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Comment by hughw | Hacker News Reader

Reducing the number of humans could be one approach. The idea causes rancorous response from religious people who believe God told us to be fruitful and multiply. To reduce births might require coercion, it's true, but it would not require killing people or making them suffer. I don't see how else we can continue to enjoy the benefits and power of technology while keeping the planet habitable and enjoyable.

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>To reduce births might require coercion, it's true, but it would not require killing or people or making them suffer.

The demographic shift of increasing the number of retirees per healthy adult will definitively cause suffering. There's a reason why Millennials are putting off having children - they can't afford to.

Well, not while buying avocado toast.

You realize the world's birth rate has already been on the decline for decades, correct? And in general, the bulk of this occurred not because of coercion, but because of economic development and the ensuing shifts in optimum family strategy.

Yes but I can't say for sure the cause is economic development. It seems likely, but it's a correlation, not a proven cause.

When you say "birth rate is falling" its effectively the second derivative on "number of people" right? As in, if we have go from 2 children born per person to 1.5 children born per person, we are still growing the number of people.

Even if "children per person" falls slow enough you could even indefinitely increase the rate that new people are added right?

That's right, but note that the replacement rate depends on mortality rates and any gender-bias for either birth or mortality. Generally birth rates below 2.1 are consider "sub-replacement", but it can be much higher in some locales (due to disease, war, etc). Here are some per-continent population projections:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_(UN...

(Interestingly, the above chart was created about 10 years ago; I do wonder how accurate it's been.)

I said children per family, not per person.

I don't really understand the distinction: fewer children per family is the same thing as fewer per person right? Like if you have 1.4 children per person on average that means exactly 2.8 children per adult man + woman?

All I meant to point out is that "birth rate falling" doesn't map to "population falling", if the average number of children per couple drops 2.5 to 2.1 then each generation is still larger (and the population still grows exponentially).

Yeah, it has to fall below 1.0 child per person for the population to decline. And it's commonly reported that is happening in developed countries.

In fact, the world already hit "peak child" some years ago. The number of children in the world has stopped increasing. That means that the world's population is now only growing because of life expectancy increases and not because of increased numbers of people being born.

The population will continue to grow for a while because of developing countries' life expectancy catching up with developed countries, but unless there are drastic technological breakthroughs to improve life expectancy beyond where developed countries are now, the world population will stop growing fairly soon.

Coercion doesn't mean suffering to you but it might to others. The world can support more if everyone consume less.

Every time I see this suggested I am reminded of Idocracy. Only some people will choose not to reproduce. The genes of those who disagree with this idea will be the genes passed on to later generations. One could also assume that the opposing ideas regarding reproduction are also more likely to be passed on. I don't really see this as a viable voluntary solution.

If not voluntary, how could a place do this without instituting something like a 'one child' policy?

Wealthy nations already seem to have topped out on population growth, and now grow only through immigration. It could be that when societies reach a certain level of development they naturally produce fewer than two children per family.

As other nations continue to grow and industrialize, the issue then doesn't really go away. It seems that the problem would just move around the globe until we hit critical mass. The only solutions I see to this issue are to be more efficient with the resources we do have and/or move to another planet and start the process over again. Since moving to another planet is not something we will likely be able to do with billions of people in the short term, conserving resources and reducing consumption seem to be a more reachable goal.

If it is true that industrialization reduces bithrate below 2 per family, the issue would go away as other nations industrialize. If the whole world industrialized and reduced birthrate below 2, we'd reduce population and hence consumption. I'm not understanding your "critical mass" argument.

> As other nations continue to grow and industrialize, the issue then doesn't really go away.

Sure it does, as each national industrializes it solves part of the problem; when they all do it, problem gone.

> It seems that the problem would just move around the globe until we hit critical mass.

You really haven't thought this through.

I can see why you'd think that. However, industrialization does not occur overnight. > You really haven't thought this through. I don't know why you would say this. Do you think that Earth will never reach a point where its population exceeds the planet's capacity to support it?

Where will the problem move to when every nation is industrialized?

The United States has basically already solved this problem. Just make housing, healthcare, and college tuition incredibly expensive so no one can afford to have more than a small number of children.

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