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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

"All he was doing was adding one new variable to the forecast: the level of improvement in female education."

This may be a bit of a trolley problem. If population were indeed controllable by this one variable, where too little female education resulted in overpopulation and too much resulted in population collapse, would it be ethical to impose an upper and lower limit on it? Would it be ethical not to?

As a libertarian my default position is, that should be left up to those women. I don't believe that authoritarian measures are useful for human flourishing. But if I were convinced that this is an existential issue for the species I'd have to struggle between 1) maybe an authoritarian species shouldn't survive, and 2) ethics are ultimately in service to our survival and must adapt to that end.

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It is more like a one and zero, not a spectrum of shades of gray: women can be educated enough to know about fertility, contraception and birth control or not.

The part that is a large spectrum is the desire of people (not only women) to have kids. I know educated people with 4 kids and people with the same level education with 0 kids, with all the intermediary numbers being present. I talked to women that are childless and they have various reasons for that, I talked to women that have 3-4 kids and they have various reasons for that, but the common theme is they all have made some informed decisions. For women without education having kids is mostly out of their control.

The ethics of it are irrelevant in a world where genes and memes[0] are under intense selective pressure. Wait long enough and the infertile will weed themselves out.

[0] In the original sense of the word.

it's not education so much as subjugation, for which education (reverse) proxies. less subjugation and more freedom correlate with better education (for all, not just women), and that correlates with a greater diversity of life choices over primarily bearing and raising children.

so yes, that one variable is not a master switch. propagation has many, many avenues, assuming we don't wipe ourselves out in a myriad of other ways.

The prediction in this article is that the population will reach a stasis of around 8-9 billion, so no real danger of humans dying out (humans might, but not for this reason). Also this happens in 2100 and beyond when surely we will have started to become a spacefaring species.

Why authoritarian measures instead of incentives?

There are much easier ways to fix this:

Option 1) You could make it easier to afford and raise children.

I realize this seems a little extreme in a US context, so here is a more affordable option:

Option 2) You could encourage women to get an abortion if they're pregnant with a boy.

All we need to maintain the population is that each woman on average produces one new woman. Plus a few men, perhaps acting as sperm donors.

I jest, of course, but my point is that there's more than one way to be authoritarian.

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