion, or even a couple billion, as the author points out others have suggested. We have, so far, overcome resource limitations, and likely will be able to continue to do so for some time. I'm just skeptical of how long we can continue to do that.
  • kiba 3y ago
    Matters in the universe is a lot. Ditto the amount of energy. People may argue that unlimited growth is unsustainable, and I agree. But what people don't realize is just...how much resources there is and how much just sits there being wasted by being radiated and hitting inert rocks and gases. The problem is not resource availability(of which they are abundant and uselessly radiating out), or even engineering or economic challenges. It's political. If you take care of the politics, the world is your oyster, and you can have as many billions of people you want within physics and economic reasons.
• stephc_int13 3y ago
  Luckily, population growth is dampened by the housing market, modulo transportation technology. No natalist policy can change that, when young adults are living with their parents because they can’t afford housing, they are not going to make babies. This is not education and wealth, or at least only indirectly as those are related to living in large crowded cities.
• victorbstan 3y ago
  What is this drivel of nonsense. We’ve been combating overpopulation, the population and natural destruction cause by overpopulation. And now you have nut bags like this? What is this industrial revolution's swan song?
• downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  If you were serious about this line of argument you would be appalled by the massive waste of potential in today's population, so many wasted brains especially in the "third world", and you would be an advocate for global wealth redistribution, generous welfare, increased spending on education, better nutrition, reduction of pollution that affects health, etc.
• Barrin92 3y ago
  What strikes me about this recent wave of pro-natalism is how banal and devoid of serious argument it is. Just to mention a few things, any ethical system of a mature civilization should have something to say about the entire biosphere, not just homo sapiens. The article doesn't lose a word on the fate of any other species on this planet, and I don't know how one can even have this discussion without recognizing that we're only one of the many inhabitants here. If you're going to propose an entire world view based on some superficial notion of self-interest you can justify anything. For a worldview that leans so heavily into utilitarianism it's very odd to ignore most sentient life on earth. I invite the author to visit a large scale factory farm to see the "technological progress" in action that sustains 8 billion people and then to ponder how that squares with his own supposed standard for ethical progress. Second point is this naive Steve Pinker-esque belief in "progress" to begin with. If you're going to argue that "more geniuses" and "more ethnic restaurants" constitute some deep and authentic moral progress for human civilization you have your work cut out for you, most people on the planet don't share that value system, and it's not obvious that anyone should buy into it without justification. It's almost naive to the point of being tautological, where "progress" is when more people do more things, and therefore having more progress is having more people.
• psadri 3y ago
  More geniuses — there are plenty of talented "brains" that simply never get a chance due to malnutrition, disease, lack of education and opportunity. We'd have far more of them if we could provide a higher minimum standard of living throughout the entire world.
• amiga1200 3y ago
  More geniuses The problem here is with the distribution of future geniuses. More likely than not they will be born into a population with low education. The probability of nurturing this talent for the betterment of mankind will be low. In highly educated populations, the birth rate is normally low.
• r_hendricks 3y ago
  Many of those who want to have more kids can’t afford it. Plain and simple. In conversations like this, people often skip over this reality which always surprises me. Instead, they seem to focus on winning the ideological battle of what the ideal world should be.
• Timber-6539 3y ago
  At a personal level, it doesn't matter how many more people exist on this planet. It's the quality of them that does.
• underlogic 3y ago
  I think the best reason for a lower population is that in the age of AI having 8 billion people of every persuasion with access to a wealth of destructive information and accelerated research it's inevitable someone is going to start a fire we can't put out. Be it a grey goo scenario, a weaponized or misaligned super intelligence or a bioweapon or lab accident which I'm certain covid was. Our best shot right now at surviving the next 50 years is to reduce our population and hope that proportionally reduces the risk of an existential threat by self replicating means. A nuclear war might actually save our species. Is that a radical point of view? Pretty sure the logic is sound at least
  • gestalte6 3y ago
    [dead]
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  "Growth" - everything in this world is about "growth" - if your economy is not "growing" it is a disaster, thus you import more people because people == "growth". Despite the fact that growth is bad for the environment and espite constant "growth" for decades our problems have not been solved.
  • abigail95 3y ago
    Is it easier to have a completely green supply chain with 1,000 people, or 1,000,000? When does the growth become bad?
• throwaway892238 3y ago
  Oh, HN. Always upvoting the dumbest contrarian thinkpieces. It's like accidental 4Chan without the humor.
  • fsflover 3y ago
    I upvoted for the great comments, which I can now use in discussions.
• hilbert42 3y ago
  "One argument for a larger population is based on utilitarianism, specifically the version of it that says that what is good is the sum total of happiness across all humans." Utilitarianism doesn't say that 'good is the sum total of happiness across all humans' but rather it says it's 'the greatest good for the greatest number', which is substantially different, so this is a distortion of the facts. I would refer the author to the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill especially his work Utilitarianism. "If each additional life adds to the cosmic scoreboard of goodness, then it’s obviously better to have more people (unless they are so miserable that their lives are literally not worth living)." I can't be bothered to debate population argument in detail again as it always polarizes and ends up in unresolved arguments—except to say the author doesn't seem to have enough understanding about the implications of exponential growth. The facts are clear even to Blind Freddy that the resources and environmental problems presently being experienced are caused by excessive demands on the planet's resources. Of course the elephant in the room is the world's population but any serious discussion about that is verboten in the public discourse.
  • usrusr 3y ago
    I think your last paragraph sums up the article very well. One question remainins: did the author succeed in convincing himself? It's a fluff piece based on naming a few patterns that could be used as arguments for more humans, not an exploration of the problem space. For example he does not even mention that one pattern that has accompanied humanity through all of history: population control through war. When it's too crowded for young humans to live like their parents and grandparents did, they are easy to rile up against some other group and then the population level resets.
    • hilbert42 3y ago
      I'd suggest the answer to the question you posed is likely 'yes'. The points the author raises under More options tells me much about the person he is and I've encountered his type before and they think like that. As I said I don't see much point in discussing population as much as I'd like to. With the world as it is, it's easy to be disparaging against those who argue for a larger population and that we'll always find or develop more resources but it serves no purpose when those who are in favor hold those views as beliefs rather than having arrived at them objectively. We shouldn't forget there's long social and religious traditions concerning fecundity and 'go forth and multiply', and these beliefs are deeply ingrained in much of the population. Also, one has to be heartless not to feel very sorry for a grieving couple who've been told by an IVF clinic they can't have any children even if that would benefit the planet. Much of the world's population see the biological urge to multiply as normal and fundamental so it's understandable why those who question the doctrine such as Paul Ehrlich and Jane Goodall have been verbally pilloried over the years. Their message is repugnant even if correct. That said, we need the discussion and we need to listen to Ehrlich et al but it's not going to happen for reasons stated. What I find most disconcerting and hypocritical are environmentalists and groups like Greenpeace arguing about pollution, limited resources and environmental issues whilst they blatantly ignore the population 'elephant'. When asked why they've been known to say "it's too hot handle, we wouldn't touch it with a barge pole." I'd like to discuss your point about population control through war as history of warfare is an interest of mine but it's too big to post here.
• yareal 3y ago
  These all have the same fundamental error -- the presumption that progress and faster progress is desirable. With today's luxuries but half the people, everyone could live pretty well, and have meaningful work. Genuinely, if we focused less on driving progress at all costs and focused more on "well being for all", we wouldn't even need to reduce the population. We have the capacity to provide a safe, comfortable, low effort society for everyone today. We just choose not to arrange ourselves to pursue it.
• nsoonhui 3y ago
  Duh. Of course I should want a bigger population: more market for my business, more chances for me to mate, and more people I can talk to and learn from. It's a no brainer, no ?
• faeriechangling 3y ago
  Seems to be fixated on the idea that only Human Resources matter at the expense of all other resources. Our current population is being propped up by all number of finite resources, most significantly oil, for which we have no certainty of finding more supply of in the future. With a higher population, we're depleting those resources faster. It may in fact be better to get to a lower level of population which is long-term stable. We are aggressively burning through our natural resources and while humanity won't go extinct our population is doomed to absolutely plummet during an age of poverty.
  • ttt11199907 3y ago
    > Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age. I think the OP would say oil is "basically not a catastrophic resource shortage." This seems like a typical misinterpretation of exponential growth as linear growth. There's literally fixed mass on the planet. Growth cannot continue forever no matter how many geniuses it might produce.
    • faeriechangling 3y ago
      When it comes to our ability to just find a substitute, past results don't predict future results. The author is like somebody who thinks because a stock went up in the past it's a good buy without looking at the fundamentals. Oil made the 20th century absolutely explode in terms of population growth, we went from less than 2B to more than 6B in the 20th century and 8B now. Whale oil, elephant tusks, and seabird guano did nothing like that. How does one reasonably expect to replace a miracle? Electrification comes nowhere close, not that it isn't worth doing.
• FrontierPsych 3y ago
  >First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions. There might be 1,000 certified geniuses per billion, but we are still slaves to probability. That genius might be born in the slums of Calcutta or in the middle of the Amazon rainforest or in the vastness of the Mongolian steppes. I guess the hope would be that 3 or 4 might have the luck to be born to a middle class or higher family in the first world. Also, whatever this dude wants, the world is in major decline. For example, because of China's one child policy, their population will be halved in 50 or 70 years and nothing can stop that. Japan has a high over 40 population, Italy, Germany, Spain, and especially South Korea. Russia has been declining in population and with the war, the best and brightest have left Russia, never to return (they are devoloping lives, wives, children wherever they are now), and the meat grinder of the war. Same with Ukraine. The same thing happened in ancient Rome as well. It got so expensive to raise a child in Rome (yes, inflation existed back then as well), because of money pouring into the administrative city of Rome - for the same reason now in the first world, that people stopped having children. Even back then they had rudimentary birth control. The Roman Emperors gave all kinds of incentives for families to have children - grants and tax reductions, but it was not enough.
  • t09i209ba893 3y ago
    I've never heard that about ancient Rome before and would be interested in learning more. Any particular references you could point me towards?
• hcfman 3y ago
  Unbelievable! The only way you could possibly argue that more humans is good if you also believe that it’s perfectly fine to wipe out all other species on the planet. The most true thing about this thread is the word selfish.
  • abigail95 3y ago
    Is the world worse off because you exist in it? What should people who care about the planet do about that?
    • scotty79 3y ago
      Of course it's worse off. An people should do whatever the law and mortality allows them to do.
    • paulcole 3y ago
      Yes, 100% it’s worse off because of me. The obvious answer is to not repeat the same mistake. Encourage people to not have children.
• alexey-salmin 3y ago
  [flagged]
• willi59549879 3y ago
  Too much of a single thing is usually not good. Wild populations of animals have diminished rapidly. More people also means less space for the dwindling wild populations. Making all life on earth one species is not a good idea, one dimensional thinking is usually detrimental to the system.
  • imgabe 3y ago
    Have you ever driven across the US? There is an unfathomable amount of open space. Same in most countries, aside from maybe Europe. We are nowhere close to running out of land.
    • em-bee 3y ago
      yes, but do we want to turn all that land into high density housing? (ok, i exaggerate but) there are tangible benefits from leaving spaces open and untouched.
      • savingsPossible 3y ago
        No, and we absolutely can keep 95% of the open space for the next 200 years with much higher growth
        • AlexandrB 3y ago
          Citation needed. All that space would need to be turned into farmland.
          • savingsPossible 3y ago
            open space includes farmland? I mean, it is plausible op meant nature, but they asked about not high density housing I for one see a lot of value in yet another big congested city, and very little value in a forest (only instrumental value, to keep humans, dogs and a handful of other preferred species alive) -- I would prefer the big city not to be as congested, and I would keep some forest as a tourism destination for people who like that, and also enough forest to not cause harm to the "humans and dogs" populatin, but that is that -- instrumental forest, not as an end goal
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• SunlightEdge 3y ago
  Does AI/Robotics counter a lot of OPs arguments? AI in 50 years time could be totally mind blowing. And there could be all kinds of robots running around by then. I think the human population going down to 2-5 billion is a good thing.
• globalnode 3y ago
  Never ever thought I'd see this argument. It's amusing in the same way you would be if you saw someone intentionally throw off all their safety gear before attempting a dangerous activity "just because". Or even better "Aim for the Bushes Scene" -- check it out, a new approach to population management.
• scotty79 3y ago
  More people leads to lower value of each human life. What are many times more geniuses worth if they are they are not valued thus often unable to achieve anything?
• smashmiek 3y ago
  “We fucked the world, and we’re gonna fuck our way outta this!”
• smashmiek 3y ago
  “We f*ed the world, and we’re gonna f*k our way outta this!”
• scotty79 3y ago
  If more people means more geniuses we should be getting new groundbreaking insights about fundamental physics every year. We don't because the resource of human learnable undiscovered physics was kind of limited resource that kinda ran out. In the spirit of the article we replaced one resource with another. So now most of our numerous geniuses instead of discovering how to steal more from the universe learn how to steal more from consumers in investment banks, marketing companies and tech giants.
• croes 3y ago
  >More geniuses First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions. >If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all. The same is valid for psychopaths and other bad people.
  • okwhateverdude 3y ago
    > The same is valid for psychopaths and other bad people. Just what we need. More soulless, avarice soaked, societal parasites.
• archargelod 3y ago
  I think we could apply Brook's law[0] here. "Throw more scientists/engineers at the problem" doesn't mean that problem will be solved faster. Moreover, he assumes that increasing number of people will result in higher number of geniuses, but "Correlation does not imply causation". Ok, even if we assume, that number of exceptionally smart humans will increase. We have limited resources of our planet and industries. Having even more people will most likely lower the average standard of living. Wouldn't it be harder to find those geniuses if most of the population are homeless, drug addicts and living in slums? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
• cbare 3y ago
  I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.
• nielsbot 3y ago
  > The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue. There are a lot of big ifs in this statement.
  • usrusr 3y ago
    In defense of that statement, it says "not fixed", not "unlimited". But that's of course what he meant... Carrying capacity can also be temporarily distorted. How much effective carrying capacity would we see if tomorrow there suddenly were not any hydrocarbons from the past? Yeah, I'm old enough to remember "peak oil", that time when we knew full well about the greenhouse effect, but enjoyed distracting us with doomsday scenarios about not enough "new" oil getting prospected.
• computersuck 3y ago
  Egypt now has a much bigger population than egypt then, and they are a very poor country Larger populations get significantly harder to manage and educate. 1 programmer can do in 1 month what 9 programmers can do in 9 months
• latexr 3y ago
  > If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all. That’s just making up numbers. The author has shown absolutely no basis for the argument that for every million people born, one of them will be a genius with the intellect and opportunities to advance humanity and offset the harm of the other 999999 and then some.
• dash2 3y ago
  People saying "he doesn't address the downsides" could read the three pages on the same site which do address the downsides, and which are prominently linked right at the start of the essay: https://rootsofprogress.org/unsustainable https://rootsofprogress.org/unsustainable https://rootsofprogress.org/catastrophic-resource-shortages https://rootsofprogress.org/catastrophic-resource-shortages https://rootsofprogress.org/can-growth-continue-ignite-talk https://rootsofprogress.org/can-growth-continue-ignite-talk
  • throwanem 3y ago
    Everything in those links could have been more concisely expressed in a single sentence, short enough even to make a pithy quote, drawn from one of them: "The question of severe externalities is interesting and difficult, but let’s set it aside for the moment."
    • dash2 3y ago
      That’s completely untrue. For, example, the first of them has a lot of interesting and relevant history about how the decline of one scarce resource motivates the search for others.
      • throwanem 3y ago
        If you insist we also talk about the tendentiously presentist and heavily cherry-picked historiography here on display, then I suppose we can do that. Given your apparent partiality, though, I don't know why you'd want to.
• precompute 3y ago
  Quality always trumps quantity, but management can make or break situations. If you're yourself exceptional but have control over a primitive civilization, you're doing okay. But if you're not a stellar performer who manages to control an advanced civilization, you've really pulled something off. All these questions about population always skirt around eugenics, but there's a good case to be made for encouraging population growth of a people that's respectful towards others and tries to minimize social conflicts. Such people are found everywhere in the world, "race" notwithstanding.
  • austin-cheney 3y ago
    > Quality always trumps quantity I have never observed that in practical application.
• not_the_fda 3y ago
  L'enfer, c'est les autres
• jakeogh 3y ago
  Direct violation of HN rules editorializing the title. @dang
• vinceguidry 3y ago
  It's not a new argument, and is also one used to justify anti-abortion policies, bans on contraception and the like. Wasn't just the religious folks.
  • Sammi 3y ago
    Don't arguments have context? Doesn't the conclusion of an argument depend on the context?
    • vinceguidry 3y ago
      Yes, and I was adding context. Policy positions get all kinds of promoters for all kinds of different reasons. A position can and should be rejected purely on the basis that the 'wrong' kinds of people support it. It can be considered again when the right kinds of people start supporting it. This is how you don't put total rank assholes in power, and also how enormous assholes game the system to get in power. If you own a bar and a group of neo-Nazis come in, you have to throw them out. If you don't throw them out, then they will turn your normal bar into a neo-Nazi hangout. Neutrality isn't an option when violence is a possible result.
• james_levy 3y ago
  "And yet, there are good reasons for thinking that precisely the opposite is true: the more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found." Choked up while reading "A 2022 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research compares U.S. states and shows that ageing is already a persistent drag on economic growth and productivity; when the proportion of the population over 60 years old increases by 10 percent, economic growth (GDP per capita) decreases by 5.5 percent and productivity by almost 4 percent." Ha now we talking !
• tonetheman 3y ago
  [dead]
• JaceLightning 3y ago
  That's the stupidest article ever. "Let's destroy our planets and kill all the animals because it might lead to better science maybe"
• jmyeet 3y ago
  I don't want more humans per se. I want more humans to have access to a life of dignity where their basic needs are met and there's absolutely no reason why every human currently on Earth can't have that. The only reason they don't is we choose to withold it from them. Why? Capitalism. So a tiny few people can hoard even more wealth. Also, much of the talk around more people is strictly self-serving: to preserve and create even more concentrated wealth (by creating more humans to exploit) and the preservation of power structures by maintaining certain ethnic majorities. In much of the world we have what I've seen called a "hopelessness crisis" and it goes well beyond people not having children because they simply can't afford to. Many people now believe they'll never have security so what's the point in doing anything? Particularly anything long-term. Why should someone who struggles to have enough to eat and put a roof over their head care about, say, the long-term risks of climate change? Particularly when we, as a society, have chosen to deny that person housing and food security. As a planet, we produce enough food to feed everyone and enough wealth to provide shelter for everyone. Now this also touches on how many people the Earth could support. Many argue the Earth is overcrowded. That's simply not true. We're not far from the point where quite literally trillions of people could be supported comfortably on Earth.
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  What was wrong with the title Why you, personally, should want a larger human population?
  • jollyoldpirate 3y ago
    [flagged]
• jaysonelliot 3y ago
  This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today. At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the world economy. But the unintended consequences were devastating. Resource extraction has been catastrophic, of course, as has the destruction of natural habitats that come from population explosion, the accelerated extinction of animals, and the potentially apocalyptic global warming that has resulted both directly and indirectly. Demographers predict a population collapse (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human-population-global-growth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YE0.lKLn.Y_nGJFimv4NH&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human...) that could see the world drop under 2 billion again, but without help, it will probably come too late to save the planet as we know it now. We should be doing everything possible to discourage birthrates and get the only habitable planet in our known universe back to a sustainable equilibrium.
  • naasking 3y ago
    This idea that we should depopulate is the terrifying perspective. People have been crying that the sky is falling since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. There is no "saving the planet as we know it now". The planet is ever-changing, and has never been static. There are certainly dangers to the path we're on that we have to mitigate, but depopulation is not one of the solutions.
    • zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
      You can encourage lower reproduction with tax incentives. Nothing wrong with that.
      • naasking 3y ago
        We don't need to encourage it, birth control and capitalism have already produced a depopulation trend in all developed countries. It's not a good thing.
• giantg2 3y ago
  So the author mentions a sustainable population level but does absolutely no research into what level is sustainable, nor talk about it at all in their own argument. And of course we see no mention of obvious counterpoints. More geniuses, ok. But how about more psychopaths? Not just from a pure numbers perspective, but higher psychopathology rates correlate with higher living densities, which are sure to increase when increasing the population significantly. Arguments about more people meaning more cuisine need much greater support. It seems much of the culinary development flourished because of isolation first followed by globalization. What we've seen more recently seems to be less new styles or dishes and more homogenization of existing styles. Much of the exposure to other cuisines is actually from negatives like war and famine, both from occupation, refugees, and warriors returning home with newly acquired tastes. And of course many of these conflicts were around scarcity of resources especially during transitional times when switching from one resource/tech to another. Like they say in the market, past returns are not indicicators of future returns. Blindly relying on benefits of infinite technology growth exceeding the rate of population demands is not a compelling argument.
• pier25 3y ago
  Ecosystems need space. Space is limited and we've already eaten most of it and destroyed so many ecosystems to feed people and other reasons.
• deeviant 3y ago
  Yes, but how many geniuses will live in squalor and never be given the proper environment to thrive? I know I'd rather there be geniuses but who are given a life to support their growth and contributions, of which perhaps half really realize their potential, than more geniuses where most struggle to find even the basic necessities, let alone the support and resources needed for their talents to flourish. It's not just about the quantity of geniuses that a larger population might yield, but the quality of life and opportunities available to them. Having a high number of geniuses doesn't automatically translate to societal progress or innovation if the conditions aren't conducive to their development. It's essential to create an environment where potential can be recognized and nurtured. This means investing in education, healthcare, and social programs that help identify and support individuals with extraordinary abilities, regardless of their background. The goal should be to maximize the potential of every individual, not just increase the population in hopes of statistically getting more geniuses.
• powera 3y ago
  Progress isn't infinite, status is often a zero-sum competition, and exponential economic growth is something that only people who are bad-at-math want (and should they be doing economics?). Also, the whole essay is begging-the-question; so much of the argument is <<we need more people because "more is better".
• moralestapia 3y ago
  Wow, I get it is an opinion piece so it shouldn't be fact-checked, but still, what an absolutely ignorant and naive take on the subject. It seems like the author has never come across the concept of what a "Behavioral sink" is, which is not really hard to find/understand; as well as the many other sources of data, experiments and thoughts that would easily invalidate the purported benefits he portrays. "More geniuses, more R&D investment, more ambitious projects, better aesthetics, better careers, more niche communities, more niche markets"; no correlation between this and population size. If you take a look at the most populated cities on Earth, about 8/10 are FAR from being "an aesthetic population center where people live happy and fulfilled lives, with artists and geniuses together to improve human progress". Had the author not traveled outside the US ever in life? "but that's due to economic and social factors that have kept them subdued for centuries" 1. It's not ... 2. ... even if it was, why would a larger population get rid of those issues instead of making them worse?
• al_borland 3y ago
  I often wonder how much the average return on the stock market, which everyone with a retirement plan depends on, has simply been a function of a population growth. If the population shrinks, economies will have to contract, the market will need to fall in proportion to the people available to buy stuff, and the compound interest gravy train for a comfortable retirement will end. This is my selfish reason for wanting more people. This is based on nothing but my own rumination. I’d love to be proven wrong, as this worries me.
  • light_hue_1 3y ago
    Certainly had hasn't hurt Japan's stock market. The Nikkei is at an all time high, back to the lofty heights of the 80s. Retirement in Japan is also wonderful. You should check it out.
    • throwawaygal7 3y ago
      Didn't it take thirty years to get back there?
    • al_borland 3y ago
      How much of this is due to globalization and Americans buying a lot of products from Japan? If the global population reaches a peak, or population growth is centered in areas without much money, would that still hold up?
    • pcthrowaway 3y ago
      Is it really at an all-time high? Adjusted for inflation?
      • akvadrako 3y ago
        Japan's inflation rate has been close to 0% since 1990 https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi
  • mdorazio 3y ago
• yhavr 3y ago
  I call it bullshit. Arguments like "more progress" and "more geniuses" would make sense only if global population manages "geniuses" and "progress" efficiently. Which in fact is completely opposite. Homo sapiens brains are evolved for small population size, and unable to comprehend the modern structures involving millions of people. As a consequence, billions of already existing humans still don't have access to proper education, economy or tech scene to unlock their potential. So the more humans you bring, the more potential Einsteins will stuck in Congolese villages, that's it. Even "developed" countries, from what I observe are quite far from the ideal talent-unlocking - they still have crowded classes, non-motivated teachers and fixed curriculum. So millions will be (and already are) also stuck in "boring 9-5" "paying their student debs" even don't knowing their full potential.
• wonderwonder 3y ago
  Its been fascinating reading through this thread and seeing real world examples of deccelerationism and the despair and pessimism that drives it and those calling for more people, accelerationism and the overall hope for humanity that they carry. Deccelerationism is just depression and surrender.
• btbuildem 3y ago
  The endless-growth mindset will eventually be viewed as a mental illness. We pity hoarders, but we somehow look up to the unreasonably wealthy, even though they are eerily similar in their attitude and behaviour towards "their precious". If you look at a graph of human population over the last 1000 years [1] (and since -10000AD if you want [2]), it looks eerily like a stock market chart that has temporarily spiked before crashing back down to a more reasonable valuation. Over the ages, we've had many population declines [3] but they've tended to be smaller and smaller (relatively to the total population). Is there a massive "correction" coming, as challenges of carrying capacity, climate change, global conflict and disease rear their ugly heads? Hard to say. Regardless - I object to using the word "progress" as a stand-in for "more". It hardly ever is. 1: https://i.imgur.com/iSNbGTN.png https://i.imgur.com/iSNbGTN.png 2: https://i.imgur.com/73zV927.png https://i.imgur.com/73zV927.png 3: https://i.imgur.com/sccJBGB.png https://i.imgur.com/sccJBGB.png (these are hastily back-of-the-napkin'd with GPT, so take with a grain of salt)
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    "eventually" will come too late.
• mtalantikite 3y ago
  I’m curious to know if the author has spent any significant time in any place that is going to feel the brunt of the climate catastrophe. I’d invite them to spend a couple months in Delhi or Dhaka and then take another pass at this think piece. Or maybe they’re cool with taking in a few hundred million climate refugees into the US and just didn’t mention it, as many parts of South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa will have wet bulb temperatures that are unsurvivable in the next few decades. Also, some parts just are off: “A bigger society has more cuisines, more architectural styles, more types of fashion, more sub-genres of entertainment.” Then why are tons of languages on the verge of extinction? Why do so many apartments around the world look like IKEA exploded in it? How come the weaver I visited in Lombok is making patterns and cuts for westerners rather than their traditional stuff, and he himself was just wearing basic tshirts? How come the clothing store across from the spot I stayed at in south Goa was selling Jack Daniel’s t-shirts rather than traditional crafts? How come every gen z person is wearing what I wore in middle and high school? It’s not like SHEIN is making new niche styles for people. “Better matching to careers” Tell that to the young men in Algiers that asked us for directions to any consulate that would maybe help them get a work visa to leave since there’s no work. Or any of the migrants getting on dangerous boats to cross the Mediterranean to do whatever work they can find. Every cousin of mine that can leave has left. There are plenty of geniuses sitting around without many options just because of where they were born, we don’t need more population to get more geniuses if we’re not even working with what we’ve got. I’ll give him the niche markets one, though that’s more a function of communication via the Internet than it is about population numbers go up. I don’t know, it’s hard to take a think piece like this seriously. It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche. Living in a luxury Airbnb in Canggu doesn’t count. Happy to be wrong though.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • yellowapple 3y ago
    > It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche. Even a "privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US" would be feeling the brunt of a growing population in his wallet. More people = more demand for land = higher land prices = higher housing costs. Even in my somewhat-minor metropolitan region of the US am I feeling it. There are of course approaches to solve that issue (cough cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax cough cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism cough cough), but the exact sort of person who'd benefit from population growth under the socioeconomic status quo is also in all likelihood someone with a vested material interest in opposing said approaches - that is: someone who owns land and seeks to profit from said ownership, be it by renting it to others or by speculating on its future sale price.
• johnea 3y ago
  More neoliberal bullshit. The human world survived just fine when there was 1% of the current population. The whole idea that we "can't afford to take care of so many old people" is premised on the assumption that Elon and Bozo need 2/3 of the world's economic output, and the other 1/3 should be spent bombing each other. The idea that the consumption/person is declining is also bullshit. As 3rd world countries see how 1st world populations are living, they also want these opulent lifestyles. The physical world (you know, the one that "might be a simulation" and is ignored in favor of twerk tic and fortnight) cannot support the world's 3rd world residents going through the same consumption bender that the 1st world has gone through in the last 50-100 years. We need to stop breeding people, just like we need to stop breeding dogs and cows... In 100 years when the population is back below 1 billion, then we can worry about under-population...
• CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  I'm shocked at the comments in a great way. Usually this place is full of frothing-at-mouth pro-natalism. Even the AI hype cycle is finally shutting up. Miracles do happen.
• rafd 3y ago
  We, as in humanity, haven't even figured out how to support the people we already have. We never have. Even without the threat of climate change, billions are under-nourished. High tech might alleviate some issues, but the root cause could be addressed through existing social technology. For example, say we had AGI robots that could do all the work that humans do today - if owned only by rich capitalists, the quality of life for many may actually drop. But, combined with land value taxes and universal basic income, the result would likely be an increase quality of life (unless it turns out humans are willing to keep increasing population as long as the amount of aggregate suffering is below a certain level). AGI robots don't necessarily make things better. But social tech like LVT+UBI could meaningfully make things better, and, it could do it today (without the need for more "geniuses").
• midnitewarrior 3y ago
  This author is completely out of touch. Species are hopelessly in decline; climate change is causing havoc for many already. The last thing this planet needs is more consumers. He's very hopeful about the future of a growing population and how it can create more geniuses that can save us. He points to more people finding us more Einsteins, but he neglects to acknowledge we are just as likely to find more Hitlers, antisocials, narcissists, terrorists, serial killers and school shooters as well. Nearly everything in our modern world is made worse with more people. Our human habitat is being depleted, our healthy food sources are becoming scarce, and we scorch the land and the air to provide modern necessities to all. We go to war over resources, and our ever-growing need for energy results in a Chernobyl or Fukushima or Exxon Valdez or Gulf War far too often.
• floppiplopp 3y ago
  graph go up means world more gooder - that's the real simpletons reasoning, a literal moron writing that more people equals a better world, an idiot who disregards social and economic reasons why we can't have so called "geniuses. we're currently around 8 billion people on the planet, there's enough "genius" and "talent" out there, they just lack access to education, to jobs, to clean water and nutritious food. there's probably more that one person who could add value to the world who's stuck gluing sneakers for cents a day somewhere. I guess it gets the unfuckable right wing natalists going and it's the easier to understand solution for these 'tards, because really solving the problem requires actual effort and intelligence.
• madacol 3y ago
  I am shocked by the overwhelming negative comments I do not think the author is arguing for mindlessly expanding the population disregarding our current consequences. I think his concern is that people seem to have forgotten that population growth is generally very good in most situations, especially in the long term. So instead of promoting de-growth as the solution to our problems, we should be trying to solve our current, and temporary, bad externalities of our growing population (climate change, loss of biodiversity), and that is a technological problem
• naveen99 3y ago
  how about a principled calculation of the planet carrying capacity for humans, Based on water, agriculture and industry requirements ? I mean we already have states fighting over water rights to rivers. I suspect we can’t go much higher than a 100 billion. But resources are already being diverted towards silicon life. from here I suspect we go towards 50/50 human / silicon . Until the silicon declares independence.