12 ms·

> "40 percent of Earth’s population is alive today because, in 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to make synthetic ammonia." More people

by spodek 13y ago

> "40 percent of Earth’s population is alive today because, in 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to make synthetic ammonia." More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck. (I use the term limits to growth in reference to the book Limits To Growth -- http://joshuaspodek.com/the_best_book_on_the_environment_economy_and_ecology http://joshuaspodek.com/the_best_book_on_the_environment_eco... -- which strongly informs my perspective and I recommend to others as particularly relevant here. It offers a systems perspective -- http://joshuaspodek.com/systems-perspective-population http://joshuaspodek.com/systems-perspective-population -- necessary to create effective strategies to help everyone in the context of a finite planet.) Reducing suffering caused by disease undoubtedly improves people's lives, but increasing the population without the ability to provide everyone resources doesn't. We know that simply having enough resources for everyone doesn't mean everyone will get enough resources. How we distribute resources matters and that's a social issue, not technical. Trying to solve social issues with technology doesn't work that well. Changing social patterns is much harder. Capitalism is great at increasing the pie, but poor at distributing it to those without capital. I applaud his optimism and support for reducing suffering from disease and supporting education. I suspect he's helping create a world with similar fraction of people suffering versus happy, just more of them. And accelerating toward limits to growth, some of which we can't overcome with technology. (If you challenge the belief that the planet has limits to growth or even that we're near any, I recommend the excellent blog "Do the Math" -- http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/post-index http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/post-index -- which looks at physical consequences to growth by a Caltech-trained physicist. I also recommend it if you like reading thoughtful, intelligent blogs by knowledgeable people who do the math behind what they talk about.)

lifeisstillgood 13y ago
Oh come on that does not even make sense. >>> More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck. Its not that people think gosh I have 1000 more calories, I will have another child, its that without those 1000 calories either the mother dies before or during pregnancy or the child dies after, of starvation. Granted there are now lots of other things to kill the child, malaria etc, but I guarantee every single person on HN will rather take the chance of malaria than the certainty of not being born in the first place. I also guarantee that most of HN places themselves on the "not yet happy" side of the fence, so I find your argument which seems to be "its no good bringing another child into this world, they might not die of starvation but something will get them, and they will never be happy" to fly in the face of, well, millions of years of evolution. We've always been unhappy. More people is a good thing, more people, and in a world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice, it is an unalloyed good.
- arca_vorago 13y ago
  I don't think you understood his comment fully. He was not claiming that "people think gosh I have 1000 more calories, I will have another child" it's that with increasing lifespans globally, the population is booming, but the "world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice" doesn't exist anywhere but your head. So the world pop is now 7 billion + but the things needed to keep that population in a good condition are not manifesting. Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc. It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    That's what Erlich said, while people like Borlaug successfully worked the problem.
  - mistermann 13y ago
    > but the "world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice" doesn't exist anywhere but your head. Incorrect, that idea exists in the heads of many people, and many of them are doing something about it. > the things needed to keep that population in a good condition are not manifesting. Incorrect. Standard of living is improving for most people. > Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc. I'm open minded and willing to be convinced, but it will take more than a mere opinion. I don't see anything compelling in the news that even suggests this is likely. > It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering. So we shall just ignore happiness, but focus on suffering? Got it.
    - arca_vorago 13y ago
      Here are some good papers, there are lots more, but a small primer on what I am talking about. Bottom line is this, I was replying to the response to this comment "More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck." that said "this doesn't even make sense" I'm showing that it does make some sense, though there is plenty of room for debate. I think too many people misinterpreted his comment for Malthusianism. Here are a few papers on the matter: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1846696/pdf/brmedj02604-0062.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1846696/pdf/brme... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586590/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586590/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1811054/pdf/procrsmed00289-0015.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1811054/pdf/proc... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332674/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332674/
chappi42 13y ago
> Trying to solve social issues with technology doesn't work that well. Changing social patterns is much harder. Maybe it could e.g. when offering a 'globally funded retirement provision' to people who agree to only have one child. Or maybe if you only offer Malaria/Polio 'technology' to people who agree to this and that condition.
- tptacek 13y ago
  If your concern is simple overpopulation, work to end the oppression of women in the developing world and to find pathways out of rural poverty, both of which are key drivers for population growth.
tptacek 13y ago
This is glib Malthusianism. Population in the developing world is growing, but metrics for quality of life are improving --- we're eradicating disease, reducing malnutrition, enrolling students, and starting to enable bottom-up markets. The limits your comment refers to are abstract, even hypothetical, while the progress being made is concrete. "Better lives"? Polio: bad. Freedom from polio: better.
- cobrausn 13y ago
  Agreed. Don't know what it is, but I see this kind of comment all the time on HN, Slashdot, and the like, but rarely encounter it elsewhere.
  - rfrey 13y ago
    The only other place I've encountered it was high school social studies.
- temuze 13y ago
  100% agree. And I think it's important to talk about the late stages of demographic transition. As we urbanize, birth rate goes down. This has happen in many countries, including Japan, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Some of them even have the opposite problem, of population going down too fast! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
  - h4rrison 13y ago
    Agreed. As another example, Singapore has such problems with birth rate that they need to have huge immigration just to maintain a stable population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Demographics
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  It's not just glib Malthusianism, it's neo-colonialism. It's paternalism and cultural superiority in green clothing. In short: it's bullshit. Oh, the poor little wogs, they lead such brutal lives, it's so sad that there are so many of them, if only there were fewer of them the world would be a better place. This is the sub-text that I see underlying these comments. It's "surplus population" crap yet again. These are people. People with dreams and ambitions. People with lives and families. People who are capable of amazing things if given a chance. They're not just grubby uneducated unwashed masses. These are folks who will build the world of the 21st century, who will help lift their own countries out of poverty. These are people who will build fusion reactors, and space ships, and nano-technology. People who will cure cancer, create art, and music, and literature. They don't need people who think that they are wastes of resources, all they need is a chance, and just enough help to start building their own futures.
mfn 13y ago
I think that in the long run, our biggest bottleneck is technological innovation, and not any static resource constraints. The return on new scientific breakthroughs is huge, and even if only 1% of the population can come up with and develop such ideas, the return will often be enough to increase the quality of life of the other 99% by orders of magnitude.
- duairc 13y ago
  I think that's hopelessly techno-utopian.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Given that it's a very accurate description for the recent history of mankind from about the mid-19th century until the present I think it's rather tendentious to label it as "hopeless" let alone "utopian".
- genwin 13y ago
  We're risking mass die-offs and mass migrations on that tech bet, hundreds of millions of people. Why not lessen the risk by focusing on a low-tech approach to reduce the population via birth control?
austinz 13y ago
I think it's more humane to improve sustainability by lowering birth rates, rather than letting existing people starve to death/die of sickness en masse. You argue that improving people's lives is only postponing the inevitable. I disagree, because the things Gates wants to do can facilitate economic development and provide a natural check on population growth. As countries grow richer birthrates tend to trend downwards, for a variety of reasons. The one country that actually took population growth seriously and tried doing something about it (China) continues to get shit over its policies today (sometimes for good reason). Just providing people in developing countries with access to contraception ignores many of the reasons that people in those countries choose to have large families. Finally, I've read that UCSD guy's blog, and while I respect his expertise, I can't get over the fact that his analysis often seems to rest upon rather shaky assumptions. For example, one of the blog posts he links to ("Galactic-Scale Energy") argues that exponential growth means that even a modest ~2% growth rate, sustained into the far future, would result in humanity needing to consume ludicrous amounts of energy. The math is sound, but the assumption is that the human population will also continue increasing exponentially (e.g. 1%), meaning that economic output continues to be divided among the current populace at a rate that is not necessarily exponential. However, if population growth really is slowing down (as statistics show [0]), then 2% growth into the far future with a constant or slowly increasing population results in a ludicrous amount of economic output available on a per-capita basis. The author's point is that unchecked growth is a bad thing; I don't think unchecked economic growth is even meaningful in the context of a population that is no longer increasing. Many of his other posts contain similar 'spherical cow' assumptions meant to make his mathematical models more appealing in terms of presenting his overall message. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_rate_1950%E2%80%932050.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_ra..., data from US Census Bureau.
- novalis78 13y ago
  Why does everybody want to lower birthrates? We need to settle the solar system, not wait until the next ice age or meteor mass extinction in an "environmentally friendly" mode of existance...
  - 13y ago
toddmorey 13y ago
I don't think your viewpoint is really as far off from Gates as you pretend it is. Remember that he's also offered financial incentive for birth control / std prevention[1]. What alarms me is that there seems to be the morbid implication in your words that disease serves as population control. Improving quality of life and reducing unwanted pregnancy are parallel and not incompatible efforts. And I think they are two of the most important challenges of our generation. [1] http://www.psfk.com/2013/04/bill-gates-condom-challenge.html http://www.psfk.com/2013/04/bill-gates-condom-challenge.html
jaibot 13y ago
Actually, my assumption would be less disease leading to more prosperity leading to smaller families. The current correlation between disease and population growth in any given part of the world is pretty strong. Hans Rosling has some good talks on the subject.
narrowingorbits 13y ago
> More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. I rather think living is a necessary prerequisite to living better.
benihana 13y ago
>More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. But in this case it does, as quality of life over the entire earth has improved over the past 100 years and continues to improve.
- tcdent 13y ago
  100 years is a very short time period when referring to the human race.
  - jorgem 13y ago
    Maybe it's safe to say that quality of life has generally improved for the human race over the last 100k years.
    - tcdent 13y ago
      I think you should do a little more research before coming to that conclusion. Personally, I am not comfortable presenting any decision on that as fact.
    - rsheridan6 13y ago
      It is not safe to say that. By many measures, including height, disease burden, and hours worked per week, paleolithic man was better off than his descendants until pretty recently.
- collyw 13y ago
  You have swallowed the American dream / fairly tail! Inequality growing. More and more people (in the UK) relying on food banks. Falling real wages, with increased rents. Must depend on your definition of improving.
  - dimkar 13y ago
    There are so many spheres that prove that our life Now is better than 100 years ago: how knowledge and information is spread, how fast you can travel, I bet you know at least several dozens of people around the world. Food, clothes, entertainment -all of these things have changed and for the best. Bill is right, it's fair to share the perks of nowadays life with those who live like hundreds year ago. It's like going back in time when travelling to the poor regions. We can and should welcome people from underdeveloped countries to the World of Today.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
So you have read the "The Limits to Growth" (which was pretty scary in 1972) looked at what has happened over the last 40 years, and not figured out where it went off the tracks? Quite simply it is this, extrapolation of closed systems always fails to predict the behavior of those systems. The two most interesting examples are the use of energy and birth rates. Birth rates go down as countries become more prosperous for a variety of reasons, but the effect is that once it gets below replacement rate (as it has in Japan and elsewhere) the extrapolating the population leads it going to 0. We intuitively know that it is unlikely a population will simply die off due to a failure to reproduce. But it is easier some how to imagine a crushing horde of people, too many too feed, crammed into pens. Why? Energy is another area where we've constantly predicted (again via extrapolation) the end of the world as we know it, and again it has failed to materialize again and again. These are examples of the responsiveness of the system to forcing functions. People don't reproduce as much if they are not worried that their children won't live to adulthood, energy as an expense is minimized by gains in efficency, process changes. The US' carbon 'footprint' has remained flat for years, policy change, people change, the economics change. So predictions based on extrapolation are fallible if not simply wrong.
rayiner 13y ago
Population growth is largely a solved problem. Not to say that it is totally under control, but rather that it has been successfully addressed in many large test-cases to the point where it's probable we can address it anywhere, given the appropriate level of governmental and social infrastructure. Fertility is below replacement rates in China, and it's population will peak in the next decade. India's will peak by 2060. Population in Africa continues to grow, but with economic development there is every reason to believe that it can follow in the footsteps of India and China. See: http://www.economist.com/node/21541834 http://www.economist.com/node/21541834
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
contingencies 13y ago
Couldn't agree more. Fertilizer has been a major accelerator of unsustainable agricultural practices which, on the whole, have acted to centralize food production and agricultural land ownership in to the hands of industry, disempowering the world population and removing social and long term environmental sustainability concerns from the act of food production. Aside from poisoning vital and irreplaceable freshwater systems, the closely related practice of unsustainable water use has created salination poisoning agricultural land itself, and agricultural poisons further decay the remnants of the naturally sustainable and verdant ecosystems the industrial food factories supplant. Given this situation, to then turn around and claim that GM is the answer is ludicrous. Modern civilization has clearly lost its way by diverging too far from nature, which abhors a monoculture. The obvious and sustainable path is a move towards heterogeneous planting patterns, and ideally toward greater decentralization in land ownership, production and the re-recognition of longer term concepts such as sustainability, social and environmental concern. A simple example: I have read that many farms in the US are actually energy-negative, ie. they cannot produce enough calories in agricultural output to offset the oil they burn. For those here wanting to improve the world through agricultural change, please consider reading some of the philosophy behind permaculture and the short but thought-provoking book The One Straw Revolution then applying technical knowledge to building robots that can efficiently harvest densely interplanted crops from potentially reformed large-scale agricultural operations that may accept a high variety of species and thus embrace natural methods for pest control and moisture retention, eliminating most agricultural overhead in existing operations. New operations should be smaller and decentralized, because we need exercise, nature is nice, and robots aren't free. Tangentially, last night I met a guy who has spent three years trying to find ways to save coral reefs and said that on a global scale we're screwed - they're all going to be gone within less than a generation. I spent a few weeks in Sumatra last month and the rainforests for which it was once famed are almost gone. Meanwhile in many Asian population centers (I'm in Bangkok at the moment), a view from above confirms that concrete dominates a landscape of air conditioning and energy-inefficient floor to ceiling glass, pockmarked only by the nervous system of fossil fuel burning transportation infrastructure, the odd plane flying overhead about a brown haze, and the glimmer of thousands of unnatural lights feeding on the same fossils, while themselves produced through an alchemy poisonous chemicals. The virus that scarred the landscape this way, humans, potter at all hours throughout, concerning themselves with alcohol, fashion, colosseums of sports on television, and reproduction.
TausAmmer 13y ago
There is something about humans striving for some ultimate goal? Living in horrible poverty, still having children, dooming them to that same poverty/disease/misery cycle? Or giving them a choice to rise up and get rich? What makes one to reproduce and doom they spawn into same cycle again and again? If thee was able to play all his life without worry for forced work to eat, would he be so keen on reproducing again and again? Poverty fuels rich people? Most likely in some cases. Having layer of fear between these two. Either fear/like/hate other and experience themselves thanks to other. Some play life seriously, some not so, one with serious face will try hang onto ledge for as long as he can, nailing others to the ledge so they won't fall off too. Success is achieved, people don't fall off, but nails in palm makes it no pleasure also.
igravious 13y ago
How crass. On such a button-pushing subject linking to your own blog. As if you have the very best post ever written on the topic. Even if you did though (which I doubt very much you have) humility should lead you away from self-promotion. If your writing is that great others will eventually submit your posts and link to you, won't they? Also, a quick look at your submissions history shows that every single submission is one of your own blog posts. In short, you are nothing but a self-promoter. > More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. Yes. And. So. What? Where did you get that from the article? Better disease prevention leads to a _reduction_ in population growth. And this is the observed trend. > limits to growth Ok. So we have an energy growth ceiling. Yes. And. So. What? Where did you get in the article that Gates is calling for _unbounded_ energy growth? I read a lot of techno-utopianism, I read a lot about disease prevention. But _unbounded_ energy growth. Nope. > Capitalism is great at increasing the pie, but poor at distributing it to those without capital. This speaks directly to the article. Gater says that he is a fan of capitalism. He is suggesting that the current economic model is a good model. You are not. (I agree with you to some extent by the way.) You need to articulate a _better_ model instead of just disagreeing. Are you advocating more socialism? A Tobin tax? A carbon tax? What model are you proposing that better distributes wealth than the current one. Arguably Bill Gates's own action show that in order to address his needs he had to _go outside_ capitalism (i.e., he had to turn to philanthropy) to achieve his goals. This and his seeming antipathy to open-source and free-software are two very real areas you could take serious issue with Bill Gates rather than your overpopulation/finite_world/limits_to_growth schtick. Pity I was late to this party :)
andrewfong 13y ago
Gates has actually addressed this specific line of thought. He originally spent a lot of time looking at birth control before switching to vaccination. --- "In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die. “If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda. In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates. --- http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/02/the-second-coming-of-bill-gates/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/02/the-sec...
Aqueous 13y ago
The first problems are disease and starvation. Once you've improved conditions with respect to disease and starvation, more people are alive, demanding more resources. Now able to function as economic actors, they work and produce economic output - wealth for the society they live in. In turn this wealth produces a middle class. People who move into the middle class reproduce less frequently, have fewer children. So the best cure for overpopulation isn't limiting growth it is accelerating it. As much as it sucks to admit, there's no shortcut here. You need to go through every stage of development. Societies can't skip from step A where there is rampant starvation and disease and basic needs aren't met to step D where there is a flourishing middle class and population stability and control, without first going through steps B and C where basic needs are met but there is also overpopulation and widespread poverty. If you ask me, disease should be our #1 priority. Human beings can do almost anything if they are well, but if they are sick it becomes much, much harder to function and provide for their own basic needs. They are much more likely to starve if they are not well enough to go out and work.

by spodek 13y ago

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

Oh come on that does not even make sense. >>> More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck. Its not that people think gosh I have 1000 more calories, I will have another child, its that without those 1000 calories either the mother dies before or during pregnancy or the child dies after, of starvation. Granted there are now lots of other things to kill the child, malaria etc, but I guarantee every single person on HN will rather take the chance of malaria than the certainty of not being born in the first place. I also guarantee that most of HN places themselves on the "not yet happy" side of the fence, so I find your argument which seems to be "its no good bringing another child into this world, they might not die of starvation but something will get them, and they will never be happy" to fly in the face of, well, millions of years of evolution. We've always been unhappy. More people is a good thing, more people, and in a world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice, it is an unalloyed good.

arca_vorago 13y ago
I don't think you understood his comment fully. He was not claiming that "people think gosh I have 1000 more calories, I will have another child" it's that with increasing lifespans globally, the population is booming, but the "world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice" doesn't exist anywhere but your head. So the world pop is now 7 billion + but the things needed to keep that population in a good condition are not manifesting. Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc. It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering.
- tptacek 13y ago
  That's what Erlich said, while people like Borlaug successfully worked the problem.
- mistermann 13y ago
  > but the "world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice" doesn't exist anywhere but your head. Incorrect, that idea exists in the heads of many people, and many of them are doing something about it. > the things needed to keep that population in a good condition are not manifesting. Incorrect. Standard of living is improving for most people. > Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc. I'm open minded and willing to be convinced, but it will take more than a mere opinion. I don't see anything compelling in the news that even suggests this is likely. > It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering. So we shall just ignore happiness, but focus on suffering? Got it.
  - arca_vorago 13y ago
    Here are some good papers, there are lots more, but a small primer on what I am talking about. Bottom line is this, I was replying to the response to this comment "More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck." that said "this doesn't even make sense" I'm showing that it does make some sense, though there is plenty of room for debate. I think too many people misinterpreted his comment for Malthusianism. Here are a few papers on the matter: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1846696/pdf/brmedj02604-0062.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1846696/pdf/brme... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586590/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586590/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1811054/pdf/procrsmed00289-0015.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1811054/pdf/proc... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332674/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332674/

chappi42 13y ago

> Trying to solve social issues with technology doesn't work that well. Changing social patterns is much harder. Maybe it could e.g. when offering a 'globally funded retirement provision' to people who agree to only have one child. Or maybe if you only offer Malaria/Polio 'technology' to people who agree to this and that condition.

tptacek 13y ago
If your concern is simple overpopulation, work to end the oppression of women in the developing world and to find pathways out of rural poverty, both of which are key drivers for population growth.

tptacek 13y ago

This is glib Malthusianism. Population in the developing world is growing, but metrics for quality of life are improving --- we're eradicating disease, reducing malnutrition, enrolling students, and starting to enable bottom-up markets. The limits your comment refers to are abstract, even hypothetical, while the progress being made is concrete. "Better lives"? Polio: bad. Freedom from polio: better.

cobrausn 13y ago
Agreed. Don't know what it is, but I see this kind of comment all the time on HN, Slashdot, and the like, but rarely encounter it elsewhere.
- rfrey 13y ago
  The only other place I've encountered it was high school social studies.
temuze 13y ago
100% agree. And I think it's important to talk about the late stages of demographic transition. As we urbanize, birth rate goes down. This has happen in many countries, including Japan, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Some of them even have the opposite problem, of population going down too fast! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
- h4rrison 13y ago
  Agreed. As another example, Singapore has such problems with birth rate that they need to have huge immigration just to maintain a stable population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Demographics
InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's not just glib Malthusianism, it's neo-colonialism. It's paternalism and cultural superiority in green clothing. In short: it's bullshit. Oh, the poor little wogs, they lead such brutal lives, it's so sad that there are so many of them, if only there were fewer of them the world would be a better place. This is the sub-text that I see underlying these comments. It's "surplus population" crap yet again. These are people. People with dreams and ambitions. People with lives and families. People who are capable of amazing things if given a chance. They're not just grubby uneducated unwashed masses. These are folks who will build the world of the 21st century, who will help lift their own countries out of poverty. These are people who will build fusion reactors, and space ships, and nano-technology. People who will cure cancer, create art, and music, and literature. They don't need people who think that they are wastes of resources, all they need is a chance, and just enough help to start building their own futures.

mfn 13y ago

I think that in the long run, our biggest bottleneck is technological innovation, and not any static resource constraints. The return on new scientific breakthroughs is huge, and even if only 1% of the population can come up with and develop such ideas, the return will often be enough to increase the quality of life of the other 99% by orders of magnitude.

duairc 13y ago
I think that's hopelessly techno-utopian.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Given that it's a very accurate description for the recent history of mankind from about the mid-19th century until the present I think it's rather tendentious to label it as "hopeless" let alone "utopian".
genwin 13y ago
We're risking mass die-offs and mass migrations on that tech bet, hundreds of millions of people. Why not lessen the risk by focusing on a low-tech approach to reduce the population via birth control?

austinz 13y ago

I think it's more humane to improve sustainability by lowering birth rates, rather than letting existing people starve to death/die of sickness en masse. You argue that improving people's lives is only postponing the inevitable. I disagree, because the things Gates wants to do can facilitate economic development and provide a natural check on population growth. As countries grow richer birthrates tend to trend downwards, for a variety of reasons. The one country that actually took population growth seriously and tried doing something about it (China) continues to get shit over its policies today (sometimes for good reason). Just providing people in developing countries with access to contraception ignores many of the reasons that people in those countries choose to have large families. Finally, I've read that UCSD guy's blog, and while I respect his expertise, I can't get over the fact that his analysis often seems to rest upon rather shaky assumptions. For example, one of the blog posts he links to ("Galactic-Scale Energy") argues that exponential growth means that even a modest ~2% growth rate, sustained into the far future, would result in humanity needing to consume ludicrous amounts of energy. The math is sound, but the assumption is that the human population will also continue increasing exponentially (e.g. 1%), meaning that economic output continues to be divided among the current populace at a rate that is not necessarily exponential. However, if population growth really is slowing down (as statistics show [0]), then 2% growth into the far future with a constant or slowly increasing population results in a ludicrous amount of economic output available on a per-capita basis. The author's point is that unchecked growth is a bad thing; I don't think unchecked economic growth is even meaningful in the context of a population that is no longer increasing. Many of his other posts contain similar 'spherical cow' assumptions meant to make his mathematical models more appealing in terms of presenting his overall message. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_rate_1950%E2%80%932050.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_ra..., data from US Census Bureau.

novalis78 13y ago
Why does everybody want to lower birthrates? We need to settle the solar system, not wait until the next ice age or meteor mass extinction in an "environmentally friendly" mode of existance...
- 13y ago

toddmorey 13y ago

I don't think your viewpoint is really as far off from Gates as you pretend it is. Remember that he's also offered financial incentive for birth control / std prevention[1]. What alarms me is that there seems to be the morbid implication in your words that disease serves as population control. Improving quality of life and reducing unwanted pregnancy are parallel and not incompatible efforts. And I think they are two of the most important challenges of our generation. [1] http://www.psfk.com/2013/04/bill-gates-condom-challenge.html http://www.psfk.com/2013/04/bill-gates-condom-challenge.html

jaibot 13y ago

Actually, my assumption would be less disease leading to more prosperity leading to smaller families. The current correlation between disease and population growth in any given part of the world is pretty strong. Hans Rosling has some good talks on the subject.

narrowingorbits 13y ago

> More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. I rather think living is a necessary prerequisite to living better.

benihana 13y ago

>More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. But in this case it does, as quality of life over the entire earth has improved over the past 100 years and continues to improve.

tcdent 13y ago
100 years is a very short time period when referring to the human race.
- jorgem 13y ago
  Maybe it's safe to say that quality of life has generally improved for the human race over the last 100k years.
  - tcdent 13y ago
    I think you should do a little more research before coming to that conclusion. Personally, I am not comfortable presenting any decision on that as fact.
  - rsheridan6 13y ago
    It is not safe to say that. By many measures, including height, disease burden, and hours worked per week, paleolithic man was better off than his descendants until pretty recently.
collyw 13y ago
You have swallowed the American dream / fairly tail! Inequality growing. More and more people (in the UK) relying on food banks. Falling real wages, with increased rents. Must depend on your definition of improving.
- dimkar 13y ago
  There are so many spheres that prove that our life Now is better than 100 years ago: how knowledge and information is spread, how fast you can travel, I bet you know at least several dozens of people around the world. Food, clothes, entertainment -all of these things have changed and for the best. Bill is right, it's fair to share the perks of nowadays life with those who live like hundreds year ago. It's like going back in time when travelling to the poor regions. We can and should welcome people from underdeveloped countries to the World of Today.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

So you have read the "The Limits to Growth" (which was pretty scary in 1972) looked at what has happened over the last 40 years, and not figured out where it went off the tracks? Quite simply it is this, extrapolation of closed systems always fails to predict the behavior of those systems. The two most interesting examples are the use of energy and birth rates. Birth rates go down as countries become more prosperous for a variety of reasons, but the effect is that once it gets below replacement rate (as it has in Japan and elsewhere) the extrapolating the population leads it going to 0. We intuitively know that it is unlikely a population will simply die off due to a failure to reproduce. But it is easier some how to imagine a crushing horde of people, too many too feed, crammed into pens. Why? Energy is another area where we've constantly predicted (again via extrapolation) the end of the world as we know it, and again it has failed to materialize again and again. These are examples of the responsiveness of the system to forcing functions. People don't reproduce as much if they are not worried that their children won't live to adulthood, energy as an expense is minimized by gains in efficency, process changes. The US' carbon 'footprint' has remained flat for years, policy change, people change, the economics change. So predictions based on extrapolation are fallible if not simply wrong.

rayiner 13y ago

Population growth is largely a solved problem. Not to say that it is totally under control, but rather that it has been successfully addressed in many large test-cases to the point where it's probable we can address it anywhere, given the appropriate level of governmental and social infrastructure. Fertility is below replacement rates in China, and it's population will peak in the next decade. India's will peak by 2060. Population in Africa continues to grow, but with economic development there is every reason to believe that it can follow in the footsteps of India and China. See: http://www.economist.com/node/21541834 http://www.economist.com/node/21541834

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

contingencies 13y ago

Couldn't agree more. Fertilizer has been a major accelerator of unsustainable agricultural practices which, on the whole, have acted to centralize food production and agricultural land ownership in to the hands of industry, disempowering the world population and removing social and long term environmental sustainability concerns from the act of food production. Aside from poisoning vital and irreplaceable freshwater systems, the closely related practice of unsustainable water use has created salination poisoning agricultural land itself, and agricultural poisons further decay the remnants of the naturally sustainable and verdant ecosystems the industrial food factories supplant. Given this situation, to then turn around and claim that GM is the answer is ludicrous. Modern civilization has clearly lost its way by diverging too far from nature, which abhors a monoculture. The obvious and sustainable path is a move towards heterogeneous planting patterns, and ideally toward greater decentralization in land ownership, production and the re-recognition of longer term concepts such as sustainability, social and environmental concern. A simple example: I have read that many farms in the US are actually energy-negative, ie. they cannot produce enough calories in agricultural output to offset the oil they burn. For those here wanting to improve the world through agricultural change, please consider reading some of the philosophy behind permaculture and the short but thought-provoking book The One Straw Revolution then applying technical knowledge to building robots that can efficiently harvest densely interplanted crops from potentially reformed large-scale agricultural operations that may accept a high variety of species and thus embrace natural methods for pest control and moisture retention, eliminating most agricultural overhead in existing operations. New operations should be smaller and decentralized, because we need exercise, nature is nice, and robots aren't free. Tangentially, last night I met a guy who has spent three years trying to find ways to save coral reefs and said that on a global scale we're screwed - they're all going to be gone within less than a generation. I spent a few weeks in Sumatra last month and the rainforests for which it was once famed are almost gone. Meanwhile in many Asian population centers (I'm in Bangkok at the moment), a view from above confirms that concrete dominates a landscape of air conditioning and energy-inefficient floor to ceiling glass, pockmarked only by the nervous system of fossil fuel burning transportation infrastructure, the odd plane flying overhead about a brown haze, and the glimmer of thousands of unnatural lights feeding on the same fossils, while themselves produced through an alchemy poisonous chemicals. The virus that scarred the landscape this way, humans, potter at all hours throughout, concerning themselves with alcohol, fashion, colosseums of sports on television, and reproduction.

TausAmmer 13y ago

There is something about humans striving for some ultimate goal? Living in horrible poverty, still having children, dooming them to that same poverty/disease/misery cycle? Or giving them a choice to rise up and get rich? What makes one to reproduce and doom they spawn into same cycle again and again? If thee was able to play all his life without worry for forced work to eat, would he be so keen on reproducing again and again? Poverty fuels rich people? Most likely in some cases. Having layer of fear between these two. Either fear/like/hate other and experience themselves thanks to other. Some play life seriously, some not so, one with serious face will try hang onto ledge for as long as he can, nailing others to the ledge so they won't fall off too. Success is achieved, people don't fall off, but nails in palm makes it no pleasure also.

igravious 13y ago

How crass. On such a button-pushing subject linking to your own blog. As if you have the very best post ever written on the topic. Even if you did though (which I doubt very much you have) humility should lead you away from self-promotion. If your writing is that great others will eventually submit your posts and link to you, won't they? Also, a quick look at your submissions history shows that every single submission is one of your own blog posts. In short, you are nothing but a self-promoter. > More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. Yes. And. So. What? Where did you get that from the article? Better disease prevention leads to a _reduction_ in population growth. And this is the observed trend. > limits to growth Ok. So we have an energy growth ceiling. Yes. And. So. What? Where did you get in the article that Gates is calling for _unbounded_ energy growth? I read a lot of techno-utopianism, I read a lot about disease prevention. But _unbounded_ energy growth. Nope. > Capitalism is great at increasing the pie, but poor at distributing it to those without capital. This speaks directly to the article. Gater says that he is a fan of capitalism. He is suggesting that the current economic model is a good model. You are not. (I agree with you to some extent by the way.) You need to articulate a _better_ model instead of just disagreeing. Are you advocating more socialism? A Tobin tax? A carbon tax? What model are you proposing that better distributes wealth than the current one. Arguably Bill Gates's own action show that in order to address his needs he had to _go outside_ capitalism (i.e., he had to turn to philanthropy) to achieve his goals. This and his seeming antipathy to open-source and free-software are two very real areas you could take serious issue with Bill Gates rather than your overpopulation/finite_world/limits_to_growth schtick. Pity I was late to this party :)

andrewfong 13y ago

Gates has actually addressed this specific line of thought. He originally spent a lot of time looking at birth control before switching to vaccination. --- "In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die. “If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda. In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates. --- http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/02/the-second-coming-of-bill-gates/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/02/the-sec...

Aqueous 13y ago

The first problems are disease and starvation. Once you've improved conditions with respect to disease and starvation, more people are alive, demanding more resources. Now able to function as economic actors, they work and produce economic output - wealth for the society they live in. In turn this wealth produces a middle class. People who move into the middle class reproduce less frequently, have fewer children. So the best cure for overpopulation isn't limiting growth it is accelerating it. As much as it sucks to admit, there's no shortcut here. You need to go through every stage of development. Societies can't skip from step A where there is rampant starvation and disease and basic needs aren't met to step D where there is a flourishing middle class and population stability and control, without first going through steps B and C where basic needs are met but there is also overpopulation and widespread poverty. If you ask me, disease should be our #1 priority. Human beings can do almost anything if they are well, but if they are sick it becomes much, much harder to function and provide for their own basic needs. They are much more likely to starve if they are not well enough to go out and work.