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Comment by sturgill | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the plot line for Avengers vs Thanos... Life would just be so much better if there was less of it.

That's exactly what I thought! Call Thanos and he will solve it... More to the point, this is typical elitist nonsense: saying that the back death was good for future generations is just psychopathy in disguise. There is nothing preventing our society to improve life conditions for everyone, except that some elitist groups don't want to lose the privilege of having more than others.

"saying that the back death was good for future generations is just psychopathy in disguise"

I seem to recall reading somewhere that genes selected for among European survivors of the Black Death improved resistance to HIV.

I’ll do you one better. With 23andMe pull the raw data and look for the CCR7 gene. You can see if you have enhanced viral resistance! The future is now

Thanos’ problem was that he never read a book on urban planning. Maybe he would have gotten around to it in his garden time had he not been interrupted.

But I would be totally down to watch a series about economic development during the blip (and after the blip!). If half of all people disappeared, you would probably see a massive surge in wages. But it might not be enough to keep society alive. Assuming they did solve for it, the post blip period would almost certainly result in massive global crises as countries which experienced heavy immigration are now overpopulated and countries which experienced mass emigration now have a lot of people with basically no societal infrastructure anymore.

God save disputes over property rights

Spoiler alert, perhaps too late. The critical difference is that we're talking about the societal choice between allowing people to choose not to have children versus nudging them to various degrees to do have children. Compare to the movie's choice between letting people live versus killing them.

There is never less of life, just fewer humans. When humans disappear other life takes their place. Also the economics of Black Death shows that if you live in a country with a declining population the rich are forced to pay the middle class more, unlike a country with an increasing population whether through birth or through immigration.

The Economic Impact of the Black Death of 1347–1352

http://msh.councilforeconed.org/documents/978-1-56183-758-8-...

The problem, of course, is that modern technological base NEEDS a certain amount of consumers for mass production to makes sense.

We aren't living in an agricultural-trade system anymore.

Besides, we need fresh bodies to populate heavenly colonies.

1/2 the world lives in extreme poverty, we have no shortage of consumers.

despite not living in an agricultural-trade system nothing has changed. if the economy is growing but the population is shrinking than either the working class should have more money or the rich and their corporations should. you should be able to get the same amount of tax out of either than you lost through the shrinking population. the rich and the corporations have shifted the tax burden to the growing population which helps them make more money in multiple ways... by paying less to workers because of more competition and then passing on the entire tax burden to the wage earners.

we have no heavenly colonies and when we do they will support very very small populations, say at most a million people probably 10,000 years in the future... in the meantime we'd be lucky to get 100 people to create a self-sustaining colony.

>>1/2 the world lives in extreme poverty, we have no shortage of consumers.

More like 10%: https://howmuch.net/articles/people-living-in-extreme-povert...

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