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Comment by point78 | Hacker News Reader

Good? We need less population, not more...

Maybe but we also need an increase in quality of life, not a decrease. While a plateau (and even reduction) in number of people would not necessarily be a bad thing, it needs to be in a kind of controller fashion to avoid a broken age pyramid, ending up with too many elders incapabke of substaining their means by themselves, and too few working age people to support them, ending with both group living below the means we should strive for them to reach.

The age pyramid in some european countries, in china, in japan, ... Is scary, and not because of the decline of population it represents, but because unless we also change and adapt society accordingly there simply won't be enough people to pay for those who can't work anymore, and the few that can pay end up paying more than their fair share.

It's a huge issue, and nobody wants to change it much, making it feels like we will wait until the situation explodes before adapting.

Right, it's a balance. A small decrease may not impact quality of life but a larger one would. Imagine Steve Jobs living in a world of population 1000. He'd be living like a homeless person foraging for berries in bushes in the forest, no matter how good his entrepreneurial skills may be. We need people to innovate, build, grow, trade with each other to achieve high quality of life.

But that ship has sailed. Population changes are notorious in how extremely predictable they are. If we wanted a slow decline we needed to act 20 years ago.

Right now the numbers look suspiciously quiet, hiding the fact that there are a number of countries growing ridiculously fast (sub-Saharan Africa), and a lot of countries (all of "the West", except the US) in accelerating decline.

So there will be increasing immigration despite low (global) population growth.

And this is over and done with. It's a fact at this point. Policy today can only determine if in 20 years we want to cause +0.2% in kids or -0.2% in kids. I mean anything short of a meteor strike or new spanish flu won't really influence anything sooner.

If they are predictable then many people have done an extraordinarily bad job at projections. Because there are a lot of real howlers out there then if you look at proven wrong population projections of the past both from Malthusian demagogues and official sources trying to do extrapolations.

Although it is true we can only "add" at 0 for new humans if you want workforce ready new humans immigration from elsewhere is required.

Well Malthusians are frankly crackpots trying to make a political point which the numbers (especially now) don't support. So that they come with numbers that are found lacking ... is not a fair attack against serious people.

Which specific forecast did you think was so bad ?

A lot of technology comes from population increase. Necessity is the mother of invention, and more brains and resources means you can do more interesting things and things which increase the quality of life and production of everyone else. If you want technological advancement, innovation, and better life for everyone-- we need more people. And if you want space exploration and expansion, we need more people with more ideas and resources.

Reminds me of this speculative post on SlateStarCodex:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...

Ultra-brief summary: it may be that technological progress is actually tied to population growth, not economic growth - and population growth is slowing down. So unless we can figure out a way to switch the driver of scientific and technological breakthroughs from population (more researchers) to economy (e.g. machines that would think for us), we're gonna stall the progress of science and technology too.

Or. Use the existing population more effectively? Educate everybody instead of just the rich few. Subsidize technology again. Understand that basic research is the foundation of later development.

But we have to hope for a rational society for all that! I will be far easier I agree, to just grow population instead.

Using the existing population more effectively through structural changes would IMO very quickly hit diminishing returns. But it could be viable with various kinds of technologies designed to improve individual and organizational cognitive performance; hell, I think this is the very way from here to the "machines that think for us", so it's a part of the solution.

Wait - we don't need geometrically expanding technological development. It becomes sufficient at some level? So 'diminishing returns' might not be a thing, if we can get to where we need to be with some level of population.

And I'm pretty sure we have a long way to go on using existing population better. We probably don't use 10% of the very-smart people - they live and die in some lonely village somewhere without ever being recognized. Remember Ramanujan - one of the few to find his way (almost by accident) into the academic world.

> Wait - we don't need geometrically expanding technological development. It becomes sufficient at some level?

I don't know. I might reconsider "sufficient" after we've cured aging and had 100 years to play with molecular nanotechnology. It's my belief that we have a long way to go still.

> And I'm pretty sure we have a long way to go on using existing population better. We probably don't use 10% of the very-smart people - they live and die in some lonely village somewhere without ever being recognized. Remember Ramanujan - one of the few to find his way (almost by accident) into the academic world.

100% agreed here and I've used this argument in the past in support of helping to improve living conditions in developing nations. That said, even if we could 10x the intellectual output of the world through non-technological changes, what then? How do we get to the next 2x or 10x improvement?

To be honest that looks more like a history of really bad projections and extrapolations that failed to even try to account for many other variables let alone the correlations and their causations.

It brings to mind one flaw of the game series Civilization as a game with fixed assumptions - it always assumes food surplus maps to population growth. While it certainly poses a limit past a certain point more food isn't going to help any more than twenty randy husbands will cause a fertile woman to have a full term baby every month.

Food to farm labor's link has been downright economically broken with mechanized farming. People and even land aren't the limit to production for first world farming ability but the limit past which it makes no economic sense to do so.

Hyperbolic growth requiring a singularity to sustain does not imply hyperbolic growth alone is going to give a singularity - unless there are no other limits which will become readily apparent as it is approached.

That's africa, not the west.

There will be several hundred million migrating from Africa to the west.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

Only if western policy supports it.

A westerner is 10x worse for the environment than an African.

Hasn't a lot of GDP growth over the last century been caused by population growth? What happens when the GDP pyramid scheme pops?

A lot of technology comes from population increase too. Necessity is the mother of invention, and more brains and resources means you can do more interesting things and things which increase the quality of life and production of everyone else. If you want technological advancement, innovation, and better life for everyone-- we need more people. And if you want space exploration and expansion, we need more people with more ideas and resources.

Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years?

More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage.

We know it makes more sense to use materials from outside than having to drag them out of Earth's gravity well; I don't see why wouldn't that apply to humans as well. Let's have kids there when we get colonies going, it'll be a new and wonderful experience; there's no need to rush.

> You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear.

On the contrary, you're the one playing up fears like extinction events. People are not having kids because they don't want to, not because point78 asked them to.

Why do you think so?

But the chart is forecasting 11+ billion!

Because the shape of the population pyramid is changing. From a wider base when the fertility used to be high to about everyone surviving to their 80s. It's this momentum that will keep the total population increasing a couple of decades.

Read Factfulness by Hans Roslin if you want to learn more about this phenomenon and similar questions about poverty in the world.

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