6 ms·

What's the case for higher population? As someone who spends time actually in the wild, my perspective is we've used up enough of that and can't afford to take

by aklemm 2y ago

What's the case for higher population? As someone who spends time actually in the wild, my perspective is we've used up enough of that and can't afford to take any more. Population growth seems required by modern economies, but is there some other requirement I'm not aware of making that growth desirable? Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.

mensetmanusman 2y ago
Higher population spreads out the cost of technology making it affordable. Right now 5 workers support every retiring boomer, this will drop to less than 2 in our old age. Spending time in the wild may be more unlikely as the time required to maintain a lifestyle grows beyond the number of hours in a day.
kiba 2y ago
Pollution has more to do with high intensity resource usage and unpriced negative externality than the # of people who are alive. For example, meat is much more energy intense because you require farmland to not only feed people, but also the cows. It also pollutes more, in addition to being more expensive to buy, but not expensive enough to cover all the damage being done to the environment. Also, increased efficiency is a form of economic growth. We are after all doing more with less. Another important thing to consider is that population size allows and enable certain economic activities to exist. For example, I go to theater and do theater activities, but theater can only exist if enough people go to theater. That threshold can be more easily reached if your theater is in a city. If you want computer to exists, you need a certain amount of specialists dedicated to that. You need a large population because not everyone cares about computing and there are essential tasks that first need to be taken of such as agriculture and grocery stores and trains. Finally, economic growth is desirable the same reason improving technology is desirable. It enables more capabilities. The bad side is when we abuse these capabilities, not that these capabilities are bad in itself.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> What's the case for higher population? I don't think you understand the math of this. It's not that anyone wants a higher population, it's that the spectrum is a little screwed up. There's this line in the middle (fertility rate 2.1), and anything to the right of that is "population spirals out of control". Then everything to the left of it is "human extinction in just a few centuries". We're currently on the "human extinction in a few centuries". And all the arguments that we're not are positively stupid. People seem to think that we're like moose on some island, that "population bounces back" (it does for animals, because their fertility rate never goes below replacement, so when population pressures subside, their populations recover). Every time you ask "what's the case for higher population", you're actually helping to murder our entire species. If you were rational, you'd be pushing the idea that we need that 2.1 fertility rate, the one that doesn't result in higher population, and doesn't result in human extinction.
- kiba 2y ago
  Population growth/degrowth is contextual. You cannot extrapolate trend and expect the condition to never change. There is no reason to expect that the population will die out in a few century, only that we are in a currently bad situation. That being said, the lack of population growth we're seeing likely represent a crisis of some kind across the world. Otherwise if it's benign, it just means that people just don't wanna start families.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    > Population growth/degrowth is contextual. You cannot extrapolate trend and expect the condition to never change. Little girls raised by mothers who only have 1 child don't grow up thinking that they want five children. Little girls who grow up being taught by childless teachers, excited and inspired by childless role models in the entertainment industry don't think they want four children. When they're bombarded with propaganda about how "adoption is just as good", they tend to believe that. And so on. These things don't change just because population is shrinking. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't believe these things to be deliberate. But I do recognize them for what they are. > There is no reason to expect that the population will die out in a few century, only that we are in a currently bad situation. There actually is. People like yourself tend to look at the "population". "Gee, there's 7.2 billion sixty year olds! We'll never go extinct." But it's really the one small demographic slice that is shrinking all the time, even while population grows... the demographic still young enough to make more people. Your claim is that this trend doesn't just stay the same, that it might reverse. But it's so much worse than it merely not reversing... the trend becomes more extreme. As fertility falls, there are far fewer examples of high fertility for children to grow up around and be normalized to. They lower their own fertility in adulthood in response. Fertility decline is set to accelerate, not slow.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Retric 2y ago
Larger populations both enable and incentivize more R&D, art, etc resulting in net positives in the short and long term. That’s somewhat counterbalanced by smaller global population having more resources per person to work with, but you have fewer geniuses with 0.8B people vs 8B people. The speed of population collapse also impacts our ability to care for infrastructure and the elderly. While I personally think the global population would be better off at a steady 2-5 Billion people vs 10-20 Billion, dropping down to say 100M would make modern electrons manufacturing difficult to maintain let alone improve upon.
Log_out_ 2y ago
Having your dna lottery tickets in the urn that is global conflict?
keybored 2y ago
It’s not about higher population. It’s about not having a lopsided demographics. Spend some time in front of a whiteboard, imaginary or actual: - Less working age people - More old people - More geriatric people This is the transition which you skip over before you get to the fewer but better-off people. (Better-off? Well I have retiring at 72 years of age or later to look forward to, compared to something like 65 for my father.)
ericmcer 2y ago
Nature vs Nurture I guess. If more people = more progress we would see way more innovation coming from China/India/Africa. Each of those places has double the population of Europe and 5X that of the USA, but aren't really driving human progress in any meaningful way. It seems like pouring more resources into fewer people has better outcomes. 2-3 generations of depopulation might be what we need to make space for some huge innovations.
- poisonborz 2y ago
  China and India, but even Africa not driving human progress in any meaningful way? They are not perfect countries with a western eye, but you should read a bit more on what goes on outside the western hemisphere. Or just look at the label of all your electronics.
  - ericmcer 2y ago
    I mean just google major inventions that have come out of each of those countries versus the united states. I am not trying to be elitist, just making an argument that more people != more innovation and smaller groups with more resources will produce better results than just making tons of people and hoping more random geniuses appear.
    - poisonborz 2y ago
      Are you serious? Compass, gunpowder, in vitro fertilisation, metallurgy, the concept of zero and decimal number system. In current times China and India has a manufacturing industry the US can't compete with (tries to, with expensive hogwash like the Chip act). Strictly speaking yes, more people != more innovation, but your examples are just not making sense. You are talking about the second and fifth largest economies worldwide.
      - ericmcer 2y ago
        Yes I am serious, what you are claiming is: US has 333m so: China 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations Africa 1.3b = 4X more innovations India 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations I don't think this holds true at all. Also the innovations you mentioned are from a time before China had a massive population compared to Europe. I am talking about the last few generations when the human population exploded. Why would an innovation from 1000 years ago have any relevance.
marcusverus 2y ago
The case for higher population is that population growth brings economic growth, which brings prosperity. > Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people. Fewer people is easy, but fewer-but-better-off people seems very difficult. The wealth- and tax-revenue-creating capacity of the stock market (which has been going up at an inflation-adjusted average of ~6% annually since the late 1800s, driven by growth) simply cannot be replaced. With compounding 5% returns, saving 10K/year will net you a ~$700K nest egg over 30 years. With a flat market, you'd only have $300K.
niam 2y ago
Cheaper goods, larger market, more things to market, age demographic balance, broader cultural influence (inasmuch as one believes this to be a good thing), increased chances for innovation. All or some of this probably ties into what people mean by "economy", but I think it doesn't lend to any appreciation of the material difference that having more people thrown at a problem presents. Taken to the extreme: a world void of other humans might be entertaining but would be a woefully inefficient place to learn about medicine or the cosmos. Which again presumes an audience who cares about any of that, but I wager that many do. Automation certainly replaces some people for some tasks, but we haven't escaped the need for humans yet.
bitcoin_anon 2y ago
The case for higher population is that it indicates that a species is thriving.
GeoAtreides 2y ago
> What's the case for higher population maybe you missed it when you first read the article, but it is explained, at length, in the article
fasa99 2y ago
>What's the case for higher population? A lot of society is a ponzi scheme e.g. social security, insurance. Young supporting the old. In some senses, young inexperienced people "paying their dues" are handling most of the frontline gruntwork. No young people means scutwork for the rest of us by definition. The final revenge of the young naive. That's the "real world" case for it. The nationalistic case for it is harnessing a natural resource: population. Big country in terms of population can dominate others economically and militarily. People is power and leaders want power. The humanistic case for it is that of Eli Musk : humans keep growing exponentially, as does knowledge, as does economy, until blossoming out into space and the universe. The futurist view. Idea being, the more people there are the faster that happens, the lower the risk. > Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people. Yes, they will naturally fix themselves. it will be painful for some as goods become more expensive, but life gets easier - less traffic, cheap housing, fruitful resources, and so on. Japan has it figured out. All the beautiful rural places to live. Places like that fully exist in the US now too (see: appalachia) But here's what happens on the long term that is obvious to me : population will begin growing again. They'll be some gene variant that makes people deeply want to reproduce on a biological level. In a few generations everyone will have this gene (people without it... they didn't reproduce). Call it a genetic bottleneck on the genetic will to procreate. It's worth noting that in 5-10 years we could easily have cloning vats. We now have "cloning as a service" for all pets and livestock, many such commercial companies - on a biological level it's trivial to imagine the same service and structure for human, the only barrier is ethics and regulations. We have cloned primates and cracked the underlying tricks that might equally clone a human. We have cracked genetic modification vis a vis an infinite number of genetic mouse models and CRISPR. We have early stages of artificial wombs (CHOP; some years ago) but equally one could make a human chimeric pig to incubate the clones. I don't envision this will be seen in the near future but at somepoint, somewhere along the lines, some nation state will begin doing this in secret not unlike a manhattan project, and as we saw with nuclear proliferation, once the cat's out of the bag everyone will do it, everyone will complete the civilizaton "world wonder" called "The Cloning Vats" https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cloning_Vats https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cloning_Vats

by aklemm 2y ago

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Higher population spreads out the cost of technology making it affordable. Right now 5 workers support every retiring boomer, this will drop to less than 2 in our old age. Spending time in the wild may be more unlikely as the time required to maintain a lifestyle grows beyond the number of hours in a day.

kiba 2y ago

Pollution has more to do with high intensity resource usage and unpriced negative externality than the # of people who are alive. For example, meat is much more energy intense because you require farmland to not only feed people, but also the cows. It also pollutes more, in addition to being more expensive to buy, but not expensive enough to cover all the damage being done to the environment. Also, increased efficiency is a form of economic growth. We are after all doing more with less. Another important thing to consider is that population size allows and enable certain economic activities to exist. For example, I go to theater and do theater activities, but theater can only exist if enough people go to theater. That threshold can be more easily reached if your theater is in a city. If you want computer to exists, you need a certain amount of specialists dedicated to that. You need a large population because not everyone cares about computing and there are essential tasks that first need to be taken of such as agriculture and grocery stores and trains. Finally, economic growth is desirable the same reason improving technology is desirable. It enables more capabilities. The bad side is when we abuse these capabilities, not that these capabilities are bad in itself.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

> What's the case for higher population? I don't think you understand the math of this. It's not that anyone wants a higher population, it's that the spectrum is a little screwed up. There's this line in the middle (fertility rate 2.1), and anything to the right of that is "population spirals out of control". Then everything to the left of it is "human extinction in just a few centuries". We're currently on the "human extinction in a few centuries". And all the arguments that we're not are positively stupid. People seem to think that we're like moose on some island, that "population bounces back" (it does for animals, because their fertility rate never goes below replacement, so when population pressures subside, their populations recover). Every time you ask "what's the case for higher population", you're actually helping to murder our entire species. If you were rational, you'd be pushing the idea that we need that 2.1 fertility rate, the one that doesn't result in higher population, and doesn't result in human extinction.

kiba 2y ago
Population growth/degrowth is contextual. You cannot extrapolate trend and expect the condition to never change. There is no reason to expect that the population will die out in a few century, only that we are in a currently bad situation. That being said, the lack of population growth we're seeing likely represent a crisis of some kind across the world. Otherwise if it's benign, it just means that people just don't wanna start families.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > Population growth/degrowth is contextual. You cannot extrapolate trend and expect the condition to never change. Little girls raised by mothers who only have 1 child don't grow up thinking that they want five children. Little girls who grow up being taught by childless teachers, excited and inspired by childless role models in the entertainment industry don't think they want four children. When they're bombarded with propaganda about how "adoption is just as good", they tend to believe that. And so on. These things don't change just because population is shrinking. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't believe these things to be deliberate. But I do recognize them for what they are. > There is no reason to expect that the population will die out in a few century, only that we are in a currently bad situation. There actually is. People like yourself tend to look at the "population". "Gee, there's 7.2 billion sixty year olds! We'll never go extinct." But it's really the one small demographic slice that is shrinking all the time, even while population grows... the demographic still young enough to make more people. Your claim is that this trend doesn't just stay the same, that it might reverse. But it's so much worse than it merely not reversing... the trend becomes more extreme. As fertility falls, there are far fewer examples of high fertility for children to grow up around and be normalized to. They lower their own fertility in adulthood in response. Fertility decline is set to accelerate, not slow.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Retric 2y ago

Larger populations both enable and incentivize more R&D, art, etc resulting in net positives in the short and long term. That’s somewhat counterbalanced by smaller global population having more resources per person to work with, but you have fewer geniuses with 0.8B people vs 8B people. The speed of population collapse also impacts our ability to care for infrastructure and the elderly. While I personally think the global population would be better off at a steady 2-5 Billion people vs 10-20 Billion, dropping down to say 100M would make modern electrons manufacturing difficult to maintain let alone improve upon.

Log_out_ 2y ago

Having your dna lottery tickets in the urn that is global conflict?

keybored 2y ago

It’s not about higher population. It’s about not having a lopsided demographics. Spend some time in front of a whiteboard, imaginary or actual: - Less working age people - More old people - More geriatric people This is the transition which you skip over before you get to the fewer but better-off people. (Better-off? Well I have retiring at 72 years of age or later to look forward to, compared to something like 65 for my father.)

ericmcer 2y ago

Nature vs Nurture I guess. If more people = more progress we would see way more innovation coming from China/India/Africa. Each of those places has double the population of Europe and 5X that of the USA, but aren't really driving human progress in any meaningful way. It seems like pouring more resources into fewer people has better outcomes. 2-3 generations of depopulation might be what we need to make space for some huge innovations.

poisonborz 2y ago
China and India, but even Africa not driving human progress in any meaningful way? They are not perfect countries with a western eye, but you should read a bit more on what goes on outside the western hemisphere. Or just look at the label of all your electronics.
- ericmcer 2y ago
  I mean just google major inventions that have come out of each of those countries versus the united states. I am not trying to be elitist, just making an argument that more people != more innovation and smaller groups with more resources will produce better results than just making tons of people and hoping more random geniuses appear.
  - poisonborz 2y ago
    Are you serious? Compass, gunpowder, in vitro fertilisation, metallurgy, the concept of zero and decimal number system. In current times China and India has a manufacturing industry the US can't compete with (tries to, with expensive hogwash like the Chip act). Strictly speaking yes, more people != more innovation, but your examples are just not making sense. You are talking about the second and fifth largest economies worldwide.
    - ericmcer 2y ago
      Yes I am serious, what you are claiming is: US has 333m so: China 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations Africa 1.3b = 4X more innovations India 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations I don't think this holds true at all. Also the innovations you mentioned are from a time before China had a massive population compared to Europe. I am talking about the last few generations when the human population exploded. Why would an innovation from 1000 years ago have any relevance.

marcusverus 2y ago

The case for higher population is that population growth brings economic growth, which brings prosperity. > Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people. Fewer people is easy, but fewer-but-better-off people seems very difficult. The wealth- and tax-revenue-creating capacity of the stock market (which has been going up at an inflation-adjusted average of ~6% annually since the late 1800s, driven by growth) simply cannot be replaced. With compounding 5% returns, saving 10K/year will net you a ~$700K nest egg over 30 years. With a flat market, you'd only have $300K.

niam 2y ago

Cheaper goods, larger market, more things to market, age demographic balance, broader cultural influence (inasmuch as one believes this to be a good thing), increased chances for innovation. All or some of this probably ties into what people mean by "economy", but I think it doesn't lend to any appreciation of the material difference that having more people thrown at a problem presents. Taken to the extreme: a world void of other humans might be entertaining but would be a woefully inefficient place to learn about medicine or the cosmos. Which again presumes an audience who cares about any of that, but I wager that many do. Automation certainly replaces some people for some tasks, but we haven't escaped the need for humans yet.

bitcoin_anon 2y ago

The case for higher population is that it indicates that a species is thriving.

GeoAtreides 2y ago

> What's the case for higher population maybe you missed it when you first read the article, but it is explained, at length, in the article

fasa99 2y ago

>What's the case for higher population? A lot of society is a ponzi scheme e.g. social security, insurance. Young supporting the old. In some senses, young inexperienced people "paying their dues" are handling most of the frontline gruntwork. No young people means scutwork for the rest of us by definition. The final revenge of the young naive. That's the "real world" case for it. The nationalistic case for it is harnessing a natural resource: population. Big country in terms of population can dominate others economically and militarily. People is power and leaders want power. The humanistic case for it is that of Eli Musk : humans keep growing exponentially, as does knowledge, as does economy, until blossoming out into space and the universe. The futurist view. Idea being, the more people there are the faster that happens, the lower the risk. > Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people. Yes, they will naturally fix themselves. it will be painful for some as goods become more expensive, but life gets easier - less traffic, cheap housing, fruitful resources, and so on. Japan has it figured out. All the beautiful rural places to live. Places like that fully exist in the US now too (see: appalachia) But here's what happens on the long term that is obvious to me : population will begin growing again. They'll be some gene variant that makes people deeply want to reproduce on a biological level. In a few generations everyone will have this gene (people without it... they didn't reproduce). Call it a genetic bottleneck on the genetic will to procreate. It's worth noting that in 5-10 years we could easily have cloning vats. We now have "cloning as a service" for all pets and livestock, many such commercial companies - on a biological level it's trivial to imagine the same service and structure for human, the only barrier is ethics and regulations. We have cloned primates and cracked the underlying tricks that might equally clone a human. We have cracked genetic modification vis a vis an infinite number of genetic mouse models and CRISPR. We have early stages of artificial wombs (CHOP; some years ago) but equally one could make a human chimeric pig to incubate the clones. I don't envision this will be seen in the near future but at somepoint, somewhere along the lines, some nation state will begin doing this in secret not unlike a manhattan project, and as we saw with nuclear proliferation, once the cat's out of the bag everyone will do it, everyone will complete the civilizaton "world wonder" called "The Cloning Vats" https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cloning_Vats https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cloning_Vats