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Comment by NTDF9 | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely don't understand the constant push for population growth. Why does population need to keep growing? GDP? Paying taxes for some social benefits for the old?

How is this sustainable? When does the ever increasing growth end?

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People living longer, governments with generous social spending end up with that spending swallowing up the budget as working age population shrinks, so without a working age population increase less and less workers supporting more dependents.

I mean, we all know non-negative increase eventually exceeds carrying capacity of planet, though that capacity has been bumped up a few times due to technology (cheap fossil fuels, green revolution, etc).

The “easy” solution is to keep growth juiced and hope we’ll figure something out (technological or societal structural innovation) before we hit one of the hard limits.

I’m a bit more interested to see what happens when the megacities exhaust their water supplies, which they are burning through at an amazing rate.

China's total fertility rate is already well below replacement level, their population will start shrinking around 2027. They're just attempting to boost the birth rate so the dependency ratio (number of people who work to support the retired) isn't so dire.

China's total fertility rate is already well below replacement level

I hadn't heard about this, but a quick DDG shows it's true.

"Census data for 2000 produced an estimated TFR of 1.22 children per woman (for the year November 1999 through October 2000"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2849170/

Unfortunately the article is from 2009, and a lot has happened in China in the last decade. I'd like to see some updated studies, if anyone has a linky.

A "one child policy" is pretty obviously below replacement level.

The one child policy was never a strict limitation to one child, policies are almost never perfectly successful at surfing their goals, and it was weakened in a series of steps already, so it's not at all inconsistent with it having existed to be surprised that the actual birthrate on China is below replacement.

Agree that we need to lower the population but this is best done gradually. A sharp demographic shift cause a lot of instability and problems.

With too dramatic shift you can’t take care of old people anymore. People will reject essentially murdering old people to save the environment.

I think birt rates around 1.8 - 1.9 is probably a sensible rate. That will cause a gradual decline. 1.2-1.3 is way too low and will cause a lot of problems.

> People will reject essentially murdering old people

Troublingly, the crisis in U.S. healthcare suggests otherwise. We're currently murdering old people not for the survival of the species and/or civilization, but to increase healthcare and insurance industry profits.

Recent U.S. politics has shown that exterminating the elderly/sick/poor/dissenting is essentially a marketing problem. Don't call them "old people," call them "welfare queens." Convince people that it will only ever happen to someone else (immigrants, people with different skin color and/or ideology than you, "poor people" who deserve what's coming to them -- quite unlike temporarily embarrassed millionaires like yourself, etc).

Yessir, market your mass-murder correctly and people will think it's "business as usual."

As a counterpoint, we need to come to grips with the fact that we, as a society, cannot afford to pay several hundred thousand to multiple millions of dollars in healthcare costs at the end of most people’s lives.

You know, the USA is at the extreme end in this respect, in most other countries it doesn’t cost that much to provide healthcare.

Declare health insurance a mandatory nonprofit industry. Truly nonprofit. I view education the same way, and suggest stripping it down to just what's necessary to learn. Room, professor, chairs, chalk board, light bulb, books. Student brings pencils and paper. Adminstration should be streamlined by combining university systems. Costs should be low for the state and the only thing a student needs to provide are good test scores on entrance exams.

Basically austerity for health insurance middlemen and schools but no charge for education or healthcare. For example, I see a big push to air condition schools and I'm left unsure how my generation (Xennial) even survived. Not only my schools but my home never had air conditioning either.

These things are not necessities. Neither are health insurance profits.

> we, as a society, cannot afford to pay

...because the giga-rich stole from us. Let's not couch their actions in the passive voice, or pretend this situation just happened somehow. The "neoliberal" (ie not new or liberal) takeover of America was orchestrated by the rich for their own benefit, and almost 40 years later we're still suffering the effects: stagnant wages, rising profits, and ever-increasing wealth inequality.

There is indisputably enough of wealth for everyone on Earth to die with dignity. The problem is distribution, not quantity.

> several hundred thousand to multiple millions of dollars in healthcare costs

Healthcare price, not cost. The underlying cost is quite affordable.

The price is not because the insurancestudent debt/pharmaceutical/healthcare industries extort obscene profits (and taxpayer subsidies!) by leaching off a life critical, non-negotiable service. See above.

Need to maintain the debt.

Countries like the US would face serious questions if they re-projected population growth into declines as that would mean there will be less workers around in the future to pay taxes to service the debt.

Some see it as a cultural arms race. A "the other cultures aren't stopping having children, so we need to out-populate them!" sort of deal.

What the fuck is with the idiotic voting going on here lately? Every single comment I make, many simply pointing out facts or objectively mentioning something uncontroversial, is getting downvoted lately. What I said in this comment is absolutely the mindset of a lot of people. I am not one of those people.

> What the fuck is with the idiotic voting going on here lately?

Maybe because it was a short low effort statement on a rather complex topic? I mean I'm not innocent of doing this but I never complained about down votes...

On topic, in the case of China I highly doubt being the country with the highest population puts too Much pressure on you, especially if your "arch enemy" america is at a quarter of what you have. It has more to do that they realize supporting the older generation isn't possible with the system they are currently running (it's based on the German system and they see what kind of problems we have over here even without a one child policy). But apart from that in general an aging population hurts society on a purely psychological level. So it doesn't seem that unreasonable to stop a very restrictive policy that arbitrarily crippled population growth and then in turn try to reverse the changes in society and mind set it created (little emperor syndrome to name the most popular instance).

For an example of this see the quiverfull movement in the US. Those "N Kids and Counting" shows were about members of the quiverfull movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

The linked article shows the number of "quiverfull" people is less than a rounding error: 0.0025%.

So, not so much a "movement" as a reality TV show.

They're the explicit part of a larger idea.

I grew up Baptist, and remember the preacher explicitly making the same argument. There just were not a lot of people who defined their identity around it; they still internalized the idea though.

The nature of exponential growth is that it doesn’t really matter that much how small the starting number is. You quickly end up with a big number no mattwr what.

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